The state of Namada and what to do about it

General
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The state of Namada and what to do about it

Currently, Namada seems at a bit of a stalemate. The facts are as follows:

  • TGE and genesis of network was December 2024
  • Nam moveability and following listings were sometime around June 2025
  • Initial listings were on 3 medium/low-tier cex (kucoin, gate, mexc), as well as osmosis (dex), with very shallow liquidity on osmosis. Nam was listed on coingecko but not coinmarketcap, the latter due to cmc asking around $2.5-$5k usd for listing, I believe, and heliax believing that was not worth the cost.
  • As the autumn progressed, the price of Nam was decreasing, marketing was absent, but network running and being actively developed, community was asking increasingly about marketing, further listings, and visibility on the network from founders in particular.
  • In the middle of this, Anoma decides to TGE XAN, and indications are made that after that season of listings are over, focus will be back on Namada too. Nothing happens.
  • During the latter part of the fall, Knowable (gavin) attempted to negotiate with heliax taking over the responsibility for the network. My impression from statements made about this effort was the talks were pretty serious but ultimately did not come to head. At the same time, statements made by several parties imply that some heliax founders were blocking a major network upgrade for Namada for months for reasons of wanting Anoma (the project) to be undisturbed, and ultimately, Namada leaders decided to move forward on the upgrade without heliax approval.
  • During the same time period, some of us were doing all we could behind the scenes to get Anoma to commit to a XAN airdrop to Namada OG contributors. In talks between myself, gavin and chris goes, we got quite a way towards this, unfortunately still at this point, to the best of my knowledge, Anoma has not committed to such a drop.
  • After a long silence from Anoma founders, Adrian showed up in the discord January (Validator Circle, January 22), promising that Namada would be developed further (not just maintained), promising to show up consistently, while recognizing his absence and fault in that, promising to take care of dex liquidity and coinmarketcap listings. None of these promises have been fulfilled. In fact, Adrian (and Awa) have been entirely absent from the community discord ever since, and have not responded to any direct messages, in spite of reaching out through multiple trusted parties encouraging them to get back to us. In spite of a lot of us pleading in the discord for some sort of engagement (check mainnet coordination channel if in doubt). The absolute level of disrespect to those who have put so much into this project, is hard to describe.
  • It is part of this picture that my understanding is that Christopher Goes (cwgoes) have left heliax and that process as I understand it, have been underway for some time, with the main responsibility for handling Namada being with Adrian and Awa.
  • At the moment, very little development work has been done on Namada the past half year. Many heliax devs who worked on Namada were laid off, and my understanding is the remainder have been tasked almost exclusively to Anoma-related tasks during the past half year. The one medium-level thing we had pop up, where the Namada extension suddenly stopped working on Chrome was not addressed in a timely manner by heliax. Only when a community member supplied a PR to fix the issue, was the extension updated with a lot of push through informal channels, and over the course of a few months. I am scared to think of how any critical incidents would be handled. (I am reminded there was a cometbft upgrade during the spring, in fairness).
  • That being said, the state of the network appears healthy, the product is working, and to be perfectly honest, I still think Namada is an extremely attractive product offering, even with the caveats about the Cosmos ecosystem. If it was marketed, listed, promoted, treated as anything but the orphan child. Instead, Adrian and Awa have been missing for the better part of at least 4-5 months (Awa almost never engages with the community in discord, but for Adrian’s part), while touting having founded Namada in various social media posts etc. Anything but marketing and promoting the chain / network. Or even communicating with them/us.
  • There have been many remarks from heliax and others about the Cosmos ecosystem being “dead”. personally I feel this is a bit overstated, but opinions differ on this I guess. For sure it is an issue for Namada with Osmosis as the only remaining trading place, that Osmosis has been put into maintenance rather than more active development. There are very few good trading metrics available for NAM, due to the way Osmosis displays data, and due to liquidity being very shallow (when a market falls under $1k in liquidity, Osmosis apparently does not track it).

So that is the state of Namada. How do we move forward? This post is an attempt to open that discussion with the community.

I see some possible options going forward. (some have suggested putting up signaling proposals for vote, but I think discussion needs to come first):

  1. We, as a community, make a plan for responsibly shutting down the network, seeing as noone seems to be taking responsibility for its wellbeing at the moment. This is an option.
  2. Some form of community takeover of the network is attempted. I have my sincere doubts whether a model like this would be viable, given the current state of the community. I would not be able to take on a task like that, for a number of reasons.
  3. We could explore some hybrid model where heliax/Anoma keeps ownership over the network and IP, and remains responsible for Namada development, but community gets control over website, x account, discord server, business development (that would probably require heliax to hand over some of their tokens) etc. I think a model like this might work, but the achilles’ heel here is that development resources for Namada seem sparse at heliax for the time being. Who knows if that could change with some proper market exposure though?
  4. Heliax/Adrian in particular gets back and delivers on the promises made when he last appeared. (this would be nice)
  5. Status quo.
  6. Any number of other options I may not have considered. Some voices I talked to before drafting this has suggested a hardfork, I personally don’t see us doing that, but who knows.

