Stargaze - Part 1

*** Disclaimer none of this is financial advice. Curious Cosmonaut received no funds to write this and has been fully self-funded so far.

Stargaze Overview and Team

This is part 1 of a 3 part series on a deep dive into all things Stargaze.

Part 1 covers an overview of Stargaze

Part 2  covers tokenomics and burns

Part 3 data, collections, technology, and threats

Overview

Stargaze is the first application-specific chain for NFTs to launch in Cosmos. Their team are contributors to CosmWasm along with Juno and Confio.  CosmWasm is the leading smart contracts used today in Cosmos. Stargaze has a vision to become the go-to decentralized marketplace for NFTs in Cosmos as well as the premier NFT launchpad in the Cosmos ecosystem.

Stargaze is leading the way through the development of creating standards for NFTs through ICS721 to be able to move between various Cosmos chains. These standards would allow a project to mint an NFT on Stargaze and take it anywhere, whether it is a community badge, NFTs for another exchange, NFTs for games, or more.

These standards and IBC open up an interesting use case where NFTs can be made in Stargaze and traded on Secret Network with a privacy wrap as an example. This path can also be the opposite, where originally privacy-focused NFTs could be moved over to Stargaze and NFTs from any other chain.

This model opens up many doors for various games and projects to use Stargaze as the go-to marketplace for the Cosmos ecosystem.

Stargaze aims to go way beyond just the Cosmos ecosystem by using the Gravity Bridge; they aim to bring over Ethereum NFTs. Ethereum NFTs are the strongest NFT community today, and this model could lower fees for trading, similar to how Polygon supports Ethereum today.

Bridges and an app-specific chain also bring up opportunities for things like NFT index investing opportunities, NFT DeFi opportunities, social clubs, DAOs and more.

An NFT application chain has a unique advantage over certain ecosystems today. Take Ethereum as an example; unfortunately, some of the NFT mints have taken up entire blocks or congest the network creating massive fees and eroding value to investors and the projects.

Solana, another popular chain, has had issues because its fees are so low and its structure has attracted bots that have crashed the network multiple times, impacting NFTs and all other projects in the ecosystem.

Vertical solutions like Ethereum and Solana struggle because they are trying to fit and balance many types of projects into one box.

Other NFT app-specific chains such as FLOW may struggle to bring in capital from crypto natives as it acts as a silo. Stargaze differs from this because they connect to the entire Cosmos ecosystem.

Stargaze can rethink NFTs. The community owns its own entire transaction capacity on its chain and, therefore, can combat challenges. For example, if bots start to attack NFT mints, Stargaze could customize the fees, amongst other actions. The Stargaze community could raise fees to $20 to execute, where the user gets $19.99 back later. This fee strategy would make the capital for bot attacks very high, increasing the barriers to entry.

Stargaze implemented a feature called governance-gated CosmWasm, a predefined contract used to make NFTs and other functions. It makes it easier for content creators to build contracts and protects consumers. Unfortunately, some chains have had a long history of malicious code built into NFT contracts.

Given the Cosmos multi-chain model, Stargaze could create a secondary chain if needed to split mint sales and marketplace sales. Especially with Interchain Security coming, they could still utilize the same token for both chains or create a second chain they themselves secure using the same token.

Team and Community

Stargaze was co-founded by Shane Vitarana, who is a core member of the team. Shane has a long background in technology, having built apps like Drum Kit and the Ted Talks app. He has built many repositories and was one of the earliest contributors at Groupon. Shane has a large repository of code and helped contribute amongst others on CosmWasm, as previously mentioned.

Stargaze was also co-founded by Jake Hartnell, a co-founder of Juno as well and a contributor to CosmWasm. Jorge Hernandez is another co-founder and developer at Stargaze praised for his abilities and Stargaze’s uptime/quality as well as a contributor to CosmWasm. Beyond this Stargaze has a team of developers, community managers, data scientists and more.

Now please give us a follow and follow along as Curious Cosmonaut expands on each of these topics over the next 2 more days! Tomorrow is tokenomics and burns.