Convert entire STRD supply to ATOM

As a preamble to this post, we’d like to clarify that this proposal is still in the idea stage. No specific details have been decided. We intend for this post to be the beginning of a community discussion, out of which a formal proposal with concrete details might emerge. Since its launch one year ago, the mission of Stride protocol has been to unlock Cosmos liquidity. Liquid staking activates idle staked liquidity, increasing onchain economic activity. To date, Stride has unlocked over $35M of liquidity for Cosmos DeFi. Considering its role as a liquid staking chain, Stride’s security and decentralization is especially important - since Stride stTokens are exported widely across the Cosmos and integrated into the DeFi ecosystems of many chains. So roughly speaking, the more secure and decentralized Stride gets, the more people are willing to liquid stake, and the more liquidity is unlocked for Cosmos DeFi. In June of 2023, Stride took a major step to bolster its security and decentralization by joining interchain security (ICS). As a chain secured through ICS, Stride is the most secure and decentralized liquid staking protocol in Cosmos. But in order to continue to scale…

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My first impression is that would be potentially incredible for the Cosmos Hub…

and I don’t see how it could be fair for current STRD holders (I am one of them). Myself and others like it because we see a powerhouse in the making. Getting ATOMs at the current STRD price would be really unsatisfactory. I see IBC as being the de-facto blockchain communication protocol and I see stride as the de-facto IBC staking protocol.

And even at current prices, according to Osmosis Info, Stride has a marketcap of $74m, way more than the current Hub community pool owns ($33m). The only way the Hub could pull this is by forking and inflating the supply ? I’d be even more against that. And the Community pool is too precious to spend on one bet.

TLDR imo this would remove tremendous upside to strd holders and potentially remove integrity from the atom token (which already has a bad reputation) depending on how the acquisition is financed.

I’ll add that I’m a proponent of the Hub fully owning protocols to create more value, but this isn’t it. A good counter-example would be Duality DEX before they found a deal with Neutron.

Stride:

From Stride’s perspective, this would be a good idea because it would greatly increase the decentralization of Stride protocol

What does your community think of this?

Also…

Whose idea was it to buy a token that has 80% of its value derived from ATOM? Can we the Cosmos community vote to remove them and to please never represent the Hub in any capacity?

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Agree with WillB. The economics of STRD are really good with a big upside, and the economics of ATOM are let’s just say a work in progress. Stride annualized revenue is 10x ATOM’s, and I think most of ATOM revenue is from Stride at the moment. I’m all for lots of collaboration with the hub - STRD value at least right now depends on ATOM doing well, but I don’t see a merger and swapping the token for ATOM getting a lot of support from STRD holders. There should be multiple ways of working with the hub where the value created is shared between the two communities.

First thing that came to me was:

How will governance work for other derivatives than stATOM.

If all Governance was done by STRD then other networks and protocols have at least bribery options or a fair chance to acquire STRD as a protocol and use that for voting.

If ATOM gets the governance than the Hub starts controlling stake decentralisation and more on other cosmos networks - a big sovereignty risk.

This doesnt go into the tokenomics part of the conversation whatsoever, with Stride being one of the more clearly valued Tokens i think it would be a big loss to the wider community of STRD holders at this moment in time. Will need more time to fletch out details though. The fact that Stride could now pay more directly to Cosmos validators and Stakers would be good though for solidifying the ICS economic bond.

Very intriguing.

The economics of this conversion are going to be very contentious, but it’s a no-brainer from a product standpoint for the hub, and the Stride team is top notch, so the prospect of them being essentially hub devs is

STRD holders who bought the top are probably not going to like this, though, if the conversion is conservative.

A lot of people invested into Stride how do you plan to compensate this? Current market cap on CoinGecko is 68 million. Fully dilluated is about 78 million.

Nobody has thought this through. ATOM would need to print (inflate by) $80M to buy out all stride holders at current prices, nobody with 2 brain cells would agree to sell for less.

Hello, I am holder of STRIDE and now I think it is the worst idea I have ever dream - I value STRIDE 40 x or even more now and dont understand why I need more Atom with 2-3 x potential???
What is for STRIDE holders and community ??
What is the profit for Stride holders ?
I am upset and destroyed …

the truth is that I will convert my best token in a trash inflationary one (Atom) with no pourpose and full of cartel. I dont want that to happen …

To help make Stride protocol as decentralized as possible, the entire STRD supply could be converted to ATOM, making ATOM the governance token for Stride…

Stride is decentralized already ! And no need to decentralized it again.

STRD supply could be converted to ATOM…

Atom price can be 2 $ tomorrow … we loose everything.

You can increase the yields for stATOM and Stride, so you could finance it with the ATOM staking yield over a longer time period + the additional buys with free liquidity

The idea of enshrining Liquid Staking (LS) into the Cosmos Hub, as mentioned by notable figures like Vitalik Buterin, is understandable. However, the transition to a new token system, as proposed here by Stride, raises concerns. This proposal would essentially strip existing Stride token holders of their rights and tokens, which they have acquired and staked in anticipation of governance participation (among other benefits). If changing ETH from PoW to PoS was like changing the engines of a plane mid flight, this could be seen as forcing the passengers to change a plane mid flight! Even though validators are the same for both chains, the underlying belief systems are different. The community’s past reaction to ATOM 2.0 clearly showcased a strong aversion towards minting new tokens. In this light, the proposal’s requirement of a hefty $80 million investment to acquire Stride appears to be a high-stakes gamble from the viewpoint of an ATOM holder. This proposed financial allocation not only risks market stability but also tests community trust. Moreover, Thyborg’s suggestion of initiating chains without tokens, although theoretically compelling, has shown practical shortcomings…

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Thanks for sharing this idea. Some initial thoughts about this, currently Stride inflation and revenues go to STRD stakers and governors, except the % for the Cosmos Hub as a consumer chain. Let’s say all this STRD is converted to ATOM, it would be liquid ATOM. Will this ATOM be staked/liquid staked and to which validators? Or would it be used as STRD currently with governors not being staked? If the Cosmos Hub would then collect all Stride revenue what will happen with current STRD stakers and governors? Is the plan like swapping all STRD for ATOM with vesting so STRD holders become ATOM holders? But then those who buy the STRD what happens since now all Stride revenues go to ATOM holders? Also, part of the current Stride consumer chain revenue is from inflation, if all STRD tokens are converted to ATOM and STRD dissapears, then no inflation revenue as consumer chain, but only the other revenue sources? Stride: Given the decentralization, maturity, and neutrality of ATOM, it would be a more trusted governance token for Stride protocol, likely leading to an increased adoption of liquid staking. Edit: it seems the governance of Stride will then be the total…

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As a small investor in both atom and stride I don’t see any benefit in the proposal.

Now I have the possibility to invest in both coins and split my portfolio between the two as I wish. If I wanted to go all ATOM I could simply swap all my STRD for ATOM at Osmosis.

The proposal removes this option. Investing in Atom would mean investing in the stride protocol automatically. Also my share of the profits in liquid staking would get very diluted, since cosmos hub is the larger partner in this merge. If I wanted to weight my portfolio more towards liquid staking I’d have to look at other protocols.

In short, not a big fan of the idea.

In general a really interesting proposal, the problem is that Stride already launched a token and there are too many vested interests involved. People chose STRD for a specific reason (different tokenomics etc.) In general I think ATOM and STRD token holders are complementary, if you merge both now, you risk losing a part of the communities.

I don’t think it is the best thing for the STRD team to decentralize too early, I don’t know how far the devs are with the roadmap and what things they are planning, but at this stage it is better to have a more centralized structure and get things done fast.

So to sum it up, I really like the idea, but I think it is too late.

As an alternative the HUB could invest a substantial amount in the STRD token (maybe 25%), so you can decentralize governance, but the HUB doesn’t control governance. OFC we need to think about how we use these 25% in the governance process (delegate these tokens to validators and stakers, similar to the OP system and they can vote with their allocation?)

This is a good idea to consider. The Hub could simply buy STRD on the market - gives holders the option of selling if they want to.

I don’t think the ATOM would be vesting ATOM. IMO it should be fully liquid so that Stride stakers that want to opt out can sell their ATOM.

Nobody that currently holds STRD should want to exchange fully unlocked STRD for another token that is subject to a vesting period.

RoboMcGobo:

I don’t think the ATOM would be vesting ATOM

Oh I just mentioned vesting because I read it in the proposal:

Stride:

Stride contributors would continue working on Stride protocol, as well as helping out with Cosmos Hub. Their ATOM allocation would be subject to a vesting schedule.

Ah, yeah so I see this as Stride contributors (i.e., Stride Labs / founders) would have tokens subject to a vesting schedule, not the community at large.

This is a very difficult subject. I can see the benefits for the Hub with a native liquid staking solution where ATOM is the value-accrueing asset.

However, it again brings a sole reliance on one protocol, which I already expressed multiple times that I don’t like it. We have a local saying “One is none”
In IT infrastructure it is quite common to work with failovers and parallel backups to ensure that if one thing goes wrong the service is not hurt. And currently in the Cosmoverse we are exactly doing just that. We see how the downfall of OSMO value hurts the value of all coins in the ecosystem. We have seen how the fall of UST has damaged the complete ecosystem. And now we are doing this for the 3rd time with Stride? Come on…

Disclaimer; I have STRD in my portfolio and am a governator on the network. But I also look at the bigger picture what is good for Stride and the ecosystem for the long run. And this is not it.

they dont want to sell at all. No sense.

Can we talk about the fact that the presentation started with a request for decentralization and ended with the idea to positioning themselves as a quasi monopoly for ls on cosmos?
This might be economically speaking awesome for atom-holders short-midterm-wise and a safe heaven for one of the best teams in the space as far as I can judge stuff like that. However, it is horrible for liquid staking in the ecosystem in my humble opinion. “A winner takes it all”-scenario might be inevitable when it comes to ls, but this will settle it in an instant and max out every risk related to the matter.

LittleLionMan:

However, it is horrible for liquid staking in the eco system in my humble opinion. “A winner takes it all”-scenario might be inevitable when it comes to ls, but this will settle it in an instant and max out every risk related to the matter.

