At Citizen Cosmos, we believe in the power of decentralized communities and the potential of blockchains to build a better world. We understand that blockchains are not just digital technologies, but they are similar to natural hives, forests, and patterns in the environment that allow us to communicate better. We value communication, honesty, and decentralization. We believe that open and verifiable blockchains should be viewed as digital nations and that our role is to help build and bring value to these nations.
+
Our unique value proposition is that we are an ecosystem developer in the web3 universe, working directly with citizens or token holders in decentralized and censorship-free blockchain networks. We do not represent the voice of the people like a mayor, but we are part of the community's voice. Our cities are decentralized, censorship-free, open and verifiable blockchain networks. We provide a variety of tools such as a web3-focused podcast, educational content, hackathons, distributed validator infrastructure, and an offline network that allows us to help dev teams form strategic partnerships. We also work with offline projects such as local artists, galleries, and permaculture communities, educating them about crypto and sometimes investing in them by donating crypto.
+
Our mission is to become the layer-0, a community bridge between ecosystems. We strive to run more nodes, create more content, form more partnerships, and validate more networks. We believe that by promoting communication, objective content, and education, we can create more efficient consensus and help to build a better world.
+
For now, Citizen Cosmos is primarily focused on Tendermint, Cosmos-SDK and Ethereum, but not only. We are a citizen of the interchain, and we validate Cosmos-based networks. We cover events as a media outlet, organize and sponsor events, create educational content and help people to dive into the rabbit hole. We also work with offline projects such as local artists, galleries, and permaculture communities, educating them about crypto and sometimes donating crypto to these projects.
+
By delegating tokens to our validators, citizens can help us to keep going and contribute to the growth of the ecosystem. We strive to meet our values and believe that if a city can be prosperous and meet our values, we start to work around it. Our goal is not to be the best or unique team, but to work together with the community to build a better world.
+
May the code be with you!
+
OUR TOOLS
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+
+
We operate validators on the Cosmos Hub, Cyber / Bostrom, Omnflix, Neutron, Bitcanna, LikeCoin and Evmos networks. Check for more information here, where you will find help on how to stake on these networks.
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+
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We have an NFT collection dedicated to our podcast episodes, slowly creating one of the coolest DAOs in the space. Check it here.
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We're content creators too. We share information and experiences through blog articles and guides on a range of topics. Whether you're looking for advice, inspiration, or just some good reading material, our content has got you covered. Check our blog here.
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We produce podcasts, odysseys, debates and create educational content. You can check all our podcast episodes here and our live streams on our Youtube channel.
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+
+
OUR MANIFESTO
+
+
From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam... Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves...
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+
From 'A Pale Blue Dot', by Carl Sagan.
+
We believe in freedom above needs. We believe in possibilities above enforcement. We believe in values above desires. We believe that censorship has killed more people than anything else together combined. We value honesty and we value the truth. We value love and cherish all existing creatures. We value intelligence and we value decentralization.
+
We believe in communication, which allows participants to think, make their mind up and cast personal votes on any topic and subject. We think that content should strive to lack subjective opinions and help its consumers to form an opinion, which will result in better discussion, and in turn in a more efficient consensus.
+
We believe that blockchains are not simply a form of digital nations. But, open and verifiable blockchains are somewhat similar to natural hives, forests, patterns in the nature that allow us to communicate better. Without communication, we are doomed, and decentralized consensus is a tool that can and will help those who desire to make our pale blue dot a slightly better place.
Benefits of decentralization and a comparison between decentralized and centralized systems
+
One of the key benefits of decentralization we discussed is that it eliminates the need for intermediaries, which can reduce costs and increase efficiency.
+
Decentralized systems are also more secure and resilient, as there is no central point of failure. In contrast, centralized systems are vulnerable to hacking, censorship, and other forms of manipulation.
+
Challenges of implementing decentralized systems
+
Implementing decentralized systems can be challenging. For example, there may be technical barriers to adoption, such as scalability and
+interoperability issues. There may also be regulatory hurdles, as decentralized systems may be perceived as a threat to bureaucratic systems.
+
When it comes to decentralized social media, the challenges are even greater. Social media platforms are inherently centralized, as they rely on a
+centralized database and black-box algorithms to manage content, not to mention the data ownership.
+
Decentralized social media platforms must therefore find a way to replicate these functions in a decentralized manner, ensure that users have
+control over their data and privacy, while also thinking of hwo to incentivise users.
+
+
Permacast, Decent.Land and Benjamin
+
Permacast is a decentralized podcasting platform that allows creators to publish their content without intermediaries and keep then stored on the permaweb.
+Decent.Land, on the other hand, is a decentralized virtual world that enables users to own and control their own identity across multiple blockchains.
+
Benjamin has a background in marketing, development and journalism, and utilizes his skills to create decentralized systems that empower people and
+promote freedom with the help of the Arweave infrastructure and ecosystem.
+
+
Conclusion
+
While there are challenges to overcome, the benefits of decentralization for the social space are clear. By eliminating intermediaries and promoting
+freedom and autonomy, decentralized systems have the potential to transform the way we live, work, and interact with each other.
+
If you want to hear more from Benjamin, make sure to check out our podcast where he shares his experiences and perspectives on the future of technology and
+society.
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here)
Celestia is the first modular blockchain network. By decoupling consensus from execution, Celestia enables anyone to easily deploy their own
+blockchain, without the overhead of bootstrapping a new consensus network. Blockchains on Celestia are simultaneously scalable, sovereign and secure.
+
+
+
Most existing blockchains are monolithic - meaning that the execution and validation functions are performed by the same powers, leading to scalability issues.
+Scalability is the ability to increase the number of transactions, without a equal increase in operating costs. If a blockchain can increase the number of transactions
+it processes without equally increasing the cost for nodes to verify the transactions, it is scaling. The idea of modular blockchain is to divide all tasks into smaller
+ones, to concentrate on solving specific tasks rather than all in a row. This is made possible by combining several specialized blockchains.
+
+
Celestia is an example of a modular blockchain that provides the other functions that rollups depend on, like consensus and data availability.
+So Celestia, being a modular blockchain and focusing on data availability and consensus, is a highly scalable modular blockchain. Other chains (L1 and L2) can use
+Celestia to scale data availability while focusing on execution. Celestia will become sort of the foundation for the rest of the chains, with other blockchain developers
+being able to rely on celestia for data availability and consensus while focusing on execution. This is possible since Celestia’s light clients do not verify
+transactions, they only check that each block has consensus and that the block data is available to the network.
+
Data availability
+
The problem of data availability is this: how can nodes be sure that when a new block is produced, all the data in that block has actually been published on the
+network. Specifically, a node will verify data availability when it receives a new block that is getting added to the chain. The node will attempt to download all the
+transaction data for the new block to verify availability. If the node can download all the transaction data, then it successfully verified data availability, proving
+that the block data was actually published to the network.
+
Celestia uses what is called Data Availability Proofs. These and fraud proofs are key to enabling on-chain scaling of blockchains. Data Availability Proofs allow for
+nodes to download and sample a small portion of random chunks from each block in the chain. If any full node detects something suspicious they can notify light
+clients with a data availability fraud proof.
+
+
Beyond their security advantages, Celestia light clients play a fundamental role in the security and scalability of the network as a whole. Celestia light clients
+rely on security in numbers. There must be a minimum number of light clients to ensure that the original block data is recoverable from all the samples they take
+individually.
+
On the other hand as the number of light clients increases, then the size of each block can also increase without compromising the security or decentralization of the
+network. Larger blocks means more data throughput and more scaling.
+
Sovereign rollups
+
A type of rollup that does not use a settlement layer to determine its canonical chain and validity rules. Instead, the canonical chain of the rollup is determined by
+the nodes in the rollup's peer-to-peer network. This means that settlement occurs on the rollup, rather than a separate settlement layer.
+
Sovereign rollups on Celestia do not post their blocks to a smart contract, but directly onto the chain as raw data. The Celestia consensus and data availability
+layer does not interpret or perform any computation on the rollup blocks, nor run an on-chain light client for the rollup.
+
Instead, the rollup effectively operates like a layer 1 blockchain: full nodes and light clients download the blocks of the rollup directly from the rollup's own
+peer-to-peer network. The main difference is that they also verify that the rollup block data was included and ordered on the Celestia data availability layer via
+a Merkle proof. Therefore, similar to a layer 1 blockchain, the canonical chain is determined by nodes that locally verify the fork-choice rule and the transactions
+of the rollup, rather than an enshrined on-chain light client.
+
Fraud and validity proofs also work similarly to how they would work in a layer 1 blockchain. Fraud proofs are gossiped to clients directly via the peer-to-peer
+network, and validity proofs are simply included with the block header (for example, see Mina Protocol). Because the network synchrony delay in a peer-to-peer
+network is likely to be significantly smaller than the delay of getting a fraud proof included on-chain, this means that the challenge period for peer-to-peer
+fraud proofs can likely be much lower, leading to faster finality for light clients.
+
A rollup chain is sovereign if it does not enshrine a settlement layer to determine the canonical chain and the transaction validity rules of the rollup. Rather, the
+canonical chain of the rollup is determined by the nodes in the rollup's peer-to-peer network (provided that the blocks are available on the data availability layer).
+This means that the settlement layer cannot force inclusion of transactions into the rollup.
+
Sovereign rollups can also use Ethereum as a data availability layer only without enshrining Ethereum for settlement, however this adds more overhead compared to
+using a “pure” data availability layer such as Celestia, because the rollup nodes need to take an interest in the validity of all the transactions in the Ethereum
+settlement layer, in order to run a node for the Ethereum data availability layer.
+
It is also possible to construct a “settlement rollup” on Celestia, which is a type of a sovereign rollup. A settlement rollup can have non-sovereign rollups that
+use it as an enshrined settlement layer. However, the settlement layer is sovereign in the same way that the Ethereum L1 is sovereign as its community often upgrades
+it with hard forks via social consensus.
+
You can read more about sovereign rollups and how they work here.
+
Celestia Tokenomics
+
At the moment there is no tokenomics, but it is known that Celestia will have its own token, which will be used to secure the network via Proof of Stake, and to pay
+for transaction fees on the network. Also Celestia plans to implement a fee-burn mechanism similar to EIP-1559 in Ethereum so that burnt fees will offset new token
+issuance as Celestia gains adoption.
+
Why Celestia makes sense?
+
As we said above, the key advantages of Celestia are:
+
+
Scalability - Separate functions across different layers and Celestia's focus on data availability allows you not to worry about transaction execution and smart
+contracts, which increases scalability.
+
Shared security - The lack of cost to attract and maintain validators, and the overall security that Celestia provides for the blockchains built on top of it,
+makes it easy for everyone to run their own blockchain.
+
Sovereignty - Unlike monolithic blockchains, where applications must follow the rules of the blockchain on which they are built, blockchains built on Celestia
+can set their own rules through sovereignty. Developers can change the way a transaction is processed or anything else that gives independence to blockchains built
+on Celestia.
+
Roadmap
+
The launch of the main celestia network is scheduled for 2023, and preparations are now underway for a test network in which those who filled out a form in advance
+to participate in the test network will be able to participate.
+
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here.
Bostrom is a superintelligence, with a permissionless knowledge graph at its core built on a blockchain (cosmos-SDK) and content addressing mechanism (with the current implementation of IPFS protocol).Bostrom allows adding knowledge (creating cyberlinks between particles) to the knowledge graph verifiably. By "verifiably" we mean that it is guaranteed by blockchain design that the holder of a particular private key added specific content into the blockchain at the known time.
+
+
The knowledge graph is a directed weighted graph between particles (CIDs or Content-ID of files, also known as content addresses, IPFS-hashes, IPFS-links).
+Cyberlinks are the edges of the knowledge graph, particles are the vertexes (aka nodes). In order to create cyberlinks in Bostrom, user accounts (so-called neurons) must have VOLT and AMPERE tokens. By definition, created cyberlinks cannot be deleted. This means, among other things, that they will always be taken into account in cyberrank (until "forgetting" or "pruning" functions are introduced).
+
+
IPFS (interplanetary file system) is a distributed (decentralized) file system within which files are stored on network members' computers. Files are received by their CID (cryptographic hash, particle in Bostrom's terminology) using software that supports IPFS protocol.
+Files are downloaded from network participants' nodes. Therefore, the more devices have the file, the higher chances it can be downloaded (and potentially faster).
+
Cyber
+
Cyber is a distributed, self-sustainable computer for answers, managed and governed by its users. It is structured to resemble a superintendent AI organism, which can learn from the data it taught by its users. Cyber is able to provide answers to questions without blackbox intermediaries and already has MVP's, such as, an alternative to Google and Twitter.
+You may think of Cyber akin to a huge Wikipedia without censorship, which is at the moment waiting to be filled with knowledge from the current web, or even by a transition of data to the new, transparent web. A web in which you control your own dataset. A web that is free of censorship. A web where the internet works for you and not the other way around.
+
Cyber is basically a big decentralized knowledge graph, to which users add and read information from. While validators (of Cyber) use their machines to rank and index the user provided information in a trustless manner. For now, Cyber works with a technology called IPFS, which is basically, a distributed P2P storage where users can safely store and exchange data, but Cyber can work with any similar technology such as DAT, GIT, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Swarm, etc.
+
Cyb.ai - is a WEB interface to the Bostrom blockchain developed by the cyber~Congress DAO. Among Cyb.ai's many functions are:
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-receiving data on cyberlinks recorded by Bostrom blockchain from the node
+
-creating cyberlinks
+
-receiving and sharing objects in the IPFS network using library ipfs-js
+
Bostrom and Cyber tokens
+
There are several native tokens in the Bostrom network: BOOT, HYDROGEN, VOLT, AMPERE, TOCYB. Each of its own usage.
+Cyber Congress governance tokens : GOL and THC.
+
BOOT is the main token of Bostrom. The token's name BOOT symbolizes the BOOTloader nature of the Bostrom network for the future Cyber network.
+
With BOOT one can:
+
-"hire a hero"(to delegate tokens to a validator), being paid rewards in return (risk fee)- for each staked BOOT a HYDROGEN is minted (with a 1 to 1 ratio)
+
-pay for network transactions (pay for gas). Though now, many validators accept transactions with 0 gas fee
+
-vote for protocol changes and public goods
+
With HYDROGEN one can:
+
-"investmint" HYDROGEN for a limited period to produce VOLT and AMPERE tokens
+
-exchange it back for delegated BOOT to transfer BOOT into a liquid state
+
Volt token:
+
-is needed to create cyberlinks
+
-amount of Volt tokens on a balance of the selected neuron regulates how many cyberlinks per day the neuron can submit
+
Each Volt token on the neuron's balance allows creating 1 cyberlink per day. The ability to create cyberlinks is restored within a day.
+If the network is underloaded, one can produce more cyberlinks (up to 4 cyberlinks for each Volt on balance per day).
+
Ampere token:
+
-is needed to create cyberlinks
+
-amount of Ampere tokens on a balance of the selected neuron is used to compute "ampere-per-cyberlink metric", which is used in cyberrank algorithm
+
The more Ampere tokens the neuron has, the higher his cyberlinks would be ranked. Cyberrank is recalculated for each cycle so that the changes in the amount of Ampere tokens on the neurons' balances that produced cyberlinks would influence the cyberrank of the whole graph. It's reasonable to think of Ampere tokens as a measure that characterizes the impact of cyberlinks created from the account on the knowledge graph.
+
TOCYB token is a token of a future Cyber network. Everyone who has TOCYB will be able to convert it at a 1 to 1 rate into CYB tokens through the private exodus. The contract will be developed by cyberCongress.
+
All the tokens can be in two states: frozen and liquid (except TOCYB which is always in liquid state).
+
When tokens are in liquid state they can be:
+
-transferred to other addresses in the Bostrom or other blockchains of Cosmos network
+
-swapped to other tokens using liquidity pools. Other tokens can be non-native Bostrom tokens transferred by IBC protocol from other blockchains of the Cosmos network
+
More tokens:
+
THC is the main governing token of Cyber. THC is an ERC-20 token and lives in the Ehereum mainnet. THC has utility value in the form of control over cyber~Foundation(is the community governing DAO behind cyber).
+
GOL tokens are the testing equivalent of THC.
+
PUSSY tokens are the main tokens of the space-pussy network. This is a CosmWasm and IBC enabled network that is supposed to help to test Bostrom, Cyber and launch new communities and contracts.
+
You can read more about cybernomics on Github page
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:
You can buy BOOT tokens at Osmosis Frontier. We will be able to exchange ATOM/OSMO/JUNO and many other tokens for BOOT tokens. I'll show You an example using ATOM.
You can also obtain BOOT on cyb.ai, using IBC. We will be able to exchange, for example, ATOM or OSMO for BOOT tokens. I will show you an example using ATOM.
Particles are bits of Information (text, image, audio, video files or any other information, such as - map coordinates) that are registered on the Bostrom blockchain. Each particle is stored using IPFS, hence is immutable.
+
A cyberlink is a link between two particles registered in Bostrom blockchain by a particular neuron. In the case of Cyber and Bostrom a neuron is just another word for a user. Each user represents a neuron, and together - they represent a global formation of the superintelligence. To create a cyberlink in Bostrom, neurons need to have any number of Ampere and 1 or more Volt tokens on their balance.
+
+
+
In other words, one can describe a cyberlink as the most simple, verifiable and immutable communication process. When subject A interacts with object B, they communicate. They do so by creating a cyberlink, which in its turn is the backbone route for all the information contained in Bostrom.
+
There is a search bar in cyb.ai. When a user enters a query in the search bar cyb.ai computes the IPFS of query contents. If there are cyberlinks originating from the search query's IPFS hash, then the chain returns particles sorted by cyberrank, cyb.ai node retrieves files from IPFS and presents these results.
+
Thus, the cyb.ai search bar displays particles that are cyberlinked to the search query particle. We don't need any tokens to use the cyb.ai search string, unlike creating cyberlinks.
+
+
How to create a cyberlinks
+
Before we can create a cyberlink, we need resources to interact with the Bostrom blockchain (aka superintelligence). These resources can be obtained in the process of investiminting.
+
For each staked BOOT a HYDROGEN(H) is minted (at a 1 to 1 ratio) free of charge. With this HYDROGEN we can investmint for a limited period (1 to 520 days) to produce VOLT and AMPERE tokens (both are needed to create cyberlinks). In essence, the longer a user/neuron locks their H for, the more assurance in the network they show, and the more V or A they can produce. With time, the production of V and A becomes more and more difficult.
+
Each VOLT token on the neuron's balance allows creating (roughly, for the moment) 1 cyberlink per day. The ability to create cyberlinks is restored within a day. This is represented by a battery, separately for each neuron. Each transaction or action on the Bostrom blockchain uses some amount of battery. If the network is underloaded, one can produce more cyberlinks (currently, this is up to 4 cyberlinks for each Volt on balance per day).
+
Amount of AMPERE tokens on a balance of the selected neuron is used to compute ampere-per-cyberlink metric, which is used in cyberrank algorithm.
+The more AMPERE tokens the neuron has, the higher his cyberlinks would be ranked. Cyberrank is recalculated for each cycle.
+
To get started (assuming you already have H, if you don't please refer to THIS guide) go to cyb.ai and click on HFR (Note that I currently have an empty battery):
+
+
+
Here we can choose the amount of HYDROGEN(H) and the period for which we want to freeze them. By moving the slider you will see how the amount of VOLTS(V) changes:
+
+
After selecting the amount of HYDROGEN(H) and the period for which they are frozen, click on Investmint:
+
+
Now, we need to obtain AMPERE tokens. To do this click on AMPERE(A):
+
+
Here we can choose the amount of HYDROGEN(H) and the period for which we want to freeze them. By moving the slider you will see how the amount of AMPERE(A) changes, after selecting the amount of H and the period for which they are frozen, click on Investmint:
+
+
+
Now we have AMPERE(A) and VOLT(V):
+
+
The battery shows how much Energy(W) is now available. Energy (W) is the product of ampers and volts:
+
ENERGY(W) = VOLT(V) x AMPERE(A)
+
Our battery is not empty, by clicking on it we will see how many cyberlinks we can create. The battery will fill up during the day:
+
+
We can now create a cyberlink. To do this, write in the search box query, which should give our result, for example - Citizen cosmos:
+
+
We see the results that are returned by our query:
+
+
To get our result for this request, we can attach an image, text, or a hash - this is the creation of the cyberlink:
+
+
I'll provide a link to the Citizen Cosmos Twitter here:
+
+
Now, when you search for "Citizen Cosmos" in the search box, my result will also be displayed:
+
+
In the same way you can create a cyberlink with an image, video, document or any other information:
+
+
Select the file you want to upload and click on Open:
+
+
Great, we created a cyberlink with the logo Citizen Cosmos:
+
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here)
To stake your BOOT tokens, all you have to do is click Stake in the Keplr wallet:
+
+
The Keplr Dashboard website will open, and by scrolling down the page below we will see a list of validators:
+
+
+
Сhoose a validator to whom you will delegate your tokens and click on Manage. If you want to support us, please stake with Citizen Cosmos. However, please do not forget to delegate to smaller validators and decentralzie your stake
+
+
Next, click on Delegate:
+
+
Click on Continue to Delegate:
+
+
Choose an amount to delegate and click on Delegate:
+
+
Done. Your available and staked balance is now available in the Keplr wallet:
Сhoose a validator to whom we will delegate our tokens and click on it. If you want to support us, please stake with Citizen Cosmos. However, please do not forget to delegate to smaller validators and decentralzie your stake:
+
+
Click on Stake, enter the amount of BOOT and Generate TX:
+
+
+
Great, our transactions was included in the block:
+
+
In the next part of the guide, we will learn how to create a cyberlinks.
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here)
Let's go to cyb.ai and connect Keplr(If you have not yet registered and received your citizenship, then use our
+guide):
+
+
+
+
And next click on Teleport:
+
+
Here we can exchange BOOT, A, V, H, LP, TOCYB, PUSSY, ATOM, EVMOS, JUNO, GRAV, DSM. Before exchanging a non-native coin requires sending it to the Bostrom chain, I will show by the example of exchanging ATOM to H.
+
First, We need to transfer ATOM from cosmos hub to bostrom. Choose the amount of ATOM that we will transfer to bostrom and click on Deposit:
+
+
Great, now our Atom is on the Bostrom chain. Now we can exchange this Atom for H:
+
+
Other available coins can be exchanged in the same way.
+
How to add liquidity on cyb.ai
+
In order to add liquidity to the pool we need to go to the Warp section:
+
+
Here we will see all available pools, the volume of liquidity, and your share in the pools:
+
+
To add liquidity to the pool click on add liquidity:
+
+
Choose a pair and an amount that we want to add to the pool and click on deposit:
+
+
And confirm the transaction in the Keplr:
+
+
Done, liquidity has been successfully added. To see your share of the pool, go back to the warp tab:
+
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:
The 66th episode of Citizen Cosmos was dedicated to the CUDOS project - the decentralized cloud computing network. Among the topics discussed with Matt Hawkins, the CEO of CUDOS, were crypto, mining, diversity of cloud computing projects, gaming, education, and many more. However, above all these topics stands the primary goal of CUDOS is sustainability and eco-friendliness. Therefore, we will discuss the data centers, their harmful impact on the ecology, and the ways of dealing with them.
+
Data centers, facilities that centralize an organization's shared IT operations and equipment to store, process, and disseminate data and applications, consume 3-7% of the world's electricity. In addition, data centers require 24/7 to keep their equipment running. As a result, the operation of the data center provokes greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. CO2 emissions are also results of data centers usage of computing power making it one of the most disturbing factors. Moreover, this does not even consider the impact of construction of the data center, which is also the sourse of various harmful emissions. To learn more about the carbon footprint the data centers and cloud computing leave, we recommend reading Hessam Lavi's article from Climatiq.
+
PUE
+
As the problem of data centers’ harmful emissions is becoming more and more disturbing, many big and smaller companies are considering the PUE. PUE or Power Utilization Efficiency is a metric for evaluating the energy efficiency of a data center. PUE reflects the electrical energy consumed by the data center to the point consumed directly by the data center equipment. For example, if the data center receives 10 MW of power from the network and all equipment keeps at 5 MW, the PUE indicator will be 2. If the reading gap decreases, the coefficient will be 1, which is perfect. The PUE is globally used to understand which regions are affected mainly by the data centers' emissions. However, although the indicator may help some areas to start working on problem-solving, it might sometimes be unjust. For example, some data centers simply have worse climatic conditions than others. So, to cool a conditional data center in South Africa, you need much more electricity than a data center in Iceland. The most energy inefficient data centers are in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and parts of the Asia-Pacific region. Europe and the area uniting the USA and Canada are among the leaders in terms of PUE. So how can the PUE be lowered, especially for the regions with a hot climate?
+
Free cooling
+
One of the ways to lower the PUE is free cooling. A significant percentage of energy consumed by data centers goes to operating artificial cooling systems. The implementation of free cooling is one of the ways to reduce the cost of this energy. The outside air is filtered, heated, cooled, and supplied into the server room. Exhaust hot air is thrown out or partially mixed with the incoming flow. The more outdoor air temperature is suitable for the data center hall, the less energy is needed to bring it to the desired condition.
+
Proper use of the capacity available in the data center can also contribute to energy efficiency. For example, the purchased servers should either work for the clients' tasks or consume minimal energy during downtime. One way to control the situation is to use infrastructure management software. For example, a data center infrastructure management system. This software automatically redistributes the server load, disables idle devices, and recommends the cooling fans' rotation speed. In addition, timely updating of equipment is an integral part of improving the data center's energy efficiency. For example, an outdated server is often inferior in performance and resource intensity to a new generation server. Therefore, to reduce PUE, it is recommended to update the equipment as often as possible.
+
Finally, the optimal way to lower PUE is to use virtual servers. They consume 80% less energy. It happens because putting more virtual servers on fewer physical machines incurs hardware maintenance, cooling, and power costs. In addition, virtualization allows reallocating virtual resources from processors to storage. Therefore, electricity is only used to ensure operation, and alternative energy sources improve energy efficiency.
+
Particular actions
+
Talking about CUDOS and their dedication to sustainability and reduction of carbon footprint, it is important to talk about their particular actions. Cudos offers scalable computing solutions that address two apparent possibilities. Firstly, the Cudos network is an l1 blockchain in the Cosmos ecosystem. It uses a consensus system with delegated share confirmation (DPoS). At its core, PoS is also more careful about the environment. Therefore, it does not require energy for crypto mining, like the Proof of Work protocol. By communicating with other networks and providing data and computing oracles, the Cudos network can also effectively act as an l2 solution for other blockchains and solve scalability and throughput problems. Secondly, Cudo Ventures is working on creating a platform for automating the process of managing and trading unused computing power. Finally, it improves existing cloud service offerings regarding supply and demand for computing power. Thus, the Cudo solution will provide sustainability, economic rewards, and improved and personalized services. Ultimately, Cudo aims to connect them by giving them the first ever new Level 3. Furthermore, it will allow blockchain networks to seamlessly perform any computing work, integrating cloud and blockchain solutions into one.
+
Today, data centers are one of the most worrying sources of ecological problems. However, more and more companies are striving to make the data-keeping process as eco-friendly as possible regarding the PUE index. As we see even smaller companies like CUDOS getting involved in sustainability awareness, we can be sure that sooner or later, most data centers will be energy efficient.
+
+
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The way we store data has come a long way since the days of physical storage devices like floppy disks and CDs. In today's digital age, data storage has evolved to become much more accessible and efficient. However, the methods we use to store data are still vulnerable to hacking attacks, censorship, and data loss. This is where the concept of permanent storage comes into play.
+
The Concept of Permanent Storage
+
The concept of permanent storage refers to a type of data storage that allows data to be stored permanently and retrieved instantly. It provides a decentralized way of storing data, eliminating the need for centralized entities that can be vulnerable to censorship and hacking attacks.
+
Censorship resistance is another critical aspect of permanent storage. In centralized systems, there is always a risk that data can be censored, deleted, or modified. However, with permanent storage, the data is stored in a tamper-proof manner, ensuring that it is resistant to censorship.
+
Permanent storage is essential for storing valuable data, such as academic research, art, and personal records. It ensures that the data is accessible to everyone, forever. This type of storage is particularly important for data that needs to be preserved for future generations.
+
Scalability and Cost-Effectiveness
+
Permanent storage can also provide scalability and cost-effectiveness, making it an ideal choice for organizations that need to store large amounts of data. Unlike traditional cloud storage systems, permanent storage typically involves a one-time fee, making it more affordable in the long run.
+
The concept of permanent storage has been the subject of exploration and development in various ways, one of which is through blockchain technology. In a recent episode of our podcast, we had the pleasure of hosting Benjamin from Arweave.News (Now Permaweb.News) and Decent.Land, who is working on projects involving blockchain-based storage solutions. Permaweb.news calls itself the go-to source for community-driven news and updates about the Arweave ecosystem (a permanent storage infrastructure protocol). And Decent.Land is a set of web3 social protocols for identity, DAO governance and social networking built on Arweave.
+
We encourage you to tune in to our podcast episode to learn more about the concept of permanent storage through blockchain technology.
+
Final Thoughts
+
In conclusion, the concept of permanent storage is crucial in today's digital age, where data storage has become a vital aspect of our lives. It provides a decentralized way of storing data, ensuring that it is resistant to censorship and hacking attacks, and is accessible to everyone, forever. With the development of technologies like blockchain, permanent storage is becoming more accessible and cost-effective, making it an increasingly more practical choice for organizations that need to store large amounts of data.
+
+
Become a Citizen of the Cosmos. If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here
The transition from centralization to decentralization
+
Until recently, our world was primarily centralized. The priority form of government was, in most cases, a pyramidal structure. Decisions and orders descend from top to bottom. From bosses to subordinates, from corporate managers to branch directors, from the central bank to banks, from the president to ministers, and on to the people. And although it is believed that democracy prevails in society, and all decisions are made based on a social contract, we all see perfectly well that critical decisions are made in a single center of concentration of power.
+
However, blockchain has changed everything...
+
Everything changed with the invention of blockchain technology (although some conspiracy theorists believe that this technology was given to us from above =)). Blockchain gradually entered our lives and changed our paradigm of thinking from centralized representations to decentralized ones. Blockchain has shown that it is possible to negotiate, make decisions and monitor their implementation without involving a single center of power. In the blockchain, all processes and management are open and belong directly to the community without intermediaries. Therefore, it is quite attractive, which is why the number of decentralized services proliferates.
+
Decentralization in the wild
+
A decentralized service is a distributed organism where each user is a part of one whole. As an example consider the forest as an example of a decentralized system of blockchains and interchains.
+
The tree blockchain interacts with the grass blockchain and the squirrel blockchain. Many decentralized ecosystems in the forest are interconnected by bridges and send transactions to each other. The kingdom of mushrooms alone is worth something.
+
The forest does not have a single control center. Instead, each part of it acts in its interests. Yet, all its elements are combined into a giant ecosystem and are naturally synchronized with each other.
+
The idea
+
In the same way, a group of people united by a common idea or having the same values can join a community where there will be no chairperson, deputy, secretary, etc. The meaning in these positions disappears, and corruption opportunities are associated with them. Such communities can interact with other groups and communities as well as individuals. And the rules of these interactions and communications are equal. A smart contract monitors the fulfillment of the conditions of exchange and transactions. Regulators, notaries, and brokers are no longer needed. They are extra in this chain of interaction.
+
The idea of decentralization is increasingly capturing the minds of people. The absence of a central governing body is so attractive that the number of new blockchains has recently been overgrowing. And the number of services built on these blockchains is growing even faster. Already today, we see such services as decentralized exchanges, decentralized finance and loans, decentralized data storage services, decentralized video hosting (https://bastyon.org), instant messengers (https://usedust.com), and even social networks (http://twister.net.co). And in the future, entire states based on the blockchain may appear.
+
Which decentralized services are you lacking?
+
+
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A common misconception about how cryptocurrencies are stored in digital wallets is that they are "stored" within the wallet itself, similar to how money is kept in a
+physical wallet. However, this is not the case in the realm of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. In reality, digital wallets do not "store" cryptocurrencies or
+money in the traditional sense. Instead, digital wallets are access points that allow users to interact with the blockchain and manage their digital assets. The actual
+ownership and transfer of cryptocurrencies are recorded on the blockchain, which is a decentralized and distributed ledger. Digital wallets simply store private keys.
+
In a recent podcast episode, we talk with Pedro Gomes co-founder of Wallet Connect about this pressing topic and much more.
Blockchain technology has disrupted the traditional notion of a digital wallet as a centralized repository for money. Instead, it has transformed digital wallets into
+access points to a decentralized and distributed blockchain database. Within this new paradigm, the private key takes center stage. It is a unique cryptographic key that
+is securely stored in the digital wallet and serves as a digital signature, providing proof of ownership and enabling secure transactions without the need for
+intermediaries.
+
The private key ensures that only the wallet's owner can access and manage their digital assets on the blockchain. When a transaction is initiated from a digital wallet,
+the private key is used to sign the transaction, verifying the identity of the sender. This digital signature is then validated by the blockchain network, ensuring the
+integrity and authenticity of the transaction. Once a transaction is confirmed and added to the blockchain, it becomes immutable, meaning it cannot be altered or reversed.
