Cosmos | Monthly report — July 2022

This month’s trends, key metrics, and developments within the Cosmos Ecosystem.

While the whole industry has been almost silent, this month has been exciting for Cosmos on the development side of things, with new chains coming out and rumors of other chains looking to implement IBC.

With that, let’s take a look at all of the interesting developments, project launches, and partnerships this month!

Keeping up the news on Cosmos

Partnerships & Integrations

• THORChain has officially added $ATOM to its list of native tokens, and with this integration, users will be able to swap their $ATOM directly into any cryptocurrencies that are supported on THORSwap.
• dYdX, the leading decentralized derivatives exchange is looking to create its own chain on Cosmos by using the Cosmos SDK. Currently, dYdX runs on Ethereum and an L2 called StarkEx, and the reason for their migration is due to their claim that neither Ethereum nor StarkEx can meet its requirements for throughput speed while maintaining 100% decentralization.
• Secret Network is partnering with Axelar to provide private cross-chain messaging — such as private voting for DAOs, front-running resistant swaps — and NFT transfers. By connecting to Axelar’s network, Secret is able to communicate with other non-IBC blockchains such as Ethereum, Polygon, and more.
• Filmmaker Kevin Smith is the first in history to release a movie in the NFT format with his recent release of a comedy-horror anthology film called ‘KillRoy was here’. This 5,555 generative art collection NFT release comes with the full movie and exclusive content — such as commentary tracks, and behind-the-scenes footage —minted on Secret Network’s primary NFT minting platform called Legendao.

Upgrades

• OKEx Chain (OKC) has successfully implemented IBC on its testnet, and is looking to enable IBC compatibility on its mainnet soon.
• Injective has recently undergone a mainnet upgrade. With this upgrade, it now supports CosmWasm (Cosmos WebAssembly) smart contracts, and is the first chain to allow self-executing smart contracts as of now. Apart from that, Injective now supports negative maker fees and binary options support. The full list of upgrades can be found here.
• Keplr has recently upgraded its Dashboard, giving users a plethora of new features such as Dark Mode (…finally?), being able to view assets by chains/tokens, and much more!
• Gravity Bridge has recently posted their Q3 update, and the two front-ends for Gravity Bridge has now enabled IBC Auto-Forwarding, allowing users to execute transactions ETH <> Cosmos with one transaction. Apart from that, they have described the various working groups who are focusing on various interesting developments, such as the ICS721 working group who are focusing on Interoperable NFTs.

New Developments

• Inter Protocol ($IST), a stablecoin soft-pegged to the US dollar (USD) is going to be live on mainnet soon. Created by Agoric, $IST is aiming to be the stablecoin for the Interchain.
• Adena is creating the first wallet for gno.land (a project created by Cosmos’ founders), and is going to be on Beta soon.
• Osmosis has announced its plans to build a system to arbitrage its own DEX, with profits going back to $OSMO stakers, alongside a liquidation market for Mars.
• Cosmos Hub is launching Neutron, which is a permissionless Interchain-Secured smart contract platform. They have recently been funded 150,000 $ATOM to develop the platform, and it is something to look forward to.

On-Chain Analytics

In this part of the section, we go through some of the on-chain analytics to see what is happening in the broader Cosmos ecosystem.

Due to the lack of higher timeframe analytics, we will be using this month’s data as a baseline for future series of Outpost reports.

Top 10 Chains (By Transaction Count)

Based on transaction count alone, we see that the chain on Cosmos with the most transactions right now is Osmosis, followed by Band and Injective, each with a staggering difference of around 3 million transactions.

Now, when we switch over to comparing the IBC volumes between the various zones, we see that it’s roughly similar, with Osmosis leading, followed by Cosmos Hub, Axelar and Evmos.

One interesting thing to note here is this: With Kujira only recently launching, it has bumped its position 39 up over the past month, and the question next is if we will see it go head to head with Osmosis as one of Cosmos’ leading DEX.

The difference? Kujira implements a CLOB style DEX, while Osmosis is an AMM DEX. And while Osmosis is still developing it’s pooled liquidation mechanism for everyday users with Mars Protocol, Kujira already has its own one working. That’s something to think about over the next few months.

Wrapping it all up

That is it for July’s update on Cosmos! As we’ve seen from the updates and articles, I predict the next few months will be much, much more interesting for Cosmos, with developments coming out really quickly.

Let me know your thoughts on Cosmos for this month, and see you next month! Until then, stay safe!

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