Cosmos's AtomOne Split: The Infighting, The Fork, and What It Means for ATOM

So I spent half my morning down a rabbit hole, trying to figure out if some disgruntled crypto founder was now moonlighting as an engineer making tiny cameras for Formula 1. Because for a glorious, confusing hour, that’s exactly what the internet was telling me. Two products, two completely different universes of tech nonsense, one bafflingly generic name: AtomOne.

Let's start with the one you can actually hold in your hand.

When a Good Idea Hasn't Been Ruined... Yet

The Atom You Can Actually See

There's a German company called Dream Chip. They make cameras. Not the one you use for your sad vacation selfies, but serious, professional-grade hardware. Their big claim to fame is the "AtomOne" line, and now the "AtomTwo." These things are, and I'm not exaggerating, smaller than a matchbox. The new one weighs 55 grams. That’s less than a deck of cards.

They're designed to be put in places normal cameras can't go. Strapped to a referee's chest, mounted on the bumper of a race car, stuck behind a soccer goal. The whole point, according to their marketing guy Christian Kühn, is to "bring audiences closer to the action and allow for the communication of excitement and emotion."

And you know what? For once, the corporate-speak isn't entirely garbage. When you see that insane point-of-view shot of a car vibrating itself to pieces at 200 mph, or a puck screaming past a goalie's head in super slow-motion, it's probably one of these little German cubes doing the work. They even made one with a zoom lens, the "AtomOne Mini Zoom," which is just an absurd combination of words for something that weighs 267 grams. It's a real tool, for a real job, solving a real problem: how to get a high-quality shot without decapitating an athlete.

They talk about global shutters, which stops motion from looking all wobbly and weird like it does on your phone. They talk about ND filters to stop glare. They even partnered with another company to make it a tiny pan-tilt-zoom camera, basically a microscopic security dome for capturing millionaire sports stars instead of shoplifters. It’s a tangible piece of engineering. A physical object built with purpose.

And honestly, that’s where this story should end. A neat little piece of hardware. But offcourse, it doesn't.

Forking Off: The Art of the Crypto Rage Quit

The Atom That Only Exists as an Argument

Because then there's the other AtomOne. The one that exists purely as code, spite, and a multi-year flame war on X, formerly Twitter.

This AtomOne is the brainchild of a guy named Jae Kwon, one of the co-founders of the Cosmos crypto ecosystem. To make a long, excruciatingly boring story short, Kwon is mad. He’s been mad for a while, apparently feeling like the community he helped build is conspiring against him. The final straw was something called Proposal 848, a vote to cap the inflation rate of ATOM, the network's token, at 10%.

Now, if you're a normal person, your eyes just glazed over. I don't blame you. But in the crypto world, this is basically the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kwon believes that high inflation is essential to pay for network security. His opponents, including his own co-founder Ethan Buchman (who now runs a separate company), argue they're "overpaying for security" and needlessly tanking the token's price.

The proposal passed. Kwon lost.

So, what does a crypto founder do when they lose a vote? They "fork" the network. It's the digital equivalent of taking your ball and going home, but with more venture capital and a 20-page whitepaper. He’s calling his new, breakaway version… AtomOne.

This is a bad idea. No, 'bad' doesn't cover it—this is a five-alarm dumpster fire of ego and hubris. Kwon's own quote to The Block is a masterpiece of self-important jargon: "The objective of GovGen is to provide a forum to facilitate the forking and splitting of blockchains based on governance activity, or in other words 'smart chain reproduction'."

Let me translate that for you: "We're inventing a complicated new system so that every time we have a temper tantrum, we can create a new coin and pretend it's innovation."

It's a "rage quit," plain and simple. It's happened before with Bitcoin Cash and a dozen other projects, and it almost never works. You can't just copy the code and expect to recapture the "social capital," as the nerds call it. You can't just declare yourself the real version and hope everyone follows. That ain't how people work.

This whole mess is so emblematic of the crypto space. It’s a fight over abstract principles and the definition of money, waged by people who seem to have forgotten how to have a normal conversation. They're arguing about whether a token "was ever meant as money" while a German company is using a product with the same name to film a car race. The contrast is just...

Then again, maybe I'm the crazy one here. Maybe the future of civilization really does hang on the staking rewards of a mid-tier cryptocurrency.

Proof That Two Industries Can Share a Name and Zero Clues

So, What's in a Name?

I just can't get over the collision. Did no one in either of these camps do a five-second Google search? It's like launching a new electric car and calling it "The Honda Civic." It speaks volumes about the insular, navel-gazing nature of both industries. The broadcast hardware guys are so deep in their world of codecs and sensors they don't look outside. And the crypto guys are so convinced they're building the future in their Discord channels that it would never occur to them that a name like "AtomOne" might already be taken by, you know, a thing that exists in the physical world.

It reminds me of my last apartment building. They spent a fortune hiring some branding agency to rename the building "The Axiom." An axiom is a self-evident truth. The building's elevator was broken for three months. The irony was apparently lost on everyone but me.

One AtomOne is a tiny box of glass and silicon capturing reality. The other is a ghost in the machine born from an argument over inflation percentages. One is about showing you something real, the other is about convincing you something abstract has value. And I'm just sitting here wondering if Jae Kwon is going to get a cease-and-desist letter from a camera company in Garbsen, Germany. Now that would be a story.

One of These Things Is Not Like the Other

Let's be real. One of these AtomOnes is a marvel of miniaturization that lets us see the world in new ways. The other is a glorified blog post about a temper tantrum, backed by code. One is a tool, the other is a symptom of a disease. And if you can't tell which is which, you might be spending too much time online.

Reference article source：

• Dream Chip’s AtomTwo is the world’s smallest global shutter broadcast camera
• Jae Kwon to lead community GovGen initiative as prelude to controversial AtomOne fork
• Dream Chip Releases AtomOne Mini Zoom Camera