Cosmos July Newsletter
Why the Cosmos Newsletter
Curious Cosmonaut Research has identified that information can be scattered around the Cosmos ecosystem and it is crucial to have it aggregated and semi-curated. It will also be a good reference point later in the year and future years of the progress in the ecosystem. If you are serious about Cosmos this is a must.
Developer Activity
First off, what is Github commits for us non-engineers? According to Free Code Camp it means
“The git commit command will save all staged changes, along with a brief description from the user, in a “commit” to the local repository. Commits are at the heart of Git usage. You can think of a commit as a snapshot of your project, where a new version of that project is created in the current repository”
The last month we can see the most developer activity thanks to Mintscan is:
- Osmosis 615 commits
- Cosmos 417 ommits
- Proverance 359 commits
- Axelar at 280 commits
- Cudos at 257 commits
IBC Activity
This month was a relatively slow month compared to some recently with a 30 day average IBC volume of ~$345 Million from a total of 2,511,090 transactions.
The top 10 in volume and number of channels are as follows:
- Osmosis
~$266.4 Million in total IBC volume
~$93.5 Million inflows
~$172.9 Million in outflows
~ 25.7 Million total transactions on chain
1 Million IBC transactions
277 IBC Channels.
2. Cosmos Hub with ~$119.6 Million in total IBC Volume
~$62 Million inflows
~$57.6 Million outflows.
~ 1.9 Million total transactions on chain
360 IBC Channels
3. Axlear with ~$113.2 Million in total IBC Volume
~$80.3 Million inflows
~$32.9 Million outflows.
~ 820 Thousand total transactions on chain
20 IBC Channels
3. Juno with ~$31.8 Million in total IBC Volume
~$15.8 Million inflows
~$16 Million outflows.
~ 1.3 Million total transactions on chain
94 IBC Channels
4. Evmos with ~$30.5 Million in total IBC Volume
~$13.6 Million inflows
~$16.9 Million outflows.
~ 3.6 Million total transactions on chain
21 IBC Channels
Notable News
Pheng Steps Down
The legendary Peng Zhong steps down from Ignite. This stirs up some controversy on why he steps down and the future of Ignite with the 50% layoffs announced. It also sparks controversy if it has anything to do with Jae coming back.
Overall the community rejoiced in wishing Peng nothing but the best. Everyone who met Peng seemed to find him an incredibly kind and generous person with his time and knowledge.
Peng has been deeply involved in the Cosmos ecosystem for nearly 7 years and it will be interesting to see what he does next.
Ultra Stablecoin
Another project throws its hat in the ring for a stablecoin in Cosmos, which is Ultra on the Juno Network. Beyond that, there is almost no information on this project, but it will be interesting to watch.
OKC work to implement IBC and bring USDT to Cosmos
A project called OKC, a chain focused on the Metaverse and part of the large OKX exchange, announces they are running IBC on their testnet. One of the projects on their chain HoneyWood will be the first project to utilize IBC.
HoneyWood looks like a fun mindless farming and PvP game that allows players to play to earn. Although skeptical of most of these token models, it may be an interesting game for those interested to try, given the low cost to start.
For those interested more in what OKC is, apparently, they are one of the approximately 12 chains USDT is now natively on. They apparently have over 200 projects built on their chain now. OKC has market cap is around 300 Million. Their token launched around January 18, 2022 at around $54. It had ATH of around $240 and has since come down to $18.
According to Footprint, the ecosystem had over 1 Billion in TVL but is now around 39 million.
NEAR IBC
There is some commentary that NEAR is getting closer to implementing NEP and will connect with Cosmos but this is relatively unclear.
Injective — CosmWasm
Injective announces CosmWasm is now live on the mainnet. This allows smart contracts, options, maker fees, and more for the platform they highlight. Injective has been experiencing a good amount of IBC growth as well in the Cosmos ecosystem.
Nomic Updates
Nomic, who is bringing BTC to Cosmos with their sidechain as NBTC has announced they are now enabling their bridge and slowly rolling out BTC into the ecosystem.
We checked, and we could see some BTC in one of our staked address. They are trying to prevent large volumes by charging a huge premium to focus on slowly bringing this to the ecosystem in a safe and tested way.
Today not only can NOM not be transferred, nor can NBTC this is all allowing them to slowly expand and test features while also continuing to expand mainnet.