This post is mainly to open discussion, and I will admit, to part to try and finally get some reaction from remaining Anoma founders, as they often pop up when they feel the network may be shutting down.

Please tell me what you all think, and which way you think we should consider going forward as a community, which unfortunately has been put rather on the side of the network leadership at this time.

Let me also say that I am disappointed that so many of us have not seen the fruit of our efforts, as I believe we would have been in a world where the network was given a fair chance. I don’t mind contributing on a voluntary basis, that’s the name of the game here. But I think it’s fair to expect that teams work for the success of their project.

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It is sad to see such a beautiful tech seeing this day. I wish namada was also a priority. Would love to see evm and solana support one day though. Good tech , bad politics?

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now that Namada’s been drained, people should consider removing all funds from any protocol where it is not clear that those who should be responsible for it are actively working on it. there seems to be almost no credible Namada dev activity since December 2025

at least one person has said that this has wiped them out. i’m disappointed that actions weren’t taken to sunset Namada back when i proposed it at the January 15 Community Bonfire: Namada wind-down - Google Docs

at a time where LLM models are rapidly improving at finding bugs (and thus exploits), a protocol shouldn’t be running with competent maintainers asleep at the wheel

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Personal context: I stepped away from Heliax (on my own volition) at the end of Q1 2026. Most people involved with the project are aware; I’ve so far held off on a broader public announcement on the request of Heliax communications, but I think it’s important to clarify here to avoid potential misunderstandings. I’m happy to discuss more context 1:1 with anyone interested, but obviously this is not the topic of import today. I do not represent Heliax or the AF and comment here on a purely personal basis.

Due to the recent exploit, this thread has come to mix two topics, which I will split here for clarity.

First, concerning the exploit, associated operational matters, and the current state of crypto security:

  • Needless to say, this is extremely unfortunate and I’m very sorry for anyone impacted.
  • My understanding is that Heliax is currently running incident response. I wish them the best of luck and I’m happy to contribute if helpful.
  • I’ve started runs of the latest top LLMs (Claude Opus 4.8, GLM 5.2, GPT-5.5) on the Namada codebase to look for potential issues related and unrelated to this particular exploit. This is by no means sufficient, but it seems at least directionally helpful. I’ll report anything I find to the appropriate parties. It might also be helpful to run Claude Mythos 5, if anyone has access to that (I do not).
  • In my view, the current state of cybersecurity in crypto is extremely difficult, turbulent, and dangerous. This is primarily because recent advances in LLMs have reduced the cost of sophisticated analysis and attacks to near-zero. The danger is particularly acute for custom tech stacks with less capital and security attention (such as Cosmos, including Namada, other such non-major ecosystems, non-major DeFi, etc). Personally, I would recommend that folks withdraw any substantial holdings from such protocols and ecosystems, at least for the time being. I want to be clear that this is not an attempt to disclaim responsibility for this particular incident – I’m just trying to provide a realistic evaluation of the general state of affairs. Many previously-latent bugs have been exploited in the wild recently, including in projects with far more attention and resources to dedicate to security. Although I’m optimistic about the long-term security impact of LLMs, it will take time to find a new equilibrium, and in the short term I expect further exploits and pain.

Second, concerning the broader questions of Namada’s future:

