How to Use Mintscan
Mintscan is one of many products Cosmostation offers. Cosmostation is first and foremost one of the largest Cosmos ecosystem validators maintaining active validators on most Cosmos chains. They also operate a Cosmos wallet (Cosmostation IBC Wallet), a bridge (Spacestation.zone) and Mintscan, a Cosmos ecosystem blockchain explorer.
Mintscan is a block explorer for Cosmos-SDK based networks; it’s the Etherscan of the Cosmos. With over 50 active chains in the Cosmos ecosystem and many more set to launch in the coming months, savvily navigating Mintscan and understanding how to unlock its full potential is key for making sound investment decisions.
Through a series of several articles, we will be breaking down some of the ways you can harness the power of Mintscan. These are all relatively easy to do and require no coding skills. We will look at chain data, validator data, and overall ecosystem data.
After reading these articles, you will have the confidence to utilize these tools to research any Cosmos chain.
The primary "raison d’être” for Mintscan is researching blockchain data. The platform provides insights into market capitalization, staking parameters, and even GitHub activity. We will walk you through a deep dive of the Evmos chain to highlight what can be learned from digging into Mintscan.
From the Mintscan main page, clicking on EVMOS will navigate to the EVMOS chain landing page.
Let’s dive in.
First on display is current price, market capitalization, and 24-hour trading volume. Next to this is a graph showing the price and volume data for the most recent daily, week and monthly time frames. Market cap is helpful as it is better indication of project value than any sort of pricing; it is calculated by taking the total number of currently outstanding tokens multiplied by the current price.
You can do this yourself if you want to double check: take 320.15M (total tokens in circulation, via the bonded tokens box) times $1.41 (current price) to get the current market cap of $451M. You can compare this to other chains for a more accurate picture of chain size. (for instance, at the time of writing this, EVMOS is at a $451M market cap, while ATOM, the largest chain in the cosmos, it at a $3.4B market cap.)
Next, looking right below the graphs, sits the bonded token ratio, inflation rate and staking APR::
Bonded tokens are tokens that are staked; the higher the ratio of staked tokens, the closer staking % is to inflation %.
Inflation is how many total new coins will be put into circulation.
Staking APR refers to the number of new tokens you will receive for staking your tokens.
As you can see on EVMOS, only 90.6M of the 320M current tokens in circulation are staked. This means only about 30% of the tokens are receiving inflation rewards. This is one of the reasons that the EVMOS staking APR has been so high for so long, as the staking rate is dramatically lower on EVMOS than on most other cosmos chains.
For example:
ATOM: 67% staked
JUNO: 65% staked
SCRT: 65% staked
While a lower stake rate can support a higher APR, it also can speak to a less secure chain. All non-staked EVMOS is liquid and could theoretically be sold at any time. This is a risk to any chain, but more pronounced on those with lower staking amounts and something to keep an eye on.
The last data point to look at on this page is the community pool. This is what the community has available to spend via governance. While a large amount of available funds is neither good nor bad, I personally like to see chains that are actively spending their community funds on protocols, projects, liquidity pools, and other things to further the chain. That is one reason why this number on its own is not super helpful, but in tandem with other data can be enlightening. We will discuss how you can determine that in a future article when we look over proposals.
Going no further than the EVMOS landing page, we were able to quickly see current market cap, price, trading volume, staking ratio, staking APR, inflation and community pool size. These are all very important data points usable for determining chain value. Next article I will dive into chain parameters, speed, governance and more.
In the next article in this series, we will dive into chain parameters, speed, governance and more. If you enjoyed our coverage of Mintscan and wish to stay up to date on our blog posts, please consider subscribing to our Crypto Chemistry newsletter.