+
One of the key benefits of using a private key in a digital wallet is that it enables secure transactions without the need for intermediaries. In traditional financial
+systems, transactions often require multiple intermediaries, such as banks or payment processors, to verify and facilitate the transaction. These intermediaries add
+complexity, cost, and potential delays to the process. With a private key, transactions can be conducted directly on the blockchain without the need for intermediaries,
+eliminating unnecessary fees and delays.
+
Risks
+
It is important to note that this system is not without its risks. Because your money is stored in a centralized database, there is always the possibility of a
+security breach or a hack. It is crucial to ensure that you are using a secure digital wallet and that you are taking appropriate precautions to protect your personal
+and financial information. Such as securing your private keys in a safe location, Not sharing your private keys with anyone or owning a hardware wallet.
+
Final Thoughts
+
The concept of a digital wallet has been transformed by blockchain technology, shifting from a centralized repository for money to an access point to a decentralized
+and distributed blockchain database. The private key plays a central role in this new paradigm, serving as a digital signature that provides proof of ownership and
+enables secure transactions without the need for intermediaries. The use of private keys enhances security, ownership control, and autonomy for users, while also
+imposing the responsibility of proper private key management. As blockchain continues to evolve, the concept of digital wallets and the use of private keys are likely
+to play a pivotal role in shaping the future of digital finance.
+
Become a Citizen of Cosmos
+
Support us in our mission of creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities by staking with us:
The latest Citizen Cosmos podcast was dedicated to the Kadena project. Serge and his guests Will Martino and Randy Daal discussed L1, multichain and scaling, and many other topics. However, one topic that stands out among the others is the use of blockchain technology, and especially enterprise blockchain. In this article we are going to see the benefits and the use cases of enterprise blockchain.
+
Blockchain is a technology that competes with the existing way of document management and accepted formats of interaction between counterparties. Only when solving problems, can the blockchain turn into a product. Blockchain is a technology that competes with the existing way of document management. It increases security, efficiency, and transparency across many industries.
+
Many companies looking at blockchain technologies are interested in adopting its three main features: decentralization, immutability, and cost-effectiveness.
+
First, let’s talk about decentralization. Most businesses usually use a centralized server that stores all the data for them, thus allowing anyone who needs the information to go through the database with various permission levels. The one and only central server stores and keeps under control access to all the company’s public and private data. Such a state of affairs may create problems if the server stops working due to malfunctioning or a hacker attack. This is where decentralization comes in. In a decentralized network, there is neither a central server nor an authority. If some peer goes offline, several identical peers can still perform the same functions.
+
The second blockchain benefit is immutability. It basically means that once data or a transaction has entered the blockchain, it can’t be deleted, altered, or destroyed in some other way. In addition, the ledger is transparent, so no one can hide or steal money or use it for unwanted purposes. It is possible due to each grouping of blocks in a blockchain containing a hash of all the data in the preceding blocks. So, with the immutability of blockchain, if anyone tries to sabotage the company’s data, the company would instantly know which data was altered.
+
Cost-effectiveness speaks for itself and probably needs no explanation. Companies spend vast sums of money yearly to keep up with governmental regulations. For example, KYC requires institutions to update and maintain their identities. With government-maintained blockchain, this expense can be offloaded. Customers could keep updated data on the chain and release it to the facility.
+
Today, the enterprise is still developing, and many companies join this technology daily. For example, J.P. Morgan, GoldmanSachs, Santander Bank, and other banks have been developing their private blockchains within the last several years. Let’s look at the implementation of enterprise blockchain in the example of Walmart.
+
The famous American retailer Walmart was one of the first to use blockchain for food products' quality control and traceability. The company first tested the concept by delivering mangoes from Latin America and pork from China. The experience was then transferred to tracking the origin of the greens. The retailer demanded a transition to the blockchain from all greens suppliers after another epidemic of E. coli poisoning in the United States. Walmart used the technology of the IT giant IBM, which launched the IBM Food Trust initiative based on this case. Participation in it provides the following benefits: food safety insurance through traceability of the supply chain and transparency of data on the expiration date, manufacturer, method, and transportation conditions; constant supply chain efficiency improvement through automating processes and collecting big data that helps you find the best logistical paths; increasing consumer trust and loyalty through open access to most of the data in the blockchain, which allows assessing product quality and authenticity; reduction of food waste and spoilage during transport by identifying problem areas that cause the most spoilage; protection against food fraud. Walmart set an example to the global retailing networks, so today, Carrefour, Nestlé, Unilever, and many others either already have their private blockchains or building them right now.
+
In conclusion, enterprise blockchains unlock the potential of blockchain technology and can provide more ingenious solutions not only to individuals but also to big companies and industries.
+
+
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Episode name:
+The Best Day Ever: Discussing The sustainability of Open Source, Product Market Fit and Dank Meme's with Willy Ogorzaly.
+
In this episode, Willy Ogorzaly from ShapeShift and the Fox foundation is interviewed. He gives the details of his startup journeys and the secret to his success. He gives his definition of dank memes and their power in community building. There is information given on the Arkeo airdrop, as well as thoughts on the ultimate interface for a decentralized universe.
+
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Welcome everyone to a new episode of the Citizen Cosmos Podcasstas. Sometimes I forget what I'm doing where I am, but we are here. the Citizen Cosmos podcast Willy hi. Welcome to the show again. Welcome back to the show. Shall I say?
+
willy:
+GM Serj, happy to be back. Thanks for inviting me.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Yea, So just for the listeners out there, we have willy with us from shape shift. Well, I don't know if I should introduce it like that any more. Shall I, shall I still say shape shift, or shall I now use the name of the upcoming chain? Or what shall I do? Man? How shall I introduce you?
+
willy:
+It's a good question. I'm a community member of shapeshift. I'm a community member of Arcio. Technically, I'm the head of decentralization for the Fox Foundation. But a lot of people aren't familiar with the Fox Foundation. So shapeshift is probably the most recognized brand. And Arcio
+
+
willy:
+is the new one that I'm excited to chat about a little bit today too.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Yay! well, first thing is first before the recording. you already told me best day ever. shall we? You know what you know what. let's go step back wait. I'm unfair. I'm being unfair
+
citizen_cosmos:
+because I think I'm being unfair to all the listeners. Because well, the last time we recorded with you is been like over here, Right and I didn't do you. You introduction in my opinion, so I'm going to ask you to introduce yourself to say anything you want about yourself. not just maybe a lit, more than a community member, Because I know Are a lot shy people. That's great. The shy people are the best. I do all
+
citizen_cosmos:
+the work. so I've got to let you introduce yourself. Willy I apologize for this shity introduction. I'm sorry, go on, please.
+
willy:
+No, I appreciate it Serj I Like it would you introduce me better it's better. But yeah, I'll do my best
+
willy:
+My name is Willie. I am having the best day ever like surge mentioned I hope you're all having the best day ever too. I've been in crypto for about five years now so I joined Back in 2017 happened to get my first taste of crypto. Ethereum was the first token I bought and pretty quickly became obsessed. At the end of 2017, I had just sold my first startup. And over the course of the year I've become very obsessed with crypto. Started going to the meetups and drinking from the fire hose, learning everything I could. And so that same month that we sold my first startup, which was just legal, I started a tool called Bitfract with some friends. And Bitfract was the first tool where you could trade Bitcoin for multiple digital assets at once in a single transaction. And it was built on top of ShapeShift. So... It was pretty exciting going from my first startup journey, which was like a five year uphill battle. And even though we sold, it wasn't a huge win for the team. We paid back the investors and it was a very small win for the team. And then going to Bitfract, which was a six month journey from having the idea to getting acquired. And it was like instant product market fit. People loved Bitfract. It was a free tool. It was generating revenues on day one though, because ShapeShift had an affiliate revenue program. And it was an awesome journey, especially working with friends. We didn't raise any money. It was a much bigger win for the team. And that's what got me involved with ShapeShift. So I joined ShapeShift June 2018. I was a product manager there for three years until we decentralized and launched the DAO, which was another best day ever. And that kicked off the six month transition of kind of winding down ShapeShift's operations and transitioning a lot of that over to the DAO. And then in January, after ShapeShift had pretty much terminated all of its remaining employees, including myself, helped start the Fox Foundation. which is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to supporting ShapeShift DAO and achieving full decentralization. So it's a separate entity, has no control over the DAO, but we're there to support the DAO, and we're also responsible for maintaining a lot of the legacy centralized infrastructure, which kind of brings us over to Arcio, which is now this new project. So a big part of kind of the remaining bits of ShapeShift's centralized infrastructure is the node bit. And it's run by different community members, so I wouldn't say it's fully centralized right now. we want to further decentralize it. And that's what Arceo is, is a network. It's a Cosmos L1 app chain designed to incentivize node operators to run this node infrastructure and to provide blockchain data to users and to broadcast their transactions so that end users don't have to run their own node and dApps don't have to rely on centralized infrastructure or run their own nodes. It's making it easy for anyone to just plug into this decentralized node network. So yeah, it's, last thing I'll say about Arceo is that it's taking the node infrastructure that ShapeShift has been developing for almost a decade now, basically, because ShapeShift was first started in 2014. It's an open source library called Unchained, and Arkeo basically is incentivizing the node operators to run this unchained software. So, the network itself is new. It's been under development for over a year now between ShapeShift DAO and Coinbase Cloud. Really awesome partnership there. And, but it's building on top of years and it's taking this existing open source technology that currently powers shape shifts node infrastructure. And then just decentralizing that and incentivizing a distributed network to run that software.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Seriously the person who is going to invent an you and mute button. I will personally send them a million dollars. Because like really, man, I mean, I mean thats not a call to action. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Willy, but like happens all the time. The guest does you know? huge talk and I'm having my notes down and I'm like so excited and then I'm like I'm on mute and I've been on mute for about ten seconds. So First of all for all the guests that that just here in Willy for the first time. An, maybe not for the first time. I want to say something. You know, guys, this is like our ninetieth podcast with guests, But we have recorded thousands of hours because we didn't just record podcast, we have streams, and we have other things, and so on, and so forth, And last time when we had the podcast with Willy, really really made this deep impression on me like I'm really serious. Like this sentence of I'm having the best day ever. I think like a person that says that this is like I know you are right in front of me and I'm talking about your third person. Not very nice. I get it, but like it really did impress me and I think like when you talk to people That you understand that there, industry builders as a person can, and I'm not right now giving you compliments. That really did impress me so much that I went out there talking to people about it. I was like for for for for still until today, Sometimes at a conference I like talking to somebody and I'm like you know. Willy, You know. What told me? He told me he's havin the best were for seven years and he's been saying it every day. so yeah, guys, just saying you know, like you know, there are different people out there, But the reason I'm talking about it, I think recently. And this is the question. I'm goin at the first question. I'm going to ask you so recently I saw on Twitter. I think it was two days ago. It was the second or the third time I saw Poll, That says, Oh, Crypto is like Bla Bla Bla, How do you between the founders? Out of all the projects there's so many scams out there. How do you deferinshit? How do you filter my answer before you give yours? I'm going to say straight where it's going to be easy. It's the values the values of the people that built, and this is the first question. I know it hasn't got a lot to do with what you said yet, but I will connect at all. I promise. as usual, So my first question to you is out of all this like crazy market out there right now, So many builders. How do we filter between all those builders between the people that are well good. What is good, Okay and bad, But let's just try and keep in those black and white stigmas for a second.
+
willy:
+I think you kind of nailed it with the values. I would agree with that. I think it's its mission, vision, values. But to your point, there's so much noise in the space, like how do you actually connect and communicate that to just your audience members to somebody on crypto Twitter, who is getting flooded with a newsfeed of all this new stuff getting built. And so I would say, ultimately, it boils down to the memes, you got to have dank memes. And when I say memes, I don't just mean like the images with the text that make people laugh, but like that higher level. It's like, it's that mission, the value, the vision. And then how do you translate that into digestible tidbits, these messages, these powerful memes that will resonate with your target audience, with your community? And especially for DAOs, I think it's like, that is one of the key pieces to nail. And it's really hard, it's much easier said than done. I think at ShapeShift, we do so much, we still need to figure out, like what is our really dank meme? What is that message that resonates with people? But like some good examples, I think Gitcoin. funding open source public goods, right? And giveth to like the ultimate donation platform or rewarding those who give. Those are really clear memes. And what that enables is people all around the world to like share that vision, those values, that mission can hear that meme and then recognize like, oh, this is the community that I should be a part of. This is the community that aligns with my values and mission. So first step to building a aligned community. Thank you. is to have some dank ass memes.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+I love that little. I'll do the same to me, my cat. come on, pass me a bottle of water damn it. Now
+
willy:
+hahaha
+
citizen_cosmos:
+I'm joking, I skin. So whoever passed your bottle of water, that was amazing. Sorry, the coup of tea No, This is a great thing you say because there is sometimes so many like what seemed to be. I'm really like, scared to use those words I'm going to be using right now because they're very stigmatic, But I want to to ask the question. I have to use them to make the point, and like you know, There is so many things sometimes you've seen on crypto Twitter, Like the thing about the Memes, which, in my opinion, about the values what you say, it just makes sense like you mentioned Open Source, for example, and I know that you are very big, open source, Maxi, Like Last time we talked about. Giveth we talked about. You know the whole process of how you saw the foundation. You know, decentralized, and you know and who, By the way, whoever is listening guys get out there. Check. check the previous interview we did with Willy on our website. Um, and it's fantastic, but you know back to open source. Well, I didn't back to Open Source. One and one other thing I'm keep on seeing recently, a lot. a lot. a lot on Twitter is, for some reason, I don't know if it's a marketing move And maybe you can explain it from your perspective Is a lot of people, in Web3 starting to doubt the efficiency of open source Yet If we just go out there, you know, Even Wikipedia is good enough resource to Understand, And that, actually, it's eighty twenty open source, eighty, close source, Twenty, It's just the twenty source of close source. Facebooks, you tubes and so on that we use every day that everybody uses. And that's why we so used to that. What about you? I mean, I know you are a big maxi of open source. Why is that in your opinion, we are seen or might even see even one or two people in crypt suddenly doubt the efficiency of open source.
+
willy:
+That's a really good question. I think we can touch on some cool stuff there. I think in the Web 2 world, closed source was a much more defensible position. First of all, you're not holding people's funds. They're not putting too much trust in you, other than the data that they're giving you. So that's whereas in Web 3, when you're actually building applications that are responsible for holding users' funds, it's so much more important to be open source. And as a user, even though the end user might not know, like a user is safer, I would argue, using an open source DAP or wallet or whatever, then they are using a closed source one, just because even if they don't understand how to review the code, there's people out there who do. And especially if you combine that with like a bug bounty program and stuff, now there's an incentive for white hat hackers to like peruse this and find this and report it and fix it. And that's what we have a shape shift. And yeah, I would, I feel much more comfortable personally using these open source technologies than the closed source technologies. Um, also, yeah, in the web two world, um, you can, you create these walled gardens and you can charge fees, but in the web three world, we have much more of an ethos of like building these public goods. And that's something that I'm so passionate about. I think the best type of software is free software and as software developers, um, and product builders, we can, that's one of the best ways that we can have a positive impact on the world. Um, like software is such a good fit for being a public good because you write the software and unless you impose walls or you impose fees and ways to extract value, it is the public good that anybody can access and anybody can use and your use of it doesn't hurt my use of that public good. So I think that's a big part of why public goods and open source are part of the ethos for web three. Maybe why they get some pushback is that it's hard to capture value. And I think we're still as an industry trying to figure out like, okay, if you do build an open source public good, or even just any open source app, how do you capture the value from it? And how do you create a sustainable, defensible competitive advantage so that if you do figure out a way to find product market fit or to capture value, someone can't just come fork that and take that. And because then it becomes very hard to actually capture value. And it's really hard to solve these problems, right? even in the Web 2 world, where there's huge incentives to solve these problems. Like most startups fail. And that's with that really big incentive of like, if you solve this problem, then you can capture all the value from, from that you create. Um, and so in the Web 3 world, maybe it's hard for people to see like, Oh, why should I go build this open source thing if someone can just come fork it? And so for that, I think, I think the answer is similar to what it is in Web 2 is network effects. Like that's ultimately. the most sustainable, defensible competitive advantage for an open source web three project is you need to figure out a way to develop network effects because while your code can be forked, those network effects cannot be, the community cannot be. And so just like in the web two world, network effects are what enables like Uber and Lyft to be able to charge fees and defend from someone else just coming and launching a similar app that has the same technology, but without that network of riders and drivers, very hard for a new entrance into the market to come disrupt. and steal market share away from Uber and Lyft. And the Web3 world is similar. You need to develop those network effects because it's even easier for someone to come copy your code and deploy it competitively.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+I'm gonna dig slightly over here. if you don't mind. Do you think that the problem might arise much earlier Like I mean, if you look at educational system and to copy from somebody in the exam is a crime. you know. it's like it's a crime. the hardest crime you could probably do. Apart from caving. I'm not even sure what. What's more difficult right for a teacher with a student whose ... school, or a student who copies from other people, So I think it's a bilt into us, I think that that like desire to believe that you can achieve more than you can achieve with somebody else together, or you know that the belief that if I build five walls around myself five, I'm in the roof. you know, six with the floor, or whatever, you know, four walls around myself. I will be more you know safer than than somebody. It's not like that right in real life, and I think I really like. In my opinion, I don't know, and I would Love to know yours. Of course here, but I think it's much much cheaper and it goes back really to the roots of the way were being raised as kids. the things were being told, you know, like follow the rules. You have to do that. you cannot think outside the box. You
+
willy:
+Yeah, it's super interesting concepts we're getting to like in school, there are these rules that you can't, can't copy. And those are the rules. So you got to play by the rules. And in software there's copyright laws, and then there's licenses that apply to software and stuff. And so sometimes you are breaking the rules by copying some software. And there's a delicate balance, because the reason that those rules exist is because it's important for there to be incentives, like in capitalistic market, like we need there to be incentive. Otherwise, no one's going to build the stuff to solve these problems. Right. And so these laws help protect the innovators and the builders who do create value and make sure that they can actually capture that value. And it can't just be taken because otherwise maybe no one would ever build anything. Um, but I'm like kind of a utilitarian, like on the other side, like it's for the end user, it's great. Like if someone copies code, people are only going to use it if there's some improvement, right. And so you. Like as long as you have to find that balance of like, where is there still incentive for people to come innovate and create value? But at the same time, how can you encourage people? Like as long as people are copying stuff and improving it, I think that's great, but you still just need to make sure that there's incentive for people to do that. And that's kind of, I think, the balance that we're trying to find in Web3.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+I think the first time somebody contacted me was about two and a half three years ago. It was the founder of a project, I don't wanna drop name names right now, but he asked me that he has a project. Now that project exists and it's not a small project and he was like, Oh, I love what you're doing, you know, but I cannot touch any of your work. You don't have a license and I was like Well, you can. I'm telling you you can do whatever you want for free and he's like No, But you need to put a license, So I actually went in an Our get Help. There's a license called Being good, and part of it says that I invented it, and part of it says that you can do whatever you want, But if you copy our work and make money from it and don't share with us, you're a bit of an ass hole. It literally says that like you know,
+
willy:
+Hahahaha
+
willy:
+I love that philosophy.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+But you know like what's the point of messing around? I'm not like I'm saying. Hey, it's free. But if you want to make money from it and it's just from my work, you didn't do anything to it. Be nice if you shared a couple of shekels with me. You know, if you don't, it's up to you and then License. you know. But
+
willy:
+I love that because
+
willy:
+what are you going to do? Are you really going to go out there and like sue somebody like, you know,
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Exactly
+
willy:
+maybe, but it's, I love that you're saying that because it's so similar to, I think, the situation that a lot of DAOs have right now, because shape shift as a DAO without any legal entity, we're in the same boat. I always say come fork any of our stuff, come copy any of our stuff that applies to our software that applies to our governance process, like anything come fork it. And part of the reason I say that is because we don't have any mechanism of actually defending. Anyways, and not only do I believe in it, I love being able to promote that, but in reality, the DAO does not have a legal entity. It does not have the ability to actually go sue somebody who copied all of our stuff. So I love your philosophy, and it's kind of like the status quo for DAOs, for open source DAOs without legal entities.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Here is my next question, which's going to bring us back to the shapeShift DAO, and the next one is about Product Market Fit. Get ready. But before that, before that, let's talk a little bit about what we just spoke about about the ability, I mean, let alone my views, and what I believe in what you believe in. But there is the foundation. There is a project. and you have mentioned it since the very beginning. Even in your description you said the words not profit organization. Then, as you carried on speaking, U, use the word public goods. Positive impact. A, And I love it. You love it. We all love it. Let's play, but I'm going to play Devil's advocate. Where is the money Lebovski like? I mean, What's going on right? I mean to the person out there that looks at all that and says, Hey, great, this guys are building non profit wait A second. What are they earning right? And it's like a whole thing. So why? the question is why is it a non profit? The foundation? Why it cannot. Why in general may be foundations Decide to be on profit. In your opinion, Should they actually be for profit foundations like Ethereum Foundation, or or anything else? I don't know. Yeah, let's talk a little bit about that.
+
willy:
+It's a really awesome topic and it's very timely because we're having a lot of these discussions or even debates right now in ShapeShift DAO. So first of all, the foundation is non-profit and it's separate from the DAO. So the reason the foundation is not for profit is that really we started with 7.5% of the total Fox supply. So we were funded as part of kind of a DAOgenesis and we have a specific mission to support ShapeShift DAO in achieving full decentralization. Once that mission is done, there's no reason for the foundation to exist. And our intention is to dissolve the foundation and transfer any remaining funds that we have to the DAO treasury. ShapeShift DAO, although it's a public good, it's up to the community to decide if it should be a nonprofit, or if it should be profit seeking. And I love public goods. I think that's the best type of software, but I do think that I believe in rewarding innovators and stuff for the value that they create. And I think there's room for both. And I actually believe personally that ShapeShift can generate the most profit, the most value by being an open source public good. And I think about it from first principles, ShapeShift DAO's vision right now and mission is to build the ultimate interface to the decentralized universe. So what does that interface look like? Right? What does the ultimate interface to the decentralize the universe look like? I don't think we're there yet. Like I love MetaMask. I don't think MetaMask is it because not only is it a privately held app, it's not completely open source anymore, but it's only, it only supports EVM's. Right? And so I think the ultimate interface to the decentralized universe from first principles will be multi-chain. It will support multiple wallets too. Like I love Ledger Live, but it just supports Ledger. So that's not gonna be the ultimate interface to the decentralized universe. Non-custodial, of course, that's a given. Open source, we talked about that. Community owned. I don't think that the ultimate interface is gonna be owned by Coinbase or some private organization. I think it's gonna be owned by the users, the community. Private is a big piece of it too. I think that's a big differentiator. On shape shift, you can go to private dot shape shift dot com zero data whatsoever is collected on you. And. Decentralized and that's where Arkeo comes in, like if, if we, if the very interface that the decentralized the universe itself is centralized, like what's the point, you can still be censored. And then free. I believe that's just such an obvious thing to me. And a perfect example of it is that shape shift. Again, we talked about this earlier, like if shape shift were to put fees on top of these decentralized protocols and we were to get product market fit with that. it'd be very compelling for a single engineer to just come fork ShapeShift, deploy their own new governance token, their own new DAO, and say, hey, guess what? There's no fees, I'm taking away the fees. And instead, this is the strategy that I think ShapeShift should do, and that we're kind of on track for. But there's a debate happening right now on whether ShapeShift DAO should add fees, specifically on top of Thorchain swaps. So there's a proposal up that just passed ideation, which is the second out of three stages in our governance. to add 25 basis points of fees on top of Thorchain swaps. I put up a counter proposal to say no fees, because I'm very passionate about not adding fees. I don't think that's a winning model. And I'll tell you what I think is the winning model in a second. But my counter proposal is to not add fees and instead add optional donations on top of these Thorchain swaps or really any of the features that the DAO wants to monetize. Because part of the argument for fees is that Some users don't care. Some users would be more than happy to support ShapeShift in this open source project with a small amount on these transactions that we're helping them and facilitating. And so if that's the case, cool, let's give them that option. Let's even make it the default so that by default, if you don't check a box and opt out, you're gonna donate 25 basis points on your ThorChain Swaps or any of these other swaps that we decide to add optional donations to. And that way we can still be free. We can still be a public good. But for the users that are happy to support ShapeShift, we could have an additional revenue stream to help us survive this bear market and fund further development. So I think that's a nice compromise between the community members that like, do want to experiment with fees and the community members like myself that are like, no, fees are dumb, they're evil. It's, it could really, they're not gonna make the DAO successful because right now we don't have enough usage where fees will actually make us profitable, but they could break us. They could make it very hard to find this product market fit. And the reason for that, that I believe that so passionately, is this next model that I'm so excited about, which is no fees plus Fox rewards. So right now, the Dow already has affiliate revenue partnerships with a number of different partners, everything from buying and selling crypto, trading, earning yields, buying hardware wallets, buying swag, like you name it. We already have affiliate revenue agreements in place for like some of the main things that crypto users want to do. And the affiliate revenue model can apply to any kind organization that generates revenue, generates profit. We don't care how that protocol or service generates revenue, we just want a slice for the value that shapeshift drives. It's the same model that shapeshift used to offer to integrators like Bitfract. And it's awesome because it enables an interface to not put added fees on, which I just think is like Metamask. Yes, they do it because they have those network effects already established, so they can justify these fees, like we talked about earlier. And Metamask charges 0.875% on top of every swap that goes to their wallet. which is more than the protocol's charge. And yes, they're able to generate a lot, but I don't think that's because it's a good model. And I don't think if they didn't have those network effects and started with that, which is kind of where ShapeShift is right now, like we're trying to get users from Metamask to come over to ShapeShift. And like, could we charge a little bit less fees than Metamask? Sure, but it's a race to the bottom. And instead, I think we can front run that race, make our fees zero, generate affiliate revenues, which we're already doing, and then reward users who generate affiliate revenues for the DAO proportionally with Fox tokens. That can make ShapeShift objectively the best way to use the growing number of protocols and services. So take Osmo for example, or staking Osmo. ShapeShift DAO right now has a validator on the Osmosis network with 5% commissions, which is a minimum amount of commissions that you can have for a validator on Osmosis. What I would like to see the DAO do is that if you delegate to the ShapeShift DAO validator, you earn extra Fox tokens that you wouldn't earn. So now it's like the best way for you to stake your Osmos. Osmo is basically to the ShapeShift DAO validator, because now you're getting those Osmo rewards, and you're also getting Fox tokens. And now when you hear that, you would have to be crazy as a user to not go stake your Osmo to ShapeShift DAO's validator. It's very different than if ShapeShift were to put fees, extra fees on top of staking to the Osmo validator in our interface. That would be super lame, I think. And even if we were to add fees and then reward Fox to offset the fees, I think it's a big difference from just like, being free, not putting any fees on top of these protocols or services, still generating affiliate revenues, which we have in place for Cosmo, Osmosis, Juno, for these validators we run. We could do it for any validator that we run. And then rewarding the users who generate revenue with Fox tokens, actually giving them ownership in this awesome open source public good. That I think is a disruptive winning model. And we're so close to finally, actually if you have doubt, being able to prioritize and release that.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+I have a question about this model. quick question before, though, Is there a bit of a paradox for a decentralized universe to have an ultimate interface or not? I mean ultimate decentralized kind of like paradoxal. no?
+
willy:
+Well, I think there will be, right? It's inevitable that there will be a winner, like the main interface that people use to connect, yeah, to explore the decentralized universe. And I think it's valuable too. I think there's a lot of value in building that. I think there's still a lot of problems right now that we have with kind of the interfaces out there to the decentralized universe that needs to be solved before we can get mass adoption and before we can have what I believe is like, what I get excited about using myself basically. We're still not quite there yet. And I think like the Ethereum and Cosmos, the fact that there's not really a lot of great interfaces that support both is a perfect example of that. And that's one of the problems that Shapedhip is eagerly trying to solve basically. And it's, yeah, even just being able to see your whole portfolio. Like if you're a Power DeFi user, but you also have some Bitcoin and you also have some Cosmos stake, like where can you actually see all of your positions? Zapper and Zerion do a great job showing you your DeFi positions in Ethereum, but they don't do a great job supporting these other networks. And those are the opportunities that Shapeshift is like laser focused on solving this next year.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+I think the one of the reasons I'm like secretly routing for you, Really secretly because I'm a decentralization maxi so im against ultimate interfaces, but in secret I'm routing for you is because you're early is because it's not because of your philosophy, not just the value. I think I'm answering my own question, kind of here right now. The first question I asked you, You know, I think it's about sometimes being what's the right word? Not early, but the love for exploration
+
citizen_cosmos:
+because pioneer and exploration. you know this is what humanity is about, Because you know all I mentioned. Zapper, you mentioned. Like who else? did you say? Zapper, And
+
willy:
+Zerion.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Zerion thats right, And if I'm not mistaken, one of them comes from Eastern Europe, So I think I met the team, one of the teams early on, And you know it's a thing. A lot of those teams. they stick to those things like like, I don't want to slag Bitcoin off right now, but like to Bitcoin, you know, And they stick to it religiously and they lose in that process. The irony is that all of the thing about exploration and pioneering and about going on an exploring, you know, and building for the decentralization, kind of becomes them now in the in the same place as whoever before them was there. You know, the Web2 people that were saying, Oh, web3 isn't going work Now. the Web3 people are coming and saying Web3 is going to work, but only our web3 is going to work, and your web3 is going to fail. So it's like this is why I'm kind of secret Routing for shapeShift, But it's a secret, so don't tell anyone
+
willy:
+Yeah.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+about your model. Wait, because otherwise we're going to wonder of and I'm sorry, I still want ask you about our Arkeo product market fit, and about your model. I have one question for you. So while you were talking, I wrote something down here, and you, you talked about cash back or reward model, which is a perfectly great model. You know, I have to. I have to ask, and I'm not going to be myself If I don't. I don't know if it exists that kind of model in the Financial world. I haven't seen one. for sure. Maybe NFT is a little bit similar, but I think that there is a better model than Cashback reward, and this is a question to you, emotional and experience model something that gives back not rewards in cash but in emotions. If you could in shapeshift, Could you know For using shapeShift was rewarding me in emotions, Then I think than the users would definitely go back, because there is nothing else better than more important than that,
+
willy:
+I like where your heads are. I mean, ultimately it's all like those endorphins. How come we get endorphins released in our users'
+
willy:
+brain? And
+
willy:
+maybe it's maybe that's like a monetary reward. Maybe it's a confetti explosion. Maybe a little bit of both, right? Like why
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Uh.
+
willy:
+not both? But yeah, ultimately that's what we're trying to do here. And yeah, I do think there is nothing like a financial incentive. That is probably one of the most powerful things.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Of course,
+
willy:
+And we've seen that like when the moment SushiSwap launched and it was a better place to provide liquidity than Uniswap because the token rewards. And one week, over half of Uniswap's liquidity was drained and sucked over to SushiSwap and a vampire attack. So like these DeFi users, they care about the bottom line. But what I think is especially powerful about this model is that we're not just giving them Fox tokens, which do have a value, but we're giving them ownership in this platform that they're using. And I think it's a great way to build the community, right? Like you can come into Shapeshift, use Shapeshift, it doesn't cost you anything extra, you got all these awesome features. And guess what? You're actually earning Fox. It doesn't cost you any extra to use these protocols. And if you went directly to them. And now you're earning Fox tokens. You're actually becoming a member of this community for this platform that you're using, which hopefully you love. And that I think is really powerful. And then the perfect flywheel is like, okay, you wanna earn some more Fox? Cool, keep using the platform and guess what? Come participate in the community, come add value to ShapeShift. Like what skills do you have? What can you offer? That I think is like the winning model. And back to like the first principles of what's gonna be the ultimate interface. We said it's gonna be community owned, right? So. whichever interface has the strongest community, basically. That I think is a key part to being the ultimate interface to the decentralized universe.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Absolutely, and I think the community comes the emotions right, But Let's get slowly to product market fit, And I know this is another one of your lovely favorite topics
+
willy:
+It's a buzzword right now.
+
willy:
+I think every DAO is like. Yeah.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+but I know you like the topic. I know
+
willy:
+I love it, yeah.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+that because I already spoken with you before that, and I know that I love the topic and this is a good point to bring us to Arkeo as well. Before we even talk about Arkeo, let's let's keep Strait to this. Let's what is the product market fit of Arkeo for both? Not you know. no, no, no, no, let me rephrase that what is the product market fit of Arkeo? I'm sorry. This is three times of the same question in the Web3 space, not particularly for cosmos, not particularly for Ethereum in the Web3 space. What is this product market fit?
