Cosmos Labs Acquires Mintscan and Team to Expand Ecosystem Development

Cosmos Labs is acquiring the Mintscan product suite and welcoming select Minscan personnel, who will bring their multi-year body of work in Cosmos infrastructure development to the Cosmos Labs Ecosystem Team. This move will expand the engineering efforts behind the Cosmos Hub and the broader ecosystem.

The new team members will operate as Cosmos Labs Korea Co., Ltd. (CLK), a newly formed, wholly owned South Korean subsidiary of Cosmos Labs. CLK is led by Una Yu (“Grace”) as Managing Director of the new entity. The team assumes oversight of Ecosystem Products at Cosmos Labs, alongside Cosmos Labs’ Ecosystem Lead, Robert Renier, expanding the Ecosystem team in product, engineering, and operations. With these new members on board, the team takes on three key areas of work:

• Accelerating the Cosmos Hub product roadmap with the existing Cosmos Labs team.
• Ensuring ongoing reliability and expansion of Skip:Go and IBC Eureka.
• Supporting other ecosystem-critical infrastructure and tools, including but not limited to Mintscan.

In the Chaos → Stability → Growth arc that Cosmos Labs laid out in the May forum post for the Cosmos Hub and Ecosystem, this acquisition is the concrete bridge into stability and will support the Cosmos Hub and ecosystem growth moving forward. It puts dedicated resources behind the Cosmos Hub and the institutional DeFi opportunity opening up across IBC, while the enterprise track continues to advance adoption of the Cosmos Stack and surrounding products.

The two directions are aligned in purpose but no longer compete for engineering capacity, and wins on the enterprise side (tokenized deposits, capital markets infrastructure, institutional rails) can now become direct tailwinds for institutional DeFi around the Hub.

The existing Cosmos Labs team could not be more excited to welcome these new members. They are onboarding to Skip:Go and the Cosmos Hub, with the immediate focus on stabilizing the infrastructure the ecosystem depends on today and pushing the roadmap forward from there.

Why Now: Multiple Mandates, Both Critical for Cosmos

In a May post on the Cosmos Hub forum, Cosmos Labs committed publicly to two goals aimed at bringing the Cosmos ecosystem to a state of stability and fostering growth:

• Growing the team dedicated to the Cosmos Hub so that the work could move faster
• Securing long-term, accountable stewardship for the infrastructure and tools upon which the broader blockchain ecosystem around the Hub, IBC, and ATOM depends.

Together, these define Cosmos Labs' two mandates: the enterprise track and the public ecosystem infrastructure track, now resourced to run in parallel.

This acquisition delivers on both commitments while positioning the Hub for a growing opportunity: the emergence of institutional DeFi over IBC, which has become every bit as consequential as the enterprise adoption and tokenization work happening at the Cosmos stack level.

The ledgers that have built durable traction over the past year are the ones working toward institutional and real-world asset use cases, and many of them sit on the Cosmos stack:

• Injective has become one of the largest venues for on-chain stocks and is bringing the $200b music IP industry on-chain with Musicow.
• Figure went public in September 2025 and now holds more than $15.3B in tokenized assets on Provenance, becoming the prime RWA ledger.
• Polygon Payments, Cronos, Lombard, and Stable are adding tokenized rails and innovating on payments with tokenized assets and stablecoins.

With leading RWA, capital market, and institutional DeFi projects built on Cosmos, there is an opportunity for the Cosmos Hub to serve as the coordination and settlement layer for capital, assets, and primitives moving across these ledgers via IBC.

Crucially, the infrastructure the ecosystem already depends on is precisely what is needed to capitalize on that opportunity. Expanding the capabilities of Skip:Go, IBC Eureka, and other essential Cosmos infrastructure will lay the foundation for the next stage of the Cosmos Hub’s growth.

This acquisition provides Cosmos Labs with the resources necessary to execute on that growth. With the expanded team in place, the Cosmos Hub roadmap can advance in parallel with the enterprise go-to-market motion that Cosmos Labs has been building.

Accelerating the Cosmos Hub Roadmap

The expanded Cosmos Labs ecosystem team will continue the public roadmap process that began in May, building the Cosmos Hub roadmap in dialogue with the community rather than behind closed doors.

