Cosmos ATOM Alignment (Project Highway) | Berachain DeFi News, MANTRA OM Price Explosion & More

Bonas deas, bonas deas, starting off with Barachain, which I know a lot of you, based on the comments I get from recent videos, really, really dislike, probably because of the AirDraw, because of the price performance, and the fact that they have previously distanced themselves from the Cosmos brand, which I also dislike, right? I want them to be proudly representing Cosmos, and there is a path. If we look at Greg Ozuri and Akash Network, if you look at JP from Mantra, right, there is a path to be successful, to be sovereign, to be innovative, to be exciting, while at the same time also elevating, embracing, and pushing Cosmos, right, and to be proudly representing Cosmos. So I wish Barachain did that 100%, and I did everything I could over the past two years, ever since I've really met Smokey and the Barachain community, to fix that and contribute to that. So far, I haven't really achieved it, but I think there's still a window that we can get Barachain realigned with Cosmos, especially now with new leadership. In the meantime, it is important to follow people like Steven, because right now, Barachain is so almost hated, that people are just turning a blind eye and say like, ah, Barachain is not going to make it, it's a shit coin, and a shit chain. And at the same time, you do have a lot of opportunities right now, especially because a lot of people are turning their backs in the early days. I'm personally very convinced that Barachain is going to make it. Of course, you can say I'm biased, because I have invested into Barachain like two years ago. I also got an RFC allocation, which I'm going to show you in a second. But Steven is the DeFi master, the DeFi yield master, and he is just printing money left and right. And there's a lot of strategies right now, also with Stride for the liquid staking for BGT, that you can just print money. And he's literally giving all the instructions on how to do that, right? So check that out and get familiar with the Barachain hub, because that's where you find some of these strategies. And that's where you also really understand what Barachain is all about. That said, I want to share the RFC allocation that I got, which I'm extremely grateful for. And when I say I got it, I don't mean myself as Michael, but the C2 Labs team, the C2 Labs company, which is an organization that has four people now. So it's me plus three. Seppos and Tang are both full-time on the team. And then we have Moses, who is doing C2 Espanol. And we applied for this allocation to sustain the business, right? Because at this point, running the YouTube channel, running C2Zone, running everything that we do, has around a monthly burn rate of 13,000 to 14,000 USD. So an annual burn rate of $150,000, $180,000. And this definitely helps us to boost a little bit, at least, our sustainability, right? And I'm very, very grateful for that. And the Barachain team has also clearly communicated that this grant or this allocation can only be used for the purpose stated in the application. So that's what we're going to be doing. Now, getting to one of the main topics today, we have a lot. But this is one of the main ones, which is that Ripple is very, very close to connecting to IBC with the XRP Ledger. Pierce's technology is a team that is actually building that. They were also having a strong presence last year at CosmoRose Dubai. They gave presentations. They gave panels. They were just there in full force, not only the PCS team, but also the Ripple team themselves. But the way this looks like is you have the XRP Ledger, and they also are building an XRP Ledger sidechain that is fully EVM compatible, built on the Cosmos SDK. So as far as I understand, they're leveraging FMOS's EVMOS software for that, which is licensed. So they also have an agreement with the EVMOS team. And for connection between the XRP Ledger and that EVM sidechain for XRP, they are implementing Axelar. So they're connecting to Axelar. There's a full blog post on how that works, how that looks like. And last year, as I mentioned, they were all there as part of the interchain track at Cosmoverse, which I'm always glad to see that we can also provide a platform with Cosmoverse where those conversations are happening and eventually also drive forward such integrations. This was obviously done already before Cosmoverse, so I'm not saying that this only happened because of Cosmoverse, but I think Cosmoverse is a great platform, a great venue where those conversations can be accelerated and refined. And builders can talk to each other for a couple of days and have meetings and in-person conversations. It's much, much more impactful on that end. So yeah, that's what we had last year. Also, Aurelie was there. I think she is also based here in Dubai. So it was definitely good to meet the Ripple crew and hopefully they will be involved at this year's Cosmoverse as well, which is still a work in progress. So stay tuned for updates. But yeah, it's coming. Now, one bitter play probably on this whole XRP integration is to look at Coreum. Coreum is a project that actually we've been covering for a long, long, long time before they launched their Cosmoverse chain. And they already built a bridge to connect to the XRP ledger. As far as I understand, that is fully EVM compatible. And they are basically an RWA L1 that