Overall, the Nomic team is working on an amazing task, and side chains with IBC are going to be needed for the best security for connecting with a PoW chain, according to experts.
dYdX Migration
dYdX was the big headline this month. This had the entire crypto ecosystem in shock and had Ethereum lovers questioning the viability of layer 2s.
Rather than provide too many opinions here, given the massive size of this news, we aggregated some content and interviews here, mainly Antonio of dYdX and Thyborg.
E-Money brings Fiat to Cosmos
E-Money announces they are working to bring fiat directly into Cosmos by allowing people to buy EEUR using Simplex. It is worth noting that Simplex has very high fees highlighted below on their website. Still, this is another good option for some users.
“Simplex’s fees range between 3.5% — 5% of the transaction value.
We do apply a minimum fee of 10 USD, which means that if your transaction is for a lower amount, the fee % will be higher than that. Additional fees may be applied if purchasing with a fiat currency other than USD.
In addition to Simplex’s fee, the wallet/site that referred you to Simplex will sometimes charge a fee for the transaction.
When issuing a purchase from Simplex.com, the transaction fee can range from 13 to 17 %.”
Accelerating Interchain Securtiy
Prop 72 passed in Cosmos to allocate roughly 1 Million dollars to jump starting Interchain Security (ICS). It allocates 150K ATOM to this imitative. 50K ATOM will go developing a DeFi hub consumer chain on ICS. This will allow another 100K to be used to fund large projects moving to ICS.
They will get 50% of the funds to start and then the rest within 2 weeks after launching ICS. Lots of details, including the pros and cons of various community members, were all highlighted here.
Juno Halts Again
Juno was halted again due to a bug issue creating a consensus failure. Jake remains very modest about the issues, and many individuals in the Cosmos ecosystem come to help for a speedy recovery. Unfortunately, the halt was also during the listing of Juno but a huge congrats for Juno’s first exchange listing.
Juno continues to show both the pros and cons, as Jake has highlighted in the past of a very decentralized network that is moving fast.
JackalDAO opens Beta
JackalDAO ($JKL) on the Secret Network announced they have their beta live for users to test the platform. For those unfamiliar, Jackal DAO is a privacy-focused data storage platform built on the Secret Network.
Secret Network Improvements
The Secret Network added more coins like Juno, Stars, Gravity, and Luna into their privacy wrapper. This allows individuals to hold even more coins in a private manner preventing people from tracking their holdings and movements as easily.
The Secret Network also released a large upgrade to their network called Shockwave.
Keplr Updates
Keplr has made some enhancements to their wallet dashboard. There has been some feedback in the community though that while some features are nice the color pallets are a little too intense and some things are now less intuitive than previously. Regardless it is a great product, and it is great to see them shipping features.
Cosmostation Updates
Cosmostation also announced some advancements this month; love to see the friendly competition. They have created an extension wallet that now supports cosmos and many non Cosmos assets such as Ethereum, Polygon, Binance, and more. This is critical as Cosmos expands to become the true Internet of Blockchains.
Mintscan Updates
The tool expansions just keep coming. Mintscan ships a new tool that lets you see better details about holders of an asset as well as breakdowns on how much is staked, liquid, and so on. They also announced that they added the feature to see developer activity.
penumbra First Transaction
penumbra ($PEN) was able to do their first fully privacy shielded transaction! If you are not familiar with them they are building crosschain DeF/trading. This could be valuable in allowing chains to run publicly but also for some privacy in holding, staking, sending, swapping, and governing assets. This could be one project to certainly keep an eye on.
First NFT Movie
Kevin Smith released the first ever NFT movie on Secret Network. There are 1,000 NFT movies available and at the time of writing this 599 were minted. The NFT holders owned full commercial rights to the movie and could participate in offseries such as comic books and sequels. Kevin Smith and Guy of Secret Labs did a great interview with the Delphi team on their mint.
Decentr and DVPN Partnership
Decentr and DVPN announce a partnership for DVPN built right into their desktop browser, although not their mobile browser yet. For those unfamiliar Decentr is a blockchain based browser tool, and DVPN is a decentralized VPN system. If you have never tried Decentr we recommend checking it out.
Interchain Foundation Update
The Interchain Foundation announced that they were changing up their ATOM delegations.
