Part of our ongoing commitment to build the Cosmos Hub roadmap in public, as laid out in From Chaos to Stability to Growth.
A few weeks ago we shared the first output of our tokenomics research with Gauntlet, “Where Does One Day of ATOM Emissions Go?”, which traced how a single day of ATOM emissions moves through the network and found that emissions contribute very little to actual sell pressure. This update goes a level deeper and asks a harder question. Across all of ATOM’s sell pressure, who is doing the selling, and how much?
This is an early look at Gauntlet’s Phase 1 sell-pressure analysis, now extended across the full first quarter. Over sixteen consecutive weekly windows (January through April 2026), the model attributes 25,523,746 likelihood-weighted ATOM of sell pressure to the holder cohorts that initiated it. These findings are still being finalized. We’re sharing the direction now and will follow with the complete, validated report.
What we’re measuring
We never assume a transaction is a sale. Every movement of ATOM out of a tracked cohort is sorted into a route, and each route carries a likelihood: the share of that flow we treat as genuine selling. Weighted ATOM is raw ATOM multiplied by that likelihood.
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Direct deposit to a known exchange wallet scores 0.95 (high confidence). Funds landing on an exchange are overwhelmingly there to be sold; the small discount covers internal and custody moves.
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IBC transfer leaving the Hub with a swap instruction in the memo (e.g., via skip:go) scores 1.00 (treated as a certain sale). The memo is an explicit instruction to swap ATOM on arrival.
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IBC transfer with no swap memo (bridges, LP moves, custody) scores 0.25 (only a quarter counted). Some is bridged out to sell, but much is liquidity routing or custody.
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Unstaking scores 0.00. It is a leading indicator of future supply, surfaced for context but never counted as a present sale.
Note: exchange-attributed flow measures ATOM arriving at exchange wallets, not confirmed fills. Once ATOM hits a centralized exchange, what happens inside is invisible on-chain. This is the best available on-chain proxy for selling, not a complete picture.
What the data shows
Sell pressure is concentrated in a handful of cohorts. The six largest cohorts account for 92% of all weighted sales over the quarter, and they make up 90% of the total in a typical week. Whale holders (100k to 1M ATOM) alone account for roughly 30% of the total and are the steadiest contributor, the closest thing in the data to a persistent baseline.
But the rest of that pressure is episodic, not a steady stream. Outside the whale baseline, large weekly spikes are almost always one cohort in one week, rather than a broad-based shift. A few illustrations:
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Weekly totals swung nearly fivefold across the quarter, from about 740,000 weighted ATOM in the quietest week to 3.5 million in the busiest.
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The exchange cohort’s share of weekly sell pressure ranged from under 2% to almost 56% depending on the week.
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Mid-tier retail holders concentrated about 85% of their entire sixteen-week total into a single week, a near-pure one-off rather than a recurring seller.
Within each cluster, a small number of wallets, sometimes just one, drives most of the flow. The single largest contributor was one whale wallet that routed roughly 3.2 million weighted ATOM straight to exchanges over the quarter.
Validator commission selling is negligible. Validators accounted for roughly 31,000 weighted ATOM over the full quarter, about 0.1% of the total. The large-holder behavior that matters shows up through cohort activity, not the commission line.
Why this matters
The main goal of this workstream is to replace assumptions with evidence before any tokenomics decisions get made.
It’s good that we did. Anecdotal assumptions were that inflation (via staking rewards and validator commissions) were driving the bulk of sales activity.
In fact, selling is concentrated among a small set of large actors moving in bursts, not broad-based, persistent, inflation-driven selling from everyday stakers. That distinction matters for how we think about inflation, emissions, and which levers the Hub actually has.
What’s coming next
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A wallet-level deep dive into the concentrated set of addresses behind most of the sell pressure: whether selling was preceded by an unstaking event, current staking positions and holding duration, and how behavior evolves week to week.
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Extending the analysis across a wider historical window and around significant market events (terra, prop 848, 10/10, etc), to test how today’s patterns compare to past periods of volatility.
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Additional framing on the inflation question, measuring sell pressure against total ATOM trading volume, and benchmarking ATOM against comparable major networks.
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Phase 2 scoping: translating these empirical findings into concrete design questions and economic parameters to model, the bridge from “what is happening” to “what, if anything, should change.”
We’ll share the validated Phase 1 report and the Phase 2 framing as they’re finalized. As always, this work is being done in the open, and broad community involvement is a priority at every step. Questions, scrutiny, and pushback are always welcome on the forum.
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Join the monthly validator calls (active-set Cosmos Hub validators only)