Hi Cosmonauts! ⚛️
Thank you for tuning in and welcome aboard! My name is Estelle and I hope everyone is doing great today, welcome to the Cosmos ecosystem news roundup. Here are the top stories in the Cosmos ecosystem for the 1st half of July:
dYdX v4 public testnet released, why dYdX decided to leave Ethereum and build a customized Cosmos chain for scalability and decentralization? How will dYdX fee revenue benefit the Cosmos ecosystem? What is actually dYdX or Perpetual futures contracts? Why native USDC in Cosmos is so important before the dYdX v4 mainnet? In this episode we are launching officially the new Crypto regulations and compliance section in partnership with MME, the Swiss law firm who helped to set up the Ethereum Foundation and JayBee, the leader in blockchain compliance in Switzerland that advises leading companies and crypto banks. We are also launching in this episode a focused section about the Chain4Energy project. Injective’s Mito Finance stable and strategy vaults are live, Secret Network was featured in a Coindesk article about how Privacy as a Service could unlock Web3 for the next billion users.
All this and a lot more in today’s episode, remember to click the like and subscribe buttons and also the notifications icon. Without further intro, here is the news!
Tech
dYdX released its public testnet built on Cosmos, which is the last milestone before the mainnet launch expected before the end of September 2023, you can provide feedback and trade testnet tokens via the link included here. Bitcoin and Ethereum markets are available although over 30 markets are expected following network upgrades. Moreover, the v4 iOS app is also available for testing and the link is included here. To understand the magnitude of this we will review some key concepts and statistics and why dYdX chose Cosmos instead of Ethereum.
Centralized exchanges such as Binance, Coinbase or Kraken offer spot trading as well as derivatives trading such as futures or options. A key difference of derivatives compared to spot trading is that the underlying asset is not traded directly but rather the derivative tracks the price of the underlying asset. These exchanges however are centralized and the risks of centralized exchanges are well known. Decentralized exchanges or DEXes have become popular also, such as Uniswap or Osmosis, which rather than using Central Limit Order Books are based on AMM which could be considered a form of spot trading with swaps of crypto assets. In contrast, dYdX is a special case, because while it offers derivatives trading based on an order book such as Binance for example, it is decentralized and with its upcoming v4 release it is aiming to become totally decentralized. Therefore, dYdX would be a derivatives order book based
Gno.land released some updates, firstly contributors to Gno.land or Game of Realms are eligible to apply to their Funding and Grant program. The grant program has several categories such as researcher, builder of applications or products, or programs for students, developers or advanced developers. Topics for the grants include infrastructure, interoperability, documentation and more. If you are interested in applying you can follow the link here, then you need to fork the repo, create a new file with your project name, follow the instructions in the application template and create a pull request. The grants team initially reviews the applications and if successful the submissions are then sent to the review committed for quarterly reviews. For the grants, the payment would be in Fiat or ATOM for completed milestones. Gno.land also released an article with several recent updates such as the launch of Gno by Example, the link is included in the here. The article also mentions the development of GnoVM, participation in several conferences and more.
DeFi/Staking
Sentinel announced a new Merit Based Validator Delegation program. There are three categories for the evaluation, contributions to the community such as creating educational videos, distributed development efforts related to dVPN applications and nodes, and infrastructure contributions related to the hosting of dVPN nodes.
Project launches & network upgrades
Lava Network announced the release of Lava SDK Alpha which is a TypeScript/JavaScript implementation of the Lava Protocol that enables direct peer to peer communications between developers and RPC Providers. Moreover, Lava SDK alpha is open source meaning that anyone can read the code, suggest new ideas or help to fix bugs. This is an important release since the Lava Network team has been mainly focused over the last few months on this release.
Archway launched its mainnet and during the first month after the launch a total of over 15 dApps are expected to launch. Archway allows developers to capture a percentage of inflation and gas fees related to their smart contracts thus incentivizing them.
