Author: Nancy, PANews
In the world of anime, Astro Boy has never had just one ending. He is both the hero who merges with the sun, remembered by the ages; and the discarded scrap metal, forgotten in a corner after his energy runs out.
In the crypto world, Cosmos is known as "Astro" in Chinese communities due to the phonetic similarity of its token ATOM to the Chinese name "A Tong Mu" (阿童木), a popular cartoon character. Once hailed as a hero in the blockchain space with a vision of connecting all things, Cosmos has gradually fallen short of expectations amid tensions between technological development, ecosystem growth, and conflicting interests. Today, this once highly anticipated project is facing ecosystem decline, asset migration, and a reassessment of its narrative.
The star product Noble, which once supported half the sky, has chosen to leave.
On January 20, Noble officially announced its departure from the Cosmos SDK, migrating to an independent high-performance EVM L1, with plans to launch the mainnet on March 18.
This decision has sparked heated discussions within the Cosmos community. In the eyes of many, Noble is one of the key forces in the history of Cosmos DeFi development and also serves as a central stablecoin hub in the Cosmos IBC (Inter-Blockchain Communication) ecosystem.
For a long time, the development of DeFi in Cosmos was hindered by the lack of native, highly liquid stablecoins. This directly led to a highly fragmented liquidity ecosystem, forcing reliance on cross-chain bridges for capital allocation, which themselves carry trust costs and security risks. Even more devastatingly, the algorithmic stablecoin UST, which the Cosmos ecosystem had heavily relied on, collapsed in 2022, causing a massive shock to the ecosystem.
The real turning point came in 2023. At that time, Noble partnered with Circle, positioning itself as a general-purpose asset issuance chain specifically built for the IBC ecosystem, and became the first native USDC issuance platform within the IBC ecosystem.
With the introduction of native stablecoins, Cosmos has finally gained the ability to compete with other major public blockchains in liquidity. DeFi TVL has rapidly rebounded from its low point, with transaction volume and user activity increasing simultaneously.
While the Cosmos ecosystem is recovering, Noble has also experienced rapid growth. It has raised over $18 million in cumulative funding and is gradually becoming one of the core infrastructures of the IBC ecosystem.
To date, Noble has cumulatively processed over $22 billion in trading volume and has become the primary liquidity layer for more than 50 blockchains. Meanwhile, Noble's ecosystem partners have issued over $250 million in assets, including various stablecoins such as USDC, EURe, USDN, and USDY, with approximately 30,000 global monthly active users.
From the recent actual operational data of IBC, the importance of Noble becomes more apparent.
According to Map of Zones data, over the past 30 days, Noble IBC has achieved a trading volume of $93.84 million, firmly ranking first among the 110 zones connected via IBC. Its volume is more than 1.8 times that of the second-place project, Osmosis. Meanwhile, the majority of the other chains either remain nearly stagnant or exhibit low monthly trading volumes. To a large extent, the current activity level of the IBC ecosystem is being driven by Noble.
However, compared to trading volume, the nature of the capital is more worth noting. In the past 30 days, the top-ranked Noble had an average single-transaction amount of approximately $1,272, while the second-ranked Osmosis had only $56, and dYdX had about $28. At the same time, during the same period, Noble had fewer than 48,000 transaction addresses, yet it contributed a significantly larger capital volume than other chains. This indicates that Noble is not relying on a large number of retail transactions to maintain its data performance, but rather serves as the primary channel for large capital inflows into the Cosmos ecosystem.
The departure of core liquidity infrastructure is undoubtedly a severe blow to the Cosmo ecosystem.
Noble's reasoning for this migration, though tactful, hits the mark. He argues that the EVM ecosystem offers a more mature toolchain and a more concentrated pool of developer resources, which will help deliver features more efficiently and better serve mainstream applications and institutional demands. In contrast, the Cosmos ecosystem has gradually become a limiting factor in terms of product iteration and functional expansion.
Astro Boy with a broken arm says goodbye to "selling tractors in toy stores."
Noble's escape is not an isolated case, but rather a microcosm of the crisis within the Cosmos ecosystem.
"Cosmos ecosystem is nearly on the brink of death, with many projects already shutting down (e.g., Penumbra). Some projects have transitioned to maintenance mode and redirected their resources elsewhere (e.g., Osmosis), while others are in the process of exiting (e.g., Noble). User and market interest in Cosmos has dropped to historic lows," noted Christopher Goes, co-founder of the ecosystem project Anoma, in a recent post.