+
willy:
+Yes, well, so anybody who's ever run a node knows how challenging it is to do this, especially to keep your node running, to keep your node updated and stuff, and then to do it at scale when you have an application that you know, users, thousands of users depend on. Keeping that node infrastructure running is probably one of the hardest challenges for any Web3 DApp. And that's why most DApps just like rely on something like Infera basically. And I know Infera is trying to decentralize and that's awesome to see that they're working towards that. But again, still, that's just for EVMs. And basically, what Arkeo is, is decentralized Infura for all the chains. It's chain agnostic. And it's pretty cool. It's like, if there's demand from users for a certain chain to be decentralized, then there's incentive for any of the node operators on Arkeo to then run that node and provide that data. And you don't need every node operator on Arkeo to run nodes for every single chain. You just need at least one node operator to be running infrastructure for that chain for it now to be available. And then if there's demand for more, for more, then that won't incentivize more node operators to come online. So that's kind of all the crux of the problem that Arkeo is solving. It's something that end users can use, but probably most end users are just gonna be using it through a DAP, such a shape shift that is powered by Arkeo. So DAPs are obviously a big kind of target market and really for like any DAP that wants to be truly decentralized. which a lot of dApps right now are not. Behind the scenes, they are even relying on centralized node operators. Another thing that's not decentralized is the interface piece too. And so it's like we talk about DeFi and stuff, and secretly, one of the unspoken secrets is that it's not all decentralized yet. And that's like a big problem. That's where we need to get to eventually. So that's kind of like the underlying problem that ShapeShift is trying to solve with Arkeo. And then of course, just developers, just if you're a developer and you just need a node for any purpose and stuff, Arkeo will be a great solution. There will be free tiers. And then if you need additional data for whatever you're doing, then you can pay for that with Arkeo tokens.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+So basically Arkeo is the decentralized in Infera,
+
willy:
+Exactly. For an Chain agnostic.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Right, right, right which, and it's which end you can own a part of it. because it has. I'm assumably. it will have some kind of a token which will give you some ownership. right. Right as any token does I'm not. This is no legalities dropped. The legalities plays around all of the words I'm saying right now, So I'm talking about in you know web3 stigmas right now right,
+
willy:
+Yes, there will be a token and there will be an airdrop too. You should probably mention that. Just search Arkeo Airdrop, there's a bunch of good information on it. But we're really trying to reward kind of a big scope of users. So of course, Fox Token holders, because Fox Token holders incubated this project, but also Cosmos Stakers, Osmosis Stakers, Juno Stakers, Osmosis liquidity providers, Thorchain liquidity providers, all of those will be eligible for an Arkeo Airdrop when the network goes live. and the snapshot is rolling. So if you're already one of those in one of those buckets, great, you're probably gonna get an airdrop. Don't take my word for it. Make sure you look at all the details for what will qualify you because there are some asterisks. And then, yeah, if you're not one of those yet, you still have time to become one of those. The Arcio airdrop is a rolling snapshot that started November 29th of 2022 and is rolling until 30 days prior to the launch of Arkeo, which is still TBD but is estimated for Q2. of this year.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+I'm curious, but I usually don't ask questions about air drops. but since we are slightly on the top and it's not going to be like a question of how much is the Airdrop worth Not for sure Not. in your experience and opinion, what are the because Air drops in my opinion, are a very cool way of acquiring users If we're talking right now in corporate terms which I hate, but you know it is. It is the same thing as a useraquisition. Instead of You know, you're letting the user test your product and this is what they've been rewarded for, It's very difficult, especially a mean Ethereum is a huge project this day's. It's mass, you know, rabbit hole of user. All types of users have there been? in your opinion any good ways to you know, pick and and do an air drop? Sorry, apologize for my, for my words, getting lost today, but Your opinion has there been really a way to do an air brow that stood out? Let's let's make the question simple.
+
willy:
+Yeah, I've always been a big fan of airdrops. I've been fortunate to be included in multiple airdrops and stuff. And I will say I'm always impressed by the airdrops that kind of do a good job of telling you about what the project is and what the token does before you claim it. So I think some good example of that, of course, ShapeShift, but also Giveth did a really great job with this. ENS did a great job. Most recently, like SafeAirdrop, I thought they did a really great job. And so yeah, when you do an airdrop, it's worth being thoughtful, right? So you're launching a new token, you're launching a new chain. One of the main things, one of the main purposes of the airdrop isn't just to acquire users, it's great for that. But also if the purpose of your token is a governance token, then it's essential that you have a distributed community of owners. And these people that you're airdropping to, these are the original governors of your protocol, at least the people who hold that token. So... It's a really great way to kickstart the decentralization in the community of whatever this project is. And you have the opportunity to really be thoughtful about, who are you going to reward? I love how Giveth did this. Shapeship, of course, a lot of projects reward their past users. That's a given. So if you already have users and you don't have a token yet, giving your token to past users is a no-brainer, in my opinion. But then also, what Giveth did was it tried to find any Ethereum address that had a token. done social good that had donated on Gitcoin or donated on CLR fund or donated on the giving block. Like whenever we could, whatever Giveth could find, if Giveth could tell that this address had participated in public goods, it's like Giveth wanted you to have some gift tokens, basically. Another really cool thing that Giveth did is that it didn't just give you all the tokens up front, but it gave you 10% of the tokens up front. And then the rest, we didn't call it vesting. which is a strategic move because vesting feels like, okay, like some of this stuff is locked. It's almost like it's being taken from me. Instead it was just the give stream. So it's like, hey, here's some tokens. And guess what? You're gonna get more tokens for the next five years, which is also a really great way to encourage people to stay involved basically, and to support Giveth for the longterm. So I thought that was a pretty cool strategy. There's some downsides to that though too. And probably the main downside is that some people who get your airdrop are just gonna sell it immediately. And if you do have a vesting period, then those same people, although the best thing I might discourage some of those people to dump, because they're kind of like dumping on their future self, it also can result in like ongoing sell pressure just throughout the period of whatever that stream or vesting is.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+One of the craziest thing solution. By the way, I love, I must say, donating tokens ... on obvious. So that's like wasting gas. Why did nobody think about it before one of the craziest solutions? I think was, I've seen it Still is. you can claim the drop, but you will only get it once. A hundred thousand users have claimed the Airdrop.
+
willy:
+Ah, interesting.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+That's like. You know it's like, but it's cool. you know at. I'm not saying it's good solution. I don't say it's great. I'm not judging it right now. I'm just saying it's crazy in terms of like I've seen like you know, rekt drop from Evmos. For example, I've seen one from from from different teams out there. and one you mention. it sounds really cool. Just weird of amount of things you can do to to to retain retain use use retention, shall I say, And this is actually my next question about Arkeo. Who is Arkeo Users and what is currently the foundation behind shape shift? Shall I say? it's them who are having the biggest focus right now doing to attract and to retain those users in place, apart from the air drop. Of course,
+
willy:
+Yeah, so I will say Arkeo is probably mainly focused on the B2B side, or maybe like B2D, B2DAO. But it's also B2C. It's B2D in terms of developers. But I think its main focus, and probably, yeah, will be getting projects who have applications to use Arkeo to power their node infrastructure. One really interesting thing is that in this open source world, it's possible that community members will decide to kind of just deploy open source front ends that are powered by Arkeo, even without the permission of that protocol or project. So like you could imagine like the Arkeo development team or a community member might just deploy a Uniswap front end that is powered by Arkeo without any input from the Uniswap community. But then ultimately the hope would be that the, you know, you could reach out to the Uniswap community and say, Hey, check out this awesome decentralized version of your interface. And then that that would encourage them to adopt it for their official interface. That would kind of be the perfect scenario. And then as a result, any of the Uniwap users would then be users of Arkeo, but wouldn't actually like be paying for it themselves. They might not even know that Arkeo is what's powering the app behind the scenes.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+I'm curious because it's It's interesting because the whole centralized node operation thing this day is quite the big discussion in the cosmos ecosystem, Especially, there's been some drama over that. I mean, in Cosmos love drama, it's good. The more drama, more participation by the looks of it, the more drama, the more the price goes up. I'm not saying I'm a price person, but it does look to work, so it's a big topic of discussion, and especially with the whole Methamasku thing like a few months ago right Where they could see your IP if you did some swap. So whatever, I don't remember exactly what it was or if you, of course you had to use ... for that. No, not a custom end point, but it's interesting that that you guys are looking. That is an industry that you've seen in that direction. So much development already so early on that I think. what's exciting in my opinion
+
willy:
+Totally, and it really is something that ShapeShift has a lot of experience in and is well positioned to solve. ShapeShift has been running nodes since 2014 for a ton of different blockchains. So it's one of the things that we've always done very, very well, and doing it in an open source way with Unchained, which you can see right now. It is what powers the current app.shapeshift.com. So yeah, it's basically like, it made a lot of sense. And we realized that ShapeShift needed this for our own interface, in order for ShapeShift's interface to be truly decentralized, something like Arkeo needs to exist. and there wasn't a solution out there. So that kind of led Michael Perklin, who is well known in the Cosmos space and was the former chief information and security officer for Shapeshift to kind of start thinking about Arkeo and how not only could this network solve Shapeshift's decentralization needs, but also any interface that wants to be truly decentralized could tap into Arkeo. And yeah, I should mention too, the lead developer is Chad from Chad Barreford from ThorChain. which also is another protocol that has a lot of experience, basically, not only building Cosmos app chains, but running all these different nodes for the different chains that ThorChain supports. So could not have hoped for a better lead developer than for Arkeo, than ThorChad.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+For all the listeners again out there. My last recording was with Chad
+
citizen_cosmos:
+just say that this is the irony of things of life is always great and again for all the listeners and viewers in the audience to day as well, I know there's only like four of you right now, but still there is people here that listening to this interview already were just released today. Stable coing discussion with Chad involved, So if you're interesting to hear to Chads, thoughts the person that well is mentioning go Our YouTube. It's not on our website. it's not a podcast. It's a stream. A debate format, and they're talking about Stablecoins And Chad is actually probably one of probably the most active character out there, so Yeah, definitely go and listen and Chad has some very interesting thoughts. Really. really like it. Do you have? I mean, I know I know. I'm really apologizing for the next question. But do you have a rough ETA Arkeo? I know it's stupid question in development, but still
+
willy:
+Q2 2023 is what I've heard. So yeah, it's all happening in the open.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Okay. okay, cool.
+
willy:
+So all the development, you can go to like GitHub and look at Arkeo network. It's all open source already. You can track progress there. Also probably the best way to stay up to date is there's Arkeo Twitter, or right now it doesn't even have its own Discord yet. It's that early, but there's Arkeo channels in the ShapeShift Discord where you can follow along and even get involved if you're interested.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Oh, thanks and last time by the way and by the way, guys, sorry again to all the listeners out there, All those links that Willis mentioning the are in the notes for the podcast. So if you miss the out right now, when will saying it? Don't have to write it down. You can go to the podcast notes. Have, look at it, and it's over there. Last time we spoke a little bit about Lazer eyes. Remember that and I remember.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+since then a lot of people did remove lazars. What about you? You still have Ethereum name and Lazer eyes, or you decided to stay only with one, or you removed all of them.
+
willy:
+Yeah, I'm trying to I think we did the last podcast, I think I had just removed my laser eyes. Um, yes. And I think that was right around the time that not only was I like,
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Oh yes, yes, you just removed the laser ice and you had the ether. Yes, I'm sorry, sorry.
+
willy:
+okay, I'm not it might be a while before Bitcoin gets to 100k. But I think it was right around
+
willy:
+the time too, where I was like, you know what, I love Bitcoin, but I really think that Ethereum is gonna flip in Bitcoin. And like all the things that I loved about Bitcoin, I think like now Ethereum is doing better, basically. And I think Bitcoin's main value prop is like store value. And at this point, and I think like with EIP 1559, I think like I believe sound money is great. I think ultrasound money is going to be even better, basically. And not only do you have that use case, but you have infinite more use cases over in Ethereum. And that's where all the innovation is happening now. Like Bitcoin's like another one of Bitcoin's main value props now is that it's so resistant to change and so unlikely to innovate and change. And that's, you know, that might be valuable to some people, but for me, I'm much more interested in the spirit of innovation and experimentation that is so alive in the Ethereum community. So Ethereum and Cosmos, those are my favorites these days. And Bitcoin, I still have some Bitcoin, but yeah, I'm much more bullish on both Ethereum and Cosmos going forward.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Absolutely. I mean. if you this is, I'm not even sure how some people are still so stuck and I really don't want to put in. It is a personal opinion. Of course it is. I don't want to put a judgment. but it does feel. sometimes I already spoke about that people are really stuck. Sometimes that you know progress is what we do is humans right. Nature doesn't go back. You don't see a tree become a root. Suddenly, you see it given new roots, but progressing growing right. And I have a question You in this direction, which is kind of like the last question. To summarize what we spoke about. It's not about Arkeo, it's about your personal opinion about product market fits, and about the whole kind of web. Three space. We're talking about Bitcon, we're talking about product market fits, we're talking about, You know networks which provide services, the decentralized services in the future, Like Arkeo about echo systems, like Cosmos Etherium, others out, the near polkadot bla, bla blah, it seems, And and take this into mind, this is like you know. Given one given two is the whole things were saying with centralized exchanges, which is kind of obvious. and this is where we come to. Of course the shape shift as well, and you know it was kind of expected from everybody who was expecting Central Ecenges to crush. Big time. I'm still exchange. Still expecting them to crush. I still think, the more I crash, the more adoption we grow. Nevertheless, this is number two. The given number two, it hits happening you know it's there, So the question is more or less like that. What's in our opinion, the next kind of evolutionary state in bridging? How will bridges convince users to stop using CEX's? Because we have discussed this the last time, but we didn't discussed this thing. There wasn't so many crashes from centrelized exchanges when last I our discussion. So what is the innovation? that in your opinion, the centralized exchange is apart from reward and users, because it doesn't seem So far. So far, it does not seem to be the winning thing that gets users going to to DEX's. How will Dex's and bridges and whatever not change at all, and finally get all the users to stop using CEX's.
+
willy:
+Yeah, it's a really great question. And I don't know if I have the answer. I think if anyone has the answer, please let us know because it's a great question. But I do think there's some reasons that I haven't been super surprised that users still tend to migrate to Cex's. I think we're making a lot of progress. But if you think about 2014, when Shapeshift was started, there really wasn't a way back then to trade your crypto outside of a centralized exchange. And so in trading was like by far the most popular use case at the time. So obviously that was kind of the status quo. That's where we started in terms of momentum. That's where the inertia was. But we've come a long way already since then. So now it's 2023 and not only are there more use cases in crypto besides just trading, but you actually can trade. And not just through like through shape shifts across chain, but through completely decentralized protocols and not just like, Uniswap and stuff on Ethereum. But now with ThorChain, you can trade across chain and with Osmosis and Axelar, like now there's actually some competition. And there's much more liquidity. I remember that was something like even when ShapeShift had to implement KYC in 2018, there were people experimenting with like atomic swaps, but they weren't feasible to like replace ShapeShift's existing volume because the liquidity just wasn't there. It would have been way more expensive for end users. And like, again, like All things created equal. Basically, yeah, it wasn't compelling enough for the benefits that you got from doing it in a decentralized way. It was not compelling enough for most users to pay that extra cost. Now, it's 2023, we've come even farther. We have all of DeFi, and in many ways, DeFi, as we can see, has competitive APRs or yields, competitive liquidity, and you don't have to trust anybody. And you don't get burned. Like... But there's still the risk of hacks and stuff. So there's still some risk, we're not quite there. But I can see where things are moving. And I think as DeFi continues to mature, as these protocols become more battle tested and secure, and as liquidity grows, which I think can happen. I think especially when institutional players realize, okay, we can get the same yield in DeFi, and it's actually more secure, more safe, more trustless. Then... DeFi is gonna win there and as more liquidity comes, then that's gonna, like ultimately that's what we need. Another piece I think that's really big is the account abstraction basically. So like we need more liquidity, we need better user experience. Basically, and we're getting there, like DeFi is going to be able to offer all the same stuff that C-Fi does but better. In fact, I always think about like, how will C-Fi compete with DeFi once we get to that point? Like it can, I think. But the other big piece, of course, is account abstraction. And that's still something that I don't know exactly what the best solution is, but there's a lot of different projects working on improving that. Right now, these 12-word seed phrases are still so risky that for a lot of users, it actually is, it actually, they might be less likely to use their funds on a CEX than if they had their own seed phrase, right? With great power comes great responsibility. So I think that's another critical piece to solve. Once we have solved those pieces, then yeah, I really think that DeFi will replace CeFi. But there's still a couple of things that we need to, as an industry, fix and improve on.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Definitely and last question. I've already asked you before, so I'm going to have a slight change in it. It's a. It's a set of a couple of questions. So has anything changed in the projects apart from shape shift and Arkeo, and cosmos, and Ethereum and Bitcoin that you find interesting are there any new project that you are watching out there in like technologically, I mean that are developing something. Really, You know, an innovating pioneering that That you are taken an influence from or inspired by
+
willy:
+Yeah, one that came to mind when you said that is a getcoin passport. Um, I think it's really awesome. And they're really focused on solving this, this challenge, um, which is another one of the big problems we have in, in Defi or crypto right now of, um, cibil attacks, basically. And, uh, right now, like there's not a great way, especially in a decentralized way to know that like an address on a blockchain belongs to a unique individual. Um, and because of that, it makes it very hard to do things like that you can do and Cefi of like, you know, For example, giving incentives to a user, like $10 signup reward, basically, because Coinbase can do that, because they KYC everybody, and they have a pretty good idea that this account belongs to a unique individual. But for a decentralized project to do that, anytime that you have some reward program where people could, for example, put in $1 and get a dollar and a penny out, or put in $0 and get a penny out, it's very vulnerable to cibil attacks, and very quickly all your rewards will get drained, not by real users, but by bots, basically, by one. one algorithm, one guy named Al. So Gitcoin Passport is solving that. And I'm really excited that they're focused on that because now projects like ShapeShift can just tap into it. We don't have to solve that huge problem ourselves. They can just say, hey, go get a Gitcoin Passport. And based on whatever the project is trying to do, it can require a different score. So different levels of like proof from the end user that they are a unique human. So very excited about the work happening over at Gitcoin Passport.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Nice. And has there been any new people again dead or alive? That could have. you might have found them. An author that inspired you that was inspirational for you or a coder that you found inspirational Of. Maybe you read something
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Somebody that inspired you this year.
+
willy:
+So, um, I just moved down to Austin, Texas, and I've been really impressed by ATX DAO. Um, crystal gravy dot ETH is the, uh, kind of main, main person I've been interfacing with over there, um, to get, to get familiar with ATX DAO. So shout out to him. Um, it's pretty cool. It's like a DAO, uh, you have to have NFT membership and the DAO organizes a ton of events. So I'm going to one this afternoon, going to one on Friday and then went to some last week. So super active. Yep. The events are awesome. The community is awesome. The DAO has gone in front of the Austin Congress and like, uh, presented on behalf of web three to help inform some of their decisions, which is really awesome to see. So that's cool. And, uh, yeah, I had to be a member of it and I got my NFT, uh, which I'm grateful for it because there were only like 150 out there. Now the floor, there's only one NFT available on open sea right now. And the floor is 250,000 ETH. So, um, it's very, yeah, like nobody right now that's part of this community wants to sell basically. So, um, I was very grateful to get, I only paid a little bit less than one ETH, which was expensive. It's probably one of the most expensive NFTs I've got, but like, I really wanted to be a part of this community and I'm sure the value that will come out of it will exceed
+
citizen_cosmos:
+I'm curious if in the future you know something like post stamp collecting. NFT collecting will be compared to one another, and the next generation will be collecting. You know something else? I'm just curious what it's going to be. I really want to know. I collect NFT's too but poststamps sometimes. Hahaha, Willy is there anything else you would like to add to our conversation?
+
willy:
+No, I really appreciate it. Serge, thank you. Thank you everyone who was listening. Um, yeah, if you like what you're hearing, please, I invite all of you guys to come hang out in the shapeshift community. We're super active, we got an awesome community, and we have meetings in public pretty much every weekday. So yeah, we'd love to see some of you guys come join in the ShapeShift Discord and get involved.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Bye.
+
willy:
+Bye. Bye, Serge. Much love, everyone.
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:
Episode name:
+Discussing Interfacing with nation states, UX as utility for people and Inherent risks of validating with Tyler Schmidt.
+
In this episode, Tyler Schmidt Co-Founder and business lead at Strangelove is interviewed.
+The secret's to good decision making and how to achieve true personal freedom are discussed. Tyler gives his philosophy on building and how his values have guided him. He tells us some of the projects that Strangelove is working on. The podcast also touches on the complexities of operating in regulatory frameworks in different nation states.
+
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Hi everybody and welcome to a new episode of the Citizen Cosmos podcast. Today I have Tyler Schmidt with me today, twice today. I don't know why he's only once today, but he's here with me. And he is the co-founder of Strangelove. Tyler, hi.
+
tyler_schmidt:
+Hey, Serj. Nice to meet you, man. It's wonderful to be here.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+How are you man today? How's your day going so far?
+
tyler_schmidt:
+So dude, I'm doing fantastic. And top line item that I have to discuss with you, there is a new cosmonaut on the way.
+
+
citizen_cosmos:
+You're not gonna
+
tyler_schmidt:
+I am.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+believe it. You're not gonna believe it before you say it. Let me do it, let me do it. I'm gonna ruin
+
tyler_schmidt:
+Yes,
+
citizen_cosmos:
+it for you
+
tyler_schmidt:
+yes.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+because I had
+
tyler_schmidt:
+Okay.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+it prepared. You have a baby coming on. Congratulations, man. We did our
+
tyler_schmidt:
+Yes.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+homework. Woo! Woo! Yeah, good.
+
tyler_schmidt:
+Hell yeah. You did your homework. Great.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Of course, of course.
+
tyler_schmidt:
+Yeah. We're getting really excited. This is like the last thing that I'm probably going to do before I go off into paternity leave. The baby's coming on Monday. So. We have it scheduled. It's very orderly here in the United States and it's basically ready to go. So,
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Nice.
+
tyler_schmidt:
+you know, step one, we got to get the kids crypto portfolio in shape. I will, I will probably create my own wallet for him. Oh, it's a boy, by the way. That's also exciting. But yeah, we're going to get him some Atom and get a nice little nest egg for him so he can understand about, you know, the future of finance. All very important things for babies, you know.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+I'm loving this. I'm loving this. Great. And what do you know the name already or not? Or is it a secret? I mean, this is
+
tyler_schmidt:
+We are leaning towards calling the baby Owen,
+
tyler_schmidt:
+which is not a family name. It basically he gets his own lease on life. We don't want to have too many like pre-existing states that are going to mess with them. We'd rather have a blank slate to work with. So.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+long as you don't call him Do, that would be good
+
tyler_schmidt:
+Yeah,
+
citizen_cosmos:
+I think. D-O-Do is not a good name, neither is Kwon.
+
tyler_schmidt:
+we can't
+
citizen_cosmos:
+So,
+
tyler_schmidt:
+name him Do. No. Well, you
+
citizen_cosmos:
+no,
+
tyler_schmidt:
+know, we
+
citizen_cosmos:
+no,
+
tyler_schmidt:
+were
+
citizen_cosmos:
+no,
+
tyler_schmidt:
+thinking
+
citizen_cosmos:
+and Kwon
+
tyler_schmidt:
+Kwon
+
citizen_cosmos:
+also.
+
tyler_schmidt:
+for the middle name. Yeah.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Well, congratulations. This is always happy to hear that people are feeling, you know, I'll say why I'm saying that because like for me, I know it sounds maybe a bit loud for a start of a podcast, but like, I know I've been in this space for like over 10 years to hope something changes. And I think when people are ready to have like two partners or three or five or whatever, ready to have offspring, right? Let's call it like that. I think that means they are feeling safe to do it, Like, yeah, that means something we're doing in this space, even though it's not to me in this case, but yourself is correct, right? So I don't know, that makes me happy. I don't know if it's probably too heavy i said it but yea
+
tyler_schmidt:
+Yeah.
+
tyler_schmidt:
+Well, you know, you're touching on a really good point here. And this is something that more of like lifestyle and then dealing with this industry that has a high amount of volatility and whipsaws you back and forth, a lot of that. But in order to make wise decisions in this space, you need to have security. One of the things that Jack and I always talked about when starting this business is starting it from a solid foundation and a solid base. And, you know, making sure that the bills are paid, you know, making sure that our tax liabilities are covered, making sure that we have no debt, things along those nature, just so that you can make the right decisions that you need to make, not out of desperation, not out of nervousness, but out of this is the right decision for the business, this is the way that we can bring more utility of the cosmos, like for our business and in a sense that's what we're trying to do. But you gotta be wise about that.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+I'm glad you say that because, you know, I'm not meant to say that the validators and the crypto businesses and whatever, let's call them web three entities of today that are making money on web three. I'm not saying they're all white and fluffy by no means, but sometimes people underestimate the intensity in my opinion. And I know usually I'm on the different side. This is for all the probably listeners to share. Usually I'm kind of like a bit more critical to that. But I think what you're saying, you know, about the business and that you're creating jobs and that those jobs are also people that have lives and they also have responsibilities. And then their turn, they're caring for somebody, you know, and like even a small validator employees, you know, between two to four people somewhere, right? A small like content creator employees, like one to three people, like an average with talking like up to 10, 15 and so on and so forth. Like all together down the line. That's a lot of people that are and I'm glad that you say that because this is what, Oh, why do people hate Do Kwon so much? People don't hate Do Kwon. There's nothing wrong with Do Kwon. But what
+
tyler_schmidt:
+Yeah.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+was wrong was the promises, the false promises that he did. And.
+
tyler_schmidt:
+Yep. So I want to, I want to zoom in on a piece and a point in time and strange love where we had this really critical decision to make. Um, we were, this is like, uh, late 2019. Um, we had made some really good investments in the, in the Akash network amongst others. Uh, we're running a validator for Akash and we're doing really well with our validator business. And we're basically making venture capital investments at the same time. This is like strange love. 1.0. We're like just a validator. We're just making venture. We had sit there and go we want to do more Jack and I have always wanted to do more and we've wanted to bring core product offerings to the space and make more impact than just venture. We want to build like that's basically the summation of it. If we if we need to build we got to get a team and our portfolio was, you know, vast majority of it is crypto assets. You know, we didn't have a lot that's like sitting in USD in a bank account at the time. So we said to ourselves, like, we got to make a business that can gainfully employ people and do that for a long period of time. And that's a pretty big pivot considering how most of our assets were sitting in crypto. And like with all the volatility, all the drawdowns, we had to sit there and say, we need to manage a company that can operate on 10% of what our war chest of operating budget currently is. So we look at this and we say, cool, can we operate with 10% of that? Good. Okay. Now we can make the decision to move forward with this and de-risk the business in some ways and feel more comfortable operating a business in this tumultuous space. Um, and I gotta give credit to my validators out there. Um, a validator sounds like a stable business, right? It's like, cool, I'm running these machines and I'm getting tokens based on staking percentages and. rewards and commissions and all that. But it's really not because you are entirely at the mercy of the tokenomics or the token price and what happens there. And then of course, if you want to liquidate any of those assets, you have to go through a liquidation event on some Dex. You may move the scales of that Dex in an unfavorable way. I've had to be on the sell side of trades for a number of times that I haven't had wanted to. necessarily move the price in the way I did, but I'm paying operational costs. So there's a lot of these sort of risks inherent in doing something that sounds as stable as operating a validator when in reality, we're starting to look at validator operations more as a venture bet, where people come to us and they say, hey, I want you to come and validate on our chain. You're a reputable validator, we'd really love to have you. And we say, we really gotta look at what you guys are doing. and make sure that we agree with your guys mission. You know, you guys have the opsec in place or you know, whatever the parameters are of this engagement. We need to feel good about it. And that's much more of a venture style decision than it is like a, yeah, let's just use some DevOps and turn a couple of switches and get this thing running. Because a lot of the, yeah, it's not that simple. You know, you gotta, you know, cover your costs. And sometimes a lot of these... When you do the research and you look at these chains, it turns out that there are a small percentage of chains that make most of the money for validators. And there's a larger percentage of chains that don't necessarily turn a profit just based on your rate of return alone. You're going to need to see price action and price action in the token in o rder to gain some kind of, I don't know, just a good gain on your investment there. So, yeah, it's. definitely a business that has lots of inherent risk. And what we've been trying to do is be as defensive as we can and create a stable of a business as we can so that we can employ humans. And we chose to play the game on the absolute hard mode setting by incorporating a business inside the United States. And in the world of crypto, very hard. uh, with the regular regulatory landscape and, uh, the tax landscape very hard. Um, but I'd love to zoom in on another piece of the strange love story that I think was really interesting and that was just cool. We're Genesis validator on the Cosmos blockchain. This is really exciting. Uh, and at that time it was really cool. Uh, I was there with Jack when we stood up the validator, uh, and we, we did it together, we exchanged all the private keys and got our, our op sec in place for that. Um, but really exciting. Um, Oh man. Um, but, uh, at that time, uh, we needed to figure out how we're going to declare all these assets, declare our income and provide books to give to the powers that be the United States government. Cause you know, if I was in Laos or if I was in, um, in. Puerto Rico or Lisbon, you know, I may not have the same regulatory compliance, but in the US, we got to declare all of our tokens, you know, and get cost basis for all of them right when it happens. So one of the first things that we had to do is come up with spreadsheets that were tax reporting. And Jack came up with a really great method for pulling this data directly from the blockchain. So we really just ran queries. on the blockchain and then populated that data into a spreadsheet. And at that moment when Jack was like, I think I know how to do this. And he goes ahead and does it and then gets back to me and he's like, here's the spreadsheet. I got, you know, the exact timestamp for when the tokens landed in our wallet. I got, you know, date, I got everything broken out like by the second, you know, hyper, detail, more detailed than, than the regulators could possibly ask for. I sat there and I said, wow, this is a business. You know, and that was just a really powerful point in strange love's life when it was just, you know, two best friends having a lot of fun. And pretty soon it's like, great. We make enough money that we can declare that to the, to the government, pay it. And we have a real business. So that was another exciting piece of the strange love story. And again, doubling down on security, the business is crazy enough on its own. We need reliability in the space. And that's a lot of what we try to bring.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+And, you know, as listening to this, like to reflect as a validator, just like myself, to say, hey, you even, you haven't even spoken when you were saying that about the road to Fiat. Cause unfortunately, sometimes you need Fiat. Even if you're trying to operate the most Web3 in the world validator, you still will come across it. And, you know, you were talking about this hard route and I was thinking, ah, he hasn't even mentioned Fiat, has he? I was like, whoa, but because
+
citizen_cosmos:
+sometimes you're like, damn. I wanted to go a different question because this is just a comment, but the second thing that I want to reflect on, this is more interesting in my opinion, and I want to know your opinion on this too. The second thing you said was to me very interesting, and you started to talk about the US government and about running the Validator, and I understand where you're coming from, but I want to ask you this, how or what do you think or how do you think should a person decide on which leverages to pull cause in my opinion there is two leverages. There is like the game, the business, right? And then there is the values and the philosophy, right? And like sometimes those two things are just not in gear with each other, right? They just don't run. So like, I mean, here, because you're talking about, you know, we need the business, but then there is, but we want to build this business in the decentralized way and want to prove to people that this can work. But Damn it, here's the US government saying, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, whatever you do, you're going to do it our way. So we have to say values down business up. So at which point, like, how do we do this? How do we level that out? What's the golden answer here?
