Who Is Jae Kwon, and Why Did ATOM Holders' GNOT Share Fall to 26%?

Jae Kwon is the Tendermint and Cosmos founder who started Gno.land in 2022, and its ATOM airdrop came to 26.26% of GNOT supply at the 12 September 2026 genesis. The airdrop kept its 350 million GNOT from the 25 March beta post, when that was 35%, while total supply rose from 1 billion to 1.333 billion.

The count never moved, so the whole change comes from the divisor. The allocation record pinned for the genesis lists the same 350,000,000 GNOT against a 1,333,000,000 total, after a 2 September commit added 332,000,000 for NewTendermint LLC. The ATOM and AtomOne airdrops together fell from 58.10% to 43.59%, and the NewTendermint and investor lines rose from 30.00% to 47.41%.

Jae Kwon at a Glance

Who Is Jae Kwon, the Cosmos Founder Behind Gno.land?

In crypto, Jae Kwon's name is tied to Tendermint, and in July 2018 he co-wrote The latest gossip on BFT consensuswith Ethan Buchman and Zarko Milosevic. The paper presents Tendermint as "a new protocol for ordering events in a distributed network under adversarial conditions".

That problem, where a network has to keep agreeing while some of its machines fail or lie, is the subject of our explainer on Byzantine fault tolerance.

Gno.land's 25 March beta post calls him the founder of Tendermint and Cosmos. It says he started the project in 2022 and that it set out to bring next-generation smart contract programming to the Cosmos ecosystem. The chain runs on Gno, a language derived from Go. For the Cosmos side of his record, the hub and its ATOM token, start with our explainer on Cosmos (ATOM) and Tendermint.

A release that NewTendermint LLC issued on 18 September 2026 names him founder and CEO of Gno.land. The same release says NewTendermint, which he leads, is the core maintainer of the protocol and its GnoVM virtual machine. His GitHub profile pairs Tendermint and Cosmos with AtomOne and Gno, and that AtomOne link matters here, because AtomOne holders received the other airdrop in the GNOT allocation.

He is a different person from Do Kwon, with whom he shares a surname.

The allocation README pinned for mainnet names him as well. It lists "Jae" as one of seven GovDAO founders and skips him for the 1,000 GNOT founders' grant because "he holds a snapshot entitlement". The code behind the README spells that out as a Cosmos Hub entitlement, so his own GNOT comes from the same 2022 snapshot as every other ATOM holder's.

How Did the GNOT Airdrop Reach 2022 ATOM Holders?

The ATOM side of the GNOT airdrop rests on a Cosmos Hub snapshot at block 10,562,840 on 20 May 2022. The March post calls it a partial governance snapshot. Our guide to what a crypto airdrop is and why projects run one covers the general case, and this one adds a vote test on top of the balance.

The governance part is Cosmos Hub Proposal 69, a signaling vote on adding CosmWasm to the hub's Rho upgrade. The chain records it as rejected when voting closed on 13 May 2022, a week before the snapshot. Under the pinned README, a wallet that voted YES counts its liquid ATOM only, and its staked ATOM "is excluded entirely". A NO vote counts staked ATOM at 1.5 times and NO WITH VETO at 2 times. Abstaining or not voting counts it once, and each wallet then takes its weight's share of the 350 million GNOT.

The weights favor staked ATOM that voted against the proposal, and NO and NO WITH VETO together carried 80.12% of the voting power cast in the final tally.

If you held ATOM at that block, your share depends on how you voted as well as on what you held. The repository's own walkthrough lets you find your row in the snapshot, read your Proposal 69 vote and recompute your weight by hand. Proposal 69 was an on-chain vote, and our guide to on-chain vs off-chain blockchain governance explains how that model works.

AtomOne's 231 million GNOT follows a snapshot dated 25 December 2025 at block 6,439,117, and the README applies no governance weighting to ATONE and PHOTON holders.

The Arithmetic Behind the 26.26% Share

Every document keeps the ATOM line at 350 million GNOT, so its share moves only with the total, which grew by 333 million.

