Cosmos and Polkadot were once the most-hyped blockchain interoperability solutions, worth hundreds of billions of dollars each and promising to be the backbone of an interconnected ecosystem of chains. However, this vision never came to life as intended, and they have now fallen to the wayside in exchange for appchains and rollups on different ecosystems. Let’s explore Cosmos and Polkadot’s visions, their new competition, and if there’s any hope for revival.

Though different in technical implementation, Cosmos and Polkadot were created to bring interoperability to sovereign blockchains. They created separate standards, consensus protocols, and communication layers that chains could build upon and offered the ability to plug into a wider ecosystem of similar chains. Cosmos’ ATOM was meant to act as the hub between different Cosmos SDK chains, providing a way to bridge tokens in exchange for a fee paid in ATOM. Similarly, Polkadot’s main chain was meant to power connections between various Parachains, which paid in DOT for one of one hundred available spots.