2022 is a wrap: reflecting on the good and bad 💭

2022 was a historical year for the Cosmos ecosystem and IBC with the Ethermint project, which has its origins dating back nearly half a decade, was launched under the rebranded name “Evmos” after a community pool grant by our friends at Cosmos Hub.

Despite a shaky start due to a botched software upgrade, the team bounced back with a successful stable mainnet launch in late April with much excitement from long term observers, media outlets, and developers looking to deploy Ethereum contracts on Cosmos.

With the exception of intermittent RPC reliability issues, the Evmos chain has been stable and incident-free with upgrades to the chain being deployed on a fairly regular basis. Unfortunately, as the Evmos network began to gain traction, the Nomad Protocol, which provided canonical bridging between Evmos and other EVM chains fell victim to an unfortunate exploit. Evmos TVL in a matter of hours was essentially drained to nearly zero.

As unfortunate as the incident was, the Evmos Community continued to build and initiated proposals to bring TVL back to the network with the help of a variety of bridges including Gravity Bridge, Axelar, Multichain, Celer, and of course, the IBC protocol for IBC assets. Evmos also managed to continually be amongst the top pools on Osmosis in terms of liquidity, volume, and returns.

Diffusion Finance, the leading DEX on Evmos before the exploit also made a considerable comeback in impressive speed as the Evmos Community rallied behind Proposal #64 which incentivized users to stake their liquidity. In a similar proposal #67, Kinesis Labs, a stablecoin swap and another victim of the Nomad exploit sought to rebuild TVL through community pool incentivization.

Notable Projects

Despite the setbacks, various projects continued to not only build but improve on their platforms.

OrbitRumble - The Orbital Apes team, for example, not only expanded their NFT marketplace, but launched other projects such as an NFT raffle platform OrbitRumble, which saw more than 38,000 raffle tickets minted in a few months.

FootieSZN - We also saw the launch of the FootieSZN, an NFT-based fantasy sports platform, on Evmos mainnet in time for the 2022 World Cup - despite the initial on-chain rejection for a funding request. A huge commendation to the team for continuing their project even without the community support that they had wished for. Although the platform admittedly needs some touch-up, the concept and flow of mechanics were brilliantly displayed.

SpaceFi - The team at SpaceFi has been busy building out their platform on Evmos and zkSync, and although they have not launched on mainnet as of this writing, I thought that they definitely deserved a shoutout for taking a unique approach to their platform.

Soul Network - Soul is a cross-chain DID (decentralized ID) network in Cosmos and Ethereum/EVM ecosystem. They feature three main features, the Badge, the Stamp, and the Soul ID. These three modules make up your on-chain reputation, starting with on-chain achievements, behavioral data-based minting, and an SBT to solidify your name on chain.

Evmos Domain - Evmos domain is a fork of ENS that utilizes the .evmos domain on the Evmos chain. Evmos domain has managed to get decent adoption, with integration with popular DEXs like Diffusion and Orbit Market. The special Evmos-specific domains are easily integrated with existing projects, using ENS’ existing and well built out SDKs.

Hackathons, Networking, Developer Onboarding ⚒

• HackATOM 2022 - The Evmos team made an appearance in Seoul, South Korea in July and August to co-sponsor HackATOM 2022 along with fellow IBC projects such as Cosmos, Juno, and Osmosis with the passing of Proposal 42. “Korea blockchain month” followed days after, in which Evmos attended and both directly and indirectly participated in ETH Seoul, Buidl Asia, Korea Blockchain Week, and nearly a dozen more events in which valuable networking and relationship building with the thriving Cosmos and Ethereum ecosystem in Korea.

• Huobi Momentum Hackathon - In Proposal 27, the Web3Scholarship from Huobi Incubator received community pool funding for the largest Evmos hackathon to date. The number of registrants and projects exceeded expectations (163 projects, 800+ participants) with a good mix of entries in the four different main tracks (39 DeFi, 58 Web3, 41 NFT/Metaverse, 32 Infrastructure projects). The full list of winners and submissions can be found on the Devpost page.

