Cosmos CEO Reveals L1 Chain Strategy & Institutional Adoption Roadmap

Layer-1 chains are eating the blockchain world—and Cosmos Labs is serving the main course.

The Interchain Revolution

Magnus Mareneck drops the blueprint for Cosmos' L1 dominance as institutional money finally wakes up to what crypto natives knew years ago. The interconnected blockchain ecosystem isn't just coming—it's already here, bypassing legacy systems that move at traditional finance speed.

Wall Street's Late Arrival

Institutional adoption finally hits critical mass while traditional bankers were still debating whether Bitcoin was a 'real asset.' Now they're scrambling to understand interchain security and cross-chain composability—welcome to the party, suits.

The connectivity infrastructure that makes isolated chains look like dial-up in a 5G world. Because sometimes the best way to win is to build the entire playing field—and charge rent for premium positioning.

One cynical finance jab: Traditional institutions always arrive fashionably late to the revolution—right after the real profits have been made and they can overpay for exposure.

Key Insights

• According to Cosmos CEO, Magnus Mareneck, existing L1 infrastructure is inadequate, and crypto companies want custom L1 chains.
• Fortune 500 companies, especially financial institutions and banks, are expected to lead institutional adoption of crypto.

In 2025, crypto news saw a new surge in institutional adoption, even as the market witnessed a tremendous shift in overall skepticism of institutions toward cryptocurrency.

This marks a significant milestone even as corporate and banking biggies, including BlackRock, JPMorgan, Citibank, Fidelity, and more, rode the crypto wave this year, even as prices surged to new highs.

According to an EY’s 2025 survey report on Institutional Investor Digital Assets Survey,

Institutional investors globally increased their allocations to digital assets this past year and intend to continue to do so throughout 2025.

In an exclusive interview with The Coin Republic’s Editor-in-Chief Varuni Trivedi, Magnus Mareneck, CEO of Cosmos Labs, discussed the changing trends in institutional adoption in the crypto industry.

Cosmos Labs is a leading tech stack used for developing L1 chains. Cosmos, which is separate from but closely connected to Cosmos Labs, is also called the internet of blockchains.

Institutional Adoption: Beyond Exposure and Investment Portfolios

Institutional adoption is critical for the growth of the crypto market. Apart from reinforcing legitimacy, it can also improve market depth.

According to Mareneck,

“..our impression has been that the new institutional adoption curve is going to come from basically different companies trying to build new Layer-1 blockchain because the existing infrastructure solutions don’t really serve as viable paths to build real integrations into existing companies.”

So far, institutional adoption has largely involved hedge funds, asset management companies, and treasury companies getting exposure to leading cryptos like Bitcoin (BTC) and ethereum (ETH).

However, lately this has changed. For instance, recently in crypto news, three of Japan’s biggest banks announced joint plans to launch a Yen-pegged stablecoin, according to Nikkei Asia.

Last month, Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT) announced the addition of “a shared blockchain-based ledger to its technological infrastructure.”

Why WOULD institutions want to build their own L1 chains when there are existing legacy L1 chains such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana, to name a few?

Crypto analyst a16z describes the benefits of L1 chains succinctly in an article, stating,

“An L1 is the heaviest lift, most complicated to build, and benefits the least from the network effects of any partnership. However, an L1 also would give a fintech company the greatest control over the scalability, privacy, and user experience.”

Financial institutions and banks are looking for systems that can be smoothly integrated into their systems, not the other way round. This is why such institutions want to build custom L1 chains.

Speaking about the significant role of Cosmos, Mareneck mentioned that it is the most used stack for building L1 blockchains. He also stated that the focus remains on onboarding newer institutions into crypto.

Further, he delved into the why companies may prefer to build new Layer1 blockchains,

“… because the existing infrastructure solutions don’t really serve as viable paths to build real integrations into existing companies. So we anticipate that the majority of the things coming out of Cosmos are going to be Fortune 500 companies, major financial institutions adopting the stack to sort of come on chain and start integrating their existing businesses.”

Stablecoins, Tokenization Offer Real-World Use Cases to Banks

While the Fortune 500 companies offer a multitude of opportunities at scale through financial institutions, there is also another area, though largely untapped, that is now being explored. According to Mareneck,

“…we are looking at banks. We’ve talked to a number of different banks here in the US, and we’ve actually started sort of expanding that search to Japan, Korea, and Europe…also in Latin America.”

Institutions are increasingly adopting crypto for more than just investment purposes.  Community Banks in the US are a case in point.

At the Community Bankers conference held on October 9th, 2025, Jeff Sinnott, the CEO of Vantage Bank, encouraged community bankers to consider blockchain-based systems for their Core workflow.

Elaborating on how banks are leveraging and integrating blockchain into their operations, Mareneck explained,

“Generally, what we’ve found is that banks are interested in two major categories. The first is tokenized deposits, right? Very similar to stablecoins, but basically, this is a way for them to tokenize the actual money coming into their bank so that they can better track it within their internal systems. And then, of course, stablecoins”

According to Mareneck, stablecoins offer a decent advantage to banks because when they mint their own token of a dollar, they can keep the yield even when users transfer their stablecoin elsewhere. That’s because there is an underlying collateral.

Mareneck then went on to discuss another aspect that banks can leverage – asset tokenization. He said,

“We see a lot of banks, especially large asset managers, want to take advantage of a liquidity advantage that you get when you actually tokenize your company’s CORE assets.”

He highlighted BlackRock’s announcement of plans to tokenize its crypto exchange Traded Funds (ETFs), adding that there were smaller examples as well. According to him,

“We’ve seen a lot of tokenized real estate. For example, there’s a company called Revolve that just sort of launched a real estate NFT that you can actually buy a house or fractional shares of the house.”