Introduction

This post is part of the MyCryptoOutlook2022 series.

I have started investing in cryptocurrencies in early 2021 during one of the Covid lockdowns when all of my favorite past-time activities were on hold and I needed an outlet for my energy.

The first currency I invested a significant amount in was ETH, because most of the applications I was interested in (mainly games like SOrare and Gods Unchained) were running on ETH and I was fascinated by the possibilities of smart contracts. While I have invested in various other tokens over the past couple of months, ETH still is my largest position.

Obviously, the largest drawback of ETH are eye-watering gas fees that make transactions below 1000$ basically uneconomical and I decided to look into other chains with interesting applications and lower fees like Avalanche or Binance Smart Chain. This opened my eyes to the difficulty of navigating several different blockchains and the need for an overarching layer to connect them, the Inter-Blockchain Communication protocol.

The Cosmos Ecosystem

Cosmos is a rapidly expanding ecosystem of independent interconnected blockchains built using developer-friendly application components and connected with ground-breaking IBC (Inter-Blockchain Communication) protocol.

The whole Cosmos ecosystem is all about interoperability. Cosmos allows developers to build their applications on new, custom-built blockchains while still being able to connect their applications to other chains in the Cosmos ecosystem.

This allows developers to “opt-out of high transaction fees and network congestion, make their own rules, and scale for mainstream adoption” as Cosmos phrase it on their website.

With an ever growing number of blockchains, interoperability will become on of the main issues in the crypto space and Cosmos is perfectly positioned to benefit from this. Personally, I would be disappointed if ATOM didn´t get to the 90$-100$ range before the end of 2022.

The Cosmos ecosystem is growing by the day and consists of 262 apps and services like Regen Network, a project promoting sustainability and helping companies track and offset their carbon emissions. You can find details on all of them here.

From a small-time investor´s point of view, the Cosmos ecosystem has one amazing feature: A large number of significant airdrops to stakers and liquidity providers.

There were a number of airdrops in 2021 already and even more are coming up in 2022 (or ongoing already). The latest significant airdrop I was able to claim was the Stargaze airdrop worth about 1,700$ at todays STARS price.

Most airdrops require you to have staked ATOM (outside a centralized excahnge) or be a liquidity provider in a specific pool at the snapshot date. Some airdrops might also require you to stake other tokens (like JUNO or OSMO) from the Cosmos ecosystem.

You can find a list of upcoming airdrops here.

How to buy and use ATOM

You can buy ATOM at basically any exchange. For example, you can buy your ATOM at the sponsor of this article, Bityard.

For a detailed review of Bityard, I suggest you reat this article by MikeZillo.

I usually move my ATOM directly into my Keplr wallet to stake it or use it to purchase other tokens from the Cosmos ecosystem which might not be available at centralized exchanges. For this, I tend to use Osmosis.

Osmosis is an automated market maker (AMM) protocol built for liquidity providers.

To get the highest return from my ATOM and to improve my chances of future airdrops, I have about half my ATOM staked. The other half is used to provide liquidity to a few liquidity pools on Osmosis.

Discovering Osmosis has been an absolute revelation for me. It has by far the best user experience of any application in the crypto space I have used. There are liquidity pools for most token pairs from the Cosmos ecosystem and the APRs usually are pretty interesting.

With a setup like this, I hope to be perfectly positioned to future airdrops and I am looking forward to seeing what 2022 has in store for ATOM.

To wrap this up, I would like ot thankf Bityard for sponsoring this article. If you are looking for a crypto exchange, make sure to give Bityard a go.