Maghnus Mareneck, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Cosmos Labs – Interview Series

Maghnus Mareneck, is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Cosmos Labs — prior to leading Cosmos Labs, he co-founded Skip (2022–2025), worked as an Associate Product Manager at Atlassian (2020–2022), co-founded Clarus Art, and gained experience at Bridgewater Associates designing global macroeconomic analytics.

Cosmos Labs is the core development and ecosystem-growth organization advancing the Cosmos Stack, driving innovation across the Cosmos SDK, IBC, CometBFT, and Cosmos EVM. The group focuses on scaling adoption, building products for enterprises, and strengthening the broader network of interconnected blockchains powered by Cosmos technology.

You’ve moved from macroeconomic research at Bridgewater to product roles at Atlassian and then into founding Skip Protocol before co-founding Cosmos Labs. How did that blend of technical, economic, and product experience shape your vision for a sovereign, interoperable blockchain ecosystem?

At Bridgewater, I developed a strong understanding of how economies function and how individual economic parameters can drive significant, compounding changes. My work focused on analyzing inflation of various goods and linking them to broader regional performance. This experience highlighted that economies, like blockchains, can be tuned through small changes, resulting in entirely different incentive systems. I’d say this perspective drove my interest in blockchain as a configurable “economy-in-a-box” technology. Cosmos, as a sovereign and customizable system, effectively enables large-scale, economy-like systems.

At Atlassian, I transitioned from analysis to product, driving Fortune 500 integrations for Confluence, a large-scale SaaS product. This taught me the value of actually being on the front lines and building software. Blockchain brings these experiences together, allowing us to build a customizable, widely used blockchain stack and collaborate with customers who view networks as foundational economic systems, adjusting parameters to achieve desired incentives.

Stablecoins are rapidly shifting from crypto-native assets toward regulated financial instruments. How do you see this evolution influencing how banks approach stablecoin issuance and cross-border settlement?”

We’ve found that banks are primarily interested in two areas: tokenized deposits and stablecoins. Tokenized deposits, similar to stablecoins, allow banks to digitize incoming funds for improved internal tracking. On the other hand, stablecoins enable banks to retain yield on underlying collateral, even as users transfer tokens externally. This trend is evident in Japan, where SMBC Group has partnered with Toki Finance to enable the use of stablecoins for security token payments, reducing fees and accelerating settlement. The programmable nature of blockchain also eliminates counterparty risk, which plagues many TradFi workflows today. Significantly, they are leveraging IBC and the Cosmos stack to achieve interoperability across multiple blockchains, making cross-border settlement practical. When banks can issue stablecoins in compliance with local regulations while maintaining interoperability with other networks, actual institutional adoption becomes possible.

Cross-border payments remain one of the clearest real-world use cases for interoperable chains. Where do you see Cosmos having the most immediate impact on settlement speed, cost, and transparency?

In this environment, interoperability is everything. Cross-border payments today move through correspondent banking networks that take days to settle and charge significant fees. When you’re dealing with multiple institutions, each with its own systems and compliance frameworks, you need infrastructure that connects them seamlessly.

That’s what IBC (Inter-Blockchain Communication standard) does. We’ve seen more than 80 chains connected via IBC, facilitating billions in cross-chain transfers. The immediate impact is clearest in corridors with high remittance volume where the existing banking infrastructure doesn’t serve people well. In underserved corridors, Cosmos-based settlements can dramatically reduce costs and settlement times. An example is Project PAX in Japan, a case study of a collaborative initiative to build a cross-border stablecoin settlement layer that integrates with existing bank systems via Swift’s API framework. For enterprises, the value is straightforward: faster cash conversion cycles, lower treasury costs, and audit trails that regulators can actually verify. The internet shouldn’t feel like an isolated place. There shouldn’t be an Ethereum ecosystem, a Solana ecosystem, and a traditional financial ecosystem where value can’t move between them. The solution is Cosmos: where we use IBC to connect all chains and traditional financial rails, providing the end user with seamless access.

Governments are increasingly evaluating blockchain frameworks to modernize national financial infrastructure. What’s driving this new wave of public-sector interest in sovereign chains?

What’s driving this is pretty simple: governments want to enact their country’s Law, and blockchain gives them a powerful framework to do this for their financial systems. They want to program their monetary policy, their data, and their infrastructure. Public chains don’t offer that.

When you’re a government, there is no way you’re trusting anyone except yourself. Sovereign chains built on Cosmos allow governments to customize consensus mechanisms, set validator requirements aligned with national security standards, and implement privacy controls that meet their domestic laws. The move toward interoperable blockchains is a trend even governments cannot ignore, as the alternative is being locked out of a connected financial system as traditional systems become more archaic and less interoperable. We’re actively developing two CBDCs in Latin America, and we expect this model to be replicated across South America, Africa, and Southeast Asia.

Digital identity is emerging as a foundational layer for both governments and enterprises. How do you see blockchain-based identity working across interoperable networks, and why is this important to Cosmos?”

Digital identity is one of the many critical missing pieces for getting institutions comfortable with blockchain at scale. Right now, users have to complete redundant KYC processes on every platform they use. That creates friction and exposes data unnecessarily. Blockchain-based identity changes this by enabling credentials to follow the user across chains without requiring repeated verification.

On Cosmos, each sovereign chain can set its own identity requirements. A regulated securities chain might need full KYC. A consumer application might allow pseudonymous access. But IBC can be configured to enable those credentials to be recognized across the ecosystem, so once you’re verified in one place, that verification could ostensibly be portable. The technical approach that’s gaining traction uses decentralized identifiers with verifiable credentials. You can prove you’re over 18 or accredited without revealing your whole identity. This is important because cross-chain interoperability gives users more choice and power. Banks and blockchain projects alike may want to keep their users locked into their networks, but that’s not how the internet should work. We hope to work closely with partners to help achieve this level of user UX as they begin exploring DID onchain.

