Cobalt is the cathode stabilizer that the industry keeps swearing it will engineer away, and keeps not engineering away. Supply is brutally concentrated — the DRC and its Zambian neighbours do the heavy lifting, and a lot of the midstream runs through China. Every "cobalt-free chemistry" headline deserves a hard look at whether the chemistry actually ships at scale, or just ships in a press release.
LFP took share, every cathode maker promised to engineer cobalt out, and yet the DRC still anchors the metal and a Chinese major still decides the price by turning one mine on and off. Read the chemistry that ships, not the chemistry in the press release.