As a cornerstone of crypto liquidity, the stablecoin market has seen significant growth in recent years. According to data from DefiLlama, the total market capitalization of stablecoins has successfully surpassed $210 billion, setting a new historical record. This has attracted an increasing number of “hungry players” entering the market, eager to claim their share—Noble is one of them.

Just last month, Noble became the first blockchain to issue the USDN stablecoin, denominated in USD, using the M^0 protocol. Not only that, but Noble has already formed deep partnerships with multiple stablecoin issuers, including Circle, Ondo Finance, and Hashnote Labs, accumulating a total of over $540 million in stablecoin asset issuance.

This article will take a deeper look into the Noble project, exploring its team background and financing, core protocol, issued assets, ecosystem governance, and incentives, presenting its growth potential to users.

What is Noble?

Noble is built on the Cosmos SDK and is an application chain specifically designed to issue native assets within the Cosmos and IBC ecosystems. It supports functions like asset minting, burning, blacklisting, and more.

Source: noble.xyz

Currently, Noble focuses on stablecoin asset issuance. Its partners include stablecoin issuers like Circle, Ondo Finance, Hashnote Labs, and Monerium. It has issued stablecoins such as USDC, USDY, and EURe. According to the latest data, Noble has issued over $540 million of stablecoin assets. Leveraging the IBC and CCTP protocols, these assets can seamlessly circulate and interact across nearly 50 different blockchains.

Noble has not issued a native token. To incentivize network validators, the team utilizes a transaction fee model. Additionally, upgrades and governance of the Noble blockchain are carried out through multi-signature proposals, involving the Noble team and core validators.

Team Background and Financing

Noble was founded in 2022, initially consisting of just three core members: CEO Jelena Djuric, COO/CFO Stefan Coolican, and CTO John Letey. Jelena co-founded the Web3 Council of Canada and has been involved in several crypto projects, including Cosmos, Dfinity/Internet Computer, and Celo. Stefan served as President and CFO of Ether Capital and was also an investment banking director at Cormark Securities. John has deeply participated in multiple crypto projects and developed token standards and applications for Arweave and the Ethereum ecosystem. He was also the CTO of Web3 data solution KYVE.

Over the past two to three years, Noble has completed two rounds of financing, raising a total of $18.3 million. In October 2023, Noble secured $3.3 million in seed funding led by Polychain, with participation from Borderless Capital, Wintermute, Circle Ventures, CMCC Global, Hustle Fund, and Interop Ventures. In November 2024, Noble successfully raised $15 million in Series A funding, led by Paradigm, with additional contributions from Wintermute, Foresight Ventures, Polychain, Informal Systems, and angel investors from Celestia, Skip Protocol, Succinct, and Conduit.

Core Protocol Architecture

Noble is an intermediary, efficiently distributing native assets to different blockchains through collaborations with stablecoin issuers, thereby promoting liquidity within the ecosystem.

In terms of asset issuance, Noble adheres to industry-standard smart contract functionalities. By leveraging the Cosmos SDK, it allows developers to integrate existing modules and seamlessly incorporate custom modules, catering to the personalized needs of asset issuers. It incorporates the Tokenfactory module model, which enables asset issuers to mint and burn tokens, as well as freeze addresses, and maintain blacklists.

Currently, Noble focuses on bringing more assets into the Cosmos ecosystem. While the multi-chain architecture of Cosmos and the sovereignty of each independent blockchain emphasize high customizability and scalability, they also exacerbate the decentralization and siloing issues within the Cosmos ecosystem. The development and optimization of the IBC protocol provide solutions for interoperability within the Cosmos ecosystem, allowing Noble’s assets that support the IBC protocol to flow throughout the IBC ecosystem.

In summary, IBC is a universal interoperability protocol that allows different blockchains to communicate with each other, ensuring reliable, orderly, and authenticated communication. IBC consists of two main layers: the transport layer and the application layer. The transport layer is responsible for transmitting, validating, and ordering messages or data packets that must be communicated. Its key components include light clients, relays, connections, and channels. The application layer refers to the objects with which end users interact, typically various applications.

Source: IBC Protocol

To better understand how IBC works, it can be simplified as an analogy to a postal delivery system. User A sends an envelope to User B via postal services. The postal service collects the envelope from User A and delivers it to User B’s mailbox. In this analogy, the transport layer of IBC is similar to the postal service—it doesn’t know what’s inside the envelope; it only performs the tasks of collecting and delivering the envelope. The envelope itself is analogous to an IBC data packet containing information about User A (the sender) and User B (the recipient). Finally, the receiver (the application) is responsible for opening the envelope (data packet) and interpreting its contents.

