COSMOS NEWS: ATOM, NAM, stTIA, stkDYDX, OSMO, AKT & MORE!!
Hi Cosmonauts! ⚛️
Welcome to the Cosmos ecosystem news roundup, here are the top stories in Cosmos in the 1st half of February:
COSMOS HUB AND CONSUMER CHAINS: Partial Set Security implementation started and IBC channel upgradability, major technical developments in the Cosmos Hub, learn the details in this episode. Major growth for stTIA and stDYDX liquid staking tokens launched by Stride, what’s next for Stride?
NAMADA: The Shielded Expedition is progressing after several restarts and new releases, watch this video to learn what happened so far and which validators are at the top of the ranking
DYDX v4: The launch of stkDYDX by pStake and also the iOS App already available
OSMOSIS: New vaults and incentivization for stTIA
KUJIRA: A collaboration being discussed amongst Kujira, MantaDAO and Neutron, more details in this episode
CELESTIA: A new foundation delegation program announced, who is eligible? When is the deadline to apply? How many validators will be selected?
SEI: Several updates about the growing Sei NFT ecosystem in this episode
PERSISTENCE: Two major developments in the Persistence ecosystem with the launch of stkDYDX and also Restaking, which is an innovative concept to provide additional defi yield to liquid staking tokens
SECRET NETWORK: Learn about SnakePath in this episode and how it enables new use case in DeFi
AKASH: A partnership announced with a major healthcare organization, what is the goal of this collaboration and why was Akash chosen?
OTHER ECOSYSTEM NEWS: Dymension launched and reached quickly significant trading volume and marketcap, based on this launch and the previous Celestia launch what are the expectations and estimations regarding the imminent Namada mainnet launch?
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)
Partial Set Security is progressing with work already started on the implementation. When Replicated security launched in 2023 there were expectations for certain revenues from consumer chains. Therefore, when Neutron and Stride joined as the first consumer chains, there wasn’t any historical data about previous consumer chains. After several months, validators and especially the smaller ones, started to complain about the lack of revenues from consumer chains with exponential infrastructure costs for each new consumer chain. Then, it became very challenging for new projects to join as consumer chains. Some decided to merge instead with an existing consumer chain or delay the launch as a consumer chain. A proposal was also passed to provide NTRN vesting to validators as revenue and alignment for running the Neutron consumer chain. Thanks to the upcoming Partial Set Security, both projects and validators will have a lot more flexibility. For example, major projects that require more security could launch with the N parameter close to 100% which would be similar to replicated security. Other smaller projects could choose a much lower N parameter value to increase the chances of being approved. For validators, especially the smaller ones, it means they would only be forced to validate those chains joining with a high N value, for the others they could have the option but not the obligation to join.
Partial Set Security won’t be fully permissionless but it will require a governance proposal. However there will be a lower quorum requirement. For new networks bootstrapping security is challenging, so thanks to Partial Set Security many new networks could leverage the security of the Cosmos Hub. In replicated security validators have been very selective and hence only two consumer chains joined so far. Thanks to Partial Set Security many additional networks could start benefiting also from the security of the Cosmos Hub.
Great news for IBC with the release of ibc-go v8.1 with IBC Channel Upgradability. Until now, to add new features a new channel had to be open but this was not ideal. Thanks to this release, now existing IBC channels can be upgraded to use new features such as fee middleware and upcoming features like ICS20 or multihop routing. This release is a major innovation for IBC, further confirming it as the standard for blockchain interoperability.
Major news about Stride and the launch of stTIA. Stride hadn’t launched yet stTIA because they were waiting for interchain accounts on Celestia. They even started a discussion on the Celestia forum about this. However, they took the decision to temporarily launch stTIA with a multisig similarly to Milkyway and incentivizing stTIA with an important STRD airdrop. This was a major success. Within a short time period, the TVL of stTIA increased above the TVL of milkTIA and stTIA became the largest liquid staking token for Stride even above stATOM. Stride is planning to change to interchain accounts when they are available in Celestia in around 3 months. Given the recent increase in STRD price, the value of the airdrop for stTIA holders became quite significant, thus further incentivizing liquid staking TIA with Stride. The airdrop is 5 million STRD which is 5% of the supply, given the recent increase in price of STRD the value of this airdrop is around $30 million.
In addition to this, Neutron is also supporting stTIA with NTRN rewards for the pool stTIA/TIA on top of the STRD from the airdrop.
Another major liquid staking token that Stride recently launched is stDYDX with an ongoing airdrop as well. stDYDX has already become the 5th largest liquid staking token on Stride. Very impressive progress by the Stride team, well done!
Neutron also provided an update in the forum mentioning that the transactions and smart contracts are being prepared to provide the NTRN vesting to validators as part of the previously approved governance proposal for alignment between Neutron and the Cosmos hub validators.
