COSMOS CRYPTO NEWS: NAMADA MAINNET PHASES, ATOM, DYDX, OSMO, XPRT & MORE!!

Hi Cosmonauts! ⚛️
Welcome to the Cosmos ecosystem news roundup, here are the top stories in Cosmos in the 1st half of April:

COSMOS HUB AND CONSUMER CHAINS: NTRN vesting allocations updates, stSAGA and stDYDX TVL growth

NAMADA: End of the Shielded Expedition and mainnet launch phases

DYDX v4: v4 upgrade and governance discussions

OSMOSIS: v24 upgrade, alloyed assets and LAB StreamSwap

KUJIRA: Roadmap and airdrops updates

CELESTIA: Foundation delegation program cohort 1 updates

SEI: Overview of the Sei Creator Fund

PERSISTENCE: Solana liquid staking and airdrops announcements

SECRET NETWORK: Grants program cohort 2, dSHD and more

AKASH: Hackathon and active leases growth

OTHER ECOSYSTEM NEWS: Saga mainnet launch, Nomic’s stBTC and Berachain last fundraising

Focused sections about the Cosmos hub and consumer chains Stride and Neutron, Namada, dYdX, Osmosis, Kujira, Celestia, Sei, Persistence, Secret Network, Akash and Crypto regulations and compliance updates with MME

All this and much more in this episode, and now for today’s top stories:

Cosmos Hub and Consumer Chains (Neutron & Stride)

Neutron announced that the 10,000 NTRN vesting allocations to Cosmos Hub validators are finally being implemented. Since there are 180 vesting allocations, the execution will be separated into six different proposals on DAODAO. Each of these six proposals will make vesting allocations to 30 Cosmos Hub validators. The vesting schedule will be from the 26th March 2024 until the 26th March 2025. As a reminder, this vesting NTRN is provided as revenue for validators running the Neutron consumer chain since Cosmos Hub validators have been subsidising Neutron until now given the negligible revenues received so far. We are proud that this proposal has been successful and implemented. We initially created a twitter poll months ago with the idea of using part of the NTRN unclaimed from the airdrop and sent to the Cosmos Hub community pool as revenue for Cosmos Hub validators. We are happy that our idea and initiative has been successful and completed.

Stride continues its impressive TVL growth with a new all time high achieved following the allocation of 20 million DYDX tokens from the dYdX v4 community pool. The security provided by the Cosmos Hub was a key reason for dYdX v4 approving these 20 million DYDX, so it was a great decision for Stride to join the Cosmos Hub as a consumer chain last year. Stride also launched stSAGA with a 50k STRD airdrop for stSAGA holders over the next 100 days. Users are also able to LPing stSAGA on Osmosis in a pool incentivized with STRD. The next major TVL growth of Stride this year will likely be driven by stNAM. Remember that the Namada co-founder Christopher Goes led the development of IBC which is now the blockchain interoperability standard. Moreover, it is very relevant to note that Namada, while it uses IBC and CometBFT, has been built from scratch in rust and it is totally new and innovative technology. In comparison, other major projects recently launched such as Celestia were built with the standard and battle-tested Cosmos SDK.

