The entire crypto market has had a rather turbulent February, with so much going on in the world affecting global market, blockchain notwithstanding. However, the fact that Cosmos SDK chains are holding strong and weathering the storm is truly a testament to the strength of the projects and the resilience of the community. New layer 1 projects built with the Cosmos SDK continue to launch and now we are starting to see the first layer 2 projects appear on the Juno chain as it just continues to ignore the overall market structure.

Cosmos Bridges

A number of bridges to Ethereum and Bitcoin have launched or are close to launch as the competition for which bridges will become the go-to bridges for the ecosystem heats up. Bridges to Ethereum include Umee, Gravity Bridge, Evmos and Sommelier. Nomic is a bridge to Bitcoin which has no competition at this stage and is looking very promising. Avalanche is developing a bridge to connect to the IBC as well. All these projects are bringing the blockchain space together to form the beginnings of the internet of blockchains. Read more about Cosmos Bridges here.

NFT’s

Stargaze launched their mainnet in January and are getting very close to launching the marketplace which will take place on the 2nd of March. Recently, announcements include the first NFT projects launching on the marketplace including the amazing looking Tardigrades. Another huge announcement from the Stargaze team is interoperability with Ethereum, meaning NFT’s minted on both Ethereum and Stagaze can be transferred to and from the Stargaze marketplace and OpenSea. This is huge news. Bridges to Terra are also in the works which will give access to RandomEarth. Game changing stuff for the NFT space.

OmniFlix has also launched its mainnet and is in the final stages of testing its dApps. The applications on OmniFlix are wild, with a marketplace boasting its own payment service call Stream Pay (SPAY) and the ability to mint, buy and sell NFT’s with any IBC compatible token. With the aforementioned bridges in play this means that not only Cosmos SDK tokens will be spendable, but also ETH. This is just scratching the surface of what OmniFlix can actually do so I highly recommend looking into OmniFlix and discovering their incredible array of use cases.

Juno Layer 2 projects

Juno has continuously moved from strength to strength since launch. One of the very few development teams in the blockchain space that delivers quality projects quickly, efficiently and on time according to their roadmap and announcements. First and foremost mention will be Junoswap. Junoswap is a layer 2 DEX built on Juno and has very quickly captured huge TVL even with the incentives contract incomplete. Junoswap team announced this week that the incentives contract is complete and is now undergoing testing and auditing and is due to go online within the next fortnight. An incredible achievement to the team who have once again garnered the trust of their community by bringing this contract to completion on schedule. With 50 applications, contracts and tools now up and running on Juno and many more in development this chain is one to be a part of.

Airdrops

This month was another hefty month for Airdrops as Cosmos/Osmo/Juno stakers received more airdrops from new projects. Junoswap snapshot were taken for the upcoming RAW airdrop and will be distributed in early March. Secret Networks’, Shade protocol came online this month and handed out tokens to stakers of ATOM and SCRT. Persistence finally announced the pStake airdrop which will be going out to users in the coming days. Stargaze round four and five airdrops will be released to recipients in March as well as Comdex airdrop round two. Nomic Bitcoin Bridge gifted the NOM token to ATOM stakers and Sommelier dropped their SOMM token to stakers of ATOM and LP providers on Osmosis. Likecoin handed out some tokens to stakers of ATOM, OSMO and JUNO. Gravity Bridge also dropped GRAV tokens to ATOM stakers. Further airdrops of Marble token (Juno L2) to JUNO stakers and Raccoon meme coin tokens to be handed out to Juno stakers as well in the coming weeks. Further announcements came from Hansum, Owlies, Diffusion and Ceberus, with many more confirmed and rumoured airdrops in the works. If the price action wasn’t enough to keep Cosmos SDK investors happy the airdrops are bringing smiles from ear to ear.

It’s been another massive month for the Cosmos Ecosystem with so much more going on than can be covered in a short article. From bridges that have been years in development coming to fruition, NFT marketplaces launching, airdrops every other week, new Dex’s and Smart-contracts exploding, February was a very exciting month for the Cosmos.

I’ll be deep diving into more chains and aspects of the Cosmos ecosystem over the coming weeks and months so subscribe if you haven’t already to keep up to date with everything Cosmos

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As the Cosmos Interchain ecosystem continues to grow, the importance of bridges to chains outside of the IBC is clear, and after several years in development multiple bridges are coming online. With the Gravity Bridge and Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) protocols now being utilized by teams at Atom’s own Gravity DEX; Emeris, Gravity Bridge (GRAV) and Evmos (EVMOS), plus a Bitcoin bridge built by the team at Nomic (NOM), very soon we will see the greater crypto space becoming less fragmented as it becomes possible to transfer tokens, NFT’s and utilize dApps via cross-chain interoperable bridges.

Gravity Bridge

Gravity Bridge will operate as a neutral Ethereum to Cosmos bridge. It will allow any Cosmos SDK based chains to utilize the Gravity Bridge via IBC without the need to develop a connection to the gravity bridge protocol on their own chain. This will give access to ERC20 assets (Ethereum layer 2 project tokens), across the Cosmos and begin to unify two of the largest ecosystems in the crypto space.

Gravity Bridge will be able to bring ERC20 assets from Ethereum into Cosmos, as well as Cosmos assets to Ethereum ERC20 representations. ATOM, and any other asset in the Cosmos ecosystem, will be able to trade on Uniswap and other Ethereum Automated Market Makers (AMM), and interact with Ethereum DeFi like any ERC20 token.

Airdrops to Atom holders and stakers of the Graviton token were distributed a couple of weeks ago. Osmosis is already in the process of setting up connections to Ethereum via Gravity Bridge and now we eagerly await the first chains to connect and allow ERC20 assets to be accessible via IBC.

Evmos

Evmos utilizes the Cosmos SDK and serves as the first IBC-compatible EVM-based chain, bringing composability, interoperability, and fast finality to Ethereum. The aim of Evmos is to create a more balanced L1 system in which developers, users and block proposers are on more equal footing to gain sustainable value accrual across all these important actors.

The initial distribution will be via what the team are calling a Rektdrop. The EVMOS token will distributed far and wide across Cosmos SDK chain stakers and liquidity providers, and Ethereum L2 liquidity providers (AAVE, Uniswap etc). The thing that sets this airdrop apart is that they will also be distributing tokens to Ethereum users who were affected by a slew of rugpulls, hence the name Rektdrop. This is a very amicable way of helping those who got rekt by these ETH based rugpulls to recover some of their financial losses.

The liquidity that has the potential to now flow between the Cosmos Interchain ecosystem and the Ethereum ecosystem will be enormously beneficial to the blockchain space as a whole, making the entire space easier to navigate and less reliant on centralized exchanges.

Gravity DEX: Emeris

Emeris is the platform built by the Cosmos team to be the central hub and wallet for Cosmos DeFi and a place for the gravity bridge protocol to be utilized. Whilst the initial launch was lackluster, as Emeris was viewed by the community at large to be too soon, being barely more than a month after the launch of Osmosis, creating community tensions of undue competition and concerns of the platform still being in early Beta. Gravity DEX has failed so far to capture significant value for users, so has done very little in the way of growth however, Emeris still has great potential to be a central point in the Cosmos ecosystem as it matures.