+
tyler_schmidt:
+I love this question. You know, I say that Jack and I are definitely from the early class of crypto people, where I was investing in Bitcoin in like 2012 and 2013, was really interested by all the ideas of an open and transparent global currency. And what and you know, Bitcoin has evolved over time. What the narrative of Bitcoin has shifted. but I'm still really interested in some of those core fundamental ideas. And I think, you know, you have to, you have to at least interface with like the, you know, global currency, global financial instruments, ideas to be passionate about the space and the way that we are. And we really believe that we're building something better, but Jack and I are also pragmatists. And this kind of just goes back to like, we've been playing games together of all sorts for a number of years. And you got to be a you got to be pragmatic. You know, like we really wanted to do something that exists within the United States of America. We love being Americans for better or worse. You know, I don't think that they're at the at the absolute cutting edge on regulatory compliance. I think there's a lot that can be improved upon there. But. We really need to work within where our national and where we work. So, you know, there's, there's a side of me that wants to be like, oh, the federal reserve, how dare you? And like, I philosophically, you know, don't agree with that, but, um, you know, that's the system we're in. And, uh, it works in America, uh, for, for now, and we have to play around with nation states. So I think at a fundamental level, you have to understand that. these global protocols aren't just gonna replace everything. They're still gonna be nation states and we're still gonna need an interface with nation states. So I've wanted to try and pragmatically make sure that interface between these global protocols and nation states is seamless or it works as well as it can. Basically because I've been paying taxes for since I was young, don't. No one likes it. Um, but I think it's also a headache. Um, you know, the way that the U S government has it done. And I think, you know, we have this amazing distributed ledger technology that tracks all of my transactions. Why is this not automated? You know, so one of the problems that I would love to continue working on at strange love is automating some of this process for compliance with nation states. Um, I'm a bit more of a, uh, of that position of I would like to work with nation states. I think nation states are still a good thing. And that may not be everything, everyone in the world, people can disagree with me on this. And I really accept those discussions too. I'd love to see where we can have global protocols that usurp nation states in many ways. IBC, I would love for IBC to become the primary communication protocol for finance. That would be wonderful. We can replace Swift. Good, get rid of it. You know, so but you have to strike a balance Um, it just if you want to Do things at the scale that strange love is doing Um, you need to comply with nation states If you want to employ people and you want to pay them in a local currency that they can use You've got to work with nation states Um, we could go full pirate route, you know, and that that's another valid strategy that we could have done We could have said We are gonna incorporate offshore, we're gonna keep all of our holdings in crypto, we're gonna pay all of our employees in crypto and leave it up to them to convert. But I felt like that wouldn't provide enough security for the employees that we wanna have work with us on a long-term basis. We really wanna hire people and keep them and have them grow with the company. And getting paid in your local currency is one way that I think it benefits from that. And not everyone on our team wants local currency. We pay people in USDC. We pay people in other cryptocurrencies, mainly USDC. So it's more of a mix these days than just inside the US, but also we employ people around the planet now too, which is really exciting. My team actually, a majority of them work out of Indonesia and we have a really dope front end team full of absolute ninjas. And I found them through my man, Griko, who was just in the same coding groups that some of my other colleagues were in. And you just make a global connection like that. You ask for his friends, his friends ask for their friends. And if word gets around that you have a good thing going, people wanna work with you.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+I was just going to say that to me, like the bottom philosophical, like debates always ends in, you know, like I am kind of on the other side, you know, on that pirate side, I guess. But to me, the bottom line here is very simple. The decentralized world, the decentralized philosophy is decentralized. If somebody wants to have a nation state, you cannot call, you cannot think that you are pretending that you want to build decentralization if you say let's kill the nation states because that's
+
citizen_cosmos:
+not the centralized because the decentralization is about the freedom of choice So
+
tyler_schmidt:
+Mm-hmm.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+so is like the whole essence, you know of the word anarchy It's about freedom of choice about having the freedom to do what you want to do So that means whether it is the banking system where it is Bitcoin whether it is atom whether it is I don't know dog or whatever Dodge sorry, but it's up to to to the to the community to decide what they want so i totally agree with you tho. Here is a questions for you more in your direction, I guess,
+
citizen_cosmos:
+with the line of thought. So I know that you love UX. I know that. I
+
tyler_schmidt:
+Mm-hmm.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+know that you've worked for several companies, big names, including Harley-Davidson, for God's sake. That was impressive, PayPal. And I was like, this dude really went through all of them,
+
citizen_cosmos:
+So two questions, and I'm going to go one by one, let you answer why in your opinion is UX so important? That's the first question.
+
tyler_schmidt:
+UX, I have a very simple answer for you. UX is the best way to provide utility to people. It's the best way to take something that's a piece of technology and distribute that so that people can get an advantage out of utilizing that technology. And that's what it's all about. When I was in school, I studied economics and philosophy. And I studied economics to figure out how the world worked. And I studied philosophy to figure it out. what I really wanted to do to make an impact in the world. And I came on this combination of, oh, the economic concept of utility. There's actually a metric that you can track that is like the amount of benefit that this good or service provides to people. I thought, that's really interesting. I'd love to do a philosophical essay on what utility is and what its meaning is. I was like, cool, that sounds great. So I started delving into that and then, you know. through logic of reasoning, I've always been interested in technology and tech. I've always wanted to work in tech. So the ability to widely distribute technology to every member of the population through mobile leapfrogging and the amount of digital access that exists in the world today is really phenomenal. So if I want to generate the most amount of utility for the most amount of people in the world with my one life on this planet, UX seems like a good place. You could say stuff like software engineering at large is that, but I didn't really go down the software engineering path. I was a bit more soft skills. I tried my hand at coding, but I just got kind of bored coding. I got a little frustrated with it and I still code. I can publish websites and stuff, but it's just never drawn to me the same way that design or human factors has. And I've gotten a lot of enjoyment out of it over the years. But yeah, it's all about utility, dude. That's what it's all about.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+It's amazing that you say that because the next question related to that is, do you think that adoption can be the result of that? Would you say, let's go higher? Usually adoption for any tech happens on the application level. It's very rare that it happens anywhere else, whether it's AOL, whether it's HTTP, those are all applications. This is not bottom line. Usually the UX, whatever you pronounce, however we pronounce it correctly, it happens on that So does that mean that UX and adoption are directly correlated?
+
tyler_schmidt:
+Oh yeah. Oh yeah.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Okay.
+
tyler_schmidt:
+Um, I, okay. So a good technology does not necessarily make a good product. And that's something that I believe you can have absolute banger, hot fire, amazing latency, you know, low packet, like, you know, low data packet transfer protocol, whatever you have. Um, but if it's not gaining usage, If it doesn't have all of the affordances in place to make it easy to pick up and use, it may not be a complete product. The usability side of it is what completes that equation and turns a technology into a cohesive product. So for me, UX is absolutely necessary. And I think it's true on all products, including stuff that may be more backend or more... Just a test suite. OK, let's use an example. Interchain test, one of the test suite that Strangelove just built for the Interchain. It's a great product. And if you want to set up an IBC native chain, I would absolutely recommend using it. It has developer experience. We look at how the developer is putting in their tests and making sure that those tests are very good. And that is a form of UX. We call it developer experience, but it is also UX. So making sure that that's easy to use, that the command line tooling has good prompts, you have a good help section, the prompts take you where you need to go, all that's really important. So even stuff that's back in focus still has UX implications that make it a better or worse product. But when it comes to the app adoption level, that you see a lot of times, you know, you can hide, you can hide subpar technology behind a really good and clean user experience and still do okay, I believe is, you know.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+I think we mentioned one at the beginning of this podcast already, one example. I let people fantasize, I'm not going to say, if they want to go back 20 minutes, back to the naming of the baby, that could actually remind them of you. Just
+
tyler_schmidt:
+Yes.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+saying.
+
tyler_schmidt:
+Yeah.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+But, man, I kind of agree, but there is still a part of me that screams, but damn what about all the infrastructure I mean, I'm gonna be my own devil's advocate here and say, well, but then you could apply the same laws to the infrastructure, right? And this is what I'm trying to get at not not
+
tyler_schmidt:
+Yeah.
+
tyler_schmidt:
+well, like could the infrastructure stack be better? Like where can we make it so that, like Ignite is really cool. Like I love Ignite, I got some great demos on building your own blockchain at Ignite. A lot of that experience is the usability and user experience of working with the command line to stand up your own blockchain. And it's a really good product because it has all these good user affordances in place. If you don't have them, the Cosmos SDK is still fire. You know, Cosmos is still really great. And, you know, I think like you look at you look at something like Atom and the hub and you think honestly still pretty good product on its own, you know, and where are the usability pieces there? start with the wallet strings. You start with the fact that the wallet string has Cosmos at the beginning of the string to denominate what chain you're on. That was a user experience choice that the developers made that was really smart. And little things like that are where you improve the quality of a product to support an underlying infrastructure that's super rad.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Definitely, definitely. And I think you can even take it much further than that, right? To do people design. But what about you mentioned Cosmos yourself? And then you already started to talk about it, because it was obviously obvious, like the next obvious, sorry, logical question. UX in Cosmos. Where are we? In your opinion, of course, what do we need to do to improve it? Do we need to improve it? Let's go. Like, I
+
tyler_schmidt:
+Yeah,
+
citizen_cosmos:
+mean, what are we doing?
+
tyler_schmidt:
+I think we're at the infant stage. So, um, I would love for some of my friends over at Galileo to like debate me on this. Um, I think that we've been focusing on infrastructure for a number of years. Um, what is now coming out is the application boom. So we're starting to see applications come out with real use cases, you know, quasars coming out really excited about quasar Mars protocol. really cool user facing product. So we're starting to see user facing products break through and start to gain adoption. I'm really excited about this phase. I feel like this is just the beginning. There still aren't, I guess, one thing that I think is a value in Strangelove is we take web two practices and bring them into web three, like the good stuff. You know, we leave the bad stuff, but like we pick up some of the good stuff. You know, Golang is really great. Kubernetes is really great. Cloud managed infrastructure is really great. You know, some of those things are really fantastic. But so. Uh, where is that now you're seeing a lot of app chains come in, come in, and it's getting really exciting. And we're going to see a wide amount of competition to see what use cases make the most sense. Um, what I'm very interested in is, is this going to be a website that I go to in a browser that then has a Dex or it has a lending protocol or a yield, a yield farming strategy or an NFT protocol. Like what are the services that I'm going to receive at a website layer? Now, what are the services that I'm gonna receive at a wallet layer? And where is that wallet going to exist? Is that going to exist in the browser as a Chrome extension? Is it going to exist on a phone? Is it going to have a seamless handoff between a browser and a phone? Is it a desktop app? Or is it all of these? I think a lot of these are still questions that we need to find a winner. For some of these so I would say the space is very liquid right now We're still searching for a lot of the best solutions. I'm incredibly interested in brave browser, by the way I feel like user basically we need to figure out where the motes are and where there are users So the motes are mainly around browsers right now They're kind of around wallet extensions and exchanges as well Like a big mode of user acquisition is like Coinbase or Kraken, you know Like those are big places where lots of users interact. And that's gonna change, and we're gonna get more decentralized solutions and things like that down the way. So I think that we are starting to see improvements in UX and user-facing applications, but this is really just the beginning, and we're gonna see a lot more. Yeah.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Do you think there is anything in particular apart from, I mean, you mentioned already, hashes the strings, sorry, the strings of the wallets. And you mentioned already the beginning of the string begins with the chain ID, right? What other examples of something fascinating in your opinion that is different actually from the way the interchange does it to the way, let's say, I was gonna say web two, but it was a Freudian slip because I wasn't
+
tyler_schmidt:
+Mm-hmm.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+referring to that I was referring to crypto 2.0. And to kind
+
tyler_schmidt:
+less.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+But yeah, do you think that the Cosmos ecosystem has got something in particular unique in terms of UX design that attracts people apart? Well, I'm not going to say anything, so
+
tyler_schmidt:
+Yeah,
+
citizen_cosmos:
+I would let you.
+
tyler_schmidt:
+I've got two. I've got two for you. So one's a simple one and one's a bit more nuanced. Simple one is IBC transfer. IBC transfers are fucking great. They're low cost, then it's moving something from one address to another chain. I use IBC transfer all the time when I'm just like. Moving money to you know, I want to check out this yield farming protocol cool. I'll transfer some tokens from here to there And that's a really cool piece of ux and that allows for All kinds of things to be built on top of that um, I think um, I forgot the quick term for it, but basically when you Lose money on a chain when you have no money in a wallet and you need gas fees to pay to pay To transact to move all the all the money out of that location You know, that's something that I would love to see an improvement on where, oh no, I'm out of gas. Here we can do an IBC transfer to get you the gas that you need to finalize this transaction and clear out your wallet and move it with zero dust. That's the kind of UX improvement that I'd like to see happen in the Cosmos ecosystem and we can potentially build that here at Strange Love.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+I don't think it's very difficult. I mean, I'm not sure about atom, sorry to cut
+
tyler_schmidt:
+Yeah.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+in there, but if we're talking Cosmwasm, you could technically go to any pool or any multi-sig, loan it from there and then put it back within the next block already, right? I mean, it's like a flash loan to pay the gas kind of thing.
+
tyler_schmidt:
+Yeah, yeah, that seems very reasonable. So that's just some stuff that I would love to see more of. I think the other thing that's interesting is just how decentralized this ecosystem is, the fact that you don't necessarily need to use the entire Cosmos SDK in order to be a Cosmos ecosystem chain. I mean, you can look at chains like Penumbra. that don't use very much of the Cosmos SDK, but use IBC. And the fact that it's basically, it's very decentralized and allows for people to build what they truly want to build, be it a sovereign app chain or what have you. But that amount of composability is something that I really respect in the Cosmos ecosystem.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Pardon me, the unmute button. I was always saying that my wish, as of, I always say that, I keep repeating that, but I will say it again, my
+
tyler_schmidt:
+Mm-hmm.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+wish as partially podcaster is to have a new design for the unmute button because the way it's designed now, people forget about it all the time, including myself. Just complaining.
+
tyler_schmidt:
+Yeah.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+But to move on to a slightly different topic, yet still in my opinion, incorporating a lot of UX in it And I think you will understand why I'm saying that, I mean, crypto asset management. And this is something that, I mean, you already touched on about the baby, right? And you touched on it about the business. Some of it was a bit humorous, but it's not. It's got both sides to it, right? Every joke has only part joke.
+
tyler_schmidt:
+Mm-hmm. Yeah.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+So what do people, what should I'm going to ask, like the most obvious question, but feel free to like kind of dig it in a little bit. And I will try to follow up with something more interesting. But the most obvious question here that arises is considering the state of Web3 today, and I'm not talking about specifically where the market is. I'm talking about the uncertainty, the instability, and at all, not just the Web3 market, even like Elon Mem, that was a good one. Elon Musk posted a meme recently.
+
tyler_schmidt:
+Yeah.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+You know about like put your money in the banks now banks are scams put in crypto put money in cryptos crypto is scam So we're coming like to the crypto asset management question What on earth do people do like where do we go do they go left do they go right? What's what's what's what's to choose? What's the what's the 101?
+
tyler_schmidt:
+You know, we are reaching the point where crypto has a beta that is correlated to macroeconomic markets. You can't deny that any longer. It used to be that was a weaker correlation and they kind of moved a little bit differently. As this market has been maturing, I'm seeing closer and closer correlation between macro and crypto. It's not always there. And in interesting times like the recent Silicon Valley Bank collapse, we're seeing that crypto didn't really dip too drastically with that. And in fact, you know, rallied a bit. I think Bitcoin rallied a bit off of that. You know, but when you have a beta that is more closely tied to the major macroeconomic conditions, you realize that there is no safe harbor. I don't think that there currently is a safe harbor. But I will say that cryptocurrency assets are revalidating themselves when it comes to, oh, I would love a bank that just held my assets and did nothing with them and didn't try and do some form of hedging or front running or, you know, do some yield management strategy on top of the assets that they take in. I think people are finding that to be more compelling than they have in a long time because of what these banks are doing. And like, you know, you can say, is it the bank's fault? Is it not the bank's fault? I don't really need to debate that. I mean, I think that, you know, SVB made some poor choices on some long-term bond purchases, but you know, they probably had imperfect information at the time. So I don't think it's entirely their fault. But it also shows that like a bank. used to be a place where you've assumed you would get your money back. But what we know from Bitcoin and the 2008 recession and the reason why Bitcoin was built in the first place is like, we don't fully trust these institutions. They can fail. And they do weird stuff with our money. So the, the thesis for crypto is as strong as it's ever, it ever has been in my mind. And just validates the fact that we need to have multiple places to store our money. Now. To answer your question, I'm a big fan of diversification. I love index funds. I love diversified risk. So the smartest thing that I do is we break our money up and distribute it amongst as many different places as possible. And we wanna have an even balance of fiat cash to crypto. And so far that's been working out for us pretty well.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+That's good, man, because it seems that sometimes the only opportunity, like you say, to put your money in a bank that isn't going to go and find extra yield on top of it today in crypto seems the only, and I don't want to like advertise here, but I'm going to say the name, of course, because I don't know any other examples. We're going to liquidity, LUSD, Ethereum, right? Because the only thing, but the reason for it is because they remove the people.
+
tyler_schmidt:
+Mm-hmm.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+So it seems whenever there is money and people involved, unless you remove the people, always somebody is gonna look for something else, right? So this is kind of, I guess, a problem.
+
tyler_schmidt:
+Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's a bit of a problem, but people are going to try and find innovative ways to manage money. So I think it's sort of a blessing and a curse. I may find a bank that I really like down the road that does yield farming strategies and fiat for me that may resemble what we have on Osmosis or Mars Protocol. Maybe the traditional banking sector starts to emulate some of the things that crypto does. And I wouldn't be surprised if that happens more and more assuming that the regulations allow for that to happen. The regs are pretty strict, but I would love to see more crypto influencing traditional banking.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+I think this is the perfect point to say this because usually, you know, I make notes of the speaker and as we go, I go, I look at them and I'm like, it's not always an order. And I think this is the perfect place to ask you about that. So here is what's on the top of your Twitter, right? Your knowledge is your freedom. So is that what you mean by that sentence? Your knowledge is your freedom by being able to, if you know that your money is your bank, sorry, isn't lending out your money, then you know you can get it back. Is that what you mean by that sentence or my overreacting here?
+
tyler_schmidt:
+Um, uh, I don't think it's like as detailed to, uh, the banking sector. Uh, it's much more around when you're a kid and you're looking at the world and you have school and you know, school is can be fun, school can also suck. Um, but you need to learn stuff and then you need to learn the building blocks of stuff so that you can learn more advanced things that will then impact the world. What you want to do is very indicative of what you know. So the options and opportunities that present themselves to you are very much based on what your knowledge is. And if you don't know the way the banking sector manages your money, you may make a bad decision with the bank, you know, I mean, as one example, but it's more around like, you know, what do I want to do with my time? You know, I want to create the most utility for average people that I possibly can. So how do I do that? I learn how the Cosmos SDK works. I learn how front-end works. I learn what the authorization mechanisms are and who the best providers are for authorization and private seed storage. That's currently Wallet Connect, for example. But the knowledge that you have equates to the choices that you can make. So it truly is about personal freedom. I'd say more so even than like what's in your bank account. If you know how to write a website that's a whole other type of freedom.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+definitely, definitely. It's about what I'm just to say about wallet connect. I mean, this podcast obviously isn't gonna come out like soon soon in terms of the way we do production. But I think one that will definitely come out before it because it's already close to the coming up is actually wallet connect and Pedro and the guys if you listen to this, just from what follow Tyler and listen to also fascinating. So sorry for the second of advertisement there. But
+
tyler_schmidt:
+Oh no, go ahead.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Tyler, there is something interesting on your website that I found that I want to ask you about that is related to freedom, I guess, and to UX. And I was opening up before just to see it. And you're talking here about, well, in my opinion, it's probably one of the main topics that we kind of try to touch on in our podcast. I'm going to read this here. I believe design is a method of human improvement true happiness is achieved through excellence and virtue. a balanced life propogates freedom and emotional calm, creativity equals past experience plus new information. This is interesting. I want to talk a little bit about that. So basically balanced lives equals freedom or is that what you're trying to say? Am I
+
tyler_schmidt:
+Yeah,
+
citizen_cosmos:
+getting you correct
+
tyler_schmidt:
+yeah.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+here?
+
tyler_schmidt:
+So when you cover all your bases, when you have a life that has enough work in it to feel like it's sustaining you and enough recovery time to recover for the pieces that you have and work, to me, that is a form of freedom. Things like creating habits and then setting an intention with your day. They're all really important building blocks of doing anything in the world. So if you want freedom, discipline is a way to provide freedom is another way to say that. And I'm not super disciplined, but I have a very regular cadence of what I do, like when I go to bed, when I get up, the types of stuff that I like to eat during the day, all very consistent. And that's so that I can put the work in where I need to work on a day-to-day basis. So balance is super essential and this kind of goes to everything we've been talking about like crypto is crazy It's fast-paced a lot of stuff happens hacks happen all the time. It doesn't feel like there's ever a slow news day So for me if I want to work in the sector, I need to make sure that my personal life is like almost that of a monk where you know, I have very little things that go on and You know, this is probably I'm probably different than some of your guests. I actually sleep a lot. And that's something that I programmed into my life. So this idea of balance, it's key. I sleep well so I can make better decisions without sleep deprivation. And also, this may change very soon as young Owen enters the picture. So sleep may be a very different, differing piece of my equation soon. But all of these things are building blocks to make the right decisions. And that comes down to like, what does Strangelove wanna build? Are we making the right choices to build things that can impact the Cosmos community and thus the greater ecosystem and users for the better? I sleep a lot so I can make good decisions. Simple as that.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+I love that because I sleep a lot as well. Just to say that, you know, so guys, I sleep a lot.
+
tyler_schmidt:
+Good,
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Thank you
+
tyler_schmidt:
+good,
+
citizen_cosmos:
+very much. I love
+
tyler_schmidt:
+good.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+sleeping. In fact, lately I've been kicking myself because I told myself to sleep too much. And because I had this long period and now I've been like, I need to get out. I need to stop sleeping. But like you touched on it as well. Just a second ago about Strangelove building outside of Cosmos. I like that. This was my kind of like next point that I wanted to get at. If we were to zoom out from the philosophy, right, but to kind of like, I don't know, just to zoom out from the talk about motivation and stuff and talk about the reality of what Strangelove has already built. What I want to ask, and what I try to ask and what I try to ask all founders Co-Founderst rarely other people because its more related to that. Are you internally currently like satisfied with what you guys have already built in Strangelove? And do you think that that what you are doing in Strangelove, in Strangelove, sorry, actually helps people, we kind of talked about the money and the wages, but outside of that helps people to get to a world which you yourself want to see, like you came to this industry for a reason. And it's obviously not because you want to get rich right, because you have been here since 2011 and you've stuck through a lot of, so I think you understand the question, like are you, do you think that that Strangelove is contributing to that future that you have saw some time ago to come to this industry?
+
tyler_schmidt:
+This is a great question. I'm incredibly proud of where Strangelove's at. I think the biggest thing that I saw that was a proof of the impact we're making is the Cosmos forum post where I believe Litbit recommended that Strangelove be the core maintainer of the IBC Go Relayer on the Cosmos Hub. We were like, whoa. And that was a little bit of a surprise for us. That didn't come from us. We had no say or influence in that post. But I was very honored to be brought up in that way. And because we're doing a lot of really good work on the Go Relayer, we're constantly maintaining it. And it's just a really cool piece of tech. I'm very proud of that. I'm very proud of the Horcrux tool that Jack designed. uh, you know, for sharding validator keys. I think that's another good piece of work. Um, and. We, uh, I'm proud of what we built and I think we can build a lot more. I really think that there's a lot more that we can continue to build. Um, we have a lot of API style data availability services on the backend that, uh, that we're bringing into market right now. And that's just like, do you want any, um, any transaction data for any blockchain inside the inner chain. We can pull it for you with very low latency. But another piece of this that I'm very focused on is Strangelove's internal wallet project. We're currently building a wallet. It's in the process of moving forward right now. And for us, that's a way for us to make a greater impact to end users who I'm very passionate about reaching. So Strangelove has a goal of providing whole product offerings, meaning something that touches the backend and has a front end component of it that allows users to interact with it and play with it. So we have been working for more than a year now, but over the course of this last year was very impactful for us to get the staff in place to be able to launch whole product suites and release them. And that's really what we're in the business of now. That's what strange love wants to evolve into. And that's just what me and Jack are passionate about. We think that's where we're gonna make the biggest impact.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+I didn't know this because last time I spoke to Jack and Jack has been one of the most common guests on the podcast. I think he was on at least twice for sure. I mean, I think Dan overdid him with three times from Sui now, but I don't think I mentioned this. This is interesting because I've noticed the last time I was, where was I? Because I usually don't do conferences, crypto conferences in person. I really don't understand the value of that like above me. Everything is online, sorry.
+
tyler_schmidt:
+Yeah.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Man, even interviews. And the last time I did go to Lisbon because I live in Madeira, so I traveled to Lisbon only because of Atom, of course, but of course I went to see the others and I know a lot of people. And I noticed I was talking to like Constantine from P2P, or Lido, I was talking to JK from XTechFish. Now talking to you, and this is interesting, a lot of people are building wallets and a lot of people are understanding that this is an application time like you said to the users are going to be over there. Is that the reason you are trying to go to the point of the mass concentration of users? Or what is the reason that so many people now build wallets?
+
tyler_schmidt:
+I think that a lot of people looked out at the space and said there's room for improvement. Um, and what we're seeing now is this massive creativity event that I'm very excited about. And I think the wallet space is both exploding, but also not like there's a lot of wallets in the space, but Kepler still seems to be the leader inside of the cosmos ecosystem, you know? Um, and. You know, I think Kepler is good. I use Kepler, but interacting with it on a day to day basis for, for asset management, the way that I have. I've seen areas where I'd want to have it improved too. So I said, great, this is exactly the type of impact that strange love can make. This is a true contribution to the cosmos ecosystem. And we really said, this is the problem that we see. That's the most pressing. So I think that many people have identified that. The wallet and asset management issue is one of the most pressing issues in the Cosmos eco right now. And a lot of people are just attacking it simultaneously. And we're going to see what happens. And this could be entirely Greenfield space where all of these wallets end up having a large enough user base that they can support themselves. I don't know how these other teams are operating, but strange love has. the validator business and the software consulting business and these ARR products that sort of support our balance sheet so that we can create something that's consumer facing that we hope to also make money off of as well. But really we just care about providing this value to users because if we do that, we gain more user adoption. We gain more net new users into the Cosmos ecosystem and we win the greater battles which are winning adoption over from. EVM chains and things like that where the where the big competition is So everything is happening internally in the cosmos. I think it's great I think there's a lot of healthy room for people to operate and build Their own specific wallets that may have their own specific use cases and that's going to be great I'll say that what we're building is going to go after a general user who has little to know pre-existing Cosmos knowledge and we're starting there with someone that may not be a Cosmos expert. And hey, that could leave room for a power user while it come out. So we'll see.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Here is a last spicy question before the Blitz from what you said. Is Cosmos in competition with EVM chains?
+
tyler_schmidt:
+I think it is. You know, or if you're looking at what infrastructure are we building and versus the infrastructure they're building, it has to be. It's just that there's rollups on one chain and then there's sovereign app chains on the other chain that also happen to have rollups and data availability and all these other great things. I used to hardware mine Ethereum and I invested in Ethereum when it was worth $10 and I lost that wallet. So yeah, so lesson learned. But I've been bearish in Ethereum more times than I can count and all those times were a mistake because network effects are really the king when it comes to adoption. I mean JavaScript isn't exactly the best language out there, but it's the most widely adopted language by devs for web production. You know, some things just win via network effect. I think Ethereum with Solidity is very much an example of that. And now it has the momentum and network effects and traction to continue iterating and improving upon its experience where it had shortcomings. It may overcome those just through raw force of will. So we got to compete with those guys. And I think that's healthy. And we also have a technology advantage over them already. It's really more about these network effects, getting devs on, and then, you know, more, more things like D Y D X happening where D Y D X is moving over to the cosmos, you know, the more we see events like that, um, the more we're going to see greater adoption for the cosmos. Um, but I think that's going to happen naturally.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+I definitely agree with the competition is part of the open market and part of nature and part of you can see that this way the trees grows, right? Even right. So competing for light, I mean, and if you're looking at the way that nature does things and it's just in my opinion, like my and our goal here as citizen cosmos, we always say that is to is to bridge the communities to bridge the L zeroes. We believe that regardless of whether these protocols compete with each other, we want the communities to understand that they still have to interact and that interaction whether in born in competition or outside of competition I believe that will create a bigger synergy at the end of the day but that is not to say that they don't have to compete
+
tyler_schmidt:
+Yeah, I mean, I'd say interoperate is my keyword there. And like, let's just create more avenues for interoperation.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Tyler Blitz, three questions, they're gonna go down three to one. You don't have to be super quick. We don't have to, there's no call for that. Three projects outside of the obvious ones that you could name that technologically, that technologically arouse some interest in yourself, in your opinion lately. And please don't start saying the obvious like cosmos or ethereum projects that something interesting. There doesn't have to be three, but something interesting that you're like, this is cool, this is interesting. I have never seen this solution to this problem or this implementation.
+
tyler_schmidt:
+Mm-hmm.
+
tyler_schmidt:
+I'm really interested in Capacitor.js right now. Capacitor.js is a new JavaScript framework for cross-platform web production. You can basically build an app that's on Android or iOS and multi-factor, so you can do desktop and mobile with it. It's kind of a replacement for React and React Native. I'm really curious to delve into this technology more deeply. I think it's really interesting. That's one. Cosmove is another one, which is a Move VM instance for the Cosmos. Move VM seems to be the hot new thing that all the guys are talking about. So I'm really interested in learning more about that and getting a handle on that VM. I'm excited by that. And I just got to say. You know, I'd be remiss to not mention chat GPT-4. It's just so good. It's really good.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+For the listeners out there, whatever you listen in this to this, it came out like 24 hours ago. So, so Tyler knows his shit. Okay, second one. When you kind of already answered that in many, many ways throughout the podcast, but I'm going to be more direct with it, two things in your daily life that, that motivates you to keep on building. Well not just Strange Love but contributing to this whole movement and do everything we do.
+
tyler_schmidt:
+People that I work with at Strange Love are phenomenal. And it's a really special team. And I can't emphasize that enough. We have a high level of psychological safety and emotional trust amongst everyone on the team. And we're at a really special place at a 30 person organization that has this level of trust. So I would say the people at this point motivate me more than anything. I love working with everyone that I interact with on a day to day basis. And I feel very lucky, very lucky about that.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+And the second one.
+
tyler_schmidt:
+I'd say that the technology itself keeps me interested. There's always.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+the baby, man. The baby, man, the baby. You have to say the baby. Im gonna help you out here hahaha
+
tyler_schmidt:
+Yeah, yeah, Yes. No, the baby overrides that 1000%. Yeah.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Last one. Last one. One person doesn't matter dead or alive. It doesn't matter real or made up, doesn't matter developer, writer, cartoon character that inspires you.
+
tyler_schmidt:
+Alan Turing.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Ooh, okay, that was interesting. Good.
+
tyler_schmidt:
+I would really love to meet him and figure out how he cracked the Nazi submarine communication protocols. Yeah.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+enigma, right? Would be interesting. It would be cool to...
+
tyler_schmidt:
+Yeah, Enigma. would really love to hear more about that. But he, him and Claude Shannon are two true inspirations.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+That is very good answers.
+
tyler_schmidt:
+yeah. Yeah, man.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Tyler, man, it has been a pleasure. I loved hearing your side of Strangelove story. I don't think it's very common that we have several co-founders on the podcast throughout, the podcast even though throughout the years from the same project. So it's cool to put the pieces of puzzle together. And I hope that everybody else who listens to this enjoys that as much as I did. So thank you very much for all your time and for your awnsers Tyler.
+
tyler_schmidt:
+Yeah, Serge. Thank you, man. It's been an honor. Come on really happy to share my thoughts. I really appreciate it
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Thanks.
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:
Episode name:
+Bridging Digital Nations: A Discussion on the Corruption of Centralized Bridges, Academia vs field work & The Importance of Community in Decentralization with Alexei Zamyatin.
+
In this episode, Alexei Zamyatin Co-Founder of Interlay is interviewed. He discusses merge mining, the first cross chain protocol and how it contributed to domain squatting. Alexei gives his thoughts on the dangers of projects using their own token as collateral, the future of trustless bridges and the power of academia. There is also interesting discussion regarding the innate corruption of man over time and how trust in software increases with use over time.
+
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Hi everybody, welcome to a new episode of the Citizen Cosmos Podcast. And again, I love doing those intros and I love messing them up. But nevertheless, I have with me today Alexei. Alexei is the CEO and founder of Interlay. We will find out from him about Interlay and about himself in a second. But Alexei, hi, welcome to the show.
+
Alexei
+Hi, thanks for having me.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I'm very glad to be having you. We are slowly, in Citizen Cosmos, have been trying to interview people outside of just Cosmos ecosystem. And in my opinion, you happen to be such kind of a person who's not just focused on the Cosmos ecosystem, but focused on the whole of Interchain. And this has been our object and goal all along. So first, I mean, I already said CEO and founder of Interlay, but please, if you could make your own intro with you know, whatever you are working on, whatever you fancy telling about yourself, please.
+
+
Alexei
+Sure. So I'm Alexei. I'm the co-founder of Interlay. We try not to use the word CEO, because Interlay is a network, so we actually don't have a CEO or anything. I am the CEO of the software company that is building the open source software for it. I'm a computer scientist by trade. I got into Bitcoin in 2015 and have been working in that space, on the research side. So I actually come from a research background.
+
got into Bitcoin through Namecoin actually. So I was actually doing my bachelor's thesis and one of the topics happened to be looking into Tor traffic and obviously what's the best place to figure out how people were using Tor. Well, you look at Silk Road and that got me really interested in what else you could do with Bitcoin. And yeah, I've been kind of going from one topic to the other. So basically doing a random walk in the entire space. So looking at what else can we do with blockchains like Namecoin, decentralized identities.
