Noble Comes Out of Stealth To Solve Cosmos Liquidity

Token protocol Noble wants to establish what it says are building blocks missing in the Cosmos ecosystem.

It’s now coming out of stealth mode after six months of development, setting its mainnet launch for Monday.

Cosmos needs a native stablecoin to deepen the liquidity of the Cosmos ecosystem, Jelena Djuric, Noble CEO, told Blockworks. Stablecoins like USDC and DAI can already be ported to Cosmos appchains (layer-1 networks launched to power a single app), through bridge protocols Gravity and Axelar.

Having liquidity split across so many appchains can slow interoperability, as tokens must be manually swapped between networks for use across Cosmos. There can also be security concerns associated with network bridges, 

“We are very much laser-focused on this one very specific application,” Djuric said. “Within the Cosmos ecosystem, I think it became very apparent that there are certain building blocks or fundamentals that were missing, and one of those things is a native stablecoin to the ecosystem.”

Noble doesn’t consider itself a decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol, as in something like Uniswap. Those platforms don’t support token issuance, but they do allow cryptocurrencies to be freely listed and sold peer-to-peer.

Built using the Cosmos software development kit (SDK), Noble instead helps issuers manage their tokens: burning, minting, blacklisting and other functions.

Noble wants to inspire token issuances to port liquidity from other layer-1 ecosystems by being their token factory, in a sense. “We’re looking to facilitate the native asset issuance by working with protocols and institutions,” Djuric said. 

By staying neutral in the ecosystem, Noble hopes it can “provide something that everyone can get behind,” per Djuric. Beyond stablecoins and the like, tokenization of real-world assets was also floated.

Noble evaluating ‘Interchain Security’

The Cosmos Hub — the primary validator set of the Cosmos mainnet — allows upstart networks to borrow its validators for a fee, part of its recent Interchain Security (ICS) push. 

A properly secure blockchain network should have a measurably decentralized validator set, which consumer chains can struggle to put in place. ICS is intended to help with that, opening the door for more startups to launch their own chains on Cosmos.

Noble’s mainnet will launch as a “proof of authority chain” with a permissioned set of validators, all of which are also Cosmos Hub validators, but it’ll run ICS once it can evaluate how the software handles slashing.

Djuric tells Blockworks this decision is only temporary. “There was this last-minute design chain around slashing which we haven’t formed an official opinion on whether it is positive or negative.”

“We still intend to launch with ICS. We just want to see how it plays out in production,” she said.

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