'“Will you still think I’m cute if I’m huge?” - Juno MacGuff

Henlo Anon! Welcome to my educational post highlighting almost everything I know about the Juno Network ecosystem. Please note, I do hold tokens for some of the projects mentioned below, and anticipate that I will eventually diversify to hold tokens in almost all of the projects mentioned below. This article is meant to serve as a primer for your potential adventures into the Junosphere, and should not be treated as a green light to invest your hard earned money.

Huge love to a special person out there, @0xcarnation. She is a wonderful person and displayed a lot of patience with me, especially when it came to bombarding her DMs with material I found while researching for this piece. Definitely an anon you should be following~

What’s a Juno?

Juno Network is a sovereign public blockchain built using the Cosmos SDK framework. The platform serves as a decentralized, permissionless, and censorship resistant expansion to the Inter Blockchain Communication Protocol (IBC). This “Sister Hub” to Cosmos Hub originated from a community driven initiative to offload smart contract deployment, for the Cosmos ecosystem, to a dedicated network. The vision of the founding members are centered around preserving neutrality, performance, and reliability. Boasting scalability of up to 10,000 TPS, a blocktime of ~6s, and inherent IBC interoperability, this protocol is well positioned to be a major Hub in the Cosmos ecosystem.

What differentiates JUNO from other Layer 1 Smart Contract networks like Ethereum and Solana?

• Easy deployment of multi-chain smart contracts
• Native interoperability
• High scalability
• High security
• Decentralized network inception
• Community led core development
• Community led liquidity incentives
• Community led ecosystem development
• Balanced governance
• Dynamic fee balancing
• Clear legal status (no pre, private, or public sale)

Home of CosmWasm

This open source project has been a natural home for CosmWasm smart contracts. With the backing of the InterWasm DAO, and many other giga-brained individuals, this ecosystem is setting out to pioneer the future of CosmWasm development and adoption. Introducing WebAssembly (WASM) to the Cosmos SDK, provides developers the opportunity to write in the language of their preference. This, along with the strong network of individuals that are apart of this community, sets Juno up as a prime pick for new software engineers to hone their skills. If you are interested in the benefits of CosmWasm over Solidity, the Juno team put together a compelling summary in their documentation.

How about the token?

The tokenomics of $JUNO are designed to incentivize and foster a self-sustaining economy of developers, validators, and delegators. This coin is the native asset of the network and carries a variety of use cases not limited to: securing the proof of stake network; being utilized in on-chain governance; acting a fuel token for all contracts in the ecosystem; deployed as a work token to capture value from native decentralized applications (dApp). Juno’s total supply inflates according to a fixed rewards model that decreases after each subsequent year. During the first year, block rewards will be calculated with a 40% inflation rate resulting in the creation of ~26M $JUNO. After year two, total supply will increase by 20%. Following year 3’s 10% inflation rate, the rewards schedule will stop halving, and instead decrease by 1% each year. After year 12, the total supply of $JUNO will be ~185M, and inflate by 1% for the remainder of its existence. As of 31JAN2022, the total supply of $JUNO is ~72M, or just above 10% the initial total supply.

Moneta Hacks Initiative

The Moneta Hacks event is a 600 day long incentive program to onboard Juno’s next developers and innovators. The event is split into four, 180-day stages, each allocated for a total of 287k JUNO (or roughly $5M using today’s price of $18.3). Projects are free to jump in at any stage, whenever, to qualify for incentives. The Juno team has laid out categories for the different dApps and smart contracts they wish to see deployed on Juno Network. In order to qualify for rewards, developers will need to submit their projects/ideas to a panel of judges, who will then allocate a score according to the usefulness of the contribution. Specifically, the team is looking for the following items:

• Interchain Contracts (Very High Priority)
• DeFi (Very High Priority)
• NFTs (High Priority)
• DAOs (Very High Priority)
• GameFi/Gamification (High Priority)
• Privacy (High Priority)
• Community Expansion (High Priority)
• Tooling (High Priority)

If you are interesting in learning more check out their Medium blog post below!

Where can I Juno?