I see what you’re saying, but the whole point of ICS is alignment, economically and philosophically. If other liquid staking providers want that alignment and buy-in from Hub community, they can apply to be a consumer chain. Stride is making moves, so from that perspective, I respect what they’re doing. It’s up to their and the Hub’s stakeholders to see if this makes sense.

Basically your going to dilute the current governance holders. If I own 1% of stride token, I have 1% of the governance vote. The governance is the only real value the token actually provides.

So I want 1% of the ATOM supply to replace my 1% of Stride supply.

Jeff:

So I want 1% of the ATOM supply to replace my 1% of Stride supply.

1% Stride supply= ~$700k
1% ATOM supply= ~$25 million (~36x larger)

stAtom fees this year for staked Atom have been around ~$330,000, let’s be generous and say that they increase the yield 10 times. It would take 13 years to be equivalent to HALF current Stride prices (not taking into account any type of NPV analysis.

you can add others chains - not only Atom, dydx, acash and so on on Stride and this way you may say another idea

If increased alignment is the goal, I would much rather see a token swap between the two chains. Stride would potentially get permanent protocol owned liquidity, and the Hub increased revenue (80% of host zone rewards currently go to STRD stakers) and increased Cosmos-wide governance influence (Stride has been gaining an increased foothold in VP on chains). Can’t see any form of redemption/burning making sense here.

Stride ATH was 2.5$ .

If the hub wants Stride , that is the number Stride hodlers should agree on.
That way , no one has to endure a forced loss.

Its a shame this is all that could be pulled together for a keynote cosmoverse announcement. It feels as though this prop was contrived to fit the place of the more obvious and mutually beneficial route of acquiring NEW relationships for ICS (stargaze, umee, osmo). On the surface this comes off as half-baked and redundant (Stride even said this idea only came about a couple days/weeks ago) but here are a couple items to consider nonetheless. • This is by no means a merger of equal parts. Lets at least call it what it is. Stride is proposing that the Hub ACQUIRE their entity. Calling this a “merger” is insulting to the Hub and diminishes it’s value. $ATOM holders must be protective of what has been built. • Lets not put the cart before the horse. Devs worked for a long time to build ICS, so are we now going to sidestep that entirely for what is presumably and expensive exotic deal/transaction that sets a precedent for future ICS/acquisition candidates. Are we absolutely sure that Stride’s need for more decentralization can’t be met under the current ICS provisions? Have we already matured passed the point where ICS is not longer sufficient? • How do we value Stride?…

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Just a few questions:

• How is ATOM going to pay for it?

• Where is it going to be? (ICS chain to keep the hub minimal?)

• What happens to the STRD locked in LPs on other chains? Redemption at fixed price?

• Speaking of price, what is it? How do we get to a value?

• Who decides/votes on allocation of statom vote weight to atom validators? Committee? Who is on that?

Atom can buy Stride on Osmosis if he needs Stride.

Atom can buy Stride at the Team or Whails if he need it so much.

It is my propose

Doing this destroys Stride’s business potential & makes it an enshrined ATOM or IBC LSD protocol.

There is currently no viable competition in the LSD market so of course Stride is in the lead on top of the various community pool spends to benefit Stride. If competitiors emerge, the ATOM community is going to be avoided bc there is now clear conflict of interest. Why spend resources if the Hub is favoring 1 single solution?

On the topic of resources, Stride now has 0 way of bootstrapping new stAssets bc who is going to incentivize them? You’d be joking to think the Hub would incentivize other assets, especially when it could just use the community pool to create POL again? So boom, Stride now becomes a single LSD protocol & the LSD market is wide open again. Even if the Hub tries to now compete directly in the LSD market, it starts losing credibility by basically destroying “fair” competition in one of the largest DeFi markets.

Add this on top of the governance and funding issues, this proposal has no positive outcome imo.

First of all, thank you for suggesting this idea and discussing it openly with the community to gather feedback. I think it’s the first time we’re officially discussing M&A deals between blockchains on a Cosmos forum, it’s exciting but of course there are still some unknown factors. This could potentially pave the way for other deals in the future and that’s why we need to think about it carefully right from the start. I want to share some open topics that have come to mind after reading the post: Legal Side: • Since we’re talking about an M&A deal, it’s clear that the Hub will need lawyers who specialize in crypto and M&A. The open discussion is great, we can’t rely solely on community goodwill for something as complex as this. The Hub would need to hire lawyers to help structure the deal in collaboration with Stride’s lawyers Stride Contributors: • The core contributors at Stride have done a fantastic work in making Stride successful within the Cosmos ecosystem. If this deal goes through, the Hub should ensure that Stride core contributors remain committed for a defined period of time to keep developing the protocol and providing value to ATOM holders…

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L-O-FUCKING-L. Never change cosmos, never change.

Lots of really great points raised here already. I’m still processing this, but wanted to add some questions and initial thoughts that I feel are critical to consider as part of this proposed acquisition and have not even been remotely addressed yet. I don’t have any answers, but I feel that we should at least try to define and aggregate the problems as a starting point. I’m going to try to be as neutral as possible here but disclaimer, I’m far more economically and ideologically aligned with Stride. Stride’s Alignment With the Rest of the Ecosystem I’m starting here because I don’t feel like this has been deeply addressed in any comments so far. This proposal will effectively convert the Cosmos Hub in itself to the liquid staking hub of the ecosystem. I understand that the proposed implementation here will see Stride as a side chain to the hub, but imo this is indistinguishable given that Stride will now lack its own native governance system. That being said, Stride will lose its credible neutrality as an independent liquid staking chain to a chain that, by its very nature, seeks to acquire additional consumer chains and build products that compete with independent…

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Interesting idea, Jae; however, I’m just not interested in converting. Thanks for offer tho!

Thank you to the Stride team for your vision and generosity! This has many benefits Most people only care about what happens to their Bags and not the future of the Cosmos ecosystem, but clearly this will provide the ecosystem with a way to reduce chain operating costs. • To Cosmos: LSD is a system service and middleware of the chain itself, and may take over the ecology, just like the problem faced by Lido in ETH, so ATOM acquires Stride and then provides a kind of Public goods to maintain neutrality. Orthodoxy, the acquisition of Stride and the acquisition of Osmosis are completely different things. Osmosis is not a middleware service of the chain itself. LSD and LSM are a type of product. They should be merged and then turned into Public goods SDK. • To Stride: With the legitimacy of Public goods SDK, LSM+Stride LSD+Communty Pool will be a good idea to solve the problem. LSD Pool will have excellent depth without any additional incentives. This idea is to reduce the operating costs of the chain. The Cosmos ecosystem is Appchain, which brings power but also costs. Therefore, this kind of service is an excellent public product like ICS. • To Atom: There is no one more…

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Hard no for me obviously.
I’m against centralisation. The Hub gobbling up Stride would be a recentralisation process, and the opposite of what we’re all trying to accomplish.
It would ternish Stride, a succesfull project with a strong tokenomic and a vibrant community, by diluting it in a struggling project with a disatrous tokenomic.
The Cosmos Hub will solve its own issues by changing and reforming itself, finally, not by bringing down others with him, by buying out their success.

This is nothing more than a bad joke from Stride team. They said that it was an idea born between drinks, so I wouldn’t take it into account. There are a lot of people that bought Stride way above current market price, and due this absurd event, price is going even lower due fears. So why in the world should we, Stride holders, accept to be merged only being payed our market cap in the time of the deal? There is no sense to accept that if we are not paid a huge premium, and Cosmos can’t offer what we worth/want. Buy us is for sure a huge deal for Atom, IMO would be their best move since inception. But is HORRIBLE for any stride holder. We are a chain that can accrue the real value of all cosmos adding new and old chains and taking a big chunk of all TVL. Nobody become more decentralised merging with Atom since is a clearly centralised chain. A lot of us bought stride because we DON’T want Atom, so I would never accept to change my precious Stride for it in any case. And in the case I want market price, I can simply dump now. We are not charity, wont sell for Atoms at a steal/cost price. And I sincerely hope that the team makes a statement soon, apologizing and…

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I’m really happy to see all of the amazing discussions going on above. With that being said, I don’t have much more to contribute currently to this discussion as I resonate with most of what others have pointed out above such as @Kam and @RoboMcGobo . What I do have to say is, If and IF this discussion carries on, I believe It will be a type of M&A that we have not seen in this space yet ( please do correct me if I am wrong here) . M&As are also a lengthy and expensive business so we’d have to discuss alternative methods such as a Token swap (I’ve seen this discussed briefly above) . My second concern which many pointed out above is that more likely than not, Stride will be the chain most affected TVL-wise and with how much it can grow (since it will be more ATOM aligned than other chains) which would in turn, affect the Stride contributors/investors the most. Lastly and I think no one has mentioned this yet but - If Stride gets absorbed into the Hub, can the Hub continue to natively issue ATOM and stATOM? I can’t think of a network that mints its own liquid-staked token. ETH has LIDO, StakeWise etc. all of which are third parties. Would It be good to have a heavily…

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I don’t think it’s fair or constructive to reduce legitimate concerns about how each respective chain values this acquisition to something as simple as “people worried about their bags.”

This also ignores concerns around how Stride liquid staking as a product offering (as well as all non-ATOM existing and future LSTs) may suffer as a result of this acquisition due to a loss in perceived / actual neutrality, as has been raised by a few people in the forum now.

All that aside, I think the idea of a type of bond / revenue share token is an interesting idea that should be exploted further as a way to compensate for a perceived value discrepancy on the stride end.

Would be lots of questions associated with this (desirability of issuing a timeboxed revenue share token in the first place, would it be tradeable or soulbound, what percentage of revenue, how long is the term, how to handle the token after expiry of the term, who the “issuer” of that token is for legal reasons, liquidity provision of that token, etc), but think this is a neat potential solution.

Who is responsible for the losses incurred by the holders who purchased STRD tokens at a high price? Can these losses be compensated for by the belief in the development and strength of the Stride team, which motivated people to buy tokens at a high price?

Good for Atom hodlers, good for Stride team but what about us Stride hodlers / investors.

