Another tech enthusiast's dream to change the world.

Written by: Eric, Foresight News

On the evening of September 16, KuCoin and Kraken launched a new coin simultaneously: GNOT.

For most people, this is just another new token queued for listing. But for veteran players in the Cosmos community, this day has been awaited for five long years: Jae Kwon's Gno.land has finally made its token truly liquid.

A story of leaving out of spite

The name Jae Kwon carries significant weight in the cryptocurrency world: he founded Tendermint in 2014 and later co-founded Cosmos. It can be said that he laid the foundation for much of today’s cross-chain ecosystem.

The 2008 financial crisis made him lose trust in the traditional financial system; it was the starting point for his entry into the industry. Later, various practices of institutional manipulation of information and public opinion deepened his vigilance against "black box systems."

However, in 2020, he left the empire he had built with his own hands. The immediate trigger was rather unromantic: he wanted to pursue new projects, while several executives in the company felt he was neglecting Cosmos and left in anger, prompting him to resign as CEO. In early 2021, he simply quit all positions in AIB (All in Bits, the early main development entity of Tendermint and Cosmos) and the Interchain Foundation to fully focus on a new project called Gno: a blockchain world where code must be completely exposed to the sunlight, readable, auditable, and forkable by everyone.

His solution was very "programmer-like": the new chain did not require learning a new language. Gno language is about 99% similar to Go, allowing millions of Go developers to move in easily. More radically, smart contracts (called Realms) on Gno.land only go on-chain in complete source code form, without compiled black-box bytecode; the entire chain acts like an "on-chain GitHub," where anyone's code can be opened and read.

What were they doing for five years?

The answer is: slowly grinding, to the point where the community became impatient.

In 2021, Jae Kwon almost single-handedly created the prototype of the Gno virtual machine, with the first application on-chain being a forum called Boards.

Indeed, the first application of a chain is a BBS.

2022 was a dramatically charged year. Proposal 69 of Cosmos Hub sought to integrate CosmWasm into the mainnet, and Jae Kwon strongly opposed it, declaring he would support a fork if the proposal passed, and promised an airdrop of Gno.land tokens to those who voted against it. The proposal was ultimately rejected, and this "empty check" became the basis for the largest airdrop of GNOT later. That year, Ignite split off, and he became CEO of NewTendermint, publicly feuding with former colleagues, with CoinDesk's headline at the time reading "Fighting for the Soul of Cosmos."

In 2023, Proposal 848 of Cosmos proposed to cut the inflation cap of ATOM from about 20% to 10%, and Jae Kwon again stood up in opposition. But this time the community passed the proposal, and Jae Kwon chose to directly fork into AtomOne: a chain that is very Web3 but no one fundamentally uses.

Jae Kwon is very stubborn; he firmly believes that the economic model written into the project’s "constitution" cannot be touched. If changed, it would no longer be the original Cosmos. AtomOne then became a symbolic "original Cosmos," with no practical significance.

In 2023, the project held a "Game of Realms" competition, offering a prize pool of 133,700 ATOM, using a challenge method to filter contributors. In Jae Kwon's ideal, governance should belong to those who work, not to those with money.

Then came the long march of the testnet: in 2024, Test4 became the first permanent multi-node testnet, and the prototype of GovDAO governance went online; by 2025 it iterated to Test8; and by June of this year, the testnet had already progressed to Test13, with over 680,000 transactions processed on this single network.

Five years, 13 testnets, over 150 contributors, and more than 2400 merged PRs. The project's official website is so rudimentary it looks like something thrown together by a programmer, as it was indeed directly written with backend languages.

Half sea, half flame

In March of this year, the Beta mainnet launched, and GNOT was distributed for the first time, but the transfer function was deliberately locked, and tokens could not be transferred. Not until September 12 was the brand new mainnet gnoland-1 officially launched, with 3.26 million accounts receiving the genesis allocation; the transfer restrictions were locked according to the terms of the on-chain constitution, with only whitelisted addresses exempt, and 96% of the tokens would be linearly unlocked over 24 months. Subsequently, governance voting was gradually relaxed, and it wasn't until September 16, before trading commenced on KuCoin and Kraken, that GNOT truly began to circulate.

The total supply of Gno.land's token GNOT is fixed at 1.333 billion: 26.26% (350 million tokens) were airdropped to users who voted against Proposal 69, 17.33% to AtomOne users, NewTendermint LLC holds 24.91%, and investors hold 22.5% (including AIB investors), with the remainder allocated for the ecosystem, core developers, and validator reserves.

Only 9% was allocated to the community and the project, with the remainder sent to "insiders." Even during the TGE, the circulating supply reached 14.8% of the total.

Back in July, Gno.land conducted a public auction. 38.76 million GNOT (2.9% of total supply) were offered for sale at a uniform price auction, with a starting price of $0.0645 and a soft cap of $2.5 million. Ultimately, the tokens sold only at the floor price, raising just $1.18 million. From September 14 to 16, KuCoin reopened the Spotlight channel for GNOT's pre-listing subscription, offering 7.75 million tokens with a hard cap of $500,000, attracting 4082 participants, oversubscribing by 15.54 times.

This result is arguably dismal compared to popular projects, but it is still significantly better than Linera, which received investment from a16z and raised a total of $12 million.

On one hand, there was a desolate public auction; on the other, a scramble for subscriptions at exchanges. One aspect indicates that the overlap between on-chain users and exchange users is still low, while it also reflects that the market is unwilling to pay a premium for "idealistic narratives" in advance, but does not want to miss out on a potentially winning cheap lottery ticket.

In conclusion

There are certainly many doubts: a lack of interest in the auction, nearly half of the holdings by the team and investors, a long unlocking period, and an ecosystem that is still thin right after the mainnet launch. Some on X are optimistic about its long-term development, while others suggest to wait and observe the real usage data first.

In fairness, Gno.land is not a project that tells stories; it resembles a stubborn experiment by an idealistic veteran: code must be readable, governance should depend on contributions, and development should use the most mainstream language. Five years of time have proven that he can build the chain, but the subsequent question is: is there anyone willing to actually use it?