Method: the March column applies the beta post's own percentages to 1 billion GNOT. The September column groups the twelve rows of the README pinned at commit 30ec189 into four lines and divides each by their sum, 1,333,000,000. The treasury line keeps the founders' grants, gas floats and premine that the README charges to the three treasuries. The README calls its pipeline bit-reproducible, so a clean rebuild regenerates the same balance sheet byte for byte. Each figure holds only as at its own document's date.

The jump came on 2 September. The repository's history file logs commit 3672d8f that day as "Constants reconciled to the finalized 1.333B". That commit added a 332,000,000 GNOT line for NewTendermint LLC and lifted the contributor line from 119,000,000 to 119,993,000.

Before that date the code paid one 300 million line to an address it labeled "nt llc + investors". The September code splits that line into two investor tranches of 150 million each and gives NewTendermint LLC its own 332 million.

For a single ATOM wallet the count went the other way. The history file says the 12 March exclusion of the Interchain Foundation's addresses multiplied every remaining ATOM-side entitlement by 1.0460234058. That's a 4.60% rise over the balance sheet that launched the beta chain, which ran under the ID gnoland1, and AtomOne-only holders were unaffected.

On that step alone, a 2022 ATOM holder's GNOT count rose inside a bucket that became a smaller slice of a larger supply.

Who Holds the Rest of the GNOT Token Supply?

The other 73.74% of the GNOT token supply splits among the AtomOne airdrop, the treasuries and the NewTendermint and investor lines. The README gives the two investor tranches and the NewTendermint LLC bucket three multisig addresses, and part of the unlocked tranche goes to public-sale buyers and settled partner distributions. It says each of the three carries the nt1 signer set plus one provably unspendable key, and nt1 held all 632 million in the 2 September code.

The three GovDAO treasuries follow the same pattern with the GovDAO members as signers, and together they account for the 120 million that replaced the March post's contributor line. The README gives the two signer sets effective thresholds of 4-of-7 and 4-of-6.

Gno.land's 16 September mainnet post counts 3,262,481 accounts holding 1.333 billion GNOT at genesis. It says transfers were locked at genesis under section 126 of the constitution, apart from a short exemption list. Nearly every account also carries a vesting schedule, "with 96% vesting continuously over 24 months from launch". The pinned README builds that 91-address exemption list from the Ecosystem treasury and both investor tranches, plus every public-sale and partner row. It leaves NewTendermint LLC and the Core and Validator Services treasuries off the list on purpose, saying each "needs a ruling".

Section 136 of the same constitution sets 150 million GNOT of the investor allocation to unlock at the mainnet launch, and the other 150 million keeps its vesting schedule. The March post put the switch-on of GNOT transfers to a GovDAO proposal and vote. The 16 September post starts GovDAO with one tier-one member named aeddi, with six more joining after genesis through regular proposals.

Four founding validators secured block 1, according to the same post, and our guide to who blockchain validators arecovers what those nodes do.

How to Trade ATOM Futures After the Gno.land Genesis

The snapshot sets the limit for anyone trading ATOM on this story. ATOM you bought after that 20 May 2022 block earns no GNOT from this bucket, because only balances held at block 10,562,840 count toward those 350 million.

ATOM futures on Phemex run on the ATOM / USDT perpetual, live since 25 November 2022, with leverage of up to 50x and funding every eight hours. That's three funding settlements a day on any position you hold. The perpetual closed at 1.867 on 26 September 2026, 4.30% above its 1.79 close on 25 September. The perpetual's highest 2026 close was 2.632 on 13 January, and its lowest was 1.223 on 1 August. The 26 September close stood 29.07% under that high.

For scenarios through 2030, our Cosmos price prediction for 2026 to 2030 lays out the forecasts.

For GNOT holders the date that matters is the end of the 24-month vesting clock, which started at 15:00 UTC on 12 September 2026 and runs to September 2028.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and is not financial advice. Cryptocurrency trading involves substantial risk. Always do your own research before making investment decisions.