Cosmos price and where to buy ATOM

What is Cosmos?

Cosmos is a network of independent blockchains that can pass tokens and messages to each other through a shared protocol, IBC. ATOM is the token of the Cosmos Hub, staked to secure it and used in its governance.

How to buy Cosmos, step by step

1. Pick an exchange. ATOM is listed on every exchange we track. Compare fees, funding options and whether it serves your country in our exchange reviews.
2. Create and verify your account. Regulated exchanges ask for identity documents before you can deposit fiat.
3. Fund the account. A bank transfer or a stablecoin deposit usually costs far less than a card payment.
4. Buy ATOM. Use the ATOM/USDT or ATOM/USD market, and check the cheapest venue in the table above first.
5. Decide where to keep it. On the exchange is simplest, but the exchange then holds your coins. In a Cosmos wallet you control, you can stake ATOM with a validator; unstaking takes a waiting period before the coins can move.

Where to buy Cosmos at the best price

The cheapest venue right now is marked in the table above. Add its trading fee before comparing: on ATOM the venues disagree by about 0.15 percent on average, so on a small purchase the fee and the funding method usually matter more.

• The price on that venue. Each row shows the gap to our composite.
• The trading fee. Our fee comparison lists spot fees side by side.
• How you fund the account. A bank transfer or stablecoin deposit is usually far cheaper than a card payment, which often costs several percent.

Why the Cosmos price differs between exchanges

In our minute-by-minute measurement the gap between the highest and lowest venue averaged about 0.15 percent, against about 0.025 percent for Bitcoin. It went above half a percent in about nine minutes out of every thousand, and reached about 1.1 percent at its widest.

About two fifths of the ATOM spot volume we track trades on a single venue. The spread figure at the top of this page is the live measurement; our guide on why crypto prices differ between exchanges explains the mechanism.

What moves the Cosmos price

The wider crypto market, and in ATOM’s case its own news too. In our hourly composite, ATOM moved with Bitcoin at a correlation of about 0.43, where 1 would mean identical moves, and its moves were about two and a half times the size of Bitcoin’s.

ATOM-specific drivers come on top: staking changes, governance decisions and leverage. The funding rates on this page show whether leveraged traders are paying to be long or short right now.

Pros and cons of Cosmos

Pros

• Staking rewards with validators.
• Part of a large network of connected chains.

Cons

• Unstaking takes a waiting period.
• One of the wider price gaps between exchanges we track, about six times Bitcoin’s.
• It trades far below its all-time high of about $43.8.

Cosmos’s highest price

Cosmos’s all-time high is about $43.8 on volume-weighted data. The chart above shows the last 30 days of our composite, and the ATOM to USD converter applies the live price to any amount.