Nomic Bitcoin Bridge

January 31st 2022 saw the launch of the Nomic Stakenet with NOM being airdropped to Atom holders and stakers. At this stage the token is only able to be staked and the Bitcoin bridge is yet to be launched. However, the Bitcoin Bridge is bringing Bitcoin to Cosmos. The bridge creates a new asset, nBTC, which is IBC-enabled and fully backed by BTC.

This will open the floodgates for BTC pairs in DeFi with the most exciting being Osmosis. If you haven’t checked out Osmosis I highly recommend it as Osmosis has the second highest TVL to MC across the entire blockchain space and with Ethereum and Bitcoin bridges going live (not to mention superfluid staking), Osmosis has the potential to be the biggest DeFi platform in all of cryptocurrency.

There are other bridges such as Sommelier that are not far from being ready too. (Not to discount Sommelier with just a mention, as it is also a high level, brilliant project). The blockchain space is slowly but surely becoming defragmented, as these important projects come online.

I’ll be deep diving into more chains and aspects of the Cosmos ecosystem over the coming weeks and months so subscribe if you haven’t already to keep up to date with everything Cosmos

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As Juno moves from strength to strength, touching on $1 billion in market cap without ever being listed on a centralized exchange, the latest updates for this Cosmos SDK chain will leave your head spinning.

Juno is permissionless smart-contract chain built with Cosmos SDK that is quickly taking the Cosmos ecosystem by storm. Juno is the ETH equivalent in the Cosmos ecosystem. With Cosmos Atom being the central connecting hub of the Inter-Blockchain-Communication (IBC); Juno is the smart-contract platform. 47 apps have already been built upon Juno and one of the most exciting is Junoswap. Junoswap is the first decentralized exchange (DEX) to launch on Juno on January the 13th 2022. As it stands, rewards for providing liquidity on Junoswap are limited to swap fees however, Junoswap will be launching an incentives token called RAW towards the end of February or early March.

Raw tokens will be distributed via an airdrop at this time. Snapshots are rumored to be taking place throughout early February of  Junoswap and selected Cosmos SDK chains. Details remain shrouded in mystery as to what the eligibility criteria will be but, if other airdrops are to be any indicator, staking Juno, Osmo and Atom will be a safe bet and possibly even providing liquidity on Junoswap and as an early adopter may be rewarded. However, no details have been leaked on the actual criteria which will hopefully deter gaming of the system and airdrop hunters.

Speaking of airdrops…… Anyone involved in the Juno ecosystem will know by now about the airdrop of NETA token. Neta is currently a non-functional ‘store of value’ token, much like Ion is to the Osmosis ecosystem (or Bitcoin is to the broader crypto space). Neta was airdropped on the 1st of February via a claim mechanism and was distributed to Juno stakers, Juno governance participants and a little extra dropped to those staking to validators outside of the top 10. Neta is a limited supply token with a supply cap of 32950 however, any tokens unclaimed by the end of the month will be burned. For those who participated in governance this was a very generous airdrop as some people received the maximum of 16.2 Neta which is valued at $1700USD per Neta at the time of writing. Some very happy airdrop recipients out there this week. There will be a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) in which the holders of Neta will be able to discuss and vote on a potential use case for Neta beyond a store of value. Which brings me to the next development in Juno to report on…..

Dao Dao is a platform for building DAO’s and is the primary platform for communities to use for governance of their projects. DAO DAO is a tool for building multi-chain DAOs: DAOs whose treasuries can hold any IBC-supporting token, and DAOs whose tokens can be transferred to any IBC-supporting chain.

DAO DAO is made up of some smart contracts written in Rust and a visual UI for managing everything DAO-related. At its simplest, a DAO is an organization where you can vote on proposals. Proposals are updated to a ledger---their text, whether they passed or failed, and who voted on them. Proposals can be natural language rules or laws (for example, you could run a legislature with them), or they can be software. When a proposal passes the DAO's voting period, that proposal becomes canonical. It will be as "passed" in the ledger, and any proposal messages (effectively, bits of code) will be executed on the chain, modifying the DAO's state.

The DAO's governance can itself be modified by governance proposals. For example, the voting rules of the DAO themselves (e.g., how long voting periods last, what proportion of people need to vote on something for it to pass, etc) can be modified by governance proposals. DAOs manage voting through governance tokens. Like shares in a corporation, governance token determines your voting power. A person with 80% of a DAO's tokens will be able to pass things autocratically. Distributing tokens evenly will give everyone an even vote, assuming no one trades their tokens.

There are many more projects in development and Juno is quickly becoming a powerhouse in the crypto space. With many expecting that this project has the potential to exceed smart-contract projects like Solana, Terra and Cardano, Juno is project well worth keeping your eyes on. For further research, find links to projects and Telegram pages below.

https://t.me/JunoSwap

https://t.me/JunoNetwork

https://www.junonetwork.io/

JunoSwap — Swap

https://daodao.zone/

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Omniflix is the Cosmos SDK chain for the metaverse. Get ready for one of the most exciting chains to come online in 2022. Offering tokenized assets & communities, creators will have the ability to mint, manage and monitor both NFTs and tokens powering metaverse communities. OmniFlix is a decentralized media and network layer for creators and sovereign communities, powered by NFTs and related distribution protocols and….. mainnet launch is imminent!!!

Since 2017, the OmniFlix team has been developing a massive project designed to be used in conjunction with the Cosmos Inter Blockchain Communication Protocol (IBC). A huge part of the Cosmos community, OmniFlix has been providing the most beautiful user interface (UI) for users to stake and monitor their tokens via OmniFlix inSync, which can be used to manage Juno, Osmosis, Huahua, Stargaze, Likecoin, Comdex and more.

The OmniFlix Network is made up of a number of projects including OmniFlix inSync and OmniFlix Studio. Once the mainnet is launched next month more aspects of the network will start coming online including an inter-operable marketplace (OmniFlix Market), Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO), OmniFlix Nucleus, which is a platform to self-publish digital media & NFTs from across networks and allow discovery of NFTs from across networks either, via linear broadcasts, curated asset pools or even interactive videos. OmniFlix.me will be a single profile platform to showcase your digital media NFTs/collectibles from across chains & networks and be a place to create and deploy assets and dApps/contracts across multiple chains like Ethereum, Cosmos, Terra and other chains powered by IBC.

In the process of OmniFlix’s development they have been a recipient of the Cosmos Community contributor grant, awarded the Best Custom Zone during Cosmos Game of Zones and received multiple grants and rewards from the Akash Network.

Three snapshots have been taken over the past month of delegators and liquidity providers across the Cosmos community and will be used to determine the allocation of the upcoming OmniFlix airdrop. Details of the eligibility have been kept quiet by the team so far so avoid people gaming the system but, now that the snapshots have been taken further information will be released in the coming weeks.

Next up will be the mainnet launch and the token release via a liquidity bootstrapping pool (LBP) on Osmosis. Keep your eyes peeled for this as LBP’s are quickly overtaking ICO’s an initial sale mechanism and are the best way to get into a project on the ground floor.

