Cosmos Labs Pitches Enterprise Future at Cosmoverse 2025, But Ecosystem Attrition Casts a Shadow
Cosmos Labs used its annual conference in Split, Croatia to announce a strategic shift toward institutional clients, while ATOM continued to trade near its lowest levels since 2020 and several ecosystem chains closed down during the year.
Cosmoverse 2025 ran October 30 through November 1 in Split, Croatia, bringing together over 60 sessions and a hackathon that drew more than 100 builders from across Europe and beyond. The fifth edition of the event served as the formal launch pad for Cosmos Labs' repositioning: away from a permissionless, developer-first multi-chain ecosystem and toward curated, enterprise-grade blockchain infrastructure for banks, governments, and capital markets firms. Representatives from the European Central Bank and the Croatian National Bank participated in open discussions about monetary system futures at the event, which organizers described as a historic first for a web3 conference.
The Enterprise Pivot
Cosmos Labs co-CEOs Maghnus Mareneck and Barry Plunkett, along with CMO Nico Poggi, outlined a strategy centered on what the organization calls the "Cosmos Stack." The stack combines three core components: the Cosmos SDK (a framework for building application-specific blockchains, at version 0.53 in 2025 with version 0.54 targeting 2026), CometBFT (a consensus engine targeting up to 10,000 transactions per second), and IBC version 2, also called Eureka (a cross-chain messaging protocol now connecting 119 chains). Cosmos Labs also open-sourced a Cosmos EVM with account abstraction support and introduced Proof-of-Authority modules, which allow regulated entities to run private chains without issuing a public token.
Mareneck stated that financial institutions are choosing Cosmos for sovereignty, scalability, and control rather than depending on other blockchains. Plunkett added that IBC is being extended to reach Solana and Ethereum Layer 2 networks. The 2026 roadmap targets 5,000 sustained transactions per second with 500-millisecond block times. Additional roadmap targets include a 30x improvement in IAVLx write speed, reducing commit time from 150 milliseconds to 20 milliseconds, and approximately 2x internal TPS gains through BlockSTM parallel transaction processing.
Cosmos Labs claims more than 200 companies are now using the Cosmos Stack, including Polygon, Hyperliquid, Ripple, Binance, and Noble (which has since announced plans to migrate away from the ecosystem). Enterprise adopters named at the event included SWIFT, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp (SMBC), Figure, Ondo Finance, and Progmat, a Japanese digital securities platform. That figure comes from Cosmos Labs itself and has not been independently verified.
Separately, Cosmos Labs and co-developer Peersyst confirmed they are building two central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) in Latin America, though no country names or launch timelines were disclosed.
ATOM: Tokenomics Under Review, Price Under Pressure
Cosmos Hub's native token, ATOM, was trading around $2.20 in December 2025, well below the $4.61 to $4.81 range it held between April and July 2025 and roughly 90 percent below its all-time high of approximately $44.70 set in January 2022. As of June 2026, ATOM was trading at approximately $1.69, according to CoinGecko.
The token has a circulating supply of about 203 million out of a total supply of roughly 261 million.
Poggi outlined three strategic pillars for the Hub: dedicated ecosystem teams called Hub Units, an enhanced validator delegation program to support network health, and a redesign of ATOM tokenomics. That redesign is still in early stages. No concrete proposal has been published, and Cosmos Labs said it is working with research firms and gathering community feedback before any changes are formalized.
Earlier in 2025, the Hub also abandoned plans to add CosmWasm smart contract support, citing insufficient developer demand. That decision closed a potential on-ramp for Rust and Solidity developers who had been considering building directly on the Hub, and it sits within a broader pattern of developer attrition that has affected the wider Cosmos ecosystem.
Ecosystem Attrition Is a Real Counterweight
The Cosmoverse announcements arrived against a backdrop of contraction. Multiple Cosmos ecosystem chains closed or stalled in 2025, including Comdex, Kujira, Evmos, Stride, Quasar/Tower, and Picasso/Compostable.
Noble, which handled native USDC issuance and generated the highest IBC transaction volume of any chain, began migrating away from the ecosystem.
Osmosis (OSMO) dropped approximately 79 percent from end-2024 levels, and Juno's token nearly went to zero.
Despite that contraction, IBC activity remained substantial. The protocol recorded more than 7.2 million transactions in 2025, with over $3.5 billion in 30-day transfer volume as of December 2024 and more than $41 billion across the top ten cross-chain routes over ten months in 2024. Monthly active IBC users reached 1.5 million in December 2024. Those numbers provide a baseline against which any further ecosystem shrinkage will be measured.
For developers in South Asia and Africa, this context matters. South Asian countries, particularly India and Pakistan, recorded an 80 percent surge in crypto adoption between January and July 2025 compared to the same period in 2024, according to a DeFi adoption study published via ResearchGate. India also has a large pool of Go-language developers (the Cosmos SDK is written in Go), and DoraHacks, which co-hosted the Cosmoverse hackathon, maintains significant engagement across India and Southeast Asia.
Nigeria's crypto ecosystem processed around $59 billion in transactions across 2024 and 2025 combined, and both Nigeria and Kenya have active developer communities weighing which infrastructure layers to build on.
The Cosmos Stack's Proof-of-Authority module is technically relevant to CBDC deployments across these regions. India's Digital Rupee pilot is ongoing, and several African nations including Zimbabwe have already launched or explored digital currencies. If the Latin American CBDC projects produce a working reference architecture, regulators in South Asia and East Africa will have a concrete case study to evaluate.
At the same time, the enterprise-first pivot raises a real trade-off. Public goods funding, permissionless chain deployment, and open DeFi infrastructure may receive less priority than private institutional services. Builders in lower-income markets who have historically depended on public Cosmos infrastructure should weigh that shift before committing to the stack.
What Comes Next
Cosmoverse 2026 will move to Hong Kong, marking the first time Cosmos has held its flagship event in Asia. That geographic shift reflects growing institutional interest in the region, though Africa's developer community has historically been underrepresented at flagship Cosmos events and the Hong Kong venue does not directly address that gap.
VALT, a personal data sovereignty startup founded by Zac Wickstrom, won the Cosmoverse 2025 pitch competition. VALT's focus on personal data sovereignty carries direct policy relevance in Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa, where active debates about data localization laws and digital identity frameworks make the concept immediately actionable for regulators and builders alike.
The ATOM tokenomics review, the Latin America CBDC builds, and the IBC expansion to Solana and Ethereum L2s are the near-term developments most worth watching as Cosmos Labs tests whether its institutional pitch translates into measurable on-chain activity.