A brief analysis of the latest upgrade of Cosmos: Can "copy safety" improve the value capture ability of ATOM?

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For a long time, because the governance mechanism of Cosmos is too decentralized, the prosperity of the ecology has no direct relationship with ATOM, and the market value is outside the top 20. On the other hand, Polkadot, which is also one of the "cross-chain duo", has a market value twice that of Cosmos despite its weak ecological successor.

The crux of the issue is whether their platform tokens have value capture.

The Cosmos community is aware of this and has been pushingLet the Cosmos Hub undertake the verification task of the blockchain in the ecosystem, thereby capturing the value within the ecosystem.

However, the high inflation rate (and other flaws in the details) in the original plan was not conducive to ATOM holders and failed, so the plan was readjusted and re-voted in the past two weeks, and finally officially passed with a support rate of 99.48%. It will be officially launched on March 15th.

The core of this upgrade lies in "Replicated Security (RS, Replicated Security)", which is the original Interchain Security (Interchain Security),Allows blockchains in the Cosmos ecosystem to share verification resources for increased security, with the Cosmos Hub acting as a security provider.

This means that IBC-based blockchains can share security directly from Cosmos Hub without having to build their own verification nodes, and they can also directly share new features released by Cosmos Hub in the future.

The price is to send a part of the fee (25% by default) and the future inflation of the platform currency (in the form of continuous airdrops) to the Cosmos Hub, which will become rewards for validators and delegators.

Therefore, this upgrade of Cosmos can be understood as a mechanism similar to Polakdot's parallel thread, but instead of raising DOT to auction the slots of the relay chain, it is only necessary to add a proposal to the Cosmos Hub and pass two-thirds of the validators Voting is initiated (validators will not reject clients as long as the criteria are met).

However, for security reasons, any time one-third of the validators do not want to validate the chain, the service will be terminated immediately.

The Cosmos ecology has actually been growing in a low-key way, and the technology stack is also becoming more and more complete in the open source ecology. This upgrade is very attractive to the projects of the Cosmos ecology. Some leading projects have expressed strong interest in Cosmos Hub's Replicated Security interest.

I believe that in the future, more and more IBC-based blockchains will choose Cosmos Hub to provide security, which saves the cost of self-built nodes, and secondly, ATOM truly has value capture.

Especially in the future, under the narrative of "Next Billion User", there will be a steady stream of developers coming in to develop their own blockchains, and the Cosmos ecosystem that has accumulated great advantages in technology (the Cosmos ecosystem for rapid development of blockchains) SDK, permissionless cross-chain IBC protocol, Internet-level Tendermint consensus protocol) are good choices.