+
got really interested in merge mining, which happened to be the first cross-chain protocol that was deployed actually. And then kind of, you know, went from topic to topic, we looked at payment channels, commit chains, which later became all these L1s and roll-ups. And then I ended up doing a PhD out in Pure College in London. Again, by pure coincidence, I landed there. And the topic that we ended up working on in detail was cross-chain communication. So after the SegWit2X debate on Bitcoin, for me personally, I kind of realized
+
okay right the bitcoin is not going to change not a lot probably shouldn't in with like probably it is as good as it is let's put it this way but we still need innovation so the idea was well how can we get bitcoin to other networks and connect kind of the adoption and the values of bitcoin with all these new networks ethereum cosmos polkadot and so on where a lot of the innovation is happening and we wrote a paper we proposed the first economically secure bridge design back in 2018
+
Specifically for Bitcoin to Ethereum, we then went and followed up that work, providing a general overview of the cross-chain space, like the problem, different solutions, working together with quite a bunch of researchers that were at that time leading experts in the space. And then ended up spinning out into Interlay to really now build this in practice. It was the most rewarding thing really is to take the paper and then try to build it and make a product out of it. and we have been doing that for the past three and a half years now.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Nice, nice. So you said Namecoin. I remember Namecoin is probably for me is the first real use case really for cryptocurrency apart from money. Okay. So obviously money is the obvious one. But well, what was your first, you know, a different question? What was the first shitcoin that you baught
+
Alexei
+I mean it must have been Namecoin because I needed it to play around with stuff. Yeah, I was never super fascinated with trading and so on. I was a student back then, I had no money or anything really. So the time investment was what really counted, especially everyone was telling me, oh, it's dead. The price had just dumped back to $200. Everybody was like, oh, it's Bitcoin, it's dead. What are you doing? Why are you wasting your time? So that was kinda already
+
like, oof, OK, we're taking a risk here. So yeah, I guess it was Namecoin. And then, yeah, later, I don't remember. It's, yeah, I don't remember anymore. I think I definitely got some Dogecoin at some point, just again, just to play around, because I was doing analysis of MergeMined coins, showing that MergeMining can be good, but it can also be very, very bad. It's like Dogecoin was fully centralized partially because of that.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+No, no, no, don't worry about it. I was just curious. I was curious.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Uh-huh.
+
Alexei
+So it was really like many for research purposes do some transactions, you know be able to kind of do something
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Oh, we definitely get to the mergemining part. Don't worry. Just like, I like trying to see how far away I was in my 2014-15 from the same kind of tokens that most of the guests that come to the podcast were. And sometimes it's hilarious that you find out because there weren't that many, right? I mean, of course there was like, you know, the Bitcoin talk, altcoin thread, right? And you could find thousands and thousands of them. But the big ones are more or less
+
the same. You mentioned your in...
+
Alexei
+Yeah, I was just getting started, I think. I was like hanging out. I was more like observing. I wasn't, I was just getting started. I was more like watching and learning and like doing research. I wasn't as deeply involved in the ecosystem until a few years later, I guess.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Oh, I understand. I mean, it took me three years to read the Bitcoin white paper from the point I actually started to use that stuff. So you mentioned your intro into the blockchain. And you mentioned computer science, you mentioned other several things that could be seen as techie related. What attracted you essentially to that area? Like why, why technical area? Why computer science? Why, why, why merge mine in the first place?
+
What was the X factor?
+
Alexei
+So I went to gymnasium in Austria. I grew up in Vienna in Austria and I went to gymnasium here and we really didn't have any like the technical education was very limited. It was more focused so people who graduate from that school they'd usually become like doctors, lawyers, economists go in that direction and so on. We barely had anyone doing tech and I kind of got interested in it. I don't know why so you know you always had like in a classroom you have like a beamer, a computer and you have to have
+
someone who volunteers to make sure it's turned on and then kind of fix it, like help teachers operate this. So I basically got to do that. And it felt cool. Like, oh, you know, you're the computer guy. And I had like, the computer science education was really minimal. Like my first time coding was actually my final year of school where my parent, I was already thinking like, you know, maybe all the computer science and parents like, well, you know, you've never done anything with computer science before you go and study that. Why don't you go in like there was a program where you could try
+
university courses during your last year of school. So I went and tried to learn some C programming, C++. And that was the first time I actually got any coding experience. And it was super interesting because you get to build stuff. So I always want like, once I discovered this engineering aspect of, even if it's just software and you can't really see it, you're actually building and you get to be creative and actually have something that you can result pretty quickly. The other option would have been a doctor but
+
Yeah, that I think it's better this way. Let's put it this way
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It reminds me of, I don't know if you remember or if you've seen this, there is a movie from the 90s. I'm not going to say the name of the actors now. They are famous like 90s actors and it's like a romantic adventure comedy movie. The guy is like running through the jungle and he's like roaming and breaking stuff and everything is going wrong. And then he's like, damn, I should have listened to my mommy and been like a beauty therapist
+
earning, you know, whatever. So sometimes in our industry, like when you say the doctor would have been the worst option, I'm like, I don't know, you know, maybe a doctor would have been much calmer, you know.
+
Alexei
+Maybe. Yeah.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Alexei, you mentioned merge mining and I know one of the papers you did was analysis and effects and implications of merge mining. I'm curious what has drawn you to research merge mining and why this particular paper? What did you find? What was your findings that led you to move on in your journey?
+
Alexei
+So when I started my bachelor's thesis, we were actually looking at Namecoin, and specifically was name squatting. So that was the first kind of research work we did. And we realized like Namecoin tried to do like decentralized identity, you know, like you could register a website, domain, whatever, and it was decentralized. What's the number one problem? Squatting. Like every name, everything was squatted. You had no real adoption at that point anymore. And we tried to figure out like, okay, why does it not work? Like what's the biggest problem? And we realized like miners were just buying these domains left and right.
+
scanning Alexa top 100 or 1,000 and just getting all of them in all combinations. And then we were like, OK, well, why do miners do that? And essentially, we saw, OK, they are just merge mining. It doesn't cost them anything extra because they're getting the name coins on top. So merge mining means you mine Bitcoin, and you can also reuse that prof of work for namecoin. And then namecoin was not worth a lot, especially when the market crashed. They were just buying domains, like some of the big miners, just, I guess, speculating that maybe the domains in the future
+
will be worth more. And then we kind of saw, well, merge mining, that's kind of a bad side effect, because you have miners doing stuff. They're helping your network, but they really don't care about it. And then we kind of dug deeper, and we saw, oh, wow, Namecoin was actually centralized for quite a significant period of time. Like, there were a few pools that had more than 50% of the hash rate. Because merge mining, it's not mandatory. So any miner can decide to do it. And what happens is typically the mining pool operators just, you know, they turn it on.
+
you update the software, but basically they will just also merge mine. So we realized, well, it's kind of curious and curing like back then it was like this was more with the security research center. So the idea was, okay, like where can we break stuff? Where can we show that things are not working? And yeah, that kind of got me more involved in the whole space. So we did a lot of data analysis, got to learn about different proof of work mechanisms and also realized, well, actually it's pretty cool because it's like it's cross-chain. Like you have two blockchains that
+
talk to each other. And I always found that interesting. And back then also saw, well, probably, you know, you already had so many blockchains, there's never going to be one coin to rule them all, right? There's always going to be different innovations coming out, and we'll definitely need to talk to each other. But it has to be decentralized. I was always very interested in this full decentralization. How can we solve this very tough challenge of not trusting anyone? And I think that's kind of what's sent me on this direction of really digging deeper into research
+
solve this interoperability problem, which turned out to be unsolvable. And you have to do a lot of complicated things to make it work through incentives. But that made me choose to go the academic path. There was the option to go work for one of the bigger consulting companies in the blockchain, doing blockchain for them. But back then, you know, consulting companies were looking into how to sell mastercoins to institutions, which was not super interesting.
+
So yeah, that's kind of the direction I went in.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I actually have a question about academia here for you, but before that you said one interesting combination of words and I want to know what it means for you. You said the combination of words full decentralization a second ago. What does full decentralization mean for you or is there such a thing as full decentralization?
+
Alexei
+I mean, you've been, you're catching the right questions, I guess. So no, of course there is no full decentralization. I mean, there is no full trustlessness. You always trust something. Um, and like how I personally see decentralization is it means. I don't trust a single entity, but I distribute trust across many different people, um, and the set that this group of people can change. So even if a part of it becomes corrupted over time, it can be kicked out or new people can join. So you have this continuous growth and, or like change dynamic network
+
making it permissionless. So in theory, anyone can join, which makes it inclusive to everyone, which I think is a big, big property that is important here. And then it also means I don't trust that someone in a top of an organization remains honest for whatever, like for as long as I'm using it. Because for me personally, I think for a lot of people who've experienced, FTX, Quadriga, and all of these, like MTgoks, all of these things that have happened over the years, one lesson learned
+
I think for all of us is people tend to be corrupted at some point. It happens to everyone and if a temptation is great, so is the risk. And the trust in a certain organization doesn't, just because something has existed for five years and worked well, doesn't mean that it's not going to be corrupted tomorrow. There is no guarantee, right? You can trust people and that's great, but I generally am a very optimistic person. I try to say the best in people, but we've seen also that there's a lot of corruption. And I think the whole idea of crypto is to well,
+
let's encode as much as we can in software, get it, let thousands of people run the software and then the chance of all of them being corrupted and changing the software is very low. And I think the cool thing about that is, the longer the software runs, the more people run it, the more people join the network, the greater your trust becomes in it because you can actually see, look, it doesn't have bugs, it's been running for a while. There's a big enough community of people where the chances of them all suddenly being currupted
+
and trying to steal from me directly, one out of 100,000 users is very low. Of course, at a grander scale, if you're moving in with billions of dollars into a network that only has TVLs of a few hundred million, then it becomes risky again. And then that's where these things can break. But for a normal individual user, if I'm using Bitcoin, Ethereum, or even any of the smaller chains, I'm pretty safe. I mean, if it matches all the criteria of being decentralized and robust,
+
I know if it doesn't have some admin keys which some or two or three people control The likelihood of everybody colluding is very low and the longer the thing is operating the less chances of there being a bug That might affect me and I think this for me is like the upside of being decentralized Trust grows with time. Whereas the trust in an institution as we've seen with the case of FTX best example We all thought ah, they're really doing a great job. They're really doing it the right way Well, how I mean even myself
+
I count myself to the people who thought, well, actually they're playing the right, the long-term game right, they're doing regulations, and thankfully I didn't use them. But you know, I also got tricked. I thought they were doing the right way, right?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Absolutely. I think people underestimate how communication develops over time. Considering blockchain is a communication tool, the more two people or three people or a group of people communicate between each other, the better that communication usually, right? That's the goal should become. And of course, the same happens here. Absolutely agreed. Before I move to the academia questions, though, again, something you mentioned that I would love to hear your opinion. You mentioned TVL's and Marketcaps
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And actually lately, well, lately, it's not like it's the first time in blockchain that we see this becoming an issue or a question. And this is my question. Is this the following the following example that I'm going to describe? Is it an issue and should something be undertaken? So what I'm talking about is a lot of projects where the TVL is higher than the market cap. And hence, a lot of people are afraid that, OK, if the Marketcap of a project with a TVL
+
of 40 million is only like 400,000 and what stops people overtaking that project and using the total locked value. Now, is it a real issue to be concerned about or is this more something made up in the air kind of thing?
+
Alexei
+I mean, so it really depends. It is definitely, look, if I put on the academic hat, it's absolutely an attack vector, right? So from a theoretical perspective, it's like if you use a system that only has 10 million market cap for the need of asset that is needed to vote on certain things, you could be at risk because in theory, somebody could buy 7 million of it and try to steal the 40 million that you have locked in the network. Now, this is theoretical. Now, if you look at execution,
+
does often look quite different. So the question is, okay, I mean, if you try to, if the network was only worth $2 million, why? Because not many people are buying it. If you try to buy 50% of that of the market, you're gonna push the price. If you try to buy OTC, I mean, you have to find someone who's gonna sell you these 50%. So I think in practice, trying to acquire a meaningful position of an asset or a network is not that simple. You have to have enough people who want to sell it to you. It's similar, like,
+
Definitely, I would argue, easier than with acquiring 50% of the hash rate, because you need the other physical aspect. So in proof of work chains, you need to get mining power, mining the ASICs. But again, it's still possible if you know the producer or the companies that are building these ASICs to do it themselves. With proof of stake and coin vault governance, it does become potentially easier in theory. But again, I've not seen it. There has been hostile
+
governance takeover attempts, but these things typically happen because people don't vote. That's the bigger risk, that people don't pay attention to governance and that just governance proposals pass without people being aware. So I think it's more on the way that governance is structured. If you're conservative and you're careful and make sure that, you know, and we don't need to reinvent things like democratic voting has been around for a while and you can add a lot of failsafe features like, okay, if it's a close vote, if there's a sudden last minute flip of the vote because somebody
+
like last few minutes, like change the vote. OK, extend the voting period or don't activate it and re-vote again. So yeah, I think maybe coming back to the original question, it's definitely something to pay attention to. It does not mean that all this thing will be attacked. I think it really depends on how the native token is used in the protocol. So if it's used like in the case of Luna, where it's really part of the protocol and there are a lot of emission, new emissions
+
can be triggered by some failures in the system, then it's difficult. Then it's dangerous. Because then the value fits use as collateral. So I think generally using your own token, like in the protocol as collateral, and that's so collateral is dangerous. So you just then you just speculate that the people or hope that the people who stake it have intrinsic value and want to be honest. And the majority it's statistical game then it's no longer economic security. We're not as strong because what's the first thing that loses in price?
+
protocol breaks. It's the native token. And if, as in the case of Luna, or there's other protocols, right, which will trigger, if something goes wrong and the token price goes down, if it triggers liquidations, for example, or more emissions of this native asset in attempt to stabilize, what will happen? You get into this death spiral. And that is risky. So that's basically what you should be, I think, looking out for in a system. If basically this economic securities or if, depends on the native asset
+
because then it's no longer economic. Then it's very weak. Let's put it this way.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
+
Alexei
+So it's a bit of a flip side. It's not the governance aspect, but it's the governance side is slow. You will see somebody making the vote. And usually, if it's a proper governance system that is in place, it takes a lot of time. It's not that, OK, there's suddenly a proposal. And within minutes, everything's gone. It takes days, weeks. There will be a lot of people who are seeing this, if it's a bigger network, and raising alarms. What's more dangerous is these automated things. If it's a defib protocol and you just have a lot of escalating events
+
which happen automatically within a few minutes, which can happen in like we've seen like in the case of...
+
Citizen Cosmos
+No, it was interesting to watch, you know, it was interesting to participate in that and not the first time or the last time we I think participate in things like that. Let me let me ask that. I mean, I have a lot of questions springing out. I wrote them down that I will try to ask you in a bit. But I'm going to ask you the academia question. It might not be the most fasinating question. We do get a lot of researchers coming on to this show and I like
+
Citizen Cosmos
+to ask them this question. Now, what is your opinion as somebody who has a lot of research papers out there, a lot of research work out there and you can follow your kind of academia path, it's out there. What's your opinion? And I'm going to extend the question a little bit. The question itself is academia versus field work kind of versus doing things. But then kind of like extending this question, I would say that, you know, especially in Cypto
+
especially in a field or an area which is not always following the academic path, right? It's asking questions, it's asking a lot of questions, which is actually from academia, I guess. But still, you know, what's your opinion as somebody who comes from the academia side and identifies as the academia side? Is the correct way to do everything is following the strict rules that exist in academia?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Or is it ok to go left right and experiment.
+
Alexei
+I mean, I don't think academia has strict rules. So especially in like in the blockchain Bitcoin space, academia is very, very fast. That it was a very, it's very stressful. So when you, when I started my PhD, I always had the feeling I got the classical imposter syndrome. Oh, everybody knows so many things. I have an idea. I check presented last year at a conference and you, you know, you go, you, you try out the experiment, you go in different directions and then you get closer at some point. Oh, you've suddenly you're doing completely new stuff that nobody has thought about
+
before. So I think if you look at the Ethereum research forum, the early Bitcoin talks, a lot of these things, a lot of the ideas that were turned into papers later have been actually mentioned already. They existed in some forum posts. It's a different beast to actually take that, build it into a full, like actually prove that it works and, you know, structure it in a way that it can be reproduced because it's a different thing to write an idea in a forum, hey, look, why don't we use, we could use, you know, do atomic swaps with light clients. So that existed.
+
And then I think what you're getting to, and I think I fully agree, you don't have to write a peer reviewed paper to have a brilliant idea and have a very valuable contribution. If you look at the Bitcoin sidechains paper, they did a really good work of taking what existed in the forms, adding on top of that, and putting it together in a comprehensive manner. And they were very fair in referencing existing comments and discussions in these forms, which is a very tough thing to actually do to find them all. And personally, I mean, when I was working,
+
coming from these forums as well, I would always personally try to see if we have a new idea, did it exist there? And if it did, fine, let's credit the people, but did they pursue it further? No. Well, then it's still actually, if it's a good idea and it has never been pursued further, maybe it should be, maybe we should try to extend on that and build a proper academic work. But what does academic work mean? It basically means you specify, okay, what are the assumptions? You challenge it and you try to put it in a structured manner so someone who wants to build this in practice can read through it and understand
+
okay, the assumptions are okay, we have, I don't know, this guy is honest or we don't assume any honest third parties. We assume that messages get delivered on time. So there's some basic things that you have to assume, but are very important for a system to work or not. So I think you have both. So you have a lot of stuff happening in crypto, which ignores academia. And I honestly think that's not a good idea. And generally, if you look at the protocols nowadays that are really successfull
+
they have a lot of researchers coming from academia working with them, because a lot of these problems have been studied before. So if you're ignoring academia and you're saying, oh, it's a bad thing, it's so social institutional, you're just going to be at a disadvantage. On the other hand, we have a lot of researchers who just completely who play this purely academic game. If it's not peer reviewed I'm not going to look at it. And I fully disagree with that approach. That doesn't work. And honestly, for me, there's a reason why I am no longer in academia, I like building
+
Alexei
+things, I prefer to really focus on products and solving problems. And I don't care anymore as much about citations. It's nice, you know, as an academic, you get your citations and you get a bit, you know, get addicted to it. It's so great. I unfortunately I've seen in many instances and I still am on like committees for conferences and I review papers, there's often the case where it's just a paper for the sake of writing a paper and then it doesn't contribute anything. And that's the other side. And I think you, if you look at it here.
+
Ethereum today, and also Polkadot, Cosmos, and Avalanche, and all these L2s. There's a lot of research in there. There's a lot of academic work, like researchers leaving academia or still working with universities to actually prove that things are working, really dig deeper and build these more sophisticated systems. I think it doesn't have to be a university. If you look at Paradigm, for example, they're a very good example of hiring people out of academia to work in industry and still doing research and I think this is the way to go.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I'm glad you said it because a lot of the people I talk to in crypto, the most fascinating minds are some of the most fascinating minds, sorry, come definitely from academia. Some of the other ones definitely are people who never touched, never spent a single day in university. And it's astonishing to see what other things are out there. Let me ask you a strange queastion
+
Citizen Cosmos
+like resume a question in the direction of academia, considering you've done so much research, considering the words you say right now that not everything has to be bound to academia, and considering that in the experience of a lot of crypto projects, starting crypto projects, unfortunately, a lot of the teams kind of miss out on research in the market. What would be your advice as sombody who has done a lot of extensive research
+
Citizen Cosmos
+for any teams that are starting their journey out there. They have an idea, they think it's the most fascinating idea and they need to implement it. What would be your advice on how to approach the research side?
+
Alexei
+This is why I still enjoy working in academia and a lot of my friends and former colleagues are now still in academia, I think they share the same ethos. It's about solving problems. So if you were to approach, so if you have a new idea and you're not sure if it has been done before, well, what's the best way on the internet to get validation, just post it. Hey, I have this idea. Does it work? If you're concerned that it might be such a great idea.
+
then you have to Google. Then you can go on Google Scholar and search for some papers. You can go on ePrint. The cool thing about academia in the crypto space is everyone makes sure that the papers are open access. If I see a paper that is not open source and I cannot read it without paying, I generally assume it's not a good paper because somebody is trying to hide. Why otherwise would you not make it publicly available where you know all the innovation, all the cool things are actually open source? So that's always a red flag, I think.
+
if you see papers that are behind paywalls in our space. So you can always find anything open, like it was open access and that was chat GPT-4. I mean, that solves a lot of problems. Ask the AI, right? Just throw in your question and it'll probably help you out, like point it towards existing works. I mean, and the better it gets, the easier it becomes. Or drop one of the researchers an email. I mean, let's say you want to do something with threshold signatures, right? And you Google threshold signatures
+
you will get a list of papers, right? Of course, it's hard for you to get started, like which one's the best, which works, which doesn't. Citations help, right? But you can drop an email to the authors and they will actually reply more often than not. And the interesting part is a lot of the authors of these works are somehow involved in other startups in the crypto space, so they know the game, right? They're super happy to help. So I think it's just talking, right? Just ask and then, I mean, for an academic, for a researcher,
+
Alexei
+I mean, the biggest gratification, I think, is if somebody is interested in your work and asks you questions and wants to build it. I mean, so for example, in Interlay, we publish the papers, but everything we do is open source. Even if we do it as a product and so on, all the papers, all the research we do nowadays, we publish it. Why? Because somebody else might be able to do something good with it. And in the end, there is no point of hiding it and isolating all the work you've done. I mean, patents are one thing.
+
I am not a big fan in this space of trying to hide information because in the end
+
If you came up with the idea, the chances of somebody stealing it from you are pretty low. If they improve on it, fine, it can happen, right, that somebody steals your use, but at nine out of ten cases, it'll end up you collaborating or there's a better solution and you learn from that. So I think it's getting there.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Thank you for saying that, by the way. Thank you for saying that, man. I think it's very important for more and more people to say those things. For a long time, people were scared of opening things up due to limitations or what have been told, especially, it depends on where they come from in the world, right? If they come from originated, the origin, sorry, is especially Eastern Europe or Asia, unfortunately, due to the sociological issues.
+
kind of, oh, everything is going to steal my stuff, you know, and like, it's funny, you mentioned ChadGPT and just before we started to the recording, I was on crypto Twitter as usually and there was a letter, there is now an open letter with a lot of signatures from a lot of people to stop, that is calling to stop the research of AI models stronger than ChadGPT four for the next six monts because we are as humanity are not
+
Citizen Cosmos
+prepared for it and it's signed by like now a lot of people and it's interesting. What do you think? Should people be afraid of going down the rabbit hole? Doesn't matter which research we're talking about now. I mean, of course we're talking chat GPT, but
+
Alexei
+This is a tough one. So I think there is no correct answer, right? And I think there's always been two camps, right? Like people who build stuff and want to just innovate and sometimes ignore the ethical questions around it, whether it is ready. And I think if you're a scientist and if you're building something and that is part of your job to think about the ethical implications. In our case, coming from like a secure research background, if I'm researching something
+
that might break? The ethical question is, should I be doing that? Do I need to communicate this before? Do I need to be careful? Do I need to talk to people who might lose money if I just go publish a paper that shows, oh, there's a bug in a protocol, right? So the ethical question is always present and should be. Whether we should hold off building, expanding chatGPT for the next six months, I do not know. I'm not an expert in this field. I don't know if it's really going to make a difference, honestly. Are we not ready as a
+
society, I don't know. I don't think it's the right or wrong answer. I think it's good that it's been challenged because if we never challenge things, then we never figure out what's the best decision. And we've seen it, I think, with privacy. I think on the internet is a very good example where we've seen that a lot of companies who just pursue innovation and really just also profits at the expense of individuals, like they're losing their privacy and being harmed
+
And I think it's good that we try to be proactive rather than just reactive. What is going to be the right decision in the end? I do not know. Probably not the spicy answer that you hoped for, but...
+
Citizen Cosmos
+That's I... No, no, no, no, no, I was curious about your opinion as a researcher not trying to make spicey content
+
Alexei
+I mean, I have seen both sides, right? If we at Interlay come up with something that could really, like that has a very positive impact on a lot of people, but could make a lot of people, you know, lose a lot of money or be at harm. Oh, it's a tough question. Do you, what do you do? Like you need to innovate. There's a lot that you have potential investors that want you to push forward. And there's a whole industry depending on you and really that wants this. On the other hand, like it's a tough position to be in. Like, could you live with yourself that you just say, oh, whatever, let's do it. And then people get harmed. But on the other hand, what if you, if you're too slow and you dont do
+
Alexei
+it, maybe industries or other people get down too. So it's a tough one. I think it's, the goal is just to talk to as many people as possible and then make an educated guess and then see what happens.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Hmm.
+
I know one guy, Einstein, he made an educated guess. I know what happened after that some years, but nevertheless, let's talk bridges, right? Let's talk bridges, bro. Let's talk bridges. So, man, bridges. Here is, I'm gonna throw something at you and you tell me, I mean, of course your opinion is gonna be biased, I understand it, but since you're building one, but still I want to know what you think about this. So here is something that I've been,
+
and a lot of founders and you know we discuss a lot of things like really for many years now and one of them thoughts that I've been not just hearing but expressing myself and agreeing with and this is something I want to throw at you is that bridges what we call today bridges I'm not talking IBC the technology I'm talking actually things like interlay I'm talking I don't know Evmos, Gravity bridge
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Axelar, I don't want to name anymore. This is just random names. So yeah, whatever springs to mind first are to become more the next centralized exchanges really, because the more centralized exchanges are failing us. And if we see now Binance or Circle or anyone like that fail, or when we see one of them fail, probobly will push all the projects
+
Citizen Cosmos
+that have been building bridges and have been staying somewhat in the background like Interlayer or like Fusion, for example, to a much different positions where they're actually becoming not just a bridge, but they're giving APRs, they're working with staking, they're working with interchange technologies, they're giving user interface, user experience. What's your thought? I mean, I can carry on for a while, but what's your thought about this? What are your thoughts, about this idea
+
that bridges will succeed a lot more like such as yourself.
+
Alexei
+So when we're talking about this topic, I always think about Vitalik's prediction that the future will be multi-chain, but it won't be inter-chain. And it's something I've been thinking for a long, long time. I mean, my PhD focused on how do we build trustless bridges? And one of the key results of the whole PhD, and it was like theoretically proven, peer reviewed, critically discussed, but in general, but not accepted, it is impossible to build a bridge between two networks, which is completely trustless. You always have
+
something in the middle that you trust. And that kind of, if you think about, is Vitalik right or wrong, it kind of first would lean us in the direction, OK, he might be right. He also will have these centralized bridges between all those networks. And it's going to be super challenging. And the future might look like, OK, well, they will become the next centralized exchange. Because what is Binance? You can use Binance as a bridge between two networks. You go to Binance, you withdraw. A lot of centralized bridges today are just the same, right?
+
Alexei
+But then on the other hand, we know since 2014, I think, is when the sidechains paper came up. Please correct me if I'm wrong. We know that there is a way to improve this. The best way to build a bridge is to have both networks verify each other. So you have two live clients. And this is how IBC, the standard, is ideally supposed to work. You have two Cosmos chains, and they verify each other. The same is the same case in Polkoredik CM.
+
we have a shared security model where the parent chain makes sure that the cross-chain communication works successfully between the two networks. So when I talk to, let's say, Akala or Moonbeam, I know that our transfers will be enforced by the Polkadot network. So these are these two models and they work. And we can make bridges trustless and then you don't need to have a centralized exchange anymore. But then what is a centralized exchange? So yes, you will trust, in the case of Polkadot, you have Polkadot, the relay chain, and the thousands of staker nodes
+
and so on that you will trust. Arguably much much better than centralized exchange like FTX. And you also obviously when you talk between two chains you trust each other. So my personal perspective and this is a bet I'm actually willing to actually take right. I think in the next five years we'll see big networks like Ethereum, Polkadot, Cosmos, Solana, Avalanche and so on build trustless bridges between each other. Trustless in the sense of being liteclient to liteclient. There
+
always some trust involved. You need to make sure the messages are delivered, the light clients need to work. Then my bet is within five years, this will be the main way of bridging between these chains. And then other solutions that are more centralized, they will focus on bridging from these big ones to smaller chains. Smaller chains which can't afford the sophisticated light client technology or which have some custom tech which where light clients don't work. And it's very difficult to build a good and safe and scalable light client as we've seen with the Ethereum
+
case with Altair, which has vulnerabilities. So I think it will be a transition. But the risk is, and that's what I'm concerned about, is that we rely too much on trusted bridges. And I think, but in all fairness, the more we move in this direction, the more bridge hacks happen, the more cautious teams become, and the more open they are about the risks. So if we look back at the 2017, or even Defi summer 2020
+
Alexei
+the bridges that we had, they would even have paths to decentralization, but they wouldn't openly admit that they're actually centralized. If I look at it nowadays, I think most projects are very open about their security. Not all, right? But most are very open and say, look, this is what we do, this is what we believe in, these are the risks, and we're trying to improve light clients, and that most of them are open to the light client to light client technology as well, once it becomes available, because most of them know they'll have to evolve into that to compete
+
with these light client bridges. But yes, I definitely see the risk, and these failures of these bridges have been known to wipe out entire ecosystems. Best example is what happened to Nomad. It was very unfortunate. It had nothing to do with the bridge technology, right? It was a very unfortunate event. And I feel very sad about it because I think they had a very competent team and still have, right? And there were a lot of smart people working there. Bugs happen. But then the fallout was
+
very big. We were also affected, right? Because it took a hit. The Polkadot ecosystem was affected and others. So it's definitely a risk. And I do think we need to be very careful and educate the community about, is it wrapped or is it native? And I always, when we work with the DEX, I would always like, this is the first question I'd raise. Okay, well, why are you not, if they don't do that, why are you not showing that you don't have native Bitcoin? You can't have native Bitcoin. You should not be showing the native bitcoin logo
+
unless you're really doing an atomic cross-chain swap where it's native Bitcoin. Because otherwise you're lying to people. And I think educating the community of, okay, hey, look, it's not native, it's deposited somewhere, it's somehow wrapped. Of course Binance also wraps their coins, right? It's wrapped on the Binance exchange. It's the same thing and they don't do it. But I think we as decentralized technologists have to be better than Binance or FTX. We have to showcase here the risks, this is what you're doing, educate
+
yourself and basically at least the user knows if a bridge breaks I might be affected. If I have no idea which bridge a protocol is using, if I hear bad news about the bridge I might be too late to get my funds out and then it's unfair because your core community of builders will know and they will basically get out but your users will not be able to.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Absolutely. But by the way, 22nd of October, 2014, introduction to such and so you were absolutely correct. Let's do some basic education. Can you let's go back to some very basics. Can you explain in your own words the difference between wrapped and a native token?
+
Alexei
+I mean, it's actually very simple. So Bitcoin only exists on the Bitcoin blockchain. There's nothing physical. But if we were to use a physical analogy, think of it like this. If you want to trade a barrel of oil, it's actually physical. You know oil exists. It's in the real world. If you want to trade it in the stock exchange, you wouldn't drag the barrel in and put it there. If the stock exchange is digital, it's a different system. There's no way of you to start giving glasses of oil
+
to people and them giving you money. That's not gonna work. There is some standards of how stocks are traded. So it's your commodities. What you do is you put it somewhere in custody and this someone will give you a digital certificate saying, okay, we've deposited here, thousand barrels of oil. Now you can go and trade them. And if I buy one of these certificates, in theory I could go and redeem and actually get that barrel of oil. And this is the same thing, that this is the same way how wrapped assets work. You have things that exist on
+
Bitcoin, on Polkadot, on Cosmos, on Ethereum, so generally on the chain that they were minted on. I think it's a good definition to say a native asset is native on the chain that it was minted on and this also includes USDC. If Circle mints USDC on different chains then it's native because it was explicitly minted by Circle on that chain and it will be wrapped if somebody else except the minter moves from one chain
+
to the other. And again, in most cases, it's always wrapped. So if you take Bitcoin, there is no Bitcoin minter. So nobody is issuing Bitcoin unless the entire Bitcoin proof of work consensus would say, oh, now we're also moving Bitcoin to some other chain. And this will not happen, obviously. Then Bitcoin is open, another chain is always wrapped. And wrapping means there's something in the middle that makes sure that the Bitcoins are locked up while you are using the wrapped asset and idealy when you
+
Alexei
+want to go back, this thing or committee or whatever will guarantee safety and will guarantee that you can get the Bitcoin out. And that's how all of these bridges work in the end. And then the challenge of wrapping or bridging is how do you build this intermediary? Is it one person? Is it a group? Is it an entire network? And I think it's fair to name examples. You have Bitgold. WBTC is one company. You have multisig federative
+
Alexei
+bridges like the Bitcoin bridge to RSK or you've had a few like other kind of systems. And then pretty close to that you have networks which is just a multi-sig but a bit bigger if and the difference would be that anybody could join right if you have a key rotation and bridge operators can change and like come and go then you get I guess systems like Axelar if it is really permissionless or other networks that you know use kind of some threshold or consesus model on top to have some
+
kind of rotating set of operators. And then the ideal case is if you don't have anyone holding the assets anymore but you have smart contracts. That's the optimal case. That's the live client bridge model.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Hopefully, we will see more projects actually move that way. And just for the record, when I said, I think I might have not been a little bit clear with what I said, bridges, in my opinion, will take the place of centralized exchanges. I guess what I meant wasn't trying to imply that there will be the bad actor. I was actually trying to imply that centralized exchanges will cease to exist and we will have decentralized bridges instead of them. Where users
+
are actually able to communicate in the same light way as they today. I mean, what was the only reason a user can go to a central exchange today? It's probably user experience or security kind of experience. So in my opinion, I think Bridges will catch up onto that in the next couple of years.
+
Alexei
+But to be fair, then I will say it. I agree with the risk, right? So there is a risk today that the bridges that we have today, which are more on the centralized side, will become the next FTX. FTX is a bad example because it was clearly fraud. It will become the next exploited or problematic centralized failing point, right? Because your security is only as strong as the weakest link. And our weak links today are Oracles which are
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Yeah, of course.
