Tendermint re-delegated ~19M ATOMs to new Cosmos Hub Validators

Dear Cosmonauts,

This is a follow-up blog post to April’s announcement that Tendermint is unbonding all of its ATOMs.

To recap, Tendermint had made plans to unbond the majority of the ATOMs held in its treasury and re-delegate to Cosmos validators who have been active contributors to the Cosmos Network.

To refresh your memory, in 2017, the Interchain Foundation had launched a public fundraiser, raising upwards of $16M in BTC and ETH valued in USD. As part of the fundraiser agreement, Tendermint received 10% of the ATOMs launched at genesis for building the initial infrastructure of the Cosmos Network and for delivering on the feature set outlined in the Cosmos whitepaper.

Today, over 3 years later, those ATOMs sitting in Tendermint’s treasury are being put to work. They were largely illiquid because almost all of the ATOMs were bonded. In total, as of Oct 2020, Tendermint has roughly 22M ATOMs in its treasury, 85% of which are earmarked for redelegation to the following list of Cosmos validators.

Comprehensive list of Cosmos validators we will be bonding to:

In the initial announcement post, “Tendermint is unbonding all of its ATOMs”, we broke down 4 levels of delegation. After receiving a wave of interest as applicants rolled in, we ultimately ended up breaking down the categories into 5 tiers: 100k, 200k, 300k, 500k, or 700k ATOMs.

By the end of the process, 70 out of the 125 validators will have gotten Tendermint delegation — a much higher number of validators with a much more distributed delegation to each validator than the past set of delegation recipients. The second column shows Past Delegations, and almost all previous delegation recipients now have reduced New Delegations. But as a result of this exercise, many new validators who had previously no Past Delegations now have substantially more, well-deserved, New Delegations.

The decision process first entailed bucketing each validator into a tier based on the scope and cadence of public goods contributions they’ve made from the beginning of the year to now. Then, 15% was reduced across the board to enable Tendermint investing and financing decisions.

Now, you might’ve noticed that the initially announced unbonding date was slated to begin in April 2020. This process became longer drawn out than expected, as we were internally revamping our operational security protocol and setting up new multisigs in order to have a robust, agile key management system to do the unbonding and subsequent delegation. This took some time to implement, but now that the heavy-lifting has been completed, we are now set up to more quickly respond to governance proposals and be able to delegate, redelegate, undelegate, or vote faster while being more secure than ever.

This initiative is the start of many ongoing initiatives that aim to bolster public goods development in the Cosmos Network.

Up, up, and away

Your Friendly Fellow Cosmonaut