COSMOS NEWS: ATOM, NAMADA SHIELDED EXPEDITION, INJ, LIQUID DYDX & MORE!!
Hi Cosmonauts! ⚛️
Welcome to the Cosmos ecosystem news roundup, here are the top stories in Cosmos in the 1st half of January:NAMADA SHIELDED EXPEDITION UPDATES: Pilots and Crew members selected and ready for the start of the Namada Shielded expedition, learn all the latest updates and information in this episode
LIQUID STAKING FOR DYDX: Stride and Persistence will soon bring stDYDX and stkDYDX to offer several advantages to DYDX stakers, watch this video to learn all the details
COSMOS HUB GOVERNANCE: A proposal to better align Cosmos hub validators and the Neutron consumer chain and another proposal suggesting to reduce the minimum inflation parameter to 0%
INJECTIVE VOLAN MAINNET UPGRADE: The largest upgrade in Injective’s history, learn all the key highlights in this video
Focused sections about Osmosis, Secret Network, Persistence, Juno, Stride and Crypto regulations and compliance updates with MME
All this and much more in this episode, and now for today’s top stories:
Tech
Several important updates about the Namada RPGF Drop and the Shielded Expedition. The 12th of January Namada announced that the RPGF Drop was closed following the previous deadline extension. All those who claimed their NAM tokens will have their submitted accounts included in the Namada genesis block proposal which will be made by the Anoma Foundation. The Namada genesis block will also include the allocations for the first Community Builder RPGF round and the RPGF Nominations.
The Namada Shielded Expedition had an unprecedented interest by the community with over 140k crew members and over 10k pilots applying to participate in the incentivized testnet. While all eligible crew member applications were accepted, the selection process for pilots was highly competitive with over 10k applications for just 100 available spots. We are proud that we were selected as one of the pilots for the Shielded Expedition and we look forward to continuing contributing to Namada as the mainnet is approaching. The selection of pilots was done by the Anoma Foundation, Heliax and Knowable.
The deadline for pilots to submit the valid pre-genesis bonding tx was updated to the 25th January 2024 at 9am UTC. Moreover, an updated timeline for the start of the Shielded Expedition was provided. On the 29th January by 12pm UTC the remaining genesis files will be published and the protocol release for the Shielded Expedition. The genesis time will be the 30th January at 17h UTC.
Then, the Shielded Expedition will last for several weeks and Pilots and Crew members will compete with each other. The tasks will consist of mining asteroids to receive ROID which will be the points for the leaderboard. Asteroids which are mined earlier or that are rare will give a larger amount of ROID points for example. The ranking of Pilots and Crew members in the leaderboard, called Nebb, will be in real-time. For the winners of the Shielded Expedition, the Anoma Foundation has allocated 30 million NAM which is 3% of the total token supply. Before the genesis, additional information will be shared regarding the list of wanted tasks called asteroids and also additional details about the ROID system.
DeFi/Staking
The trading rewards constant C on dYdX v4 was increased to 0.9, following the previous increases in November and December 2023. These increases in trading rewards in dYdX v4 happened while trading rewards were reduced on dYdX v3 leading to a growing volume in dYdX v4 which is now getting close to the volume of dYdX v3. The migration of trading volume from v3 to v4 is happening as expected with clear increases coinciding with the increase in the trading rewards constant C.
Several major milestones were achieved on the dYdX Chain since the launch at the end of October 2023. There has been over $12 billion in trading volume, over $2 million in USDC staking rewards and over 74 million DYDX has been staked.
The season 2 of the dYdX Launch Incentives Program, which is run by Chaos Labs, was announced. The season 2 will last for 6–8 weeks, and in this season 2 performance based rewards will be 20% of the total trading rewards, totaling $800k in DYDX tokens. For season 3, the promotion/relegation criteria will be based on top performance percentages
Project launches & network upgrades
The largest upgrade in Injective’s history, the Volan mainnet upgrade, was successfully implemented on the 11th January 2024. The Volan upgrade includes the world’s first ever Real World Asset Module (RWA Module). This new module allows institutions and users to launch and access RWAs and structured products, for example treasury bills, credit products, tokenized fiat pairs and much more. With the RWA module, Injective is the only blockchain with support for a permissioning layer directly on its native chain that amongst several other advantages adds compliant access points for financial institutions. The RWA module allows the seamless creation and management of permissioned assets with custom features.