In fact, over the past more than a year, dozens of Cosmos ecosystem projects have chosen to shut down or migrate, spanning multiple sectors including stablecoins, privacy, lending, DEX, and NFTs, with almost none left untouched. Some projects reached their end due to weak growth, unsustainable revenue models, and continuous loss of developers. Others gradually bled out under the impact of security incidents, liquidity exhaustion, or macro market changes, ultimately deciding to abandon the Cosmos path. Meanwhile, migrating to other ecosystems such as Base, Arbitrum, Solana, and Sei, or even building independent blockchains directly, is becoming an increasingly realistic and common choice.
Christopher Goes also further pointed out that the Interchain Foundation (ICF) has clearly shifted its funding focus toward business development and value capture for ATOM, reducing its priority for the broader ecosystem, and even choosing to abandon some aspects of it. Meanwhile, the entire industry is moving toward a more product- and revenue-centric model, with resources and attention concentrating on a few existing ecosystems and assets.
This marginalization crisis stems from both internal factors and changes in the external environment.
As a core narrative, the Cosmos Appchain model has faced challenges in reality. Launching and maintaining a blockchain independently requires significantly more investment than initially anticipated. Particularly for most medium- and small-sized projects, this economic model is nearly unsustainable in a bear market. More importantly, compared to the smooth experiences offered by other ecosystems, Cosmos's fragmentation issues have yet to be fundamentally resolved.
Moreover, the token economics of ATOM also exacerbate the problem. High inflation in the early stages indeed helped incentivize staking and enhance security, but without an effective value absorption mechanism, it continuously dilutes token holders in the long run. Furthermore, application chains built on the SDK hardly rely on ATOM itself. They each have their own native tokens for gas, staking, and governance. The fees and value generated from the ecosystem's growth do not flow back to ATOM, failing to form an effective value capture loop. The end result is that application chains become increasingly "fat," while ATOM keeps getting "thinner."
In addition, internal governance conflicts are seen as further weakening Cosmos's execution capabilities. From early disagreements among co-founders to heated debates over adjusting the ATOM inflation rate, and even threats of forking at one point; subsequently, the ICF, responsible for ecosystem oversight, was accused of issues such as opaque fund management and insufficient developer support, leading to a gradual loss of community trust.
Last year, Cosmos Labs (formerly Interchain Labs) also faced controversy over centralization. At the time, Cosmos network validator POSTHUMAN publicly pointed out that Cosmos Labs did not represent the broader Cosmos community, as its voting power was lower than that of Cosmostation, and it had close ties with the ICF. Its advocacy for a "survival of the fittest" approach, halting EVM implementation, freezing ISC-related payments, and promoting a private chain path led to projects leaving the ecosystem, damaging Cosmos' reputation and the interests of ATOM holders. POSTHUMAN called for community and builders to take the lead in development.
External competition is equally significant. Between 2023 and 2025, high-performance blockchains like L2 and Solana rapidly captured the attention of developers and users, offering lower barriers to entry and stronger liquidity aggregation capabilities. In contrast, Cosmos's complexity has gradually become a disadvantage rather than a moat.
In response to recent pessimistic sentiments in the market, RoboMcGobo, the growth lead of the Cosmos ecosystem, recently stated that the so-called wave of project closures is not unique to Cosmos, but rather a systemic deflationary trend across the entire industry. Whether it's Solana, Arbitrum, or Base, activity levels have significantly declined. The era of "crypto serving crypto," characterized by competition among existing projects, has come to an end.
In his view, Cosmos's past issue was that it had been "selling tractors in a toy store." The Cosmos SDK is essentially an industrial-grade heavy-duty tool, yet it has been widely used to build simple applications like DeFi or NFTs, where the use cases do not match its full capabilities. Its programmable interoperability, tamper-proof ledger, customizable protocols, and compliance tools remain advantages that are hard to match with other blockchain solutions. At the same time, a frequently overlooked fact is that some of the world's largest banks and governments are using Cosmos to drive their next phase of growth.
RoboMcGobo also stated that Cosmos's growth focus next year will be to place its SDK in the hands of customers who can truly create real-world value. As the crypto industry moves toward its "adulthood," more projects that remain in the "toy store era" will exit or shut down. It is a natural progression to move beyond products and use cases from the childhood phase.