OmniFlix has big goals and could be a major player in the metaverse. Decentralisation is so important for metaverse to function without being a platform for massive corporations to simply sell products to users and sell users’ information to corporations. The team behind OmniFlix are well known in the Cosmos ecosystem as being heavy hitters, and this project has been in development since 2017, so it has definitely not been rushed into and has been carefully planned and developed. Check out the links below for further reading and have a look at OmniFlix inSync, it is possibly one of the most beautiful and easy to use UI’s in the blockchain space and is an example of how the OmniFlix team isn’t just building a great back-end but, are also focused on presenting fantastic front-end experiences for the end user which is an essential part of blockchain technology moving towards mainstream adoption.

https://www.omniflix.network/

https://medium.com/@OmniFlix

https://juno.omniflix.co/ (OmniFlix inSync)

https://app.omniflix.studio/

https://t.me/OmniFLixChat

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Welcome to the first edition of State of the Cosmos. In this episode we’ll be looking at the most recent updates and additions to the Cosmos ecosystem. Everything from new IBC connections, chain upgrades, airdrops, new projects, news and more, so grab yourself a coffee and get yourself up to date on the State of the Cosmos.

NFT’s entering the Cosmos universe

Stargaze is a the first interoperable NFT marketplace that is IBC enabled. The token was listed on Osmosis via a liquidity bootstrapping pool (LBP) on the 19th of December 2021. A massively generous airdrop went live on the 17th of January. Anyone who was a part of that is smiling from ear to ear. The marketplace will be launched in early February and is looking to be a very exciting project indeed. Stargaze has applied to Terra for a grant to setup an IBC channel directly to Terra from Stargaze to be used for the transfer of NFT’s between the two chains. Groundbreaking stuff, very exciting times ahead for Terra and Stargaze NFT’s

Kava 9 joins the IBC gang

With the Kava 9 upgrade, Kava will become fully IBC interoperable across the Cosmos ecosystem. With an Osmosis listing imminent and huge incentives being offered on Kava Lend exciting times are ahead for Kava.

Juno Moneta upgrade is massive

Juno implemented its first major network upgrade on December the 15th 2021. The upgrade named Moneta opened up the ability for permissionless minting of CW-20 tokens via Junomint. Governance approved a payment to Keplr to provide ongoing support for the next 12 months including Keplr mobile app support. Just a few days ago Juno also launched Junoswap, the first decentralized exchange on Juno. The number of projects set to release on Juno in the coming months is far too many to list in a short article such as this but, suffice to say, Juno is growing at a break-neck pace. Not to mention the snapshot taken at the time of the upgrade secured early adopters an airdrop of NETA token, which will be a store of value token for the Juno network. Juicy!!

Osmosis is pumping!!

Anyone who has been a part of the last six months of Osmosis’s growth has seen an incredible project evolving. Not only is Osmosis fast, cheap, and extremely user-friendly, it is quickly screaming up the charts to become one of the biggest DEX’s in the blockchain space. With well over a billion USD total-value locked (TVL) and over 100 million USD in volume daily, it is easy to see that Osmosis is here to stay and will continue to be the go to DEX for the Cosmos ecosystem. Recently upgraded to allow the Cosmwasm module to function on the Osmosis chain, other projects can now launch smart-contracts on the Osmosis chain. Governance also approved for the clawed-back Ion tokens unclaimed in the airdrop last year to be moved to the Ion community pool, so the Ion community now has the funding to create their own DAO and begin developing a use-case for Ion.

Listed on Osmosis in December/January so far is Terra (LUNA), TerraUSD (UST), Stargaze (STARS), Lum Network (LUM), Desmos (DMS), Bitsong (BTSG), Dig (DIG), Vidulum (VDL), Comdex (CMDX), Bostrom (BOOT), Ki Foundation (KI), Secret Network (SCRT) and Chihuahua (HUAHUA).

Desmos. Social Media Revolution?

Towards the end of last year Desmos sent out an airdrop to Atom stakers which for most, left us scratching our heads. The airdrop was messy and left a bad taste in a lot of recipients’ mouths. However, slow as they may have been to get things up and running, Desmos have now listed on Osmosis. What on earth is Desmos? Desmos is a blockchain setup for social media platforms to build on and connect to. To create fairness across social media through decentralization and to give back to users through giving back the funds to users that advertisers spend to reach their audiences, rather than one centralized app reaping all the rewards. Big goals and a positive concept. Let’s hope they can realize their dreams.

Chihuahua. Just another useless dog coin?

Pretty much. Chihuahua (Huahua) is toted as being just another useless meme coin. Will it do anything? Probably not. Does it have a use case? Not yet. Is it gaining a massive following? That would be a very big yes. Cosmos’s first useless meme coin has taken the ecosystem by storm and has been performing surprisingly well since launch. Considering that it is built on its own chain and is not ‘dogged down’ by fees, which are next to nothing, it definitely has a ‘leg-up’ on other dog coins. With ridiculous staking and liquidity provision rewards it is no wonder that the FOMO has kicked in hard for Cosmos moonbois and girls. Sleep on Huahua? Well, I’ll leave that up to you to decide.

Crypto.com hacked!!!

Anyone using the CRO app woke up two days ago to find that their access had been restricted and withdrawals unavailable. Several accounts made complaints to CRO in the day prior that suspicious activity was occurring on their accounts and for some funds had disappeared entirely. To their credit CRO moved swiftly to lock all accounts and within hours were requiring that all users verify their accounts and add 2FA as default. Investigations are still on-going as to how the chain was hacked and fortunately very little was lost before CRO moved in to thwart the hackers.

The attack is speculated to have occurred after the attackers found a way to bypass the 2FA security measures on the exchange. This has prompted Crypto.com to alert users to reset their 2FA information, as well as having to log back into the platform to regain access to their accounts. The crypto exchange announced that this update will be rolled out gradually to users. Upon completion, withdrawals will then be enabled and users will be able to send their funds out of the exchange. “We understand this may be an inconvenience, but security comes first,” the exchange said.

I’ll be deep diving into more chains and aspects of the Cosmos ecosystem over the coming weeks and months so subscribe if you haven’t already to keep up to date with everything Cosmos

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There has been an awful lot of chatter when it comes to the environmental aspect of energy usage when it comes to blockchain technology. Particularly when talking about Proof of Work (POW) chains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum that use enormous amounts of energy to sustain the integrity of the chain. Enter Proof of Stake (POS) chains that use significantly less energy and are fast overtaking the popularity of POW chains. This article won’t be talking about the technical side of the differences between POW and POS rather, this article will be focusing on the benefits of Staking on Cosmos POS chains for you, the investor.

How to Stake

If you read the previous article on Osmosis you would likely have set yourself up a Keplr wallet by now. Or perhaps a Cosmostation wallet? These tools will be essential to get started on your journey to becoming a delegator. It is highly recommend all cryptocurrency holders to keep their tokens in a non-custodial wallet such as the ones previously mentioned. Not only can you use your non-custodial wallet to hold your tokens safely, but the private keys to your tokens are then yours to own, as opposed to keeping your tokens on an exchange in which the ownership of the tokens private keys actually belongs to the exchange.

To stake your tokens simply click the staking button in your wallet of choice and it will take you to the staking interface. Once there choose the number of tokens you wish to stake and hit the stake button. Now your tokens are staked and you can start reaping the rewards.