We risked our money when you started and the price was going down

Please tell us one single benefit for us, just one

• The part you are interested in - about bonds with time-term interest: The idea comes from the services provided by Pendle, asset token and interest token. The interest token will decrease by 20% every year from the current income of 80%, for example, after 4 years 0. Stride Holder goes to exchange and gets Atom and an interest token. Please ignore the rationality of specific figures, just give an example to illustrate the technical feasibility, and this does not involve too many legal issues. There is a very broad space for bargaining and design. Those who value Stride’s income can go to the secondary market. Free trade. • Regarding the problem of non-Atom LSD: This is an opportunity to upgrade LSM & LSD and reduce the operating cost of the chain. Cosmos has too many chains and too few useful dApps. I think we all agree on this. Turning LSM & LSD into SDK, the Stride team’s goal after the merger should also be committed to this. Vitalik Buterin’s recent article “Should Ethereum be okay with enshrining more things in the protocol?” is also the same idea, in the middleware of the chain itself. In terms of services, more Public goods can be provided to reduce the deployment and…

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Andy we can merge in a year term if you think that Stride price is good - the community made Stride as project - no community - no project.

If you think that Cosmos has too many chains - it is not about Stride. Stride now is heart of all Cosmos ecosystem.

According to the corruption in Atom and others cains I seppose everyone knows - that stakers every chain pay for all, not teams or validators or funds. Stakers pay for ALL

First and foremost, i extend my gratitude to all those who will contribute to this discussion and to the Stride team. Regarding the potential benefits for the hub, the proposition to merge with Stride appears to be a logical step. LSD stands out as a product that identifies PFM and effortlessly showcases a revenue stream. Introducing a product that grows in tandem with the interchain’s expansion promises to add significant value to the hub. As more chains join, more LST is generated, resulting in a greater inflow of value to the hub. From the outset, Stride and the Hub have demonstrated genuine alignment and cooperation. The teams supporting the hub have also put in substantial effort to facilitate the integration of LST into the Cosmos ecosystem (informal, hyphaa and iqlusion ). ICS have laid the foundation for cooperative ventures. Also it can be inferred that, given the hub’s existing 15% share of the revenue, only 85% remains to be merged. The Necessity for High Standards Executing a M&A on a decentralized chain presents a unique set of challenges. Historical experience has shown that governance can lead to conflicts … It is imperative to anticipate these challenges.…

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A lot of the points I was going to make have already been addressed, just wanted to add a point around vesting.

I think any potential buyouts/mergers/acquisitions should have terms that all existing vesting accounts be converted to $ATOM vesting accounts.

Investors of Stride with vesting should be bound to the same vesting schedule with their newly acquired ATOMs.

Sorry sir but I’ve paid my Stride very cheap back in January. So so price at which Stride holders entered isn’t the issue here sir. It’s what they paid for.
I’ve paid for Stride not atom sir. I’ve sold my Atom to buy some Stride

Sorry, Stride will not succeed alone, it will only succeed with the success of Cosmos. If Cosmos falls, Stride as a chain service will die.
Stride is not heart of all Cosmos ecosystem.
Cosmos Stack like Cosmos SDK、Wasm、IBC is the heart of all Cosmos ecosystem.

Regarding the problem of non-Atom LSD: This is an opportunity to upgrade LSM & LSD and reduce the operating cost of the chain Enshrinement isn’t what’s being proposed though. The proposal is to have Stride continue on as a sidechain secured by ICS and using ATOM as its gov / gas token (think like what Duality wouldve been before the Neutron merger) The fact of the matter is, if stATOM continues to be the predominant asset in Stride’s TVL a year or two post-merge, the merger will have failed. The Hub will have just purchased its own TVL back (likely at a premium). To drive real value to the Hub post merge, Stride needs to be able to attract LSTs from external protocols like dYdX or Celestia. It may struggle to do that when it that revenue is going to be potentially used to fund competing consumer chain protocols. Atom has been insisting on neutrality for more than two years and has not directly participated in Defi, NFT and other businesses While this may have been true pre ICS / AEZ, it’s certainly not true now. The Hub has become a rent-seeking protocol that has a direct financial interest in the success of consumer chains that compete with many of the protocols…

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Yes, it will not succesed alone but it is not the reason to merge.
Yes, technicaly it is not heart now, but community of Stride thinks about Stride this way. And in a year may be you change you mind about Stride.

RoboMcGobo:

Enshrinement isn’t what’s being proposed though. The proposal is to have Stride continue on as a sidechain secured by ICS and using ATOM as its gov / gas token (think like what Duality wouldve been before the Neutron merger)

I know，but step by step we can do it，merge LSM&LSM as a SDK，Cosmos staker pays too high cost for the chain

for sure your are not aligned with the hub . but against it … you should invest on a 100%soveraign chain and not stride which is align with it

Another interesting consideration:

A good portion of Stride’s supply (namely, the community pool, growth fund, and incentives fund) could be burned without minting any corresponding ATOM tokens. The fund is owned by the protocol and not any particular user or investor.

The protocol could just agree that the value of these uncirculating tokens is some value less than par which would allow for the Hub to buy all circulating STRD at the premium that is likely warranted here while still paying far less than the current market cap of $80ish million.

Will try to hash out numbers for what this might look like when i’m not flying.

Somebody just please remember to save the Bad Kids that are being held by the Stride multisig before we start burning things

And again, the core issue, how Stride holders that bought above current market price, or even at current market price, benefit from that?

You are taking into account our community will accept, and we clearly don’t on that terms.

This is not about being able to buy us, is about nobody sell a share of a company for less than current price.

The debate is only turning in “how we benefit Atom the most”, and that will never work.

To make this deal worth Stride holders minimum need a x5 premium, and of course, Atom can’t pay it, so this is a no sense.

A zoom out question.

Can anyone explain what exactly are the decentralization benefits that Stride gains and how are they measured. I would love to see some criteria and numbers here.

Honestly, a r&d question on my side

Adding few thoughts: • deal is proposed in time when liquidity is really low. Try selling/buying large volumes…so how to valuate this? Also regarding fair value - very hard to determine since CF are minimal / peer analysis shows that strd is overvalued. And don’t try to sell the future since we saw what happened with Luna. • alignment can be achieved on many levels. options etc what if we detail transition in 5 smaller steps. with final one when atom is swapped with strd (lets say in 5 years…when also CP will be enough big to swallow this) • what if stride team decide tomorrow or next year that they move to other project? • Why exactly is this good for Atom holders? • I think we are back again with the discussion about where do we want to see atom - where is this content alignment? or vision that everyone will be sharing and talking? I know that everyone would like to see atom back in two digits territory. but will such ad hoc actions help? or are we on path where division will break it? Also - I can not overlook Thyborgs attitude toward Sunny which was revealed on stage yesterday (I felt it like if you are not with me you are against me - why such attitude I…

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There is no way this deal won’t rekt somes stride holders & dammage even more the atom tokenomics…

The best you can do is increase alignment between the hub & stride by investing more on stride and improve the ics deal.

to stride holders : the hub can acquire quicksilver and their team for almost nothing. if quiksilver was the one secured by the hub its valuation could have also went to 80m and this is still possible

80% of stride tvl is atom. Yes atom has shit tokenomics but whitout the atoms on your tvl stride price worth nothing.

Big no for this prop we can build so many things with so much money. Increase alignment is the best you can do. You launched a token you can’t dump it just like that on atom holders.

Without looking into it too deep, I like the idea…anything that adds to the utility of ATOM is goes and I would rather treasury funds go to an establishes protocol like Stride instead of start ups. I understand this could be detrimental to current STRD holders however, I’m sure they can be mad whole somehow.

SHabuQureshi:

I think most of ATOM revenue is from Stride at the moment.

Sorry.! What do you mean by this?

Nope, not gonna happen. They need to first justify that MC is the right matrix to value the project. when I can with 5K USD ruin the market cap by 20%. The fairer valuation of stride should be based on The times-revenue method which determines the maximum value of a company as a multiple of its revenue for a set period of time. The multiple varies by industry and other factors but is typically one or two. In some industries, the multiple might be less than one. You can read more about the Model here From the rough calculations, I have the figures ~7 million USD. Now the question is are the current STRD holders willing to do this? Stride Upside Stride has a great Upside as a current winner among the LSDs, so their annualized revenue can increase from 700K USD (considering their numbers right). This factor should be included in the fair value calculation Stride current value driven by Cosmso hub No one can deny that Stride has been a winner among the LSDs by acting fast, but we also know that Cosmos HUB has been a great help with the success. Hub has onboarded Stride on ICS and validators are running the chain free of cost, we have given them 450K Atom for bootstrapping.…

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The idea itself is ok, but we need the details (How, when, etc) of execution before making the comments.

view from strd holder: If the core development team thinks that these two directions can be tried in the future, I will also be happy to give my answer and oppose the merger. stride needs to maintain its independence for the following reasons. • Being deeply bound to the cosmos hub is not necessarily a good thing: a) The future of the cosmos community is not necessarily atom, but may be a chain that adopts the IBC protocol or uses the cosmos sdk. b) The merger with hub loses independence and impartiality, which is likely to affect the cooperation of other sovereign chains (such as osmo/dydx). • At present, there is no merger and acquisition plan that has the best of both worlds for atom investors and stride investors. No one is willing to give up their own interests, and it is even more difficult considering the current very poor hub community pool. • There is no data or examples to prove that the merger can greatly improve stride’s decentralization. stride has always been committed to decentralizing tokens and distributing tokens to active people. If the governance is changed to through atoms, then the previous efforts will be in vain. Right? • The development costs and…

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Does this model take into account forward revenue projections? Imo this is highly relevant in the case of Stride, as current revenue is dramatically underrepresentative of Stride’s revenue potential in the near term (LSM literally just launched, stTIA and stDYDX expected).

Re: mcap, if you’re concerned about someone “wrecking the market cap with $5000,” a simple solution here is to use a 10, 14, 28 day rolling twap price for both assets, which is fairly common in situations like this to prevent manipulation of markets.

mcap (less tokens not in active circulation like strategic reserve, etc) is absolutely relevant here.

I see a lot of noise in this entire thread.
Stride makes 700k anum? Stride is the definition of a distressed asset. i.e. Toxic
What is strides earnings once adjusted for EBIDTA?

