March 18, 2025 | Read Online

The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) continues to flex its network effects, now poised to play a strong role in the Cosmos Interchain ecosystem. The Interchain Foundation (ICF) has announced the open-sourcing of evmOS, which will be rebranded as Cosmos EVM. It's positioned as the canonical EVM implementation for Cosmos SDK-based chains.

The quality of DePIN revenue:

Source: EV3 Ventures

The "quality" of revenues for DePIN (decentralized physical infrastructure networks) appears to be far more resilient than that of non-DePIN crypto businesses, argues EV3 Ventures co-founder Salvador Gala.

Prominent DePIN companies like Helium, Geodnet and Akash grew revenues by 6-58% when comparing February 2025 numbers to their best revenue-generating months in 2024. Non-DePIN businesses like Jito, Uniswap and Aave, in contrast, saw a decline in 37-58% by the same comparison.

This analysis "aligns with what many DePIN connoisseurs have suspected about the fundamental difference between DePIN and traditional crypto revenue models," Blockworks research analyst Nick Carpinito said.

"The comparison to commodities businesses is spot-on as we've seen this pattern repeatedly in traditional markets where cyclical businesses appear cheapest at their peak earnings moments, creating value traps for inexperienced investors. The same dynamic is playing out in crypto, where protocols that rely primarily on speculative activity look deceptively cheap when market cycles approach their peak."

— Donovan Choy

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Cosmos and the EVM

The ICF today announced the open-sourcing of the evmOS EVM stack — now rebranded as Cosmos EVM.

This move underscores a broader industry trend: Ecosystems that once sought to differentiate from Ethereum are now embracing its execution environment. That goes for Tezos, EOS, Ripple — even Iota!

By funding Cosmos EVM's development and open release, the ICF aims to satisfy demand for an EVM standard. It allows any Cosmos chain to easily plug in Ethereum smart contracts and liquidity, according to Barry Plunkett, co-CEO of Interchain Labs (ICL).

"We're going to make it extremely seamless for Cosmos developers to have an EVM and extend its functionality with Cosmos," Plunkett told Blockworks.

The EVM isn't new to Cosmos, but the ICF's decision follows years of fragmented adoption — projects like Injective and Cronos previously forked versions of evmOS-forerunner Ethermint to build their own Ethereum-compatible chains. EvmOS' developer, Tharsis Labs, licensed its up-to-date version to commercial partners such as Ripple, which used it for the Ripple EVM sidechain. These deals helped fund development but left the technology closed-source.

The ICF grant, which Plunkett describes as "small" but that "recognizes the great work that the [Tharsis] team has done" will allow the code to be released under an Apache 2.0 license as part of the Cosmos SDK. ICL, as the engineering arm of ICF, will be the maintainers.

By making the Cosmos EVM part of the Interchain Stack, ICL aims to streamline development, improve user experience and expand interoperability between Cosmos and Ethereum-native applications.

Every prior EVM integration in Cosmos has felt "clunky," according to Plunkett. The problems ranged from wallet incompatibility to poor bridging experiences, making it difficult for Ethereum users to interact with Cosmos chains.

Cosmos EVM, however, is set to change that.

"I think a lot of the existing chains will probably adopt this," Plunkett said, adding "we're having a ton of conversations with upcoming chains — a next generation of Cosmos chains that haven't picked their solution yet and have been waiting, wondering, 'Is there going to be an official one?'"

The dominance of EVM is now evident across an array of layer-1 and layer-2 chains, including new Bitcoin L2s — some of which are built using the Cosmos SDK. Infrastructure providers — whether exchanges, custodians or oracles — favor standardization, and the EVM remains the path of least resistance.

ICL expects major DeFi protocols to take notice too, as Cosmos EVM should reduce the cost and effort needed for Ethereum-native teams to deploy apps within Cosmos.

Cosmos Hub and ATOM

While Cosmos EVM will be open source and permissionless, Plunkett noted that Cosmos Hub governance will need to decide its own role in this shift.

"There's going to be a question that the Cosmos Hub community needs to ask itself: Do we want CosmWasm? Do we want the EVM? Do we want both? How does this affect the Cosmos Hub's role as being this distribution platform for the ecosystem?" Plunkett said.

The biggest unanswered question is whether the Hub will launch an EVM chain of its own. IBC v2 — also known as Eureka — is turning the Hub into a cross-chain liquidity router to connect Ethereum mainnet, Solana and Ethereum L2s. If the Cosmos Hub deploys an EVM chain using ATOM as gas, it could attract new users, capital and liquidity, making ATOM a more critical asset in cross-chain settlement.

With ICF leading outreach to major Ethereum protocols, Cosmos EVM could serve as the inflection point so that Cosmos is no longer walled off from Ethereum, and instead embraces the EVM's growing footprint.

— Macauley Peterson

On Ethereum's interop problem

How Arbitrum is Pushing the Limits | Steven Goldfeder

Will real-time proving solve Ethereum's interop problem?

Steven Goldfeder: I don't think real-time proving helps interop very much. What's stopping the chain that produces zk proofs from producing a second proof also in real time? That creates two histories of the chain. A proof doesn't mean anything unless it's a canonical proof, and for that you need L1 settlement. Unfortunately, L1 finality is 12-18 minutes, so there could be a reorg and the first proof that represents the set of transactions is worthless because the actual set of transactions included in the L1 is different. In summary, real-time proving for interop still requires chains to trust each other, because recipient chains need to know there won't be another proof being created.

What should Ethereum enshrine?

Steven Goldfeder: Precompiles that accelerate Ethereum's rollup-centric roadmap is something we should look at. They would have to be a common denominator that benefits all rollups so it would allow the Ethereum ecosystem to continuously pursue its multifaceted variety of rollup innovation across different L2 roadmaps. That of course comes with the price of fragmentation. But I disagree with Toly who says there will be only six interesting smart contracts. I think that's an incorrect vision because there will be so much innovation.

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