+
Alexei
+bridges to the real world and bridges which are bridged between different crypto networks. And I think if we don't push innovation and unfortunately decentralized bridges are more difficult to build, they're not as profitable, you typically don't need a token, so it's not as easy for venture capital firms to invest in them. Decentralization has a price and unfortunately we only care about decentralization when it's too late. So we just have to hope that
+
enough smart people out there that are willing to go altruistic and spend their time or maybe there's networks and like I know that Interchain Foundation and Polkadot, Treasurys and so on, they actually you know they're more altruistic and they fund things like this and that's I think the right way to go.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Yeah.
+
Yeah, definitely. And this is actually the last big topic before we move to the Blitz I want to ask you about is considering you guys are more focused... Well, at least you identify, right? It's very correct work to use in today's world, identification. So you guys identify as a Polkadot project to some extent. And I apologize, correct me if I'm wrong, of course, but...
+
like that. But what I was the question that I'm trying to get at is we haven't seen yet as many communications, in my opinion, at least. I mean, there are some developers talking between Cosmos and Polkadot projects, between Avalanche and Cosmos Polkadot, but there isn't like that, you know, that acceptance that, hey, this is all the same. This is just the Internet of blockchains. This is exactly what we were. This is exactly the reason why we came here for them to interact,
+
in a decentralized manner without any points of failure, blah, blah, blah. So what is the reason for it? What is stopping, apart from human greed, of course, and human tribalism? And if it's the only thing that's stopping, how do we get rid of it? What is stopping people from starting to understand that the interchange is wider than one single project?
+
Alexei
+I think economic interest and tribalism is definitely one big, big aspect. So it happens. And I think right now there is this push with app chains. I think Polkadot and Cosmos have very similar approaches. They just did it in different orders. Polkadot did shared security first. Cosmos was very successful positioning Cosmos as the key as a good way to build new chains. But no shared security. Now basically they're moving in this direction. So Polkadot is really pushing substrate. And it's getting like...
+
building on Substrate, Cosmos is working on Interchain Security. Who is going to be first? I don't know. What I can say is that we as Intelli, when we were just thinking of where to build, we were talking to both Cosmos and Polkadot. Because these two networks were like, hey, we'd like a really decentralized bridge. And we're willing to provide some initial grant funding so you can bootstrap. And then you can decide what to do with it. As long as you do it open source, you can build it or you just give it to us. We ended up building on Polkadot because we like rust
+
why it made sense. And I generally can identify with the ethos of being fully decentralized. But I see that ethos in Cosmos as well. And in fact, we have a still pending grant from the Interchain Foundation from a year ago to as soon as the Substrate IBC library is ready to bridge over Bitcoin. And I'm still waiting for that library. And we've really been going back and forth of like, OK, is it ready? Is it pending? And I know there's been multiple teams working on it.
+
The problem is it's not easy. And that's the second point. I think at this stage, what's holding us back is technical limitations. So all the tribalism aside, I think maybe that's on the outside. But behind the scenes, everybody wants to integrate because there is added value, right? Especially the teams that are actually building products and the users. The users don't want to care about am I on one chain or the other. They want to use a good product. And if it makes their lives easier to go between different products, if they're on different chains, they will come to the products that allow you to do that.
+
that are well integrated among each other. So I think it's a win-win situation. What's holding us back is technical challenges right now. So light clients and making these things work is difficult. And if you want to do it properly, you need light clients. So I know that, for example, Polkadot has been working. There's a team that is funded by Polkadot Treasuries been working on building a trustless Ethereum bridge. Again, maybe let's say decentralized Ethereum bridge with light clients for a long time now. And then Ethereum switch from proof of work to proof of stake
+
they have to rebuild the light client now, the light client on Ethereum has issues, so they need to fix that. It's bleeding edge technology. It takes time. And the thing is, if you're building this, you have to do it properly. Otherwise, what's the point? You could have just added a multisig, and just be a centralized bridge. And the same with Cosmos, like Substrate IBC, like you needed the Polkadot light clients, you need to make it work with the Cosmos libraries. There were problems with using STD and OSTD, right? Even with the rust frameworks
+
themselves and also someone to push it and provide funding. And I think the mix of all of this is why we still don't have it. But it's for me, like my personal goal is to figure out how we can contribute either in the dev side, but there's teams working on it, or in education and just advocating for it and advocating for more support from the core teams. But again, in absence of this, you actually have Axelor is working very closely with substrate
+
teams and will likely end up being one of the systems used to bridge between Cosmos and Polkadot. In fact, it already works, right? So if you go to some Moonbeam Dexes, you can actually swap and go over to some Cosmos Dexes pretty quickly. And you have other bridges working from Ethereum to Polkadot and from Avalanche and Solana to Polkadot. So it's going to be solved and less decentralized very quickly and I was... It doesnt mean
+
Alexei
+more secure because obviously if a decentralized bridge is launched, there's still the code risk. So something that has been operating even maybe not using LiteClient, but has been operating for a while, probably still more reliable for at least some time until the code matures. So it's going to be a slow transition, but I think it's definitely going to happen. First, it's going to be using some existing businesses, and with time, it's going to become more altruistic using really protocol-to-protocol LiteClient bridges.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Amen. But, you know, by the way, just for the record, sorry, before we move on to the Blitz, Neutron, the first interchange security chain, is about to launch in a month's time on Cosmos Live. So it's a tight race, you know, considering we're talking about non-tribalism, using the word race is amazing. But no, this is definitely our goal here is that Citizen Cosmos is accually just that, its education to help
+
Citizen Cosmos
+people see that hopefully that there is nothing to be afraid. We all big family and the more we cooperate, the more we can achieve. Alexei, quick blitz. Well, quick, depending on you. But it's three questions. I say blitz, but they're not really blitzy blitzy because I'm a slow person. I talk a lot. So feel free to answer them as you wish. First question, they're going to go like three to one as in three things, then two things and one thing.
+
three projects kind of typical I know that technically interest you and they don't have to be blockchain projects by the way but please don't say typical things like Apple or Ethereum or things like that say something that you're kind of more interested in something innovative
+
Alexei
+That's a good one because I have to go outside of the bubble of what you're doing day to day. I think what I'm really interested in is custody projects. The project is that try to solve the custody problem using threshold signatures or also looking something that not many people know. Actually on Bitcoin natively, you can use like Schnorr adapter signatures and all that were enabled through Tapper upgrade. So I think that's super interesting. Projects that try to
+
say, OK, we don't need to wait for five blocks, but go on a big players to integrate something to give us good security and for institutions to be able to manage their keys. Hey, we have a whole network of hundreds and thousands of nodes you can use. And we can plug into all of these different projects. And projects can plug into us. I think that's really interesting. And that's the next, I think, big push in terms of the custody problem that we'll see. I'm personally very interested in things that are outside of the DeFi bubble.
+
So the connection between DeFi and actually real world commerce. Also I guess I'm biased because we work on Bitcoin and you see that there's people using Lightning for payments, but it's still very difficult and not everybody wants to pay with Lightning and with Bitcoin itself. And I think finding this balance between using Bitcoin as a store of value and as a payment and giving people the choice to do this in an easy way and basically have this gradual
+
transition from fiat to crypto Bitcoin, not instantly like, oh, we're going to be all Bitcoin tomorrow. That's not going to happen. So projects that kind of move in this direction, and I'm biased because we try to do that as well. I'm very interested in that. And I think, again, this is what we really need for adoption. And the third one is probably, and I never thought I'd say that because I never really jumped on the NFT train. But exploring the creative side
+
Alexei
+of NFTs for not just buying a JPEG and putting it on my profile and collecting it, although I think that's very interesting, but exploring, OK, how can we use that incentive model? So the slightly different definition of ownership and playing on the fact that, OK, I can have something digital and people like having things. How can we use this to not only the technology, so that's a technological problem, but it's more like a society problem. How can we use these incentives and get people
+
in doing more things in the decentralized way, in breaking out of like old kind of structures. So publishing for example, I've been talking to a startup that's doing that recently that I find super interesting, right? They're trying to do publishing in a decentralized way, incentivize people to work together so they're not as dependent on these big publishing houses and that I think is also super interesting.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Nice. Two things that, two motivational things that motivate you in your daily life, day to day life to keep on building interlay and everything else you're doing.
+
Alexei
+I think the number one is that I can with good confidence and good conscience say that we have never really, that I have nothing bad to feel, but we've never really corrupted ourselves in that sense. We really have always been trying to be fully decentralized, transparent with what we're doing with our community and that I can say that I honestly believe that we're trying to solve a problem that will make lives of many people better. It sounds like very everone is trying to make the world a better
+
Alexei
+of place and so on. But I think that our path so far has really been of really like each decision we've made, we've really kind of tried to find a good balance between business decisions and still staying true to the value of Bitcoin and the vision. So that I think is that that's what makes it very easy for me, even whether bull market, bear market, whether something breaks, whatever that, you know, if things don't work fine, you know, we're doing our best to really solve a problem that we honestly believe in. So that's number one, so I think believing in the
+
cause if you want to call it. And then the other thing is I think people using the product. So actually, you know, people coming into our chats and saying, hey guys, Binance was down. I had to get some Bitcoin out. I went through one DEX and Moonbeam. I went through Intela. It worked. This is great. This made my day. That's the gratification. So actually, having people use the product and having people like what your doing and actually
+
Alexei
+giving you feedback and taking the time to say, oh, okay, I like this, but this was bad, can you fix this? So I think, yeah, I mean, that's the biggest gratification that I think you can get as a founder is people actually using this stuff and actually saying, hey, I liked it, or look, I liked this, but I didn't like that. Even if they say, look, it's shit, I like the idea, but you're doing a bad job, still, you know, they've tried it, I know I need to improve. So I think this is really like what makes it interesting.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Absolutely.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Absolutely, I understand totally what you mean to be honest. And last one, dead or alive, real or made up, a character, a person, a writer, a developer, an inventor, doesn't matter. A person that again, dead or alive, invented or not invented that influences you or has influenced you in the past or a character.
+
Alexei
+Who is this tough?
+
Alexei
+So I mean, for me, it was probably my, but it's not a famous person, right? I mean, it was my grandfather. So he was a researcher back in the Soviet Union and everything. And like he would always, so one thing he'd always say, right? And I think that really influenced a lot of like the way that I kind of approach things. You can have the smartest idea, the best product, but if you can explain it to people and explain why it works and why it's better, and also you can phrase it in a way that it can stand the test of time
+
Alexei
+smarter minds can look at it and find improvements, then you're never going to make it. And I think this kind of, this approach of, you know, like you can be this, you can think you're super smart, you're the best idea. And I know a lot of people that, you know, they don't want to talk about it and they're very secretive and they can't explain what they're doing. And if you can't explain what you're doing, it's never going to get built. It's never going to reach public. And if you want to hear something, I guess, more on the,
+
Alexei
+I guess fanboy stuff or like who I really like in crypto Twitter. I think like right now, like I think that also has influenced me recently is Udi Werthammer and Eric Wall doing this Bitcoin order NFT thing. Well, everybody was, you know, trying to, you know, hype and like sell, like do like NFT drops and make money. What they did is basically they created this program where you like, it's a wizard school, like where you have to sign up and you basically do challenges and you learn about Bitcoin. And then you could get one of those NFTs and they did it very, in a very smart way. And they, you know,
+
their influence to get people to learn more about Bitcoin. I hope I don't regret saying that. I hope they don't mess it up. But so far, this has been really cool to see actually, Hey, you know, people in crypto are not only in for the gains. I mean, probably you never know, right? And maybe they don't have to anymore, but still, you know, standing up and spending your time to increase adoption and just, you know, education and not getting any monetary value out of it. At least not imminently. I think that's cool. And I think that for me also kind of, I'd like to do something like that
+
as well.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I like both answers. I like the grandfather answer more, to be honest, but just saying. Alexei, thank you very, very, very much for your time. And it's been a huge pleasure. Thank you for your answers and thanks everybody else for listening and tuning in.
+
Alexei
+Thank you so much.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Bye.
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:
Episode name:
+Boris Mann, storage, web applications & decentralization of web3.
+
In this episode, Citizen Cosmos speaks to Boris Mann, co-founder at Fission nodes, building protocols for the future of the Internet and web3.
+Boris shares his passion for the use of content addressing as a potential solution to storage on web3. If you do not know what content addressing is, I would suggest
+listening to the podcast for the concise and elegant manner in which it is explained.
+Boris also delves into what he believes the future of the internet is and how we can get there.
+During the Blitz, Boris reveals his motivations for crusading for user privacy and social responsibility.
+
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Good space-time y'all. In this episode of The Citizen Cosmos podcast, I speak with Boris Mann from Fission Codes. Powering hub decentralized web applications. We discuss the future of Web 3 marketing, the steps needed to get away from Web 2 and where we are on our Web 3 journey. We also talked about interoperability, DID's, decentralized storage and the pros and cons of IPFS.
+
Boris
+IPFS is awesome, works everywhere in many ways. Content addressing has won and continues to win, in really interesting ways. It's a commons network. It's best effort. People say, "That's terrible. What if it goes away?" And I say the flipside, "Literally any piece of content that any human on the planet cares about, they can keep it online themselves effectively for free, effectively forever."
+
+
Boris
+I think we're in a really tough spot in this Web 2 ad supported world, where a lot of people in the world have been trained that everything on the Internet is free. They start needing to think about how they help themselves, their users, their partners, their friends, their countries, their regions, do stuff. That's the part that we need to start making 100% the part of Web 3.
+
Boris
+I will advocate and shill for content addressing.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Before we rocket off into our next episode. Here are some news from the sponsor of this episode Cyber Congress DOA , the foundation has started its delegation's policy for validators on the Bostrom Blockchain, and the Space Pussy Network was launched with 96% of its supply to be dropped to various cosmos ecosystem chains.
+
Hi everyone. Welcome to another episode of Citizen Cosmos podcast.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I have with me Boris Mann from Fission today on the show. Boris Hi, welcome to the show.
+
Boris
+Hello, Thanks for having me.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Do you want to first of all, introduce yourself and tell us about what you do exactly?
+
Boris
+Sure. Absolutely. So I'm the founder and CEO of Fission. What Fission is doing is building a full edge computing stack of identity data and compute, to equip front end developers with the stack that lets them build these edge applications, all on top of ipfs and content addressing. We've been doing that since 2019. I have a long history of being involved in open source, and so we believe what we're doing is very important to basically empower more user privacy and encryption and make it easier for devs to do the hard things like implement those right from the beginning when building an application.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Yeah, that is actually a lot of the things we connect to. Obviously, open source, content addressing and trying to make developers life easier. I guess it's not an easy task that you have there, especially in a Web 3 world. How do you find it so far? The task?
+
Boris
+Well, I think my co-founder, Brooklyn Zelenka and I, we did some core work with Ethereum. I helped run some of the early Ethereum Magicians Unconferences, helped make the Three Magicians Discourse Forum a place for discussion, and Brook ended up doing poor work on the Ethereum Virtual Machine. What we found, is obviously a lot of these things with smart contracts and blockchains has lots of new things that you have to learn, not just new things to learn, but that are themselves just in the process of being built and evolving, so new for everyone.
+
Boris
+So everyone starting on the ground floor. What we found is that a lot of the time, a lot of the challenges came with the regular Web 2 stuff. It's too hard to build a full stack application. As a developer, you have to become the full stack developer to build full applications. So while blockchains and similar systems add a sort of back end as a service, there's still all of these other components.
+
Boris
+And so what we realized is that perhaps there was a way to use these distributed systems and cryptography and content addressing to make these things easier, so that developers wouldn't have to end up running Ruby on Rails or Python or Node.js server, which sort of defeats the purpose of having a decentralized back end. And I'd say generally, yes, this is a hard task, a big step, a task of doing things differently, but also that it's important that we have these things as components, when in comparison we look at the three American corporations that run the major hyper clouds and say maybe we want some edge computing to be run more broadly than just those three companies.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+That is something that is like music to my ears, man. Seriously, because I have been in this field for a long time and I think unfortunately, a lot of projects, developers, they really don't make the distinguish between Web 2 and Web 3 stack, and a lot of them assume that by building certain something that they can label it as Web 3.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And very often as we have seen, that is not the case. And very often, it leads to really big problems in the industry and misleads where people take it. In your personal opinion, do you think that today what we label as Web 3 or call Web three, I mean, you mentioned yourself, it's very difficult to create that stack. How far away do you think we are on our journey as Web 3, to really become Web 3 and not Web 3 dependent on Web 2?
+
Boris
+So I was around in building software in the transition, open source software, and then in the transition from Web 1 to Web 2. And I remember at a certain point, a lot of people really hating on the term Web 2, in part because it had been captured. There was a Web 2 conference in San Francisco that I remember, that I think tickets were $2,000 and I was in San Francisco at the time.
+
Boris
+So I just hung out in the lobby outside of where the paid area was. And and so we hung out with some of our friends, I think Web 3, unfortunately, I think it's something important for us to address. I ended up choosing to use that term. I believe that edge computing, which is where Fission focuses, is a superset of just blockchain technologies, distributed systems, cryptography, content addressing. These are computer science and programing language primitives.
+
Boris
+They're not owned by anyone, and it should be a kind of purity test of Are you web three enough? So in some ways we have to go back and say, "What do we mean by this? And so how far along are we in our journey?" Well, we're currently in the journey where a bunch of grifters and various bad actors have made the term Web 3 be, a bad term for many people.
+
Boris
+I don't really know what to do about that other than to showcase good things that are happening. There's a parallel or related movement that, we'll call the label, D Web. And I'd say another related term would be Fediverse, originally meaning activity hub standards. That's happening with Mastodon, there's a lot of people migrating to that.
+
Boris
+But also other P2P systems like Secure Scuttlebutt or Matrix Protocol or the P2P and so on. So lots of words, lots of different directions. Web 3, D Web Fediverse. So in some ways I think that we have to go back to first principles and say what we mean by these things. Let's make it so that we have portable identifiers.
+
Boris
+DID's is one of the things that Fission focuses on, that's not just blockchain accounts. Let's focus on user privacy. Most blockchain systems are completely transparent. You see every single transaction and every single action you take can be fully correlated. That's bad. It's really bad and we just accept it as normal, right? And so we need to work on some of those things.
+
Boris
+So what Fission is doing is, it's focusing on building a stack that is an edge computing stack, that can address Web 2 blockchain, but also Web 3. If you want to add encrypted data, you can include some of the stacks and standards that we built on top of IPFS. If you want to have actions that happen off chain, which we do, the entire web is off chain if you think about it.
+
Boris
+So I think we need to have a more nuanced approach to some of these things. I'd like to see a focus on user owned data. So many people in the blockchain centric space are like, I have my account, so I own every single one of those transactions that I made on there. Not wrong based on cryptographic principles and everything else like that, but it's still far away and usually the user doesn't cache that stuff locally.
+So things like, Lite clients are going to be interesting to me. But to more correctly answer your question and shop for a moment rather than just monologuing, I think we've made really good progress. I think right now when you're interviewing me, we're ten days, two weeks into this amazing flourishing of people looking past Twitter and saying, "Maybe I do want to join a shared server and move onto social media that is run by small servers powered by Mastodon or Pleroma or other activitypub software.
+
Boris
+And I think that's a really exciting turning point, that I personally haven't seen since the early 2000.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+A lot of things resonate there because, I'm making notes as we go, as I usually do, and I don't know which way to go because a lot of the things you mentioned, I'm like, I need to get that. I'm going to try. I'm going to try. So first of all, about terms and I mean, I can go further.
+There is the term metaverse, which is a synonym for the Internet, in my opinion, being sold under a crazy source of, I don't even know what source it is. But that is one thing, you know, that is crazy thing. But one thing I did want to get more into is that you mentioned the whole case with Twitter and Mastodon and the centralized social service thing, social networking. It is interesting because I have partially as a project and me personally, we have worked very closely with a project that is working also with content addressing and creating a distributed model of communication, but not not talking about that. What I do want to mention is that what I have personally found when I was trying to work with the guys and what we are still finding very hard and this is something I've seen in your blog, is about marketing decentralization that people were completely unready and just really, not wanting to use that because it's simply doesn't matter if it's decentralized, they don't care.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It doesn't matter if nobody owns your data that you own all the data. People just do not want to simply touch things, they don't want to touch. They don't want to go beyond their, and I'm really sorry, apologies to say that to everybody, but beyond the responsibility bubble. So the question is, how do we proceed on with marketing?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And I'm going to put a label on it, but how do you proceed on with explaining to everybody that what we are labeling here as Web 3, that it's not a bad thing, that, yes, there is going to be some responsibility, there is going to be some differences, but in the long term, this is what's going to benefit you.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+This is what's going to help those companies, those big three companies, five companies, stop from using you to their own desires as they intend. So the question is very long term resume, how do we go on about marketing? And this is something I've seen in your blog that I would love to hear more from your opinion here.
+
Boris
+Sure. First of all, walk the talk. How many Web 3 companies published to Medium without even bothering to map their own domain to it? You can't even be bothered to do it yourself. So, I think that's the start. Walk the talk in those sorts of ways. From my long involvement with open source. One of the phrases that I like to say is when I got started in open source in the early 2000, it was still a radical act. It isn't anymore today, and it leads to , a lot of developers, not really engaging with it in a certain way. Some of this is just simply, how do we work together, how do we pool effort? There are a lot of financial incentives for everybody to build their own thing, but for the long term, what you really want is high quality standards and implementations that have a diverse set of maintenance and contributions over time.
+
Boris
+So I would also ask, how many of your upstream opensource dependencies are you supporting? If you're not supporting them, why not? So I think a lot of thisis movement building, is what it comes down to. Movement building takes a long time. To the point of marketing, you can't just keep telling people well in the long term it's the right thing to do. And that applies to open source software as well. What are some things that you can get immediately, that are different, that enables different things? I hear a number of projects who talk about thingslike banking the unbanked. I'm like, that's amazing. That's an amazing focus.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I was just making a comment. I wasn't gonna interrupt you, but I was saying, Let's do the opposite. Let's unbanked the banked and not bank the unbanked.
+
Boris
+Oh, that's a great.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Let's, do the opposite.
+
Boris
+Unbanked the the banked. Yeah.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I love that is what we need to do. Not bank the unbanked. Let's not give them banking, they don't need it. They need to unbank the banked, But I'm sorry to interrupt you. Sorry.
+
Boris
+No, not at all.It's fantastic. Let's at least get some fun clips out of this, right. So I'm like, that's amazing. Are you spending some time on the ground in Southeast Asia or Africa or parts of South America or other places like this? I think that's another thing that I'd like to see more of. When I was getting started with open source since the early 2000 and frankly, the vast majority of people participating in open source were young white males in North America and Western Europe, because also those were the areas of the world that were online, who had high speed Internet at the very beginning that was connected and so on.
+
Boris
+Early 2000, where barely out of the dial up times at that point. And so today we really do have the whole world online. So we have a responsibility to get more people involved in different ways and then really address local problems, right. We have members on our team in Africa who don't have stable home Internet. They actually use a mobile hotspot to connect, and that's fairly common. So can we use edge applications and IPFS to message and share data, peer to peer? So those are the sorts of things that I'd want to be looking for. Yes, it's incredibly hard, but a lot of the Web 3 space is developers sitting in front of a laptop or desktop with a large professional desktop operating system, building applications in fullscreen.
+
Boris
+If your stuff doesn't work on mobile and you only can use it with a browser extension, you're not building for the whole world.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I would go absolutely further here. You know, you're saying build it in fullscreen. We'd be lucky if some people test on certain, like safari even. That don't bother you know. I'm not an Apple user myself but still Jesus at least, Jesus, has got nothing to do with it. Test him as well. Definitely.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+But exactly. This is ridiculous. It's a lot of people when you start to talk to people more and more and I have been myself down that road, I have been in Middle East, I have been living the Middle East, I've been in Asia, living in Asia, in Africa. And you see those things. This is a different world. And you know, when you're born today, a white male in Europe, or in the States, you're a very lucky person, to be honest.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+You're like in the 5%, if not less. And people just really don't want to see beyond that. They forget the 80-20 parroted that the 80 and the people forget that it applies to everything, not just to finance. It's interesting.
+
Boris
+Yeah. And I think I can rant a lot on mobile. I was onboarding people and explaining what was happening with blockchains, and there's this interesting stuff that was happening and I was onboarding people initially with Dogecoin. There's a good app on iOS and I'd get people to download an Android or iOS wallet and I'd send them. I get them to set up a wallet and I'd send them some Dogecoin and I onboarded tons of people in person.
+
Boris
+And then when I started working with Etherium, I created my own Boris coin. Just as an example, same thing, and I would get people to download a wallet at the time, Trust Wallet, when it was an open source project before it got purchased by Binance, really great mobile, open source on iOS and Android, and I'd get them right there, to do that.
+
Boris
+And of course, a lot of people who were deep into crypto were like, I don't have a wallet on my phone. Again, this is how people primarily out of the world, is they have a mobile phone as their one and only computing device, that is the majority of the planet. And so we have to practice these things. So again, what is the immediate utility?
+
Boris
+And in fact there's some interesting surprise and delight that you could do when you start to understand the system. You could do some of these things with a regular website or a database or so on, but it starts to click after a while where it's like, Oh, you have this QR code and you can scan something and I could pass you something back and forth. How do you create Boris coin? Why does it have your face on it? And I've been doing that, you know, I've onboarded three or 400 people in person to encourage them to create a wallet on mobile. So I think those are the sorts of things, again, okay, now that we're out in the real world with a public private key pair on a secure operating system, that is biometrically locked, that can backup encrypted to cloud services. Frankly, that's better than a desktop with a browser extension.
+
Boris
+And I'm really excited my friend Pedro, building Wallet Connect. That of course, connects those phone wallets to browsers and lots of other things as well. Right. We've come a long way and what are we going to do with it?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I think that is actually the biggest question. But this is interesting that you say that because the next question I have for you, you know, I like to go on projects', websites. I like to think of myself as a little bit of a product person. And so one of the things I do is I go on to project websites and one of the first things, what they say too, I'm looking at one of some of the first things they say and like you said, what are we going to do with it?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And this is the question exactly. So the Fission website says building protocols for the future of the Internet. What is the future? What future is the correct one? How do we know that it's correct? And where is that future?
+
Boris
+Yeah, great question. So I think we're a bit of a funny company and we are ultimately one of the core things that we do right now. We're a protocol engineering team. So I talk to you about building this edge app stack of identity data compute on top of IPFS. We really think that content addressing is huge, unlike location based addressing. Right now, If you run a server at example dot com, no one else can help you host example dot com. Let's say an actual file, example dot com slash forest dor jpeg. No one else can help host that file. They could download it and they can put it on their own server. My server dot com slash forest dot jpeg, but we don't know it's the same one.
+
Boris
+In fact, it doesn't share between the two. And once you put content, whether it's an app or files or data or something that's encrypted onto content addressing, amazing. We do all sorts of different interesting caching. So if you have a podcast that I really like, I can help keep it online. I know that that podcast hasn't been edited because it has a unique content address and I can save it, literally even just on my desktop or on my phone.
+
Boris
+And then when people around me are requesting it, I'm helping keep it online. That's this really nice commons network of IPFS. However, in practically leaning in and and trying to use IPFS for apps for an entire apps and for read right of IPFS and adding that, we found that the IPFS protocol itself still needed work, so we ended up getting sucked in and rather than just working on our dev tool stack, we went on a multi-year journey of working with extended IPFS and file point ecosystems, in improving the protocol itself.
+
Boris
+So that's kind of what we mean by that. Brooklyn's Zelenka my co-founder and CTO, she developed UCAN, which is decentralized off protocol that's getting some really good adoption. All of these things we end up developing is open standards. One of the downsides of IPFS was that everything was made public, so Brook developed the web native file system IFS, which is a way for users, apps and servers to have encrypted data on top of IPFS in a turnkey way.
+
Boris
+And so what is the future of the Internet? I think part of it is having things more user centric, having portable data, having something that's content address. That means you could do everything from mobile, to servers, to embedded devices and everything else like that. In a way that is a really interesting open way, including self verifying data. And a lot of things need to be secured by cryptographic tokens and signing in different ways.
+
Boris
+So killing the password. I think also today that user data has become a toxic asset. If you are running a service that has lots of user data, you can get hacked and if you don't keep it encrypted, it can get stolen. So I think it's important for more and more data to be end to end encrypted and encrypted at rest.
+
Boris
+I sometimes joke and I say that if Apple of Apple's iCloud and their system in general was open source, then Fission wouldn't have to build what it's building, right? That mode where instead of everything going through separate servers, you've got your own devices at the edge, you've got local computation doing things like machine learning and other things like that and things being fully encrypted.
+
Boris
+And so what we want to do is both build protocols and that needs standards. So it's not just us, it's not just a chunk of open source code. It's one level more important than open source code, which is the spec. So multiple people can implement it in multiple different programing languages and know that they have interoperable and then use those building blocks to build these more user Protecting applications and services. That's where we're heading.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I like this future and hopefully it doesn't contain the word on chain status, because it's one of the biggest scams right now, on chain. You're on chain. What? I mean, I'm on chain. I've already been on chain all my life, and the computers are connected. Sorry, I'm going in on a different thing. I do want to talk a little bit about storage and about the IDs.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+But you mentioned the word interoperability. And of course, you know, having such a name is Citizen Cosmos. I cannot help to ask, are you guys currently ,I know you are because of been on your GitHub, but let's make it public or let's talk about it. Are you guys at all building anything for the Cosmos ecosystem? Are you currently working just with Etherium?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Well, of course not, because we also are working with IPFS, which means you're kind of working with anything that wants to store anything, which means you are working with Cosmos. But I'll shut up and let you answer. Sorry.
+
Boris
+So we're really focusing on stack right at the edge, and it composes well with any blockchain. So we've done a proof of concept that we call Wallet Off, where people can use existing blockchain what's on any chain to use their existing keys as a DID. And then we pair that with an encrypted winifest file system on IPFS. We haven't done this yet for any Cosmos based chains.
+
Boris
+Theoretically, parts of this should work with the EVMOS and other chains that include an EVM. This is a public call. All of our stuff is open source. We'd love to see some proof of concepts of doing that. We also work with the Chain Agnostic Standards Alliance, CASA. That's something I was involved with with the very beginning with Pedro from Wallet Connect and now Wigi from the Ethereum Foundation to not have to reinvent the wheel.
+
Boris
+We're having a discussion with Brave and their built in wallet . Met with the Metamask team and others on on standards for using wallets and the public private keys there, to the proper way to encrypt and decrypt data in a standardized way. So we're always working on those sorts of things. And then personally, just having come back from Lisbon, IPFS Camp Protocol Labs Summit of Filecoin Lisbon, lots of things happening there.
+
Boris
+We think Filecoin is unique. So IPFS is awesome, works everywhere, in many ways. Content addressing has won and continues to win it really interesting ways. It's a commons network. It's best effort. People say, "That's terrible. What if it goes away?" And I say the flip side, "Literally any piece of content that any human on the planet cares about, they can keep it online themselves effectively for free, effectively forever." That's a really good use case. Incentivized Persistence. Paying for persistence is also very important and Filecoin being a chain that has focused on that is great. And the next challenge is interacting with lots of other systems of all kinds. So one of the things that we kicked off is a new working group. There's going to be a Filecoin interchain and bridge working group.
+
Boris
+I know where there were some early discussions already of Cosmos Ecosystem as one of the first places to bridge into. That's really where I see this work. Happy to talk more about this, come see us come check out our code and our stuff composes really, really nicely with any sort of chain.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I think I'm definitely going to try and get the cyber team to look at what you do, and I suggest you guys look at them because they were. Yes, I'm a bit biased, but they were the first Cosmos chain to work with IPFS three or four years ago already, and they use IPFS as basically the heart of the system.
+
Boris
+Amazing.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+That's all built on that. So yeah, I think you guys might have a lot of... it's completely open source. So maybe there are some libraries that you use then I'll definitely do the same thing for them. Talking though, about file coding and about storage. DID's is another topic I would love to talk about, but for a second about file coding and storage. So there is the devil's advocate thing and there's the good thing, the devil's advocate thing, which I would also love to hear your opinion is that I would like to separate, IPFS and Filecoin, right? I think it's like IPFS is a cool thing in there is Filecoin with a little bit of, well, I don't know, there is questions to be asked and there's questions to be answered and this is actually a question to you, not to me. Do you think that if Filecoin would go away tomorrow, including the foundation and the money the foundation has, would IPFS still be around considering what it is?
+
Boris
+Yeah, it's commons network. It literally can't go away at this point. So a lot of people point at it as saying that as a downside. Oh well how do you know it's going to stay online? Well, how do you know a website is going to stay online? It's the same. Someone has to do work, possibly pay for resources to keep things online, keep things fast and everything else like that.
+
Boris
+I think we're in a really tough spot in this Web 2 ad supported world, where a lot of people in the world have been trained that everything on the Internet is free. And there's two parts to this. One is let's use a completely made up example, a JPEG on the Internet. It doesn't cost anything. It doesn't hurt anyone if you copy those bits.
