COSMOS NEWS: NAMADA, ATOM, DYDX, DYM & MORE!!

Hi Cosmonauts! ⚛️
Welcome to the Cosmos ecosystem news roundup, here are the top stories in Cosmos in the 2nd half of December:

NAMADA SHIELDED EXPEDITION AND RPGF DROP UPDATES: RPGF drop claim period extended, deadlines and key dates and phases about the upcoming Namada Shielded expedition and more

DYDX V4 UPDATES: Several important updates in this episode about the trading rewards incentives, the 6 month launch incentives and the overall great progress of dYdX v4

NEUTRON VALIDATOR ALIGNMENT: A proposal to better align and incentivize Cosmos Hub validators running the Neutron consumer chain, learn all the details 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

The Namada RPGF drop claim period has been extended until January 12th 2024 at 9am UTC, from the previous deadline of 28th December 2023.
Remember also that the deadline to register for the Namada Shielded Expedition is the 2nd January 2024 at 9am UTC for both validators called Pilots and users called Crew members. Then, on the 4th January the 100 selected Pilots will be announced and Pilots will have until the 11th January 9am UTC to submit valid transactions to bond their stake at genesis, and the Shielded Expedition genesis file will be published on the 8th January. Finally, on the 12th January the Anoma Foundation will propose the Shielded Expedition genesis block files and the genesis time will be 16h UTC on the 16th January 2024. Users that apply to participate in the Shielded Expedition should be familiar with command-line tools.

2023 was a year of great growth for the Cosmos ecosystem and IBC, with IBC-enabled chains growing from around 50 in 2022 to almost 110 in 2023, representing over 100% growth.

The Dymension mainnet is approaching and this will bring the Internet of app-specific rollups or RollApps, to the Internet of Blockchains in Cosmos. Dymension facilitates the deployment of app-specific rollups and standardises rollups with IBC and this will further accelerate the growth of the interchain ecosystem. With thousands of RollApps deployed and around 1k listed on the Portal, Dymension will accelerate the growth of the Cosmos and IBC ecosystem.

DeFi/Staking

The dYdX Chain cumulative trading volume reached over $5 billion in around a month after the full trading launch, congrats! Chaos Labs also provided an update about the 6-month launch incentives program which launched on the 28th November, at the same time as staking and trading rewards. Over 1,500 traders so far earned points and these rewards will be received retroactively. To ensure that traders benefit from tight spreads and minimised exchange risk, an allocation will also be given to market makers, and a total of over 800 MMs have participated so far. Chaos Labs also announced several trading seasons with randomised length to prevent volume spikes at season ends and more.
The trading rewards constant C increased on December 17th and the third and final increase to 0.9 will be around January 10th. In parallel to this increase of rewards in v4, rewards have been decreased on v3 so this is expected to incentivize the trading volume migration further to v4 until most volume is happening on the new dYdX Chain. The 5th on-chain governance proposal on the dYdX Chain was approved to add the TIA market.

Project launches & network upgrades

The Neutron neutrality upgrade was completed successfully. This was an important upgrade since it completed the merge with Duality. This upgrade brings several advantages such as leveraging Duality’s hybrid orderbook to enable new dApps to be easily bootstrapped and avoiding fragmented liquidity. Also, developers are able to replicate stable, weighted, concentrated pools and more. Duality combines the efficiency of AMMs and the flexibility of orderbooks. The Neutrality upgrade also updated Cosmos SDK from 0.45 to 0.47, updated the Wasmd module to v0.45, the tokenfactory module, integrated the globalfee 1 module and also enforced setting of minimum gas prices between validators amongst other features.

Governance

For many months since Neutron joined the Cosmos Hub as a consumer chain there were discussions about how to better align Neutron with the Cosmos Hub and especially with the Cosmos Hub validators given the negligible revenues from Neutron. A recent governance proposal migrated the unclaimed NTRN from the Neutron airdrop to the Cosmos Hub community pool. While there are still discussions about different ways to use these NTRN, one of the ideas has been already proposed for both Neutron and Cosmos Hub governance. This idea consists of allocating 10k NTRN vesting linearly during one year from the NTRN unclaimed from the airdrop to each Cosmos Hub validator in the active set to support with the costs of running Neutron and to better align and incentivize validators. In this proposal it is also mentioned that there will be additional proposals to increase alignment of other current and future consumer chains and more information about this will be released soon. To be eligible to receive the 10k NTRN, validators need to be running Neutron nodes by the 31st of December, those opting out with the soft opt-out feature will not be eligible.
Since the NTRN will be vesting, validators who become inactive will have their NTRN reallocated or returned to the community pool.
Tokens are allocated to Cosmos Hub operators running active nodes on Neutron. Operators whose nodes become inactive on Neutron will be reallocated or returned to the Cosmos Hub Community Pool and this will be managed by a multisig.