When large enterprises explore building their own Layer-1 on Cosmos, what are the most common misconceptions or areas of confusion you encounter early in those conversations?

The first misconception is that building a Layer-1 requires starting from scratch. The Cosmos SDK lets developers build custom blockchains quickly with minimal overhead. We’ve seen more than 200 blockchains launched using this approach since the Cosmos SDK’s launch. With the right resources, enterprises can deploy a production-ready chain in weeks rather than years.

Second, there’s this belief that sovereignty means isolation. Generally speaking, when choosing a chain or a different stack like Hyperledger, that is true – even when building a smart contract on Ethereum, you need to depend on third-party bridges with high trust assumptions. With Cosmos, that is not true, because the stack has native interoperability embedded (IBC) and it is able to connect to any other Cosmos Chain, as well as Ethereum, EVM chains such as L2s, and Solana soon as well. It generally can extend to any network, as it is easily extensible and today connects to over 120 networks. This is a misconception that requires a lot of unlearning and reeducation from enterprises.

Finally, many enterprises assume that blockchain requires trade-offs they’re unwilling to make. Cosmos lets you define who participates in consensus, what data is visible, and how transactions flow. Giving you the power to configure it to your requirements rather than adapting your business to the chain.

Enterprise adoption requires strong assurances around security, auditability, and governance. How does Cosmos Labs help institutions meet compliance requirements while still benefiting from decentralization?

Enterprise adoption hinges on security, auditability, and governance, and Cosmos was designed with these requirements in mind, both for developers and enterprises alike. Onchain governance provides configurable voting mechanisms and upgrade procedures that can align with corporate or regulatory approval workflows. Every transaction is traceable and auditable by design. That’s table stakes for frameworks such as SOC 2, ISO 27001, and banking regulations that institutions, particularly financial firms, are held to an incredibly strict standard. At Cosmos Labs, we work directly with these institutions as advisors or implementers to architect chains that meet their specific enterprise requirements. That might mean privacy controls under GDPR, transaction-monitoring hooks for AML, or token structures that satisfy securities-law definitions. We’re developing reference architectures for various institutional use cases to reduce implementation timelines from years to months. More importantly, that is why the Cosmos Stack is so important and a good fit. It’s the only stack that allows you to configure the chain and infrastructure end-to-end to ensure compliance (e.g., automatic AML checks on transactions and integration with the chain’s core behaviors).

Tokenization and onchain assets are gaining momentum across traditional finance. What real-world examples from the Cosmos ecosystem best illustrate this shift?”

We’ve seen this shift happening in concrete ways. Ondo, a major real-world asset issuer, launched on Cosmos. Noble operates as a dedicated stablecoin issuance hub and now hosts native USDC, providing a compliant, IBC-connected on-ramp for the entire ecosystem. We see many banks, especially large asset managers, seeking to leverage the liquidity generated by tokenizing their core assets. There are smaller examples as well. For instance, we’ve seen significant activity in tokenized real estate. Revolve, a newly launched company, offers a real estate NFT marketplace where you can purchase an entire home or fractional shares. Across all these cases, the common thread is that tokenization on Cosmos is enhanced by IBC’s connectivity and the added benefits of sovereignty. A tokenized asset issued on one sovereign chain can be traded, used as collateral, or settled on any connected chain. This liquidity benefit is precisely what makes tokenization valuable, moving it beyond novelty.

With more than 200 chains built on Cosmos, how do you guide governments or enterprises toward best practices when deploying and governing their own sovereign networks?

Governments and enterprises behave differently from traditional open and permissionless blockchains. On Ethereum, or ATOM, you have decentralized validator sets and operators helping run an open network. Enterprises and governments want sovereignty and higher levels of control, so instead of Proof of Stake, they tend to steer into Proof of Authority or permissioned validator sets, where they select who operates the network (similarly to bank trust networks), or run the network themselves. Especially because governments want regional specificity (i.e., a U.S. chain operating on U.S.-owned infrastructure). Estonia is a great example, as they utilize their national blockchain network (operated wholly in Estonia) to protect their services against foreign cyberattacks. Trust is distributed, and token stake matters less over trusted relationships (i.e., different government agencies operating nodes for a national CBDC network). The fact that Cosmos is able to provide this level of permissioning and control is what unlocks blockchain adoption for many enterprises, who can still benefit from distributed, secure systems, without having to sacrifice compliance or autonomy over their infrastructure.

From your perspective, what signals indicate that blockchain is moving beyond proof-of-concept pilots and becoming core financial infrastructure?

From our perspective, the clearest signal is that major financial institutions are no longer running experiments. They’re running production systems with larger user bases and pilots with their innovative customers/users. JPMorgan is pushing into its own deposit token. BNY Mellon, the world’s largest custodian, is now offering digital asset custody to institutional clients. These are real deployments with real volume. Our impression is that the new institutional adoption curve will come from companies building new Layer-1 blockchains or integrating blockchain rails, since existing infrastructure solutions don’t provide viable paths to build integrations within existing companies. We anticipate that most companies adopting the Cosmos stack will be Fortune 500 firms and major financial institutions moving onchain to integrate their existing businesses. In addition, regulatory clarity is the other signal. When regulation shifts from ambiguity to a legislative framework, it unlocks institutional capital. We’re seeing this now with MiCA in Europe, stablecoin legislation advancing in the US, and also Japan, which took time to roll out regulations, but now has a fast-growing stablecoin ecosystem unified under JPYC, the nationally regulated coin.

Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit Cosmos Labs.