700,000$/anum means nothing, if we do not see the rest of the balance sheet. Strides burn rate is 500k per month. In a distressed asset case, STRIDE would be worth maybe 100k USD. Its a bleeding ship, with a high burn rate, and almost no capital generation compared to the liabilities it has on its balance sheet. 70m valuation is a joke, only a crypto bro who LARPs as a Jpeg trader would fall for this. The big boys are here, and we going to discuss real valuations, as known in the real world.

This guy is the only other adult in the room, and his valuation is ‘nice’ because it does not show the liabilities Stride has per month/ anum. In fact, in the adult world, this discussion would not even start with out the entity in question publishing their entire balance sheet according to GAAP. Because they failed to disclose balance sheets according to GAAP, FASBA, and the real friends and family rate (FNF) that early funders got, it should be taken as an attempt for an unqualified team and venture capital bros to get an easy exit using the liquidity of others. The ability to build a product, is not the full scope of being a ‘great team’. The other 90% of the coin, is managing your balance sheet, which few teams seem to understand, or care about, or they know they can abuse uneducated speculators new to finance. We all know ATOM is the real money in the Cosmos, as it is the only asset which can discharge debt compared to any other asset in the ecosystem. Thus their request for a golden parachute via the asset which can deliver that debt relief. Just ask Ethan about this, he refuses to say this about any project, but will discuss it in quiet when trying to dump his CoFi…

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For those in startups… ~100% of Silicon Valley and the tech ecosystem at large are a low interest rate phenomena in the last 15 years. Most of the companies were socialized losses. The adored tech companies were not productively profitable or moated for the amount of capital invested and time duration passed. You could have bought the S&P500 and took a stock loan to buy real estate and outperformed the vast majority of them. Gitlab, Palantir, Affirm, OpenDoor, Grubhub, Stripe, Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, Coinbase, etc… cannot suddenly turn on a viable* profitability switch. The companies that may have been useful are not technology companies as much as glorified gov’t contractors – all of fintech. Very hard to find real technology companies. It is non existent. There was never a free market, just men in the casino and those cockroaches who attempt for the pickings. *Viable referring to the time-value of money vs. a reasonable portfolio of S&P500 and stockloan to buy real esetate against it.) Facebook, Figma, and Instagram seem to be the only viable ones in the last 15 years-ish. Most of these startup mentors and advisors who have surfaced have no conspiracies around…

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I like the spirit of this post and appreciate the hard work that many are doing towards AEZ Alignment. I also have a lot of respect for the Stride team and think their ability to execute is super valuable. That said, taking this post at face value, it’s really hard to make sense of the numbers. I am attempting an analysis here, and maybe folks with more info and insight can help fill in some of the gaps. Currently, Stride is trading at an ~88.5x net revenue multiple. Comparatively, Lido is trading at a 23.7x multiple (Defi Llama) : | Lido | Stride | Market Cap | $1.374b | $62m | Net Revenue | $57.8m | $700k | Net Rev Multiple | 23.7x | 88.5x | If we are to incorporate stTIA and stDYDX per @RoboMcGobo ’s comments, which, is very hard to do without knowing the LST demand and inflation schedules for stDYDX/stTIA, the numbers improve but still seem a bit away: 20% LST, 8% Inflation | DYDX | TIA | Stride | FDV | | $2,750,000,000 | | Market Cap | $344,526,096 | $165,000,000 (6% genesis) | | stDYDX / stTIA (20%) | $68,905,219 | $33,000,000 | | Gross Rev (8% inflation) |…

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I just have to say that it’s great to see some actual numbers being put up on the board after 72 posts haha. This is a well-reasoned and insightful analysis, and while I think there might be some disagreement on some of the forward-looking revenues (which, as you said, are pretty rough to calculate anyway), this represents significant progress already. Also want to highlight that it’s pretty neat to see that we’ve collectively gotten this far without any input at all from anyone at Stride Labs or Informal Systems. Shows that this type of social coordination is possible if the community is passionate enough. 0xpatrick: I am curious to see this fleshed out more. Burning some portion of the 87.6m issued tokens seems like a necessary starter for further analysis of a full acquisition here. I’m going to be working with @Rarma to quantify this more exactly. He’s going to grab concrete numbers on the number of STRD tokens in all of these varied token pools that are wholly protocol owned. In theory all of these could be burned with no corresponding ATOM minted, subject to any premium that governance may vote to assign. Though the tentative “finger in the wind”…

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Show the liability side of the balance sheet please, and stick to GAAP.
There is no volume, any penetration depth of liquidity can tell you these valuations are inflated. Less than 0.1% of the supply can drop the asset value by hundreds to thousands of basis points.

Fair market value, must be defined by back testing and pen testing real available liquidity.

waqarmmirza:

The fairer valuation of stride should be based on The times-revenue method which determines the maximum value of a company as a multiple of its revenue for a set period of time. The multiple varies by industry and other factors but is typically one or two. In some industries, the multiple might be less than one. You can read more about the

If you want to buy a company or use tradify methods, you buy the total market cap + premium when you OPA a company. Not a single shareholder would admit to sell at a loss in normal conditions.

You deciede if is cheap or not according your models, multiple, NVP or wathever fancy method you want in order to get an intrinsic value, but you DON’T use the model in order to set the buy price price, you use it just to check it current price is worth for you to acquire.

Again, stride community will never accept anything below current market cap. Minimum we want a HUGE premium to compensate the loss of what this gem is.

Asking for some input from folks on the ATOM end of this. I’m struggling to understand the argument that STRD should be valued less because it doesn’t have sufficient liquidity on the open market.

The Hub would be acquiring the entirety of the STRD supply on a quasi-OTC basis and then burning it, meaning inability to later sell that purchased STRD is irrelevant (it won’t exist anymore).

When traditional companies merge, nobody evaluates the depth of the company’s stock on various brokers’ orderbooks as part of the measurements of that company’s value. They don’t need to. No shares of that company’s stock are being sold on the open market. You look at various other objective metrics (revenue / projections, debt, price / book, etc), and issue shares of the acquirer to shareholders of the acquisition target according to the mutually agreed upon valuation.

Can someone explain to me why this should be any different in Stride’s case?

RoboMcGobo:

Can someone explain to me why this should be any different in Stride’s case?

It shouldn’t and there is no other explanation than they want to steal us.

Clearly being diluted to buy current Stride is a prop that wouldn’t pass in Atom governance since they believe it should worth way less (just because they don’t have that much money to spend).

And on the other side, Stride dont want to be bought, and that is the main point of discussion. Why even bother to talk about acquisitios when we dont want to be acquired.

Nah
STride is not worth 70m Because its burn rate per month is far higher than any cash it produces.

GAAP is standard. Its why your going to be stuck bag holding assets like this, and will fail to understand the mark up / mark down accounting rule which is applied to bitcoin now, and allows pensions and firms to entertain a position with out inheriting downside risk and volatitly of the asset class. Your tax authority uses GAAP. So should you.

Appreciate the attempt to try to find a logical valuation on this @0xpatrick. It is disappointing that the ones that proposed this aren’t commenting on it and letting everyone else sort it out. It tells me that either none of them sorted it out beforehand or/and they have no idea how to sort it out after seeing all this comments.

I also want to highlight here @RoboMcGobo @moonz and @Kam for their fantastic responses and questions, that sadly have been ignored by the proposers of this plan.

Don’t confuse value and price.

Value if a subjetive meassure that vary from person to person, model, future estimations, and incredible sensitive to any input you use based on YOUR beliefs.

Price is what the total market deciede a stock or token worth, and is what anyone have to pay if they want to acquire it at the present time.

You can’t produce a valuation until there is a clear published and audited balance sheet. STRIDES burn rate per month is way higher than any rev they produce. It is a distressed asset, and is why they seek 70m USD in exit liquidity, via the asset which can handle the ability to discharge the debt. That happens to be Atom in this eco system.

Where in your world, does anyone even entertain valuation, M&A with out seeing an audited and published balance sheet?

To be fair to them, from what I understand they’re holding on to aggregate feedback first. They do fully intend on stepping in and working on this with us, AFAIK.

It’s a polarizing proposal though, so I think the laissez-faire approach makes sense at least initially. They want to listen before they speak.

Edit: Appreciate the shoutout as well, Luis

You can ignore GAAP all you want. You are just a grypto bro if you do, and look very silly in the eyes of professionals. Fine with me, just makes the other side of the trade much easier to hedge for us.

There is no where in the world, where you even begin discussions of M&A with out an audited balance sheet. Again strides burn rate is > then the cash they produce. Its a liability as defined by GAAP

Since the acquisition is being financed in ATOM, should we run the same liability analysis on the Hub?

My understanding is that the Hub’s burn rate expressed as a percentage of revenue outweighs Stride’s by easily 100x.

Tbh the simply fact of try to adapt tradify valuation methods and GAAPs meassure in crypto is ridiculous and for sure silly in the eyes of any proffesional.

Even being a deep value investor myself with a long career I would never try to do it.

This is crypto, a world where a PNG can reach 80B market cap.

Sure, every investment is the present value of future cash flow, Audited balance sheet is mandatory for any M&A and you can tell any shit you want to look clever, trust me, you dont doing that.

There is one truth, market cap is that it is, is what the product worth in order to acquire it, and not a single stride investor would accept less because is the price you can dump on market whenever you want. Only core devs trying to find exit liquidity would accept that stupid move.

So you either accept it, or move on. Regardless of the accounts you want to show to enhance your ego.

Yes, Atom is a liability as well. Thats why it trades as such when the dollar pumps. The average man hour cost in the entire eco system is 300 dollars per hour, and no cash is generated. Even Bitcoin is a liability, unless you get a favorable ruling by the financial accounting services board. (Which it has) Which allows a firm, LP, Scorp, Endowment, Trust, to mark up or mark down the asset and thus not inherit the volatility on their balance sheet, thus making quarterly reports much more clear for investors, and thus making the asset attractive to hold on the balance sheet. But just like bankruptcy court, you have a hierarchy of assets and their values. When it comes to intangible assets like Atom which produce no cash, you start with back testing and pen testing the liquidity to define the value of said asset. Atom is the only asset which can discharge debt, its why every team seeks to be financed by ATOM. It is thus positioned better in the hierarchy of intangible assets which are distressed. What ever gets you access to dollars the fastest with out too much slippage maintains the seat at the top of said Hierarchy when we have to discuss the risk profile that exist in…

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You have no idea what your talking about. Its clear. You are a risk taker, and not a risk manager. You are trading distressed intangible assets, which must be marked down on a balance sheet.

