A little bit of chit-chat
Proposition 72, which aims to fund a DeFi consumer chain from the Cosmos Hub Community Pool, looks likely to pass today after reaching late last week the quorum needed to become enacted. As of writing, there is a majority of 85.38% of Ayes votes. That will be a massive milestone for the Cosmos Hub as the first big consumer chain will be built to bring DeFi to the greater Cosmos Ecosystem.
The Keplr team is looking for Beta Testers! They just shipped a new dashboard, and they are looking for people to test and share feedback to improve the product. If you want to participate, drop a comment in this tweet explaining why you are the best to do the job.
ADA in Comos? 🌎
The connection between Cosmos and Ethereum is getting stronger and there is ever better interoperability with Polkadot. Now, it seems it is Cardano's turn, or at least that's what Sifchain is working on.
The Sifchain team has applied for a Project Catalyst Fund9 grant to build the first bridge between Cosmos and Cardano. The bridge, called Peggy 2.0, will be made with the vision of connecting EVM compatible (Omni-EVM) chains with Cosmos starting with Cardano but eventually expanding to Polygon, Moonbeam, Avalanche, and others.
The bridge is already fully funded and is in the build phase at the moment, so whether or not the grant is accepted, the project is already on its way!
ATOM, OSMO, welcome to the ERC20 world ✋
A governance proposal has been published to deploy an ERC20 token contract representation of the OSMO token on Evmos, basically creating a synthetic native OSMO.
One use case of this new feature could be the inclusion of OSMO and/or ATOM in the Aave Protocol once it launches on Evmos. Another would be a simple swap, trading synthetic tokens for the Evmos native token on Evmos itself. This new module will allow the use of synthetic tokens in DeFi protocols, NFT marketplaces and new applications based on the ERC20 standard.
Evmos Congestion update: According to on-chain data, it seems Evmos has been freed from the spam bots congesting the network.
Interchain Accounts are a reality ⛓️
One of those mythic features of the greater Cosmos Ecosystem that has been waiting for a while is Interchain Accounts (ICAs). Juno became the first sovereign chain to enable this capability. Core developers carried out the upgrade with only minor hiccups.
The upgrade v7.0.0. only added the ICAs host functionality to Juno, meaning that any IBC controller chain could interact directly with Juno apps and functionalities. For example, a controller Chain A user could execute transactions on JunoSwap (such as stake, vote, swap tokens, etc.) without having to do an IBC transfer or login into the JunoSwap app.
The biggest opportunity from this deployment is that with ICAs enabled, Quicksilver can now add Juno to its liquid staking platform, making Juno token holders eligible for the Quicksilver airdrop.
According to Proposition 28, "a future upgrade will be brought forward for ICA Controller functionality if and once that becomes desirable".
The sky is full of stars 🔭
One exciting project shipping new features during this bear market is Stargaze. We sat down this week with its founder Shane Vitarana to talk about what's on the horizon of the project and how it's becoming a strong player in the NFT ecosystem.
Q: When will the audited marketplace be launched?
A: We got the audit done, and the audit came back and luckily found no critical issues, which is great. It found some minor issues and some other issues that we're working on fixing now. A lot of the front-end updates for that are already done. So launchpad v2 is going out first. That's what we're working on for this week. I will write a Commonwealth post about it because it has some changes to the fees. There's an AirDrop fee that's going to be coming. People have this nice bootstrapping period of free airdrops, but it also causes a lot of spam and adjusting some fees, like the collection creation fee. So, in summary, v2 is coming first, and then it's updated to the marketplace right after that.
Q: Which new features will come with the upcoming upgrades?
A: An exciting feature is collection bidding. So users will be able to make bids across a whole collection. The thing we're working on now that's a little more important right now is the v2 of the launchpad. So there's an update to the launchpad, including random minting and other things people have asked for. Also, governance around verification of projects, because right now we have a problem where we have just too many projects launching, which I guess is a nice thing to have, but they may not be up to the quality standards that people expect. So we need better curation and verification tools.
Q: The NFT market is becoming hotter with a lot of buzz around new marketplaces in networks other than Ethereum, partnerships between Polygon and Reddit, etc. Where does Stargaze stand in this market?
A: Stargaze's differentiating factor is that it's a chain. So it's not just a marketplace. The NFT marketplace is the bootstrapping mechanism for the chain. It's a way to get activity, start trading, and start using it. And it is the flagship feature. But because Stargaze is his chain, it's all about vertical integration. It's about creating remarkable experiences and creating the best product for users. Many other things are coming that will seamlessly fit into the marketplace. So that's the goal. All the different marketplaces built on some L1s can't do some of the things that Stargaze is doing. Like, as an example, the zero gas. And then, interoperability is another example. Being a Cosmos chain, it automatically connects to other IBC chains, and we are also working on Ethereum integration. So we had news that dYdX is moving to Cosmos, right. Everything that they're talking about, all the stuff that the reasons why they are moving to an app chain are the same reasons why Stargaze is its app chain.
Q: Which projects are being built on top of the Stargaze chain?
A: It's still in the early days of the stuff, but a whole ecosystem is moving underneath. So one of the things I'm excited about is a generative art platform being built on top of Stargaze. One of our genesis creators, Stewart, who did a drop called Hyperion, is really into narrative art. I'm also really into generative art. If Stargaze didn't have a community, it was only just me. I'd probably just be building that. This generative art platform will be launching soon, and that's one of the first things that's built by someone not part of the team. We have some other things coming soon. We just announced something with Livana, a Terra project, and they're breaking up into working with a bunch of Cosmos chains.
Q: Are there any plans to bring RWAs to Stargaze?
A: In my mind, we should optimise for the digital native use-case first, get everything working, get the UX working, and get all that stuff working great just for the digital native case first. But there are connections to be made with the real world, with analogue art, if you want to use that term.
One thing we're thinking of doing for that use-case is having the FoundationFoundation buy the physical item, and then it mints an NFT of the item, and that becomes the kind of tradable thing. The FoundationFoundation would then have a mandate not to sell the physical art. And then it turns into its museum or gallery. So that's the long-term plan for physical art, but it will come later after the digital phase is all done.
Airdrops List
No airdrops in sight this week.
Wrap Up
If you like our newsletter, share it with your friends so they can be also on top of the latest and the greatest (and sometimes not so great) of the Cosmos ecosystem.
In the meantime, feel free to follow us on Twitter @zkvalidator and visit our website to stake with us.