At Chorus One, we’ve been long time supporters of the Cosmos ecosystem: we were among the genesis validators for the Cosmos Hub and multiple other flagship appchains, contributed cutting edge research on topics such as MEV, actively participate in governance, and invested in over 20 Cosmos ecosystem projects through our venture arm such as Celestia, Osmosis, Anoma, Stride, Neutron.
The Cosmos vision resonated with many for different reasons. It offered a technology stack that empowered user and developer sovereignty, enabled a multichain yet interoperable ecosystem, and prioritized decentralization without compromising on security. Since its inception, each component of the Cosmos stack on a standalone basis could command multi-billion-dollar outcomes if properly commercialized:
Additionally, many ideas that are now widely recognized were first pioneered by the Cosmos ecosystem before gaining mainstream adoption.
However, the Cosmos Hub has been plagued with divided strategic direction, governance drama, little focus on driving value accrual and commercialisation, and slow iteration leading it to being outcompeted by its more agile, product-focused peers, that now have far exceeded the Hub in terms of performance, developer ecosystem, applications, and ultimately economic value creation.
Some initiatives didn’t get the results expected for the Hub, and one example is Interchain Security. Early on, we raised concerns that this model could lead to more centralization, and then explained the economic issues with Replicated Security. Alternatives like Mesh Security, Babylon, and EigenLayer have since entered the space, offering teams a wider range of shared security models to choose from. As a result, only two chains adopted ICS: Neutron and Stride. Recently, Neutron decided to leave ICS, leaving Stride as the only remaining ICS chain that will use Replicated Security from now on.
A major change in Cosmos was long overdue, and we believe it began with the acquisition of Skip Inc. The team rebranded as Interchain Labs, a subsidiary of the Interchain Foundation (ICF), now leading Cosmos’ product strategy, vision, and go-to-market efforts.
In this piece, we seek to present the bull case for what’s ahead for Cosmos, driven by a reformed focus on the Cosmos Hub and ATOM as the center of the ecosystem, internalized development across the Interchain Stack, and a north star centered around users and liquidity across Cosmos.
Between 2022 and 2024, the Cosmos Hub and the Cosmos ecosystem as a whole needed a breath of fresh air and a new team with both the execution skills and vision to revive the ecosystem and make it exciting again. More importantly, a team that was completely independent from the conflicts and divisions that were created within the ecosystem. It was time to leave politics behind and focus on uniting the community under one clear vision.
The team that brought this fresh and new vision is Skip. Co-founded by Maghnus Mareneck and Barry Plunkett in 2022, Skip became a key contributor in the Cosmos ecosystem by working on areas such as MEV and cross-chain interoperability. In just 2 years, the Skip team has made meaningful contributions to the ecosystem by building tools and software such as:
In December 2024, Skip was acquired by the Interchain Foundation, marking a historical moment for both Skip and the Cosmos ecosystem. Rebranded as Interchain Labs, Skip became a subsidiary responsible for driving product development, executing strategy, and accelerating ecosystem growth across Cosmos.
We see this as a bullish turning point in Cosmos for three reasons:
Skip’s new mandate is to position the Cosmos Hub as the primary growth engine and liquidity center of the ecosystem. This represents a significant shift in strategy, with ATOM evolving from a governance-focused token to the core asset underpinning value capture across the entire stack. At Chorus One, we’ve worked with Barry and Maghnus since the early Skip days as an investor and operator and saw Skip become a dominant player for MEV within Cosmos and a market leader in IBC transactions via Skip.go. We couldn’t think of a better team to drive the Cosmos Hub.
The Cosmos ecosystem relies heavily on IBC, its native protocol for blockchain interoperability. However, IBC has mainly been adopted by relatively homogeneous blockchains, most of which use CometBFT and the Cosmos SDK. Implementing IBC is complex, as it requires a light client, a connection handshake, and a channel handshake. This makes it especially difficult to integrate with environments like Ethereum, where strict gas metering adds additional constraints.
In March 2025, IBC v2 was announced. It simplifies cross-chain communication, reduces implementation complexity, and extends compatibility between chains. The main features we’re excited about with the integration of IBC v2 and the broader vision for the Cosmos Hub are:
With IBC v2, we believe the Cosmos Hub can become the main router for the entire Interchain. IBC Eureka is the upgrade that brings IBC v2 to the Cosmos Hub. It simplifies cross-chain connections by routing transactions between Cosmos and non-Cosmos chains through the Cosmos Hub.
IBC Eureka aims to increase demand for ATOM as it encourages routing via the Hub. In the future, one possible mechanism under discussion is using fees collected on these transactions to buy and burn ATOM, a model that could both reduce supply and create sustained demand. Although fees haven’t been decided yet, the framework establishes a foundation for potential value accrual to ATOM through real usage.
IBC currently is already a top 5 bridging solution by volume, with the most (119) connected chains, before establishing connections with major established ecosystems such as Ethereum and Solana. With this vision, the Cosmos Hub is becoming a central hub for the interchain economic activity, serving as a main Hub for bridging and competing directly with solutions like Wormhole or LayerZero.
Historically, Cosmos was plagued by user experience problems. Although its initial vision was to become a lightweight demonstration of the Cosmos stack, it also lacked features that other competitive alt-layer 1s have become known for, such as smart contract programmability, interoperability with external networks, high-performance throughput, and fast block times.