+
Boris
+Amazing, abundance. Creative commons licensing, a bunch of other things like this that allows for reuse and mixing, it doesn't cost anything. That's amazing. That's a fantastic place, that we should have this abundance mindset around it. Same thing with open source code. The bits of code that you have checked in the GitHub repository, download it, make a copy.
+
Boris
+It doesn't hurt, doesn't subtract from that. But, at scale this does cost a lot. And in fact the interesting thing is that bandwidth, if you have some services at at Amazon and you're using S3 and S3 was the first service that Amazon launched. I launched some Drupal hosting services in the early days in 2005. So this was about 18 months before Amazon launched S3 or any other AWS services.
+
Boris
+So we had to run a lot of bare metal or vps's and do all that stuff ourselves, and it was a lot harder. But anyway, with Amazon S3, you pay a relatively small amount for storage and the cost for bandwidth is five X that. I actually had someone approached me. They're were like, Oh, Fission, you know, we're trying to check out at IPFS.
+
Boris
+Really interesting things. You know, we're hosting some stuff on vsekl right now, but we got a bandwidth bill for $1,000 last month. I'm like, Yeah, can IPFS make that cheaper? I'm like, Probably not. It depends on the use case and a bunch of other things like that.There's some really interesting deduplication use places for IPFS, but if you need to persistently keep something online, whether it's IPFS or a commercial hosting service like those things vsel.
+You still going to have to pay for bandwidth in some ways, unless you and if you want it to be fast, you may need to do some caching and that's either running stuff yourself or paying someone to run it. And this comes down to I'll do the open source thing again, right? So the code is free. If you file an issue, there's only so many maintainers with only so much time. Being in the community writing documents and troubleshooting things, maintaining it, right?
+
Boris
+If you build something in JavaScript approximately a week later, if you have any sort of normal dependencies, you'll need to update five different dependencies. And that's work that has to be done by someone. I think that's something to keep in mind generally that protocols like IPFS are not going to go away and they give us the capabilities to work on a commons network together.
+
Boris
+But people shouldn't be surprised if they start needing to think about how they help themselves, their users, their partners, their friends, their countries, the regions, do stuff. That's the part that we need to start making 100% the part of Web 3. Not the lip service part, but saying a responsibility to work together with others to maintain the things that are important.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I think that people really underestimate how much, myself included.,I think, to be honest, until a certain point in my life, how much of a big a role communication is in everything. Whether it's money, whether it's religion, whether it's software, whether it's anything in relationships, it's all communication. And when we have a middleman there, then we shouldn't be surprised that something doesn't go our way.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+There's a middleman there, that has a subjective opinion. Whether it's God or whether it's somebody, an administrator on a server, it's still a middleman. So...
+
Boris
+Exactly. And I wanted to bridge it a little toFilecoin. So we can say things like storage is effectively free, asterix. We have terabytes on our local machines. We've terabytes on our phone and other things like that. But the people time for maintaining servers and services and code, that's not free. And then if you scale it up, if you say I need to keep around petabytes of climate data, okay. Okay, Now we're talking about we need raid arrays and we need servers and we need someone has to do the work and oh, you know what? It's really important data. So we should probably make sure that we have at least one offsite backup. That's somewhere else as well. That's work, right? We've had this long phrase where we considered the cloud to be this thing over the air that someone else takes care of.
+
Boris
+And you could do that. There's a bunch of people that will pay you services that you pay for, for those things. So I see Filecoin, that let's make sure this is backed up in three locations and there is a marketplace where multiple providers can say, I have a good data center and I'll properly back it up and all that stuff. Something like that, if that layer needs to exist, which is why Fission chose to work with Filecoin.
+
Boris
+Basically, if Filecoin didn't exist, it's the exact sort of thing that we would work on building. And whether it's IPFS or Filecoin, I think that's the other thing is we looked at it and of course one or two years ago, I'd be on here shilling Fissioncoin, and Fissioncoin was going to solve storage and a lot of the stuff doesn't work very well yet.
+
Boris
+So where are we in our journey? We're in our journey that we need to pick some solutions that are going to work, that are going to survive into the future. And we need to make them better and we need to keep solving people's problems. And whether it's fiat dollars or tokens, we need to pay for services, so that other people keep servers on and files online.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I guess this was my initial question and I might have asked i t a little bit wrong, but what I was trying to get at is exactly the right word is not whether if Filecoin will go and IPFS will disappear, but more as what if there will be no market that will reward that work? Will it still? I mean, of course something else will be invented.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+That is the obvious answer. And this is how markets work and live. So I guess, yeah, the question you already already answered.
+
Boris
+So yeah, you could persist IPFS in a number of different ways. One of those things is that you could, Fission essentially has had an extremely long extended beta where we persist things for people that have accounts on our system and we run on a number of different services, including AWS and there's people that you could pay a regular style subscription to get persistence as well.
+
Boris
+So I think that's the important thing for protocols, is that you can mix and match these things. I think it's really interesting and important to not just have, once you have open protocols and markets around things like storage for Filecoin, then you can have people who take a whole different set of approaches. Some people might build a commercial offering for enterprise for self-driving cars.
+
Boris
+I think they do something. I think I was reading four terabytes of data, per day in telemetry and sensor readings. And again, imagine building an offering just for that data. Yeah, there's a great business there, and if for that business using Filecoin or some other decentralized storage is a good fit and works for them, and just because it's decentralized isn't going to make it win.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It's another topic, I think a huge hot topic for discussion of decentralization and philosophy and blockchain are not the same thing and people really need to get to that. While still we on the topic of storage, one last question, I guess on storage, I have seen several different solutions so far into storage and whether it's Storj or a Sia or a Blue Zelle or Zero Chain or IPFS or whatever, I'm trying to look for the right word not to offend anyone here, but there is always something like economics and Filecoin or like nothing is working in Storj.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+There's always something out there that is I mean, there is I don't know if you're familiar with CKB Nervos Network, and I guess that is a very elegant solution that I've seen. But still, it's not exactly storage. It's just an interesting solution to what they're building. But it's an independent silo, I guess, in terms of what they are doing now.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+So the question is, isn't this the most simple solution here? I mean, the question is what would be the most simple solution? But I'm going to try to give an example of what comes to my mind as a simple is instead of making decentralized computation machines, why not also make decentralized disks, machines? You know, we already runingblockchains machines which make decentralized, distributed computations.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Why not distribute the storage as well? Why not, each machine is just a hard drive, you know, why not? It sounds simple, but so the question is like, which way do you think we should go? Or should we just stay right now with the Commons network that we have with IPFS and everybody should really chip in and develop that.
+
Boris
+Why not both? So I think a bunch of people are going to, I will advocate and shill for content addressing. Content addressing is amazing. I'm going to keep saying this. It has a way for us to any file in the universe, has a hash, has a content address that's self verifying, and it won't change. That's amazing. And as an attribute it means you can do some really, really interesting caching and transmission, in different ways.
+
Boris
+So that's the promise basically of some of these things. So some of this is the long steady work of standards and any interop where all of the systems that you mentioned could expose their persisted content as the content address. And then all of a sudden we can have a number of different... we can come together and know that the content address is unique, how we fetch it, whether we have permission to fetch it, whether because of the type of account we have, it might be faster or slower to fetch such a thing.
+
Boris
+All of those things can be layered on top in different ways, but we know that this content address is the address of that asset, that media, that content, whatever it is, and wecan go to multiple different places and get it. We don't really have that today at that layer. So that's why I try and open people's minds is that, oh yeah, this is possible.
+
Boris
+There is a way you can see if you can fetch that thing. And the answer might be, I don't have it. You need to find it somewhere else or it's permissioned or other things like that. So I think that ultimately that's one of those pieces that come together. And it's very important for me because even without export formats or anything else like that for the user, if their data is not tightly coupled to a server address, a location address, if it instead is used as a content address, that already means that systems that understand content addressing, that data will just work with those systems.
+
Boris
+So again, that sidesteps the whole question of use chain X use company Y, and be like, how do you speak content addressing?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I definitely agree, to be honest, was just like a question to go further. Start with saving snapshots in IPFS blockchain snapshots, because I think that is one thing that is really missing. Another thing is every thought has a hash, Jesus, everything has a hash. Jesus has a hash probably and you know, again, I'm sorry to offend all the religious guys out there, but it'strue, you know, every thought has a hash and we can connect it all into the big brain and work together with it.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Quick question on the DIDs before we resume. I had an interesting podcast guest. We had a very fascinating conversation. It was about a year ago, I would assume, and it had a very certain approach to the DIDs and into the way they deal with it. And one question that I would like to ask you that I asked them is, isn't the best kind of the DIDs just a private and a public key pair?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And that kind of solves pretty much everything out there. Do we need anything beyond that?
+
Boris
+These are some of the areas where we bridge to different standards in different ways. So DIDs are a recommendation now from the W3C, which works on web standards. The stuff that Fission works on goes beyond the web, at the network layer and other layers. So we look at and use standards when we can, when it makes sense, when it fits our requirements.
+
Boris
+So for example, the web crypto API is built into every browser, including mobile browsers and what the web native stack, the SDK that the developers can use from us today uses by default out of the box. So there's a non exportable private key in your browser that web crypto API, but not in userspace were it can stolen, but not exportable.
+
Boris
+So every browser has that. So Mobile Safari or Brave on your desktop. All of these things support the web crypto API. And so we use that to derive a DID from just that public private key pair. So DID Key. I think there's over 200 different DID types. A lot of people think about identity and authentication services and they say, if I could charge just a few cents for every identity in the world, I will make a lot of money.
+
Boris
+So there's a lot of motivation to do a number of different DIDs. And there's the XQCD comic with lots of different standards and so on. We find it useful to have a decentralized identifier, a decentralized identifier, not identity. Your browser is not you. Especially we have browsers on multiple same, you have multiple identifiers. Right? That and that's not even talking about username or anything else like that.
+
Boris
+Blockchain space unfortunately has over focused on, I use the same goddam public private key pare for every single app and then if it's compatible I cross chains and use it again for every single app. Thus opening. We've done a terrible job of advocating for the user here and it's going to have to evolve beyond that. We have to have some privacy in there.
+
Boris
+So DID Key is a good starting point. It's pretty bare and you don't really know what you're getting, so there's not many constraints on it. DID PKH is one that works across chains and generally you should be able to use any blockchain key type and derive an address that you can then use DID PKH. I think there's some other useful ones.
+
Boris
+I don't have the whole list in front of me. There's some web based stuff that have some tradeoffs of ease of use versus possibly people hosting stuff for you and another stuff like that. But ultimately reusable identifiers controlled by the user that they can take with them, is how you should think about it. And of some of the existing DID work has been around very large enterprising systems.
+
Boris
+What Fission has worked on, is running code and rough consensus. That's the phrase from the ITF of like this should be something that should be drop in simple that frontend developers can just use to create accounts for their users. A hackathon right? If we don't get that right, if the first step is run a giant Java server in a corporate data center, you're not going to get adoption, because it's going to be too hard. And we'll see where the rest of the 200 list of the DID types end up.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I guess the answer here is basically usability and privacy, right? This is why it's not the point, you need usability and privacy. By the way, talking about a person who wanted to give a couple of cents their identity, some comes to mind here. You know, maybe that's the way is giving 8 billion back to the world. Now I'm talking about from FTX of course but yeah a bad joke. I know, bad joke. Boris. I still have a lot of questions to ask, but to resume, I'm going to do a quick blitz that we do with every guest podcasts and their abilities and then blitz. Can you plural the word blitz? God knows.
+
Boris
+Sure.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Give me three projects, outside of the top 20 preferably. So not Filecoin and Etherium and Bitcoin that you are interested in terms of what they do technologically these days, watching them and watching what they're building.
+
Boris
+Yeah, I met the team at the KOII Network. They're doing some very interesting things and lots of people, even running servers at home. So I think there's some interesting stuff that they are doing, KOII dot network. I'm literally just going to list you people that I met in Lisbon, the Function Land team also thinking about some home storage in different ways.
+
Boris
+And then the last one is one that I'm really excited about, that we're going to be doing some more support for, which is Cappy Loon. So Cappy Loon is taking the original Firefox OS and a mobile operating system. It's since been forked called KaiOS and is used heavily in India with tens, hundreds of millions of feature phones in India.
+
Boris
+And so Fabrice from Cappy Loon has in turn forked it. And he's building a mobile Firefox OS called Cappy Loon that includes D Web built in. So things like IPFS out of the box all and I think hardware and open hardware and mobile app stores, that's a whole other battle to fight that you can't really fight head on for a variety of reasons, including user safety.
+
Boris
+You know, those mobile operating systems are in fact quite safe and secure for the average user. But Cappy Loon is very exciting, and I think there's some really interesting things that that might be coming in that direction.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It's a shame we didn't meet in Lisbon because I was also there but we didn't cross pths there. Second question, give me two things on top of your mind right now that motivate you to do what it is you do. And I'm not talking about writing code, I'm talking about Believing in all the values that you've been talking about over the past hour and building what it is you're building, the two daily things that motivate you in your daily life, To do whatever it is you do.
+
Boris
+So I started building in open source that was more around like the basics, getting content online with blogging and CMS platforms like Drupal and WordPress and others, and standards like RSS. I've been blogging for over 20 years and RSS was an amazing entry into that, talking to people all over the world again, which is commonplace today.
+
Boris
+But think of like a cozy group of pen pals around the world that you mayberead three posts a day rather than three posts a second, as we do today. And so that motivation was important for everyone, for individuals to be able to put stuff online and communicate that way directly. And what we've seen is ultimately a lot of those platforms are too complicated to run their security issues.
+
Boris
+The lamp stack architecture means you're running these entire servers and we need to make it ever more simple so that people can communicate directly and share things that they care about and communicate about very important topics. And so in many ways, I'm back because mission wasn't completed the first time around. And I think it's important that we have easy ways for people to communicate to collaborate, to work on things together.
+
Boris
+Sometimes that means facilities for pooling capital together. That other thing has been perhaps made easier by parts of Web 3. For, and now the pause to solve the really hard problems that we have ahead of us. So can we connect in our local community? Can we support and buy local? Can we then connect to other people who are on the other side of the world who are in their own local area, but maybe facing similar challenges?
+
Boris
+And can we share the knowledge and information that we have from code to apps to capital to to anything else to build together? And can we demand more of our local, regional and national governments to act in the same way? Here's a weird thing. In the U.S. lots of information, lots of data is required to be publicly available, that's paid for by government funds. In Canada, where I live, things that are produced by the government are usually by default, covered under King's Copyright. But I literally fucking paid for this. It should be available to the country. So even some of these principles of design, of decentralized systems, of open information, you know, how do we bake these in?
+
Boris
+In a way, you're going to hear me say it again. That protects user privacy, that keeps people from harm. That means collectives of people can work on things and support each other in getting stuff done. If it doesn't fall into those categories.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I just want to say like one more in the belief, the question. But before I say that's one thing, as an Islander, I definitely understand about what it means to connect local communities. And you're talking about just pay for the thing. Well. What surprises me more is that when you have your own land and then you have to get paid to get buried on the cemetery. But wait a second, I have my own land. I want to get buried here. I don't want to go to the cemetery and. No, no, no, no, no. That doesn't work like that. Last question. One person. Does it matter? Developer, writer, philosopher, Bitcoin or not? Crypto guy, medium GitHub account. Twitter doesn't matter. A book. One person you suggest everybody else out there to follow or to read.
+
Boris
+I'm going to say two.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Okay, two is good, two is better.
+
Boris
+Firstly, everyone should read, Ostrom. Elinor Ostrom wrote about Commons and how to sustain Commons. And then the other one is Christine Lemmer-Webber. She is the architect of the activitypub spec. She's done a amazing work around Ocap capabilities model for security. She's got a new nonprofit called The Spritely Institute that is working on doing secure capabilities in a distributed way.
+
Boris
+And I'm really excited to see how her work powers a number of different things. So check out Christine Lemmer-Webber at Sprightly and Read Ostrom.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Boris, thank you very, very much. Of course, the show notes will contain all that and of course all the links to Fission. So thank you very, very much for finding the time to join me. Everybody else, thank you too. Thank you for listening.
+
Boris
+It's been awesome. Thank you very much for the opportunity.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Thanks. Bye.
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:
In this episode, Citizen Cosmos speaks to Phoebe Poon, co-founder of LikeCoin, a decentralized publishing protocol, built on Cosmos SDK.
+Phoebe discusses how the changing social context in our ever-changing world is making Web 3, especially decentralized publishing ever more relevant.
+Phoebe sheds light on broader and lesser publicized use cases for NFT’s as well as giving key advice on how to succeed with a start-up during Crypto Winters.
+She addresses historic preservation in many different forms, potential avenues for monetization and the barriers to user adoption, as well as many other topics.
+
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Good space-time y'all. In this episode of The Citizen Cosmos Podcast, I speak with Phoebe Poon. Founder of Likecoin, an open sourced, decentralized, publishing protocol, built on Cosmos SDK. We discuss storage, publishing, history, social media and Web 3. We also talked about the importance of preservation, the role of the community and surviving Crypto Winters.
+
Phoebe
+Sometimes we need to wait for certain social context to happen, to let the layman or majority of the mass understand why this matter. The mindset of running a start-up is very important.
+
+
Citizen Cosmos
+The most important invention in the world, is history, because it doesn't matter what weapon you have. If you control history, then you control everything else. What if there was no heaven?
+We know we cannot expand too quick, to be lean, and so that's why we can survive a lot of crypto winters.Before we rocket it off into our next episode, here are some news from the sponsor of this episode, Cyber Congress DOA. The foundation has started its delegation's policy for validators on the Bostrom Blockchain, and the Space Pussy Network was launched with 96% of its supply to be dropped to various Cosmos ecosystem chains.
+Hi everybody. Welcome to a new episode of the Citizen Cosmos podcast. I have with me Phoebe today from Likecoin and from Liker Land. Phoebe, hi, welcome to the show. Would you like to introduce yourselves and tell us about everything you do and working on?
+
Phoebe
+Yeah, thanks for having me. Hello, everyone. I'm Phoebe, one of the founding team member of Likecoin, also currently the team of Liker Land. Where we started building around decentralized publishing and work with a lot of media and writers from where we came from, on utilizing blockchain and also decentralized storage to be a better future for publishing.
+We actually started in about 2017 on Ethereum, exploring the idea of reinventing the like, more the monetization part. And then after we have almost complete our whitepaper, we decided to go one step further, to develop our own sovereignty chain, an application specific chain on publishing, on Cosmos in 2019. It feels like very long time ago. But yeah, that was a hell of a ride in Cosmos.
+
Phoebe
+And then now we are in 2022 having our chain connected with a lot of other chain using IBC and serving a lot of our users, especially in Southeast Asia. So yeah, it's a very interesting application specific chain on publishing. I guess in Cosmos, we might be the only one working on this area and vertical right now, and that's how Cosmos works, right?
+
Phoebe
+The Internet of Blockchains serving different kind of vertical in the space. So I'm very happy to be here today to share about what we do.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Nice. Nice. It is a hell of a ride if you think about it. I mean, for crypto, since 2019, even 17, right. This is a couple of dinosaur extinctions, definitely. And I'm not joking around. You know, if you look at all the projects that there have been since then have been reborn, died and never came back.
+It's definitely like a few mass extinctions. So well done on that and we'll definitely talk a little bit about that. First thing is first that I would like to ask you, and this is going to be like a really lame, simple question, but I would love to hear your explanation as somebody who is, like you said yourself, you have spent already so many years working on that. What is the difference for a person out there between media and publishing and decentralized media and decentralized publishing?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+So for somebody out there who's maybe a little bit clueless about what we are all doing over here, maybe has some experience, doesn't matter. But what would you explain to somebody who spent so long working on it? How would you describe the differences?
+
Phoebe
+Yeah. Wow, that’s a great questions to kick off the discussions, because I have a lot of stories to tell about how we educate non crypto people to get into the space. The first thing is majority of the time you are not actually in doubt about the product but actually educating them about the basic of blockchain, one on one.
+
Phoebe
+And majority of the time are actually teaching them how to create a wallet. I think that's the first very funny and fundamental part of being working with a lot of layman users is that before you actually introduce them what Likecoin is or what decentralized publishing is, you need to create wallet and why it matters to you. I think that's the first part where you need a lot of patience to fill the gap between Web 3 and Web 2 world.
+
Phoebe
+So that's the first thing. And I guess the second thing we observe is that we see a transition between at least from 2019 to today, 2022. It is because the social context is a little bit different now. I remember when we first started on Cosmos and start to onboard users using our on WordPress. People are actually very intimidate about creating wallets and all of those stuff going on blockchain or why do we need to store on IPFS.
+
Phoebe
+However, because of where I came from, the social context tell them, Hey, there are actually things that could be disappeared one day, in just one night. Even it could be a 30 years old newspaper, or it could be as simple as your Twitter account or Facebook account that could be deleted in just one night. And you actually spend your entire like ten years of time and effort building all your social graph, writing all your blogs, email all your content.
+
Phoebe
+Some people even craft a lot of good status on their Twitter. You see all the Twitter storm or even on Facebook. And when they experience those situation first-hand, I mean, knowing something could be disappeared. they start to realize what we have been telling them is a solution towards a problem right now. So I guess is a learning for us too is sometimes we need to wait for certain social context to happen, to let the layman or majority of the mass understand why this matter.
+
Phoebe
+That was quite a very remarkable month for us, especially in the past two years, where we see a spike in adoption of what we build. Especially the tools that we have in place. People start to reach out to us instead of us reaching out to them. So I guess this is a very interesting atmosphere and user adoption observation compared to a lot of different projects.
+
Phoebe
+Thirdly, I think is also because a lot of Web 3 projects, they don't really have the right tool to on board layman without technical knowledge. Especially, we work with writers and journalists, meaning the expertise is in writing, meaning they don't have understanding on any turncode work. And so you actually need to prepare a lot of documentation, a lot of tutorial and a lot of walkthrough in person.
+
Phoebe
+That will take a lot more time than getting people on board to any defi projects. They will easily get because they like trading. They already in the atmosphere of being in FX or traditional trading. So when they adopted defi projects it's much more easier. But compared to us, when is the product that merge into Web 2 user flow. It's a little bit hard and you need a lot more workflow. So I will share a little bit, three of these points on the experience that we had.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+This is awesome and I still want to talk a lot more about the experience because it's very interesting to see what the projects have learned over those, the projects that are not there for like half a year but much longer. There is a lot in my opinion, to be learned from you guys and it's awesome. But before we get a little bit more into that, I still want to dig a little bit about the decentralization spectrum that we started to talk about.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And as you were explaining, you mentioned a couple of times, not why, but you mentioned that it matters to change to decentralized publishing. You also said that it will bring a better future. And there was several times where you mentioned something like that. But could you explain why, in your opinion, that future is better? Why does it matter for us to change from the publishing model that we have today in Web 2, to what you guys are proposing and to what blockchain is offering in general?
+
Phoebe
+Yeah, I think I will bring up several aspect of things. The first is to reinforce why I mentioned social context is so important in terms of the understanding or why we need this product nowadays. Today, not before or tomorrow. I think first is, where I came from. A lot of pro-Democrat media actually got shut down in two weeks of time.
+Historical record of 30 years newspaper got wiped out in one night and that's part of where historical preservation or content preservation is one of the important aspect of having publishing on the decentralized manner. I think that's the first thing is very important. And the second is how we can actually improve the current publishing industry, from a sunset era to somewhere individuals can actually participate and have much more ownership and potentially to monetize open content, especially because web two business model isn't really catered for open content.
+
Phoebe
+As you can see, a lot of media actually pursuing a paywall model or even a subscription model that actually isn't really working so well. And most importantly is, if media set up a paywall for information that meant to be distributed, much more wider, much more broader. So that important truth of some sort of social aspect that need to deliver is actually deterring them from doing so because of paywall.
+
Phoebe
+So meaning, people who not afford to pay, or who cannot access are unable to access all this important content. So I think for our vision is there should be a way for open content to be monetized and also to have a better way to preserve them as of history record. And also most importantly, there's a way to improve the content integrity of that particular content.
+
Phoebe
+I think this is quite important when you look back into history or also because of the social context that we have. And if you read the book of Animal Farm, you know, social content integrity actually important when it come back to be a reference point of information. Where you actually want to have a place, you can actually fact check it.
+
Phoebe
+You can use some certain timestamp to proven some kind of work and all this need to be done or is a better way to be done in a decentralized manner. So I think in combined there are three key words that I would say why do we need decentralized publishing? One is content integrity, second is content preservation and also thirdly is how open content could look for a better business model and monetization model, not just for the creator themselves, but also how they actually build community around their fan base and also how they actually sustain a better content quality, in terms of the ecosystem.
+
Phoebe
+When you think about it, currently there are a lot of media model actually relying on advertising, and then I'm sure a lot of people already realize is the sole business model is relying on advertising, meaning whoever can pay you more, the more content you would create around those. I mean, you will see a lot more same content for the people who can pay, however, for quality content that actually not attracting advertising will have less presence in the internet.
+
Phoebe
+At the end of day, humankind would be less too exposed to quality content. That means that it will become a more commercialized content filling in our daily lives. So I guess that would be leading to a more bigger problem that we see in the long run. So that's why I think it's very important to explore how Web 3 can empower all this kind of not just business model, but different kind of how content should be published and how content should be owned and how content should be distributed.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Of course, I think it was totally agree with everything you said. I think it was Isaac Asimov, who said the most important invention in the world, is history, because it doesn't matter what weapon you have. If you control history, then you control everything else, including religion and including any other form of anything else. So preservation, definitely.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I think one of the most important things and on a note of preservation, actually, I would love to hear, if you don't mind, your opinion, I think it's a big discussion of the history of when and how did we progress in terms of media and from going from newspapers to distributed media to decentralized media. Do you think that that progression, you know, from The New York Times or the Sunday Times, The London Times, whatever, being number one source of information for the whole world, has that changed. Are things like platforms that allow you to do like Likecoin, like Mirror, so on and so forth, has that really changed the way we as humans, as the end user, perceive information and where we take our content from? Or is that still a progress that is still going to be going on for many, many years to come?
+
Phoebe
+I definitely see it is still evolving, especially from what you said. Editorial generated content, right, New York Times, BBC, CNN, Wall Street Journal, they're all majority of them are editorial generated content, which is, I would say, the Gen 1 of how media started. And they still hold a lot of centralized power in terms of influence and impact.
+
Phoebe
+However, I do see a switch with the rise of Patreon, Medium, Substack, even Mirror dot X, Y, Z, even Likecoin. We're actually doing some more focusing on user generated content and I still see it evolving. I think they're all looking for a way to sustain this whole business model. And in terms of how we can gather writers and how we get the readers, is because I think we're not lacking of writers, we are lacking of readers. How we can actually gain the attention span of readers to read quality content.
+
Phoebe
+So I think it is still evolving and now with the Web 3 in place, people can have more imagination of what potential it could be, in terms of this transformation, I would say. I think especially during COVID, we see a lot more information or have a rise in terms of readership on this kind of user generated content during COVID, especially because it was outbreak from China. China had a more compressed media landscape.
+
Phoebe
+So in terms of people wanted to know what happened inside. It actually rely on a lot of this Web 3 media platform to actually distribute their information. So I would say social contexts also play a very important role in terms of how people adopt or, how people have to change their behaviour of where they preserve information.
+
Phoebe
+And different major crises will also bring a new behaviour. And I think I see this a lot more during COVID and post COVID. Actually, also during some Western event, right? Like the presidential election of Donald Trump, the whole thing, how they switched from major media to social media, I think the whole landscape, no matter, is institutional player or users like from the funnel, bottom of the funnel, the whole funnel is actually evolving to become more and more hybrid.
+
Phoebe
+And even I think tier 1 media actually struggling to keep their writers or columnists on them because why would they pay? What would they let The New York Times take a majority cut of their readership or even traffic instead they can actually start their own Patreon or Medium or something like that. I think there's still like a unspoken battle between two.
+
Phoebe
+And I think the balance between these two will be very interesting to see. Yeah. So one thing that we also observe and notice is people who actually care enough about their content, they also moving away from platform centric publishing platform. Let's say Mirror dot X, Y, Z or Mirror or Medium or Substack. One thing that writers actually don't have time to manage is you need to handle multiple platform or distribution channel, and that's actually a headache.
+
Phoebe
+Let’s say we have a podcast today. We want to put it on YouTube, Spotify or even Google Podcasts. There's a lot of distribution channel. And how they can actually distribute better. Sometimes might not be rely on one single platform. So our approach is also the same. Likecoin isn’t the platform itself, it’s actually a infrastructure layer, it’s like a publishing stack that can facilitate in all kind of websites, especially WordPress, because we believe if a writers actually care enough for their own content, they actually want the full autonomy of their sites, their topics so that they can work on the SEO, so that they can monetize or explore different business model is just not one. We believe it could be a hybrid business model, so some might still rely on a lot of Web 2 business model, let's say subscription, let's say advertising, but then they can also add some element of Web 3. And that's where our plugin articles came in, where they can actually play around with collect as an NFT or even monetize with our like button.
+
Phoebe
+So all this kind of mixture I believe would fit in the current publishing landscape because it's still evolving. I don't think there would be a clear cut between Web 2 and Web 3. So we won't see a clear jump. For journalists saying, Oh, let's jump directly into Web 3, let's set everything on Mirror dot X, Y, Z or something like that.
+
Phoebe
+I think it's really hard for them to get over that hurdle. That's why our position of our product, majority of them actually the bridge between Web 2 and Web 3, they have a choice to get the hybrid business model. They have a choice to store their stuff on IPFS or Areweave or they can also still chose to store on centralized platform.
+
Phoebe
+It doesn't matter. We believe it will be a process of education to laymen users, especially in the publishing industry, for media players, for publishers, for journalists, for editor to understand, hey there actually something new that you can add in to your current workflow. So I think that's very interesting to see their acceptance level. I think also on the reason like NFT hype, a lot of majority of a magazine or newspaper actually exploring that as well. I think Times did it, some of them not quite successful, some of them did quite well. I think they're all start to explore new business model to survive. Right. So I will see these evolvement coming along.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Would you say on the topic of advertisement model, because I think that is a very important part of that. Would you say that it's fair enough to say that it's not about, so much the advertisement model? Because I think that will change a lot. And I think the Wed 3 market is still going to explore that, you know, whether it's going to be, like you say, like a plugin, a tool or whatever that you guys use, or the fact that you can monetize your own content and so on.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I think the biggest change is from people going thinking in their mind, okay, I'm working for a company or I'm working for a freelance company, to me, I'm the content and a lot of people, when they kind of understand that, the hustlers economy, right? I guess, you know, when they realize I am the content, not the other company, then that's when the big change, the big shift, I think happens with people.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+At least that is my experience. Would you say that is true in your experience and the experience that you work with other people, or for them It's more important to understand, like you said, you know, we have a tool that can make us money? Doesn't matter who is the content who produces it. Where is the shift happening, in the mind or in the tools that the person uses? I guess that's the question.
+
Phoebe
+I think the NFT hype actually proven that it’s more on the mind than the tools, because we have been trying to educate laymen on Metamask, on why you need to own your key, own your content. All these kind of same tools already, I think is the people not ready. And once you see more peer getting into this landscape, they start to switch in terms of their conceptual of what is crypto, what is blockchain and want could NFT do.
+
Phoebe
+So I would say mind is over tools. These tools is quite easy to build, frankly speaking, although with a really seamless experience of, wow, it could take time but it’s not that difficult. Is that how people are willing to accept and give it the first try is the most difficult part. So I would say mind, and I think most importantly for Web 3 compared to Web 2 is, does it allow individual to have a choice?
+
Phoebe
+I think that's very important. For Web 2 since the majority of our daily consumption on social media or publishing or media, they are quite centralized. You actually don't have a choice or don't have a say in terms of how you actually want to own your content or how you want to monetize. You basically don't have choice in the infrastructure level, where things should be done.
+
Phoebe
+Even royalty is quite centralized structure right now. But in the high side Web 3 could deliver a better future, in terms of this. however, I think what is lacking right now is the successful use case, especially in our vertical. I would say NFT, brought a lot of more discussion in terms of creators’ economy, but majority of the discussions are still around art pieces, gaming assets.
+
Phoebe
+But for more day-to-day content is still lack of discussion of how it could evolve or how it potentially can be. And this is like a both way sort, right? Because NFT kind of now layman had an image of what NFT should be. They have a framework because of what the story of the market has been telling them.
+
Phoebe
+Oh, it could be a pixel art, it could be something like that. But how could be a blog as an NFT. But when you think about it, NFT is just a format of how you carrying all this kind of content, what you're buying is on the NFT. What you're buying is actually the content itself. So I think this story needs still take times to evolve when more use cases start coming up.
+
Phoebe
+But I do see a lot of more industry leader leaning towards that. Vitalik had his book in NFT format, e publications are actually thinking about adopting royalties in terms of launching royalties because it actually does make sense. Well, if you are having a huge secondary market, on publishing for school publishing. So I think this is more like a mind or storytelling time, instead of tools, tools are ready, not the heart, but mind, it takes a lot of different elements, social context, peer industry.
