The history of Cosmos began in 2014, when founder Jae Kwon released "Tendermint: Consensus without Mining". Proposed a consensus mechanism Tendermint that does not require PoW mining. Later, Jae Kwon founded Tendermint Inc to develop applications based on Tendermint consensus theory.

In 2016, Tendermint Inc released the white paper "Cosmos Whitepaper - A Network of Distributed Legders", marking the creation of the Cosmos Network. The white paper envisions Cosmos as a network of many independent blockchains (called Zones in the white paper) that collectively use the Tendermint consensus mechanism and are interconnected through the IBC inter-chain communication protocol.

In 2017, Cosmos imitated the Ethereum Foundation and established the InterChain Foundation, a non-profit organization to promote the development of the Cosmos network and ecosystem. On April 5 of the same year, Cosmos held a public sale of its native token $ATOM, raising $16.8 million for the Cosmos network at a price of $0.1.

In 2018, the development of Tendermint, Cosmos SDK, IBC inter-chain communication protocol, and Lunie wallet were completed. In order to verify the stability of the technology, Cosmos released several public testnets.

On March 14, 2019, the Cosmos Hub mainnet, the first blockchain in the Cosmos network, was officially launched. The next day, Cosmos announced it had raised $9 million in Series A funding led by Paradigm.

In February 2021, Cosmos completed the Stargate upgrade, marking the official integration of IBC inter-chain communication into the Cosmos network. Cosmos has completed the vision expressed in the first version of the white paper. Since then, more than 50 blockchains including Terra, Cronos, and Osmosis have been deployed.

On May 9, 2022, the Terra ecosystem’s native stablecoin $UST detached from the U.S. dollar price, causing the collapse of the Terra ecosystem. The Terra blockchain ceased service on May 13. In June, derivatives DEX dYdX announced that it would use the Cosmos SDK to deploy dYdX Chain, an independent blockchain based on the Cosmos network.

In September of the same year, Cosmos released the ATOM 2.0 white paper. The white paper states that inter-chain security and a new $ATOM value capture method will be introduced to Cosmos in future upgrades. Cosmos co-founder Ethan Buchman also wrote an article reviewing the development history of Cosmos, and called the period before September 2022 the "Initiation" stage of Cosmos. At this stage, Cosmos is mainly completing the technology stack based on the 2016 version of the white paper. After September 2022, Cosmos will enter the next stage of development-a new stage called "Integration". At this stage, Cosmos wants to prove that it has the ability to play a certain role in the political and economic fields of the real world.

In March 2023, the stablecoin issuing company Circle announced that it would use the Cosmos SDK to deploy Noble, an independent blockchain based on the Cosmos network, to issue native $USDC to the Cosmos ecosystem.