If you want your asset to actually hit a wider market such as endowments, pensions, trust, Scrops, ect. You might want to learn accoutning. After all, thats what ledgers are for (:.

GAAP works just fine. Everyone who uses it, is not down -80% on average

Your use to EBITDA which is just bullshit earnings. This stuff is fun and nice. I like it as well. We all did. It was easy money, when central banks artificially suppressed the cost of capital for 15 years.

Immo if the hub support quicksilver it can get the same valuation. Let buy quicksilver and improve it. Let put the 450k atom on qck and enable unstacking of liquid staked asset and see what happen

hay current Stride price can be 0,01 $ - you idea is nonsense. Whails and others can do it in 1 minutes. It is absolutely unfair.

Hub can buy Stride on Osmosis, in Team, in Treajury, from Whails - thay all have Stride for 0,0000001. All those to buy it for 2.5 $ and wait for better times should compensate this.

Hay, lets look Atom balance sheets according to GAAP, FASBA, and the real friends and family rate (FNF) that early funders got.

Atom was 14 - now 6.9 $ super projekt in my bag now…

Stride is much better then you thought.

what good would two chains be when hub validators cant effectively direct one? is this for a fork?

This idea was a cool slap for stride holders, i don’t know how i feel about the situation (if I’m not looking my $STRD bag). The Hub’s and stridezone’s health is reciprocal. Imho, this idea presented on Cosmoverse, coming from the dev team, already done its thing.

Further the discussion, $STRD will be dumped further (the rabbit is kinda out of the hat now) imho and that would be great opportunity for an acquisition by the hub. Marketcap is irrelevant if Stridezone burn all their reserves belongs to the team/treasury, staking rewards etc. That would be an expensive codebase for Cosmos though, which is printing $1m per year right now.

It’s clear that Stridezone do not need to get bought by the hub, but that would be great for the hub (do we need it really, i can not answer this yet, stridezone was my prime example for appchain vision).

I am an enduser, that’s my 0.02 $ATOM which nobody would/should cares anyway.

I’m divided on this, but mostly a bit upset about how it was announced. Firstly, I completely understand the idea of wanting to merge this project with the Cosmos Hub. Philosophically, the idea is elegant and entirely aligned with the vision and role of the hub in its ecosystem. Deep down, I agree with it. Then there’s the way it’s being done. Making the announcement during the Cosmoverse was quite poorly timed, abrupt, and without consultation. You might say it’s just an idea and that consultation will come later. However, we all know the impact such announcements can have. Announcing a contemplation of a merger between Stride and the hub is, in a way, telling those who invested in Stride for the product’s robustness and the team’s efforts that, ultimately, vision matters more than the effort they’ve put into supporting the project thus far, and they won’t be rewarded for it. In my opinion, it’s a mistake on the part of the team that doesn’t quite grasp who the STRD holders are. Most of them are people who were disappointed by ATOM’s results, its inflationary nature, and its lack of leadership and a well-driven product—everything that STRD offers. Announcing that their…

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A few thoughts: When the proposal was announced, STRD FDV was at around 80m, which is obviously way too high based on revenue multiples. However Stride TVL has been growing fast, and is expected to even grow faster with LSM, TIA & DYDX, so it is clear that the STRD token is valued on growth potential rather than current cashflow. The fact that STRD token is now down >15% from the announcement, makes that deal “cheaper” for the the Hub, but increasingly unlikely to pass on the Stride side, as more and more STRD holders are underwater with their position. I conclude from this, that right now is not the right time for the buy out. For the above reasons AND for one reason stated a few times before: It would harm the chances of being the defacto LST of Celestia and Dydx, due to other players being able to incentivize their LST with their own token. However, I think in the long run, the idea to enshrine LSTs is generally great for the Hub. Therefore I believe, the actual merger/buyout, should be delayed by at least 12 months, which would potentially allow for: • Stride becoming the main LST for Celestia & DYDX • STRD valuation getting closer to it’s “real valuation”, as…

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Appreciate the patience! We’re also all traveling back from Cosmoverse. But this forum thread has been very instructive to find out what are the biggest questions & concerns, and upcoming forum posts & twitter spaces will be a lot better targeted as a result

Importantly, it was decided to use Cosmoverse as an opportunity to put the idea out there (which in itself has several benefits for both sides) and maximize exposure, but I think everyone involved is aware that we have a long road ahead and not planning to rush this process.

I don’t have a fetish or a bias for liabilities. Fiduciary simply does not allow that. We must create risk composites. I explained the risk profile for both assets. If you are radicalized agent for stride that is fine. I got a FNF rate, so I don’t mind all the free guerrilla marketers who will die on the altar of the coins future opportunity cost horizon. Again, it is a hierarchy of risk. Which ever asset can discharge the debt with the least resistance, is the most attractive asset. Just ask Ethan, he loves this topic! There is no reason to deal with Bay area cost. The Bay area has been decentralized globally, and globalism flattens price. Google, and these other large firms do not even produce real earnings. So please leave out the best of the best cope. Its not 2005 any more, or 1990. Too big to fail tech firms who act more as govt contractors/ ticks do not host the best of the best. The Bay area actually produces a ton of entitlement. Real Network state organization will eat this with time. Nomic is a great reality of such. HotCoffee understands. Its not a crypto project, it is a firm, with a burn rate. The market cap means nothing if the liability/burn rate is higher than…

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All of the above is completely premature and unwarranted pontificating.

Disclosures are the foundation of any “m&a” transaction. Then due diligence.
It’s moronic to discuss de/merits of a deal with incomplete information.

Cosmos Hub community should possess all material information about Stride before having any of the conversation above.

Cart before horse, again.

I’d like to know if there was a private sale of Stride token and if you participated.

Before getting into FAQs, we’d like to say that we appreciate all of your feedback. The level of engagement and care shows that we’ve built something special together. We don’t take that for granted. This idea is still just that — an idea. We’re not 100% convinced it’s the right idea, and would never try to push it through without broad consensus. Engaging with the idea in an open-minded way requires a bit of trust that the Stride team is acting in good faith. We opted for an open, transparent process to involve the community in shaping the idea, presenting it once Stride contributors had internal consensus but before discussing it with many other members of the community. This required a bit of trust in the community to act in good faith, and we think it’s the right path. The only thing we ask is that you approach the idea with an open mind. We’d like to address some common concerns we’ve seen that we think can be easily cleared up, so that we can refocus the discussion on the broader concept. Also: we’re also working on a Swiss booklet , to give a balanced view of both sides of the core issues, adding to it as we get more feedback. The Swiss booklet will be published by…

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No With Veto from Stride community.

Good from Atom? Of course. You exchange a worthless token for a gem.

Good for Stride holders? Never.

I am overwhelmed at the amount of thoughtful discussion this post has seen so far. To see this amount of passionate discourse during a checks notes bear market is simply astounding. A few disclaimers and bias acknowledgements before I share my thoughts: • I am a contractor for Stride Labs • I had no knowledge of this idea prior to it being announced at Cosmoverse • I own STRD; I do not own any ATOM • I have spoken with the core devs since the announcement • My opinion on the matter hasn’t changed since our brief conversation The reason I fell down the Cosmos rabbit hole wasn’t because of ATOM, it was because of a thoughtful blog post I came across titled “The Inevitability of UNIchain”. The piece dove into the logical reasons why any crypto protocol/app that finds product market fit (PMF) would eventually pivot to launching their own chain, otherwise they continue to leak value away, primarily via MEV or txn costs for settlement / data availability (DA), depending on the architecture. Moreover, with proof of stake networks, it is clear that having a Liquid Staking Token is one of the most advantageous tools one can have in unlocking liquidity and diminishing the…

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I can’t agree more. Forgive me for the conspiracy theory. I can’t find any other reason to do this except to help seed investors achieve the purpose of exiting liquidity.

There is only one way of democratic voting and that is 1 person = 1 vote. So 1 wallet = 1 vote. Only then can the vote be fair. Not that the more tokens someone hold, the stronger his vote is, for example when the team holds the majority of tokens and overrides retail.

If ATOM price goes to $2 tomorrow, STRD will go close to zero, as it derives most of its value (80%) from ATOM.

Thus, it is fair to say that STRD is a leveraged bet on ATOM.

Seppmos:

Thus, it is fair to say that STRD is a leveraged bet on ATOM.

Stride is a leveraged play on all cosmos, not Atom.

Every investment is the present value of futures cash flows. You have 9 more tokens generating cash flows that could perfectly go parabolic any time + 2 titans confirmed (DYXD + TIA) + plenty more that will be added over time, Atom is just 1 of them.

You Just need one of them being 10% of the supply doing x10 to surpass Atom TVL on stride in a blink. And that is a pretty likely scenario in a bull. Thats why is absurd to value Stride based on current revenues / TVL.

And thats the magic of stride. You dont risk on one asset, is a index token of cosmos. Atom could fail and stride still could be insanely huge.

Stride:

And it is the view of many people that ICS isn’t a compelling enough narrative for ATOM. We need to raise the stakes [… by merging Stride]

For me it’s finally an argument that make sense for this merge : ATOM doesn’t have strong PMF so we should add a new feature to the hub: be the issuer of liquid staking for the whole ecosystem

So we sacrifice STRD holders because we think it’s more important for the whole ecosystem that the hub have a better narrative, revenue and overall visibility

But don’t say it’s about decentralisation in your first post

But in order to continue to scale Stride, its contributors aspire to enhance Stride’s decentralization even further.To help make Stride protocol as decentralized as possible, the entire STRD supply could be converted to ATOM, making ATOM the governance token for Stride

Stride holders doesn’t get anything from it, just a compensation but it’s for the greater good of the ecosystem

Post your balance sheet, or stop with the grift

Please see number 4. in my above post

Stride is worth maybe 500k. It can be forked, for 6x less cost. Let me know boyos. Dev lab ready, and fired up.

Terrible deal, can create a stride for less than 200-300k. The users and LP will come. Its not worth 70m.