is built from the same team that has built Sologenic, the largest stacks on the XRP ledger. So the same team, strong ties to Ripple, the company and the XRP community. That's definitely one that you should be checking out if you're bullish on Cosmos technology, interoperability, on XRP ledger and also on RWAs, tokenization of assets. Now, in a broader context, what does that all mean? We have IBC really strengthening its role as the interoperability standard, right? And I think personally for me, I affiliate Cosmos with IBC, right? Cosmos is the idea of interoperability and sovereignty. And the interoperability part is where IBC comes in, right? The TCPIP equivalent for crypto, the seamless interoperable standard for Web3 and crypto. And Barry and the Interchain Labs team are working very, very hard to make IBC Reca happening, which is an integration that connects to Ethereum and more. They are very excited about it. It's very secure, has full light client security, very cheap, very fast and easy for users and devs. So that is very, very bullish. And finally, there's also an exciting roadmap for IBC, which is very, very bullish. He's also saying that IBC is unique because it's an actual protocol, not an implementation. No enshrined third-party infra or token. So IBC is not packed to a token that enforces any sort of dependencies, which is something you see with other interoperability standards. Anyone can implement it permissionlessly and many can offer IBC infrastructure. The Cosmos hub, however, and this is very, very important to understand, is going to be a true IBC hub in the future. And they're actually working and really serious about this, which is amazing to hear, to be honest. And over the past years, yes, it has been hard to hold Atom, to believe in the vision, to believe in something. But I think with them at the steering wheel, the Cosmos hub could really become a true IBC router, decentralized router, and also capture value from that. That's the keyword, capture value from IBC without enforcing dependencies. I think that's at least where this is going. Larry was one of the smartest builders in Cosmos and also the founder of Dango Chain, which is going to be its own layer one blockchain. I think it's a DeFi platform. We covered it a couple of weeks ago. But he's saying if I was the CEO for IBC, I would immediately start to support Bitcoin, Solana, Hyperliquid, XRP, Dogecoin, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. And then Mark is saying you're literally pitching IBC Eureka, which is something that is coming and will actually be live by the end of March. So that's weeks away. And where all this is headed towards is Project Highway, which is something that is still in stealth and has not been published much about it yet. So Mark was talking about it. And at the CitoZone, we did a full-on recap on recent spaces that Mark also did and all the information that are available so far on what Project Highway is all about, what Atom alignment means. So because now there's a new wave of Atom alignment, a fresh new wind, which is very, very nice. And I think there is now a true path to make Atom truly great again. And Mark is saying what it basically is, is a complete rethink of IBC and chain connectivity. And also with that, I guess Atom as the asset will capture value. That is the key thing. That is the most important thing that Cosmos deserves and that Cosmos eventually also needs to have its own season because people still mostly affiliate Cosmos with Atom. And I think in that context, Atom can really claim that spot to be an inter-chain service provider without having any enforced dependencies, but to also elevate the Cosmos brand while also capturing value. So very, very exciting for that. At the same time, we see Ledger announcing that Atom is now available for swaps at Ledger Live, which is very, very nice to see also those type of announcements. Very refreshing. We haven't seen those in a while. So that's good to see. Then we also have Hydro at the same time growing after the proposal passed. We have Brian sharing that there's currently 45% APR on Hydro's round four plus a 16% staking APR, which is coming out at 61% APR on your Atom. So that is wild. Big shout out to Brian, who is also in our C2 Plus group. So he's also a C2 Plus member and he's also sharing some alpha for C2 Plus members in our Discord channel and in our community. Now, Mark is also demonstrating that he's an Atom bull. He said that all the Atom he owns right now, he bought in the open market and he has no other tokens, only Atom. Yes, they got an acquisition done from the Intergen Foundation with Skip Protocol. So he's probably also sitting on some cash, of course. The price, by the way, was not disclosed. So we don't know how much Skip was acquired for. So I think I'm pretty sure it was a good price, good deal because Skip was just killing it as well. In my case, I made a tweet about this and I also covered this in my video. I personally think that Atom is definitely a must for everyone's portfolio. I would feel, to be honest, uncomfortable only holding Atom because I think there's other verticals that need to be covered. If you look at RWA's, right, Mantra, if you look at Modularity, TIA and some other tokens, my Atom allocation relative to my portfolio size is around 8% to 10% right now. And that's not because I sold. Actually, my Atom stacks is at an absolute