Why Staking?

There are many benefits to staking your Cosmos ecosystem tokens. First and foremost you are entering a community of people who truly believe in the concept of decentralization and are working towards bring this into the mainstream. Secondly you are helping to secure the network. POS networks rely on validators to validate transactions and by delegating your tokens (staking) to the validators you are giving the validators a) the power to vote on your behalf should you choose not to vote in governance proposals b) the more token delegated to a validator the more blocks they can validate. For this reason it is best to spread your delegations across a few validators to maintain the balance of power.

Rewards for Staking

In return for delegating your tokens to a validator you will be rewarded with tokens which are paid every block (an average of every 6-7 seconds for most Cosmos SDK chains). When you consider that staking is not too dissimilar to term deposits with a bank, except with staking the returns are significantly higher. The rewards for staking are based upon a combination of the current inflation rate of the token and the percentage of tokens bonded (staked). For example if you are to stake with the Cosmos (ATOM) token the rewards at the time of writing are 14.48% APR, Terra (LUNA) is 6.63%, Terra USD (UST) is 20.63%, Osmosis (OSMO) is 97.28%, Juno is 101.33% and Huahua is a whopping 567.19%. These rates are constantly variable and will go up and down depending on the volume of staked tokens and the occasional governance change to the inflation rate.

Airdrops

There is another positive aspect of staking Cosmos ecosystem tokens, which is the incredible volume of airdrops. When new projects are released they very often drop free tokens to stakers of other tokens within the ecosystem based upon snapshots that are taken periodically. This for many, has been an extremely lucrative part of staking as some of these tokens have gone on to become very valuable as the projects grow in popularity, liquidity and utility. Just be aware that for most airdrops, central exchange validators are excluded so make sure to delegate to a non-exchange validator and keep your tokens in your own custodial wallet.

Pros and Cons

There are some positives to staking such as high yield rewards for staking, securing the network, receiving airdrops and being able to vote on governance proposals but there are also some negative aspects. Firstly, once you have bonded your token to the network you can no longer access the token if you should want to sell it. It is locked up until you unbond the token and upon unbonding your rewards cease and your token is still locked for an unbonding period. Some chains this is 14 days, other 21 days and some are as high as 28 days unbonding period. This can feel like a long time and if you are planning to try selling the top or taking profits then your technical analysis has to be quite long sighted, as 14-28 days can feel like a long time in the fast-moving cryptocurrency space. There is one more negative aspect in that you must choose your validator wisely. To prevent validators from acting maliciously and to encourage them to stay online 24/7 validating transactions a slashing penalty is in place. Most validators will refund you any slashing should that occur however, DYOR as it is possible (although rare) that your funds could be slashed (a small portion taken as a fine), should your validator act maliciously or simply have a period of downtime.

In summary, staking has a lot of benefits, from gaining substantial staking rewards, receiving airdrops, securing the network, allowing you take part in governance and being a part of a thriving community, however, be vigilant in choosing your validators. Even though the risk of slashing is very small it is something to be aware of. As always, nothing in this article should be considered financial advice. Before making any decisions always do the due diligence and research thoroughly.

I’ll be deep diving into more chains and aspects of the Cosmos ecosystem over the coming weeks and months so subscribe if you haven’t already to keep up to date with everything Cosmos

Earn Passive Income with Crypto | Staking Rewards

https://www.keplr.app/

https://wallet.cosmostation.io/cosmos

Cosmos stats - Grafana (bronbro.io)

OmniFlix Communities

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This episode is a how to guide, getting started using Osmosis for trading, staking,

providing liquidity, and taking part in liquidity bootstrapping pools.

Getting Started

First and foremost, you will need to set yourself up with a Keplr or Cosmostation wallet. This way you can keep track of all your tokens within the Cosmos ecosystem in one place and have somewhere to send tokens that you have purchased from centralized exchanges (CEX). Once you have your wallet you will need to send your Cosmos SDK token of choice from the CEX to your wallet. Once received, you can then go to the Osmosis decentralized exchange (DEX) and deposit your tokens.

There is a plethora of Cosmos SDK tokens supported by CEX’s (Binance, Coinbase, Kucoin, Coinspot etc) that you can buy with your fiat currency and then send to your wallet, including TerraUSD (UST), Terra (LUNA), Cosmos (ATOM), Secret Network (SCRT), Crypto.com (CRO), IRIS and more. Once purchased, simply send the tokens to your new wallet by going to the send token function in your CEX wallet and inputting your wallet address. Having received your tokens into your Keplr or Cosmostation wallet you can then proceed to the Osmosis application and under the asset tab you can deposit your tokens onto the Osmosis DEX.

Trading

Now that you have your tokens in the Osmosis app you can use the trade function to trade your tokens into any other Cosmos SDK token supported by Osmosis. At the time of writing there are 30 tokens available on Osmosis and more are being added almost every week.

Liquidity Mining

Aside from trading you can also provide liquidity to the liquidity pools (LP). Pools are balanced at a 50:50 ratio of two tokens and are instrumental in providing the liquidity for traders buying and selling tokens on Osmosis. The rewards for providing said liquidity are quite generous on the incentivized pools however, I will leave a link below to a guide to providing liquidity. Make sure you read it carefully and understand the risks of providing liquidity before entering into any of the LP’s. Once you understand the pros and cons of providing liquidity, these pools can be quite lucrative.

Liquidity Bootstrapping Pools

Another option you have with Osmosis is to buy new tokens through the liquidity bootstrapping pool (LBP) function. New tokens are set at a 10:90 ratio and over a period of 3 days move toward a 50:50 ratio. Once this ratio has been reached a price is set and liquidity pools open, and trading begins. The function of the LBP is to allow the market to organically find the price for the new token as the ratio gets closer to the 50:50 mark and buyers choose the price they feel the token is worth. Depending on the volume of buyers the price can go up or it can go down during the LBP, so it is a very interesting way of finding a tokens market price that is not entirely predictable.

Superfluid Staking

There is one more function of Osmosis which has yet to arrive but is in the works. Something called superfluid staking. With superfluid staking you can use Osmosis supported tokens that you have staked and simultaneously provide liquidity to the LP’s. Sounds like having your cake and eating it too? Well it is exactly that. When superfluid staking launches, you will be able to receive the inflation rewards that come with staking proof of stake tokens and also receive the rewards that come with providing liquidity. Stacking crypto is about to become even more exciting.

Please make sure that if you are planning to put tokens in liquidity pools that you understand about impermanent loss and consider your risk/reward appetite before providing liquidity. Osmosis liquidity mining 101 link is below. Nothing contained in this article should be considered as financial advice. Simply a guide as to how to get started using Osmosis. Happy Trading!!

https://app.osmosis.zone/

https://t.me/osmosis_chat

https://medium.com/osmosis/osmosis-liquidity-mining-101-2fa58d0e9d4d

https://medium.com/osmosis/vision-for-osmosis-e68e796ff1c2

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One of the most important Cosmos SDK chains supporting development and growth is Osmosis. Osmosis is a decentralized Automated Market Maker (AMM) that has grown extremely fast since its inception. With the ability to connect and trade across a multitude of tokens within the Cosmos IBC, the inclusion of incentivized liquidity pools (not to mention the incredibly user-friendly and beautiful interface), Osmosis is at the top of the list when it comes to a useful platform for trading and providing liquidity across the Cosmos Ecosystem.

