About the editor: Spencer Noon is Co-founder & General Partner at Variant Fund.

Network coverage:
Coverage on Cosmos, Evmos, and Osmosis.

• Cosmos is a network of 51 app-chains connected using IBC. It’s built on Tendermint consensus using the Cosmos SDK. ATOM is the native token of the Cosmos Hub (the first chain on IBC). Rumors of ATOM 2.0 were confirmed on September 1st, then ATOM rose ~40% to $16.49 on Sept 17th. By Sept 26th (full whitepaper release at Cosmoverse) price began to fall (to $11.32 by October 20th) in a buy-the-rumor sell-the-news cycle. ATOM 2.0 revamps ATOM economics to preserve the token’s relevancy. It will be used more heavily for interchain security and its issuance has been modified. This has been met with mixed response and some nuanced critique, which may explain the flat market response.

• Cosmos calls its app-specific chains as zones. There are 51 zones, of which the Hub is the 3rd most active. Osmosis and Axelar are the two largest by volume. IBC has been averaging $35m total volume per day with an average transfer value of $200. The projected total Cosmos network market cap is $13.6b.

• Cosmos app-chains share the Tendermint consensus layer. It has 175 active validators (out of 457 total). It just crossed 12.5m block height with an average block time of ~6.5 seconds. Coinbase and Binance make up the largest two positions with ~13% combined. The top 10 validators make up ~46% of stake.

• Osmosis is a DEX in Cosmos that is meant to serve as the liquidity hub of the ecosystem. TVL shows a platform’s liquidity depth, but it fails to provide users with information on capital efficiency. Users should understand the capital efficiency of the funds they are depositing. One way to do this is via swap fees generated by volume, compared to competing DEXs, Osmosis is nearly twice as capital efficient.

• GAMM (Liquidity Pool Tokens) are not measured by TVL, and thus TVL cannot measure the growth of GAMMs. For example, Pool #803 is the liquid staked ATOM and ATOM pool, and TVL shows price fluctuations in the underlying assets, while liquidity in GAMMs reveals a much clearer stable trend.

• In the last 90 days, Osmosis TVL has only grown over 6%. TVL does not measure the growth in tokens being deposited into Osmosis. Some examples seen in the largest tokens are wETH (45%), wBTC (74%), and USDC (13.7%), all of which outperformed overall TVL growth in the past 90 days.

• Evmos is the EVM hub of Cosmos with the mission of bridging the gap between Ethereum and Cosmos by providing state of the art software and tooling, enabling never-before-seen smart contract innovation across both ecosystems. After overcoming challenges on the path to bridging this gap (delayed launch and Nomad bridge exploit), there’s been a coordinated effort to restore liquidity; the Evmos community and on-chain analytics are stronger than ever. Daily token delegations are tracking ~2.5m.