Every thing that is a spoke connected to the hub, is just a leveraged atom trade.

WE have tons of empirical data to prove this now. An entire cycle. Atom finances all the proejcts, and all projects dump for Atoms to service their debt. Only atom can discharge debt. Atom is the least ‘toxic’ asset and the least distressed asset.

Do it then. Quicksilver, persistence and Eris tried it aswell.

If is as easy as spend 200K and you have another stride, I encourage you to do it.

You could replicate literally all chains for that quantity of money, but there are things money cant buy.

CONTEXT: First of all we would like to thank the involvement of so many parties in that discussion. Of course we expect that situation to create a lot controversies along the way. But at the heart of the question, at Govmos (the governance arm of PRO Delegators’ validator), we believe that this matter is more financial than political. ANALYSIS: Merging or acquiring two cryptocurrencies is a complex process that involves legal, financial, technical, and strategic considerations. While traditional finance M&A can serve as a source of inspiration, it’s important to note that cryptocurrencies operate in a unique and evolving regulatory environment. We also emphasized in a previous topic the likelihood to see the Hub evolve into a decentralized bank. We also shared a model of regular banking businesses in this other post . Capture d’écran 2023-10-07 222343 3488×1708 438 KB CONCLUSION: In our current context, the merger and acquisition between Stride and the Hub holds significant importance. This marks a crucial test for the Hub’s governance, examining its collective intelligence in orchestrating this operation to benefit both parties. We anticipate numerous future M&A…

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Stride: We’re not 100% convinced it’s the right idea I’m surprised you guys aren’t yet thinking in the opposite way. Feedback has been quite unilateral on the negative side. Stride: 5. Would there be a huge mint? Unclear. The tax could be used. Depends on ATOM tokenomics. Based on the current STRD marketcap, even if there were a mint, it would be a single digit percentage of ATOM supply. I don’t know who could have possibly brought that up, but let’s go back to… Cosmoverse 2022. A very well intentioned group of people want to reform the Hub around their ideals and present them to the public. Big point of contention : This involves minting atoms to bootstrap ICS chains. ATOM 2.0 has since been rejected while a lot of us desperately want the Hub to massively reduce inflation and stabilize its supply. Then Stride comes in at Cosmoverse 2023 (why does it have to be on the big stage…), knowing that the community pool is nowhere near large enough to acquire a chain like Stride, proposes to (well maybe, probably, surely) mint atoms with a fork to buy them out. Do you see now how that is such a bad look ? It is ignoring history and the current mood in…

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Everyone should take Ethans Mimbres class. Beautiful stuff

So normally when you would do a merger/acquisition the purchase price would be in a stable currency such as US Dollars. We all know the US Dollars are worth what they claim to be because USD is king. This is proposing to get the currency in something other than US Dollars so it brings into question the other asset.

Why is ATOM valued at $2B? What revenues are there that give it this much value? Why should stride holders accept this over valued coin as currency?

Firstly, I want to start with two disclaimers: I am a core contributor to pSTAKE Finance and the Persistence Ecosystem. I don’t hold STRD, and I hold ATOM. Time and again, in various shapes and forms, we find ourselves discussing the age-old question: ATOM or Cosmos: What should the Hub incline more towards? I feel the proposed acquisition of Stride is another extension of this infamous riddle. This reply comes a few days after this idea was proposed at Cosmoverse as I wanted to take a step back, comprehend, and flush out things in an unbiased way (as much as possible). These are my personal thoughts as a Cosmos Ecosystem participant, builder, and ATOM holder for ~4 years. Should the hub be credibly neutral? Let’s go back a few years to early 2021. With Gravity DEX, we asked and debated questions about whether the hub is credibly neutral and whether it should remain so for the betterment of Cosmos. Should the hub choose ATOM or Cosmos, the ecosystem? In the end, Gravity DEX did not launch with ATOM as its governance token. Through ATOM stakers, the hub took the stance that it should remain credibly neutral. This helped strengthen products and chains such as Osmosis,…

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Thanks you very much for your point of view. Appreciate more post about why this is a crazy idea that should stop and less about how to achieve to do it when both parts dont want it. pandeymikhil: Is the goal for the Hub to help Stride achieve decentralization or to acquire products that generate revenue for ATOM stakers? One may argue that it is both. I believe an acquisition does not seem to be an idea that helps achieve that. For some reason the main point since inception of the post was to achieve decentralization in order to be a trusty LSD provider and be better in the eyes of other protocols. Right now, as a ex Atom investor, I could only see 1 things regarding governance: Is totally flawed to the point where 1 simply tweet of 1 person bribing to get what he wanted giving extra airdrops totally changed the votes from yes to No/No veto in a blink. This was repeated in other ocasions, less absurd, but same result. is clearly heavy influenced by bad actors that harmed the eco in multiple ocasions, and for some reason, they are still here. If Stride reason to do this is heavy impacted by gaining trust due better governance, they should simply work to…

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In my opinion Hub should have a realistic goal and try to purchase up to 33% of all STRD tokens to better align and connect two great projects now&going forward.

STRD yield + staking rewards should go to Hub’s CP and then be automatically distributed among ATOM stakeholders. ATOM stakeholders should develop UI to vote in STRD governance

How do you value the Cosmos Hub? If you use this method the Cosmos Hub valuation would also be very low.

Stride gets to be the canonical liquid staking protocol for the Hub. So its cash out now for STRD holders or wait to compete with Lido and anything else in the future. Imho, liquid staking tokens tend to be fickle; so from a long term perspective I see sense.

I think 90% of Cosmos PoS market is going to be ATOM as chains are forced into AEZ.

I think STRD holders are overly bullish on STRD and bearish on ATOM when its the same thing. I think this is a good deal, ATOM is still bluechip. The product can expand a lot with the teams working together. Most of the STRD value is based on ATOM and it will be going forward as other Cosmos chains get cannibalized by the Hub through ICS or mergers.

I can see how ATOM holders might be hesitant to mint ATOM, I think that is also fine as it is backed by equal amount of STRD (USD value).

I think STRD holders are overly bullish on STRD and bearish on ATOM when its the same thing.

I think its the opposite. I think the market is overly bullish on ATOM while overly bearish on Stride when its the same thing. There is no reason for ATOM marketcap to be $2B. Why is that valuation correct and why should stride holders accept ATOM at that valuation?

Sure, you can look at the composite break downs above. Which define risk. You are ignoring the ability to discharge debt again, and that all projects are reliant on Atom for financing/funding. If it came down to bankruptcy, or civil damages case; what is the hierarchy of risk? Every counter party is going to seek Atoms to discharge the debt and risk. Not Stride, or any other token. Their ability to discharge the debt and or risk is almost ZERO. There is not even an OTC spread for these assets, there is not one fund willing to buy them as distressed assets. Its is the complete opposite for Atom. Its time we push on that Canton in Switzerland check in on Ethan and @MyPaoG . There is some odd stuff going on. ICF spending is out of control, and very opaque. Ethan broke many local mandates. There is no reality where man hour cost should be above $150, unless the ICF is funding teams purely based on nepotism, and ability to use the ICF as their personal bank account and war chest. Ethan raised money from a global pool of speculators. The raise was sold on the idea that all capital would go to improve the state of Atom/Cosmos. He failed to follow his promises he sold via marketing to…

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There is not one fund, truste, family office, who would buy Stride over Atom. Right now there is lots of capital buying cryptos via distressed asset clauses. You will never hear of Stride, or any other ‘spoke’ token. The same goes with any sub token under Matic, BNB, Sol. Eth is much more grown up, so you do see such purchases of Uni swap ect.

We can fork stride, and build it for way way way less. Ask yourselves why ICF gate keeps anyone who has 3-5x cheaper man hour cost on their dev labs.

Sure it’s technically possible but why would any chain use that derivative when it’s not neutral and why would anyone build on cosmos sdk when the atom community is so toxic that it is trying to sabotage any developer that builds on its stack. Or more importantly trying to sabotage any investor who invests in builders. You have a problem where no VCs want to touch cosmos because it’s toxic. Well it’ll be even worse if you try to sabotage projects that build on it

You can not measure any of this with any empirical efficacy. All the products are down against the dollar and Bitcoin and ATOM. You are creating a cognitive bias that variables A B and C is why 123 did well. Yet, all the products are equally discounted. Not just in the Cosmos, but in every network. Lets not make up fairy tales and pretend any methodology is why 1 is better than 2. This is quick way to dissolve any risk management.

Let slow down. No one wants Comdex, or Pstake, or any of that. The ICF is down stream of an ICO which raised capital for Atom. It is very disingenuous to be 3 to 4 years late to the game, and try and make ATOM as ‘capital’ work for you.

Go raise your own ICO funds. The on chain data, says everyone dumped your projects products for ATOM. Even your own dev team did. It is why you hold ATOM now. You do not hold ATOM because you were in the ICO.

You need to zoom out. If you held positions in Matic, Sol, Ava, Btc. You would come to find out, that everyone uses the word toxic. These are emotions being projected by a crowd of retail speculators who took far too much risk and are bag holding Turd coins, which not even a distressed asset hedge fund would buy. The word “toxic” is an epithet used to stop any real adult discussion. Lets refrain from using it. Atom has some of the largest industry supporters, who were all in the ICO. People who have been in the game since 2010. There is plenty of capital syndicates scanning the ecosystems under distressed asset clauses/fund thesis who want Atoms. I have never heard of anyone wanting a sub token, unless its a cathedral on ETH like UNI, or CurveFi You think it’s an accident, all the big guys forked tendermint to express their power via Thor chain or BNB? Again the real money defines risk composites, and understands “toxic” is an epithet used by over exposed retail and devs who seek liqudity. If you were to really invest in your idea of “toxic” you would hold zero Bitcoin or Eth. Bitcoin Maxi are toxic, while Bitcoin out performs even U.S. ‘risk free’ debt. Eth is toxic, the…

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twitter. com/ zmanian /status / 1711374585118048679

Atom is an overvalued asset though. Try liquidating $100m of atom and price would cut in half. Why would I want that asset when the upside is capped?

Atom has better depth, then firms on the SPX, and even way better depth than most firms outside of US equity market. Cenovus owns hard industrial assets, and can’t even meet the depth of Atom. Before you GRIFT, get experience in the wider market so you can actually make clear juxtapositions which are not held hostage to your turd coin bias.