• Covalent / Encode OneMillionWallets Hackathon - The most recent hackathon, which ended a few weeks prior, was a 4-week long joint hackathon by Covalent, Encode Club, and the Evmos Community with a $75K prize pool and a 2K EVMOS bounty by Evmos DAO. The finale and prizegiving video featuring the top 11 projects can be watched on their YouTube channel.

Cumulatively there were roughly 200 projects submitted for the three aforementioned hackathons - and I’ve had the pleasure of reviewing nearly every one of them as a judge. The following submissions were projects that particularly caught my attention, and, in my opinion, projects we should be supporting in the upcoming year. Without further ado…

Promising Evmos Projects to Watch in 2023 🚀

Evmos StayKing House - “Leveraged Evmos Staking”

What It Is: Leveraged staking and lending protocol for Evmos.

EVMOS StayKing House is a decentralized finance protocol that allows stakers to maximize their yields and lenders to earn stable profits by lending their assets to stakers using leverage. StayKing aims in creating better and wider profit-generating opportunities for all participants.

My Take: I’ve had the personal pleasure of meeting the team during Korea Blockchain Week, where they shared their vision for a truly novel DeFi protocol that utilizes the unique features of Evmos which allows for “out of the box” thinking DeFi. I was ecstatic to see the Sooho.io team listed as a hackathon participant, and I was not surprised one bit to see the team take home the Grand Prize. The StayKing House platform is the epitome of Ethereum-style DeFi amplified with the Cosmos ecosystem and the hyperconnected world of IBC assets.

Sooho.io is a Consensys-backed smart contract auditing firm based out of Seoul, with an impressive list of clients including subsidiaries from Samsung and LG. Sooho is also the brains behind the highly successful Kleva Protocol on the Klaytn blockchain, which currently boasts an impressive TVL of $63mil.

The team’s background in smart contract security and success in building TVL on other chains makes this project that much more exciting, as execution and liquidity partners are extremely important.

Share Protocol - “IBC’s 1st Contributor Onboarding & Bounty Platform”

What It Is: The first bounty and talent acquisition platform for the IBC ecosystem, native on Evmos.

Share empowers everyone to build in Web3 by making it easy to discover, join, and contribute to DAOs. Whether its an Evmos, Juno, Osmosis, or any other IBC chain-based DAO, find contributors and compensate them in your own native IBC token as an ERC20 representation.

EVSwap - “Privacy-First Asset Transfers on Evmos”

What It Is: Private transactions via ZK Proof (Simplified Tornado Cash on Evmos)

EVSwap is a decentralized protocol on the EVMOS network that allows users to transfer & receive virtual assets anonymously without the need to compromise their identity. Partly inspired by Tornado Cash, EVSwap leverages Zero-Knowledge proofs to improve transaction privacy by breaking the on-chain link between the recipient and destination addresses.

My Take: Most blockchain ledgers are transparent by nature - however, the right to privacy is still considered by many as a core facet in the ethos of decentralization and blockchain. Privacy-enhancing tools, such as EVSwap, are incredibly value-adding public goods & infrastructure to a growing network.

EvmosTracker.ai - “Evmos DeFi Insights”

What It Is: Insights and Tracking Tool for Evmos DeFi, Wallets, and Tokens

Evmos Tracker Tool is a web app that expands on the functions of Mintscan to provide additional crucial missing features for traders and facilitates the analysis of on-chain data.

My Take: Evmos Tracker is on a mission to provide data and analytics specifically for the Evmos ecosystem. These analytical tools are crucial for ecosystem development and provide insights into the health of the state of DeFi on Evmos that can not be found on existing explorers such as Mintscan or the Evmos EVM Explorer.

We would love to see the continued development of the project and hope to see more features rolled out in the near future!

TokenQL - “Query all tokens”

What It Is: Dead simple GraphQL querying of Evmos tokens and contracts.

TokenQL is a cross chain indexer that acts as a data layer for all ERC-20, ERC-721 and ERC-1155 tokens, using standard web2 tools such as graphql and RESTful APIs. This will provide a base layer data source for all defi, gamefi, dashboards, wallets etc.

My Take: TokenQL is a gem for developers that are already familiar with GraphQL and is looking to query token data quickly and easily. The indexing of the Evmos chain took weeks to complete, and we applaud the TokenQL team for providing this tool that "will open doors for many dapps to build on."

