How is the Cosmos ecosystem, which is as popular as Ethereum, developing now? (Part 1)

Cosmos has been thriving recently. Not only is its ecosystem growing day by day, but its performance is also much stronger than BTC and ETH . The article "Find a Home for labs" recently published by Delphi Lab is equivalent to directly voting for Cosmos. You should know that Delphi Labs is the main designer of the economic model behind last year's legendary project Axie, and is also one of the earliest players in the Luna and Solana ecosystems. It has very sharp and unique insights into the development of the industry.

You can easily find similar pictures on the Internet?

To show how huge the entire ecosystem is, but these pictures are too "big and comprehensive". It is impossible for ordinary users to look at all the projects above, so we will pick out the most important tracks and projects to introduce the main ecosystem of Cosmos.

Public chains - ATOM, Juno, EVMOS, Celstia

• Atom

Atom itself does not act as a general-purpose smart contract chain like ETH, so you can’t find any Dapp running directly on the “ATOM chain”, it is just a Hub.

Its original intention is to allow all other chains involved in the IBC protocol to transit through the Atom Hub.
(Note: The IBC protocol is the core interface protocol in Cosmos, which can realize the trusted and reliable forwarding of cross-chain messages between blockchains, and effectively perform functions such as flow control and multiplexing.)

Like this?

But there are two slightly embarrassing points. First, many Zones have connected IBC with each other without going through the Atom Hub for transit. Second, this model is inherently poor in value capture, which is why Atom is completely defeated by Polkadot in terms of the token model alone.

Fortunately, Cosmos’ upcoming Cosmoverse conference (September 26) will announce a new version of the Cosmos 2.0 token model, introducing a model of shared security between the application chain and the Atom Hub, allowing the Atom Hub to directly have the ability to capture value. It is said that a token supply cap will also be introduced. In short, the token and model are finally no longer the weakest link!

• Juno

Juno is a general-purpose smart contract chain similar to ETH, which can run Dapps. When it was first launched last year, it was hyped and called the Cosmos version of Solana.

But Juno also faces two slightly embarrassing problems:

First, it is not EVM-compatible. Except for Solana, no public chain has built a good ecosystem without EVM compatibility.

Secondly, the Cosmos ecosystem itself focuses on the App-chain application chain model. It always feels weird to create a general Dapp chain under this model. If I want a clockwork chain, I can come to Cosmos. If I just want to make a Dapp, I can go to the ETH ecosystem for EVM and the Solana ecosystem for non-EVM. Why should I come to you?

I can’t think of any good breakthrough point for now.

• Evmos

If Juno is Solana on Cosmos, Evmos can be regarded as ETH on Cosmos. It was highly anticipated before its launch, but it failed in its first launch, leaving a big stain. After the second successful launch, the on-chain experience was also average. I don’t know if it was due to RPC (RPC service that interacts with EVM-compatible public chains) or the chain itself. The ecosystem is also very limited . In short, it feels that its strength does not match its reputation. What is more amazing is that the annualized single B pledge has been hundreds of dollars, and the price has not fallen but has risen instead, which is a ray of light in the price performance in the bear market.

Evmos is currently facing similar problems as Juno. I want to make an EVM Dapp, and there are so many ETH L2 options, why should I come to you?

• Celestia

I have written many articles about Celestia before. It is also a very promising project. It is a completely different approach. It is neither an App-chain nor a smart contract chain. It is just a DA layer of Rollup, which can be regarded as a new school of thought in the field of public chains.

Celestia has almost single-handedly made the concept of modular public chains popular. Such projects that come to mind when a concept is mentioned are usually top-tier. The problems faced by Celestia are mainly the following two points?

Is it really necessary or a necessity to have a DA chain that is solely used to serve other Rollups ?

Second, when? ? The concept has been hyped for almost a year, and it is time to show it to the public, or to really start serving a certain Rollup. The current news is that the mainnet will be launched in 2023. It is common for relatively innovative projects in this industry to lag behind the roadmap, so for Celestia, we still have to wait patiently.