Do you understand Hierarchy of risk? Of did you really think everything was equal?

You know with out a doubt, every team request ATOM to finance their projects, and has to dump into ATOMS to get closer to dollars. It is not even debatable,(trying to debate this, just proves how much more people are going to loose) there is an entire cycle of empirical on chain data that shows this, and endless paper trail of grants, and any sleuthing of dev teams show they dumped their native turd coins for Atoms. It is clear where the capital moves to.

Before you bag hold your cognitive bias to zero, perhaps build heat maps of on chain data for yourself.

I’d rather hold a small portion of portfolio in a coin that has risk to go to zero but upside of 20-30x then an asset that has risk of cutting in half but upside of 2-3x

If this goes through, I will absolutely dump the atom and put it in a more attractive option such as BTC or eth

Sure, but retail is not moving the market. Its a nice sales pitch but is not why 14 trillion in stable coins were settled across various networks.

You want to gambol, and see higher opportunity in the gamobl. Thats fantastic. Its not 2013 any more. A distressed asset hedge fund is not looking for a 30x. 2x is fantastic when 10yr note is > than SPX yield.

You simply admitted, your opportunity cost horizon has bias for extreme risk.

Ironically my appetite to invest in atom or cosmos based projects go down from this. VCs already avoid it, I would probably be inclined to avoid it as well.

Venture capital avoids turd coins, as do family offices, trust, and hedge funds. You have no empirical data here. Your only opportunity cost is hyper driven speculation of a new coin.

Your not in asset management. Its clear. You are just retail. Venture capital also socializes the losses on people like you. Just look at the on chain data, you will notice VC and devs dumped for what? ATOM

And you were? The lender of last resort in the LP pool. Thanks for playing.

Why should I accept an asset thats going to immediately cut in half upon issuance? I want US Dollars. I dont want atom. Atom is not money - just as Bucky said.

converting stride to atom benefits the stride devs by giving them a founder’s allocation at the expense of everyone else holding ATOM that gets diluted.

validators get to convert an illiquid shitcoin into liquid atom at the expense of ATOM holders.

stride and atom validators share the same 66% VP on both chains, merging would increase centralization among top validators

Converting stride to atom results in the exact same thing we have now except ATOM holders get diluted and ATOM is more centralized.

why would anyone buy ATOM when “aligned” devs can hatch a scam over drinks at cosmoverse that might get your investment significantly diluted by validators using other peoples votes to steal your money?

Hello everyone! This is my first time contributing to the CosmosHub Forum. By way of a minor introduction, my name is Joseph, a lawyer by profession currently working as an advisor to projects within the digital asset industry - I am also a core contributor at dYdX, a part of the team over at the dYdX Operations SubDAO and part of the TraderJoe Governance Council. I shall post my thoughts on the proposal above hereunder: • Decentralisation Decentralisation is a wide spectrum and this term should not be used that liberally as it could be misleading or otherwise could be misconstrued. Decentralisation could be broken down into further sub-sets (Economic Decentralisation, Legal Decentralisation and Technical Decentralisation). When the team states that the conversion of STRD to ATOM will “greatly increase the decentralization of the Stride protocol”, what facet of decentralization are they actually referring to? In my personal opinion, the conversion of STRD-ATOM will merely change the governance parameters around the Protocol by introducing a new number of governance participants (i.e. ATOM holders), to the equation and giving them a say in the Protocol’s direction.…

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Starting with the risks of this proposal outweigh the benefits by far in my opinion I will write some of my thoughts on this: • Stride team did great work, especially compared to competitors, not least I guess they have a significant share of STRD tokens as payment/benefit. Nothing to say against it, but the assumption that motivation remains constant with change of “skin in the game” is at least questionable. Assert that before this transaction, of course, one would anyway. • The investment for the hub is difficult to evaluate: Where does the revenue of 700k (proof?) come from, the spread to classic staked atom is low, is part of the earnings for instance from a pool of atom/stAtom where the unstaking period, the users have to wait without revenue brings the revenue for stride? How do the earnings change with any potential change in Atom tokenomics?! Transparency is needed here to reasonably value the hubs’ investment with DCF. • How many Strd tokens belong to the team and is this after an appropriate valuation not a too attractive exit possibility, which could reduce motivation of further mainentance. • Mentioned by many others, I also see a monopolization of the LS market…

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This is a very bad idea. I don’t know why stride devs want exit liquidity so fast and so wild. I haven’t seen a positive comment since the start of this discussion. You have a good chain with the ability to extract value on many chains. Stride devs look like they want to hand over their golden egg-laying chicken for nothing and that is kinda suspicious.
Also I think qATOM and stkATOM should have a chance to compete and with Stride bought by Cosmos Hub they won’t have a chance to survive.
A huge no from me. I hope stride devs stop pushing this nonsense idea and continue building with keeping their skin in the game.

Atom mus be neutral, and let the dapps to compete, a takeover is a horrible form for ATOM to accrue value, and STRD isn’t the best LS solution out there, it can become the best, but needs probe itself in the open, not as a feature of the hub, all consumer chains will contribute to the hub if they have success and ATOM must be imparcial and not pretend merge with every successfull dapp, is just insane.

Mostly I agree with you, first of all, I don’t think there is any fit model to evaluate the crypto projects let alone the Stride which is mostly token-locked. The method I am using to evaluate has its own downside.

I have not said anywhere what should be the price of STRD, I have evaluated it using the model I see better than the others. Stride community shouldn’t sell their token for less it makes no sense, also it does not make any sense for Hub either to buy a project above the inflation. The complexity level is very high.

There are many models to evaluate companies/ projects and most of them use the past performance of the company rather than projections. While we cannot deny the upside potential of Stride or the Hub’s. A few reasons why MC is not a suitable evaluation model for Stride; Price Manipulation: Low-liquidity cryptocurrencies can be easily manipulated by a small number of large trades. This can result in inflated or deflated market cap figures that don’t accurately reflect the true value or potential of the project. Circulating vs. Total Supply: Market cap is typically calculated using the total supply of tokens, but many tokens may be locked up or held by the project team. The circulating supply, which is what’s actively traded, is often significantly smaller. Market cap can give a misleading impression of a project’s scale. Market Sentiment: Cryptocurrency markets can be highly speculative and sentiment-driven. A sudden surge in interest or hype can inflate market cap, while negative news can lead to rapid declines, as we are seeing currently for STRD. Token Distribution: Uneven token distribution, where a small number of holders own the majority of tokens, can lead to price…

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You are commenting like Hub is eager to buy STRD, while this is not the case and quite the opposite. We are here to have a healthy discussion so that both communities discuss and find a possible solution.

I don’t know where you are fetching these numbers and what even you are talking about.

For Cosmos Hub you have to think differently, it has many things which Stride does not have.

• Tens of Millions of liquidity (Fact)
• Availability to exchange on hundreds of DEXs and CEXs (Fact)
• Littelry no lock period on the bonding token after LSM (Fact)
• Having way more upside potential than STRD (opinion)

Based on these facts and opinions do you think we can evaluate these projects differently? I think so.

Any Premium should be based on the price at announcement date. No one wants to hold an asset that might get 20% premium but will fall 50% because of all the sudden uncertainty around it from this.

if Hub dosnt want to merge Stride - he has to be informed about it. According to price Stride 0,01 $ - it may possible in some time.
As for the disscussion - I see community doesn’t want to merge.
Merge wants core team - so community of Stride is ''hostage" of core team.

According Stride price manipulation it can be huge.

No no and one more time no. We invested our funds in Stride. We believe in team projects and high results. If we needed the Atom token, we would buy it.
The conversion of Stride tokens to Atom is very questionable and most likely not beneficial for token holders. The community will feel cheated if this proposal is accepted.

This is very bad argument. It is like saying every fiat but the dollar is not currency or money.

You should learn how markets work, and maybe you would have more bitcoin, all your charts are dead against BTC, and the dollar is very volatile against bitcoin in long term time cycles.

Are you trying to make a claim that anything that trades high beta, or as a leveraged dollar short is not fiat?

Just because final debt, is denominated in dollars, to reduce counter party risk does not mean there are not other species of money. Of course, when the dollar pumps and rates rise all emerging market currencies dump against the dollar, as the majority of global debt is denominated in dollars.

The reality is, every team needs ATOM to discharge debt and get closer to dollars. Just like in south east asia, you need to dump local native soft money for JPY to get access to dollars to hedge your account balances.

Stride is worth maybe 500k. Already in discussions to fork it at less then 42 USD per man hour. Will the Gate keepers allow such competitive dev labs? Prob not.

I truly expected a better argument than this. Anything that is not dollars is not a species of money.

Yet the dollar is totally collapsed against btc when you cycle in long duration volatility.

Every firm world wide, has to go through many gate keepers to discharge their debt and access dollars.

Japan, Korea, China. You name it! Japans entire monetary system acts a facilitator for firms to discharge debt via JPY and then into Dollars. I think you are upset, that you hedged wrong. The on chain data is very clear, everyone dumped for Atoms. Why? 1. They are long Atom 2. They needed Atom to discharge debt and get access to dollars.

They are both very bullish propositions, and is exactly what you want to see in a network state which is rising to surpass emerging markets that exist even in Africa.

What we see in this thread is scary. We see people bag holding turd coins, and doing everything they can to ignore empirical on chain data. Do they deny the science? What could cause someone to want an asset, that no one is buying? Interesting and fascinating behavior of the proletariat indeed.

if Stride worth 500k may be commynity and I buy it all ?? ))
who is ready to sell?
You are just kidding …
If you have any documentation to prove - you are wellcom

Stride will be .10$ soon

Over the past few days, I have been reading over this thread and the various comments. This single thread encouraged me to create an account. Full disclosure, at the time of this writing, I am an ATOM holder and hold very little STRD (staking rewards). I want to come at this discussion from both sides. Even though I may have skin in the game on a particular side, I would like to remain objective. From the side of the STRD holders… Competition produces better products. With this prospective proposal, competition wouldn’t die, but I have a sense that newcomers to the Cosmos ecosystem would view The Hub’s liquid staking as the de facto liquid staking. Every other app chain that provides liquid staking services would appear as a secondary offering. There is also the financial aspect of such a transition. The financials would be the main details that would need to be ironed out, but the STRD holders have been vocal they do not like the idea. We are all in this ecosystem together and we should not alienate a subset of that ecosystem. This is not to say this prospective proposal should be shut down completely, but clearly, there would be a large hill to climb to convince STRD holders…

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It is to late, everyone here read the published crypto culture of critique, and why venture capital just can not win in these markets. Especially if we have well educated discussion on why giving such cheap tokens to so many is bad capital formation, especially when they expect an asset with less risk composite to provide the back end of liquidity.