Since this blockchain was developed using the Cosmos SDK framework, we will naturally discover most, if not all, activity related to $JUNO on-chain, somewhere on the IBC. Currently, you are able to purchase $JUNO on decentralized exchanges such as Osmosis, JunoSwap, and Sifchain. Once you have some coins, the next step would be to send them to your native Juno wallet. Now for the fun part! What exactly can you do on the Juno ecosystem right now?

Stakedrops

Do you want to park your $JUNO, enjoy a high staking APR (~120%), and have a chance at receiving new ecosystem tokens? Just like the founding team, the developers and validators of Juno care about their delegators. To incentivize further decentralization of voting power, and market their products, many protocols will take snapshots of various validators to whitelist new holders. For example, if one wanted to take advantage of the high genesis inflation rates, they could hypothetically delegate to a good boy validator to receive an incoming airdrop. Free money is free income, anon. Please keep in mind, there is a 28-day locking period for delegation (i.e. if one was to delegate their Juno, they would need to wait 28 days following their unlock request until they are able to retrieve their coins).

Doky Whale was another project that experimented with stakedropping at the end of last December. Juno stakers that had at least 10 coins delegated at the time of the snapshot, were able to receive a fair proportion of 56% $DOKY’s maximum supply.

Humble Farming and Trading

Recently launched, the native decentralized exchange (DEX) of Juno Network, JunoSwap, is available for traders from all around. While the developers prepare to deploy further updates, and launch their native coin $RAW, users can perform simple swaps between many of the popular IBC assets (e.g. JUNO, ATOM, UST, BTSG, LUNA, OSMO, STARS, AKT, etc.) and prepare for the upcoming stake drop by proving liquidity to the pools. For more information regarding the distribution of the initial supply of $RAW, please check out the tweet below.

Although not much information is out, with respect to $RAW, we do know that it will be key to voting on pool incentives. Also, the developers have stated that $JUNO will remain as the primary denominator for pools, similar to $OSMO to Osmosis. It would be very interesting to see how IBC DEXs will attempt to out compete each other when it comes to incentivizing user liquidity. Will we see a Cosmos Wars too, anon?

JunoMint

For the cost of a 10 $JUNO commission fee, users are able to interact with EZStaking.io’s minting dApp. You can choose between a few different open-source CW20 contract types, and edit the expected fields for token creation (Name, Symbol, Decimals, Initial Supply, Supply Type, Logo URL, etc.). The developers of this dApp have stated that commission fees will be variable in relation to $JUNO’s price. There is no promise of the cost being reduced or increased in the future.

(DAO, DAO)

Have you ever had executive dysfunction when it comes to starting a web 3 project? Wanted to build a DAO, but didn’t have the tools required to go on-chain? Well fret no longer fren, DAO DAO has come to our rescue with interoperable DAO tooling. Users can easily (within 5 minutes) create liquid governance tokens that are IBC compatible. Yes, that means you will be able to create a DAO using DAO DAO, and then peg your governance token to OSMO on Osmosis right after. The DAO building toolkit allows users to create basic tokens, set voting configurations, manage an IBC interoperable treasury, and stake/vote on proposals. If you were ever interested, but lacked the motivation due to intimidation, check out this great tool! They are set to publicly launch on 31JAN2022.

Interchain Name Service

You are likely familiar with name service protocols by now, right anon? I am talking about the ENS, TNS, SNS, ANS… the list goes on. Practically every chain has some sort of name service protocol, which is great, but also disheartening that you need to register everywhere. Decentralized Name Service (deNS) takes a different approach, by allowing users more flexibility in using this type of NFT. Users are currently able to pick up a (de)NS for 2 $JUNO.

NETA Money

Neta Money’s sole purpose is to function as a scare decentralized store of value asset for the Juno ecosystem. Similar to $ION, this token is distributed and claimable by JUNO delegators who were staking at the time of the Moneta upgrade snapshot on 15DEC2021.

A thread on how to claim your $NETA airdrop is linked for your convenience below.