The Cosmos Hub and ATOM’s role in this opportunity is to provide the infrastructure and primitives that builders, partner ledgers, and DeFi users need to deploy and use a permissionless ecosystem of applications. Several primitives need to exist to make that possible. Some of the first items the team will explore include:

• A Hub-native liquidity layer
• Privacy primitives suitable for both retail and institutional use
• Expanded IBC Eureka connectivity to Ethereum L2s, Solana, and beyond

These directions are not exhaustive, nor are they final commitments, as additional directions may emerge as the work progresses and market conditions change. The team has already begun public discussions on the forum on part of these, with more to come as the roadmap develops.

They are the areas where additional engineering support meaningfully changes the potential for near-term and long-term growth. We will continue to share updates on each, alongside the broader roadmap as it develops, in the weeks and months ahead. You can learn more about all upcoming public discussions below.

Stewarding the Ecosystem's Critical Infrastructure

The team will tackle this commitment across two layers: the Cosmos Hub's growth-critical infrastructure (IBC Eureka, Skip:Go), and the ecosystem primitives users and builders rely on every day (Mintscan and other explorers, wallets, liquidity venues, and supporting tooling).

Skip:Go, IBC Eureka, and Mintscan are the connective tissue of the Cosmos ecosystem, the shared infrastructure that Cosmos-native protocols and users rely on every day to move assets, route IBC traffic, and navigate the network. Their continued reliability, alongside that of other ecosystem-critical tools, is a precondition for everything else the ecosystem wants to build. The Cosmos Labs Ecosystem team becomes the long-term, accountable maintainer for these products and will continue to expand the scope of that stewardship where needed.

Bringing Skip:Go, IBC Eureka, and Mintscan under one team also makes them better as products. The three share a lot of the same underlying infrastructure. Relayer fleets, indexing pipelines, explorers, APIs, and monitoring. All of it was previously duplicated across separate operators. Now, it is a single supportable platform behind all three, cleaner to operate, and easier to offer to institutional partners and ecosystem teams. It also frees up engineering capacity that goes straight into the Cosmos Hub roadmap.

Beyond the products joining Cosmos Labs directly, the team will continue working with the broader ecosystem to ensure other critical primitives (wallets, explorers, liquidity venues, and the like) remain available, sustainable, and defended over the long term. This applies the same approach Cosmos Labs took with native USDC on the Hub, whether through direct stewardship or by enabling the teams already building them.

Growing the Cosmos Presence in Korea and APAC

Korea has been ATOM's most decisive market from the beginning, where the Cosmos story first achieved network effects.

The institutional DeFi opportunity is global, but it is not evenly distributed. APAC is the fastest-growing region for crypto adoption in the world right now, and Korea sits at its center. Tokenization pilots, capital market products, and retail DeFi activity are all growing quickly, and a portion of that activity is already settling over IBC. Many of the opportunities opening up for the Hub are emerging from this region, and being close to them matters.

The team joining Cosmos Labs has been part of that story long before the Hub’s genesis, as long-term community members, developers, and operators inside the Korean ecosystem. Their direct presence in Korea, paired with the existing Cosmos Labs team in the U.S., gives Cosmos Labs a footprint across the two regions where institutional DeFi and enterprise tokenization are moving fastest, and a foundation for deeper engagement with developers, validators, and partners across APAC.

The Team’s Next Steps:

The new ecosystem team members are integrating into Cosmos Labs. The Cosmos Hub roadmap work has already begun, with the new team members and the existing Cosmos Labs team working on shared priorities from day one.

What to expect in the coming weeks:

You can expect the new team to focus on stabilizing and migrating the ecosystem infrastructure initially, before turning its attention to the broader Cosmos Hub roadmap.

We are not changing the process laid out in the Chaos -> Stability -> Growth post, and we will continue to use the same communication channels and continue the roadmapping process as expected, while integrating the new team into the work.

The ecosystem team will focus on executing this plan and continuing the public dialogue with the community about the Hub’s roadmap direction. The next session, beginning in June, will discuss options for the Cosmos Hub’s native liquidity layer. You can follow our weekly updates on the Cosmos Hub forums, subscribe to the community calendar for our live calls, and follow the Cosmos Hub on X for periodic updates.

Questions or feedback can be shared on the Cosmos Hub forum or through any of the existing community channels.

For more information about Cosmos Labs, visit cosmos.network.