Exploring Sustainable Funding for the Cosmos Hub: How Fees and Licenses Can Monetize the Cosmos Stack

Hello Cosmos community, It seems timely to open a discussion about the funding of the Cosmos SDK tech stack and the potential return on investment for the Cosmos Hub. Historically, the Cosmos Hub has always been the blockchain that finances the development of the Cosmos stack (Cosmos SDK, Tendermint, IBC, etc.). However, there has been no direct return on this investment, as the technology is open-source and no licensing mechanism has been put in place. I’d like to engage the ATOM community in a discussion on how to remunerate the Cosmos Hub through mechanisms such as fees for technical projects connecting to the Hub, licenses, or usage fees for Cosmos Hub’s stack. Here are some ideas for potential models: Fees from chains using the Cosmos stack but not connecting directly to the Hub: Even if chains decide not to connect directly to the Cosmos Hub, they could still contribute financially through minimal fees, as they still benefit from the larger Cosmos tech stack (Cosmos SDK, Tendermint, etc.). While this may seem challenging in an open-source environment, a possible approach is to convince projects that paying small fees helps maintain and improve the very tools…

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Guinch_Roze:

Do you think the introduction of fees or licenses would hinder the adoption of the Cosmos stack, or would it encourage more sustainable and responsible development?

In general, i think serious startup projects would be willing to use atom as the sole fee token for running their product, knowing they will benefit from the provided infrastructure and security set.
But i don’t think that revenue generated only from transaction fees would add significant demand on the atom token alone. I’m still looking forward to the Hydro Platform, in my point of view the very first concept to bootstrap a project without off-chain token pre-distribution (aka ICO), which could take atom among the best launchpad platforms within the whole crypto space.
Using atom as fee token should be a no-brainer for projects, that identify themselves with the cosmos network