Hub Weekly Update #1: May 14, 2026

banner-03b-larger 1500×600 300 KB This is the first of Hub Weekly Thursday recaps, straight from the Hub Unit team, per the cadence we committed to in the From Chaos to Stability to Growth post. Every Thursday, we will call out significant Cosmos Hub updates on the forum, with a short companion thread on X, recapping announcements, live events like validator or community calls, and ecosystem updates! For more info, see the linked posts, and contact @RoboMcGobo on telegram to submit news for the weekly. This week: tokenomics, USDC, and the first validator call. • A substantive first look at the tokenomics research workstream by Cosmos Labs and Gauntlet • Follow-up detail on the Injective USDC arrangement (including how revenue accrues to ATOM and what it means for teams currently on Noble), • And two threads from yesterday’s validator call worth discussing in more detail in future calls. Tokenomics Update: Early Findings from Gauntlet’s Research We kicked off ATOM tokenomics research alongside Gauntlet in early April with the goal of figuring out how ATOM moves, why, and when. Before recommending any change to ATOM’s economic parameters, we need a…

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Thanks a lot Robo, very interesting.

Now who makes the Info a 60 sec HUB TV Clip?

Onwards.

Hi @RoboMcGobo,

Thank you for this, very exciting stuff and many in the community has been looking forward to the tokenomics research!

I am curious regarding the wallet selection process, specifically how were the cohorts determined.

Was there any minimum holding threshold for a wallet to be included, or any other restrictions/filters? Was it otherwise done using random sampling?

Are there any considerations made for how much a wallet holds? Under current staking APR it will take about 2500 ATOMs staked to generate a single atom from staking per day.

A wallet holding 1000 staked may otherwise be a seller, but simply not generate enough staking yield to bother moving anything.

Would be certainly interesting (assuming if not too much trouble or if it hasn’t been done yet) if there are separate looks for wallets that reliably generate more than $100 USD worth of staking rewards vs those that generate <$10, or perhaps less than 1 atom.

Yeah great question!

Gauntlet actually pulls data all wallets within defined sample periods. So every ATOM holder is getting indexed and divided into a cohort

Cohort specific data looks at how much ATOM moves per cohort, generally, rather than at how many wallets per cohort are moving ATOM, so small address decisions likely will not skew the data much for the broader cohort.

That being said, Gauntlet is doing a separate analysis of addresses per cohort broken down by wallet size as large addresses of course have an outsized impact on the movement of funds. I can’t recall exactly what size categories they’re using, but i can try to track that down. They shared it with us in our last sync with them last Tuesday.

There will be a whale list for each cohort provided with the phase 1 deliverables as well, which will be fun to dig into.

Thanks Robo, I really like this format, it’s easy to read and very clear. Cheers!

RoboMcGobo: A reasonable working estimate of actual sell pressure from emissions, once you strip out the non-sale activity, sits between 9,000 and 18,000 ATOM per day. This is around 10% of total daily emissions and less than 0.5% of ATOM’s average daily volume. This proves what I said previously about the flawed idea that cutting inflation leads to ‘price pump’. An amount of 0.5% of daily volume can’t really have any significant effect on the price, if inflation was reduced and instead of 0.5% maybe 0.3-0.4% the result would be negligable for the price, but this would lead to people unstaking given the new risk/reward profile and then large amounts of ATOM unstaked and sold could definitely have a negative impact on the price, so actually looking at the data it seems inflation currently has no relevance on the ATOM price and cutting inflation could have a negative impact if it leads to large unstaking and selling of ATOM. I think this data from ATOM would be very similar for all other protocols, that is why we kept seeing projects that cut inflation aggresively thinking this would cut ‘selling pressure’ and lead to ‘price pump’ and the opposite actually happened. It is…

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Cosmic_Validator:

Des idées comme la taxe VP seraient bien meilleures pour décentraliser davantage et améliorer/empêcher une telle concentration dans seulement deux CEX. Je pense que par gouvernance, il serait très simple de réduire les récompenses de jalonnement pour les validateurs au-dessus de 5 % VP par exemple et de rediriger ces récompenses vers le reste des validateurs et des stakers.

here the links to discuss around that :

[LAST CALL] CHIPs signaling phase : Validator Vote Power Cap CHIPs

Any update on this topic ?

[SIGNALING PROPOSAL] [DRAFT] Improve the Nakamoto Coefficient Signaling/Text

@Guinch_Roze I have been following this draft quietly, but seeing that you intend to bring it back to the table, I must step in from an institutional investment perspective. I fully agree with @RoboMcGobo’s assessment from a few months ago, and I want to make it clear that large-scale capital will not support this. While the romantic idea of “decentralization” is nice in theory, artificially punishing large validators and CEXs to subsidize smaller ones is terrible economics. Let’s be clear: I …

Nice format for weekly updates. The tokenomics section in particular is exactly what the chains needs before any inflation parameter discussion. Two questions: • On the “moved” bucket disaggregation: The 9,000–18,000 ATOM/day actual sell-pressure estimate strips out IBC and LST deposits. But what’s the rough split between those two? If a large slice of the “moved” 21% is going to liquid staking rather than CEXes, that meaningfully changes the narrative on where real sell pressure originates, and presumably becomes a key input to the DEX prioritisation decision too. Of course, given those numbers pile up in reality. • On X402 and agentic payments: When you say “EVM-compatible AI and agent standards”. The thinking that this runs on Hub-adjacent EVM chains (evmOS, Berachain connections, etc.), or is there an appetite for a CosmWasm-native X402 implementation directly on the Hub or maybe similar? The tooling path and the type of builders you’d attract are quite different depending on where this lands. PS. On the agentic commerce thread specifically: we’ve been building AI agent tooling for validator operations and chain onboarding (recently shipped a Logos node skill…

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