First published 15 July 2020. The Hub had been live since 13 March 2019. Expanded in October 2026 so ATOM is not described as the gas of every chain in the family, and so the inflation ceiling is the one governance actually set. Cosmos is a design for many chains that can pass messages. The Cosmos Hub is one of those chains, the first one. ATOM is its fee coin and its stake. Jae Kwon and Ethan Buchman wrote the design. The software that agrees on blocks, Tendermint and later CometBFT, is a kit. A chain that uses the kit is not the Hub, and its coin is not ATOM. What is Injective (INJ)? is one of those chains.
A Hub address starts with cosmos1. An Ethereum address will not receive ATOM. An Injective address starts with inj and will not receive it either. The wrong network is still the wrong city.
Messaging is not a teleporter
In February 2021 an upgrade called Stargate put interchain messaging on the Hub. Token transfers were switched on by a later vote, proposal 41, which finished on 29 March 2021. A packet arrives if the other chain accepts it. ATOM sent somewhere that did not ask for ATOM does not become a balance there. A third-party bridge is a different piece of software again. A bridge is extra software, not a tunnel.
New ATOM is minted for people who stake. There is no ceiling. The rate sits between a floor and a cap, and it moves with how much of the supply is bonded. The target is about two thirds bonded. Proposal 848, which finished voting on 25 November 2023, cut the cap from 20 percent to 10 percent. The floor stayed at 7 percent. A later vote can move both. A dashboard rate is that block. In November 2022 a proposal called ATOM 2.0 failed. It would have changed issuance and added new Hub machinery. A blog that describes those pieces as the product is describing a rejected vote.
Delegating ATOM points your stake at a validator. If that validator double-signs, or stays offline past the line, a share of the stake can be taken, including the share you delegated. Leaving takes 21 days. During the wait the coins cannot be sent, and they can still be taken for something the validator already did. Staking is a lock and a queue, not a savings account. The Hub pays a capped set of validators, ordered by stake. The size of that set is a parameter.
Cosmos Hub restarted and moved 1,227,121 ATOM. That is a validator choice, not finality. That piece is the halt. This page is the coin. Nothing here is an instruction to stake, bridge, or buy ATOM.
