cryptOpedia⚛️

From @0xMagmar & @BPIV400 to @Cosmos ⚛️ --- Warning: Long post --- For us, the @interchain_io acquisition of @SkipProtocol has been tremendously emotional. For years, Skip has been our entire identity. We’re incredibly proud of the team, reputation, and products we've built, ranging from our MEV solutions, to our onboarding platform Skip:Go, and to our oracle Skip:Connect. We are so incredibly thankful for all our customers - @celestia , @dYdX , @osmosis, @Neutron_org, and so many others - who rely on our products and have gotten us to this point. -- Now that chapter is coming to an end, and a new adventure is starting, but this time the stakes are higher. Cosmos is the last ecosystem and stack that truly upholds the values of our movement: sovereignty for users and developers, permissionlessness, and trust-minimization. Shockingly and horrifyingly, more and more competitors to our ecosystem are racing to build a much bleaker, centralized future for the web. They have sacrificed the ideals of our movement, ideals that Cosmos still embodies genuinely. • @IBCProtocol is competing with permissioned messaging protocols designed from the ground up to create toxic vendor lock-in to irremovable fee switches and user taxes. • The @cosmos_sdk is competing with frameworks that promote centralized sequencing, reduce security to a 5 of 7 multisig, and deprioritize building fraud proofs. • @cometbft, even almost a decade after it was conceived, remains the only open source, battle-tested BFT consensus implementation. The alternative is centralized systems with no consensus at all. -- If we - if Cosmos - wins, we'll secure the future of the open web for communities and developers around the globe. The web will become a truly free, creative, and user-owned/controlled space. Communities and users will finally be free to govern, profit from, and fork the platforms they use. If we lose, the future of the web will look like the past: siloed monopolies crudely designed to trap users and extract time & money from them. That’s what we mean when we say the stakes are higher. -- Cosmos has not yet unlocked its potential. Despite countless copycat multichain ecosystems and visions, Cosmos has not stepped into the position of leadership it’s always had. It's time to change this - with a new vision for Cosmos driven by unity across the interchain, an end to fragmentation, a proper go-to-market, an influx of new builders, a reinvestment into the Cosmos Hub, and most importantly - a massive increase of liquidity within the ecosystem. We believe Cosmos can become the place where all the most ambitious teams decide to build their decentralized applications and communities. They'll build with us because we'll offer an unbeatable bundle of power, connectivity, and decentralization. They'll be able to build anything they can imagine; distribute it to users, liquidity, and other applications everywhere seamlessly; and make it truly unstoppable with full-stack decentralization. As they grow, they'll stay on our platform because we won't impede their vision. We won't represent a ceiling on their growth. This is the perfect context for the birthplace of the next generation of the internet: • An insanely powerful platform for building user-owned apps • A community of ambitious/talented developers unafraid of dreaming big • An abiding respect for community and individual sovereignty This will allow us to build the foundation for a more open, more fair internet together. -- A focus on liquidity and growth Despite the strength of our technology platform, we're facing a liquidity crisis. Developers who choose the Interchain Stack have access to less capital and fewer users than those who choose other tech stacks. Changing this is our primary focus. Developers are keenly aware of liquidity movements. They are overlooking the downsides of not building in our ecosystem - and instead building in a way that’s subservient to other tokens and blockchains - to access short-term liquidity and distribution. They want to build bigger, but can’t. If we solve this crisis, if we 100x the liquidity on chains built with our stack, we can overcome the attractiveness of these centralized solutions and secure a sustainable future for the Interchain Stack and, with it, an open future for the web. -- The Role For ATOM and the Hub in Addressing The Crisis The reality is Cosmos, The Cosmos Hub, the Cosmos stack (and the chains that use it), and ATOM are inseparable. The entire ecosystem is judged by its foundational chain and asset, and every chain that uses our stack - and is thus in our ecosystem - is affected. A strong Hub leads to a strong ecosystem that benefits every chain. As part of the acquisition, we are helping the ICF chart a new path: we are fully embracing and doubling down on maintaining and improving the Cosmos Hub, and ATOM, as a vehicle of growth for the stack and its ecosystem of chains. The Cosmos Hub and ATOM will play a major role in driving liquidity into the interchain. We plan to supercharge the Hub’s development and product suite to benefit every sovereign chain. For example, the Hub can help: • Onboard External Assets by facilitating chain abstraction, cross-chain swaps/transfers, and onboarding through smart accounts, native bridging, MPC for bridging and smart wallets, IBC connections to other ecosystems • Issue new assets by driving down the cost and complexity of launching new chains and assets through liquidity, security, and infrastructure provisioning • Unlock staked capital through incentivizing liquid staking of ATOM and facilitating PoA • Benefit the wider L1 ecosystem by creating optimism and hope around "Cosmos" and through value accrual mechanisms which will flow through the entire ecosystem. This will be the guiding light for the next phase of product roadmap and commercial strategy around the Hub: The Cosmos Hub must drive liquidity and users into applications built with the Interchain Stack. And hand-in-hand, ATOM must benefit from interchain applications growing. -- We are incredibly excited and motivated by this opportunity to serve the ecosystem and help lead the next years of Cosmos’ development. To us, Cosmos and its ideals of an open web is something worth giving everything to - because it is so important to us and the future of the internet. It is a mission of openness, of individuality, and most importantly, of sovereignty. So join us. Don’t build on someone else’s chain. Go bigger. Build your own. Welcome back to Cosmos, Mag & Barry