[VOTING] Fund Hypha to operate the Hub's public testnet program for 2026/2027

Changelog • 2026-Jun-09: Posted initial draft Introduction Throughout 2025 and 2026, Hypha has been responsible for Hub maintenance in a format we’ve affectionately referred to as “keeping the lights on”. In the first half of this year alone, we have shipped seven major and minor upgrades, most of which have been dependency bumps or executing on design choices approved by the community and Cosmos Labs. On June 4, Cosmos Labs announced their acquisition of Mintscan and the formation of a new Cosmos Labs Korea entity that will build the Hub’s roadmap in-house, accelerating Cosmos Labs’ plans for both Hub and stack. This reorganization of responsibilities will end Hypha’s contract for Hub support at the end of July (or at the conclusion of the ICS deprecation work). While we have been proud to work on the Hub, we’re happy to pass the job back to a product-focused development team and think that the CLK team brings the right talent and expertise to make this next phase a success. Hypha’s real passion on the Hub has always been the testnet: an invaluable resource for de-risking mainnet operations, improving validator knowledge of Gaia, and building new features on the…

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Cosmos Labs supports this proposal. As we shared in our June 4 announcement, we are bringing Hub technical maintenance in-house via the Korean subsidiary of Cosmos Labs in order to streamline the product work behind the Cosmos Hub and consolidate it with the same team that is now focusing on ecosystem infrastructure. The persistent testnet is a public good that is owned by the community, and we think it is best kept that way: openly funded, openly accessible, and operated by an independent team, maintaining contributor diversity around the Hub. The testnet is core infrastructure for Hub stability. Every mainnet upgrade is rehearsed there first, which is where upgrade risk and bugs get surfaced and resolved before they reach validators on mainnet. Over the past several years that process has become measurably smoother and lower-risk, and the testnet has played a large role in that process. We value it enough to have built it into validator incentives. Participation in the testnet is one of the requirements to qualify for the Interchain Foundation’s delegation program , which ensures that Validators who qualify for delegations are those who take an active role in Hub stability…

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We have known Hypha and Lexa for many years and they have been a key pillar for Cosmos Hub and the Cosmos ecosystem in general. Lexa has been involved also in the Cosmos hub forum and supporting with moderation. From our experience Hypha is reliable and can be trusted, and the funding amount requested is explained in detail and seems reasonable. It is important to have the Cosmos hub testnet well managed and Hypha is the ideal entity for this given their experience. Therefore we will also support this proposal.

Strong team, solid track record, reasonable budget. Supporting this proposal.

We are running the validator with moniker TB since years, testnet included. We strongly support this proposal because Hypha team has been extremely reliable and responsive in every occasion.

Hypha’s work on the testnet has been incredibly valuable and had a sizable effect on the very smooth mainnet upgrades over the past year, while the training sessions are extremely useful to understand gaia’s features and learn how to implement them.

The ask is reasonable, and doesn’t even require selling ATOM. It’s a no-brainer for us: full support.

T.

Hypha’s testnet program has been a key part of how we prepare for mainnet upgrades — the rehearsal sessions consistently reduce risk and help the broader validator set align ahead of upgrade day.

Hypha has been great, and we support this proposal.

Hypha’s testnet program has been crucial for validator training and testing in production-like environments since 2022. They have always delivered consistent work of high quality. Full support from Solva (ex. CryptoCrew) for this proposal!

Moving this to last call. With overwhelmingly positive support so far, we’ll be putting this into voting early next week!

The proposal is now live: Mintscan

We understand and support the work Hypha is doing on the testnet.
Does this proposal include monthly support for validators participating in the testnet? These validators are working hard as well and deserve support for their contributions.

No - the scope of this proposal is solely for funding the operations that Hypha does on the testnet, which includes facilitating the events incentivized via the ICF delegations program.

I’d be open to putting together a validator subsidy proposal that’s tied to the testnet, but I’d need to see some business reporting on validator financials in a post-Interchain Security world. Our original subsidy through AADAO, then through ICF, was to recognize the financial hardship caused by Replicated Security. Now that Interchain Security is being fully deprecated, we’d need new data to see what kind of subsidy is warranted (considering that the testnet is also part of the delegations program) and whether it’s reasonable to ask for it from the community pool.

Just to add to Lexa’s comment from the Cosmos Labs side, one reason we decided to increase the size of the delegation program is specifically to ensure validators are compensated well for testnet participation and the other activities we feel should be baseline requirements for validators.

We’re still calculating the final amounts, but validators who participate in the testnet should receive north of 200k-250k ATOM in delegations from the ICF.

Validators who do not participate in the testnet will receive no delegations.

Doing it this way also ensures that the community pool isn’t being spent to pay validators directly, which can lead to a bit of a misalignment of incentives when it comes to voting on those community pool spend proposals.

lexa: Our original subsidy through AADAO, then through ICF, was to recognize the financial hardship caused by Replicated Security. Actually, replicated security was just Neutron and Stride and back then the cost for servers was much much lower than now. With the AI bubble servers costs have increased exponentially and these costs were passed to validators, if anything the same support as before is needed if not more. Moreover, that subsidy was only for the testnet by the way, many validators had costs on mainnet running Stride and Neutron which was obligatory but were not on the testnet and received no subsidy. And also, there were validators not running Cosmos hub mainnet, Stride or Neutron but just the testnet and receiving the subsidy. RoboMcGobo: to ensure validators are compensated well for testnet participation and the other activities we feel should be baseline requirements for validators. The issue is that with the ecosystem delegation program the amount per validator will decrease a lot, and also if many more qualify for the program the amount per validator would be very small. RoboMcGobo: community pool isn’t being spent to pay…

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