Namada

The Namada Shielded Expedition (SE) ended on the 11th April in epoch 91. This was also the deadline to submit S class tasks. Following the deadline, the remaining tasks submitted were evaluated with a one week grace period to discuss the preliminary results and the final results expected in the week of the 22nd April. The Namada team is now fully focused on the mainnet launch which will consist of five phases, although it seems that the delay from phase 1 to phase 5 will be short and in fact the team wants to launch phase 1 once it is clear that moving fast to phase 5 is possible.
In phase 1, staking and governance voting will be possible with your NAM tokens. In phase 2 a governance proposal will activate staking rewards and Public goods funding (PGF) rewards. In phase 3, IBC and shielding will be activated with another governance proposal. In phase 4, the shielded set rewards are activated and finally in phase 5 the NAM transfers will also be enabled.
Regarding the SE itself, the Nebb ranking was broken and not updated for several weeks. This led to several validators who used to be in the top 10 to pay less attention to the SE and even giving up competing since it seemed complex to compete without frequent ranking updates. Other validators continued to give everything until the last moment and these validators will likely finish in the final top 10. In addition to this, because the SE lasted much longer than expected the S class tasks of RPCs, relayers, explorers or even vulnerabilities or protocol improvements were very diluted since many submissions were approved and hence the pool of points was shared amongst a large number of pilots. The S class task of building a shielded app however only a few validators submitted it and hence this could define the top 10. Moreover, because the A class tasks were not very diluted, as the S class tasks became more diluted the A class tasks became again increasingly relevant.
It is important to note that this was a super intense and competitive incentivized testnet lasting for almost two months and a half with many people leaving their jobs to focus on the SE and many participants spending countless nights without sleeping. Some of the validators participating included Cosmostation, Keplr, Cryptocito, Informal Systems, Citadel, Dimi, P2P, Zondax, Polkachu, Chorus One, Binary Builders, Simply Staking, Decentrio, Dokia Capital, Enigma and many other top validators. However, in this competition, the important assets to win were resilience, consistency, talent and strategy, not marketing or deep pockets. This means that some small or humble validators may actually finish in the top 10 winning life changing prizes while other major institutional validators may not finish in the top 10.
Before the Namada mainnet launch, in the genesis block the different NAM allocations will be included, such as for the Namada airdrop, the Community builders first round, the Shielded Expedition winners and all the other allocations. Remember, Christopher Goes, co-founder of Namada, mostly built IBC the blockchain standard for interoperability and some well-informed Cosmonauts even say he mostly built the Cosmos SDK as well. And Namada is one project of a much bigger initiative under Anoma. There shouldn’t be any more doubts by now that Namada will be the most important mainnet launch in crypto in 2024, and of a similar magnitude as the mainnet launches of Ethereum or Cosmos IBC. Tech-wise, you should note Cosmonauts that new projects such as Celestia, Dymension, Sei or Saga are all built with the standard Cosmos SDK, a tool for developers built also partly by Namada co-founder Christopher Goes. In contrast, Namada is built from 0, from scratch in rust, so this is another level of tech innovation and complexity. And precisely because it is a totally new tech, the shielded expedition incentivized testnet was required to stress test this new tech before the mainnet launch.

dYdX v4

dYdX v4 completed the v4 upgrade successfully. However, during the upgrade there were some issues that led to an extended halt. Some validators including ourselves helped dYdX Trading and dYdX Operations subDAO to find and fix the issue. In contrast, several validators receiving dYdX Foundation delegation or Stride delegation were absent and even jailed for an extended time during this upgrade which is quite concerning. The highlights of this v4 upgrade are the introduction of IBC withdrawal rate limiting, governance proposals to enable the MEV slashing committee to slash misbehaving validators, upgrade of the Cosmos SDK and especially the introduction of the authz module, which facilitates for example the management of governance for validators and could enable also the previous dYdX v3 endorsed delegates to collaborate with validators for dYdX v4 governance.

A total of 27 dYdX v4 validators voted in favour of Persistence’s pSTAKE proposal to liquid stake 5 million DYDX, in a similar proposal to Stride’s 20 million DYDX. In contrast, only a small minority of just 8 validators voted against the proposal and 12 abstained. In terms of the number of validators voting, this is almost 53% in favour, 23% abstaining and just 15% against the proposal. So you might wonder, how is it possible that this proposal was rejected? For one concerning reason, the validator Ex Machina has almost 24% voting power meaning that whether governance proposals on dYdX v4 are approved or not mostly depends on the decisions of this validator and this is really bad since it means dYdX v4 is quite centralised. We created a poll on twitter asking whether Ex Machina should abstain from voting until the centralization issue is fixed and the results were over 63% of the community saying that Ex Machina should abstain from voting and 36% saying that Ex Machina shouldn’t abstain. So, around two thirds of the dYdX community asked Ex Machina to abstain from voting until the centralisation issue is fixed. However, not only Ex Machina ignored the dYdX community, but they didn’t even participate in the dYdX forum to explain their voting decision. They simply voted no and made a proposal fail that had the great majority support from the community and validators.

Osmosis

Mad Scientists is a new and the first NFT collection on Osmosis. The community showed a great interest in the project since the LAB/OSMO StreamSwap was completed with 2.41 million OSMO raised, the largest amount raised so far by any project on StreamSwap. As a reminder also, StreamSwap is a project that was led and built by our long-term partners OmniFlix network.

Osmosis announced the Alloyed asset system to consolidate different versions of the same asset into a single and unified token. This is useful for example since on Osmosis there are different ETH versions bridged via different protocols and this creates fragmentation. Thanks to alloyed assets, different versions of the same asset on Osmosis could be consolidated and combined into one fungible token. Alloyed assets represent LP shares, this means that users could deposit different asset versions into the pool to add liquidity and in return would receive LP shares in the form of alloyed assets.

