Why the Cosmos Newsletter

Curious Cosmonaut Research has identified that information can be scattered around the Cosmos ecosystem and it is crucial to have it aggregated and semi-curated. It will also be a good reference point later in the year and future years of the progress in the ecosystem. If you are serious about Cosmos this is a must.

This covers: developer activity, IBC volumes, most active IBC chains, decentralization, and news covering as much of the ecosystem as possible.

Developer Activity

First off, what is Github commits for us non-engineers? According to Free Code Camp it means

“The git commit command will save all staged changes, along with a brief description from the user, in a “commit” to the local repository. Commits are at the heart of Git usage. You can think of a commit as a snapshot of your project, where a new version of that project is created in the current repository”

The last month we can see the most developer activity thanks to Mintscan is:

• ATOM 450 commits
• Osmosis 436 commits
• Sifchain 302 commits
• Provenance 284 commits
• CUDOS 248

Decentralization

For more on decentralization and all chains Nakamoto’s see our report here.

This month the chains with the worst Nakomoto Coefficient were:

This month the chains with the best Nakomoto Coefficient were:

IBC Activity

This month had a 30 IBC volume of $482,588,706 coming from a total of 2,692,137 transactions. This compares to last month which had a 30 day IBC volume of ~345 Million from a total of 2,511,090 transactions.

The top 10 in volume and number of channels are as follows:

Osmosis

• ~$335.2 Million in total IBC volume
• ~$117.5 Million inflows
• ~$217.7 Million in outflows.
• ~ 11.7 Million total transactions on chain
• ~1 Million IBC transactions
• 316 IBC Channels.

Axlear

• ~$182.6 Million in total IBC Volume
• ~$129.5 Million inflows
• ~$53 Million outflows.
• ~1 Million total transactions on chain
• ~93K IBC transactions
• 2 IBC Channels

Cosmos Hub

• ~$167 Million in total IBC Volume
• ~$75.7 Million inflows
• ~$91.2 Million outflows.
• ~ 1.9 Million total transactions on chain
• ~288.9k IBC transactions
• 360 IBC Channels

Kujira

• ~$50.2 Million in total IBC Volume
• ~$28.9 Million inflows
• ~$21.4 Million outflows.
• ~ 4.1 Million total transactions on chain
• ~77.3K IBC transactions
• 32 IBC Channels

Juno

• ~$37.3 Million in total IBC Volume
• ~$19.2 Million inflows
• ~$18.1 Million outflows.
• ~1.4 Million total transactions on chain
• ~177K IBC transactions
• 110 IBC Channels

Secret Network

• btn.group is bringing DeFi limit orders on the Secret Network for those unfamiliar, they are building various tools on the Secret Network and have the immature token $butt. Regardless they are building out useful tools and are a group to watch in the Secret Network.
• Strongbox announces their Minimal Viable Product, which will be a cross chain for user data encryption. It will use Secret Network to encrypt and store the data, and they will service multiple chains such as Solana.
• Anons minted out in roughly 3.5 hours after public mint opened up, raising around $300,000. They have also already had around $60,000 in marketplace volume since then as people likely trade between various assets for features they like and speculate on the price. The Curious Cosmonaut Research future gallery acquired multiple for future researchers to utilize both as a PFP and, more importantly, to join the group.
• Anons will get their own characters in Bushi game on Secret.
• Onenet and Bushi announced a delay in their mint as they apparently have raised some capital.
• Vitalik kind of cements the value proposition of what Secret Network is already doing really well.
• Starshell announces their Secret wallets beta.
• Starshell highlights their private wallet and using it for encrypted messaging.
• Starshell announces their airdrop and some potential alpha is that they have not taken the snapshot so investors can acquire enough Secret to qualify for tiers.
• Secret Network released their July updates some key points were Axelar partnership, Killroy first NFT movie, Alter and their stake to access, Serenity Shield, New Secret Wrapped tokens, Bushi updates and trailer for their game, Shinobi a BTC bridge, Terra builders fund, and an outlook for the future.
• Alter privacy messaging service on Secret Network redesigns and launches their new website.
• Shade Protocol $SHD released some timelines on their platform including the next airdrop, and the exciting Shade Bonds.
• Leap Wallet receives a grant from the Secret Network to expand their services.
• SecretNetwork explains how they achieve randomness for fair execution.
• The founders of Metarats, who handed over the NFT project to the community also handed over the DAO treasury as well. It appears the DAO has around $30,000 in the treasury. It appears the team started stepping away/being inactive in May and officially stepped down in July. At the time of writing this roughly 39 of these were trading under $50. $30,000 spread out amongst the 3,261 collections would be around $9 a piece. It appears overall their treasury may have been negatively impacted by the UST depeg.
• Stashh updated their platform to replace the addresses shown for a listing with a username. This only helps preserve privacy further and allow individuals to share their profile of NFTs without sharing their address.

