What is Cosmos (ATOM)?
Cosmos (ATOM) is a cryptocurrency that supports an ecosystem of scalable and interoperable blockchains. The Cosmos blockchain is stake-based. ATOM holders can stake their tokens towards network maintenance and receive more ATOM in exchange.
Cosmos’ Hub mainchain acts as the primary ledger for Zones. Each Zone is highly adjustable, allowing developers to establish their currencies with customized block validation settings and other features.
These Zones are built using the Cosmos Software Development Kit. Tendermint Core, the Cosmos SDK’s default consensus layer, provides a validator-based consensus mechanism suitable to many Cosmos blockchains. However, each Zone can define how its validators are selected.
The blockchain selects 100 validators for the Cosmos Hub mainnet from the top set of nodes staking ATOM, the network’s utility currency. The voting power of each validator is proportionate to the amount of ATOM staked. A leading validator then proposes more blocks for a vote by others.
Who Created Cosmos (ATOM)?
Ethan Buchman and Jae Kwon are the two founders of the coin.
Ethan is a Sustainability Existentialist, Plaintext Evangelist, and Internet Biophysicist. His goal is to develop tools that encourage self-organization among humans to create functional systems, following the pattern molecules used to self-organize into existence.
Currently, he is concentrating on blockchain technology as a means of enhancing the economic sovereignty of communities around the world.
Ethan is a co-founder of the Cosmos and Tendermint projects and has remained active in ensuring their continued development. He is the CEO of Informal Systems, a company specializing in verifiable distributed systems and organizations.
As the Interchain Foundation’s vice president, he’s responsible for research, development, and promotion. In addition, he operates CoinCulture CryptoConsulting, which provides non-technical and technical audiences with thorough instructions on blockchain technology.
Jae Kwon, on the other hand, Jae Kwon is a blockchain software architect, co-founder of Tendermint, and chairman of the Interchain Foundation. He previously worked in Silicon Valley as a professional developer for Alexa and Yelp, where he supervised the mobile application development team.
He co-founded the productivity service iDoneThis and contributed to several open-source projects. They include a JavaScript-based CoffeeScript compiler/interpreter, the Scramble.io end-to-end encrypted email system, and a bitcoin exchange. These efforts were motivated by the CryptoPunks hacker ethos, which finally led to the current work with Tendermint.
How Does Cosmos (ATOM) Work?
On the Cosmos ecosystem, transaction costs are paid in ATOM, the network’s cryptocurrency.
Cosmos comprises three layers: networking, application, and consensus. The networking enables interaction between hub blockchains, transaction confirmations, and other consensus communications.
The application layer notifies the network of the current state of transactions and balances. Finally, the consensus layer organizes nodes based on their agreement on adding new transactions. Various open-source applications and technologies are made to integrate these three layers.
Is Cosmos (ATOM) a Good Investment?
In 2021, the value of Cosmos (ATOM) surged due to its exceptional performance. More than 250 dApps and services are running on the Cosmos ecosystem, worth over $112 billion in digital assets. Terra (LUNA), Crypto.com Coin, and Binance Chain (BNB) are notable projects developed on Cosmos (CRO).
The publication of its first interface for decentralized finance (DeFi) has led to the price increase of Cosmos (ATOM). It integrates perfectly with the Ethereum blockchain (ETH), the most used blockchain for launching DeFi applications. Plus, its interoperability with Bitcoin is further beneficial (BTC). However, you are responsible for doing your research, and you should never invest more than you can afford to lose.