The Cosmos Hub has led the way for years, pioneering technologies such as proof of stake, appchains, interchain communication, and restaking. The Cosmos Hub has also pioneered decentralization, with community-funded development and growth teams. But with this innovation and decentralization can come a lack of focus.
What the Cosmos Hub needs now is a single cohesive strategy.
To identify this strategy, we can first identify a problem that the Cosmos Hub is uniquely positioned to solve, and then identify how the Hub can best solve it.
The Cosmos stack consists of CometBFT, CosmosSDK, IBC, CosmWasm, and a wide range of associated libraries and modules. This system of technologies was originated by the Cosmos Hub. What started as a toolkit championed by a scrappy band of decentralization maximalists is now widely recognized as one of the most powerful and flexible ways to build a chain. Even projects that are not ostensibly “Cosmos chains”, such as Polygon, dYdX, Bitcoin L2’s, and Eigenlayer AVS’s are increasingly using the Cosmos stack to power their creations.
But there is a downside. Along with this power and flexibility comes a reputation for technical and social complexity. You can’t just sit down at your computer and launch a Cosmos chain like an Ethereum contract. Projects wanting to use CometBFT’s byzantine fault tolerant consensus must dive into a byzantine maze of Telegram channels to recruit a validator set. Projects connecting through IBC find that their connections fail without a reliable relayer operator. And despite all of CosmosSDK’s power, building with it can have a learning curve.
The concept of appchains is gaining momentum. The core thesis of the Cosmos space has been showing up in the core architectures of most other blockchain ecosystems as well. Another concept that has been gaining momentum is restaking- securing appchains with tokens staked on another platform.
The Cosmos Hub pioneered restaking with Interchain Security (or ICS). The next update to ICS will turn it into a permissionless platform, where projects can deploy a chain, validators can opt in to validate, and delegators can back the security of their chosen validator with billions of dollars in staked ATOM, BTC, and ETH.
This platform will make the Cosmos Hub the best place to launch a chain, by giving projects a simpler, more secure way to get started, deploy their chain, and attract a world class validator set. As a chain grows, it can continue to access security from billions of dollars of ATOM, along with BTC and ETH staked through Babylon and Eigenlayer.
Blockchains are a financial technology, and market mechanisms are at the heart of most blockchain projects. Simply having access to the programming environment provided by a smart contract, rollup, or appchain is in many cases not enough to launch a project successfully. Establishing a liquid and well-functioning market is critical for the cryptoeconomic mechanisms underlying many blockchain projects.
Access to decentralized liquidity support can be a key differentiator for projects launching on the Hub. In the past, this has been done with simple governance proposals, but the new Hydro and Timewave platforms will automate and streamline this process. Timewave allows the Hub to securely enter liquidity positions to support Hub-launched projects, while Hydro allows Atom holders to lock up their liquid staked Atoms for longer durations to vote on where this Hub liquidity should be deployed.
Together these technologies will give Hub-launched projects an edge over competitors, by giving them the liquidity to scale economically while the Hub’s smart contract, rollup, and appchain programming environments allow them to scale technically.
In today’s crowded blockchain marketplace, building a technically excellent platform is only half the battle. It is also necessary to run a growth program. This spans the fields of business development, marketing, and product leadership. A growth program consists of reaching projects, educating them on the platform, gathering commitments, offering technical and development support, and even supporting them with resources such as grants, marketing, and venture funding.
This is by now a well-known playbook in the industry. Eventually, the Cosmos Hub will have an industry-leading growth program, but first we should strive for an industry-standard growth program, comparable with the likes of Solana, Polygon, and Celestia.