The Volan upgrade also brings new enterprise APIs which greatly enhance scalability with reduced latency for institutional participants. New token burn capabilities are included as well in this upgrade.
Any IBC-enabled chain can now interact from its own core chain with Injective’s Web3 finance modules such as its on-chain orderbook thanks to the support of Packet forward middleware and IBC hooks.
The new exotic oracle feed design allows dApps to seamlessly launch exotic assets such as fx, tokenized bonds and more. The Volan upgrade also allows for more Ethereum native wallets integrations and also better developer experience.
Several improvements in the Exchange module are also introduced such as a post-only mode setting, a new client order ID feature to allow users to track orders using their order IDs. Moreover, additional safety checks upon liquidations for derivative markets are now included in the Exchange module and also fixes for funding rate calculations under certain edge cases amongst additional improvements and new features. The Volan upgrade also introduced further improvements to the Gov module, the Tokenfactory module and more.
Governance
The Cosmos hub proposal 867, titled validator incentivization, received great support from the overall majority of validators and ATOM stakers. After the passing of this proposal on January 23rd, 1.8 million NTRN will be sent from the Cosmos hub community pool to a DAODAO multisig which will then perform an IBC transfer to Neutron and execute a message to register vesting allocations of 10k NTRN for each validator. The allocations will then be vested linearly over one year using dedicated contracts on Neutron. Via a corresponding proposal to the Neutron DAO, a voting vault was enabled to provide voting rights in Neutron governance for locked validator NTRN tokens. The goal of this proposal is to better align Neutron with the Cosmos hub validators, since there has been an ongoing complaint about the lack of revenues for validators running Neutron for many months. This proposal also mentioned that it is the first of a series of proposals to better align consumer chains with Cosmos hub validators.
The Cosmos hub proposal 868 is suggesting to decrease the minimum inflation parameter to 0%. A previous proposal decreased the maximum inflation parameter from 20% to 10%, however until the last few hours the Cosmos hub community was very divided and around half of the votes were opposing the proposal, the vote shifted slightly to yes towards the end of the voting period. For the current proposal 868 the situation is similar with around half of the community supporting the proposal and the other half rejecting the proposal. At the moment, the dynamic inflation range is from the new maximum value of 10% to the previous minimum value of 7%. Even if this proposal is approved, the inflation won’t start decreasing until the bonded ratio increases above the target value. While it seems the Cosmos hub community is focusing a lot on adjusting the inflation parameters it is not clear this is effective in increasing the ATOM price. Moreover, the previous proposal to reduce the maximum inflation parameter to 10% was more elaborated and included a better analysis and overview, while proposal 868 is just one line suggesting to reduce the minimum inflation to 0% and linking to a post in the Cosmos hub forum.
Events/conferences
Cosmoverse announced the location for the event Cosmoverse 2024, which will be in Dubai during October 21st and 22nd. The previous editions of Cosmoverse were in Lisbon in 2021, in Medellin in 2022 and in Istanbul in 2023. OmniFlix was the media partner for all the editions of Cosmoverse responsible for the livestream of the events, the ticketing platform and much more.
Osmosis news
Osmosis had over $1.1 billion volume in December 2023. In the whole Osmosis history, only in 7 months previously Osmosis had a larger monthly volume. The liquidity is also recovering to values last seen in mid 2022 although most of this liquidity is now supercharged and much more efficient. During most of the year 2023 the monthly volumes of Osmosis were much lower than $1.1 billion, with a great recovery towards the end of 2023.
6 months after the launch of supercharged pools all top pools by volume in Osmosis are now supercharged pools. Remember that thanks to supercharged liquidity there is a significant increase in the efficiency of liquidity, meaning that although current liquidity in Osmosis is lower than in early 2022, the comparison should be done including also the supercharged liquidity.
