The State of ATOM Staking: July 2022 Report

5 min readJul 26, 2022

ATOM is the primary driver of application and DeFi utility across Cosmos Hub and other IBC chains within the Cosmos ecosystem. When staked by users and validators, ATOM is essential for securing and further decentralizing Cosmos Hub.

With information surrounding ATOM staking spread across different sources, members of the Cosmos community (including ATOM holders and stakers) need a birds-eye view of the important highlights and data.

This report provides an umbrella analysis of the current state of ATOM staking, including all key statistics and metrics on Cosmos Hub and month-over-month trend analysis.

ATOM Overview

The below highlights key data points relating to the ATOM token:

Total Market Cap: $2.6B+
24-Hr Trading Volume: $303M
Unique Wallet Addresses: 1M+
Circulating Supply: 292M

Cosmos Hub Overview

Below is data showing IBC activity on Cosmos Hub over the last 30 days:

IBC Volume (30D): $113M+
IBC Transfers (30D): 235K+
Active Zones (30D): 48
Block Height: 11.34M

Staking Market Cap

Cosmos Hub (ATOM) currently ranks 9th in terms of the top cryptocurrency assets by staking market cap, totaling approximately $1.8 billion. It ranks 20th out of 86 in terms of its staking ratio across PoS networks.

Staking Ratio and Stats

ATOM continues to retain a strong and steady staking ratio of 63.58% with 192,584,754 ATOM tokens currently bonded in relation to its circulating supply of 302,915,073. Over the last 30 days, its staking ratio reached a low of ~61.69% but showed an overall increase of ~2.21%.

When ATOM staking was first introduced in 2019, the staking ratio was initially at ~22%. Since then, ATOM’s staking ratio has increased ~183%. Once the Gravity DEX went live in July 2021 (bringing DeFi to the Cosmos ecosystem), there has been a steady decline of the ATOM staking ratio from its peak of ~75% to current levels, around a 16% decrease.

Unique Delegates

The number of unique ATOM delegates on Cosmos Hub is now 486,535 — with an increasing staking ratio over the last month, this demonstrates that staking adoption is rising.

ATOM Liquid Staking Ecosystem & Stats

pSTAKE and StaFi are the only 2 decentralized protocols on the market that currently offer an ATOM liquid staking solution. Users can mint stkATOM and rATOM on pSTAKE and StaFi, respectively, which are the underlying representative tokens (or claims on) ATOM.

The below table contains additional data for pSTAKE and StaFi’s liquid-staked assets:

pSTAKE is bringing forth an enhanced solution for ATOM liquid staking by issuing stkATOM on the Persistence Chain (proposed to launch Q3 2022).

Other liquid staking protocols, such as QuickSilver, Lido on Cosmos by P2P and Stride have plans to deploy liquid-staked assets on IBC-enabled chains in H2 this year.

Iqlusion’s Liquidity Staking Module will be a game-changer for ATOM stakers, as it will allow delegators to tokenize their staked assets and transfer them to a liquid staking protocol without the need to unbond. This will ultimately boost liquid staking’s value proposition as a whole while still maintaining the chain’s security.

Additionally, with upcoming Interchain Accounts and Interchain Queries, interoperability and composability throughout Cosmos (via IBC) will offer even more promising developments and serve as a catalyst for IBC adoption within the Cosmos ecosystem.

Validator Stats

Cosmos Hub contains 175 active validators (out of 424) that help secure the underlying network. Running a validator node yields an average APR of ~19%.

*Currently the top 23 validators cumulatively hold over 67.1% of all staked ATOM, which is the consensus threshold for governance.

Nakamoto Coefficient

The Nakamoto Coefficient tracks the concentration of stake among a network’s set of validators or the minimum number of validators that would need to come together to disrupt or shut down a network. The larger the number relative to the total number of active validators, the more widely distributed the stake is across these validators, meaning higher decentralization.

For Cosmos Hub, the Nakamoto Coefficient is 7 with its 175 active validators.

Closing Note

A thank you goes out to all of our readers for taking a look through this report — the intention for this piece is to serve as a one-stop-shop destination for all key monthly ATOM statistics and analytics for all interested parties.

For more information on the release of future monthly editions of this report, in addition to updates and developments surrounding pSTAKE, please make sure to follow us on our website and channels below.

About pSTAKE

pSTAKE is a liquid staking protocol unlocking the liquidity of staked assets. Stakers of PoS tokens can now stake their assets while maintaining the liquidity of these assets. On staking with pSTAKE, users earn staking rewards and also receive 1:1 pegged staked representative tokens (stkTOKENs) which can be used in DeFi to generate additional yield (yield on top of staking rewards)

Currently, pSTAKE currently supports liquid staking for ATOM, XPRT and ETH and has multiple other assets in the pipeline, including but not limited to BNB, SOL and AVAX.

Developed by Persistence

Persistence is a Tendermint-based, specialised Layer-1 network powering an ecosystem of DeFi applications focused on unlocking the liquidity of staked assets.

Persistence facilitates the issuance and deployment of liquid-staked stkASSETs, allowing users to earn staking rewards while participating in DeFi primitives, such as lending/borrowing and liquidity provisioning on DEXs.

Persistence aims to offer a seamless staking and DeFi experience for PoS (Proof-of-Stake) users and enable developers to build innovative applications around stkASSETs.