The ICF announced two new Foundation Council members, Josh Cincinnati and Maxime Monod; they will join the existing Foundation Council members Brian Crain, Ethan Buchman, and Fernando Pedone. Josh Cincinnati advises the Sia Foundation, the Twilight Protocol and the Penumbra Protocol, and also sits on the board of the Mina Foundation. Previously, Josh was the founding Executive Director at the Zcash Foundation. Maxime Monod was a head of innovation at a Swiss bank and CTO in various companies.

The ATOM Alignment Treasury proposal was approved on the Cosmos hub. The AAT performs these functions in 3 different modules:
Interchain Account Management to create and maintain accounts on consumer chains to perform transactions on these chains.
Governance on Consumer Chains to monitor and clone critical proposals to the Cosmos hub governance so that the Cosmos hub can also vote on consumer chains using its protocol own liquidity (POL).
And the ICA Queue System to make simple POL actions more efficiently and in fewer steps as well as simplifying the governance process.

Events/conferences

The Builders Program hosted a conversation with several projects migrating from EVM to the Interchain ecosystem, including dYdX, about the advantages and reasons for moving from Ethereum to Cosmos. There was also another virtual event with an AMA with dYdX’s founder Antonio Juliano.

Osmosis news

The volume and liquidity in Osmosis increased significantly in the last month of 2023, showing a major recovery. This increased volume led to a higher value capture via taker fees, transaction fees or the proto rev module. For the last two months of 2023 the activity and volume on Osmosis accelerated and recovered to levels not seen since 2022.
Also, a liquid staking protocol for Celestia, instead of relying on their own layer 1 chain, it uses smart contracts on Osmosis.

Juno news

A previous Juno v16 upgrade disabled by error the frontrunning protection for the Skip’s Builder module. Proposal 327 has enabled now this frontrunning protection following the discovery of this error by restoring the original intended parameters of the v16 upgrade.

Persistence news

There are many exciting upcoming updates on the Persistence ecosystem. Firstly, the new pStake auto-compounding module is preparing for the stkDYDX launch and also the stkXPRT superfluid LP launch will happen soon. An even more decentralized pStake delegation strategy, a simpler and more efficient stkToken integration into borrowing and lending platforms such as Mars or Nolus, and many other great developments.
Instant LP unbonding for pools on Dexter was also announced, including for ATOM, stkATOM, USDC, XPRT and more. Moreover, with proposal 61 passed, XPRT is now the default token for Dexter, meaning that ownership of the Dexter vault and Multi-staking contract has been transferred to the Governance admin contract.
Furthermore, the stkATOM POL from the Cosmos hub proposal 853 was deployed on Astroport on Neutron. Stay tuned for the next exciting Persistence updates.

Secret Network news

Shade protocol was the first Cosmos DEX to launch Andromeda with trading of ANDR. The SHD/ANDR liquidity pool was also launched and you can bridge ANDR to Secret network and then swap ANDR for different assets.
Andromeda is the 1st decentralized on-chain operating system called aOS. Amongst several advantages, aOS allows to reduce the development time from months to just minutes through the use of Andromeda Digital Objects, which are innovative tools to efficiently create and compose Web3 Apps.

Stride news

Stride mentioned about a potential Dymension DYM airdrop also for stATOM with a snapshot the 19 December. Dymension is expected to arrive soon so stay tuned for further updates.
Stride also mentioned that they presented a proposal to the Anoma Foundation so that stATOM and stOSMO holders can also receive the Namada NAM airdrop. In particular, the proposal is suggesting that when the claim period is finished, to allocate a small amount of unclaimed NAM to stATOM and stOSMO holders, and including also stkATOM. The proposal also suggests tokens provided as liquidity and more.

Crypto regulations & compliance news with MME

IOSCO Finalises its Policy Recommendations for Decentralized Finance:
IOSOC (International Organization of Securities Commissions) — whose primary mission is to promote international cooperation in the field of financial supervision through the development of globally recognized standards — has finalized its Decentralized Finance (DeFi) policy recommendations, which were consulted on in September. The DeFi policy recommendations are complementary to the policy recommendations for crypto and digital assets markets issued in last November.
The primary objective of the nine policy recommendations is to address market integrity and investor protection concerns related to DeFi. This includes promoting greater consistency in regulatory frameworks and strengthening oversight across member jurisdictions. The recommendations cover six key areas for regulators:
•“understanding DeFi arrangements and structures”, e.g. services, activities;
•“achieving common standards of regulatory outcomes”, e.g. best application of the existing or new legal framework in each country
•“identification and management of key risks”, e.g. cyber risks, market risks;
•“clear, accurate and comprehensive disclosures”, e.g. seek out responsible persons;
•“enforcement of applicable laws”, e.g. “methods to obtain the appropriate data, tools and expertise they will need to conduct investigatory and enforcement activities”; and
•“cross-border cooperation”, e.g. “regulators should consider bilateral and/or multilateral cooperation arrangements beyond the enforcement context”.
Having delivered these recommendations, IOSCO is now turning its focus to monitoring implementation, addressing capacity building and providing technical assistance to its members.

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 watching and I’ll see you Cosmonauts very soon in the next episode!

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