As Juno moves from strength to strength, touching on $1 billion in market cap without ever being listed on a centralized exchange, the latest updates for this Cosmos SDK chain will leave your head spinning.
Juno is permissionless smart-contract chain built with Cosmos SDK that is quickly taking the Cosmos ecosystem by storm. Juno is the ETH equivalent in the Cosmos ecosystem. Whereas, Atom is the central connecting hub of the Inter-Blockchain-Communication (IBC); Juno is the smart-contract platform. 47 apps have already been built upon Juno and one of the most exciting is Junoswap. Junoswap is the first decentralized exchange (DEX) to launch on Juno on January the 13th 2022. As it stands, rewards for providing liquidity on Junoswap are limited to swap fees however, Junoswap will be launching an incentives token called RAW towards the end of February or early March.
Raw tokens will be distributed via an airdrop at this time. Snapshots are rumored to be taking place throughout early February of Junoswap and selected Cosmos SDK chains. Details remain shrouded in mystery as to what the eligibility criteria will be but, if other airdrops are to be any indicator, staking Juno, Osmo and Atom will be a safe bet and possibly even providing liquidity on Junoswap and as an early adopter may be rewarded. However, no details have been leaked on the actual criteria which will hopefully deter gaming of the system and airdrop hunters.
Speaking of airdrops…… Anyone involved in the Juno ecosystem will know by now about the airdrop of NETA token. Neta is currently a non-functional ‘store of value’ token, much like Ion is to the Osmosis ecosystem (or BTC is the broader crypto space). Neta was airdropped on the 1st of February via a claim mechanism and was distributed to Juno stakers, Juno governance participants and a little extra dropped to those staking to validators outside of the top 10. Neta is a limited supply token with a supply cap of 32950 however, any tokens unclaimed by the end of the month will be burned. For those who participated in governance this was a very generous airdrop as some people received the maximum of 16.2 Neta which is valued at $1700USD per Neta, at the time of writing. Some very happy airdrop recipients out there this week. There will be a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) in which the holders of Neta will be able to discuss and vote on a potential use case for Neta beyond a store of value. Which brings me to the next development in Juno to report on…..
Dao Dao is a platform for building DAO’s and is the primary platform for communities to use for governance of their projects. DAO DAO is a tool for building multi-chain DAOs: DAOs whose treasuries can hold any IBC-supporting token, and DAOs whose tokens can be transferred to any IBC-supporting chain.
DAO DAO is made up of some smart contracts written in Rust and a visual UI for managing everything DAO-related. At its simplest, a DAO is an organization where you can vote on proposals. Proposals are updated to a ledger---their text, whether they passed or failed, and who voted on them. Proposals can be natural language rules or laws (for example, you could run a legislature with them), or they can be software. When a proposal passes the DAO's voting period, that proposal becomes canonical. It will be as "passed" in the ledger, and any proposal messages (effectively, bits of code) will be executed on the chain, modifying the DAO's state.
The DAO's governance can itself be modified by governance proposals. For example, the voting rules of the DAO themselves (e.g., how long voting periods last, what proportion of people need to vote on something for it to pass, etc) can be modified by governance proposals. DAOs manage voting through governance tokens. Like shares in a corporation, governance token determines your voting power. A person with 80% of a DAO's tokens will be able to pass things autocratically. Distributing tokens evenly will give everyone an even vote, assuming no one trades their tokens.
There are many more projects in development and Juno is quickly becoming a powerhouse in the crypto space. With many expecting that this project has the potential to exceed projects like Solana and Terra, Juno is project well worth keeping your eyes on. For further research, find links to projects and telegram pages below.
I’ll be deep diving into more chains and aspects of the Cosmos ecosystem over the coming weeks and months so subscribe if you haven’t already to keep up to date with everything Cosmos