Osmosis announced staking v1 to facilitate staking directly via the Osmosis UI instead of having to use third-party wallets such as Keplr or Leap. This will remove complexity for Osmosis users and offer a more unified experience directly on the Osmosis UI. Osmosis staking v1 will support OSMO staking with the option to stake assets, collect rewards or redelegate. In the upcoming v2, support for multichain staking will be introduced.
Juno news
The Juno Charter has been ratified and the elections have been concluded. The Juno Charter was introduced by the Juno Working group. Following the approval of proposal 319, the implementation of the Juno Charter took place and members from the community elected. Currently, there are three departments composing the operational body known as the Council, these departments are development, operations and communications.
Persistence news
Persistence recently achieved several major milestones. The number of Persistence accounts reached over 51k, there was almost 200% increase in chain TVL, and also important growth in terms of average daily active users and daily transactions. The IBC volume also showed important growth and progress. Moreover, while December 2023 was the highest month by volume on Dexter, in just the first week of January 2024 40% of that whole December volume had already been traded.
pStake Finance had a major increase as well for ATOM and OSMO liquid staking and Dexter had an impressive growth of liquidity and volume. Overall, really positive and accelerating growth across the Persistence ecosystem in terms of active users, trading volume, liquidity and other metrics.
Persistence announced a new feature to cancel unstaking at any time during the 21-day unbonding period on both Keplr and pWallet. The cancelling of unstaking is done via a single click in both wallets, thus enhancing the staking user experience.
stkDYDX on pStake is approaching. Persistence released a detailed blogpost covering the imminent stkDYDX and here are the key highlights, the link to the blogpost is included below. pStake recently launched for Osmosis and Cosmos hub a new automated delegation strategy focused on decentralization and this will be also applied to stkDYDX. Similarly to stDYDX, stkDYDX will offer auto-compounding of staking rewards for both USDC and DYDX, greatly improving the user experience for staking for DYDX holders. Moreover, it is mentioned in the article a potential pStake and DYDX dual governance for stkDYDX. Another highlight is the flash unstake feature allowing for instant redemptions/unstaking of stkDYDX for DYDX tokens.
In terms of the timeline, the launch of stkDYDX is expected after the dYdX Chain upgrade to enable ICA accounts. DeFi integrations are planned for stkDYDX into DEXs such as Astroport on Neutron with potential integrations as well into Ethereum LSTfi protocols
Secret Network news
The SHD and ANDR LP staking rewards went live. Following the launch, the trading value reached over $2 million with an average daily volume of over $150k.
sSCRT is a privacy-preserving and fungible equivalent of SCRT. Shade protocol announced the launch of sSCRT as a new SILK collateral vault to the lending platform. SILK is Secret network’s native, decentralized and privacy-preserving stablecoin.
To further align and connect the Secret network and Kujira ecosystems, the Kujira governance proposal 537 passed to build Protocol owned Liquidity (POL) for KUJI and SHD. The goal is to build a $200k TVL for SHD and KUJI in both ecosystems. In particular, there will be a sustainable KUJI liquidity expansion and sustainability on both ShadeSwap and Kujira’s BOW.
Stride news
The Kujira proposal 535 increased again the stATOM mint cap, from 1M USK to 1.5M USK. The cap had already been increased recently, which shows the high demand of stATOM to mint USK. In fact, stATOM and stOSMO back over 23% of all USK.
stTIA is approaching with a Celestia Improvement proposal or CIP already created detailing the implementation of ICA. Stride explained that the Celestia upgrade process is closer to Ethereum than to Cosmos, meaning that CIPs and social consensus drive protocol development, while in Cosmos it is signalling proposals and tokenholder governance. Apart from stTIA, the other two major upcoming launches of Stride for 2024 will be stDYDX and stNAM.
Stride provided several updates about stDYDX. As a reminder, holders of DYDX wishing to liquid stake their tokens will receive stDYDX from Stride. Then, the redemption rate of 1 stDYDX increases over time because staking rewards accrue and Stride compounds those rewards.