Namada
The Namada Shielded Expedition (SE) was expected to be very challenging and competitive, especially given the large prizes for the winners. However, it has been so far more challenging than anyone was really expecting. After the launch of the Shielded Expedition, the faucet was spammed using an automated script that resulted in the specific spammer accumulating a disproportionate amount of NAAN. Given that this happened shortly after the launch, the Namada team decided to restart the SE chain. This was done on the 6th of February, but a bug introduced by accident in version v0.31.1 led to strange behaviour and had to be fixed with v.0.31.2. Then another issue happened with non-deterministic iteration over a HashSet which was triggered in an edge case when a lot of validators got slashed. Finally, validators upgraded to v0.31.4 and resynced to restart the SE chain. Something very important is that given all these releases and fixes, it was critical to follow updates closely. Many validators in the Asia time zone had to stay many nights awake monitoring the developments. While some validators initially were at the top of the ranking, after these events they lost points due to getting jailed for double signing or joining the SE chain late after the restarts. The Nebb showing the ranking of validators was updated and as of the 15h February these here were the top 10 validators by total amount of ROID points. Please note, these points indicated here in the ranking don’t yet include S Class tasks since the Namada team mentioned they are still reviewing and no ROIDs were awarded yet for S tasks.
dYdX v4
pStake launched liquid staking for dYdX with stkDYDX. pStake is bringing some unique features for DYDX liquid staking including the following: 0% liquid staking fees, 300,000 PSTAKE tokens Launch LP incentives, No-click auto-compounding of USDC staking rewards, Custom-built for dYdX chain decentralization and Extra secure with a dedicated stkDYDX audit by Oak Security. Together with Stride, pStake is leading liquid staking in the Cosmos ecosystem so make sure to liquid stake your DYDX with pStake and enjoy auto-compounding of your USDC rewards in auto-pilot!
The launch of the dYdX Chain iOS app was announced on the 2nd February 2024, bringing the power of the dYdX Chain to Apple users. Trading on dYdX is now more accessible and convenient for Apple users, being able to stay connected to the market anywhere.
Osmosis
Quasar announced the stTIA/TIA Dynamic S+ new vault with STRD incentives, which went live on February 5th. Thanks to this vault you can maximize the stTIA yield while also remaining eligible for the Stride airdrop to incentivize stTIA.
Furthermore, Osmosis announced an stDYDX/DYDX pool with STRD incentives.
The launch of several new projects and liquid staking tokens has brought great volume and liquidity to Osmosis recently, these projects include Celestia, Dymension, stTIA, milkTIA, Sei, dYdX v4 and more.
Kujira
There is a discussion in the Neutron governance forum regarding token swaps and provision of protocol owned liquidity (POL) amongst Kujira, MantaDAO and Neutron.
There are several goals for this collaboration. Firstly, it will bring the Kujira and Manta communities closer to the Neutron community. This collaboration will also bring increases in trading volumes and liquidity in both Astroport and FIN for NTRN, MNTA and KUJI. Overall this is a great collaboration proposal and further brings the Kujira and broader Cosmos communities closer together. Additional advantages of this proposal are better diversifying treasuries across several major Cosmos assets or improving trade execution on Bow and Astroport without the expense of incentivising liquidity.
Celestia
The Celestia foundation announced a delegation program. It is important to note that validators not in the active set of Celestia are also eligible to apply if they have run an active Mocha testnet validator for at least 1 month before the application deadline. The applications for the first cohort opened on February 6th and will close on March 1st, with delegations starting on the 1st of April. Applications will open again in June and October 2024 and in February 2025. A total of 50 validators will be selected for delegations, however the duration of the delegation will have three different tiers of 12, 8 or 4 months depending on the score received for the first cohort. After the cohort 1, however, there won’t be any tiers for the duration of the delegation.
Sei
NFTs on Sei are growing with several interesting NFT projects already live. For example, the original NFT marketplace on Sei is called Pallet exchange. Moreover, MRKT launched recently and they are facilitating the seamless trading of NFTs on top of Pallet. Another project called Webump has been the launchpad and tooling for the new NFT projects launching on Sei.
Persistence
Two major developments for Persistence with the launch of stkDYDX and restaking. In the dYdX section stkDYDX was already covered, but as a reminder again the advantages of stkDYDX are 0% liquid staking fees, 300,000 PSTAKE tokens Launch LP incentives, No-click auto-compounding of USDC staking rewards and more.
Restaking is an interesting idea. As a reminder, what liquid staking allows is to benefit from staking rewards and additional defi yield. This defi yield could be LPing on Osmosis for example, lending protocols and more. The idea that Persistence is bringing is allowing holders of different liquid staking tokens such as stATOM, milkTIA, stDYDX and any other LST to earn the additional yield by staking these LSTs in the Persistence chain and receiving XPRT staking rewards as the additional defi yield. While Persistence is the first supported network, more will be announced soon.
