Tokens Economics

When the protocol can support thousands of seaprate tokens, Cosmos’ native crypto is ATOM and there is about 261,000,000 ATOM in total with about 210,709,121 circulating as of the second quarter in 2021. there’s no capped max supply like in the BTC network. Atom’s main functions in the Cosmos ecosystem are Staking to secure the network, maintain consensus, paying transaction fees, and chain governance.

ATOM tokens can be staked to take part in the Cosmos PoS consensus mechanism so all holders that stake their coins could receive additional ATOM as a reward. Keep in mind that the rewards that users earn are not the same as the inflation rate but they are informed by the inflation rate. Aside from the inflation and newly created ATOM, staking rewards are funded by transaction fees. Staking ATOM doesn’t involve risks as double-signing or misbehaving because validators could face punishment by having some of the coins burned.

A user can stake ATOM by delegating the coins to their wallet to validators and starting a staking transaction. Staked ATOM is locked so it can’t be traded or transferred but staked ATOM can be unstacked if the user wishes to transfer it. The unstaking takes 21 days. The stakers also have teh chance to take part in the governance of the Cosmos network. Cosmos conducted its ICO over a 2-week period in 2017 with fundraising and the chain genesis occurred later in 2027 as well. The token distribution is as follows:

10% of the ATOMs were allocated to the InterChain Foundation, 10% to tendermint development, Initial donors 5, Prefundariaiser donors 75%. with the main purpose of ATOM being to secure the Cosmos chain, ATOM can be traded when not staked and it is available for exchange on other platforms like Kraken, Binance, Coinbase, and Poloniex as well as other exchanges.