A key benefit of stDYDX is that Stride will send all USDC collected as staking rewards to Osmosis and swap them for DYDX, then these DYDX are returned to Stride to be staked and compound the staking rewards. DYDX holders receive staking rewards mostly in USDC not in DYDX, so if they want to compound the rewards they will need to do the whole process of swapping for DYDX themselves, while in the case of stDYDX Stride facilitates this process.
Stride will stake DYDX with a set of 32 validators, with 10 validators initially selected and additional validators to be added every few weeks until the total of 32 validators is reached. The delegation to each validator selected will be equal. In the future, the traditional Stride host chain validator selection process will be implemented. To accelerate the growth and adoption of stDYDX there will be an airdrop to stDYDX holders, integrations with Osmosis and Astroport and more. Stride mentioned that the stDYDX launch date will be announced soon.
Crypto regulations & compliance news with MME
SEC Approved Spot Bitcoin ETFs
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) — the federal agency responsible for regulating and overseeing the securities industry in the U.S. — approved the first spot bitcoin ETF on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). In total the SEC approved 11 spot bitcoins ETFs — including Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC.P) and BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT.O), among others.
After years of speculation, uncertainty and excitement, the SEC’s approval is a milestone for the crypto industry and bringing regulatory clarity and paving the way for more investment in crypto
CFTC outlines ways to mitigate DeFi risks
The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), responsible for overseeing U.S. derivatives markets, has issued a report outlining with suggestions for policymakers and industry participants to address the risks linked to Decentralized Finance (DeFi).
The report by the CFTC’s Digital Assets and Blockchain Technology Subcommittee of the Technology Advisory Committee (TAC) addresses the idea that the advantages and disadvantages of DeFi depend largely on the structure and characteristics of individual systems. It highlights a key issue with DeFi systems, which is the lack of clearly defined lines of responsibility and accountability, and some industry efforts to circumvent them.
The report makes “detailed recommendations [to policymakers] to mitigate risks to investors, consumers, market integrity and financial stability, and to combat illicit financial activities”.
These include the following recommendations to policymakers:
•Resource assessment, data gathering and mapping — policymakers should prioritize enhancing their technical capabilities and comprehension, which involves determining both their current knowledge and gaps in understanding regarding DeFi;
•Survey the existing regulatory perimeter — policymakers should use the mapping exercise as a basis for assessing whether and how DeFi systems, which encompass a wide range of activities and functions, currently fall within the scope of U.S. financial and non-financial regulation;
•Risk identification, assessment, and prioritization — policymakers should aim to methodically identify, clarify and summarize the risks associated with DeFi. These risks include issues such as asymmetric information and conflicts of interest, operational and security vulnerabilities, liquidity and maturity mismatches, over-leveraging, inherent algorithmic failures and procyclicality, complexity, concentration risks in DeFi structures, and concerns related to market manipulation and illicit finance;
•Identify and evaluate the range of potential policy responses to address risks — aligned with the risk assessments, policymakers should appraise the spectrum and potential efficacy of regulatory approaches and risk-mitigation measures for DeFi. This entails evaluating particular actions and responsibilities, while also identifying pivotal points of authority and oversight that can serve as the foundation for imposing regulatory obligations;
•Foster greater engagement and collaboration with domestic and international standard setters, regulatory efforts, and DeFi builders — policymakers ought to formulate a plan to enhance involvement and cooperation within the domestic regulatory community. This collaboration should extend to standards and research bodies, such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), as well as the DeFi industry. The goal is to establish not just policy objectives but also the methods to realize them; and
•“Apply recommended framework to drive near-term, prioritized progress on digital identity, Know Your Customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) regimes, and calibration on privacy in DeFi”.
In addition, the derivatives regulator emphasized the importance of fostering interaction and cooperation with developers in the DeFi sector, as well as coordinating regulatory initiatives with international standard-setting organizations.
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. If you are staking ATOM, DYDX or INJ, consider staking with us to support our research and video production, the links to stake with us are included below. Thank you so much for reading and I’ll see you Cosmonauts very soon in the next episode!
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