Evmos

• Nomad bridge gets hacked, that was bringing assets to EVMOS and is drained around 200 Million dollars. Since then, they have recovered some of the funds. During this time, there was a lot of random arbitrages happening, which actually pushed up the price of EVMOS and some assets.
• Auto farm announced they are launching their DeFi on EVMOS. They claim they are an aggregator in 18 EVM chains already.
• Federico discussed that for Evmos he wants to see liquid staking implemented natively so it can be modified better for use cases on Evmos and therefore won’t be using Lido like forks.
• Huobi outlines why they are taking such a big role in EVMOS.

Cosmos Hub Related

• Interchain Foundation discusses discontinuing an old Tendermint version for the newer version.
• Pantera co-leads an investment of 6.7M into Stride Zone a platform trying to do liquid staking for the Cosmos ecosystem.
• Stride the liquid Staking platform announced their airdrop details.
• Stride passes CertiK security audit
• Stride announced their go live date.
• Quicksilver announces they will be airdropping their token around the end of August. For those unfamiliar Quicksilver is a liquid staking protocol for the Cosmos ecosystem.
• Quicksilver has their first successful testnet transaction of interchain queries this is a huge step towards their liquid staking modules.
• The v0.1 pre-release on Interchain Security is released and timelines to have a full launch in January. Interchain Security will open up new opportunities for the Cosmos community and provide additional methods for projects/companies to launch in Cosmos.
• Ignite splits into 4 separate entities highlighted by Thyborg.
• A proposal goes on to the Cosmos Hub to define exactly what a no with veto means.
• VanEck investment manager highlights their bullish thesis on Cosmos.
• Interchain Security has a long list of interested candidates already pre-launch.
• Robb Stack discussed how companies need to follow the Cosmos community guidelines and makes the case for this proposal to be rejected. The reason being is the pre-proposal in commonwealth allow for constructive conversations that the feedback can then be used to create the final proposal and to jumpstart the conversation. After all this proposal will impact many validators and came from a fairly new validator jumping in.

Sifchain

• The Sifchain provided some business updates, some of which are: adding MNTL to the DEX, work to hide low liquidity pools, the Ambassador program, discussed 6 active proposals, their work to get a grant from Cardano for a bridge, margin trading coming soon, and peggy 2.0 coming.
• Sifchain is implementing code to force decentralization of validators they are the first chain to experiment with this and could be huge for decentralizing chains over a long period of time. It is still worth considering a Sybil attack. Once again the Sifchain team press the boundaries in experimenting with innovations.

Axelar

• Strangelove announces a new bridge application from their labs supported by the Axelar technology called Easy Bridge.
• Sei partners with Axelar to bring various assets to their DeFi chain being built in Cosmos.

