Here’s a simple idea for the current pre-genesis Atom (key) holders….you’d better start imagining very high, almost seemingly outlandish, Cosmos valuations as being not only possible but probable because multi-billion dollar valuations could quickly be the norm from the outset for Cosmos. And if you’re still under the mindset that Cosmos is just like any other ICO this year, you’re quite wrong.

To begin with, this team drastically under-raised (at just $17 million). Post-genesis, this could likely be looked upon as possibly being the biggest under-raise in Crypto, and pretty much only comparable to OmiseGo’s $20 million crowdsale.

The environment around Cosmos’ crowdsale was right before the crazy valuations became the norm, and yet relative to others at the time Cosmos’ sale was still a very fast crowdsale with huge demand. Somewhat notably, Tezos’ Arthur Breitman was famously quoted on the Tezos Slack as saying that Cosmos was the only crowdsale he was considering investing in, however he slept in and missed it completely (the sale only lasted 30 minutes). With the current Tezos drama take that for whatever it’s worth, but in general that’s a high-profile Crypto-Dev who’s quite been quite critical of Ethereum but saw an opportunity in Cosmos. So in my opinion, at the time, Cosmos could have easily raised $100+ million during that timeframe.

Additionally, today we see Polkadot raise $130m (maybe more, I can’t find an update anywhere and since I’m in the USA I can’t access crowdsale site) and this is with no USA and China purchases and strong KYC requirements. Additionally, they have a looong lockup time until genesis of 2 years and so there’s a very high opportunity cost associated with participating in Polkadot. Take out the KYC, take out the restrictions, take out the 2-year lockup and you’d likely see a $500 million+++ raise.

Lastly, and by far most importantly here… ETH has NO scaling solution any time soon. It has lots of theory, lots of awesome research and some very early-stage code, however there appears to be no scaling for a long while here and the Ethereum team is forced to hard fork to delay their pre-programmed ice age. Additionally, with many high-profile dApps (Kin, OmiseGo, etc) requiring the use of some sort of uber-scaling solutions soon, Ethereum can’t just wait it out without any kind of solution, even temporary solution, at this stage.

So seeing this quandary that they’re in, Vitalik Buterin has partnered with Cosmos in order to make sure that Cosmos focuses on ETH and ERC20 scaling solutions when Cosmos’ Atoms launch in December. To put it another way, that’s a $29 billion crypto-currency, with billions more in associated tokens, which will be heavily reliant on Cosmos’ Hubs for scaling solutions for the foreseeable future.

Now valuation-wise one could argue that if ETH and the ETH tokens are worth $30+ billion, and that for a full year at least ETH and ETH tokens are all totally and completely reliant on Cosmos’ scaling solution in order to take ETH ‘up a notch’, that it would make sense for that Cosmos to be worth “some amount” close to the incremental value increase that ETH gets from using Cosmos’ solution.

Unfortunately, not having Cosmos’ Atoms in existence yet and not really having any real good comps like this in Crypto-land makes this very uncharted territory for valuing Cosmos.

So perhaps a better question would be, what’s the incremental value of ETH achieving a high level of PoS-based scaling now (100’s or even 1000’s of transactions per second) versus 1–2 years from now?