Trading

There are a number of decentralized exchanges (DEX) that have gained popularity recently, including Uniswap (Ethereum), Pancakeswap (Binance Smart Chain) and many more. Osmosis is the most popular DEX in the Cosmos ecosystem by a big margin and with good reason. The User Interface (UI) is simply beautiful and a breeze to use, even for the newest users of DEX’s. The trading fees are low to nil and the rewards for providing liquidity can be lucrative to say the least. Supported Cosmos SDK tokens can be traded seamlessly, and the transaction speed is almost instantaneous. No more waiting around for a transaction to make it onto the chain like you find on some other slower DEX’s.

Liquidity Bootstrapping Pools

Recently, Osmosis has begun providing a liquidity bootstrapping pool (LBP) service, which allows new projects launching within the Cosmos Ecosystem to find their price organically and functions like a reverse dutch auction over a period of 3 days, allowing the market to set the initial price of a new token.

Liquidity Mining

Another function of Osmosis is providing liquidity through the use of liquidity pools which provide funding for trades to occur and offer incentives to those who choose to provide said liquidity, by adding their tokens into a chosen liquidity pool. Incentivized  pool users are rewarded daily with the OSMO token and some pools are externally incentivized by the project whose token is in the pool, providing triple rewards (OSMO/External token/trading fees).

Governance

The OSMO token is also used as a governance token. As a typical Cosmos SDK proof of stake (POS) chain, governance is completely decentralized and anyone holding OSMO can vote in governance proposals. The community is extremely active and governance votes happen very often. In a typical week there will be 2-4 governance votes on topics ranging from upgrades, weekly incentive adjustments, pool incentive additions and more.

In the next episode I will discuss in detail how to use Osmosis and why it plays such a vital role in the development of the Cosmos Ecosystem. There are links below to the Osmosis app and their Telegram chat.

N.B. If you find yourself getting deeply involved in the community, you will find that there are many chat groups on Telegram spawned from the Osmosis chat with a large community of people consistently brainstorming new and innovative ideas about the crypto space and the future of blockchain technology use cases. Getting involved and tracking down these chat groups is highly recommended if this is something that interests you.

https://app.osmosis.zone/

https://t.me/osmosis_chat

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As Cosmos SDK projects continue to multiply, the entire ecosystem is gaining strength. With the launch of mainnet for Comdex (CMDX) just a few days ago, we see another powerful DeFi project come online. Boasting several products including an Enterprise Trading Platform, ShipFi and Synthetic assets, each of these products are designed to work interoperably together within the Persistence network and across the Cosmos network. Comdex is looking to be a very promising project amongst the Cosmos SDK club.

At the time of writing, Comdex is finalizing its initial price through the means of a Liquidity Bootstrapping Pool (LBP) on Osmosis. By opening the pool with ATOM/CMDX pairs set at a 10:90 ratio and moving towards a 50:50 ratio over a period of 3 days the CMDX token is able to find its market price. From a buyer’s standpoint, this means that the pool was listed with a maximum auction price, which declined gradually over a the three days until the pool balances of both tokens are of equal value. This mechanism made it essentially impossible for large token holders to try to corner the market and dump their tokens later. This approach is a very clever mechanism for achieving fair price discovery and broad token distribution, whilst preventing malicious action by bots or whales

Comdex is swiftly maturing into an ecosystem of solutions that will democratize finance and ultimately act as the bridge between DeFi and CeFi.

• Enterprise trading platform: Helping solve problems of trust and efficiency in the commodity trade industry and SMEs/MSMEs have better access to financing.

• ShipFi: Slated for a 2022 launch, this application focuses on bringing trade finance debt and receivable assets on-chain to obtain liquidity.

• Synthetics: Enables the creation of synthetics so that DeFi investors may get exposure to real-world assets.

All these solutions were designed from inception to work interoperably together. To better grasp how these products are made to work synergistically, let’s review the ideal flow of operations:

1. Trades are executed on the enterprise trading platform.

2. At the time of receivable creation, traders can request to source liquidity from ShipFi funds, making capital from DeFi investors accessible.

3. These funds then collateralize NFTs backed by real-world assets and mint synthetics assets. These synthetic assets can then be sold to DeFi investors, allowing them exposure to financial derivatives of real-world debt.

The CMDX token plays five critical roles in the Comdex ecosystem-

1) Being the native token of the chain, CMDX powers the network’s staking economy. Transaction fees and staking of CMDX helps secure the network.

2) CMDX holders can also be involved in the governance of the protocol. CMDX holders play a role in making critical decisions for the protocol like whitelisting of synthetic as well as collaterals that can be used on the platform.

3) Comdex synthetics app users can collateralize their CMDX holdings to create and trade synthetic cAssets on Comdex.

4) CMDX tokens will be distributed as rewards to liquidity providers and other participants who perform critical functions in the network.

5) CMDX tokens will be minted and burned to maintain the stability of cAssets in the network and ensure the solvency of the net debt of the network.

The Comdex App

The Comdex app allows users to collateralize their Cosmos ecosystem assets (such as $ATOM, $XPRT, $AKT, $DVPN, etc.) to create synthetic cAssets.

Every cAsset created on Comdex is a Collateralised Debt Position (CDP) that the borrower can close by returning the assets borrowed as debt. Users pay fees at the time of creating and closing a cAsset debt position. Open debt positions that fail to maintain the minimum collateral/debt ratio are automatically closed by liquidating the underlying collateral to close the outstanding debt position and the liquidation fee/penalty.

Users can then trade or provide liquidity with the cAssets they create on cSwap, Comdex’s AMM for synthetic assets. Trades on cSwap take place via liquidity pools containing cAsset pairs. The liquidity providers of these pools get incentivized through CMDX rewards and trading fees.

All the fees earned by the protocol get allocated to various pools dedicated to performing specific functions in the network. Fees collected in the stability pool ensure the stability of cAsset prices. At different points, these fees get used to increase or decrease the supply of cAssets. A portion of the fees collected gets used to incentivize liquidity providers and the remaining CMDX tokens collected get burned.

Liquidity Provision Rewards

CMDX tokens are rewarded to various users for performing certain critical functions of the platform. One of those functions is to provide liquidity to the liquidity pools that power trades on cSwap. In addition to the trading fees earned, early liquidity providers will be rewarded in

5,000,000 CMDX of the total allocation to incentivization will unlock at listing, followed by 3,000,000 CMDX unlocked every quarter for the next two quarters. Subsequently, 2,000,000 CMDX will unlock every quarter for the next four quarters. 1,000,000 CMDX will then unlock every subsequent quarter for the next six quarters. This encourages early liquidity provision, which is key to thriving synthetics markets on cSwap. Having rewards spread over 36 months also ensures longer-term participation from LPs in the network.

In summary, Comdex has huge potential through many avenues to be a driving force of DeFi within the Cosmos ecosystem and from all accounts, providing liquidity is looking to be a very lucrative endeavor in the short to medium term.

