Is Evmos the Catalyst for Cosmos Season?

Ho Chang Jun -

What is Evmos?

Evmos is an application-agnostic chain that will be interoperable with Ethereum mainnet, EVM-compatible environments, and other BFT chains via IBC, making it easy for users and developers to interact seamlessly between chains.

A unique feature of Evmos is that it can be used with Metamask as it is EVM compatible, which reduces the friction of using a separate wallet for the cosmos ecosystem such as the Kepler wallet.

Evmos launch is planned for February 2022, and it aims to be the EVM Hub of Cosmos, making it easy to deploy smart contracts and communicate within the Cosmos ecosystem with a block time of 7 seconds.

Evmos on Cosmos

Evmos enables interoperability between Ethereum-based applications and Cosmos’ ecosystem of blockchains, including Cosmos, Terra, Crypto.org Chain, Osmosis, and many more.

Evmos’ EVM compatibility together with IBC enabled, allows developers to build with the desired features of Ethereum within a Tendermint environment, allowing users, and their assets, from across the Cosmos ecosystem to access the utility seen on Ethereum.

The Cosmos ecosystem has been growing steadily with new application-specific chains being launched every week. Interchain DEXes have been deployed on Cosmos, among which Osmosis is already the second-largest DEX token by Market Cap and is in the top 10 dexes by volume and TVL despite only being live for six months, which demonstrates the rapid growth of activity in Cosmos.

Ecosystem

AAVE

A governance proposal to implement AAVE on Evmos has been passed with 99.56% voting YES for the proposal.

Evmos deploying Aave v3 on the Evmos blockchain expands lending to the Evmos and greater Cosmos ecosystem. Evmos will be the port of entry to Cosmos for Ethereum users and other EVM chains with the introduction of developer-focused incentives, interoperability across other Cosmos chains and interchain composability.

Evmos will have support for The Graph, Gnosis Safe, and are actively working with Chainlink to finalize support to enable a fully functional Aave v3 deployment by mainnet.

Initial Supported Assets

  • USDC
  • USDT
  • DAI
  • FRAX
  • AAVE
  • WETH
  • WBTC
  • OSMO
  • EVMOS
  • ATOM

CEVMOS

Celestia is working with Evmos to build an optimal settlement layer for EVM rollups. EVM rollups allow users to execute transactions off-chain for cheaper transaction fees while broadcasting the transaction data to an on-chain consensus and data availability layer for security. Rollups offer developers and end-users scalability as transactions are executed off the Layer 1 chain to prevent congestion.

Celestia is the first modular consensus and data availability network, to enable anyone to quickly deploy decentralized blockchains without the overhead of bootstrapping a new consensus network.

Cevmos is an open, modular stack for EVM-based applications utilizing Celestia rollups. The Cevmos stack will centre around an optimized settlement chain for rollups that is based on Evmos. This settlement chain will be implemented as a Celestia rollup by using Optimint instead of the Tendermint Core consensus engine that is used on existing Cosmos chains.

Team

Evmos was founded by Federico Kunze Küllmer and Akash Khosla. Federico has been a core contributor to a number of Cosmos projects including Tendermint, Cosmos SDK, Core IBC, Gravity Bridge and Sommelier. He has been building in the blockchain space since 2017 when he was an exchange student at UC Berkeley, where he joined Blockchain at Berkeley. Akash had been working in the Cosmos ecosystem at Anchorage and as a Co-Founder of Blockchain at Berkeley, the blockchain innovation hub where many of the original Cosmos developers started their careers. He’s been working on blockchain and cryptocurrencies since 2016 as a Software Engineer at Anchorage, Chain and Earn.com, in addition to contributing to open source projects like Interledger.

Community

Tokenomics

EVMOS Token distribution after 4 years will be:

  • 20% team
  • 10% strategic
  • 10% DAO treasury
  • 32% staking rewards
  • 8% airdrop
  • 20% usage incentives

The EVMOS token is used to provide the utility of securing the Proof-of-Stake chain, used for governance proposals, fee distribution and to pay gas fees for running smart contracts on the EVM.

