What is Cosmos ATOM? Against the trend, it surged 119%. Simple interpretation of its cross-chain technology

The cryptocurrency market, after experiencing a steady rise since the beginning of the year, has gone through a turbulent second half of the year, with a total market capitalization evaporating by $58.4 billion from September onwards. In contrast, Cosmos, which launched its mainnet in March this year, has climbed to the 16th place in terms of market capitalization, defying the downward trend in the cryptocurrency market in the latter half of the year.

What is Cosmos?

In the field of cryptocurrencies, many well-known public chains have been created, such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, EOS, and more. However, due to the inability of these chains to interact with each other, similar to how countries can have thriving economies but struggle with international trade, Cosmos focuses on achieving interoperability and scalability among different chains.

Positioned as a cross-chain protocol, Cosmos Network is more like an ecosystem. Cosmos constructs the first hub in the system, the Cosmos Hub, using its development framework Cosmos-SDK to reconstruct the ecosystem among different chains.

Cosmos-SDK can be seen as a universal development system, similar to how different brands of phones rely on the Android system, making it easier for developers to create applications.

Each chain can use Cosmos-SDK to create a sub-block PegZone, which copies and tracks the state of native chains like Bitcoin and Ethereum, acting as a bridge for interaction between Cosmos and other blockchains, enabling cross-chain operations.

Against the Trend

In addition to its strong performance in the second half of the year, Cosmos has seen over 90% growth in trading volume since October. Despite still being far from its historical high of $7.5 in May, its performance remains impressive amidst the overall market downturn in the cryptocurrency space.

Furthermore, according to the staking data platform Staking Rewards, Cosmos currently offers a staking rate of up to 8.46%. Compared to the rising decentralized finance (DeFi) applications this year, it presents another attractive option for investors.

Binance's Free Listing

In April of this year, the leading exchange Binance actively invited the Cosmos team for discussions on listing, and listed its ATOM token for free. Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao praised:

This quality project didn't even want to talk to exchanges about listing, and although we are very friendly with the team, we listed it anyway.

Here is a project that refused to even talk to an exchange about listing (and we have a good relationship with their tech guys), but we list it anyway.

Good tech wins!https://t.co/Zu0uQZuGH6

— CZ 🔶 Binance (@cz_binance) April 28, 2019

In addition to the proactive listing support, Binance also launched a staking reward program for ATOM on December 5. According to the announcement, users need to hold more than 0.5 ATOM tokens, with Binance taking hourly snapshots for daily settlements and monthly distributions, estimating an annual yield of 8-10%.