As always do your own research before making financial decisions. Nothing contained herein should be considered financial advice.

https://comdex.one/home

https://t.me/ComdexChat

https://app.osmosis.zone/

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The Cosmos Ecosystem has been growing exponentially since it launched the IBC. The first permissionless, smart contract platform for the cosmos was launched 1st October 2021 and is called Juno. Juno is the first smart-contract chain of its kind and is looking to rival some of the biggest plays in the blockchain space. 100% permissionless, decentralised and incredibly fast, Juno is set to be one of the top smart-contract chains in the world. It’s not often that a project launches with such incredible potential as Juno and getting a front row seat to these kinds of massive projects is often hard to find. All I will say is, don’t sleep on Juno.

Juno is lightning fast. Capable of an enormous number of transactions per second, Juno will be able to scale to meet the most demanding volume of network traffic. One of the biggest challenges currently with smart-contract chains like Ethereum is the incredibly high gas fees paid for transactions (Up to $300USD per transaction on Ethereum). Juno has addressed this problem and currently has very low transaction fees (about $0.05USD at the time of writing). Not to mention that Juno, being another Cosmos SDK chain, can interact with all the other chains connected with inter-blockchain communication (IBC). This opens up a whole new world of inter-operability and as the Cosmos ecosystem grows, Juno will have access to all chains across the IBC network.

The launch of Juno was also something completely different to most token launches. There was no pre-sale, no initial coin offering (ICO), in fact, there was no sale at all. More details can be seen in the chart below. Almost all Juno tokens were airdropped initially to stakers of the ATOM token, as a reward for securing the ATOM network but also in doing so, Juno’s chain will be secured with the knowledge that the holders of Juno will stake and hold for the long-term, creating good security and true decentralisation of the network. (26.6% of tokens are staked at the time of writing)

In less than 2 months Juno has captured nearly 400m in value and teams are lining up to release projects built on top of the Juno chain. This will happen very shortly as the Juno development team are currently porting smart contracts and dapp’s to cosmwasm 1.0 compatibility and testing these contracts on the uni testnet. They are also stress testing the uni testnet and testing upgrade procedures, as they move toward finalizing the rollout of their Moneta upgrade which is due to launch on December 15th 2021. Anyone who was around at the time of Cosmos Starport upgrade knows the value of staking to secure Cosmos SDK, proof of stake (POS) chains, at the time of a major upgrade. With so much value given in the form of airdrops this has become a bit of a no brainer. Excluding all other drops and just considering the value of Osmosis (OSMO) and Juno (JUNO), if you were staking ATOM on the 18th February 2021, then you know how lucrative staking can be on top of of the inflation rewards.

Juno’s tokenomics are also quite interesting, with a max supply set at 186M tokens. What is most interesting though is the timeline for inflation. Over a twelve-year period, Juno will have a series of yearly inflation drops. 40% for the first year, 20% for year two, 10% in year three and then dropping by 1% per year until the inflation rate reaches zero at which time no new Juno’s will be minted.

With so many projects set to launch on Juno once the Moneta upgrade goes live, you can be certain that along with the incredibly high staking rewards (currently approx. 120% APR which will reduce based on the total bonded rate and the inflation rate), you will be set to receive airdrops from new projects as they launch, so long as you are staking at the time of the projects chosen snapshot. If the CosmosHUB Starport snapshot is any indication of things to come for Juno, having tokens staked at time of the Moneta upgrade could be a very smart move.

Thanks goes to Bro n Bro validators and Kingnodes validators for their support in providing accurate up to date info on Juno and for just being amazing in general with their community interaction and support.

https://twitter.com/Bro_n_Bro

Juno stats - Grafana (bronbro.io)

https://kingnodes.com/

https://t.me/kingnodes

https://junochain.com/

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In my previous article I wrote about what the IBC is and how is differs from existing scaling solutions for blockchains. In this article I will have a look at how the IBC functions in a practical sense and how to use it.

Currently the IBC is limited to moving coins/tokens from one chain to another but has great potential for chains interacting with each other in many other exciting ways into the future. The greatest function that is currently in use is in the form of Decentralized Exchanges (DEX’s). The most popular and functional DEX within the Cosmos ecosystem is currently, Osmosis. Osmosis is easy to use, fast and transaction fees are low to nil. Osmosis was launched in June of 2021 and has already listed 21 Cosmos SDK built projects, with more being listed almost weekly now. Osmosis uses the Cosmos Gravity Bridge protocol, which allows sovereign tokens from any chain connected to the IBC to be moved from one chain to another. Major tokens listed on Osmosis are Terra (LUNA) and their stable coin Terra USD (UST), Cosmos (ATOM), Crypto.com (CRO), Akash Network (AKT) and the latest smart-contract chain Juno (JUNO).

Another DEX that uses the IBC protocol to connect to chains within the Cosmos Ecosystem is Sifchain. Sifchain currently has connections to both the Cosmos IBC and the Ethereum EVM and has quite an extensive list of tokens available. The functionality of Sifchain is a little different to Osmosis in that it uses a peggy bridge in which tokens are pegged for use in the liquidity pools as opposed to Osmosis which uses sovereign tokens which are moved directly from the sovereign chain onto the Osmosis chain for use in trading and providing liquidity in liquidity pools on the Osmosis DEX. As such, arbitrage plays a bigger role in the use of Sifchain compared to Osmosis. Sifchain has listed a number of major chains that can be seen on the chart below.

The most recent addition to the Cosmos ecosystem DEX’s is Emeris. Emeris was built by the Cosmos development team and while it is still in the early stages of functionality, is intended to be a major part of the Cosmos ecosystem using the Cosmos Gravity Bridge to move sovereign tokens from one chain to another and provide liquidity through the use of liquidity pools, much like Osmosis. Emeris roadmap indicates that is intends to be the first one-stop portal to provide integrated wallet and multi-wallet support, access to multiple DeFi trading platforms, staking on multiple chains and a mobile wallet app. Emeris also aims to have a fiat on-ramp in the near future, removing the need for CEX fiat on-ramps and sending your coins from exchanges to wallets and around the ecosystem.

The last thing you will need to do to get started using the IBC will be to have a compatible wallet to hold your coins in self-custody. The recommended wallet is Keplr wallet (cloud wallet) and linking it to Ledger (physical USB wallet). It is the most secure way to store the private keys to your tokens. Another wallet which is very popular is Cosmostation which has a mobile app as well as a PC app. Once you have yourself setup with a wallet and have transferred your tokens to your wallet, the Cosmos is your oyster.

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The Internet of Blockchains

As interoperability has become a hot topic in the crypto space, one name stands out as unique, and that name is Cosmos. Earlier this year Cosmos launched the IBC (Inter Blockchain Communication). Since then many chains built using the Cosmos SDK (Software Development Kit) have performed mainnet upgrades to connect to the IBC. Most exciting to me are Terra and Juno, but I’ll deep dive into those two chains in another episode.

So what is the IBC and how does it differ from other chains, interoperable and otherwise?

If you have been in the crypto space for any length of time, then it is likely that you have heard of Ethereum (ETH). Ethereum was the first mover in the smart contract industry that has become the most valuable and most used blockchain after Bitcoin (BTC). Although Ethereum has the benefit of being a first mover and is the most widely adopted blockchain by developers, it has been plagued by issues from its inception. Without diving too deep, the model that it uses is best described as vertical scaling. Any application built using Ethereum is built directly on top of it, therefore relying on Ethereum to be fast and stable, but also must pay Ethereum fees for every transaction placed by the apps users.

