Interchain Foundation Delegations 2022

The Interchain Foundation is committed to stewarding the Cosmos ecosystem by funding and advancing the creation of an interoperable, sustainable, and community-owned decentralized ecosystem.

As part of our ongoing efforts to support the Cosmos ecosystem, the ICF is updating its delegation strategy, which has been notably outdated. Due to limited staffing capacity, we greatly regret our inability to manage the delegation strategy actively and understand this is a failure of the ICF to the community. We want to remedy this and properly recognize and reward all of the amazing contributions of the validator community through delegation. The purpose of this post is to inform the community of steps the ICF will be taking over the next 2 months to update our delegation strategy.

Timeline and Policy

The ICF is committed to have delegations revised and updated by the end of September 2022.

The ICF will delegate a total of 11.63 million ATOMs, which represents 83% of the ICF’s atoms including unclaimed rewards. The rest will remain liquid for treasury management purposes. The goal of delegation is to support a healthy validator set and recognize validators who have made major contributions to the ecosystem and support the growth of the Cosmos Network and Hub.

Over the next 2 months the ICF will create criteria for evaluating validator contributions to the ecosystem and the Cosmos Hub network itself. These criteria will inform how delegations will be allocated.

We will engage ecosystem stakeholders to provide feedback throughout the process to ensure the delegation criteria are fair, representative, reflective of the Cosmos core values and the correct benchmarks to inform the ICF delegation strategy. We will hold a community call in the first 2 weeks of August (exact date to come!) to gather ideas from the community about criteria and activities they would like to see rewarded through delegation.

The delegation criteria will be shared publicly by the end of August. The delegation review process of individual validators will then begin which we expect to take 2–3 weeks. The review process will aim to be as transparent as possible and result in clear criteria for ecosystem contributions and validator operational requirements to be considered a candidate for receiving ICF delegations.

After the review process is complete, the redelegations will be implemented.

Again, we want to acknowledge our immense gratitude to the burgeoning Cosmos community. While the ICF helps to fund and steward the ecosystem, the soul of Cosmos lives with the community at large.

We look forward to implementing these redelegations and recognizing those who have made such immense ecosystem contributions.