Cosmos

ATOM is the native coin of Cosmos Hub, staked to secure the network and vote on its governance.

Cosmos is a network of independent blockchains that can pass tokens and messages to each other through a shared protocol called IBC. The Cosmos Hub was the first of these chains, and ATOM is its native coin. The project was started by Jae Kwon and Ethan Buchman, and the Swiss Interchain Foundation raised more than $17 million in a two-week ATOM sale in 2017. Today the foundation's subsidiary Cosmos Labs leads development.

ATOM has no fixed supply cap. Total supply was about 532.9 million ATOM on 27 September 2026. New ATOM is created every block and paid to stakers; the inflation rate moves between 7% and 10% a year depending on how much ATOM is staked, and it stood at 10%. About 336 million ATOM, roughly 63% of supply, was staked with the 177 active validators. Two percent of rewards goes to a community pool that ATOM holders control by on-chain vote.

ATOM is used to pay fees, to stake with validators that confirm transactions, and to vote on proposals such as software upgrades and spending from the community pool. Staked ATOM can be partly destroyed (slashed) if its validator signs twice or stays offline too long. Few applications run on the Hub itself; most Cosmos activity happens on other chains built with the same software.

The Hub changed a lot in 2026. In September a governance vote removed Interchain Security, the system through which the Hub had lent its validators to other chains. On 22 September an attacker who had taken over the Neutron chain moved stolen ATOM to the Hub; validators halted the Hub for about a day and moved 1.23 million ATOM from the attacker's address into a recovery multisig. A redesign of ATOM's inflation is being researched but had not been voted on.