Governance
The ATOM Accelerator DAO or AADAO asked on twitter to the Cosmos community via a poll their opinion about the work so far of the AADAO. Over 63% or almost two thirds of the Cosmos community thinks that the work of the AADAO is not great, in fact over 22% thinks that the AADAO should be discontinued. Moreover, community members complained and said that they don’t think the AADAO is essential and that most of the funded projects could have been funded without the AADAO and its huge associated costs, mostly salaries for all the members of AADAO. Moreover, community members seem to question the value add of AADAO beyond simply transferring funds previously received from the community pool.
In addition, the community said that the AADAO should take more risk and improve the marketing to get applications outside of the inner Cosmos ecosystem or their close connections. Some community members claim to be surprised when they see new projects funded by the AADAO, since these projects are already well-known, or established or with other sources of funding, but nothing really innovative or talent external from the Cosmos ecosystem. Furthermore, community members complained about the AADAO using only Stride to liquid stake part of the ATOM in the treasury while other solutions are available such as pStake or Quicksilver. And in addition, the community complained about the AADAO dumping almost $1 million worth of ATOM for USDC.
Some also pointed out that since the two founders of the AADAO, including Youssef, hired and are paying large salaries to the reviewer and oversight committees this is a potential conflict of interest. Because the reviewer and oversight committees in the current structure are like employees of the two founders. This means that they have incentives to agree for example with decisions of the two founders about funding specific projects and keeping their salaries rather than questioning their decisions. It was suggested that an independent auditor or oversight committee, as well as an independent reviewer committee selected by the community and not being paid by the AADAO directly would be a more transparent and reliable structure.
An individual called Lanre Ige works at Menai Financial Group in London according to his LinkedIn. He is proposing himself to manage alone the Neutron Grants program and requesting for this an annual salary of around $172,000, or a monthly salary of almost $15,000 plus a possible 25% bonus, t o put this into perspective it would be similar to the salary of a Goldman Sachs executive director in London. In addition, he is suggesting to hire four individuals and pay them an annual salary of $52k each for 10 hours of work per week. This would be a $208k annual salary equivalent for a standard 40 hours of work per week. The four individuals suggested are Dan Lynch, David Park from Cosmostation, Emir Izaddeen from LongHashX and EffortCapital. AlphaGrowth also shared a competing proposal in the Neutron forum. This is very similar to the situation in the Cosmos Hub previously, where Youssef and AlphaGrowth shared competing proposals for a grants program. And similarly to Youssef, Lanre Ige is carefully selecting well-known validators and Cosmos community members to ensure the passing of the governance proposal.
Airdrops
For the Archway airdrop we included here and here the links to check your eligibility and to claim the airdrop. If you had staked more than 25 ATOM at the snapshot date 16th January 2023, you are eligible for a 1:1 allocation for staked ATOM between 25 and 2000 ATOM. In addition, those who bridged more than €5k worth of assets in a single transaction via Axelar are also eligible for an allocation of 400 ARCH tokens. Those who participated in the Constantine-2 or Torii testnets are also eligible for 25 ARCH tokens.
OmniFlix provided an update about the upcoming FlixDrop. Testnet NFTs were successfully dropped across several categories such as Cosmos Hub Delegators and are ready for campaigns on testnet.
Events/conferences
The Awesomwasm event and the Hackwasm hackathon in Berlin were a great success. Ethan, the father of CosmWasm inaugurated the event with a talk about the first four years journey of CosmWasm. The Hackwasm goal was to build your own dApp using CosmWasm with four tracks one of them being Neutron. The total prize for the four tracks was $40k, with prizes for the the 1st, 2nd and 3rd team in each of the four tracks. Following Awesomwasm, the next great upcoming event is Osmocon in Paris on the 21st July and the ticketing platform is powered by OmniFlix. Remember also that Mintscan V2 will launch the 21st July, the same day as the Osmocon event.
Osmosis news
The Osmosis v16 Magnesium upgrade added the Supercharged liquidity module, in our previous episode we covered in-depth Supercharged liquidity pools in Osmosis so you can check our previous video to learn all the details about Supercharged liquidity pools. In addition, this upgrade added the CosmWasm pool module, which allows the implementation of new experimental pools types without needing a software upgrade. Moreover, upgrades to the Protorev module by Skip were also included as well as other minor updates.
Proposal 559 passed for the launch of an alternative Discourse forum due to issues with accessibility to the previous forum in Commonwealth. We added here the link to the new Osmosis governance forum.
