Why Cosmos, designed as a hub to connect other blockchains to one another, may become one of the most important blockchains, if it works as intended
Jon Evans / TechCrunch : Tweets: @mdudas Tweets: Mike Dudas / @mdudas : “It may seem to investors and speculators that we remain in the grip of a seemingly endless crypto winter; but to engineers, the launch of Cosmos is a strong sign that spring is en route.” ~ @rezendi http://techcrunch.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Three days before this column ran, Cosmos went live as a hub built to bridge otherwise isolated chains like Bitcoin and Ethereum (Cosmos' mainnet launch). Jon Evans reads that launch against the backdrop of a 'crypto winter,' arguing engineers see spring where speculators see endless cold.
The framing matters because it cuts against two earlier data points in this coverage: the skeptical reception of EOS's own 2018 launch, where centralization concerns dominated, and the Carlota Perez reading that put blockchain in the 'gestation' stage with more bubbles ahead (the Perez life-cycle analysis). Evans is staking the opposite bet — that infrastructure, not speculation, is what matures next.
First-order effects
- Developers building on isolated chains gain a live route to move assets and messages between Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Cosmos-connected zones, making the hub itself the piece of infrastructure they must evaluate alongside the base chains.
Second-order effects
- Other chain projects face pressure to make their networks reachable from Cosmos or risk being walled off from the emerging connected cluster — the same interoperability logic later visible in middleware plays like Alchemy raising $15M to connect Dapps to underlying blockchains.
Third-order effects
- If hub-and-zone connectivity holds, value migrates from individual chains toward the layers that route between them, echoing the earlier argument that startups should stop promising a decentralized internet and instead build viable applications on shared rails (TechCrunch's advice to blockchain startups).
The trend: Blockchain infrastructure is shifting from competing standalone chains toward interoperability layers, consistent with the Perez-style view that the sector is moving out of gestation through engineering milestones rather than price rallies.