Expansion: The Mission to 100x Cosmos, and Unlock its Full Potential
In part two of three of this series, we dive into the ICF’s renewed focus and initiatives to accelerate ecosystem growth.
For years, Cosmos has been committed to its mission to advance blockchain technology. This focus on innovation has positioned the Interchain Stack as one of the most advanced blockchain technology stacks in the world today. With groundbreaking components like IBC, Cosmos SDK, and CometBFT, over +150 chains have decided to build modular, permissionless, sovereign, and customized appchains. Despite becoming a leader in technology, the ICF and Skip believe the growth potential of Cosmos is fully untapped.
To unleash the latent potential of the Cosmos vision and builder community, the ICF has restructured to not only act as a technical steward but as a steward of ecosystem growth. Below is what we can share — right now — on our plans to reform growth efforts across the Cosmos and Cosmos Hub ecosystem.
A laser focus on increasing liquidity
The growth of liquidity within Cosmos and the Cosmos Hub will be Interchain Inc.’s #1 priority for 2025, with a target to 10x liquidity in Cosmos in the first 12 months.
Why liquidity? As explained in our recent announcement, liquidity is not tied to one project, or one chain, but affects the entire ecosystem’s attractiveness and quality of applications. Most past issues in Cosmos — fragmentation, tribalism, and difficulty in attracting applications — can be traced to a root cause: shallow and fractured liquidity.
We have a strong, proven belief that Cosmos has the industry’s best technology and best architecture for building applications. Developers want to build here, and the most ambitious teams know this. By increasing liquidity, we can make the decision to bet on the open web and build on Cosmos’ sovereign architecture an easy choice.
How Interchain Inc. and the ICF are gearing up to drive liquidity
Massively increasing liquidity requires efforts from multiple angles. For example, you can onboard liquidity from external sources, you can create new liquid assets, and you can unlock existing liquidity that is idle.
In the first post in this series, we discuss each of these. Here, we will discuss two specific strategies:
Build and invest in a world-class Ecosystem Growth team:
A function dedicated to supporting the onboarding and success of builders, institutions, partners, and users onto Cosmos, its ecosystem, community, and technologies. This team will own education and project funding/growth programs for Cosmos and will have a builders, Hub, and institution division that will support them end-to-end in Cosmos.
Unleash the Cosmos Hub to drive ecosystem growth
The Cosmos Hub sits at the heart of our mission to 100x Cosmos. The Hub is and has always been, the original and most decentralized and community-driven blockchain. We believe the Cosmos Hub is crucial to the success of Cosmos, and not just a facilitator of liquidity — it can be a key driver of ecosystem-wide expansion.
From an external perspective, the growth and success of the Cosmos Hub reflect directly on the broader ecosystem. Internally, we celebrate the sovereignty of each chain, but we also recognize the vital role the Cosmos Hub has played and the deep user and narrative centrality it has within the entire ecosystem.
As a first step, Interchain Inc. (consisting of former Skip leadership and engineering) will be supporting the maintenance and development of the Cosmos Hub and has been researching and testing a new roadmap to turn it into an engine for growth and a true “Hub” for the ecosystem.
To give a taste of what’s to come: there are many vital functions we believe the Hub should perform to help the ecosystem:
- The Hub can act as an ecosystem-aligned, cheap, and extremely fast native bridge for external assets (onboarding liquidity).
- The Hub can become the best place to deploy thousands of new applications and sovereign chains, by offering best-in-class services like oracles, security, interop, and liquidity from day 1. Skip’s product suite can be enormously helpful here.
- The Hub can once again become the reference Cosmos L1, by upgrading to the latest versions of the Interchain stack, deploying IBC Eureka, and speeding up blocktimes significantly.
- The Hub can act as a touchpoint to aggregate and bring in vendors to work with the rest of the ecosystem (e.g. custodians, centralized exchanges, and top-tier infrastructure providers).
The ideas shared here are only a starting point — any future implementation will be a collaborative effort pursued alongside the broader community.
Have ideas of your own? Start conversations with the team! — or join us in our upcoming spaces to discuss: Hub (Tuesday), Stack (Wednesday), and Community (Thursday).
Growth will bring us to the next chapter
What makes Cosmos unique is that it offers something no other ecosystem does: limitless opportunity and limitless growth potential. Here, developers are not taxed or forced to accrue value to a central token. Instead, they will thrive in an interconnected ecosystem designed to facilitate collaboration, innovation, and sovereignty. Free from constraints imposed by centralized structures, they can dream big, innovate boldly, and grow without limits.
The impact of this growth extends far beyond the ecosystem itself. A thriving Cosmos ecosystem could usher in the next era of the internet — one that is open, decentralized, and user-owned. If Cosmos succeeds, the vision of a free, fairer web will be closer than ever.
Stay tuned to part three of this series, Journey: a look into the ICF and Interchain Inc’s key priorities for early 2025. Follow us on X for further updates.
Read part 1 of this series, Unification.
Interchain Inc. is hiring! — apply here to engineering, growth, or operations roles.