Juno news
DAO DAO announced the release of Polytone 1.0.0, which can be used to build interchain applications by allowing accounts, smart contracts or DAOs to control accounts on other chains.
Persistence news
The upcoming Persistence v8 upgrade will bring several exciting features from the roadmap. For example, it seems that the LSM might be implemented in Persistence even before the Cosmos Hub. If pStake manages to allow liquid staking of ATOM without having to go through the unbonding period thanks to the LSM, a large amount of currently staked ATOM may decide to liquid stake directly via pStake and thus pStake could become the leader in ATOM liquid staking above Stride.
Great news for Dexter users, it is now possible to access Dexter on mobile devices with Keplr and the IBC wallets.
It seems that with the upcoming stkETH v2 users will be able for the first time to natively liquid stake ETH on Arbitrum and Optimism. Furthermore, users will be able to transfer liquid staked ETH between L2s and also users will have the possibility to stake ETH on Ethereum and then have the option to mint liquid staked ETH on Arbitrum or Optimism. The security audit by Halborn security is ongoing currently and then the public testnet will be launched.
Secret Network news
Coindesk published an article about Secret Network covering the launch of Privacy as a Service (PaaS) leveraging both Secret’s privacy preserving computation and IBC. PaaS products will be released over the next year including private voting for DAOs, walletless dApps and more. The article also mentions Secret Verifiable Random Function (VRF) which is a secure and verifiable random number generator. Projects that want to incorporate Secret VRF into their dApps can submit a form and the link is included here.
Great news for Shade protocol since mobile support is now enabled which includes swapping, liquid staking SCRT, wrapping assets and SILK analytics.
Injective news
Great updates about Mito Finance! The Mito stable vaults are live and now users can passively participate in yield strategies using USDT and USDC by just depositing into the vault. Then automated smart contracts participate in complex DeFi strategies. Furthermore, the Mito strategy vaults for ATOM and INJ are also live and Ninja Pass holders are able to get yield on autopilot.
Black Panther is the first native asset management protocol on Injective and it was amongst the winners of the first ever Injective Hackathon 2023. Black Panther announced that users can connect to their website using MetaMask thus allowing them to onboard thousands of new users on Injective. Black Panther mentioned how impressive it is using an EVM wallet to sign transactions on a Cosmos chain. In addition, they announced the upcoming launch of their incentivized testnet on Injective.
AssetMantle news
AssetMantle reminded that while AssetMantle has an NFT marketplace this is just a small subset on the Mantle-1 chain, the project is an NFT Economy Protocol operationalized by the concepts of interNFTs or iNFT standard and decentralized identities or DID. On the Mantle-1 chain it is possible to build dApps using MantleModules powered by both interNFTs and Decentralized Identities. If you are interested in learning more you can check the link to github below in the description, some dApps that can be built using MantleModules include for example NFT marketplaces, Metaverse worlds, games, Real world asset (RWA) NFT framework and more.
The Charlatans of Osaka arrived on MantlePlace and it was announced that the secondary market launch is upcoming! To discover the Charlatans of Osaka collection you can follow the link here.
With the MantleWallet it is possible for example to contribute MNTL and ETH to the MNTL-ETH pair on Uniswap to receive LP tokens and earn rewards. In addition, it is possible to additionally stake these LP tokens in Uniswap farming pool. Similar opportunities exist also on Quickswap, Cswap or Osmosis.
Stride news
The Stride blockchain will transition to Replicated security on July 19th and it will be the first live blockchain to transition since Neutron was a new blockchain launching directly with Replicated security. For Stride this is great news since they will benefit from the security of the Cosmos Hub, which is around 115 times larger than the security of Stride as mentioned in their governance proposal. For ATOM stakers this is also good news to earn some potential additional rewards with no additional costs. For the top validators it is equally positive news, since the additional costs are negligible for them given their revenues. However, for the small validators it is not really good news. This is because for them the additional costs to run each consumer chain are significant compared to their current revenues. In theory, the consumer chains onboarded should provide enough revenue to at least cover these costs but taking Neutron as an example, this is not the case so far. It has been around two months since Neutron launched, meaning two months of costs to run Neutron nodes for most of the 180 Cosmos Hub validators, except for those choosing to soft opt-out. Looking at the revenues so far from Neutron, Dokia Capital for example which is the 3rd largest validator with 15% commission has accumulated so far in two months around $1 worth of NTRN tokens.