One analogy to describe vertical scaling such as what we see with Ethereum, uses a glass of water. Think of Ethereum as the glass and all the apps built on top as water being poured into the glass. Eventually the glass is going to fill and any movement of the liquid in the glass is going to cause it to overflow, let alone adding more liquid to the glass at this point. The only solution to this analogy is to make a bigger glass and transfer all the existing liquid into the bigger glass. The problem we face with this type of scenario is that eventually the size of the glass is going to have to be so big that it becomes unfeasible to build at all.

Enter Cosmos and Tendermint founders Jae Kwon and Ethan Buchman’s vision to create a network of sovereign blockchains connected to each other via a central hub. Now if we re-examine the glass analogy we have multiple glasses, each built using the same materials (Cosmos SDK), but each custom built to the size and shape required for it’s specific purpose. We can have whisky glasses and martini glasses and water glasses, or in technology terms, DEX chains, Smart-contract chains, NFT chains, marketplace chains and any other kind of chain that exists and many more that have yet to come into being. Instead of everyone pouring their liquids into the one glass now everyone has their own glass and through a series of connections which we could think of as tubes or straws, liquids can move freely from one glass to another without the concern of overfilling one glass. Currently the entire Cosmos ecosystem makes up more than 5% of the entire crypto market and is growing at a neck-breaking pace.

In short, the Cosmos IBC allows for a kind of horizontal scaling that allows chains to scale infinitely and still connect to each other without slowing down the network and with minuscule fees compared to other chains, future proofing the blockchain ecosystem. Moreover, the entire network is permissionless and decentralized.

I’ll be deep diving into more chains and aspects of the Cosmos ecosystem over the coming weeks and months so subscribe if you haven’t already to keep up to date with everything Cosmos.

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Osmosis made history on June 18, 2021, by launching a massively inflationary token in an extremely creative way. 1,000,000,000 $OSMO tokens will become available over the next 10 years after a quadratic fairdrop distributed the first massive chunk of them to the community for free. I highly recommend starting here and reading all of their articles on Medium.

Emeris has also earned the right to a place in this article by launching without a native token at all. The existing Cosmos ($ATOM) token will do just fine as a way to pay gas fees on this decentralized exchange built right onto the Cosmos Hub. The rollout was slow, but interoperability with Osmosis was absolutely worth it—picture an Ethereum Uniswap-type application which was completely interoperable with all ERC-20 blockchains no matter which L1 or L2 blockchain they might currently reside upon! This single innovation represents what is likely the most substantial indication yet that IBC will end up superseding (by incorporating what works and leaving behind what doesn’t) all of the best that any other blockchain ecosystem can offer.

The Interchain Future

Cosmos is the driving force behind interchain adoption, as founder Jae Kwon’s vision has been picked up by a powerful and growing group of developers from around the world. The most obvious place to see this is in the vision for application-specific blockchains which can be built by even relatively inexperienced devs using the Cosmos SDK. Think of the scaling implications for a blockchain such as Ethereum if Uniswap and OpenSea had their own seamlessly-integrated L2 solutions which could boost throughput and reduce congestion while ensuring minimal transaction fees by completely eliminating the need for these and other applications to compete with one another for throughput and low fees.

The vision has recently been rendered exceedingly clear by a simple and very easy to illustrate concept:

These top assets show up on 2 blockchains, when it isn’t 3! I have one that’s only on one blockchain too, because all of my $OSMO has remained on its own chain! Each asset has a number next to it which signifies the number of IBC-compatible blockchains it resides upon. I was excited to learn this, but it took me a bit to learn the truth of my Osmosis token: I never thought about it before but I suppose there isn’t much need to ever transfer this native token to the Cosmos Hub! I’ve seen some folks have a hard time with this and even decide that maybe Osmosis is more important than the Cosmos Hub, but I think I see a strong reason to disagree if the Hub will be hosting technologies such as this which make it a true Hub for the user by making true one-site interchain DeFi possible.

There is substantial need to add other tokens into the Osmosis blockchain, such as my $REGEN which appears on its own native IBC blockchain as well as on Osmosis, but as more people join in and the incentive for providing liquidity drops further, this should level off and essentially provide the world of its first glimpse of a Uniswap-type application that is extremely cost-effective, secure, and fast.

There have been a few minor throughput issues, but as a daily user of Osmosis since launch (if you count time spent reading, since BEFORE launch) I believe I have seen a large enough cross-section of the network’s development to make a judgment on it. The judgment is, simply, in the affirmative. I see what the team is up to and I believe the application-specific chain architecture is now borne out by over 2,000,000 transactions and a TVL of over $200M. Emeris does not offer the free transactions currently available on Osmosis, but with over $20M TVL already despite a lack of massive inflationary Osmosis rewards, it is rapidly scaling nonetheless. Low-cost transactions and massive volume make it an appealing concept to provide liquidity to sufficiently large tokens anyway.

Our new magazine is called Cosmoswriter and we are thrilled to have brought Interchain to the Cryptowriter ecosystem. As Paragism explained last week, Cosmos-based DeFi is here and it is hot. It does, in fact, pay my rent. And I did not make a massive investment into the ecosystem—it was the quadratic fairdrop that supplied me with the seed that has now grown large enough to pay my rent.

Interchain is here, folks. ERC-20 tokens should be supported in these remarkable applications in the near term, allowing for a gigantic migration of Ethereum-local liquidity into the IBC environment we know as Cosmos.

The Vision

I would be remiss if I failed to laud the remarkable vision of the Cosmos founding team and the Regen Network dev team which has stepped in to supercharge the most compelling vision of decentralization available in blockchain today. I have had the pleasure of meeting and interacting with a remarkable proportion of them in the $ION Governance Working Group and other notable Telegram channels dedicated to supporting and interacting with the growing Cosmos community.

If you’re a DeFi enthusiast or even a layperson, I strongly recommend (just because it’s amazing, not as financial advice!) getting a feel for Cosmos SDK products in this space. Earlier this year, we saw Polygon ($MATIC) seize a massive amount of L1 Ethereum transaction volume without successfully bringing over the massive Ethereum liquidity base. The token appreciated massively and I still count myself as an ecosystem member and fan of Polygon’s technology, but as a cryptocurrency investor, the big question on my mind here is this: will the Cosmos Hub DeFi and AMM products suffer this same fate? From here, to me, the answer looks like a resounding no. A low-fee ecosystem to trade and provide liquidity for ERC-20 tokens will be a boon to projects such as my Work In Progress Publishing company (WIP Publishing; ) and our DAO-as-product PAGE DAO, which currently boasts an ERC-20 token called $PAGE.

It is positively thrilling to see the Cosmos ecosystem exploding just in time to incorporate my own personal passion project into it! Kudos to all of the hardworking Cosmos community and team members. Here at Cryptowriter we’ll be eagerly following every exciting update that comes out.

