Long-term strategy for Cosmos Hub

Introduction This post is an attempt to summarize and formalize what I believe to be the most adequate priorities for the Cosmos Hub to grow and succeed. As a consumer chain contributor, I work very closely to the Cosmos Hub’s daily operations and products, and am also strongly incentivized to ensure the Hub succeeds long-term : the more successful the Cosmos Hub’s security offering and Interchain Money thesis are, the better for Neutron. And, given the Hub’s outsized NTRN holdings, if Neutron wins, Cosmos Hub wins. (A quick throwback to Cosmoverse 22) Through this post, I hope to elicit community discussions that would ideally lead to the adoption of a clearly defined Purpose, Mission and Vision for Cosmos Hub, complete with one and three years objectives to assist the Hub’s governance in shepherding Cosmos Hub towards the most successful path. Cosmos and the Hub Before we dive into the strategic considerations of what and how the Hub’s community should be focusing on for the coming years, I believe it’s crucial to ensure we understand the “why” of Cosmos Hub, beyond “making money”. In other words, its purpose, mission and vision. Below is an attempt at defining…

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This is great. Very thoughtfully put together.

I’d personally like to hear ideas for improving the Gini coefficient for better stake distribution, and how governance can be improved overall, whether it’s tooling or endeavors like education, maybe even incentivization. Blockworks mentioned some ideas, but i’m curious what everyone thinks can be done to improve this.

Thank you for the contribution.
I would like to add a bit of focus on tools that may be needed or at least facilitate those to-be-built apps, e.g. CosmWasm extensions & dev tools for business logic; easy integrations for off-chain components (frontend, storage, indexing, middleware) with different frameworks, etc…
Even if they are crucial aspects, it’s not all about money, governance and security!

Another thing i’m thinking about is how we achieve some buy-in on the “Atom is money” efforts from outside ICS/AEZ chains. Atom wars is in the early stages, so from a protocol standpoint, that has potential. The question in my mind is how you truly get the alignment and buy-in from all (most) of “Cosmos” that Atom can serve their needs without it feeling forced?

Don’t even think about parachain auctions. That was a massive failure at Polkadot. I am perfectly fine with various chains making proposals and then validators evaluating them on a case by case basis. We don’t need to central plan computing power usage.

What happened at Polkadot - people central planned for 2 years ahead via auctions a WASM and EVM chains and both of them got killed by Solana and Avalanche. I am not sure why you are so infatuated with central planning even if a market mechanism like an auction is included. Central planning is a bad fit for a brand new and quickly growing industry like crypto.

Central planning doesn’t work in the Wild West.

Nice writing. Would like to see how it goes and will gladly follow and join the discussion.

Thank you for sharing this vision. It aligns with insights from other well-informed contributors who’ve shared their perspectives on the hub. We recommend readers explore the post introduced by @Thyborg here: The ATOM Wars: a new governance platform for liquidity injections . We’ve also engaged in the hub’s vision debate as part of our global report on the entire Cosmos Ecosystem: A permissionless B2B2C network . Returning to your thesis, we want to highlight a few points we align with: Spaydh: Refining the Security Offering: Introducing and fine-tuning Partial Set Security (PSS) and Mesh Security ; structuring the consumer chain onboarding, relationship management, and offboarding processes ; and, addressing incentive misalignments would significantly reduce platform risk, lower the barrier to adoption and enhance the overall position of the Hub. This is something we have greatly emphasized as well and is already well underway. Spaydh: Furthering the adoption of Liquid Staking: Liquid Staking has been a big part of the community discourse over the past years because it can help address the hurdle rate and the stake concentration of PoS systems.…

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Not sure anyone wants parachain auctions around here… Also, there’s a difference between “central planning” and the definition of a “purpose/mission/vision” described in this post.

I believe it is useful to (try to) define a common vision for the Hub because :

1. the lack of common ground has been one of the criticism around the ATOM community, at least since ATOM 2.0
2. having such a framework - if successful - will be a sign of achieving a higher level of maturity, collectively
3. it can be actually useful when analyzing gov props or CHIPS

OKRs have proven to be useful in organizations large and small when properly implemented, but I’ve never seen in the context of a decentralized organization. So maybe we’ll need adapt or be creative with the framework.

Thank you for taking the time to push this forward.

I completely agree with the urgent need for the development of, and agreement on, clear 3-5 year goals that serve as the North Star for the hub. Without these goals the current situation of haphazard initiatives put to vote (most of which well meaning) will keep the hub perpetually in limbo.

An unpopular opinion: lack of common grounds is a different take on a phrase with the same meaning: diverse and healthy communication, leading to everyone expressing their opinions

Very good write up! I do believe though that there is a need for the Hub to bring in “income” or “money”
in other forms than its main selling point: The main ICS provider, for multiple reasons:

1. It is not definite that the positioning of the Hub will remain the same in the next 2 to 3 years as the most decentralized blockchain in the Hub, therefore possibly leading other chains to take the position of the main ICS provider.

Spaydh:

The Cosmos Hub and ATOM are the first and overwhelmingly largest source of funding for the development of IBC, the Cosmos SDK, CometBFT and the rest of the Cosmos stack.

1. Due to funding such large projects and development without any (direct) return, there needs to be a source of income (other than inflation) that is able to cover these on the long run.

Over time, the Hub is losing more of its relevance as the center of the Cosmos or its real use case and this is getting more true every day.

Thank you for this Spaydh, a much needed conversation we as a community need to double down on. I think most of us can agree that, as you highlight, one of the core strengths of the Cosmos community is its willingness to engage in deliberation around major strategic proposals and in times of diverging opinions. On the other hand, this relative decentralisation has also, imo, left more to be desired in terms of a clear direction and structure. Coming into the ecosystem, it is hard to tell who’s working on what etc, and viewing the Hub as an organisation it is rather loosely scattered across a few teams. I believe this has altogether hurt the Hub’s strategic performance and left somewhat of a question mark hanging over its value proposition and purpose. It is also the case that governance is often technically complex and time-consuming. So the lure of free-riding can be tempting when there’s no direct reward, but perhaps even worse, also half-arsed participation; as voters are put off by the demands of active governance but remain indirectly incentivised to maintain good participation numbers, logically leading to less informed decision-making. Given what I perceive as a growing…

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Good thanks for cosmos hub