Our Favorite 5 Blockchains Built on Cosmos
Touted as the “Internet of Blockchains”, Cosmos is a novel idea that solves an issue we are familiar with, silo-ed blockchains that are not interoperable with one another. But what are the best blockchains building on Cosmos?
By: satriapamudji
Touted as the “Internet of Blockchains”, Cosmos is a novel idea that solves an issue we are familiar with, silo-ed blockchains that are not interoperable with one another.
They aim to solve this issue by creating a network of blockchains united by open-source tools that streamline transactions between the various blockchains.
You can think of Cosmos as the whole shopping mall, while the other blockchains such as Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Solana, and more are considered to be like the shops inside of that shopping mall.
In this article, we go through 5 of the most interesting “shops” built with the open-source tools that Cosmos provides.
This article was written by our Cosmos Captain, Satria. Join our Discord to get direct access to our latest and greatest insights.
1: Cronos ($CRO)
Introduction & Metrics
Formerly known as “Crypto.org Coin”, Cronos is an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible chain built using Ethermint that’s based on the Cosmos SDK, with added Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) support.
It has gone live since November 2021, and Cronos has seen massive growth in user adoption thus far, with more than 825,000 unique addresses performing transactions on Cronos.
The ecosystem landscape for Cronos is also booming, with more than 120 dApps choosing to build/integrate on Cronos.
And lastly, with the growth of Cronos, it has a total value locked (TVL) of 1.38 billion as of writing, mainly dominated by VVS Finance.
Cronos’ Native Token: $CRO
The native token for Cronos is called $CRO and it is currently ranked 24 with a Market Cap of $2.8B, a circulating supply of 25.26B, and a max supply of 30.26B.
Brief History of CRO:
CRO initially began as an ERC20 token on Ethereum in 2018 with a max supply of 100 billion that was held by Crypto.com. In February 2021, Crypto.com announced that it would be burning 70% of CRO’s supply which was done in preparation for the main net launch of Crypto.com's native blockchain.
Now stick with me because this is where it gets confusing.
When we talk about the native blockchain of Crypto.com, we have (1) Crypto.org and (2) Cronos. Since both chains are built with the Cosmos SDK alongside support for Cosmos IBC, it is interoperable with each other.
The difference is that Crypto.org is a standalone network that aims to promote the mass adoption of blockchain via fast transactions with low fees. In contrast, Cronos is compatible with Ethereum and is mainly used to allow dApps to be built on top of Cronos using Smart Contracts. And yes, if you were wondering, it’s similar to how Binance works (BEP2 & BEP20).
As of now, the only thing you can do with the Crypto.org chain is stake your CRO. Whereas for Cronos, you have a whole suite of dApps to play around with, that’s built by 3rd party developers. In the future, we might see more use cases for the Crypto.org chain as it is definitely suitable for more real-world use cases due to its fast transaction settlements with low fees.
Value Accrual of CRO:
CRO has a few sinks to promote demand for the token itself, which mainly are — (1) Trading fees, (2) NFT purchases, (3) Crypto.com Earn & (4) Crypto.com Card.
(1) Trading fees — By staking $CRO, a user is able to lower trading fees in their native exchange. For example, if a user isn’t staking any $CRO, they will be paying a 0.4% fee for every trade they make, and if they were to stake more than 5000 $CRO, this fee is reduced by 10% to 0.36%, and so on. You can check the complete list of discount rates here: Fees & Limits.
(2) NFT Purchases — Crypto.com has an official NFT marketplace, and users can only pay using $CRO. Thus, when demand for NFTs rises in the marketplace, $CRO demand rises as well.
(3) Crypto.com Earn — By staking $CRO, a user is able to earn more by staking other tokens. For example, if a user were to use Earn for 10,000 USDC, they will be getting 6% annual. However, by staking an extra $4,000 worth of $CRO, the user will be able to get 8% annually. This also works for other cryptocurrencies, and you can check out the full list here: Earn.
(4) Crypto.com Card — The card is a staple in the Crypto.com ecosystem, and it boasts a range of VISA cards that comes with a variety of perks, such as Cashback, a subscription to Netflix or Spotify, and more. To get the card, a user would have to commit to staking their $CRO for 6 months. The lowest tier of staking with minimal perks would require $400 worth of CRO staked, whereas the highest tier with the best perks requires $400,000 worth of CRO staked. For the full breakdown, check out this website: Crypto.com Cards.
Of course, there’s much more you can do with your CRO, such as using it to provide liquidity on dApps that are built on Cronos, but we will cover our favorite dApps built on Cronos in another article.
Perspective on Cronos ($CRO)
In my personal opinion, Crypto.com has had one of the most aggressive marketing campaigns in the past few years, and the ease of remembering the name helps as well (I want to buy crypto… well why not crypto.com?).