Chain4Energy news
Chain4Energy released a video tutorial on youtube explaining how to make a delegation, redelegation or undelegation in the C4E testnet, to check this video tutorial you can follow the link included here.
Chain4Energy participated in the 4th Crypto Silesia event in Poland for blockchain enthusiasts. The Chain4Energy team met great people and projects and even potential investors and partners. Also, Chain4Energy participated in the ATOM Berlin meetup as well, here you can see some photos with Liam or Josh Lee from Osmosis.
In the Cosmos Observatory Chain4Energy has an impressive score of 91 thus being the top 1 in the dashboard.
Are you interested in joining the C4E Ambassador program? Do you want to be part of the future of the energy industry? Then you can reach out to the C4E team via email at [email protected]
Chain4Energy was one of the major sponsors for ATOMBerlin and also they participated in the main panel discussion of the event with the topic of Consumer facing applications and products powered by Web3, Adam Wozney from Akash was also amongst the participants in this panel discussion. Moreover, Chain4Energy participated as well in the Awesomwasm event and they will be also present in the upcoming Osmocon, Nebular and Modular summit events.
Chain4Energy is focusing currently on their EV charging case app, with the utility for charging and settling payments for charging electric vehicles. The C4E private sale is still ongoing, and those interested in participating can join the private sale via their website. C4E is also getting ready for listing currently. Last but not least, the C4E Zealy competition continues and the C4E team has increased the rewards up to 300k C4E tokens for the July cycle.
Crypto regulations & compliance news with MME
We are very happy to announce the launch of the new Crypto regulations and compliance section with MME. MME met Vitalik and the Ethereum team in 2014 and worked with them to set up the Ethereum Foundation in Switzerland. This model of the Swiss Foundation was then copied by countless other projects including also Cosmos. MME will soon share with us a welcome video with a greeting for the Cosmos community and the announcement of our collaboration.
The Digital Euro is a form of central bank digital currency (CBDC) proposed by the European Central Bank (ECB). It is aimed to be an alternative Means of Payment: the digital euro could be used by anyone in the euro area, alongside banknotes. This new electronic means of payment would be available for online payments requiring a communication between payment service providers, the ECB and the end-user and for offline payments between peer-to-peer devices, and this form is intended to be anonymous. The digital euro would be directly issued by the central bank to the general public, without going through the intermediary of retail banks, thus reversing the logic of monetary distribution. In addition, the Digital Euro would not be a stablecoin. The digital euro differs from a stablecoin as it is a digital form of the euro which will be distributed exclusively through payment service providers (PSPs). It will be based on blockchain technology, but the digital euro will be issued, guaranteed and governed by the ECB.
On 28 June 2023, the European Commission published a ‘Single Currency Package’, consisting of a set of legislative proposals setting out a framework for a possible digital euro, whilst also ensuring that individuals and businesses can continue to access and pay with cash. For the next steps, in October 2023 the investigation phase of the digital euro project will come to an end and the Governing Council of the ECB will decide to move on to the next phase and study the technical solutions for the next 3 years. The year 2027 is the expected date of the first issuance of the digital euro in the best case scenario. Some questions are raised by the Digital Euro.
Privacy emerged as the most important issue for both citizens and professionals in the public consultations on the digital euro. European Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis has ensured that “personal data would be fully protected. Banks, not even the ECB, would not see or be able to trace, people’s personal details or data”.
In a FAQ published by the ECB one can read “the Eurosystem has no interest in collecting payment data from individual users, tracing payment behaviour or sharing such data with government agencies or other public institutions”. The privacy issue is even trickier as it must be balanced
Conclusion
And that’s all for today’s Cosmos ecosystem bi-weekly review Cosmonauts. If you enjoyed it please remember to click the like button, the subscribe button and also the bell notifications icon. Thank you so much for reading Cosmonauts and I’ll see you all very soon in the next episode!
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