The First 6 Months of the New Cosmos, and What’s Next

In Q3 2025, Interchain Labs was rebranded to Cosmos Labs. Visit Cosmos Labs at https://cosmoslabs.io/.

We are shipping, learning, and doubling down on our strengths.

Today, Interchain Labs and the Interchain Foundation take a moment to review the first 6 months of the new Cosmos. Since the start of 2025, Cosmos has seen revitalized leadership, the formation of Interchain Labs, and the unification of the Cosmos Stack, Cosmos Hub, and Cosmos ecosystem under a single mandate.

This blog post will share our next steps with the Cosmos community and ecosystem, including changes in product direction after research and iteration. We’ll also set the stage for the exciting next 6 months to come.

The First Six Months of the New Cosmos

Here’s a recap of the key updates from the last six months.

Dozens of new teams have announced new Cosmos-based projects or products, or gone to mainnet, including Ripple’s EVM Sidechain, TAC, Polaris, Ondo, Stable, Initia, Fetch, Noble’s USDN, Babylon, Lombard, Warden, Nillion, Elys, ShadeX, Namada, Side, Coreum, Stride, Fairblocks, Neutron’s evolution to a full L1, zkCloud, Seda, Fuel’s sequencer, Sentinel… Many more teams brought new features and products. Areas like privacy, RWAs, AI, and Stablecoins saw massive adoption, as Cosmos started forming new IBC connections to Ethereum, Starknet, XRP, and Bitcoin with IBC Eureka.

This momentum fuels our team. We’re deeply grateful for the trust builders have placed in us.

Our goal for these last 6 months has been to test different theses, explore Cosmos’ strengths, and identify the most promising paths forward, while still making substantial upgrades to the Cosmos Stack.

As a result, the Cosmos Stack has made massive improvements, driven purely by customer feedback. IBC v2, opened the door for IBC to be everywhere, starting with a direct connection to Ethereum. To add to this, we built the full-service interoperability offering: IBC Eureka, which leverages IBC V2, the Cosmos Hub, and Skip:Go to let users transfer any asset, anywhere, using the Hub as a router. On the stack side, we fully refreshed the Cosmos SDK roadmap and shipped the feature-packed V0.53. Last but not least, we are completing the open-sourcing and production readiness of the Cosmos EVM, now adopted by over 5+ major chains.

Behind the scenes, we’ve reworked security practices and improved security processes, introduced a new security partner (Asymmetric Research), re-run audits across the entire stack, and replaced the Cosmos Hub’s LSM module. We have also worked closely with B-Harvest, which has been great at accelerating Cosmos EVM adoption, to further the EVM stack and infrastructure.

Overall, we have shipped and learned much more than we expected in our first six months. We have succeeded, struggled, iterated, listened, asked, debated, researched, and tried again. But above all else, we’ve gained significantly more confidence in the relevance of Cosmos’s vision and have been overjoyed with the level of traction we’ve seen.

What We’ve Learned

Earlier this year, we began to explore multiple ways to better integrate the Interchain Stack, the Cosmos Hub, and the ecosystem in a more unified product that had ATOM and the Hub at its center.

This work explored three theses:

1. Layer 1s need services, users, and capital, and IBC and the Hub can deliver them. The Cosmos Hub can act as a marketplace, offering and monetizing services over IBC, like bridging (via Eureka), chain infrastructure like oracles, and integrations with tools like Chainlink and CEXs.
2. There is an increasing demand from businesses, institutions, and developers for building L1s, specifically L1s that are EVM-compatible. Having an official EVM stack is vital for opening new doors to developers and services for Cosmos chains. We also see more projects (such as Hyperliquid, Plasma) choosing to become L1s instead of L2s. That’s why we open-sourced and prioritized the Cosmos EVM stack.
3. The Hub could accelerate innovation by hosting its own VM, enabling a multichain smart contract ecosystem directly on top of the Cosmos Hub using EVM. These apps could use IBC Eureka to power their unique multichain use cases.

Over the past few months, we’ve rigorously tested these core ideas — talking to dozens of builders, customers, foundations, and institutions, and we present our conclusions here.

Exploring Routes Forward

We’ve seen strong support for Theses 1 and 2. Web2 institutions like central banks, SWIFT, Toki, Progmat, and Web3 teams like Ondo, Babylon, Ripple, TAC, and Tether, are actively exploring and adopting the Cosmos L1 stack. Building on this momentum, we’re designing new infrastructure and services that help grow our customers’ businesses while driving utility and revenue. IBC Eureka and Skip Go are examples of this model in action.

The flywheel is simple and powerful: as the IBC network expands, demand grows for the services the Cosmos Hub and stack provide.

We saw weaker signals for thesis 3. Our work showed us that launching a VM on the Hub had high costs, would disrupt the UX for the Hub’s most important users, and require massive resources and time to catch up with existing L1 ecosystems. Cosmos’ strength lies in its interconnected ecosystem of blockchains and apps. We want to double down on that existing strength, and focus on efforts that benefit the entire network.

