Evmos Looks to Jump-Start Ethereum–Cosmos Interoperability With Airdrop, Mainnet Launch

With a cleverly designed airdrop, novel tokenomics and cross-chain compatibility, the latest EVM-compatible environment may quickly rank among the most popular.

On Wednesday, Evmos announced the launch of its namesake plan to merge the best of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) with the Cosmos-based Inter‑Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol. Evmos had been slated for a Feb. 28 launch, but was delayed “to guarantee a smooth launch.”

EVM-compatible environments are popular among developers on alternative layer 1 blockchains because they allow teams to easily port over implementations of protocols that are already running on Ethereum. They’re also typically easier for existing Ethereum users to interact with, as indicated by the total value locked (TVL) rankings on sites like DeFiLlama.

Read more: Oasis Foundation Launches Emerald, an EVM-Compatible Smart Contract Environment

Young EVM-compatible ecosystems are also often ripe with lucrative opportunities for yield farmers and traders as newly-released protocols tend to be more generous with tokens.

In addition to allowing EVM compatibility and bridging, Evmos will also allow for cross-blockchain transactions using the EIP-712 standard, meaning Ethereum-based users can directly interact with contracts on Evmos – creating what Evmos co-founder Federico Kunze Küllmer called in an interview with CoinDesk “the port-of-entry from Ethereum to Cosmos.”

At launch, the chain will be home to a handful of decentralized finance (DeFi) mainstays and forks. A Rari Capital fork and a Uniswap fork were advertised in a press release, and Küllmer also mentioned Balancer fork, a CryptoPunks fork, a lending platform and an Olympus fork, many of which will be deploying with “novel tokeneconomics,” he said.

Additionally, earlier this month the Aave DAO passed a proposal to deploy its v3 implementation to the chain shortly after launch.

‘Rektdrop’

A highlight of the release is an airdrop aimed at both the Cosmos and Ethereum communities.

The majority of the airdrop will be allocated to various Cosmos ecosystem participants, including Cosmos Hub and ATOM stakers, as well as liquidity providers on Osmosis.

Additionally, however, Evmos took aim at Ethereum users with their initial distribution – specifically, ones that have been “rekt.”

Their criteria included high gas payers on popular DeFi apps, as well as victims of miner extractable value (MEV). In total, over 1.9 million addresses will be eligible for the airdrop, according to Kunze Küllmer.

Half of the project’s 200 million tokens will be distributed via the airdrop.

Tokenomics

Perhaps the highlight of Evmos’ launch is its tokeneconomic structure, one that re-examines the relationship between validators, users who interact with smart contracts and developers.

“When we studied these systems, we saw that miners and validators are the ones that receive most of the transaction fees,” said Kunze Küllmer. “So we wanted to create incentive alignment with all the different types of users, and so we introduced the idea of fee sharing.”

Fee sharing will go partially to validators, but also to the teams that created the contracts that are driving chain usage. Additionally, users will be able to vote on which smart contracts earn “usage rewards” from a community pool, which allocates tokens to users for interacting with chosen contracts.

While other chains have big-budget incentive programs at launch often ranging in the hundreds of millions of dollars, Kunze Küllmer believes that incentives baked into the base layer will help Evmos stand out:

“This is an in-protocol tokeneconomic way to create an incentive, as opposed to all these liquidity programs like Polygon has or Avalanche rush,” he said. “We natively implemented this in the protocol so all users can be aligned.”