Tribunals - Decentralized NFT-based Voting

What It Is: Snapshot.org-like Gasless Voting w/ NFT Membership

Tribunals is a decentralized NFT-based voting system for DAOs. DAOs can issue NFTs to wallets based on what matters to their community and the holders of these NFTs can create proposals and vote on these proposals whilst they have the NFTs of that DAO.

My Take: Tribunals takes a mix of easy to use NFT-based membership voting rights system and the familiarity of an interface commonly used (Snapshot). We would love to see Tribunals developed further so that it is capable of interacting with and executing smart contract functions. Integration with our Gnosis Safe deployment would make it a killer DAO tool for the Evmos network!

Cora Lending Protocol

What It Is: A No-Liquidation Decentralized Lending Platform

Cora is a decentralized lending platform that allows borrowers to get interest-free and non-liquidatable loans. The Cora Protocol is the first decentralized lending protocol that is powered by Option Strategies to manage the overall risk of a particular Lending Pool and to calculate the Borrowing Fees that borrowers should pay for an interest-free and non-liquidatable loan. This prevents Liquidity Providers to go bankrupt, since the protocol uses quantitative finance analysis methods to define the maximum amount that Liquidity Providers should lend and the right Borrowing Fee for the risk associated.

My Take: Decentralized lending is arguably the cornerstone of DeFi when it comes to decreasing our dependencies on centralized banks. However, it doesn't come without risks. Cora Protocol claims to have solved the liquidation risk by using "decentralized risk management that uses options strategies to calculate the parameters for the lending pools." While the world of DeFi is unpredictable, I welcome and encourage new strategies and models -- because without them, innovation would halt.

Cora Protocol first came into the spotlight with Proposal 55, which was rejected because the proposal did not go through the Evmos Governance processes. HetmanJones of Cora quickly realized the mistake and sincerely apologized to the community in several Governance Meetings as well as on Commonwealth. Ultimately the Cora Protocol team decided to enter into the hackathon before another community funding attempt was made. This decision, in my view, showed the team's long-term commitment to the project and was a very respectable route to take.

If my memory serves me correctly, when this decision was announced by the Cora team during a Governance Meeting, I wished them the best of luck in the hackathon, and that I would love to see Cora Protocol prove every doubter wrong by winning -- as success is the always the best revenge and redeemer.

And that is exactly what they did.

Nomis.cc - “On-chain Credit Scores”

Nomis is a Credit Karma for DeFi or a multi-chain lending aggregator that smartly connects borrowers with DeFi protocols offering custom loan terms based on borrowers’ on-chain credit scores. We help mainstream borrowers and underserved populations get alternative access to capital by placing them in a web2-like experience and enabling them to leverage their on-chain reputation to get better DeFi loan terms.

My Take: The concept of on-chain credit scores are still fairly new and can be gamed fairly easily. However, I see tremendous value in this tool to do a quick check on the wallet activity of a user, especially in the case of fighting sybil attacks. Furthermore, I can also see Nomis used as a governance tool in the future, whereas off-chain governance weights can be partially calculated by the credibility of the wallet.

Would love to see Nomis further developed to get data from the Cosmos side as well, as much of governance data resides not on the EVM side!

Hadron - “Bringing Lending Markets to Evmos”

Hadron Finance is a decentralized lending protocol for individuals and protocols to access financial services. The protocol is permissionless, transparent, and non-custodial.

Hadron Finance’s smart contract money markets are focused on assets within Evmos and the broader Cosmos ecosystem -- with the goal of increasing capital efficiency for all assets in crypto markets.

Users are able to lend any supported assets on our markets, and use the provided capital as collateral to borrow another supported asset.

My Take: I am extremely cautious when it comes to new lending markets, as they are the most exploited types of DeFi protocols - for obvious reasons. Hadron is a direct fork of CREAM Finance, which itself is a fork of Compound Protocol, one of the most battle tested lending markets in Ethereum. However, forking a fully audited, iron-tight protocol onto a new chain does not guarantee safe-haven (e.g. Agave, Aave fork exploit on Gnosis Chain).