The IBC protocol solves interoperability between different blockchains in a trust-minimized, secure, and scalable way. Based on this protocol, Noble’s issued assets can circulate across nearly 50 IBC ecosystem networks, including dYdX Protocol, Sei, Osmosis, Neutron, Injective, and others.

Source: mapofzones.com

In addition to using the IBC protocol, Noble also adopts Circle’s Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP), which allows users to burn USDC on the source chain and mint an equivalent amount on the target chain.

Each CCTP transfer follows the same sequence of steps:

1. The user burns assets (e.g., USDC) on the source chain.
2. Circle’s automation service observes and verifies the message.
3. The user or a third party relays the message and proof to the target chain (e.g., Noble).
4. The user receives the minted asset (e.g., USDC) on the target chain.

Currently, blockchains supporting the CCTP protocol include Ethereum, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Base, and others. Users can easily transfer assets into the Cosmos ecosystem without relying on cross-chain bridges.

Issued Assets

Currently, Noble has issued token assets worth over $540 million, primarily focusing on the stablecoin sector. The breakdown is as follows:

Source: mintscan.io

• USDC: A USD-pegged stablecoin issued by Circle, with a total supply of over $51.1 billion. USDC is the primary issued asset on Noble, with a total minted value of $522 million, making it the fifth-largest protocol supporting native USDC.
• USDY: A USD-yield token issued by Ondo, backed by short-term U.S. Treasury bonds. It currently offers an annual yield of 5.2%, with a total issuance of around $385 million. Approximately $18.65 million of USDY has been issued on Noble.
• EURe: A EUR-pegged stablecoin issued by Monerium, backed by cash deposits and compliant with MiCA regulations. The total issuance is around €2.874 billion, with approximately $120,000 issued on Noble.
• USYC: A USD-yield token issued by Hashnote, with a total issuance of over $1.2 billion. It will soon be issued on Noble.
• FRAX / sFRAX: An algorithmic stablecoin issued by FRAX, with a total issuance of over $647 million. It will soon be issued on Noble.
• Progmat: Several stablecoins regulated in Japan, denominated in USD or JPY, will be issued on Noble soon.

In addition to the above assets, in early December 2024, Noble will launch a custom stablecoin called USDN based on the M^0 protocol. USDN will use $M as its core building block, with $M stablecoins backed solely by short-term U.S. Treasury bonds. However, USDN has not yet been minted on Noble as of now.

Ecosystem Governance and Incentives

Noble has not issued a native token. Instead, it uses external assets such as USDC and ATOM to cover gas fees. The platform employs a transaction fee model to incentivize validators on the Noble network, where a portion of the transaction fees is distributed to validators.

Noble’s transaction fees are determined by the minimum gas fee and supplemental fees. The former applies to internal transactions (i.e., asset transfers between Noble accounts) and IBC outbound transactions (i.e., transferring assets from a Noble address to an IBC-connected blockchain). The minimum gas fee is set at 0.01 USDC per 100,000 gas units. The supplemental fee only applies to IBC outbound transactions, while relaying transactions incur no fees.

Additionally, Noble employs a Proof of Authority (PoA) consensus mechanism, which rewards validators for their network contributions. It also penalizes malicious behaviors, such as double-signing, by implementing measures like address sealing.

Regarding upgrades and governance of the Noble blockchain, its built-in NMM (Noble Maintenance Multisig) multi-signature module supports three key functions: chain upgrades, parameter changes, and IBC maintenance. Both the Noble team and core validators jointly participate in proposal voting. Currently, the number of authorized validators on the Noble blockchain is 20, all working together to ensure the network’s security and stability.

Source: mintscan.io

Future Outlook and Challenges

According to the team, Noble will continue focusing on stablecoin asset issuance and inject liquidity into the Cosmos ecosystem. Additionally, the team plans to launch assets like USDN and develop a new suite of products, including features for exchange, foreign exchange, payments, and lending, to enhance the user experience.

Considering its current development, Noble does not yet have a significant advantage in blockchain architecture or asset issuance scale. While it has addressed the stablecoin demand within the IBC ecosystem, making operations easier for users, the project’s competitiveness appears somewhat lacking. The team might consider diversifying its asset offerings, strengthening interoperability with other blockchain networks, and deepening collaborations with DeFi projects to increase Noble’s attractiveness and broader use cases.

Conclusion

Noble’s vision is to build liquidity infrastructure for asset issuers. It is currently injecting liquidity into the Cosmos ecosystem by issuing assets like USDC and USDY, catering to the diverse needs of users.

However, at this stage, Noble has a limited variety of issued assets, and its scale is relatively small. The team needs to accelerate collaborations with more institutions, blockchain networks, and project teams to promote the adoption of Noble assets across a broader ecosystem. Additionally, with the growing demand for stablecoin regulatory compliance, the team must remain sensitive to market shifts and proactively address regulatory changes.