We present and discuss an asynchronous coordinate system covering de Sitter spacetime, notably in a complete way in 1+1 dimensions. The new coordinates have several interesting cosmological properties: the worldlines of comoving ($x^i=const$) observers are geodesics, cosmic time is finite in the past, and the coordinates asymptotically tend to that of a flat Robertson & Walker model at large times. This analysis also provides an argument in favor of the natural emergence of an equation of state of the type $p=-\rho$ in the context of the standard cosmological model.