Cosmos is facing internal and external difficulties: its flagship project Noble has left, and its crypto "toy" has been abandoned.

Author: Nancy, PANews

In the world of anime, Astro Boy never has just one ending. He is both a hero who merges into the sun and is remembered by the times, and a piece of scrap metal forgotten in a corner after his energy is exhausted.

In the crypto world, Cosmos, nicknamed "Astro Boy" in the Chinese community due to the similar pronunciation of its token ATOM, once debuted as a hero cloaked in the mantle of the Internet of Things. However, it gradually botched its script in the tug-of-war between technology, ecosystem, and interests. Today, this once-hot project is facing ecosystem bleeding, asset migration, and a re-evaluation of its narrative.

Noble, once a flagship product that held up half the market, has chosen to leave.

On January 20, Noble officially announced that it would break away from the Cosmos SDK and migrate 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 development history of Cosmos DeFi, and also the central stablecoin in the Cosmos IBC (Inter-Chain Communication Protocol) ecosystem.

For a long time, Cosmos's DeFi development was hampered by the lack of native, highly liquid stablecoins. This directly led to highly fragmented liquidity within the ecosystem, forcing reliance on cross-chain bridges for fund allocation, which themselves come with trust costs and security risks. Even more critically, UST, the algorithmic stablecoin that the Cosmos ecosystem heavily relied on, collapsed in 2022, causing a huge blow to its ecosystem.

The real turning point came in 2023. At that time, Noble partnered with Circle, positioning itself as a universal asset issuance chain built specifically for the IBC ecosystem, and becoming the first native USDC issuance platform in the IBC ecosystem.

With the introduction of native stablecoins, Cosmos finally has the ability to compete with other mainstream public chains for liquidity. DeFi TVL has rebounded rapidly from its trough, with trading volume and user activity increasing in tandem.

As the Cosmos ecosystem recovers, Noble itself has also experienced rapid growth. It has raised over $18 million in funding and has gradually become one of the core infrastructure components of the IBC ecosystem.

To date, Noble has processed over $22 billion in transactions and has become a major 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 monthly active users worldwide.

Recent operational data from IBC clearly demonstrates Noble's importance.

According to Map of Zones data, Noble's IBC transaction volume reached $93.84 million in the past 30 days, ranking first among the 110 IBC-connected Zones, and its volume is more than 1.8 times that of Osmosis, which ranks second. Meanwhile, a large number of other chains are either almost at a standstill or experiencing sluggish monthly transaction volumes. To some extent, the current activity of the IBC ecosystem is largely supported by Noble.

However, more noteworthy than transaction volume is the nature of the funds involved. Over the past 30 days, Noble, ranking first, had an average transaction value of approximately $1272, followed by Osmosis at only $56 and dYdX at approximately $28. Meanwhile, Noble had fewer than 48,000 transaction addresses during the same period, yet contributed significantly more funds than other chains. This suggests that Noble does not rely on a large number of retail investor transactions to maintain its data, but rather serves as a primary channel for large funds entering Cosmos.

The departure of core liquidity infrastructure is undoubtedly a heavy blow to the Cosmo ecosystem.

Noble's reasoning for the migration, while subtle, hits the nail on the head. They believe the EVM ecosystem has a more mature toolchain and more concentrated developer resources, enabling it to deliver features more efficiently and serve the needs of mainstream applications and institutions; in contrast, the Cosmos ecosystem has gradually become a limiting factor in product iteration and feature expansion.

Astro Boy, with his missing arm, bids farewell to "selling tractors in toy stores".

Noble's escape is not an isolated case, but a microcosm of the ecological crisis facing Cosmos.

"The Cosmos ecosystem is almost dead. Many projects have shut down (such as Penumbra), some have switched to maintenance mode and moved their resources elsewhere (such as Osmosis), and some are withdrawing (such as Noble). User and market interest in Cosmos has dropped to an all-time low," Christopher Goes, co-founder of the ecosystem project Anoma, recently wrote.