  • I can’t speak on behalf of Heliax or the AF as to their plans.
  • The current situation is tricky (as @pretoro has outlined). On the one hand, the Namada network has been running just fine (or, at least, had been until this particular exploit :frowning: ). On the other hand, there is less and less external interest in the token and network, and it does not appear that anyone is interested in committing substantial resources to further develop, secure, or promote it at the moment. It is also not clear to me that doing so would be a prudent use of funds, for a few reasons:
    • The Cosmos ecosystem is essentially dead. Many projects have shut down, and those which have not seem to be trundling along in a ‘maintenance mode’ similar to Namada. Cosmos has been declared ‘dead’ many times, and come back – it might do so again, but I wouldn’t bet on it personally. Although Namada aspired to transcend the perception and economic limitations of being a ‘Cosmos chain’, it has not really managed to do so, and there is no economic sustainability to be had in running a service business (asset privacy) for a dead ecosystem.
    • In my opinion, in order to provide a high level of security assurance for a custom tech stack in the current cybersecurity environment, substantial investment would be needed (such as formal verification of much of the core protocol, as Zcash is attempting for their next circuit, and comprehensive, professional re-audits of the entire stack with the current tooling). This is doable but expensive in both money (probably $-millions) and time (at least many months).
    • The Namada stack includes many custom protocols and features (such as cubic proof-of-stake, steward-based PGF, and shielded set rewards) which, while novel and compelling from a design perspective, seem unlikely to contribute to PMF or economic sustainability in the current environment. These come with an associated maintenance and security cost which does not seem justified given the lack of demand (this is also true for much of the Cosmos stack in general these days). In some sense, perhaps investing substantial time and effort in developing these features was a strategic mistake, and I take some personal responsibility here, as I pushed for them at the time – but as much as I wish I had had better foresight, the question at hand is what to do in the world as we find it today.
  • Personally, if anyone is seriously interested in trying to steward or further develop the network, I would be happy to support a PGF proposal to award them a large amount of tokens, and/or donate all of my remaining personal NAM to support such an effort (I have already donated some to community members).
  • Another option (which I think could be more likely to succeed) would be to port the token balances (perhaps altered somewhat), the core privacy tech (MASP/SSR), and the brand/community to another “base environment” (e.g. EVM/SVM) and continue the project with a more minimal, non-Cosmos tech stack. I would also support this if someone is interested in doing it.
  • On the other hand, if folks (particularly validators) decide to conduct an orderly shutdown, I would also support that, and I’m happy to help where I can. Absent substantial security investment, I think an orderly shutdown is prudent from a user protection perspective.
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Just my 2 cents here:

It seems many projects in crypto (Namada included apparently) bet their survival on an endless exhuberant bull market mania from the get-go. If that doesn’t materialize immediatly, they start to drift, becoming directionless and trying to capitalize on every ephemeral fades they encounter (be it memecoins, stablecoins, the latest “hot” blockchain…)

You should have a vision from the beginning and stick to it no matter what. Not doing so and trying to blame your own failures on external factors shows a clear lack of insight and character.

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all kinda sad really

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i dont know how much 2 makes sense after the drain. if this was 2018, maybe. but its not. the market is overpopulated with similar chains. even if it would have been pulled out of the water, the amount of resource and effort to do anything is tremendous. and many more questions: wrong eco, no community, etc

im not even sure 1 is a go after all this =)

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I want to just respond to a few things, and include a bit more info for those who have not been following:

A few hours after I posted this thread (I’ve had it on draft for a while and gotten good feedback from key people here), it became apparent the masp of the protocol (the shielded section which can hold multi-type assets), was drained 1-2 days previous, from all material value.

We do not yet know exactly what heliax is doing about it or what the plan is, except they are working on it. In my view therefore, everything we are discussing here is a bit premature before we know more about heliax’ (the company developing Namada and behind Anoma and Anoma Foundation) stance to and response to the exploit, and what heliax’ plans are for the network going forward, if there is a forward. (I had some more reflections on specifics, but hesitating to post more before heliax has had a chance to respond, so really not writing much here except appending the record of recent events)

Engaging with a few of the comments above: (in addition to remarks made already in initial post)

  • re the proposal to wind down Namada mid January, Adrian showing up and promising the moon and continuing maintaining and developing the project, naturally made it seem like a bad decision to shut down.
  • to me, it does not necessarily make sense to shut down the network now after a full drain has happened. whether it does make sense to me depends to a large part on heliax response.

(I have more to say, but wanting to not affect any processes adversely)

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Hello everyone,

I’ve been very interested in Namada and Anoma for a long time. The vision built around intents, privacy, fractal scalability, and the overall architecture is something I really believe in. Even though I’m not an expert when it comes to the underlying technology, I have to say it’s one of my favorite projects.

I think that once this difficult period is behind us, we can move forward on a stronger foundation, hopefully with cohesion and, above all, more effective execution and follow-through on the roadmap.

I’m not sure whether staying within the Cosmos ecosystem is fundamentally a limitation. Personally, I think the bigger challenge is having a mainstream, general-purpose chain (similar to Solana) that exists outside the Cosmos Hub while being fully shielded.

Whatever the reason behind the silence from Anoma’s leadership, perhaps this is an opportunity for the project to become more autonomous. I sincerely hope that’s possible.

I’d also like to say that I’m motivated to help develop the project. Although I’m still a beginner when it comes to programming and I don’t know Rust yet, I’d be happy to contribute, especially as a volunteer at first.

I already have some programming experience (Python, C, and Bash), along with a little experience auditing blockchain smart contracts using Echidna. I’ve also created a small NFT collection. However, I’ve never built or contributed to a significant project from the ground up. Maybe that will come in the future. Whether my contribution ends up being large or very small, I’d be happy just to have helped in some way and to gain valuable experience that I can include in my portfolio.

Sorry if I’m still a bit new here and not fully aware of everything that’s going on.

I truly wish the best for the future of the project.

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