I do think chains like DYDX and AKT give back in sponsoring some interchain development. But their community pools and treasuries can’t just buy ATOM if ATOM has huge inflation and may not be a good place to invest - just from fiduciary perspective. I didn’t mention in the above paragraphs that ATOM’s annual volatility is around 100% and that also increases the expected return quite a bit. The real numbers are ATOM needs to beat 40% in annual return to be a good investment given its volatility profile vs the cost of money now. So ANYONE that has any background in asset management and finance will have huge concerns before plunking in big dollars. ATOM’s biggest problem is that it doesn’t appeal to institutional investors as an investment asset - and if you ask Jae Kwon - that is by design. He doesn’t want ATOM to be owned by the “Wall Street cartel”, but by his friends.
To be honest with you, I have no idea why ATOM was ever listed on crypto exchanges. It never should have been listed - Jae should have made this token a private placement and generally prohibited secondary listings on established exchanges in order not to embroil outsiders in his scheme. As it stands right now, you have a securities issuer in Jae who raised money in ATOM, but is not doing anything to accrue value to ATOM, you have a whole bunch of retail investors getting fooled with false marketing because they think ATOM has value accrual mechanisms similar to ETH and it doesn’t, and the most likely outcome at some point will be lawsuits (originating by ATOM token holders or by the SEC) and the token getting delisted from major exchanges at least in the US.
People should be aware that the SEC has already sued Coinbase for listing ATOM and they have made the allegation that ATOM is a security in that lawsuit. If the SEC wins this case, or even if they don’t win it but more specifically manages to prove that ATOM is a security, Coinbase and Kraken will be forced to delist it. The SEC managed to get Binance to delist XMR, so if they make it a point, they could delist ATOM from Binance as well. This delisting can come out of nowhere at any time.
Ethan is trying to rescue this very precarious situation with ICS, but I am not sure how successful that effort will be. I like the offering (it was missing before) but the value accrual situation with ATOM (the token’s utility) still isn’t great. People should not forget that ATOM 2.0 proposal came with a proposal to cut ATOM’s inflation severly and make it have only a small tail emission like Monero (XMR) - basically it would have made ATOM almost a fixed supply token like most other tokens that use the Cosmos SDK (for example, AKT and DYDX have fixed supply of tokens).
What got approved in the end was the development effort, but the inflation issue is still hanging out there.