Thanks for the thoughtful letter, Jelena!
We’re super excited about Noble and its success as the Cosmos ecosystem’s home for stablecoins. In fact, the Informal Hub and Hypha Hub Team’s funding for 2024 is mostly in the form of USDC issued on Noble.
We’ve been working closely with Noble on their economics as relates to ICS, and the ICS integration on the Noble chain. We appreciate the Noble team’s mature approach to tokenomics, and support their decision to defer ICS launch until they can knock it out of the park for the Hub validator set.
We’d like to thank John Letey and the Noble engineering team for the improvements they’ve made to the standalone to consumer migration protocol in preparation for Noble’s launch. The fact that the Noble ICS integration has been perfected will make it fast and easy to launch Noble on ICS when the time comes, and their improvements will make things smoother for other consumer chains in the meantime.
We’d also like to thank the validators who participated in Noble’s ICS testnets. Their work will mean that it’s much faster to launch Noble when the time comes, although we’ll be doing additional testnets and a rehearsal at that time.
Lastly, we are working on several improvements to ICS which will make the economics more flexible for Noble, and all other consumer chains. Improving ICS economics is our main R&D focus for 2024, and we have a few features in the pipeline. Variable commission rates will allow validators to set a higher commission on consumer chains, allowing them the flexibility to recoup their infrastructure costs on consumer chains. Partial Set Security will allow far fewer validators to run infrastructure for consumer chains. This will allow most validators the choice of whether or not to run on a given consumer, as well as concentrating rewards for those who do. We’ll have more detailed specifications of these features and implementation plans in time to start work in Q1 2024.