Some of the highlights of the Osmosis v24 upgrade are the following. The Burn mechanism for ProtoRev, which accumulates OSMO, ATOM and USDC by doing arbitrage on each swap performed on Osmosis. So all the revenue from ProtoRev will be burnt now with this new burn mechanism. The v24 also introduced a reduction in block time and the ICA controller was added, which allows Osmosis addresses to perform crosschain transactions with a greater number of chains, and several other new features and improvements were also included in this v24 upgrade.

Kujira

Kujira announced their updated roadmap and some of the highlights are the following. Regarding Sonar, seedless wallets, KYC-less deposits or DAODAO integration. Kujira futures perps will be introduced as well as FIN oracle orders and margin trading. In the roadmap some upcoming airdrops are also mentioned such as Cacao protocol’s YUM or ERIS.

Celestia

Celestia announced the foundation delegation cohort 1. However, it is important to note that a requirement to apply included having joined the Celestia testnet at least one month before the application deadline, but the application form and eligibility details were released less than one month before the deadline which means that new validators didn’t really have an option to apply to cohort 1. There were 50 validators selected in cohort 1 divided in three groups. The group 1 needs to renew their applications in 12 months, the group 2 in 8 months and the group 3 in 4 months. This means that for cohort 2 new validators can apply and the validators selected in group 3 will need to reapply also. Celestia also mentioned that certain infrastructure providers won’t be eligible from cohort 2 including OVH and others.

Sei

Sei announced the Sei Creator Fund to support creators and builders within the Sei NFT ecosystem. The Sei Creator Fund will support collections, applications, infrastructure, and events. The Phase 1 of the grants application started already and it is possible to apply directly to the Foundation. Phase 2 will be a community directed funding process in partnership with Gitcoin, involving community’s votes. The collaboration with Gitcoin will facilitate this voting process since Gitcoin is well-known for funding open-source development and public goods.

Persistence

pSTAKE announced some major news with the expansion to Solana and the launch of Solana liquid staking with stkSOL. Given the marketcap of Solana, this could greatly increase the TVL of pSTAKE. The PSTAKE airdrop on Solana with PP Season 1 was introduced the 9th April and additional announcements will be made soon including the following. The PP genesis initial eligibility criteria, more PP tasks for users to get more PP, a user dashboard with all PP information and more. Stay tuned for the imminent stkSOL launch!

Persistence also announced the Persisters Squad Program with different tiers depending on the number of followers such as advocate, voyager or Persister. The participants will receive several rewards including XPRT rewards in the range of 75 to 300 XPRT monthly based on the different tiers and additional bonus XPRT and other benefits.

Secret Network

Shade protocol announced that dSHD is live on the public testnet. This is the first ever LST for a native SNIP token on Secret network. A native LST offers several advantages over external LST according to Shade protocol and users will be able to benefit from both staking and DeFi yield, as well as autocompounding and other benefits.

The winner for the HackSecret 2024 was an upcoming decentralised crypto betting protocol called Satoshi Palace, focusing on security and anonymity.

The 2nd cohort of the Secret network grants program opened for applications, with a focus on DeFi, AI and DePin. The goal is to deploy an equivalent of up to 300,000 SCRT to around 4–5 selected projects. Also, projects using the Secret network EVM development toolkit will also be given priority. Moreover, something special for this cohort 2 is that there will be a bounty for a team willing to implement a project based on concepts described in MIT Media Lab’s Community Transformers, allowing confidential LLM interaction on Secret Network. The cohort 2 applications opened on March 15th, 2024 and submissions will be accepted for the first 3 weeks. Then, the selection process will start for several weeks and finally in the 6th week the grants recipients will be revealed.

Akash

Active leases on Akash are growing at an accelerating pace with a 10x raise since just December 2023. Active leases currently deployed on Akash with AKT are at an all-time high of over 5,000 which is an impressive milestone.

The second Akash hackathon started, with a focus on AI, network tools and deployments and prizes in AKT are worth over $200k. The hackathon will be from April 8th until May 17th 2024.

Other ecosystem news

Saga launched its mainnet and shortly after launch their token was listed in some top exchanges like Binance with good trading volume. The staking ratio is around 50% but it is surprising that there are only 21 validators in the active set. It is also concerning that the top 4 largest validators all have a 0% fee which could lead to centralization risks although some validators like SG-1 are planning to soon increase their fee.