These 2 factors have helped Crypto.com onboard a lot of users in the past few years and as Crypto adoption grows, I believe that Crypto.com will be one of the few companies/exchanges to benefit from the number of user adoption.
And as Crypto.com grows, users will also want to be able to explore new paradigms by exploring dApps, which is where Cronos comes in — to catch users that flow in from the suite of products that Crypto.com provides.
2: Osmosis ($OSMO)
Introduction & Metrics
Osmosis is an advanced automated money maker (AMM) protocol that was launched in June 2021, and it allows developers to build customized AMMs with sovereign liquidity pools.
Because Osmosis did not hard code any of the underlying structures of the AMM, they are able to facilitate experimentation for AMM development. Key parameters — such as swap fees or token weights — and fundamental components — such as curve algorithms and TWAP calculations — are fully-customizable, thus enabling the creation of newer DeFi asset types easily.
At its peak, Osmosis had a TVL of 1.6B and a daily volume of 500M. It has now dropped to a TVL of roughly 157M and a daily volume of 939k.
Osmosis’ Native Token: $OSMO
The native token for Osmosis is called $OSMO and it is currently ranked 110 with a Market Cap of $323M, a circulating supply of 407M, and a max supply of 1B.
Tokenomics of OSMO:
Osmosis is highly inflationary in the beginning stages, and this is typical for an AMM due to the nature of needing to incentivize users in the early stages.
At genesis, 100 million OSMO was released and split between the Fairdrop (Airdrop) participants and the Strategic Reserve (used to align key advisors and reward those performing crucial services for the chains).
The rest of the tokens are then split as follows: Staking Rewards (25%), Developer Vesting (25%), Liquidity Mining Incentives (45%) & Community Pool (5%). These tokens will be released by following a “thirdening” schedule, which is similar to Bitcoin’s halvening.
For example, in Year 1 there will be a total of 300 million tokens released, and in year 2, this will be cut by ⅓, and 200 million tokens will be released, and so on, until OSMO reaches an asymptotic maximum supply of 1 billion.
Value Accrual of OSMO: OSMO is a governance token, that allows voting on a few things: (1) Allow users to govern the protocol, (2) Allocate liquidity mining rewards for bonded liquidity gauges & (3) Set the base network fees, and (4) Adding more use cases for voting since OSMO is flexible.
Apart from just governance, OSMO is accrues value via the various fee swaps between tokens and it is used to boost rewards of new liquidity pools.
Perspective on Osmosis ($OSMO)
Being one of the only AMMs which allows flexibility in terms of being able to adjust the various parameters, I think Osmosis is in a good place to bring in the next wave of innovation for DeFi as it is a ground for experimentation.
However, as of now, there is not much value accrual for the Osmosis token itself, hence that is something to be wary about.
3: Juno ($JUNO)
Introduction & Metrics
Launched in October 2021, Juno is a sovereign blockchain in Cosmos that’s built for interoperable smart contracts. The blockchain aims to serve as a decentralized, permissionless, and censorship-resistant avenue for developers to launch their smart contracts.
The project was launched with and consists of grassroots community members in Cosmos, and there was no public sale/pre-sale of tokens. The JUNO tokens were only distributed to ATOM stakers.
Its community-led nature and the fact that the network is 100% community-owned, are what attract people to build on Juno. As of now, there are more than 50+ dApps on JUNO, with more coming soon.
Other metrics, such as user acquisition and TVL are not easily available yet, and hence will not be included in this section.
Juno’s Native Token: $JUNO
The native token for Juno is called $JUNO and it is currently ranked 192 with a Market Cap of $135M, a circulating supply of 54M, and a max supply of 185M.
Tokenomics of JUNO:
Being the native token of Juno Network, JUNO serves as the backbone of the ecosystem. What sets JUNO apart from typical L1 tokens is that Juno is 100% community owned.
In genesis, 33M tokens were circulating (50% of JunoHacks + Stakedrop) and the rest are vested.
JUNO’s inflation is as follows: In the first 3 years, it will be halved, and following that until year 12, the inflation drops by 1%. After which, JUNO will be deflationary and network incentives would primarily come from tx fees by the dApps deployed on the network.
Value Accrual of JUNO:
Currently, JUNO does not have a very strong value accrual as it is similar to most L1s, which is: (1) Securing the Network/Staking (PoS), (2) On-chain Governance Voting, (3) Gas fees for all smart contracts on JUNO & (4) Token Collateral.
Perspective on JUNO
JUNO is definitely an interesting project due to its nature of being 100% community-owned, which is not something a lot of L1s can offer.
This also means that JUNO has a strong community behind it, and as long as more developers come to JUNO, it has a strong chance of succeeding.
4: Akash Network ($AKT)
Introduction & Metrics
Targeted at dApp developers in the DeFi space and other high-computing & high-growth fields such as machine learning, Akash Network is a decentralized cloud computing marketplace that connects those who need computing resources with those who have the computing capacity to lease.