EVMOS token has no max supply and will have an initial supply of 200 million at genesis. Evmos is highly inflationary at the beginning, with over 300 million tokens being issued during the first year. Under the initial token model, the new tokens will be issued under an exponential decay schedule, where the inflation is decreased every year. The target will be to issue 1 billion Evmos tokens in 4 years.

This makes the long term of the network technically deflationary but we see Evmos as a token with an uncapped supply. The community can opt for an alternative inflation model after year 4. For example the community can propose a linear or constant model if the rewards are deemed too low.

Newly released tokens will be distributed in the following way, on a per-block basis:

  • Staking Rewards: 40%
  • Team Vesting: 25%
  • Usage Incentives: 25%
  • Community Pool: 10%

Usage Incentives

25% of the block emission is going toward a pool dedicated to incentivizing users.

Deferred Gas Rebates

Initially, the usage incentives pool on Evmos will sponsor gas payments for end users. The only constraint is that these incentives have to be less than the fees.

In order to incentivize smart contract usage on Evmos, the community will be able to register an incentive to a given smart contract via governance to leverage a portion of the Usage Incentives pool for a set amount of time. The intention for this is to distribute rewards to users of the contract such that it acts as a gas subsidy. This is effectively a way for the network to decide which dApps get gas subsidies for their users, and token holders are best equipped to drive network usage toward these dApps.

Liquidity Mining

In the near future, the plan is to focus on usage incentives that would drive TVL, as it is the means for incentivizing surplus behaviour in several places. The idea would be to allocate Evmos tokens from the usage incentives pool to a contract where you would lock up your DEX LP positions or when borrowing and lending on money markets.

The contract will be governance controlled so that token holders can decide what applications on the Evmos chain would be eligible for usage incentives farming. This effectively is a liquidity mining program that is linked to the base layer but controlled by  governance votes.

In 4 years, this will total 200 million Evmos tokens. The size of this pool is large because users are the backbone of any crypto project. For example, we could see the Usage Incentives being larger if governance decides that the network would benefit from more user growth.

Fees

Evmos has fees that are priced based on network usage. Gas pricing is based on EIP1559. But instead of burning the base fee we redistribute and put that capital to work.

The dApp Store

In Evmos, fees are no longer just burned money or funds that only increase the network ownership shares of network operators. Evmos now splits fees as rewards between developers and network operators for their services via a built-in, shared fee revenue model. This revenue model/fee distribution is called The dApp Store.

It is essentially an app store model, where typically some revenue of app sales goes to app store operator and most of it goes to the developer. The difference here is that the network is an ongoing active service where the network operator rents out much of the infrastructure needed to run a decentralized application.

It rewards developers based on the value and impact of their dApp, rather than their ability to spin up a new governance token and leverage connections to capital. Those building on Evmos get a real stake in the growth and governance of the protocol itself.

This fee distribution will be implemented as a 50/50 split between contract deployers and validators at genesis and can be tuned by governance. To prevent spam, contracts that are eligible have to go through governance.

Staking Rewards

Validators and delegators are crucial to ensuring security of the Evmos blockchain and help with block proposing and verification. These roles could expand to provide oracles, secure bridges, provide rollup services to Celestia or other Evmos child chains, making them critical participants.

At genesis, there will be 150 active validators which will be dependent on the amount delegated to each validator. The number of possible validators is subject to governance and can be adjusted.

40% of newly released tokens will go towards rewarding the active validators and their delegators proportionally based on the amount of Evmos tokens staked. Validators charge a commission rate to their delegators on staking rewards earned. Each validator may choose their own commission rate, but there is a network-wide mandated minimum commission rate of 5%.

Team Vesting

In order to build a set of world class teams, 25% of the tokens per epoch are going to be issued to developers of the Evmos protocol. These 200 million Evmos tokens are subject to a cliff and are vesting. These will not be allowed to be transferred nor staked until they are released.