all-time high. It's at an all-time high, my personal Atom stacks. And I'm not going to sell any of them, especially now with this new Fresh Wind and new Atom alignment. So my Atom used to be a lot higher than that, of course. It used to be by far my biggest position for a long time. But it's just underperformed, right? And other tokens have just outperformed, right? Like AKT, for example, is a much bigger position now than my Atom holdings because it just outperformed, right? I bought a lot of AKT at like 25 cents, 20 cents. So that's just how it goes, right? But Atom, I think I'm definitely not fading it. I made threads about it, not fading Atom. At the same time, if I didn't have a lot of like cash sitting in the bank or something like that, or any like real estate or anything outside of crypto, which I personally don't have, then I would probably feel a bit uncomfortable holding Atom only. Now, switching gears, Story Protocol, Mainnet is live. We covered it already a couple of days ago. And if you want to learn about the tokenomics, then watch the last video that we did. But there is an airdrop. You can connect your wallet and see if you are eligible for the Story Token airdrop. The price is relatively stable at around $1.81, which implies a $1.8 billion FTV with a $1 billion total supply. So it could be a juicy airdrop. Check that out. Next up, we have Osmosis, which is more and more becoming Bitmosis. And yes, I am calling for Osmo. I think there's a huge bottom formation. There are talks also about Osmo being potentially merged or acquired by the Cosmos Hub. I think we went through those discussions a couple of months ago. Let's see what comes out of that. But if you look at the fundamentals, the revenue Osmosis generates, the momentum they have, the trading volumes, the trade activity, the IBC activity. Fundamentals are strong AF, are very, very strong. But the token price is going just one direction, which is down only. So there's this asymmetry between fundamentals and token price. And I'm currently at an absolute all-time high with my Osmo bags that I'm holding. But the price is just crazy, in my opinion. So, and I said this before, anything below $1 Osmo, in my view, is crazy. Anything below $0.50, which is where it is right now, is completely nuts. But that's that. And SEPMOS also made tweets about the Bitcoinification of Cosmos is underway, with Osmosis leading the way. The only thing that I would point out and have been doing over the past weeks, in terms of, you know, critical feedback for Osmosis, is that at this point, I'm a bit confused which main narrative they're going with for the next years, right? Like, if you ask people, what is Osmosis? Is it a Cosmos Dex? Is it a Bitcoin Dex? Is it an IBC hub? Is it a Bitcoin L2? Then you have Polaris, which is like a trading app that's also now more and more Solana aligned, from what it sounds like. So there's a lot of things that are happening and that are being referred to as Osmosis. I personally think they should just go with Interchain Dex or Cosmos Dex. If they want Bitcoin Dex, sure. But just pick one and run with it, right? That's my personal opinion. But yeah, nonetheless, I'm still a big Osmosis fan. I think Sunny is one of the smartest guys in crypto. Same for DEF. Also one of the smartest guys. Highly respected by a lot of quality builders and teams. And Osmois, $0.32 is just, in my view, absolutely crazy. Considering the revenue they generate, the inflation is slowly coming down, still at 9%. But yeah, the next halving I think is coming also in June of this year, which is also when the fourth birthday first. What's going to happen? Yeah, on the same day of my birthday, which is June 19th. Then we also have Ondo Finance. Some news there. Ondo Finance, to remind you, is building a Cosmos Layer 1 blockchain. So they're actually migrating away and built their own L1 fully built on Cosmos. And they announced a strategic collaboration with World Liberty Finance, which is Trump's crypto project that is also becoming its own strategic reserve fund, on-chain fund. They've accumulated MOVE tokens, Aave, Ethereum, and some other Ethereum blue chips. But besides that, yeah, MOVE movement, which is also exciting to see that happening. And now they also have this partnership with Ondo, which is very, very nice. And Ondo is one of the market leaders, I would say, alongside Mantra when it comes to RWA and tokenization of assets. Now, getting back to tokenomics, we also have a few more updates. Number one here, Greg commenting that there should be a proposal around the corner to reduce inflation for the AKT token. After Sammos dropped this comment and got to ask his views on the AKT inflation, which is currently at 13%. That is nice right now with an 18% staking reward. But it is also true that this means they're overpaying for security. And I think the time is ticking if you want to accumulate cheap AKT. That train is probably leaving because, to be honest, I see this thing going to decent double figures, double digits, right? Sooner or later. And yes, there might be another leg down. There might be another 30%, 40%, 50% correction. Yes, even Osmo can go down to 20 cents, right? Like, I'm not saying that this is the absolute bottom. But I think it feels very bottom-ish, right? That's what I'm saying. And I think at those prices and, yeah, scooping those quality coins with quality teams, with decent