Cosmos | Monthly report — February 2023

February has been a volatile month that seemed promising — with liquidity shifting hands various times, as people were trying to capitalize on the artificial intelligence (AI) trend, followed by the liquid staking derivatives (LSD) narrative, and last but not least, the shift from western projects to eastern projects as the SEC ramped up their stance against cryptocurrencies.

For Cosmos, this volatility has not affected the rate of progression for projects apart from the price action, and this month has been a promising month as projects are shifting with things such as Interchain Security coming to fruition.

In this report, let’s look at some articles that you might need for the month ahead, followed by the biggest news of the week to make up for this week’s weekly check-ins, and last but not least, look at the metrics that are surrounding the Cosmos ecosystem.

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Keeping up with the Cosmos ecosystem

Articles that you might have missed out on

First, let’s look at some of the high-quality and best-read articles written on Flagship that you might have missed out on, each of which covers a different vertical of the ecosystem.

The Interchain Modules are going to drastically change the Cosmos ecosystem

With the Interchain Security module soon coming to the Cosmos Hub, we did a thorough analysis to cover the other Interchain modules as well, such as Interchain Accounts, Interchain Queries, and how they are going to affect projects that are built on the Cosmos ecosystem.

If you have not read up on how these Interchain Modules work, look at it before the Cosmos Hub v9 Lambda upgrade occurs!

Read more: How Interchain Modules will change the Internet of Blockchains

Cosmos Check-In #11: The shift in liquidity

The rotation of liquidity between various projects and narratives was felt throughout the first and second week of February. In Check-In #11, we discussed what this meant for Cosmos, and also talked about some of the project launches that were happening in Cosmos.

Read more: Cosmos Check-In #11

Cosmos Check-In #12: Fundamental shift in Cosmos

The last few weeks of February brought about some fundamental shifts in Cosmos, such as the putting up of v9 Lambda upgrade to the Cosmos Hub, and the return of the audit for ICS721, or commonly known as Interchain NFTs. In Check-In #12, we talked about this, and caught up on the happenings from the week.

Read more: Cosmos Check-In #12

Biggest news of the week

Next, let’s look at the BIGGEST news of the week, which replaces this week’s weekly check-in.

• Interchain Security is now in voting. If you have not been up-to-date with the news, the biggest news for this week is that Interchain Security, or more specifically, v9 Lambda upgrade for the Hub is now up for proposal. With that said, it seems that Nomad (the USDC issuance chain) will NOT be using Interchain Security at launch, but they will use their own PoA method.
• $IST expanding? The first decentralized stablecoin on Sei Network, as announced, will be Inter Protocol’s $IST. Soon, you’ll be able to use $IST on the Sei testnet — and we are very excited about this since we are a huge proponent of decentralized stablecoins.
• $stSEI… very soon. Another interesting piece of news for Sei, is that liquid staked SEI will also be available on launch. Honestly, now I’m starting to think that SEI will be coming to mainnet real soon, and it’s something that everyone has been waiting for.
• We’re on our way to SCRT 2.0, real soon too. This week, Secret Network has upgraded their mainnet to SCRT 1.7 and this upgrade highlights light client validation for blocks, auto restaking, expedited governance proposals and much more, bringing us closer to SCRT 2.0.

Performance of the Cosmos ecosystem

In this section, we go through some of the key analytics to see what’s been happening in the broader Cosmos ecosystem for the month of January.

Vanity Metrics

First, we look at the current vanity metrics of Cosmos (It’s called vanity metrics solely because it does not really represent the amount of building that is going on in Cosmos)

TVL of Cosmos Ecosystems

The total TVL of Cosmos Ecosystems as of 1st March is 1.21T, and it represents 2.4% of the total TVL across all blockchains — which, although is pretty decent, we feel should be higher as like last month’s report for January.

Here, we see Cronos takes the lead, comprising 33.03% of the total TVL in Cosmos, followed by Canto, which has been the talk of the town recently, and then Osmosis.

IBC Metrics

Next, let’s take a look at the Cosmos IBC metrics to see if there’s any trends ongoing within the Cosmos ecosystem.

Top 10 chains (By Transaction Count)

Based on the transaction count, we see Kujira protocol still maintains their position above Osmosis in the top 10 chains by transaction count, and Agoric ($BLD) has dropped out of the top 10. We can only assume last month, Agoric was in the top 10 because of the stablecoin developments — however, one thing to note here is that these high transaction counts do not equate to economic contributions, which we can see more clearly in the next chart.

Top 10 chains (By IBC Volume)

When we look at the IBC volume of all the chains, we see that Osmosis is at the top, and one new zone that has appeared is Canto, which replaces JUNO. Most likely this is due to the EVM narrative, as people using EVM chains are flocking to Canto as of now.

Wrapping it all up

That will be it for the updates for Cosmos this month! We’re really particularly excited for Interchain Security to come out soon, and next month’s updates will be really exciting.

So, stay tuned for next week’s check-in, and as usual, let us know what you think about this month’s report! Until then, see you in our next Cosmos update.

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