On a high level, when we talk about Akash, also known as Akash DeCloud, there are 2 main components: (1) Akash Network & (2) Akash Platform.
(1) Akash Network: It is an on-chain decentralized marketplace for leasing computer resources & acts as a supercloud platform that provides a unified layer above all providers on their marketplace that ensure clients have a single cloud platform, regardless of whatever provider that might be using.
(2) Akash Platform: The Akash Platform is an off-chain deployment platform used for hosting and managing workload. It is a set of cloud management services that leverages Kubernetes to run workloads.
So how does Akash fare right now?
As of now, the total lease count (ie. all deployments that were live that someone paid, including testing or temporary deployments) has grown tremendously, meaning people actually use Akash.
However, when we look at the daily lease count (similar to the total lease count, just on a daily basis), we can see that right now, not a lot of people are leasing. 56 new leases today as compared to January’s high, which was 532.
The current active leases, however, tell us that there is a base amount of people using Akash, which is around 400 leases, a good growth given that Akash launched not too long ago.
Akash’s Native Token: $AKT
The native token for Juno is called $AKT and it is currently ranked 434 with a Market Cap of $39M, a circulating supply of 165M, and a max supply of 388M.
Tokenomics of AKT:
At genesis, a total of 100M tokens were introduced, with 2.8M in circulation and the rest vested. The schedule of the genesis tokens can be seen below.
Akash follows a halvening method every 3.7 years, with current inflation standing at 22%. Remember, the max supply of AKT is about 388M, so we can estimate the tokens to be inflationary until around 2030 based on the Supply Estimate.
Value Accrual of AKT:
The Akash tokens hold four roles in the network, mainly: (1) Incentivization for securing the Network/Staking (PoS), (2) On-chain Governance, (3) Value exchange where AKT is the primary token for storing and exchanging of value and is a reserve currency in the Cosmos ecosystem and (4) Take Income.
I want to expand on Take Income here, as it is not usual to see it in crypto projects. This is determined by the Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) which is the total value of all completed transactions in a marketplace, and once the Akash network reaches a more significant GMV, rewards for token holders will compromise of inflationary rewards + Take Income (which is a % share of transactions in the marketplace).
Perspective on AKT
Akash is a novel project trying to compete with traditional cloud providers such as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. Although the traditional cloud providers are huge, they still fall vulnerable to a single point of failure.
Akash fixes this by being the first open-source cloud computing provider and allows developers to deploy applications with minimal configuration and server management through the use of blockchain and containerization technology.
With a projected cloud services spending of 370 billion in 2023, I believe that Akash has a chance to compete with the giants of this industry, and AKT is how you capitalize on the growth of decentralized cloud services.
5: EVMOS ($EVMOS)
Introduction & Metrics
EVMOS is short for EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) on Cosmos and is built using the Cosmos SDK with IBC compatibility. This allows any developer building on EVMOS to have the best of both worlds in terms of tooling and exchange of value.
It has gone live since April 2021, and currently has about 59 dApps in total that are building on/expanded to EVMOS.
Following that, EVMOS currently has 6.6M in TVL, which is not too bad for a project that has been live for <6 months.
Evmos’ Native Token: $EVMOS
The native token for Juno is called $EVMOS and it is currently ranked 90 with a Market Cap of $460M, a circulating supply of 200M, and a max supply of 1B.
Tokenomics of EVMOS:
EVMOS is highly inflationary at the beginning, with more than 300 million tokens being issued in the first year. However, the tokens will be issued under an exponential delay schedule where inflation is decreased every year.
At genesis, 200 million tokens were released and was split between the Rektdrop (Airdrop) participants, the community pool and strategic reserve
Value Accrual of EVMOS:
EVMOS tokens are mainly used for: (1) Incentivization for securing the Network/Staking (PoS), (2) On-chain Governance, (3) Incentivization for developers and network operators for their services in the dApp store (through built-in shared fee revenue model) and (4) Registering tokens on the ERC20 module for EVM-IBC integration with ERC20s. For a full explanation, you can read more here: Token Model.
Perspective on EVMOS
EVMOS is definitely a huge step towards interoperability and would get more users to explore the Cosmos ecosystem in depth by porting in users who are familiar with EVM dApps.
If I were a first-time crypto user and had to bridge from one ecosystem to another to try out new products or apps… I don’t think I will.
With EVMOS it makes things so much easier, not just from a developer’s POV but as a user as well.
Conclusion
There we have it folks, the 5 best crypto blockchain projects within the Cosmos ecosystem that we love and use frequently. In the next few articles, we will be diving even deeper into these ecosystems and introduce to you the dApps that are living and thriving in the various ecosystems.
I hope you enjoyed it, and stay safe in these market conditions. If you’re looking for a community, come over to Flagship’s discord to discuss more!
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