runway, well-funded, strong product market fit, I don't see how they would not succeed in the mid to long term, right? That's that. Now, we also have another quality coin and project and team that has been brutal when it comes to price action. But they have made a lot of changes. Now, not only do they have strong product market fit with their DA layer, but also they're trying to fix tokenomics right now. So, Marco Baricevic, who is actually now with Binary Builders working at or in the Celestia ecosystem, they have made a proposal or will make a proposal to implement lockup accounts on Celestia, which has been a big thing that was criticized about Celestia, which was that early investors could stake their TR tokens and then they could dump their stake in rewards because they would be liquid. And to be honest, when I first learned about this, I was like surprised to hear this. And I also did a lot of investments like Saga, for example. I could also stake my Saga and have all my Saga tokens liquid. But I never sold any of those stake in rewards. But of course, I'm staking them. I'm not going to lie. But I'm not selling those rewards because I think, especially for me in my position, I mean, as a public, you know, relatively public person, as a YouTuber as well, it would really kill reputation. But some of these VCs, right, they don't care. And like for them, it's pure business, right? No emotions, pure business. So some VCs on Celestia, early investors, they have just sold off like I think Polychain or one of them. Don't want to name wrong names. But some of the VCs, at least they have sold their stake in rewards, which actually accrued more value than their investment, right? So they already got all their money back just from stake in rewards, which is crazy. So now, which is honestly like now it's probably late. But yeah, now it's coming. A log up account on Celestia where, yeah, the core team is also very supportive of Nick White and also Mustafa, the founder, saying let's get it done. That's one thing. And then also another thing has been that, yeah, Mustafa was pointing out, you know, TIA was never supposed to be a airdrop token. I want to comment one thing on that because I think, yeah, in hindsight, of course, now a lot of people have dumped. But back then, I think it also caused the rally because a lot of teams were giving out airdrops for TIA stakers. And that was part of the narrative. That was part of massively boosting liquidity, trade volumes, excitement, education around TIA in the early days, right? We got some juicy airdrops. Now, obviously, that meta has vanished. But at the same time, I think there is probably a new meta for the Mammoths as the potential base token for airdrops in the Celestia ecosystem, which would be smart because then you're also taking away that meta from the TIA token. At the same time, you are seeing a lot of undelegations on Celestia because, yeah, that meta is going away and also the sticking APR is slowly going down over time. Anyways, that's all about that. I still believe that TIA right now, $3.18, absolutely crazy. So TIA, Osmo, AKT, even Atom right now, I think are in insane deals right now. So that's just what I'm saying. And yes, it can go down further, of course. But I'm just saying those are some of my highest conviction bets. And I think they will do well, survive this market and come out strong. If you look also at some metrics that are backing this up, right? I'm not just pulling that out of my mind, whatever. Celestia has been quietly building momentum and is achieving new highs across many metrics. DA capacity, data posted to blobs, and also revenue, right? Revenue is still low, yes, but data posted on blobs, I think that's an interesting one. And that's probably because of this here. And yes, I made a quick tutorial for the C2 Plus community the other day. I've been addicted to this game, to be honest, for the past two weeks or something. TurboTab crossed three million taps. And I think, yeah, this is the best designed onboarding and stress testing for a chain I've ever seen. And potentially, obviously, this is pure speculation, but you have all this leaderboard. You have these points that you're collecting. You have all these missions that you have to do, all these boosts where you have to basically trade. You have to provide liquidity. You have to play games. This is the best way, if there is going to be a nice airdrop, the best way on how to go about it. So we're going to see. I've been tapping. C2 Plus members, I think, are starting to tap. And I think, yeah, there are some good ways on how you can potentially at least not miss out in case there is an airdrop, right? Which we don't know. Just purely speculating based on, yeah, based on the game and the excitement about it. Anyways, Barry also saying it's very easy to launch a Cosmos chain with low inflation that is highly secure. Just need to test the parameters. And eventually, this might also come for Atom. So, yeah, Barry, I think they're also maybe considering to adjust the Atom tokenomics. Right now, the Atom tokenomics is in a range between 7% and 10% for the inflation rate, packed to the bonnet ratio at 66.67%. So if it goes below that, inflation will go to the roof of 10%. If it's above it, it will go down to a bottom of 7%. Right now, we are way, way below the threshold of two-thirds, which means inflation is at the peak right now of 10% for Atom. But