IBC v2 aims to address interoperability between Cosmos and exogenous chains. However, with the increased importance of Cosmos as a router for IBC, the hub itself also needs a native ecosystem to flourish and differentiate itself from its peers. The ICF recently funded the open-sourcing of evmOS, an Ethereum-compatible Layer 1 solution that allows developers to build EVM-powered blockchains utilizing the Cosmos SDK. The library will be renamed to Cosmos EVM, and maintained by Interchain Labs as the primary EVM-compatibility solution of the Interchain Stack. With this move, the Cosmos Hub now has a meaningfully viable path to becoming EVM-compatible and build a surrounding ecosystem, enabling and improving the IBC experience.
Lastly, the updated product direction will enable a focused approach on performance, catering to newly onboarded liquidity and users. The average block time of Cosmos Hub is currently ~5.5 seconds, and given the nature of interchain transactions often being cross-chain and requiring a minimum of 2 block confirmations, the average IBC transaction ends up being >20 seconds, which is a suboptimal user experience when the objective is for users have an abstracted experience when interacting with any Cosmos chain.
Optimizations can be done to CometBFT to reduce this to around 1 second or even less. With a 1-second block time, crosschain transactions can reach finality within 2 seconds, massively improving the interchain experience. We believe that this is the path Cosmos Hub will take, with a focus on performance in the near future.
As the Cosmos Hub advances toward becoming a service-oriented, multichain platform, a major priority is addressing the persistent challenge of liquidity fragmentation. While IBC enables seamless interoperability across chains, the Cosmos Hub still lacks a native trading layer that can handle efficient multichain liquidity routing.
Stride, a protocol recognised for its early success in liquid staking, has recently announced an expansion of its mission to address this critical infrastructure gap. With support from the Interchain Foundation, Stride is building a new DEX optimized for IBC Eureka, the native routing system of the Cosmos Hub. This new product will serve as the foundation for onboarding, bridging, and seamless asset movement across Cosmos and external ecosystems like Ethereum, Solana, and others.
Stride is purpose-built for multichain trading. It enables atomic swaps across networks without the need to bridge assets or switch wallets. The protocol supports all tokens, chains, and wallets integrated with IBC Eureka, and offers features like dynamic fees, permissionless hooks, and deep routing. Stride will also offer vertically integrated liquid staking, built-in vaults, and liquidity pools designed for both user flexibility and capital efficiency. The team already has 8 figures in liquidity commitments.
With this partnership, Stride is optimizing for the Cosmos:Go router, reinforcing its role as the Hub’s native liquidity router. In return, Stride has committed to sharing 20% of its protocol revenue with ATOM holders and building fully on the Cosmos Hub, while remaining independent and continuing to operate its existing products. This makes Stride both an economic and technical pillar in the Hub’s long-term roadmap, positioned to become a core DeFi player for Cosmos.
From a market perspective, the opportunity is large. Stride’s liquid staking product already serves over 136,000 users and secures significant value across multiple chains. By integrating liquid staking with its new DEX, and enabling features such as cross-selling, rehypothecation, and collateralized DeFi, Stride is expanding its total addressable market. Stride isn’t just launching a new product. It’s building key infrastructure that helps Cosmos Hub become the economic center of the multichain world.
The market has consistently shown that general-purpose Layer 1 blockchains are the primary drivers of value creation. Networks like Ethereum, Solana, Binance Chain, Sui, and, more recently, Hyperliquid have demonstrated that ecosystems with composability, programmability, and strong liquidity attract developers, users, and value accrual.
In Cosmos, a clear shift is emerging. The recent decision by Stride to deploy directly on the Cosmos Hub signals a new direction: some appchains are starting to rethink the need for sovereign infrastructure. Instead, they are exploring the benefits of building directly on the Hub’s upcoming permissionless VM layer, gaining access to shared liquidity, execution environments, and ATOM alignment without the overhead of maintaining an independent chain.
A recent example of this trend is Stargaze, a well-known NFT app chain. Discussions are underway to migrate Stargaze to the Cosmos Hub and convert STARS into ATOM. Such a move would align Stargaze more closely with the Cosmos Hub’s economic and governance layers, while bringing a Tier-1 Cosmos application to the Cosmos Hub. This direction, while ultimately subject to decentralized governance, reflects a growing recognition that Cosmos Hub-native applications could benefit from tighter integration and shared growth.
This marks a turning point for Cosmos. For years, teams were encouraged to launch sovereign chains. But in a competitive Layer 1 environment, fragmentation has become a liability. By consolidating applications on a unified execution layer, Cosmos Hub has the opportunity to increase activity on its L1, strengthen ATOM’s value capture, and present a more cohesive ecosystem to the broader crypto market.
With a permissionless VM, application migration, and deeper alignment through ATOM, the Cosmos Hub is becoming a competitive base layer capable of hosting top-tier applications and standing alongside the most successful general-purpose blockchains in the space.
Like many others, we were first drawn to Cosmos for its egalitarian vision: a multichain, interoperable future that prioritizes user and developer sovereignty, permissionlessness, and trust minimization. Like any emerging technology, it faced setbacks and challenges over the years. But behind the politics and drama was a tech stack that stayed true to the core values of decentralization. We couldn’t be more excited to support Barry, Maghnus, and the Interchain Labs team, along with teams like Stride, as Cosmos embarks on its next chapter, led by none other than the first stewards of its technology: Cosmos Hub and ATOM.
