Discussing The Future of Cosmos Hub and Stride

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 received 160 replies, giving it the most replies of any Cosmos Hub governance forum post in history. There’s been a huge amount of engagement with the idea on Twitter as well. And lastly, the Stride Discord has also been buzzing with discussion. This is great! It’s always been our intention that the conversion idea - and indeed all ideas that affect the future of Stride - be shaped through open, transparent, public discussion - not behind closed doors. So thank you to the Cosmos Hub and Stride communities for providing so much thoughtful feedback. Whether you support or oppose the token conversion, your feedback has been much appreciated. Regarding the feasibility of the conversion…

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Great post, way more clear and purposeful than the previous one. I think this vision can make sense indeed

Coommunity of Stride would like to thank you about this post.
We hope Stride will have long live and help us (Stride stakers) and Cosmos hub. I strongly hope that your desigion will calm down Cosmos community and prices.
It is possible that you should inform aboit it earlier. You need to know that sometimes such desigin can change lifes of people. Somtimes extrimely and tragegicaly … Yes a lot of here because of money but your fast desigion can destroys lives.
So, please, remember about it next time.
Big thanks again

Stride: Another role Cosmos Hub thought it could fill in the Cosmos ecosystem was that of security provider. And so interchain security (ICS) was planned and built. At this point, Neutron and Stride blockchains are consumers of Cosmos Hub’s security. However, many people are skeptical about the future of ICS. The income from ICS has so far been less than expected, with Neutron paying only about $5,000 annualized and Stride paying about $230,000 annualized for $1B+ worth of economic security. It’s possible this income level will grow in the coming years, but currently this low level of income creates economic difficulties for Cosmos Hub. With these existing difficulties, scaling to even five ICS chains would present serious economic challenges. And to make matters worse, there’s significant competition in the shared security space from teams like Eigen, Celestia, and Mesh Security. So while Cosmos Hub continues to enjoy the prestige and neutrality of having built the Cosmos ecosystem, and while Cosmos Hub remains the most secure and decentralized chain in the Cosmos - it has struggled to find a place in the ecosystem it created. And as a result, Cosmos Hub is slowly losing…

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If STRIDE wants to be part of ATOM since the beginning why then create their own appchain, but your post brings some light as why STRD was always rushing things, it explains why STRD never try to create Defi primitives, explain why the team was so eager to enter ICS, part of success for STRD is precisely for rush in to things as first mover but that doesn’t mean you have better solutions, for me is inevitably to think that you’re not colluded whit the cosmos cartel, the port idea is very sweet, but the reality is more sinister, the Hub doesn’t belong at a group of individuals, the objective isn’t make ATOM a superior coin, since COSMOS is an ecosystem it can’t be better than the addition of it’s parts, ATOM as a center needs to be neutral in the know that it could thrive as their appchains thrive, every team / appchain seeks the same, be successful and that’s why put efforts every day if STRD is in love with ATOM port idea you must donate your work instead of accept investors, and trade a token in markets, you should work in a module instead of an appchain, about LSM you should be developing smart contacts to connect this beautiful port to outside instead of be so worried about…

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On the Neutron part : I think the crucial part to economically scale ICS isn’t to make it attractive to delegators, but to validators. Yes, the Neutron airdrop has been good for both the delegators the community pool, but delegating from Keplr has no cost in itself. The most likely future is for validators to continuously subsidize Neutron, as getting 5% commission on 25% of gas fees will always be an abysmal number.

As you’ve pointed out, Stride is making better on that front and not because it has more gas fees, but application-related fees. With the proliferation of blockchains all around different ecosystems, I don’t expect generalized smart contract chains to be ‘‘profitable’’.

So yeah I’m looking forward the release of Subset Security and more application specific chains, which will lower total cost.

The concerns regarding the economic difficulties faced by Cosmos Hub in terms of the income generated through interchain security are valid. It’s understandable that in the face of such challenges, finding a clear, sustainable path forward becomes crucial for both Stride and Cosmos Hub’s future viability and relevance within the ecosystem.

The answer to this is the Cosmos Hub onboarding chains with proven revenues so that validators don’t have to subsidize them. Neutron is a unique case because there was big push for years to get WASM on the Hub and Neutron is the technical workaround (separate chain secured by the ATOM validators). I don’t know who was pushing for WASM on the Hub, but clearly that “pushing” wasn’t based on economic reality. Going forward, the Hub should have onboarding standards that prevent the Neutron situation from happening. Right now there is some EVM chain that wants to become consumer chain. Fine idea - what are the revenues? Chains should start out with their own validator set and prove their product-market fit (ie generation of revenues) before asking to be onboarded. This is almost comical - people don’t really understand when and why they need to run their own chain. You run your own chain only if you have a good product market fit and you have scale. When running the app at scale, you want to minimize your rent and thus lower your application’s transaction costs below those of a monolithic chain. That’s the reason. DYDX has a good use case to switch to its own chain. This is an…

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vixcontango:

If you run your own chain for a network without any economic activity on it, somebody has to subsidize your computer uptime. Why should that be the Cosmos Hub?

Exactly, really for those pushing for replicated security and the halving of inflation well done really. First you promise great revenues from consumer chains, the reality is 0 revenues and high growing consumer chain costs covered only and subsidized only by Cosmos hub validators, disproportionately affecting smaller validators where these costs are much larger compared to the negligable revenues. But this is not enough, then to make things even better you halve validator revenues for ‘sacrifice & change’ or hoping for a price ‘pump’. What’s next? You want validators to also pay your rent, your bills and your holidays?

I think you are a little bit confused. ATOM is not money. ATOM is not legal tender. US dollars are legal tender. They are the ones that pay your bills. You can’t pay your bills by increasing ATOM inflation because ATOMs are not US dollar bills. The Cosmos Hub is not the Federal Reserve, ok. Also please don’t make comparison to Bitcoin either. Bitcoin is legal tender in some countries, ATOM is not. US dollar, Bitcoin and ATOM are all very different things, but most importantly ATOM is not money. Whoever told you that increasing ATOM inflation will pay your bills lied to you. And depending on how badly they lied, to how many people, they might go to jail for this type of crime.