Cosmos Monthly report - September 2022

With the ‘Cosmoverse’ event ending just recently, this month has been jam-packed with announcements, partnerships, and developments. With that, let’s dive into what has happened over the past month.

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Keeping up with the news on Cosmos

Important news and updates from September

• The most important and exciting news that came out of September has to be that the new Cosmos whitepaper, which outlines the future of the hub, is finally released and available to the public. In the upcoming days, we will launch a piece that covers everything you need to know about this whitepaper so you don’t have to reference multiple sources.
• Kujira Protocol has launched its native over-collateralized stablecoin called $USK, and its liquidation marketplace platform called ORCA. Alongside that, if you are a $KUJI staker, you now have the ability to earn $BTC soon, made possible by Nomic’s Bitcoin ($nBTC).
• Gaurav from Electron Labs recently proposed a solution to bring IBC to Ethereum via ZK-Snarks, which will see a drastic drop in fees as compared to the solution today (usage of peg-zones).

Partnerships & Integrations

• Lido has partnered up with Neutron and presents a framework for deploying Lido as a custom implementation to serve the liquid staking needs of the whole Interchain via Neutron, a permissionless CosmWasm smart contract platform.
• DeFund is now partnered up with Sei Network, and this allows the creation of advanced trading strategies on both networks.
• Membrane Finance is creating an over-collateralized stablecoin called $CDT for the Cosmos ecosystem and will be compatible with Stride’s assets (ie. stATOM and stATOM/ATOM LP tokens) at launch.
• $EEUR is now added to the Regen Ecocredit Marketplace, and also to EVMOS.

Funding & Upgrades

• Injective Network now supports Interchain Accounts, and this brings a new level of innovation toward DeFi products and composability.
• Persistence Network is a few weeks to launching stkATOM, and stkATOM will be a natively enabled IBC token on launch, thus enabling enhanced use-cases for the IBC ecosystem.
• A new CosmWasm IDE is now live — similar to Remix IDE (Popular and widely used IDE for coding Solidity for EVM chains) — and is made possible by Oraichain.

New Developments

• The Axelar Network token (AXL) is now live, and users can now use it mainly for governance, and keeps the Axelar Network decentralized.
• The Stride main-net is now live, and that makes Stride the first liquid staking solution for the whole Cosmos ecosystem. As of now, you can stake ATOM to receive stATOM, and use it to provide liquidity on Osmosis as stATOM/ATOM for 38% APR.
• dYmension, a modular blockchain for RollApps (Rollup instances) on Cosmos has recently released its documentation and GitHub for the public to see. Honestly, this is a concept that I’m excited about and will be following closely in the next few weeks as developments come.
• Territori, a hub that focuses on allowing IBC/non-IBC communities to connect has outlined the requirements for their airdrop.

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 August.

Top 10 Chains (By Transaction Count)

Based on transaction count, we see a few chains have made their way up even further, such as Umee, Sentinel, and Likecoin. There are some chains that we saw last month but don’t see this month, such as Sifchain and Crypto.org.

Some of the reasons why this has happened would be because of the constant off/on developments in these chains, thus as we can see, last month we saw a Cardano <> Cosmos bridge built by Sifchain which made the TX count go up and it couldn’t sustain this month.

Top 10 Chains (By IBC Volume)

Recently, mapofzones had a major UI overhaul, and thus we won’t be seeing the normal IBC volume columns that we have been seeing over the past few months. Once again, we see that chains such as Evmos and Crypto.org have had a shift downwards, whereas we see a new chain called Injective appear in the top 10.

I do believe that this is because of the ongoing developments with Injective, such as the Interchain Accounts module going live on Injective, and their collaboration with various other dApps such as DeFund.

Something to take note of, but not financial advice definitely.

Capitalizing on the Trends

With the information we’ve gathered this month, we can deduce a few things, mainly (1) DeFi is getting revived on Cosmos, (2) Liquid Staking will be the survival of the fittest, and (3) We have not experienced the full capabilities of Cosmos yet

DeFi is getting spicy on Cosmos

This month particularly, we’ve seen a lot of developments from the DeFi side, mainly from Kujira, and Injective.

Kujira’s launch of $USK and its liquidation platform called ORCA will definitely bring in a lot of capital from other places as ORCA integrates with more money markets. And because the only asset you can bid for liquidated assets with on ORCA is $USK, this causes the flywheel to be exponential with more assets on the line.

Injective on the other hand, has been neglected over the past few months, but is now seeing some progress by being the first of the few zones to actually enable the Interchain Account modules.

Liquid Staking will be the survival of the fittest

Over the month, we have actually been bombarded with a lot of liquid staking protocols popping up left and right. For example, Persistence is working on stkATOM alongside others such as stkBNB, Stride recently launched stATOM and in the near future, we will have qATOM from Quicksilver and Neutron’s liquid staked assets.

While I’ve said that in the last month was that you should keep some ATOM liquid so that you can be the first to test out the various projects and capitalize on this trend. However, in addition to that, I do believe that after this month, you need to be more careful about where you liquid stake your assets as we will most likely end up with more than 10 liquid staking solutions.

Cosmos is only at its infancy stage

As we have seen this month, a lot of new endeavors for Cosmos were achieved, with more incoming. For example, bringing IBC to Ethereum via ZK-snarks will actually be huge as it allows scalability in terms of transactions, thus bringing more of a user base to Cosmos, who are seeking shelter from the high gas fees of Ethereum.

Apart from that, we also have modular blockchains such as dYmension bringing roll-ups to the already strong tech of Cosmos, thus expanding the capabilities of app-chains who are looking for serious scalability and throughput. This is aligned with the first point, which is DeFi on Cosmos is getting revived, thus we don’t know what kind of RollApps (Roll-up Appchains) will be coming)

Last but not least, with Neutron’s launch incoming, we don’t really know but can theorize what kind of apps are possible with the combination of the legacy Cosmos tech and Interchain Modules (if you haven’t heard of the Interchain Modules, take a look here).

Honestly, it’s a really exciting time for Cosmos.

Wrapping it all up

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

Cosmoverse has been really insightful as to what Cosmos can be in the future, and how the Hub plays into this vision, which we will be writing about in the next few days, so stay tuned for that.

Apart from that, I hope that 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 me for more articles like this!

Moving forward (I know, this is like the 2nd time I’ve announced this), but we will really be adding a mid-month update for Cosmos so that you can get updated more frequently and hear the news faster than everybody else.

Until then, stay tuned to our rendition of the new Cosmos whitepaper, and see you in our next Cosmos update.

And as always, stay safe!