Nomic announced stBTC in partnership with Babylon. stBTC is a Bitcoin liquid staking token and users can obtain stBTC with nBTC, and to obtain nBTC it is possible either by depositing BTC into Nomic or acquiring nBTC elsewhere. Then, users can lock nBTC in the BTC staking pool in the Nomic app to mint stBTC. Then, stBTC will accrue rewards in various tokens, by any network which opts into the use of staked Bitcoin security, similarly as ATOM holders receive rewards from the different consumer chains benefitting from the security of the Cosmos Hub.

Berachain announced a $100 million series B funding led by Brevan Howard Digital. We look forward to seeing what Berachain is building and can’t wait to help secure the network as validators

Crypto regulations & compliance news with MME

What is Namada?
Namada is a shielded asset hub, enabling full control over the sharing of personal data and bringing state-of-the-art data protection to existing assets, applications, and blockchain networks. Namada’s primary innovation is the multi-asset shielded pool (MASP), which goes beyond existing solutions limited to a single chain or asset to provide asset-agnostic data protection for the entire multichain landscape. Namada also introduces a system of incentives rewarding users in Namada’s native token, NAM, for shielding their assets, which improves data protection guarantees for the entire shielded set.

Some of the features and benefits of Namada include:
Shielded asset hub: Users can consolidate assets from across the multichain into Namada’s multi-asset hub and get state-of-the-art data protection guarantees, with the ability to choose between shielded and transparent balances and transfers.

Shielding rewards: Users collect rewards for helping strengthen Namada’s data protection guarantees by holding assets in the shielded set. Assets held in the shielded set are not locked and can be freely transferred at any time.

Shielded cross-chain actions: Users’ personal data can stay protected while interacting across chains, including with transparent chains. Users can choose to shield their activity across any connected network as they transfer assets, use applications, and engage in shielded cross-chain applications such as DeFi, interactions with DAOs and much more.

Selective disclosure: Users can voluntarily disclose their information on-demand to third parties of their choice, for compliance or other purposes.

Modular, composable data protection: Namada can be used in a modular way to retrofit data protection to existing assets, applications and blockchains. Developers can add data protection to their existing products by using Namada as a composable shielding layer, without needing to deploy anything new, giving their users the ability to choose between transparent and shielded actions for ultimate control over their on-chain activity.

IBC and Ethereum support: Namada will initially support the Ethereum and Cosmos ecosystems via IBC and a native trustless Ethereum bridge, but is ultimately designed to bring data protection to any asset and any chain that supports fast finality.

Namada’s approach to data protection
Namada was built with the idea that the ability to maintain sovereign control over one’s personally identifiable information is not only a fundamental human right, it’s a necessary precondition for freedom, democracy, personal safety, and the ability to conduct business. Namada is not about obscuring information in the conventional sense of privacy but about restoring users’ ability to freely disclose information at will rather than broadcasting everything to the entire world by default.

Public blockchains’ inability to provide data protection guarantees is not only problematic for compliance in many jurisdictions, it also hinders widespread adoption, particularly in the case of business and institutional adoption where the need to maintain control over sensitive information is paramount.
Existing tools and services for on-chain data protection are highly fragmented and impractical, limiting data protection to a single asset or a single blockchain. Users lose protection guarantees when they want to hold or transact additional assets, and when engaging in any cross-chain activity.

Namada compared to Zcash and other solutions
Namada’s design owes a lot to Zcash and would likely not exist without Zcash’s pioneering innovation. Namada’s MASP is an extension of the Zcash Sapling circuit, adding the ability to shield not just a single asset but any and every asset capable of being bridged into Namada’s unified shielded set. Zcash extended the Bitcoin protocol to provide a private asset — ZEC — an important first step but one that limits data protection to a single asset with no interoperability.

Many solutions today are limited to particular assets and particular chains, while Namada makes it possible to retrofit data protection to any asset and any chain. Since data protection guarantees are a function of a shielded set’s size (the larger the set, the stronger the guarantees), the current fragmentation of shielded sets across different assets and chains limits the scope of data protection. By contrast, Namada provides a unified shielded set for the entire multichain landscape, enabling stronger data protection guarantees for everyone (while rewarding users for contributing).

Conclusion

And that is all for today’s Cosmos ecosystem bi-weekly review so if you enjoyed it Cosmonauts remember to click that like button, subscribe button and bell icon too. Thank you so much for watching and I’ll see you Cosmonauts very soon in the next episode!

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