Will chains still pay to be integrated into Mintscan? If so, has the pricing model changed since the acquisition?
2. Mintscan API.
Are the API commercial? Is there a free tier for Hub ecosystem builders?
3. Revenue destination.
Do revenues from Mintscan stay with Cosmos Labs? Or does any part go to the Hub, for example through the community pool, stakers, or ATOM buybacks or burns? If not today, is this planned?
4. Financing of the acquisition.
Without asking for the exact amount, can you confirm whether ATOM, ICF treasury assets were used?
5. Neutrality.
Will APIs and data stay accessible on fair terms to competing explorers and tools, so that the ecosystem doesn’t end up with a single point of dependency?
6. Reporting.
Would Cosmos Labs consider periodic reporting, even high-level, on the revenues and costs of these services as they relate to the Hub?
The underlying question is the one we keep coming back to: the Hub increasingly positions itself as the economic router of the Interchain, so the community needs to understand how the value created by this infrastructure relates to ATOM.
Thanks in advance to the Cosmos Labs team for any clarification.
There haven’t been major changes to Mintscan since the acquisition, and if there are, we’ll announce them. Chains continue to integrate as usual. The API uses a credit-based model, as described in the docs: Introduction – Mintscan Docs. On neutrality, the APIs will stay accessible, and we’ll communicate any change ahead of time.
Mintscan’s business model isn’t tied into the Hub today, and that hasn’t changed since the acquisition. Our focus so far has been migrating the infrastructure, which is now almost done across all the services that moved over. As we build out the roadmap, part of the work is figuring out where Skip and Mintscan fit in serving it, so they become better integrated with the Hub. We’ll share our thinking on that then.
On financials and reporting: as we said on the first big community call, we can’t report a company’s financials, such as financing, costs, or revenue. But the key words in your post are “as they relate to the Hub.” There, the answer is yes. As services start to relate directly to the Hub (for example, Eureka or Skip if moved there), that reporting should happen, and ideally it’d just be on-chain.
On your other question, this is work from the enterprise pillar, as we described in the Cosmos Quarterly #1. These are tools built on top of the stack, focused on tokenization on sovereign DLTs. They don’t have a direct, built-in relationship with the Hub. They relate to it because they bring new networks and institutions on-chain, and that connects closely with the direction we’re taking for the roadmap. As we shared in Hub Weekly #12, the idea is for the Hub to sit between traditional finance and DeFi. Enterprise brings institutions on-chain, IBC connects them, and the Hub turns those connections into products both sides can use, starting with issuance and distribution of assets. The latest weekly has more info on that.