Token holders can determine whether or not they want to have the current dev team involved in the network and choose to reclaim any unreleased tokens from the dev team through governance and redirect them.

Evmos Rektdrop

Evmos’ native token, EVMOS, is used to secure the Evmos network through staking, to enable governance voting for network decisions, and to pay transactions fees on the network. The Rektdrop will launch with 80 million EVMOS at genesis.

The Evmos token is being airdropped to Cosmos and Ethereum ecosystem users, with the snapshot being taken on 25th November 2021 at 1900 UTC.

Cosmos Hub Users:

  • ATOM Governance Prop 44 voters
  • ATOM Delegators

Osmosis Users:

  • OSMO Delegators
  • OSMO/ATOM LPs
  • OSMO/AKT
  • ATOM/AKT LPs
  • OSMO/UST LPs
  • ION Holders

IBC Token Transfers: IBC is the core of what makes Cosmos special and they will be rewarding users who take advantage of Cosmos’ capabilities. This applies to all users that have transferred tokens to and from the Osmosis chain

Ethereum Gasdrop: Ethereum sparked a revolution in crypto by making smart contracts widely accessible to developers and users. Users of the following protocols will be rewarded based on their usage of these apps proportional to their gas expenditure.

  • AAVE
  • Uniswap
  • SushiSwap
  • Compound
  • Curve
  • OpenSea
  • Gnosis Safe
  • MetaMask Swaps
  • ENS
  • Dai
  • Perpetual Protocol
  • Yearn Vaults
  • OlympusDAO
  • Opyn
  • DyDx

EVM Bridges: Bridges are critical to the movement of funds between chains that don’t have IBC enabled. These are gas heavy, so Evmos will be airdropping users who have been using them.

  • Wormhole
  • Optics
  • Polygon
  • Avalanche
  • xDai
  • Arbitrum
  • Anyswap
  • Connext
  • Synapse
  • Hop Protocol

The Rugged: This is a selection of events on Ethereum, but users who are affected by the THORChain exploits will receive it as well, as it is the first chain on Cosmos to get rekt.

  • MEV Victims
  • EIP1559
  • THORChain (1 and 2)
  • FEI/TRIBE Genesis Contributors
  • CREAM (1 and 2)
  • Poly Network
  • BZX (Flashloan hack)
  • Iron Finance
  • Pickle Finance

Early Individual Contributors: Evmos has been a huge team effort that goes far beyond the resources of the Tharsis team. These contributors have doubled down on working on core things for the ecosystem but we felt they deserved more for their valuable work. The list includes teams that work on upstream dependencies such as Cosmos SDK, Tendermint, and IBC core, early contributors to the Ethermint library, Orijtech, and many individuals along the way who have made a significant impact to our project.

Airdropped users will have to clear 4 tasks in order to claim the full airdrop, 25% for each task. There will be limits that could disqualify users from the airdrops such as:

  • Account doesn’t exist on-chain at the snapshot time
  • Did not meet the minimum token thresholds (not finalized yet)
  • Delegated your tokens to centralized exchanges or 0% commission validators

Risks

The biggest risk for Evmos is that there are currently many EVM compatible chains such as Avalanche, Fantom and Binance Smart Chain which has many working dApps and attracted more than 10B of TVL on their chain, which will be tough for Evmos to compete with unless they can produce better dApps and incentive programs in order to attract users from other chains to bridge over.

Conclusion

Evmos is a really interesting project that combines the familiar of metamask's UIUX that has the largest userbase in defi, and the modularity of the cosmos which is a big narrative this year, it wont be surprising if Evmos gets a large influx of users and liquidity. This could kickstart the long-awaited cosmos season this year with more developers building on cosmos.

Building a new chain takes time as developers need time to build their project and it won’t be different for Evmos as well. With their interesting token value accrual, I expect many of the users and developers to stay on the chain to continue using and building on the ecosystem.

Evmos is expected to evolve with its community’s needs, the iteration that launches on day one may not look the same as the Evmos six months, a year, or a many years from now, and it is definitely an ecosystem to have on your radar.