Defi’s Three Axes and Oracles - Dex, Borrowing, Stable Token + Oracles

• DEX - Osmosis

Basically, Osmosis is the only Dex on Cosmos, which is even more dominant than Uniswap on ETH.

What’s interesting is that Cosmos officials once made a Gravity Dex, but it was far inferior to Osmosis in terms of interface, functions, and other aspects. In addition, considering the neutrality and flexibility of the Cosmos Hub and other factors, the project was closed and transferred to become a separate chain Cresent Network. However, the outcome was the same. No one still used it, and almost everyone was playing on Osmosis.

• Metonymy - Kava, Umee, Mars

Lending is a relatively strange phenomenon on Cosmos, that is, there are no hot projects at all. There are no top-notch projects like AAVE and Compound, nor is there a single dominant project like Osmosis on Dex. I guess it may be related to the previous lack of ecology, especially the lack of stable tokens such as USDT and USDC.

Kava was one of the earliest to do lending, but it got up early and arrived late, and has been slow to connect to IBC, causing an absolute top project in the Cosmos ecosystem to fall into a second-rate position. Now it has become a Defi Hub that integrates Dex, lending, and stable tokens, and now it only remembers to connect to IBC in 2022!

UMEE is a new generation of borrowing , and is also natively connected to IBC. Investment institutions include big capitals such as Coinbase, and it was publicly raised by Coinlist. However, after the airdrop by a bunch of robots, there has been no movement , and not many people and TVL have gone there. It is temporarily in a cold state, which may also be related to the bear market.

Mars was originally Terra's main project, but after Terra collapsed, it switched to Cosmos. Delphi Labs has written a special article about Mars, so it seems that it may be promoted by Delphi in the future to compete for the top position in the Cosmos ecosystem. Mars is currently in a stage where V1 has collapsed and V2 has not yet been launched. According to Twitter, it seems that the V2 plan rooted in the Cosmos ecosystem will be announced at the Cosmoverse conference on the 26th. You can keep an eye on it.

• Stable Tokens - UST, USK, CMST, USDK, Note…

The Cosmos ecosystem originally did not have a stable token, which led to Osmosis using Atom as the currency at first.

Later, UST came into being. After all, Terra was developed using the Cosmos SDK, but it was not close to Cosmos, and it felt like the son overshadowed the father. Later, it was finally connected to IBC, bringing stable tokens to the entire Cosmos ecosystem.

However, the good times did not last long, as UST collapsed, dealing a heavy blow to the Cosmos ecosystem . Then we have the current chaos of stable tokens.

Kava has developed USDK based on collateral, but its application scenarios are very limited. Basically, it can only be used by itself, with a market value of more than 40 million.

Kujira, who was previously on Terra, also came to Cosmos after the collapse of Terra and created the Atom-based stable Token USK. It has just started and its market value is only around 200,000.

Comdex imitated MakerDAO to create CMST, but I couldn’t find out the market value of this...

Canto has made a Note, which is just getting started and has not yet separated from his own project.

So, although the stable token sector is chaotic, there is basically no leader after the collapse of UST. Currently, Osmosis has USDC and DAI, which are basically issued through the Axelar cross-chain bridge. However, with the current momentum of Cosmos, it would not be too surprising to see USDT or USDC choose to be issued directly on Cosmos in the next few months.

Oracle - Oracle has always been a very important component in the Defi field, and unlike Dex or borrowing, which requires each chain to be rebuilt from scratch, Oracle is basically a winner-takes-all situation in a multi-chain ecosystem.

In the Defi Summer of 2020, it seemed that various oracles were still actively competing for market share, such as Tellor, API3, DIA, DOS, Nest, etc. By 2021-2022, Chainlink has become the only dominant player. Projects using other oracles must immediately switch to Chainlink as soon as an oracle error or problem occurs.

Cosmos actually has its own native Band Protocol, but it is completely suppressed by Chainlink. It seems that the only one that has the hope to compete with Chainlink in the future is Pyth in the Solana ecosystem, but this really has little to do with the Cosmos ecosystem. In the foreseeable future, the Cosmos ecosystem will most likely be dominated by Chainlink.