Craft Economy Pushes on
Despite that Microsoft announced recently that Minecraft will not allow any NFT monetization strategies the Craft Economy team claim to be moving ahead with their plans to build a GameFi chain and Minecraft ecosystem. We hope they can overcome this and create a fun metaverse in Cosmos even if they have to remove some monetization plans. This is something a while back a couple of our researchers mentioned Craft Economy should get a legal opinion on.
Cosmos SDK Update
The new Cosmos SDK V0.46 was released.
Evmos Updates
Evmos gets listed on Huobi making it the first major exchange to list EVMOS. Before that EVMOS was roughly a 400M market cap without ever being listed on a centralized exchange.
Fedreico also discusses the ideas of additional staking rewards to improve security. It is an interesting idea, but given the high staking APR it will be interesting if this would actually attract better security or if the funds would be better used elsewhere. Regardless it is great seeing the discussions around how to best address various incentives and security.
There are conversations around Evmos implementing Interchain Security. Evmos, ATOM, Secret, and a few others appear to be key candidates for ICS.
Crescent Updates
Crescent announces their orderbook and ranged liquidity is now live making it the first hybrid DEX in Cosmos. Crescent also announced their 3 month roadmap the combination of lending, limit orders, and an orderbook all being available could be an amazing experience for investors.
Gnoland Airdrop
Gno released an airdrop qualifier and calculator for their future drop.
Carbon <> Juno
Carbon ($SWTH) integrates with Juno to allow for permissionless futures trading.
Informal’s New Researcher
The legendary researcher Thyborg announces they are joining Informal to take on the onboarding of all the next generation of chains coming/migrating to Cosmos marking a huge win for the Cosmos ecosystem.
Osmosis New Assets Coming
Moonbeam integrates with Osmosis and is now live through Axelar; this brings Polkadot assets to the Cosmos ecosystem.
Eclipse <> Juno
Eclipse announces an IDO on the Juno Network.
Onenet Update
Onenet/Bushi announced their whitelist and Alpha access which appears to come with a lifetime access.
Sommelier Early Success
Sommelier raised 1 Million dollars in their first ever cellar on Aave.
HackATOM
HackATOM has released the videos for those who could not attend.
R&D Idea in Cosmos
B-Harvest discussed how they would like to explore the idea of creating a new Cosmos R&D center in Seoul for things like improving Tendermint, Cosmos SDK, backend kits, and more. They mentioned they had in mind 1 Million dollars for 5 engineers in mind. It is an incredibly interesting idea but $200,000 a year salary per engineer seems really high especially if there is not very key things in mind to execute. It would be nice to see some continued discussions on this.
Quasar Funding
Quasar announces they have raised an immature number of $6,069,420 dollars to bring a DeFi 2.0 like model to the Cosmos ecosystem.
Anon V2 Launch
Anon’s the first ever privacy PFP NFT series started their whitelist on July 29th they ended up selling out in around 3.5 hours on their actual public listing. If you want to learn more about Anon’s here is our article discussing them.
Sifchain <> Cardano
Sifchain is working on getting a grant from the Cardano ecosystem to bring Cardano to the Cosmos ecosystem.
About Curious Cosmonaut Research
Curious Cosmonaut Research plans to become a platform that will decentralize Cosmos Research. It will aim to create a model similar to Seeking Alpha where content creators can get paid for writing articles and funds raised will be staked or used to provide liquidity on DEXs to create income to fund the platform in addition to offering NFTs and other rewards as incentives for content creators with time. Instead of focusing on a particular individual, we plan for the content creators to represent the platform. We also plan on building some content aggregators and research tools.
Content creators can write articles and submit them for review to be published under their name or the Curious Comsonaut Research name depending on their preferences. Today content is backed on Medium, Twitter, LikeCoin (IFPS), and the Cosmos Hub using custom memos, we plan to expand into a full suite built on a platform like Akash including a full yearly Cosmos deep dive report.
Today there are no incentives in place for content creators but we hope to change that in the future; if you would like to be an early supporter feel free to message Curius Cosmonaut Research directly.
We are 100% self funded today and if you enjoyed this content any donations would be greatly appreciated towards our website and write to earn model here is our Starname and our Stargaze address is stars1xz5ljpvh9rds32cm20tz566mkhwf8r2qcm60re.
