Cosmos Monthly report — November 2022

This month has provided the whole crypto space with some shocking but and also unpredictable news (unless you were an insider) — such as the FTX collapse and, following that, the cascades of second-order effects because of FTX’s insolvency, which saw many other notable companies, such as BlockFi, opt for bankruptcy.

This has caused an industry wide-slump, with Cosmos being one of the worst performing coins throughout November, compared to other L1s this month.

However, we believe this slump for Cosmos had many reasons behind it and was not only caused by the FTX saga. One prominent example was Proposal 82, which went for voting last week, and this caused a division in the Cosmos ecosystem. Following that, a few of the long-term players of Cosmos left because of the political tensions in the forums.

But not all is negative! In this report, let’s look at some exciting news this month — to ease this mood — before we dive into analytics.

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Keeping up with the news on Cosmos

$ATOM 2.0 Updates

Proposal 82 has been rejected. Although this is only a signal proposal, this has been one of the more defining moments for Cosmos this month, as we saw over one-thirds of the voters voting with a “No with Veto” — and the reason was that they thought this proposal had too many moving parts to make a balanced vote. We will post more details to come as we get them.

Game of Chains is now on Phase 2. The incentivized testnet for Interchain Security, or known as the Game of Chains, has just completed their first phase this month, that focused on validators. With phase 2, we will see the streamlining of Interchain Security for consumer chains such as Neutron, Stride, Duality and much more.

Increasing the Hub’s Community Tax. One issue that people had with Proposal 82 was that a lot of fresh ATOMs would be redirected to the Treasury. However, after some comparisons to other chains (including chains in the Interchain), there is now a forum post to increase the community tax — so that there will be a lesser need to use fresh ATOMs to fund the treasury.

The biggest news you’re missing out on

Shade Protocol will host a stablecoin summit. On the 20th of December, Shade Protocol will host a stablecoin summit, with the core focus on projects — such as Kujira, Comdex, Duality and more — that are advancing the DeFi technology on Cosmos. It will be free for all to listen, so you can head over here to check it out!

Cosmos now has a group who will take care of marketing and communications. Recently, the Interchain Communications Council and Group was formed to expand and amplify the story of the Interchain, with stakeholders working towards things like educating external parties, run marketing strategies and much more. This means that now, Cosmos will be more widely known.

Interchain Security will start off with 10 consumer chains. Over the past month, we’ve seen much more commitments from other projects who are looking to make use of Interchain Security to bootstrap their security — such as Neutron, Duality, and much more here.

Milestones from projects that you should know

Stride expands their liquid staking collaterals. In the latter parts of last month $stATOM, which is liquid staked ATOM, was launched by Stride and this marked a historical point in Cosmos. Over the past month, Stride has since expanded the collateral to support $stOSMO, $stSTARS and $stJUNO — and we expect that there will be much more coming in the next months to come.

$IST is now live following Agoric’s mainnet-1 launch. For those who are unaware, Inter Protocol’s stablecoin for the Interchain, dubbed as $IST, is now live and spreading across the Interchain following Agoric’s mainnet launch last month.

Developing on Cosmos just got way easier. From integrating projects with core Cosmos wallets, to coding using your favourite IDE, developing on Cosmos just got way easier. Delphi announced Shuttle, which allows developers to abstract their main code from wallets, and Cosmostation is now integrated into Cosmos Kit, which is an adapter for developers. Last but not least, CosmWasm introduced Cosmy Wasmy, a VS Code extension which will help developers.

Kujira’s BOW is now in the final stages of the private testing phase. Over the past month, we have seen Kujira having an increase in their social activity — and for a good reason, as they are scaring their competitors with their relentless building. Their next development, dubbed as BOW, will help to tighten liquidty spreads on their Orderbook DEX, and it is now in the final stages before launching it on mainnet.

On-chain Analytics

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

Top 10 chains (By Transaction Count)

Based on the transaction count, we see that Teritori has made it into this list, most likely because of their launch and also the various NFT launches that happened shortly after. We, however, see that the overall trend in transaction count has dropped as compared to last month — most likely because of this prolonged bear market.

Top 10 chains (By IBC Volume)

Now, reverting to Cosmos' IBC volume of all the chains, we see Kujira is one of the top 3 in terms of IBC volume and strongly contending Osmosis compared to last month. We also see Axelar and Stride having a slow but sure increase in volume compared to the previous month.

Wrapping it all up

That will be it for the updates for Cosmos this month!

I hope this update has been insightful and you took away something or a play that’s valuable for you. If this update helped, do leave a comment, like this article, and follow Flagship for more articles like this. Also, do join our Discord!

Until then, see you in our next Cosmos update.

And as always, stay safe!