Secret Network
SnakePath was introduced, which is a cross-chain messaging bridge that connects public blockchains and their applications to privacy-preserving computation networks. This allows smart contracts with confidential computation for chains like Ethereum or Polygon. Now Secret network can be used for random number generation using VRFs that are verifiable on chain, thus enabling new on-chain use cases in DeFi for example. In summary, SnakePath allows public blockchains like Ethereum to build and operate private computation contracts on privacy-preserving chains while at the same time keeping their primary smart contract logic and liquidity on public blockchains. This enables building new dApps that have the benefits of public blockchains such as UX, latency or transparency and also the benefits of privacy preserving blockchains. It is important to mention also that SnakePath doesn’t store or compute any data, it just connects public blockchains and their applications to privacy preserving computation networks.
Remember that the Hack Secret 2024 Hackathon is finishing on the 3rd of March 2024. There are two tracks in this hackathon. The first track is focused on cross-chain privacy for dApps that implemented cross-chain privacy using Secret smart contracts. The second track is focused on dApps built natively on Secret Network.
Akash
Solve.Care has selected Akash as the main way to access decentralized compute resources to power its Care.Nodes product, which means that patients globally will be able to gain ownership of their most important healthcare data. This is important because most healthcare data has been centralized within a few large healthcare providers.
Thanks to this collaboration, patients are able to access EOB forms without needing paper copies to be sent to them and hence this reduces the administrative overhead and costs for healthcare organizations.
This collaboration also helps to demonstrate how blockchains facilitate real-world use cases. Thanks to using blockchain-based nodes to store healthcare data, patients can now have sovereignty over their medical data and have control about who can access their information.
The growth of active leases on Akash in accelerating with a 3 times increase in active leases over the last months and with active leases on Akash approaching 2000 already.
Other ecosystem news
Dymension launched, which is a project focused on the seamless deployment of app specific rollups, known as rollapps. Dymension will contribute to the standardisation of rollups with IBC. Shortly after launching, Dymension’s token DYM reached the top 5 tokens on Osmosis by trading volume. It is interesting to note that the DYM token maximum supply is 1 billion, this is the case also for Celestia’s TIA and the upcoming Namada NAM token, all have 1 billion as maximum token supply. Furthermore, the circulating supply of all of these projects is similar at around 150 million tokens. The fully diluted valuation of DYM is around 10 billion and for TIA around 20 billion. According to this, if Namada has a similar valuation then the value of NAM would be around $10 to $20. Namada raised more funds than Celestia for example and a co-founder of Namada led previously the development of IBC, which is now the standard for blockchain interoperability.
Crypto regulations & compliance news with MME
ESMA consults package on reverse solicitation and classification of crypto-assets under MiCA
The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) has published two consultation papers as part of its responsibility to establish standards and guidelines for the implementation of the Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) Regulation. The two consultation papers include one on reverse solicitation and one on the classification of crypto-assets as financial instruments under the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II (MiFID II).
Consultation on reverse solicitation
In the consultation on reverse solicitation, ESMA seeks feedback on the proposed guidance on the criteria for the application of the reverse solicitation exemption and the supervisory measures that national competent authorities (NCAs) may implement to prevent its circumvention.
The so-called reverse solicitation refers to the scenario where a potential client contacts a firm seeking crypto-asset services. Under MiCA, there is an exemption that allows third country crypto-asset firms to serve European Union clients exclusively through this approach.
The proposed guidance emphasises that the provision of crypto-asset services by a third-country entity under MiCA is limited to situations where the client exclusively initiates the service. This exception is deliberately narrowly defined. It cannot be used by a firm as a means of circumventing the MiCA rules.
ESMA underscores that the reverse solicitation exemption is applicable only in very limited circumstances, essentially acting more as a prohibition. Third-country firms are barred from actively seeking clients within the EU, except in cases where the client independently initiates the request for crypto-asset services. The consultation paper further specifies that solicitation should be broadly interpreted and technology-neutral. This includes various promotional methods such as social media, trade fairs, influencers, celebrities.
Consultation on classification of crypto-assets as financial instruments
In the consultation on the classification of crypto-assets as financial instruments, ESMA seeks feedback on the establishment of explicit conditions and criteria for the classification of crypto-assets as financial instruments. This effort, which builds on ESMA’s previous efforts, aims to harmonize the MiCA regime with MiFID II and promote consistency across the European Union.
The proposed guidelines are intended to provide national competent authorities (NCAs) and market participants with well-defined, yet adaptable, conditions and criteria for determining whether a crypto-asset qualifies as a financial instrument.
To achieve this, the draft document seeks to strike a balance by providing guidance without imposing a one-size-fits-all approach. It also takes a technology-neutral approach. Once finalized, these guidelines will provide much-needed clarity and help establish global standards for the regulation of crypto-assets.
The consultation period for the two papers will end on April 29, 2024. ESMA will assess the feedback received during the consultation in the second quarter of 2024 and expects to publish a final report in the fourth quarter of the same year.
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 reading and I’ll see you Cosmonauts very soon in the next episode!
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