Juno

• Juno’s Juicer project announces their airdrop, and this will be interesting with the Tornado Cash announcement recently. Some good threads on the announcement were discussed by indivudls like Ethan Buchan here, our thread on it not being effective, and some individuals were “dusting” tokens with “tainted” tokens to prove a point, even individuals like Bryan Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase.
• Juno inflation halving is quickly approaching.
• Loop Finance is launching an NFT DeFi marketplace in Cosmos. It is unclear if they plan to offer DeFi to NFTs outside of Cosmos. Today the NFT market in Cosmos is still early, which could be a positive or a negative for Loop. It is an interesting idea overall but a difficult market. For example, being non-fungible liquidation is difficult. How do you place a true value on something that is more or less valued independently by individual users? It is an interesting concept, though, especially as larger valued collections come into play. If someone has an NFT collection with $20,000, they may want to borrow $10,000 against that. This would allow, for example, to possibly trade NFTs without selling their main ones. Regardless it is interesting, but it will be a huge challenge potentially.
• Since writing this BendDAO an NFT DeFi platform had some issues with solvency and had to inject more capital into the platform form and are working to change their liquidation policies
• DAO DAO has launched with their awesome product that could be revolutionary in the ecosystem on how projects/communities can work together more closely for things like multi-sigs, pooling capital and transparency.
• Jake Hartnell asks the community who else should be appointed to support the Juno Growth DAO fund.

Crescent

• Crescent can now be used on mobile devices through Cosmostation who has been making various advancements over the last month.

Kujira

• Kujira announced they are going to launch an over collateralized stablecoin starting out backed by ATOM. For those unfamiliar Kujira is an ex-Terra project that migrated to its own L1 and is creating a financial ecosystem with no inflation to their token.
• Kujira announces their accelerator program and has been garnishing a lot of attention for their “Grownup DeFi” lately.
• Kujira released their update and went back live within 10 minutes as they prepare for Orca and USK.
• Public testnet is live for minting USK.

Kava

• We opened up an initial conversation around our research on Kava and potential concerns.
• Jack Zampolin makes the case for the Kava community to fund the expansion of Tharsis building the underlying technology Kava relies on.

Decentralized Cloud in Cosmos

• CUDOS provides their July updates some of which are Cosmostation supporting them, a pro fantasy league is moving to CUDOS, CUDOS got listed on no KYC ecosystem NOWpayment/exchange, and working with Copernic Space, who has some interesting initiatives and art.
• CUDOS and nuco.cloud are partnering together to drive the future of cloud computing. nuno.cloud has two offerings a pro and a standard; they will be utilizing CUDOS as part of their pro strategy.
• Akashlytics is rebranding to Cloudmos and released their new explorer. This is an amazing and almost required resource if you are investing in or interested in Akash.
• Akash showed how to deploy a cloud VPN.

Injective

• Injective announced that they have a new app coming soon called Helix but no additional info was provided on Twitter or Telegram yet.
• Injective to Secret bridge for privacy options with INJ is now live. It will be interesting if they can build privacy into the chain as a service with Secret somehow in the future for privacy building blocks on Injective APIs.

Stargaze

• Stargaze rolls out their V1 upgrade that will allow marketplace fees to go to stakers.
• Stargaze has made some updates to their website.

General News and Projects

• A project called Mun Remittance is launching a remittance service in Cosmos and announced that there would be an airdrop coming in Q4 for Cosmos, Juno, Stargaze, Osmosis and a Rekt drop for Luna holders. It is unclear how the team plans to do their on/off ramping but would love to discuss it if you see this.
• There was various threads on Echelon likely being a scam or at minimum praying on people to try and easily get free capital. Despite the infamous content stealer Dave Cosmos sponsoring it. We aggregated content on that here.
• Passage has launched their chain successfully. They are building out the Strange Clan game utilizing the chain, Akash and Unreal Engine. Their NFT Town 2 collection is also minting currently.
• Highlights of the Passage airdrop.
• Cosmonauts will be teaching blockchain and Cosmos at Berkeley which various cosmos leaders have come for this institution already. We still need some details if people can take just this course without being enrolled for a degree.
• Dimokus highlights their file that can deploy a chain quickly for a proof of concept.
• IBC between Harmony and Cosmos is now in testnet.
• Frens Validator highlights 10 upcoming airdrops.
• Skiff partners with Keplr
• JD Lorax walks through how to set it up and about Skiff
• dYdX outlines their roadmaps to full public mainnet in Cosmos in Q2 2023
• Space is launching an AMM that will focus on stablecoin swapping.

About Curious Cosmonaut Research

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