Regardless, I am extremely excited for a Compound/Aave-like lending market to launch natively on Evmos, as they bring huge value to the entire ecosystem. Hadron is definitely a project that will be watched very closely, and we wish them the absolute best of luck!

Invincible Evmos - “Asset Management & Hedging”

As EVMOS is the hub of the Ethereum and Cosmos ecosystems, EVMOS DeFi should be able to absorb these ecosystem-based assets. To absorb Cosmos and Ethereum network-based assets, we present Invincible Evmos as a financial product. In other words, it is a DeFi protocol that allows nodes to be released into financial products to assure firm profitability, organic liquidity, and asset management stability.

My Take: I saved Blockwave’s Invincible nodes for last, as I may be a bit biased on this project (I did not partake in the judging of this project). Over the past few months I have met with Blockwave in Seoul to discuss potential projects in which the future DAO treasury can utilize to strengthen the overall durability and stability of the treasury, which is in my opinion, one of the key strategies in the long term success of a self-sustainable DAO. I was very pleased to see great progress being made, and that it won overall runnerup in the Covalent hackathon.

The further development and improvement of this novel concept and protocol will not only strengthen the treasury of Evmos DAO, but to any organization, institution, or user that utilizes its services when fully ready and audited.

Protocol Level Features to Look Forward to in 2023

⚡ Auto-conversion of IBC assets to ERC20

When an IBC asset is brought over to the Evmos chain, the asset remains as an IBC asset on the Cosmos side of the chain. This means that Solidity smart contracts are not able to interact with these assets until they are converted into their respective ERC20 representations, which is currently done on the Evmos Dashboard Assets Page. This creates obvious problems on several fronts, from the degradation of user experience to smart contracts not being able to utilize the full potential of a EVM chain on Cosmos. By removing this manual human step, yet another door of possibilities in cross-chain smart contracting opens.

⚡ Interactivity with Cosmos SDK from Solidity Contracts

Another feature that can unlock a multitude of cross-chain smart contracting and interactions is the ability to interact with the Cosmos SDK via Solidity contracts. Once implemented, features like Gnosis Safe controlled native staking would theoretically be possible. Another great use case would be interacting with the gov module straight from the EVM side without relying on EIP-712 signatures.

⚡Interchain Accounts (ICA)

Interchain Accounts provide the composability and interoperability of smart contracts across different blockchains. This will create a DeFi explosion for application-specific blockchains in the Cosmos ecosystem. With composability in IBC, innovation in distinct applications can be deployed easily, without significant upgrades.

In simpler terms, ICA allows Cosmos ecosystem blockchains access to application features of another chain and carry out any action native to that chain. For example, from the Evmos chain without changing RPCs or switching networks, an ICA would be able to execute transactions on Osmosis such as swaps and LP bonding and vice versa. The implications of this is enormous and will likely mark the beginning of a new era for cross chain DeFi.

⚡ Multiple Assets Registration for RegisterCoin and RegisterERC20

Currently each asset much be registered via governance and on-chain vote individually. This creates a large bottleneck and clutter when trying to register several assets at the same time (e.g. the registration of Axelar assets all required its separate proposal). With this new feature, governance not only saves time and resources, but a batch of assets can be registered (as long as it makes sense to, and the community approves).

Psst, core devs. Missing something important? Let me know and I’ll have it added ASAP.

There are honestly dozens more projects and protocols I wish I had the time to list, but I can say confidently that the Evmos ecosystem will be much better equipped to build novel, native dapps in 2023. With the passing of ECP-1, we also fully intend to recruit the help of the Evmos Community to contribute in as many ways possible.

Stay strong, keep building, keep innovating.

New to Evmos? For developers and teams looking to build on Evmos or deploying on Evmos, we would love to get to know you! Don’t be shy to introduce yourselves on our forum.

Looking to stay up to date with Evmos DAO news? Join our Telegram announcements channel, or find us on the official Evmos discord under “DAO Announcements.”

Interested in governance and/or contributing? Join us for our weekly governance calls on Thursdays in our Discord.

Have any questions, requests, concerns, etc., feel free to PM me on Twitter @EvmosDAO.