Nomic is another one of the many airdrops that came to Cosmos eco-system participants earlier in the year. The interesting thing that Nomic did, compared to most, was they have adopted a slow and steady approach. Most of the drops came, and then the team have spent an extended period working on their use case, all the while the token price has faded ever lower and lower. Nomic, in contrast, did not enable transfers or IBC, so the token has no value or market.
The only thing airdrop recipients could do was stake and compound. In my case, my original 30 NOM airdrop now amounts to 689 NOM, through nothing more than daily compounding.
But things are moving along, with the small but dedicated team steadily bringing their use case to market.
The first use case envisaged for the Nomic project, is a bridge to bring Bitcoin into the IBC eco-system. It is a layer 1 chain (interestingly however, not a Cosmos SDK chain) which aims to be a decentralized, non-custodial BITCOIN bridge. The NOM token will secure the chain, and earn NOM inflation rewards, along with earning Bitcoin from fees collected by the bridge. Yes, you can and will be stacking Sats simply by staking NOM.
The goal for this first use case is to build a safe bridge, bringing BTC into the IBC eco-system. The nBTC token will be the IBC connected representation of Bitcoin that has been bridged into the eco-system. Up until now, any Bitcoin representation in Cosmos DeFi (Osmosis and others) has been twice bridged. First, the BTC is wrapped onto Ethereum as wBTC. Then it gets bridged again from Ethereum to Cosmos via a bridge like Axelar, or Gravity, or others.
Obviously, with bridge hacks and exploits being one of the biggest risks in the crypto space, and custodial risk around wBTC, this double bridging setup is a weakness for the Cosmos. Nomic aims to lessen this risk.
The second airdrop of NOM tokens is imminent. The snapshots have been taken, and most of the requirements are known. Stakers of ATOM, OSMO, EVMOS, JUNO and KUJI are the target. Priority is given to stake made to validators on those chains that are outside the top 20. Unlocking part of the drop requires participating in the current testnet, so it is important to engage if you had the above tokens staked on 27th September.
For playing on the testnet, I am following this guide published on Medium by Adam McDonald. I'm not going to produce a detailed guide myself, as this already has the steps needed to participate, and another guide would be redundant.
Firstly, you can find the testnet at this address
I used two different BTC testnet faucets, as I have heard that they may not be reliable, but I wanted to make sure.
After waiting for ages (I forgot how slow BTC is), the BTC shows up in my wallet.
At this point I stuffed up, and sent all the BTC via IBC to Kujira testnet. I should have read the guide more carefully and just sent a little. I didn't have any testnet KUJI to send the BTC back, and didn't have any remaining BTC to perform the withdraw task.
So I waited till one of the faucets became available again, (it takes an hour before you can claim tBTC again) and then sent another amount to Nomic testnet, and then sent it back again.
I probably could have figured out how to go get testnet KUJI to cover the gas to send it back to Nomic, but I didn't bother.
Finally, once I had BTC again, I sent it back to the faucet it came from, and claimed the last part of the airdrop on the testnet.
Overall, the process was a little clunky, but I guess that is expected from Bitcoin. I think we get so used to really fast transactions, both in the Cosmos eco-system, and also here on HIVE. However, it feels like NOM will work quite well for bringing Bitcoin in to the IBC world. With the vast array of options opening up around DeFi like loans through collateralized debt positions, stablecoin minting and so on, nBTC will be a welcome addition to the options.
If you already have NOM, don't forget to compound.
Thanks for reading,
If you enjoyed this post, here are a couple more recent posts you may like:
Cheers,
JK.