that also means staking rewards are at an absolute peak around 18% or 19% even. Now, one exciting new announcement I'm looking forward is Carter's Shade X product. March 5th, mark your calendars. World's first encrypted money market. So that is going to be interesting. Very exciting to see. And Carter's just overall a very positive, bullish builder and forward-looking and one of the best Cosmonauts we have. And I'm very proud that he's building in Cosmos and continues to do so. Now, finally, quick things. Some housekeeping. Mantra announced a Sybil slaying season. So if you have been trying to gain the Mantra airdrop, which is coming March 18th, then you now have the chance to self-report. If you use bots or something, you get 18% of your tokens if you self-report. If you report someone else that has been using bots to farm the Om airdrop, then there is a bounty for it. And you're actually getting tokens. You're getting rewards. There's a form for it. I'm going to leave the link for this announcement below this video so you can check that out. And some quick housekeeping for the Citrozone. We not only did a little bit of a brand refresh, a facelift, but also we shifted our newsletter. So the C2 report that's coming out monthly is now on Substack. You can sign up right here. I'm going to leave the link for this below the video as well. This is how the newsletter looks like. You get monthly notifications. Eventually also more. But it always takes a lot of time to put those reports together. So Tang is putting that into two to three pages with all the highlights here, even video explainers. If you want to learn about how Baruchain works, if you want to read their white paper, or if you just want to get your airdrop and see if you're eligible, you can do that here. For Baruchain, which obviously I know is not a good example right now because I know a lot of you really, really hate them. But for Story, for example, you can also claim your airdrop here. All these links are curated on a monthly basis, at least. For C2 Plus members, we do it on a much faster rate. And if people have questions like, yo, C2, which airdrop is right now claimable? Seb, my team, myself, or Tang will respond within minutes usually. So that's that. Also, as I mentioned, we did a brand refresh, a brand facelift for the C2 Zone, which is the Cosmos Media Hub. I've also been thinking a lot about where are we going at the C2 Zone, Crypto C2, C2 Ventures, all these kind of things. And for C2 Ventures, the same applies actually. We also did a facelift, a rebrand. And of course, that also applies to Cosmos, a little bit of a facelift here as well. 2025 plans are coming soon. Stay tuned. You can go on our website and subscribe to the newsletter to be informed first when the location and dates are being announced. Lastly, very, very lastly, and then I promise I'll let you go. Wondering Whale Sharks. Big, big shout out to the union team for their NFT collection fuller price right now, $560. Mint price was 5,000 stars tokens. So congrats to everybody who got to Mint 1. And in fact, we got an exclusive list. So we got two slots, whitelist slots for yesterday's Mint, round two, for C2 Plus members. So that's already the third Mint that we got exclusive whitelist for, for C2 Plus members. It really pays. There's like literally an ROI for joining that group, which is $39 a month. But this thing alone made a 30, 40X or something like that, right? And for Omies, it was even more. And for Omies, we got everyone whitelisted. For this one, I could at least get us two slots, which is good. Anyways, let me know if you managed to get a Whale Sharks. All C2 Plus members are very, very happy for the value they're getting so far in that group. And that's it, right? Always keep an eye here on the things that are being traded. On-chain Omies, of course, right now is $64 on, but the on price is just smashing it. Actually, I almost forgot to show you the Om price because it's just crazy. $7.87, up 40% right now. Big, big congrats to JP, the Mantra team. This is just as I'm recording this here, seeing the price behavior, and it's just crazy. So the airdrop keeps compounding, keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger. It's now, yeah, 50 million Om tokens. That's like 350, almost $400 million. When they first announced it, Om was at like 10 cents. So it was a 5 million airdrop. Now it's a nearly 400 million airdrop. So crazy, crazy times. I know when I tweeted about the Om price being at like $3, and I said like, yo, now it's a $150, $20 million airdrop. People are like, oh, yo, C2, but in a few weeks, it's going to be 50%, 80%, 90% less. Look now, look now. Now it's actually more than double than what I tweeted about a few months ago, and more than 12x from when I tweeted about it like a year ago or like almost a year ago. Anyways, that's all about that. Believe in something is not the new slogan of crypto, and I hope you are not giving in. I hope you are sticking around in crypto. Good times are around the corner. I truly believe that, right? That's what I bet my entire career on. I'm highly convinced. Of course, I'm also all in. I'm knee deep in the crypto trenches since years, and I continue to do so, especially in Cosmos. Anyways, that's all for today. I hope you enjoyed the episode. You learned something. Stay excited, and I'll see you very soon here on CryptoC2. Until then, stay safe and be good.