I can't shake off the thought that $ETH is following $ATOM.
Both has tech used beyond their own ecosystem:
- IBC and the Cosmos SDK run under dYdX, Celestia and Injective.
- The EVM runs almost every chain that isn't Solana.
Lots of adoption but native coins don't accrue much value.
Both scaled by pushing activity out to satellite chains:
- Cosmos with app-chains like Osmosis
- Ethereum with L2s
Cheaper for users, but value leak to the edges while the L1 pay for security.
Like L2s are slowly dying, Cosmos App-chains are pivoting or shutting down with Akash's $AKT about to propose a new migration chain.
Price is going the same way but slower for ETH.
ATOM is down ~86% over five years. ETH 'only' 38%.
The big shift was valuing L1s mostly based on fees/revenue.
I think that's flawed for L1s but $HYPE and $TRX proved that L1s can actually generate high enough fees and burn tokens via buybacks to affect the price.
Cosmos community was asking FOR YEARS to fix ATOM's inflation and weak value accrual, and nothing changed until an 86% dump forced it.
Even a founder was pushing for a hard fork.
Apathy set in within Atom and no one even talks about it on CT anymore.
Now they're redesigning ATOM to capture value instead of just paying stakers to hold. Current proposals:
• inflation tied to actual fee revenue (currently a fixed 7-10%)
• longer staking locks earn more
• value accrual extended to SDK (corporate) usage, beyond staking yields alone
$ATOM holders are so desperate they are willing to experiment.
$ETH is at way too high MC and not desperate enough to make any radical changes to it.
Vitalik called supporting ETH the asset 'outside the scope of the EF'.
So any big change probably would come the way it did for ATOM: a crisis deep enough that doing nothing becomes more costly than acting.
ETH still secures billions so too large for anyone to treat this as an emergency.
ATOM had to fall most of the way to zero before it could reinvent itself.
If ETH is on the same path, the level that unlocks it is a long way below here.
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