In fact, over the past year, dozens of Cosmos ecosystem projects have chosen to shut down or migrate, covering multiple sectors including stablecoins, privacy, lending, DEX, and NFTs—almost none have escaped this fate. Some projects have met their end due to sluggish growth, unsustainable revenue models, and a continuous loss of developers; others have gradually succumbed to the impact of security incidents, liquidity shortages, or macroeconomic market changes, ultimately choosing to abandon the Cosmos route. Migrating to other ecosystems such as Base, Arbitrum, Solana, and Sei, or even building independent blockchains, is becoming an increasingly realistic and common choice.

Christopher Goes further pointed out that the Interchain Foundation (ICF) has clearly stated that it will shift its funding focus to business development and ATOM value capture, reducing its priority on the broader ecosystem, and even choosing to abandon it altogether. The entire industry is moving towards a more product- and revenue-centric model, concentrating on a few existing ecosystems and assets.

This crisis of marginalization stems both from within and from changes in the external environment.

As its core narrative, Cosmos' Appchain model faces challenges in reality. The investment required to independently launch and maintain a blockchain long-term far exceeds early expectations. This economic model is almost unsustainable, especially for most small and medium-sized projects, in a bear market. More importantly, compared to the smooth experience of other ecosystems, Cosmos' fragmentation problem has never been fundamentally resolved.

ATOM's token economy further exacerbated the predicament. While prolonged high inflation did initially incentivize staking and enhance security, it continuously diluted holders in the absence of an effective value absorption mechanism. Furthermore, application chains built on the SDK hardly relied on ATOM itself; they possessed their own native tokens for gas, staking, and governance. Fees and value generated by ecosystem growth did not flow back to ATOM, failing to create an effective value capture loop. The end result was that application chains became increasingly "fat," while ATOM continued to "lean."

Furthermore, internal governance conflicts are believed to have further weakened Cosmos's execution capabilities. From early disagreements among co-founders to heated debates surrounding ATOM inflation rate adjustments, and even a fork threat at one point; subsequently, the ICF, responsible for ecosystem oversight, was accused of opaque fund management and insufficient developer support, leading to a gradual erosion of community trust.

Last year, Cosmos Labs (formerly Interchain Labs) also faced a centralization controversy. Cosmos network validator POSTHUMAN publicly pointed out at the time that Cosmos Labs did not represent the Cosmos community as a whole, its voting power was lower than that of Cosmostation, and it had close ties with the ICF. Its advocacy of a survival-of-the-fittest approach, halting the implementation of EVM, freezing ISC-related payments, and promoting a private chain path led to project exodus, damaged Cosmos' reputation and the interests of ATOM holders, and called for development to be led by the community and builders.

External competition is equally undeniable. Between 2023 and 2025, high-performance public chains such as L2 and Solana rapidly gained traction among developers and users, offering options with lower barriers to entry and stronger liquidity aggregation capabilities. In contrast, Cosmos's complexity has gradually become a disadvantage rather than a competitive advantage.

In response to recent pessimistic market sentiment, Robo McGobo, Head of Ecosystem Growth at Cosmos, stated that the so-called wave of project shutdowns is not unique to Cosmos, but rather a systemic deflation across the entire industry. Whether it's Solana, Arbitrum, or Base, activity levels are declining significantly, and the era of a zero-sum game of "crypto serving crypto" is over.

In his view, Cosmos's past problem was that it "was selling tractors in a toy store." The Cosmos SDK, essentially an industrial-grade heavy-duty tool, was heavily used to build simple DeFi or NFT applications, a mismatch between its application scenarios and capabilities. Its programmable interoperability, immutable ledger, protocol customization, and compliance tools remain advantages that other blockchain solutions struggle to match. Meanwhile, an often overlooked fact is that some of the world's largest banks and governments are using Cosmos to drive their next phase of growth.

Robo McGobo also stated that Cosmos' growth focus next year will be on delivering the SDK to customers who can truly create real-world value. As the crypto industry enters its "adulthood," more projects that remain in the "toy store era" will leave or shut down, and abandoning products and use cases from their childhood is a natural progression.