Highlights from Cosmoverse 2022

Undoubtedly, the biggest event of the week within the Cosmos Network ecosystem was the Cosmoverse conference in Medellin, Colombia. Spanning three days, it heralded many important announcements from key ecosystem players. Below we try to summarize the most important points, but if you want to watch the entire conference, you can do so here.

Atom 2.0

Atom 2.0: For months, Cosmonauts have been waiting for the announcement of a mysterious new idea for the Cosmos ecosystem, the ATOM 2.0. The vision for upgrading the ATOM, the native staking token of the Cosmos Hub, was laid out by several core contributors to the ecosystem, such as Ethan Buchman and Zaki Manian. The timing for the upgrade comes from the booming Liquid Staking market, which will unlock great financial freedom to stakers, who otherwise had their ATOM bonded securing the network. The road to making the ATOM a reserve value for the community will consist of:

• Funding the growth: The new vision for the Hub also brings the need for financing public goods, infrastructure, and business development efforts. This will be achieved in two phases: transition and steady state. The transition phase will last 36 months since the community adopts the new monetary policy. During the first nine months, the issuance of ATOM will increase significantly, reaching 10,000,000 a month and then progressively decreasing until it reaches the steady phase of 300,000 ATOM per month.
• A change in the security subsidy: During the transition phase, the security subsidy (staking rewards) will continue to be distributed at the same rate as normal. However, it will drop 10% per month until it ceases and the revenue coming from Interchain Security covers the staking rewards organically.
• New revenue streams: with Interchain Security launching in January, the Cosmos Hub will begin a new phase of participation in the greater Cosmos ecosystem. Besides providing security to Consumer chains, the Hub will also have one more layer to generate revenue for its stakeholders. The Interchain Scheduler is presented as “a secure block space market”; in other words, an MEV market that will generate revenue for the Hub.
• More economic coordination: All these efforts to make the Hub economy sustainable will have a mechanism that will be in charge of allocating the funds to fuel the ecosystem’s growth. This will be the role of the Interchain Allocator. Combined, the Scheduler and the Allocator will create a flywheel of growth and expansion of the Cosmos Network.

This new policy has not been enacted and is up for discussion on the Cosmos Forum.

Mesh Security: As the Interchain Security narrative gains steam within the ecosystem, Sunny Aggarwal, Osmosis Labs Co-Founder, unveiled the concept of Mesh Security. This feature will be possible once the ICS v3 is deployed and will allow any sovereign Cosmos chain to be both a provider or a consumer chain, creating a mesh effect and highly interconnected network, boosting security, and potentially increasing economic gains for stakers.

Zero Knowledge coming to Juno: During his talk, Jake Hartnell, Junø Co-Founder, gave a series of updates about the network and their approach to creating a series of subDAOs to manage the growth and operations of Juno. However, he also pointed out a nascent trend of zero-knowledge applications being born, such as Webb protocol, Vectis and Juno Juicer. Also, he pointed out that there’s work on creating IBC private transfers.

Net steps for IBC: The IBC panel touched on the importance of this protocol layer to the ecosystem’s growth. Susannah Evans, IBC Project Lead, pointed out that the next phase of IBC is the expansion to other ecosystems such as NEAR Team or Polkadot. Federico Kunze Kullmer offered that the next frontier was to add instructions on the IBC transfer to perform an action once it arrived at its destination, improving the user experience for the users of the whole ecosystem.

Bitcoin security in Cosmos: a new service is currently in the testing phase, and it’s Bitcoin security level for Cosmos chains. This new paradigm of security will be offered by Babylon Chain, which will be in charge of timestamping transactions on the Bitcoin network. This would have many benefits, including fast unbonding periods (currently, they can have up to 3.5 hours of unbonding), boosting the censorship resistance of chains and bootstrapping new networks.

Neutron update: The first consumer chain that will launch after ICS is available, Neutron, unveiled some updates to their governance roadmap. Starting with a centralized approach to managing grants, bounties, etc, it will then transition to a primarily decentralized environment and hopefully a fully decentralized blockchain that implements minority protection policies such as Quadratic Voting.

Becoming Regulation Friendly

As we approach a more regulated environment within the blockchain industry, organizations must play a significant role in educating regulators to craft a responsible framework that protects the users but allows for innovation. One of those organizations is Adan, which focuses on the European Union, and recently posted a proposal on the Cosmos Hub forum asking for funding to continue its endeavors.

As detailed in the proposal, they are looking to hire a European Affairs Officer to ramp up their operations in Brussels, as they have been focusing in the past on France alone. The amount is 15,000 ATOM, and they described their task for the coming 12 months as follows:

• Monitor upcoming legislation and regulations, such as MiCA, TFR, and the remainder of the AML package.
• Contribute to elaborating regulatory frameworks surrounding topics like DeFi, NFTs, the environmental impact of crypto, etc.
• Establish strong positions on European crypto companies’ issues (e.g., access to banking and insurance) and convey them to policymakers.
• Sensibly educate on regulatory proposals which fail to capture the unique properties of crypto-economic models and risk hindering innovation (e.g., regulating DAOs as legal persons in the traditional sense).

Conclusion

The Cosmos ecosystem is bustling with new innovation and exciting plans for the future. Our team believes that the Atom token and Cosmos will become one of the most widely used blockchains for developers and will eventually transform into an internet of blockchains where users will be able to move across dApps seamlessly.

✨KONSTELLATION Network is a blockchain protocol, built on Cosmos Network SDK, creating a global infrastructure for the future of the decentralized capital markets.

To keep up with Konstellation, follow us on:

Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn | Telegram| Medium | Official Website