Lumeris Yield Optimizer

Although not much information has been posted by the developers, we can peer into their following list and bird app likes to get an idea of what they are planning. According to leaked Discord chats, the developers have been hard at work deploying their product to testnets. Currently features include:

• Juno staking derivatives
• Auto-compounding pools with hourly re-delegations
  • Each validator will have a unique derivative, allowing users to chooses between differing APYs with respect to commissions

Future strategies include batching multiple validators into staking derivatives and creating validator groups. This idea is not novel in and of itself, for example Strader Labs introduced a similar liquid staking solution on Terra in Q4 of 2021.

Scramble Cash

Are you a fan of tornadoes, anon? Taking heavy inspiration from Tornado Cash, the team behind Scramble Cash is setting out to create a decentralized protocol for private transactions on the Cosmos Network. By providing a zero-knowledge proof, this contract will allow deposits and withdrawals to any new address. The developers behind this project are still early on in their endeavor, however if you are interested in learning more you (or contributing!) may find links to their Discord and GitHub on their landing page.

Operator Social Lounge

Do you like drip? Perhaps social clubs? Maybe even NFTs? Well, Operator Social Lounge (OSL) has got you covered. The team behind this project is aiming to, in their own words, “form a treasury driven co-op to do cool shit”.

Their initial plan is to roll out genesis NFTs via airdrops to users of the Cosmosphere. This primary collection will be known as Operator 1s. They will consist of 365 unique personas, and will be airdropped in three separate drops over the course of this year to random user wallets. Instead of launching the collection with a mint, the community will be able to decide its own fair evaluation of the OSL series by secondary market participants. Unlike many other projects, each user owns the rights to the IP therein of their operators. That means you can freely brand, commercialize, or even start a movement around your operator and his or her drip.

The first airdorp of Operator 1s will occur sometime in Q1/Q2 of 2022, depending on the functionality of NFT marketplaces on the Juno Network. The first airdrop recipients will include those who are whitelisted by spreading awareness of OSL via Twitter, and/or those who participate in the soon to be released Discord server.

PageDAO

Are you a wordcel? I bet you are, aren’t you anon~
Even if you are not, you probably know someone that is really good with words. The sad truth of the matter, is that there are uncountable authors and ideas that do not move forward due to the inefficiencies of today’s publish systems (i.e. the current system is designed around barriers to entry for new individuals). PageDAO seeks to remedy this oversight in the publishing system by creating a decentralized publishing dApp that enables the inclusion of more creative people than previously before. If you thought digital images were a major step in artistic technology, just wait until you hear more about what Page has to offer. As a tease for what PageDAO has planned with their NFTBook Liquidity Pools, check out the diagram below. The whitepaper is dense, therefore explaining that will be potentially reserved for a future article.

Strange Clan

With the rise of DeFi gaming titles such as Axie Infinity and DeFi Kingdoms, there has been a lot of interest in the direction of this industry. Taking inspiration from the latter, Strange Clan is setting out to make a comfy MMO experience that allows users to: adventure with frens; complete quests; engage in competitive battles; play with a profession system for NFT goods and tokens. With that introduction out of the way, what are the perks of owning a Strange Clan character?

• Exclusive Mounts
  • Users from the first two towns will receive exclusive egg airdrops, a dragon perhaps?
• Special Quests and Storylines
  • Unique loot and enemies will be hidden behind a special questline for the first 10k NFT holders
• Discovering New Frens
  • As an early member, you will have first access to discovering new characters that will be put on the marketplace
  • The first finder of each character will get a share of the sale
• Alpha Testing
  • Set to commence in Q2 of 2022, NFT holders will be rewarded with access to this developing game

A bit of hard alfa to catch, but long story short, the first 10k Strange Clan NFT holders will be included in the Passage token airdrop. Passage aims to create a NFT Marketplace for the IBC. Use this knowledge however you wish anon!

Closing Remarks

With that all out of the way, I would like to sincerely thank you for making it this far! I hope that you found some of this informative, and interested to check out the Juno ecosystem further yourself! This is my first publication on this platform and I would love to hear your feedback as to what you enjoyed, thought I could do better, or even just to say henlo.