Expand the value of ATOM beyond the Hub: Align incentives of CL and ICF towards maximizing value of ATOM

CosmosHub is still not the true Hub. Neither does it have much utility or usage in the ecosystem. My thought process is two fold: • Expand value of ATOM beyond the Hub and to the entire Cosmos ecosystem • Request for CosmosLabs and ICF to have more skin in the game to make ATOM successful. My reading between the lines on current state of ecosystem is that: • CosmosLabs is a for-profit company. While they may develop some/all of the Hub, their focus is to develop Cosmos stack, earn money from it, get salaries and profit. Their value is NOT necessarily increase value of ATOM since they plan to do consulting services and earn in USD (and pay their expenses in USD). This is no different from the business model of a company like EY or Accenture. • ICF has already raised a ton of money (balance of about 220M at the moment). Their goal is to fund the ecosystem (and potentially beyond just Cosmos) and fund companies like CosmosLabs and others. • $ATOM is the bottom of the chain. It’s future is decided mostly by CosmosLabs, who’s future is in turn potentially determined by ICF (of course, ICF may just be one of their investors). Neither org’s primary objective is…

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and what if ICF doesnt want to operate under the atom governance ?

Is the cosmos hub in position to ask ICF to become a dao ?

Why not? That’s the proposal. The current ICF is structured in a way that only current board members can elect future board members. Given that ICF’s history has been filled with allegations, it would make more sense for it to operate as a DAO or at least have DAO proposals on how to govern items/prioritize roadmap. Some thoughts from my community post: • What value does ICF brings to the table or the Cosmos community? Are there any significant accomplishments that ICF has done in the past one year other than launching CL? To me it sounds like CL does all the work, then why should ICF even exist? • there’s 200k ATOM of operational expenses in the months of Oct - what was that used for? My understanding is it’s expenses to employees, but possibly not CL employees, since CL is a separate arm with it’s own funds? • The only public facing job that ICF has is publish treasury. Despite that Oct was missed and between Sep and Nov, ATOM goes missing. There’s still no transparency on what happened prior to 2024 related to funds. Jae has accused them of pocketing $$$, but there’s no proof to deny this either (because guess what, the old treasury snapshots/audits or…

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I would agree with the idea the foundation becomes the main hub DAO. How the hub could enforce this transition ?

If you understand that the ATOM (a very imprecise way of phrasing it) doesn’t control the ICF, why even opening this thread?

Made some edits based on my discussion with the community.