As a result, we’re pausing the launch of an EVM platform on the Cosmos Hub, as we reevaluate our approach. This wasn’t an easy decision — we’ve spent the past two months working closely with app and infra teams preparing to launch on the Hub. We remain committed to supporting them and are now exploring other paths for them to build in Cosmos. We’re grateful for their work and excited to see them thrive. We will also continue to invest in the Cosmos EVM L1 stack, to support builders launching sovereign EVM chains.

While we see fewer opportunities for the Hub as a contract layer today, we’re growing confident in the thesis of the Cosmos Hub as a marketplace of services for L1s — delivered over IBC, such as IBC Eureka, CEX access, oracles. This approach is more flexible, allowing the Hub to support not just its own apps, but any IBC-connected chain or contract. Most importantly, it builds on Cosmos’ core strength: helping builders scale beyond contracts and grow into sovereign L1s. Complementing, not competing with contract layers.

We’re still developing this path, but it presents a promising and unique role for the Hub in the Cosmos ecosystem. Future VM or EVM upgrades may still unlock new services or onboarding paths, so we remain open to revisiting this approach as we continue learning from the needs of institutions and L1 builders. We’re taking an iterative approach.

Today is the Start of Cosmos’s Next Decade

For the remainder of the year, we will focus on refining these theses into a fully-fledged product vision for Cosmos, the Stack, the Cosmos Hub, and begin new experiments. The new Cosmos is 6 months old, and although we have a long history and incredible technology, we are approaching our growth like an early-stage startup. This means things will shift, and we are adapting quickly.

While we will continue to ship products, our primary goal for the next six months is to gain confidence in a strategy that lasts for the next 10 years. We see these months as ushering Cosmos into its roaring 20s.

From the entire ICL and ICF team, we are tremendously excited for everything we see ahead of us: the Cosmos vision of an open and connected global economy, via a real internet of blockchains, is unfolding in front of us faster than ever before. Chains from all ecosystems, Web2 and Web3 alike, are choosing to align with Cosmos’ vision of the open web, and choosing to build with us along the way.

EthCC and the first Sovereign Event Series were an early taste of this. Cosmos is reborn, reaching beyond its borders, bringing in new builders, and attracting new institutions to support our mission.

We’re just getting started. The new Cosmos is just 6 months old.

July 15th — Townhall: Rewatch below!

Join us next Monday, July 15th, at 1.30pm ET / 5:30pm UTC for a Townhall, where the Interchain Labs team, with CO-CEOs Mag and Barry will go over the topics above. The town hall already happened! Rewatch here.

FAQ: Frequently asked questions

What is happening to ATOM-aligned projects/builders?
Earlier this year, we invited teams to build with us toward a Hub-native app ecosystem, where smart contracts would live directly on the Hub. Many builders joined us on that path, and we’re deeply grateful for their time and effort. After months of exploration, we’ve decided to shift direction. We believe the Hub’s greatest strength lies in serving the interchain through services like shared security, IBC, and Eureka, not in hosting contracts directly. We know this is a meaningful change for these teams, and we’re committed to supporting them as they decide their next steps, whether that’s deploying on another chain, launching their own, or continuing to integrate with the Hub’s services. We’re thankful for the work they’ve done and want to see them succeed in whatever comes next.

How did you come to this decision?
Interchain Labs was founded with a strong focus on products and customers. To shape the Cosmos vision, we continuously engage with users, competitors, and partners; collaborate with builders; and run experiments to test our assumptions and market fit. Recently, with enough data on three key theses, we evaluated product direction, resources, and competitive dynamics for the year ahead. This clarified the cost-benefit of each path and revealed compelling opportunities, especially in Cosmos’ strengths as a Layer 1 stack and ecosystem.

Is IBC Eureka no longer being developed?
We will continue to work on IBC Eureka! We are very excited with how IBC v2 and Eureka have developed around the Hub, and will prioritize the next networks it expands to, the features it supports, and new monetization models based on the findings we shared above. It is the first Hub-powered service that we have built, of many to come.

Is the Cosmos Hub and/or ATOM being deprioritized?
No. We’re just focusing more directly on how the Cosmos Hub and ATOM offer services to apps and chains, who they’re for, and what problems they solve, to accelerate mass adoption. The Hub and ATOM are core parts of the Stack and ecosystem, with strong IBC connections, integrations with infrastructure and exchanges, and tight links to the rest of the stack. This puts the Hub in a good spot to power services like Eureka and act as a service Hub for Cosmos. We’ll keep improving the Hub with new features to make it more useful for users and chains.

What is happening to CosmWasm and the EVM?
The maintenance of CosmWasm will continue with the support of Hadron Labs, the builders of Neutron and Drop. We are very excited about a team who have extensive experience with CosmWasm as the main steward of this technology. CosmWasm will continue to be compatible with the rest of the Cosmos Stack. As for the Cosmos EVM L1 stack, the relaunched v1 will be released later this year, and multiple teams are already building with implementation (including Ripple, TAC, Babylon). While it will not be implemented in the Cosmos Hub right now, it is growing in adoption and is a fantastic tool for expanding EVM compatibility for Cosmos chains and applications.