ATOM halvingLet's take a closer look at what's going on with Cosmos.
In the past, the top 100 cryptocurrencies and crypto projects were mostly dominated by eth-related projects, that's still the case, but there is one ecosystem that caught up a lot during the bear market, it's Cosmos. Currently, 8 out of 100 are using Cosmos technology (ATOM, CRO, RUNE, INJ, TIA, KAVA, DYDX), with some more coming close to the top 100 like OSMO and AKT.
The rest are basically ETH related projects, with one moving to Solana (RNDR) and also some adopting AVAX as an alternative to eth L2s. But overall it looks to me like Cosmos is the strongest ecosystem to catch up with Ethereum.
Why is that? With Cosmos, anyone can create their own chain and connect it to the other chains using IBC (Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol). IBC can also be implemented in non-Cosmos chains like currently in SOL and AVAX.
There are many bridges, but IBC is becoming the most dominant and trusted bridge. When a chain implements IBC, it breaks out of its closed ecosystem and assets can move freely between all other chains that implement IBC.
During the bear market, Cosmos added a new feature called ICS (Interchain Security). This allows anyone to create their own Cosmos chain without using their own validator set, instead using ATOM's validators for security. When using ICS, the transaction fees go to the ATOM stakers.
There is now an interesting project using ICS called Noble. Circle is using Noble to bring it's USDC stablecoin to Cosmos. This is very important because Cosmos lost its main stablecoin UST after the Luna collapse and has been missing a major stable in its ecosystem ever since. On November 28th, Circle will activate it's Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP) for Noble. It will allow users on Ethereum to burn their USDC there and generate new USDC on Noble.
DYDX, the leading decentralized derivatives exchange, is currently moving to its own chain on Cosmos. With the activation of the CCTP, USDC from Ethereum can be easily moved to the DYDX chain, kickstarting DYDX v4 and USDC on Cosmos.
Now let's talk about the halving. When you look at the Cosmos chart, it sometimes looks like it is underperforming. But people forget that it has high inflation and that inflation is paid out as a bonus. In addition, Cosmos also had a lot of top airdrops, which gave additional yield and are not visible in the chart.
After a wild 2 weeks, the ATOM proposal 848 was finally passed yesterday, which reduces the inflation to a maximum of 10%. It's a sudden halving and it was not guaranteed that this halving would come, in fact it just flipped from no to yes during the last day. So this halving should not be priced in. Imo ATOM solving its issuance problem was the last piece of the puzzle for ATOM to turn bullish. High inflation was used to get a 67% bonded rate and punish non-stakers But high inflation has two problems, even if only non stakers were diluted. We have to pay taxes on the staking income, so even the stakers get diluted. The other problem is that prices are inelastic, and the constant selling of ATOMs by stakers hurts the price more than expected. Some voices are afraid that ATOM will become less safe with lower inflation, but I think there is no evidence for this and the truth should be revealed in the next few months.
Because the halving proposal was controversial, some of the pro-inflation crowd are planning to fork ATOM and airdrop the new token to "No Voters". This gives me BCH flashbacks. There is a risk that some of them will sell their ATOM, but I think that would be a bad choice. What we saw with BCH is that it's hard to get a minority behind the same goal. BCH forked twice more just because people could not agree on its direction and the forks became irrelevant. Those who sold their bitcoin for those forks made a bad decision. This would be clear if ATOM can keep a high bonded rate despite lower inflation. So I think even if you are against the lower inflation its better to hold on to ATOM in case you are wrong.
Now that we have the fundamentals, let's look at the chart. I think that the price is forming an inverse head and shoulders pattern and should break it fairly soon with a target of ~$18. If that happens and the price hits the target. There should be a big Adam and Eve double bottom on the chart with a target around 41$. This would mean that ATOM would have to reach back to its old ath and if it can break out of it, it has a chance to reach the channel high as a moon target of around 200$ at the top of the new cycle.
A lot of cryptos will be pumping if the new cycle happens as expected. Therefore, I think it is also important to keep an eye on the ATOM dominance, which is also currently forming an inverse head and shoulders pattern, which would then make it break out of its logarithmic downtrend.
All this makes me think that ATOM could be a top alt pick for this cycle.
Special thanks to twitter.com for helping me figure things out about Cosmos, follow the guy as he knows more about Cosmos than I do ;)
Also DYOR, no financial advice!
sources:
(I wanted to post the sources here, but TradingView did not allow me to post the links, so you will have to fact check yourself.)
