Juno

Juno blockchain originates from a community, developers, validators & delegators initiative. The goal of this initiative was to isolate smart contracts depletion into a dedicated Cosmos subsidiary hub.

Juno is a decentralized ecosystem, providing a sandbox environment for the deployment of interoperable smart contracts with no restrictions or censorship. Developers do not have to wait for validators' approval to become a part of the hub. On the one hand, it allows projects to launch quickly. From the other side, it leads to low-quality dApps.

Juno enables developers to launch application specific smart contracts using proven frameworks and compile them in various languages, like Rust and Go. C and C++ languages are planned to be added.

Differences between Juno and other smart contract blockchains

Here's what sets JUNO apart from Ethereum and Solana (according to JUNO developers):

Easy Deployment of Smart Contracts;
Permission-less base layer;
Home of CosmWasm (Interwasm DAO);
Native interoperability;
High scalability;
High security level;
Decentralized network inception;
Community lead core development;
Community lead liquidity;
Community lead ecosystem development;
Balanced governance;
Dynamic fee balancing
Сlear legal status (no pre-sale, private sale or public sale).

The network was launched on October 11, 2021 with the distribution of tokens to $ATOM holders. In December of the same year with the Moneta update the CosmWasm module was added to the network.

CosmWasm

CosmWasm is a platform built on Cosmos SDK that adapted the WebAssembly language for the Cosmos blockchain. Wasm is a low-level bytecode that runs in the browser. This code can be converted to machine code while the module bytes are still downloading (stream compilation).

CosmWasm allows developers to write modules in Rust that integrate seamlessly with the Cosmos SDK. It also allows code to be uploaded directly in transactions. We'll skip the rest of the details, but it's important to understand that it makes smart contracts faster ;)

Although the Rust+CosmWasm bundle is more difficult to develop than Solidity, it is claimed that it allows writing complex contracts without any security flaws (commemorate this point).

You can read more about CosmWasm here

$JUNO

$JUNO is the native token of the Juno Network.

As mentioned earlier, 47% of the genesis supply (64,903,242 $JUNO) was airdropped to $ATOM stakers on a 1:1 basis. That's why people love the Cosmos ecosystem — there are a lot of airdrops.

A 12 years of vesting is in place for the team.

The max supply of 185,562,268 $JUNO will be reached within 12 years. The JUNO reward model distributes a fixed number of JUNO tokens per block depending on the inflation rate and block time of the network. The inflation model is as follows:

Governance & scandals

Another important thing to mention is the sensational Juno Proposal #16. Then the Juno community voted to revoke honestly earned 2.5M $JUNO from one of the holders (dubbed "whale"), and return them into the community pool or destroy them entirely.

The reason for this decision was that the initial limit of 50K tokens per account was broken. Since a single wallet in the ecosystem already has half of the quorum, there also was a high risk for governance. You can see the results of the vote on the screenshot below.

After the heated exchange and arguments for and against, the whale appeared with a Medium post (it was deleted, as well as the account, but "the Internet remembers everything", so you can find the post in the archive)

A record of transactions performed by CCN (that's the whale from Japan) can be found here.

If you look more deeply into this story, you can run into Proposal #4. The whale had already been detected by that time, but the proposal was rejected as a result of dubious arrangements. And later, the story continued. This whole mess led to many tweets, as well as debates in various chats.

In addition to the strange behavior of the founders, it turned out that the whale, who acted in the interests of investors from Japan, embezzled airdrops. The story ended with the Proposal #20, which was supported by the community. As a result of that proposal, the chain was updated. The whale's funds were confiscated (except 50,000 $JUNO).

According to the Proposal #20 results, the fat that has been cut off from the whale was supposed to be sent to the Juno address in the community pool, but developers mistakenly copied the transaction hash instead of the wallet address and sent the funds there. Since this is PoS, the community was able to vote again to transfer the funds. "Code is law" in action…

Meanwhile, Takumi Asano a.k.a the whale, claimed that Juno's price was falling because tokens were dumped by...wolfcontract, one of the developers of the chain. To prove his words he provided the analytics.

Note that this is the first community decision in the history of crypto to shave a whale, not hamsters:)

Vulnerabilities

On April 5, 2022, the blockchain went offline because of a deployed smart contract, disguised as a classic "Hello, World!". The vulnerability impacted all blockchains that use the CosmWasm. This, by the way, happened less than a month after the sensational Proposal #16.

Ecosystem

Now the Juno ecosystem consists of about 50 applications. Among big protocols - WYND (DEX), which replaces Junoswap (DEX) (decided in prop 18 RAW DAO, details here), DAODAO (DAO creation toolkit), TFM (DEX aggregator), JunoMint (DAPP to mint your token on JUNO), StrangeClan (p2e game on u5 engine).

WIND's UI looks much nicer than Junoswap's, hopefully the product will be well developed and successful:

What we have in the end: a blockchain focused on the development of fast contracts, but probably too innovative to this day.