For this reason SharkTank says No Thanks! The big question, is what will the community do.

Discussing The Future of Cosmos Hub and Stride Essays

Note: this is a joint post by the Stride core contributors Vishal, Riley, Aidan, and John. It contains our personal opinions, and does not represent Cosmos Hub or Stride protocol. We are merely four of many Cosmos Hub and Stride stakeholders. State of play It has been a full week since the idea to convert the entire STRD supply to ATOM was first revealed at Cosmoverse. In that time, there’s been vigorous public discussion about the idea. The “Convert entire STRD supply to ATOM” post has receiv…

I completely agree with the idea of STRD turning into ATOM, ATOM taking over the governance of Stride and the Stride team working on the Cosmos Hub going forward. However, I don’t agree on the price this is happening at. Valuations are made over 10 years and the current $700K annual revenue means valuation is at most $7 million for total Stride market cap. This assumes revenue remains at $700K for 10 years. As we saw in the last 2 years, that could be too bullish of a projection! The current FDV of Stride at $70 million is a total rip off and completely unacceptable. I understand the concerns of STRD investors but the job of ATOM investors is not to bail Stride out, but to accrue value to ATOM. Value accrual for ATOM happens if Stride is acquired for less than $7 million total market cap. Sorry. With all of that said, the best chance for Stride investors to return their money is if Stride is part of the Cosmos Hub according to the plan outlined above. Stride on its own will go to $7 million I outlined even while ATOM rallies because these are fundamentally different tokens with different value propositions. The crypto market still awards great premiums to projects and the…

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This post isn’t directed towards you specifically, but anyone who supports the idea of acquiring app-chains and bringing them under the fold of The Cosmos Hub. I believe someone either said it in the thread earlier or alluded to it, but merging app-chains into The Cosmos Hub is a slippery slope - I fully agree. Reason 1: Conflicts of Interest The Cosmos Hub cannot have its cake and eat it too. We either serve the app-chains or we compete with the app-chains. There was a point in time in The Cosmos Hub’s history where you could have made the argument that such app-chains as OSMO and STRD shouldn’t exist. Those app-chain services could have been provided on The Cosmos Hub using ATOM. In my opinion, that ship had gone and sailed - we have chosen to serve the app-chains (neutrality). Reason 2: Negative Cosmos Hub Impacts Alternate universe example: The Cosmos Hub would like to acquire/merge the Terra ecosystem and convert LUNA into ATOM. We believe the idea of burning UST for ATOM is the best thing since sliced bread. It would make Cosmos the first ecosystem to be able to mint and control its own stablecoin. Now, let’s imagine the LUNA/UST collapse didn’t occur during the…

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Thank you for the post. A couple of retorts: • I view the Cosmos Hub as an infrastructure provider for app chains. I think this is also the Port City vision of Ethan. We want to preserve the technical resiliency of the Cosmos Hub and its ability to provide security while simultaneously expanding the offerings of core services. Instead of the Cosmos Hub coding new infrastructure layer products which can turn out to be a dud or have unexpected technical deficiencies in production, those products should start off as separate chains. The new products are run as separate chains for a few years during which they are tested for technical resiliency and - very important - good product market fit. Many chains start off with a vision that there is demand for some service and in reality turns out that there isn’t. But a few of these products succeed - and they do provide “infrastructure layer” service so then they are good fit to be acquired by the Cosmos Hub (ie burn all their tokens for ATOM at some price that makes sense). Liquid staking and Stride are a perfect example for this venture chain strategy. When people were discussing liquid staking, it was hard to envision for someone like…

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I do agree on your views of infrastructure fit. I believe things like LS and a DEX for the ecosystem should be handled by The Cosmos Hub. I have always thought this and always wondered why this wasn’t done by design before OSMO and STRD decided they needed their own tokens. I’d just like to caution that at the time (2021/2022), many probably would have seen LUNA/UST as a great fit. Why shouldn’t The Cosmos Hub be able to issue a stablecoin that is the de facto stablecoin of the ecosystem? It outpaced ATOM in market cap and had a good duration of time of showing great performance. If the financials were right, there would have been nothing stopping ATOM holders for voting LUNA/UST > ATOM/UST thinking it was a great idea. UST would have been scattered all about the entire ecosystem and various app-chains may not have recovered. We only now know that LUNA/UST was a bad system after the fact. If the idea is to stop at infrastructure level acquisitions, I could see it being contentious, but making sense in the long run. I just don’t see how this wouldn’t leave a bad taste in competitors mouths that aren’t deemed “the chosen ones” when The Cosmos Hub decides to scoop up app-chains…

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Since you made me think of it from what you said in your post about the chains still being separate, but both utilizing ATOM, why do app-chains continually insist on having their own token? Governance? If more app-chains used ATOM, wouldn’t that solve the ATOM utility/use-case dilemma?

I don’t see stablecoin as a fit for Cosmos Hub. It is not Cosmos Hub job to build stablecoins. Stablecoin is an app. US dollar is liability of the United States. The US or some company in the US should create an app chain that does that IF they think this is appropriate for them. We see them doing that now with Noble. Or more like Noble is a chain by a centralized entity that will be creating multiple stablecoins. At the implementation level this look like creating different legal entities in different countries and hooking up those entities to the banking system and then following all regulations. Cosmos Hub can secure Noble but that’s about it. It is absolutely insane for anyone to think that Cosmos Hub will be doing banking regulatory work in multiple countries in order to support stablecoins. Moreover, algorithmic stablecoin like UST is an absolute NO-NO, because that is essentially counterfeiting US dollars and thus subject to prosecution by the US. Even if Terra was using more legitimate backing like Bitcoin for the coin, it would still run afoul of a number of banking laws because taking deposits in USD on one hand and managing a portfolio of assets on the other hand is…

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ATOM is expensive, you are paying rent for security and some business models want/require cheaper transactions costs than that which means they running their own infrastructure (nodes). Which means their own token. Akash is one such example. I don’t see a circumstance where it makes sense for ATOM to be used instead of AKT. It would make the protocol more expensive to use which could be a headwind to adoption. We already have Ethereum that is really expensive for apps to use. And as we see many still use it. In some situations it makes sense to pay higher transaction costs in exchange for security and in others it doesn’t.

Una mas: The Cosmos Hub was working on a DEX called GravityDEX that flopped. Osmosis ate its lunch and was first to market on many features. This is why I don’t want the Cosmos Hub team to be working on technologies they don’t have expertise about. For building a DEX you need to know trading technology, not necessarily distributed computing or making SDKs which is what the Cosmos Hub team knows about. As such it is better for 2 or 3 dexes to be launched with their own chains and then let the market determine which is the winner. The Cosmos Hub really shouldn’t be picking winners and losers at inception, simply because it doesn’t have the expertise. It could fund certain projects that are inside a strategically important sector/direction but then it should let the teams battle it out in the marketplace. The Cosmos Hub doesn’t owe anybody survival, it needs to work on its own survival and 90% of the projects it funds will end up failing. That is how it is in the VC industry. This is all very experimental technology, high rate of failure is to be expected. Osmosis is an example of a project that beat the Cosmos Hub chosen one - Gravity DEX. App chain devs will beat the core devs…

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I have derailed this thread enough, so I will keep my responses short and try to tie my post back in to the original discussion. • I like your position of a stablecoin not being fit for The Cosmos Hub. Back in those years of 2021/2022, I don’t believe there would have been any stopping a proposal and a popular vote from going through. I could be wrong here and maybe our voting system is robust enough to handle such a situation. • Your stance of The Cosmos Hub’s role makes sense. The way you think about it is very similar to the VC world (due diligence - spray and pray). However, we are a single entity with finite resources (The Cosmos Hub), while there are many VCs (as a collective - effectively, infinite resources). The strategy in which an acquisition happens (the original topic of this thread) is key - the who, what, when, why and how. While GRAV and OSMO is a good example, the superior technology was much more clear cut. If STRD had a competitor that was neck and neck - I could see there being talks of an acquisition where it is not so clear cut. With your stance, it may not be that The Cosmos Hub owes any one app-chain’s survival - but optics matter. It isn’t a good…

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Wonderful synopsis of understanding and history.

Stride is a really successful platform dedicated to the cosmos ecosystem, but since it is a chain, I do not find conversion appropriate. It would be a negative situation if the Cosmos ecosystem’s number 1 liquidity staking platform does not have a token.

STRD token is doing very well right now. I think disrupting this order suddenly will harm the project.

However, the transition to a new token system, as proposed here by Stride, raises concerns. This proposal would essentially strip existing Stride token holders of their rights and the tokens they had purchased and staked in anticipation of participating in governance (among other benefits).
Even though the validators are the same for both chains, the underlying belief systems are different.
The proposed distribution of funds not only threatens market stability, but also tests public trust. The lack of incentives in the form of tokens will lead to a severe lack of user engagement.
ATOM must be fully liquid so that Stride members wishing to opt out can sell their ATOM.
No one who currently owns STRD should exchange a fully unlocked STRD for another token that is subject to a transition perio

Bro this has been settled for months. It’s not happening.

Although I do understand the advantages in terms of decentralization and security, I do not think this is a good trade off for the following reasons:

• STRD has better tokenomics and its price action shows people recognize that. Moreover, it would be highly unfair to STRD holders, let alone that it would be very difficult to make everyone whole thus damaging trust in the project;
• ATOM has been going through a bad period, with poor price action and constant drama surrounding its tokenomics, etc;
• last but not the least, as others mentioned before, it’s a big sovereignty risk as well

Just my 2 cents into this but definitely a no go from my point of view.