The demand for staking has increased dramatically nowadays. As per a recent report of JP Morgan, the staking industry size will be worth USD 40b in 2025. The launch of proof-of-stake Ethereum 2.0 is supposed to be a game-changer for the sector. There are endless accusations against proof-of-work cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin for environmental destruction and proof-of-stake cryptocurrencies have attracted amazing investor attention recently. Cosmos is a project which launched staking before many other top platforms and ATOM, the native cryptocurrency of the blockchain, has gained almost 50% in the last 7 days and 105% in the last 30 days against USD.  The stellar rise of ATOM/USD is also fuelled by the growth of DeFi or decentralized finance. Let’s have a look at the state of Cosmos DeFi.

Osmosis is an advanced AMM protocol built using the Cosmos SDK and the AMM based DEX was launched in June 2021. It came up with a novel concept of customizable AMM pools rather than going for a ‘one-size-fits-all homogeneous approach’. Osmosis was designed as a cross-chain native platform. Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol or IBC enables messages to travel between blockchains that have implemented the standard and Cosmos supports it. Osmosis had IBC built-in from day 1 and thus it helped the users to connect to the entire ecosystem of Cosmos. Osmosis has a plan to integrate non-IBC enabled chains like Ethereum and other smart contract chains down the line. A big portion of OSMO, the native token of Osmosis, was airdropped to the ATOM stakers and it created a big hype. The UI of Osmosis received rave reviews from the community.

Image Source – Osmosis Blog

The Gravity DEX Protocol became live on 13th July 2021. The official blog post said, “Gravity DEX marks the biggest stride forward for Cosmos to date. It also marks a big step in realizing our vision for the future of crypto: multiple interconnected blockchains.” Cosmos refers to itself as the ‘Internet of Blockchains’ and it is focused on blockchain interoperability. Cosmos ecosystem is quite big now and it includes Cosmos Hub, Terra, Crypto.com, Akash Network and many other projects. Gravity DEX launch was important as it enabled permissionless swaps between any blockchain of the ecosystem. Gravity DEX didn’t have a graphical front end initially and it was accessible only through the command line.Emeris has recently launched the first beta front end of the DEX. The DEX allows to trade between 5 different chains now and it will also offer attractive yield farming opportunities in the future. The average trading fee on Gravity DEX is USD 0.08 and so it makes trading accessible to everyone. The protocol also uses batch execution to remove the possibility of front-running or price manipulation and this is a significant improvement if we consider Uniswap as a benchmark.

“Emeris has a simple goal: providing access to a wide range of decentralized applications scattered around various blockchain ecosystems in a single, easy-to-use interface. Starting as a non-custodial, cross-chain DeFi dashboard, Emeris will soon extend its line of products with other entries like a mobile app and a browser extension wallet.” – Emeris blog post

It is good to connect Cosmos ecosystem blockchains but Cosmos needs non-native assets to flourish DeFi. Gravity Bridge is being made now and it will connect Cosmos to Ethereum. The bridge is going to be functional in Q3 2021. Non-native asset flow to Cosmos will be brought by the bridge and it will enrich the Gravity DEX trade volume. The Ethereum community will be able to buy Cosmos tokens on Uniswap like DEXs due to the easy and secured decentralized cross-chain bridge.

The developments with Cosmos are really exciting. To take part in Cosmos DeFi, the ideal wallet is Kepler wallet. It has a cool Chrome browser extension and works well for maximum Cosmos ecosystem projects. DeFi can never attain mass adoption if the blockchain interoperability problem is not fixed properly. Cosmos is trying to do that without compromising with scalability and the approach is really novel. Although some other promising projects are working with the same idea, Cosmos seems to be ready with deliverable solutions. It will be interesting to see whether ATOM reaches a new ATH or not in the coming days. Keep a close watch as the daily closing candles are indicating that the bulls have taken the charge.

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A Cosmos SDK Blockchain involves 3 parts. The first is the state machine, which records the changing states of the network. The second is the network, which essentially consists of all of the users who hold the token, including but not limited to the validators who keep the network online. The third part is the cryptocurrency itself; a coin because it is used to ensure financial reconciliation for transactions that take place on the network. The purpose of a Cosmos SDK Blockchain is to ensure that users pay to use the network and validators are paid to keep the network online; set it up right and it becomes something like a perpetual motion machine nobody owns. Cosmos SDK Blockchains are special because they facilitate faster, more secure transactions than other blockchains can offer, while also keeping costs several orders of magnitude lower than comparable actions on say the Ethereum blockchain. 

Cosmos SDK blockchains share a common protocol between them, written in the Go programming language. This protocol, known as IBC, allows assets from these chains to be transferred efficiently between the various different Cosmos SDK blockchain environments. DEXes will supply liquidity in the form of ERC-20 tokens and even Bitcoins and other wrapped assets, and community-built Cosmos SDK-powered applications will make a rich variety of open-source applications possible. These blockchains are all essentially distinct from one another, and hence do not need to compete with each other for access to validation etc., but nonetheless there are limits to the protocol’s throughput. Individual applications may need to become sharded to scale entirely, but the decentralized Byzantine Fault Tolerance mechanism which powers Tendermint consensus is able to secure the network more effectively than other consensus mechanisms. Cosmos SDK throughput and security are thus both industry-leading, and fees at the present time are still low enough that the network is effectively free to use.

Due to the protocol nature of Cosmos SDK technologies, it is possible to create Cosmos SDK blockchain applications rapidly and for many to scale simultaneously. As the project is open source, new development teams emerge with some regularity. Cosmos SDK is thus a community-led project with the goal at its heart to create a new sort of internet: Web3.0; the internet of blockchains.

The Cosmos SDK

The Cosmos SDK is a development kit designed to make it easy and fast to spin up Cosmos SDK blockchains. I’ve done this a few times now, despite my cursory knowledge of Go, and I can vouch for the notion that yes, it is possible to rapidly create a blockchain. However, it takes a good deal of time to build this basic blockchain into anything in particular, application-wise. A developer I work with has taken up the task of performing a pull request on the Cosmos SDK Tutorials on GitHub. Find these tutorials here. Thus far, he has completed one of them and his findings are that the software does in fact work, but a few issues prevent tutorial completion on the IDE provided in the browser by the Cosmos team for the purposes of demoing the software. 

The issues primarily result from the rapid iterative development going on behind the scenes at Tendermint. The SDK is changing rapidly (scaffolding is being upgraded, for example) and some of the changes are breaking changes. This robust development environment, rather than a hindrance because it makes getting involved with Cosmos a bit more difficult, is instead a major selling point for Cosmos, as the vision behind the network is significantly further-reaching than anything that seems to be going on with respect to Ethereum or most of the L2 solutions--a very nice thing to see in conjunction with so much hard work by so many talented developers. The teams who are so evidently hard at work are what is different from other blockchain environments; to be long Cosmos is as simple as it is to be long on Sunny Aggarwal, Zaki Manian, and Gregory Landau. 

This overview represents the general state of my understanding of these matters at this time, and as a result there may be some things which need to be clarified in the future. I’m looking forward to learning more about my favorite visionary blockchain project, so please feel free to enlighten me or elaborate on any part of this document! Cheers. Ethermint (Cosmos SDK version of the Ethereum state machine) is going to change everything by offering a secure and cost-effective solution that works well with native Ethereum applications to teams throughout the metaverse.