+
Phoebe
+Also, the recent market crash might scare off some people about crypto as well, so I think it's a lot of element coming to that storytelling and transitioning for people get into this industry.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Definitely. I think one of our things as a project is to say that our goal is building for decentralized or at least distributed communications. There is a lot of projects out there. This is actually my next question that are in one way or another are trying to do that. But I guess my question is about the differences and about how Likecoin stands out there.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+So there is, from what I know, from the ones that I'm going to mention, like on top of my head, I'm sorry for anyone else out there that I will now not mention, but I can think of Ulbit, which is a weird one, but that's definitely still communication. Not much or many heard of it, but still there is like Steemit.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+There is Mirror, X, Y, Z, Likecoin. There is Cyber with their social graphs. There is the thing Areweave is building right now. There is the Dether, I think was on Cosmos. So there is, I think the 2017 I remember a lot of them. There was like Alice, was Japanese project, which didn't really survive that long. But, but anyways, from the big ones, that's come to my mind now and all of them, they kind of pursue different methods of distributed centralized communication.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+But the ones that I think I would like you to talk about, are you free to talk about all of them or any the ones you want. What is the main differences between Likecoin from a point of what it's offering from the proposition, from the value proposition I guess compares to things like a Steemit and Miror or Hive, I guess if you want to call it Hive, whatever? Sorry for the long question.
+
Phoebe
+Yeah, no worries. I got it. I think the major difference is, Likecoin is a Web 3 publishing stack. It is not a particular platform that we want to offer to users. So there are several layers that we want to deliver to users. First is where media come to us, they actually have a application specific chain that is ready to facilitate in terms of different kind of module. A module it means what we include in the chain level. So the one thing that we build is called the metadata registry. So it's like the library system having an ISP and catalogue. And I think this is one of the things is very unique in our chain level because we do believe if you need to improve the current publishing landscape or set a better infrastructure for people to get into Web 3 and build on point publishing, you need a ISBM layer first, so that we can build things on top of it.
+
Phoebe
+So that's on the chain level where we want to take care of metadata registry so that when you point to different storage, you can actually have a card just like how you go to the library, you can actually search, Hey, this book is actually in somewhere in the world in which library, and you can see the inventory. You can see all the metadata of this book, which version of it you can even see if it’s available on Amazon.
+
Phoebe
+So, it is actually the base layer of how publishing should be organized and catalogued. So, I think that's the first thing that we’re very different compared to other platforms because I don't think they have the infrastructure support in terms of how things should be organized and catalogue and metadata. How is there a framework of how publishing in Web 3 should be?
+
Phoebe
+And this infrastructure can actually facilitate a lot of different platforms. So, meaning Steemit can actually adopt this module into their platform. Even Mirror can actually take this module to use it to catalogue their stuff. So it is a more generic framework that can suitable for all kind of publishing no matter it’s Web 2 or Web 3. So that's the first layer, which is the chain layer is a very application specific for publishing design.
+
Phoebe
+And the second layer, which is the application layer that we have, instead of building a platform, asking you to come to adopt a new, entirely new ecosystem. We build plugins. So the first standout example would be the WordPress plugin that we have. So basically there's no migration needed for writers or media site that want to try Web 3 solutions.
+
Phoebe
+They only need to download a free plugin where they only have to create a wallet and they can actually start publishing to Areweave to IPFS, to register metadata on Likecoin chain. Everything in one plugin. First is, we do believe each site just to transform themselves. We shouldn't as writer or journalist, to move their entire site to a new platform because that couldn’t scale, at the end of the day, we don't want to be the one maintaining the platform.
+
Phoebe
+You should be the one because you know your friend, the world. you are the content creators you want to work on a traffic with some Web 2 business model. Go ahead. You want to monetize your fan base, you can try this plugin. So basically we are empowering each site to be their own Mirror dot X, Y, Z.
+
Phoebe
+Instead of asking everybody, come to my platform to create account to write on it. So I think that's the second major difference. Even on the application layer, we want to have a plug in that can facilitate other people to transform even it could be an institutional media sites, or it could be as small as the individual blocks. So that's the plugin that we have.
+
Phoebe
+And then we also have the ecosystem where we onboard a very different set of validators in terms of other chains in Cosmos. We have the hybrid set. We onboard early, all media player last fast check centre media from the Web 2 space. And then we have Cosmo's well-known validators on board. So, that they can actually create a community and a DAO and an ecosystem where we have domain expertise of how publishing should be in the future or how to gatekeep the entire ecosystem when their proposals related to, hey, how can we vote on certain things, they can actually come out and tell their domain expertise.
+
Phoebe
+So that's something that we, when we invite our Genesis validator, we already had the mindset in mind, if we want to create an ecosystem for content lovers that we want to attract media, publishers and readers, what kind of people, what kind of governors that should be? It can't be solely Web 3 validators. Then they don't understand what they're doing.
+
Phoebe
+But instead you see fact check centre here, media here. Oh, they're still doing something interesting and people are more widely open and we can actually maintain the governance in a more down to earth level is not something always on parameter change. It's not something always on the chain level, right? So as the ecosystem to grow, we believe this hybrid set of validators could help us drive onboard.
+
Phoebe
+And also I think the lastly is that the publishing stack that we provide is actually very well friendly, it’s not a competitor to all those project that we mentioned. It’s that we are able to connect them, to plug in to something that they find it useful. Let's say we have that plugin get actually integrate IPFS and Areweave, so project don't have to go between protocols to think about storage. Users don't have to think about, oh, if I need to publish this blog into Areweave or IPFS, I should go to somewhere else and then come back here.
+
Phoebe
+Everything is practically one thing, they just only click you want to publish it to here and we basically. So this kind of ready tool is available for other project to use. I also see this is the most interesting part of Web 3 projects where you can actually cooperate between each others, even platforms, because the stack itself is open source and you can use it as you want.
+
Phoebe
+So I think that's the major difference of us. And today we have about 1000 active installations on WordPress. We have almost 8000 sites that are actively installed our Likecoin button, where you can like as a reward for your content, etc. So you can see all these media stand-alone themselves can facilitate as Mirror dot X, Y, Z, with what we provide.
+
Phoebe
+So I think that's the major difference between us and other projects’ approach, I would say.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It's interesting that you mentioned that ,because I think if anyone was to follow the change that the industry has gone through from the last major bear market, I'm talking about 17, 18 or 18, 19 here rather, I don't think that they were in the first two bear markets, the 15 and the 13 or 11 whatever, whatever we count as the change because there was no much projects but there was a big change in terms of where the projects on application level up, specific projects have tried to change to the model you're talking about instead of like, okay, we have a product come to us, you know, we're building a new chain. You seeing a lot of like projects are trying to do what you're saying. Okay what we need is now a plugin. What we need is not the projects to just come to us. We need to go to them and for them to understand that we have the tools. But the question I do want to ask is actually very interesting one.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I'm going to like start a little bit ahead as well. In 2016, I had the experience of trying to launch the first ever Russian social network on Web 3. It was called Golos, and we launched an ICO. And you know, it was an experiment. It was a big thing for us and for the whole Russian blockchain market.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+This was back in 2016. This was before ICO’s. It was the first official fork of Steemit. It was like really official fork. And the question is this, what was the biggest failure of this experiment for us? And in my opinion it was, it depends how you look at it. Whether it was a failure or a success was, in my opinion, the economical part, the economics, underlying economics.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It was not. No, it was just like you could milk it, you could like, you know, people could use it, could abuse it. They found ways worse, you know, and this was, in my opinion, the biggest failure. And this is why I think what kind of pushed me away from Web 3 social networking for a while, or Web 3 social, like those things for a while. In your opinion and in the form of how Likecoin does it, how important is economics?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Because this is something we still haven't talked about. I mean, we talked about the stack, about preservation, about creating a better future. What about the economics, the rewards? Is that important and how important that is? Will people do all those things, install those plugins, build their own media if they wouldn't get anything for it, rather than just the preservation and the ability to fact check or whatever, for example.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+But what if there was no rewards? Like what if there was no heaven? If you're a religious person, let me say it in a different way. And the other day, there is no heaven. Would the religion be still as valuable? And I don't mean it with offence.
+
Phoebe
+No, no, no. That's great sharing. Thanks for your experience as well. That's a great question. I think economic incentives always come into place because that's the human nature, right? So, Like what started as like as a reward. So, like as a reward where want to promote the idea of educating the public about, hey, content should be paid in some sort of way and your content should be rewarded, just like how much like you receive on Facebook.
+
Phoebe
+They're just up in the air. What if it should be like a real reward? So that was like a really early idea in 2017. I think people are really hyped about that around that. However, when the social context that come in, when we evolved to be a more decentralized publishing angle, I think we also changed it evolve along with the social context that we are in.
+
Phoebe
+I think at least nowadays, journalists in my area or in South-East Asia, they are fully aware that their stuff cannot be stored on centralized storage. It’s not something that we educate in, or give them money to do so, but because they experienced first-hand of how their stuff could be disappeared in one day. So, I think that's a little bit different in terms of social context.
+
Phoebe
+So, I think that rely on what kind of experience they have in their own society. So that's the first thing. And the second thing is, yes, I think economic incentive is still very important as well. And that's why we offer not just like the tokenomic incentives, right, but also how they can own a piece of NFT, let’s say of their memories, of their blogs or even book NFT.
+
Phoebe
+We recently had a campaign on book NFT and people are actually exploring this, in this format. And NFT also align with a little bit of economic incentive, right? When people collect NFT, they would have thought they could have resell it with a high price or they can actually own a piece of NFT that could grow in value. So I think that still lie under people mind.
+
Phoebe
+But you would be surprised when we tell them, Oh, writing NFT or book NFT, we are not actually looking at that kind of NFT hype, that flip that inflated price model. We are actually looking for something. How much would you like to pay for this kind of content that you preserve? You liking it, or you want to subscribe to authors?
+
Phoebe
+How much will you pay? You'll be surprised people are actually willing to pay than we thought, in terms of something they value. So when I say value, it means the value of collective memories. It could be non-economic incentive driven kind of value. So I think that's the most fascinating part that we discover, especially because we started as like as a reward campaign, become now more on decentralized publishing, more on integrity, content preservation and now towards the new understanding, not new understanding.
+
Phoebe
+But more reinforce on the value of the non-economic side, because you can imagine there are still a lot of people actually paying for content, I believe. Especially if I think you're in the podcast. I've been paying a lot of audio books, for newsletters because if you are a person that actually consume a lot of this kind of content, you will see good content actually need to be sustained with someone willing to pay.
+
Phoebe
+And I think we actually gathered a community that have this similar mindset along the years, and I do believe these kind of people exist. If those people who tell you they won't come in for incentives, I would say they are not our target audience for now. But there are still a majority of people who are willing to do so, especially if you see the rise of Patreon.
+
Phoebe
+They are actually paying just for the content. They don't really have incentives on the economic side where their content would be flipped in terms of like the NFT hyped up market. So, I think we should take a balance of that, where would economic incentive driven social network will be a sustainable model for people or real users to stay.
+
Phoebe
+I think the more we see it is not the answers, is it need to be a hybrid of truly find out what people actually care and what they value above economic incentive. So I think that we are in the great state is where we're exploring this, especially with like writing NFT. We've been asking a lot of our community members, why would you purchase a writing at your blog that won't increase in price or won't be like a hyped-up piece of work you will find different fascinated reason.
+
Phoebe
+It could be because they pursue for collective memories, because they're getting a postcard. I, myself, I personally post up my wedding ceremony, as a blog and they're actually ten and 20 people collected it and they're paying for it because they want to be part of my journey of my life. So I think there are a lot of value in terms of what the product could offer to people, and you would be surprised.
+
Phoebe
+They are beyond economic incentive. However, for a project like us, for application specific projects, you often see a gap between trading activities and the user itself. I'll say I would still think this is a difficult gap for us. We need to fill in how you can actually attract people to speculate your token in terms of because trading activities, right, are something that you want volume, liquidity versus you have a superset of users that actually using your stuff every day, but they're are not people that will attract to trading, which mean that economic incentives that attract them to go trade and increase in value etc. So I think this is a dilemma of a project owner, how you can actually bring this to a common ground where you can show people the holistic view of the entire project. So that's a headache problem that I think our project would face. So yeah, I'm not sure if I answered the question, but since that's a great to spark some new discussion too
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Definitely. I think the whole movement of trying to put on the same weights, objective income because as well, the income is objective, it's not subjective. People, you know, we can change that to money if we want. And I'm not saying that something isn't money or is money, and I'm being like kind of like high overview that even if somebody clicks and it's token X, Y, Z, which is subjective to somebody today, the liquidity allows us to change it to objective income.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And it's interesting that we can put objective income and personal value on the same scale. It's interesting. And again, I think that that a lot of things like you say, they haven't changed. There is still a lot to explore there. Yeah, I've been watching that scene for a while and definitely very excited to see what will win, you know, whether or not rather what but how like what would be the combination of value and income that will have a reward and value that will help people to make that final flip in their minds.
+
Phoebe
+So, my co-founder is, so his name is Kin. I always remember something that he said about a movement, I think Web 3 right now is a movement. Even what we did since, even though we started in 2017, we still think what we write on the white paper. This is a ten-year movement. As a movement because we knew it could be a very disruptive idea in terms of decentralization, in terms of the tools that people need to adopt.
+
Phoebe
+So right now we're just in the middle of it. So ten years it seems very long. But when you think about it, it actually takes… a new habit or new era or some new business model to evolve, actually take ten years, it’s a really short time. And I do believe we're just in the middle of it. So I think there's also our vision where we believe, Likecoin will take this much time to evolve to a different kind of what we could achieve as a decentralized publishing solution.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Yeah, for sure. It's definitely just the beginning, I think of the journey. I don't think it's just the beginning like a lot of people say, but it's definitely not the end for sure. A quick question on the journey. I mean, for a project that has been around for a while and not just the project yourself, have been around in this space for a while.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+You've seen ups and downs and you've seen projects while your developed yours disappear or, well, it's hard to make a crypto disappear, I guess, but to the extent of what a crypto can disappear, what would you say as a piece of advice to people not necessarily starting out their projects but working on their projects already, And you know, maybe also for a while or maybe not?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+What would be your advice to these people? To do what or not to do what?
+
Phoebe
+It reminds me of one of my recent tweet. I tweet about our learning because it was the three years of the Likecoin chain last week, especially during the chaos of the fall of FTX, I believe a lot of people are suffered and I actually personally feel bad to a lot of friends as well. So, I will share that's one of the summary of my set.
+
Phoebe
+So, there are three things. I think, first is to make sure you know why you were here and during what you're building. So, our team has been told that we were too serious in terms of our product flow, our internal procedures. We have been using multi SEC like really early on with like I need to learn about command line how to manage our wallet and they actually benefit us from the recent FTX incidents because we understand how important it is even though keeping people telling us how you guys are too serious.
+
Phoebe
+Come on, let's find something more convenient. So, at this point where you need to stand on what you believe and you need to be persistent on it. So that's the first learning, and the second learning is, there a lot of temptation in Web 3, where you can gain quick success. Came from hyping up an idea or a product and people actually came as often to come at us. Hey, you have a whole full dev team, why not just start another DEFI or NFT projects that can make a good learning? And the hard part is actually say no to these opportunities. And I think that's also come back to the first point where I say you need to know why you're here and what you're building. Thirdly, I think the mindset of running a start-up is very important.
+
Phoebe
+So, I'm very fortunate of a lot of my co-founders and our angel investor are from us. Like a lot of them are YC alumni, they have their successful business in Web 2 and Web 3. We've been studying a lot of like what is the lean start-up methodology? We've been working on internal procedures and how a product should be in terms of learning and communicate with users.
+
Phoebe
+So, I think have a mindset to run your project as a start-up and build fast, fail fast is something that we also learned in our experience in the past few years and also because of the learning of lean startup. We know we cannot expand too quick to be lean, and so that's why we can survive a lot of Crypto Winters.
+
Phoebe
+I forgot how many Winters already, so I truly believe that Web 3 is so big that isn't just about trading FX or just about defi. You actually need to bring in solutions to problem that people are facing, not the other way around. To sort out the potential of the actual use case of Crypto. So when you come into the game, I think you have to have a mindset of I'm thinking the long haul.
+
Phoebe
+It's not something in the short time that if this doesn't work, you leave. It will hurt a lot of your time and effort in this. So, I think that will be three of my learning. And also the last tip, maybe, before this I was in an exchange. I was in another crypto fund before being full time with the founding team of Litecoin and I think being with the right people is very important, especially I love surrounded by builders, my team except me, they're all coders, so I'm very fortunate that they I am actually learning from them every other day.
+
Phoebe
+I think that's very important in terms of being in Web 3 as well, because they're very close to the tech. So that actually give you a lot of faith in terms of what you're doing. And then also thanks to the community to actually stick around with us for a long time and they actually see us evolve from different products and give us active feedback.
+
Phoebe
+So, I think community is super important in terms of supporting your mission. So yeah, hopefully it’s not too long, but that's my summation.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+No, no, it's perfect. I was just going to say that thing about Crypto Winters. We were lucky this time around, lucky in brackets. We fucked up, two months before the crypto winter came, so we were already working in advance. So for everybody out there, if you want the good advice, fuck up early and it sets you up for the bear market.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+The last kind of question, the last Blitz that I wanted to ask you is that we asked there was the one that we ask all the guests if you could give me three projects from the crypto space that are interested in. It could the protocols as well, like IPFS, for example, that you're interested in and that you follow and that you think are interesting out there?
+
Phoebe
+Yeah, I think the first one I would say is I had a really good time working with Protocol Labs people. IPFS community has been very supportive in what we do and I got to spend a lot of time with them. So, I think that would be something good to look at if you haven't heard about them. Second, I've been lately studying lot about Last Protocol, although that's not a Cosmo ecosystem, but I think they're doing a great job in terms of the stack of what they could offer because it's quite similar to what we wanted to do.
+
Phoebe
+So I would love to learn more about them and certainly let me name any favourite projects. Well, I don't have a particular name of projects, but I would love to share a crypto community, especially because I attended their event in August in the US. They are the Dweb camp folks, Dweb. I think they're amazing people. I have never been to any kind Web 3 events that the discussion isn’t about tokenomics, But in terms of the mission and vision and the first question that they were asked when they come to you is how they can actually help.
+
Phoebe
+And I meet a lot of great founders there, including Gatecoin, including Protocol labs, including Ceramic. So, there are a lot of established Web 3players there where I had the conversation and got to know them as a person. So I think if anyone want to, especially if they are looking for some kind of support, no matter is mentally support or in terms of your product development of how you want to get new inspiration, I think they're a great community to be surrounded with.
+
Phoebe
+I think I benefit a lot from my presence there in the last couple of months, so I would like to share this piece of opportunities to people who are looking for something different, especially in Web 3. So hopefully that helps.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It's funny that you say it last night, ironic, sorry not funny that I was recording and most of the discussion happened around Protocol Labs and Dweb, I was on Discord.
+
Phoebe
+Really
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Yes. Was Fission. So…
+
Phoebe
+Oh, Fission! Okay. No wonder…
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Yes, yes, yes, second question. Wait, there is still more, wait, wait. The second question. Two things that motivate you in your daily life to keep on building decentralized, distributed communication, I guess, and keep on building Likecoin and Liker Land and everything else that you do. So Which two things motivate you in your daily life if you could share them, of course?
+
Phoebe
+One is community for sure. And when I say community is because I host our community call every month, even though that could be a small scale or large scale, I would love to connect with users that actually give us active feedback and people who actually care about our product. I think that's especially important if you're a product owner knowing someone actually cares about what you do.
+
Phoebe
+So I think that gives you a lot of motivation. And the second kind of community, of course, is like Citizen Cosmos. I just came back from Lisbon and I got to meet some Cosmos people face to face in person for the first time, and I'm very glad I actually did it because I finally know them as a person, not just knowing their project, but actually knowing what kind of wine they like to drink or what kind of food they like.
+
Phoebe
+So, I think it's important to have this kind of human connections, especially after COVID. And there's a lot of change in the world where human connection at the end of the day is some fundamental way of being as a human. So, I think that's quite important. So, if you get a chance, go meet some people out there. And I think in general, a lot of Cosmo people are really nice, especially because they see me as a girl that just hanging around by myself.
+
Phoebe
+They're very taken care of. So I'm so glad that I actually met them. The other thing is that I think I mentioned already, but I would like to reinforce is surround yourself with builders. So, people who actually understand what is going on. Spend less time on Twitter just in between some argument of some kind of proposals. I think it takes a lot of manpower to be fully on those kind of conversations.
+
Phoebe
+But when you actually understand more about the technology, like even though like just how Cosmo works, talking to all the projects actually made you more confidence to talking to more people. Because I guess a lot of people had a hard time to jump in, a lot of high end conversations like those that we see on Twitter. So now is just too intimidating for other people to jump in because we become our own circle.
+
Phoebe
+And I think that's not really healthy, but instead, like go talk to more builders in the space and try to understand what they do, will help support what we're doing right now. Even though you are just speculators, you are a builder, you're project owners. So that helps. So, it's awesome that we have this kind of podcast that we have a chance to share our experience and get to know more people.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Last one. One person, could be a builder, a book writer, a coder, a writer that you know doesn't have to be a crypto person. One person that you would suggest if it's a book, the book, if it's a person or a blog, or if it's a builder, it could be a GitHub account for everybody out there to follow. That will be interesting for them.
+
Phoebe
+I'm a little bit biased on this.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Good.
+
Phoebe
+Because I think there are a lot of excellent English content right now. Already. I think my co-founder, Kin, he's a serial entrepreneur, has been gaming for a lot of years and he co-founded Likecoin and he wrote a book on sociology of blockchain. Actually, blew a lot of mind because it’s the first blockchain book that does not talk about Tokenomics, but talk about the fundamental what is the value of money.
+
Phoebe
+What is the value of consensus, why DAO exists, like all this kind of thing I think lies behind actually the fundamental of blockchain in the sociology. Expect to understand it, it's great, especially for crypto one oh one I guess. So, if you are interested, I think a lot of majority of them are translated into English too. But he already got a book that was quite a bestselling, I think last early this year, the first officially sold out in Hong Kong, Taiwan.
+
Phoebe
+So, if you're interested, follow Kin Ko at Ckxpress dot com that's his blog and he's a creative common defense, so his stuff is open source and open content for sure. Advocate on that and you can also support him via Likecoin or subscribe as well. Yeah, that's bias recommendation.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I think bias is good. You know, it's good to be subjective. I think sometimes and definitely we will include this in the show notes and everything else, of course, that you mentioned. Phoebe, thank you very, very, very, very, very much. It was a huge pleasure catching up with you and talking with you and hopefully we'll catch up again in the future.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Thank you very much else for joining in.
+
Phoebe
+Yeah, thank you. Thank you also for the links here, which is one of the community.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Ah yes!
+
Phoebe
+Top Taiwan Crypto writers doing a lot of analysis has been awesome. So I also want to mention them as well.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Nice one will include all of them. Will include all of them. Yeah. Thanks.
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:
In this episode, Citizen Cosmos speaks to Carter Woetzel, co-founder of Shade Protocol, built on the Secret Network.
+Carter delves into his book, Building Confidence in Blockchain, what inspired him to write it and why he feels we should read it.
+They discuss the concept of trust in Blockchain and how we can solve the trust dilemma.
+Citizen Cosmos and Carter debate whether regulators are actually needed and whether what they actually do that is worthwhile.
+Carter discusses some of the projects being built on Shade Protocol, like Silk, a privacy protecting stable coin for Cosmos. As always, Citizen Cosmos ends off with the Blitz and gets Carter to speak to his motivations and projects that he has great respect for.
+
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Good space-time, y'all. In this episode of The Citizen Cosmos podcast, I speak with Carter Woetzel, the chief researcher of Shade Protocol, a privacy focused Defi project built with Cosmos SDK on top of the Secret network. Along with Carter, we discuss privacy on blockchains and smart contracts, Homomorphic encryption, auditability, and trust. We also talked about simplifying gas, non-traditional stablecoins, futuristic tokens and our perception of time in blockchains.
+
Carter
+Crypto’s at the crossroads of all those things. So many times, in this space we lose track of why the technology is valuable. And so why is decentralization so important? What is the problem that blockchain is ultimately solving?
+
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Lets gets rid of everybody and go into chaos and destruction! That's why we need privacy. There is no difference to the model of government or to the model of the Mafiosi.
+
Carter
+How much security do you need? How much privacy do you need? But if push comes to shove, it's not actually sustainable. It's harsh to hear. We live in a space built on speculation. The capital is here to speculate.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Before we rocket off into our next episode. Here are some news from the sponsor of this episode at the Cyber Congress DAO, the foundation has started its delegation's policy for validators on the Bostrom Blockchain, and the Space Pussy Network was launched with 96% of its supply to be dropped to various Cosmos ecosystem chains. Hi, everybody. Welcome to a new episode of the Citizen Cosmos podcast.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And today with me is Carter from Shade Protocol. And if you guys don't know about Shade Protocol or Carter, well, we're going to hear all about it today from Carter. Carter, Hi, welcome to the show.
+
Carter
+Thank you so much for having me on. It's a huge, huge fan of the podcast and look forward to being able to tell the world a little about Shade Protocol and what we have on the way.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Yay! Well, first thing is first, do you want to tell us a little bit about what you do for Shade Protocol? How did you get to do that for Shade Protocol and anything else you want to add about your own story with Shade Protocol?
+
Carter
+Yeah, absolutely. So, my journey started in 2017. I had a family member in tradfi that introduced me to cryptocurrency and blockchain, and I started reading as many books as I could on the space, really dove into Ethereum and Bitcoin and the ethos behind it. And as I was reading all these books that were out there, I realized a lot of the literature was not well-written.
+
Carter
+It was either way too focused on the tech or way too focused on the investment side, and there wasn't really anything that was somewhere in the middle. And so I spent three years writing a book called, Building Confidence and Blockchain. You can find it on Amazon or Barnes and Noble. And so, took three years of really trying to create a good piece of literature that I wish I could have read when I first started in the space. During that three years, kind of looked around the space and I said, Where's the privacy?
+
Carter
+Right? These are these totally transparent blockchains. How are we going to be able to integrate back into our everyday lives? How can we have commerce and competition, if we don't have privacy like we already do in Web 2? So, I tried to find like where people are building privacy, and that's what I found Secret network in the Cosmos ecosystem.
+
Carter
+I actually helped write the Secret Network White Paper, so I have a background in finance and computer science. Always loved the economic side of things. And of course, crypto's at the crossroads of all those things. So I helped write The Secret Network White Paper, was super plugged in with the protocol and development team and eventually spun up a validator with the other co-founder, Mohamed Petla.
+
Carter
+We actually validate on multiple different Cosmos chains, like Osmosis, Secret Network, Juno, there's a couple of other ones too, but those are like our biggest ones. But we didn't really want to settle just for being infrastructure and just being like a white paper and documentation contributor. We actually wanted to go make apps that could change the world.
+
Carter
+We wanted to take advantage of this tech stack. That's what Shade Protocol is. We want to bring global connectivity to privacy preserving Defi. We're talking about privacy preserving stablecoins, privacy preserving dex, privacy preserving lending, privacy preserving staking derivatives. Fundamentally, we believe that if we want to onboard institutions into these financial applications, there has to be privacy on the smart contract level.
+
Carter
+We have to protect consumers. The example I like to give is if I'm running a Web 3 company and I want to pay my employees and I did it on Ethereum, I'm like, everyone can see like how much each person is getting or if I'm closing a deal with a contractor, they can see all of those amounts. Or if I'm an institution, I take a massive leveraged position on MakerDao.
+
Carter
+Everyone knows precisely what my liquidation price point is, and so there's a lot of risk to transparency. Now, on the flip side, you also have to have auditability, and that's also what Secret Network offers as well, and we can dive into that. So anyways, long and short lead researcher, we closed a $5 million private raise at the end of 2021 to build out the full suite of privacy preserving defi products.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+We'll talk Shade Protocol for sure, but I want to get to know more about use first because I like this. This is a cool story, right? This is the kind of stories I like. I'm going to be honest with you, I think a lot of the founders of crypto projects, has been noticed by myself personally, that when the person has been through the journey, you know, and I think it's not a discovery I'm making here, I think is just one on one logic right, they’re kind of more aligned with what is really going on.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And that's why I always try to ask for the story and to try to understand, where is the guest coming from and what of their involvement before that? But you mentioned the book and I also have it written out here. I'm going to be honest, I haven't read it. I don't know if any of our listeners have. Can you talk a little bit about it?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Maybe shill it a little bit and maybe we will for sure include that in the description notes, like everything else you're going to mention. But just to say that I'm sure that it will arouse interest. So if you could shill it a little bit, I would love to hear about the book.
+
Carter
+Sure. It's funny because I really don't shill it to like… the books doing really well, actually organically, which is fun.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I understand.
+
Carter
+But I guess what I'll say is the first half of the book is really like the simplest explanation we can get for blockchain while still giving people a nuanced appreciation for the tech. So my mom and dad have been able to read it and they're like this, you know, when I read it, it made sense and I was with you and we try to use simplified analogies and what I really like to laser in on is the attributes of blockchain that make it powerful.
+
Carter
+So many times, in this space we lose track of why the technology is valuable. And so why is decentralization so important? What is the problem that blockchain is ultimately solving?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Why? Why? I'm going to put you on the spot, man. I want to know the answer.
+
Carter
+The answer is trust. If you go back and read. So David Chaum was one of the original professors that wrote about blockchain, even before Satoshi, way back in the 1970s, 1980s. And the concept was like, can you make a system where two pieces of technology can somehow have a language, a system of communication where we can trust each other without needing a third-party intermediary?
+
Carter
+Can we have truly peer to peer communications? And so right now, in centralized organizations, we're forced to trust a counterparty. FTX is a great example of this. We give our funds up to someone else and trust that they have our best interests in mind. We have to trust a human. But what if, instead of trusting humans, we could trust cryptography?
+
Carter
+We can trust networks and protocols. These things are objective. These things are programmatic, they're automated. And so the irony of blockchain technology is its goal is, that it's trustless trust. You can trust mathematics; you can trust these economic systems. But that's the problem with adoption. Fundamentally, to get the technology adopted, people have to trust it. And I find that the most ironic thing, the technology is there to solve the trust problem, but people are still learning to trust it.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I love this, because this is a huge topic of our podcast, of course, and I think a good third of our episodes in one way or another are dedicated to discuss those things. And I'm absolutely glad to have you as an author of a book about those things on and to hear your opinion. One thing I will ask and you know, I love doing this with questions is what's your opinion?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+You know, I mean, you were talking about trust and, you know, blockchain has enabled us a trustless technology. I love what you said, a language to me that was like music to my ears when you said language, because to me that is exactly how I see that. But to me, one of the biggest things about trust and blockchain is that people still forget, that there is a blockchain in between the people, and blockchain is not exactly P2P technology.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+P2P is when I me and you decide on something without anything in the middle. Blockchain is the man in the middle, a decentralized man, but it's the man in the middle. And this is a question and I guess like a little bit into privacy here, but feel free to answer as you wish, of course. How do we as normal users, as users who are not able to read code or maybe we all are able to record, I don't know.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Depends on the user. How do we learn to trust blockchains? I mean, it's a kind of a paradox, right? It's a trustless technology, but we need to trust blockchains. So, what do we do in this case? What do we do here?
+
Carter
+So I have an answer that most people don't like, and the answer is that it takes time. All of these systems right now are experiments, even Bitcoin. It's been, what, roughly 14 years at this point. In the time span of humanity, 14 years is not a long time. Ethereum's been around for like six years. The crypto space.
+
Carter
+our sense of time is so warped because the technology is iterating so quickly and builders are sprinting ahead and trying to get to this end state. But fundamentally what I believe will happen is we're going to have a subset of protocols that are going to be here three decades from now. They're going to be here for five decades from now.
+
Carter
+And every single year that ticks by is proof to the people that can't read code that like, hey, a lot of people are using this. It works really well. It's fast, it's fluid. These apps make sense. This makes my life easier. I feel more empowered. So I think that's the hard answer. This stuff is going to have to just take time to prove itself and everyone trying to jump in right now, you're still an experimenter.
+
Carter
+It's interacting with these new apps. The UI UX is not super simple compared to something like a Venmo like experience. And I think that it's just the tech on top of just like time improving. I think we'll also see professionalism in the space also continue to increase. So like the first people that jumped in in the last five, six years with the ICO boom, there's lots of fast money people are spreading through trying to create products.
+
Carter
+There's a lot of flash in the pan. How do we attract users? But the real sign of really solid products is the maturation tied to the user experience, such that like when your mom and dad come in and use it, it's not like, you know what the freak is these eight different buttons. This is confusing. And I think like the bridging experience in crypto will continue to improve the mobile experience.
+
Carter
+We're still so early on the mobile side of things. With crypto. There's such a long ways to go on that front compared to Web 2. So in summary, why do people not trust it? Because we haven't really the key variables is that the tech is a proven and the UI UX doesn't tell people that they're safe. And I think both of those things will improve with time.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+For sure. Time heals everything, even if you're heartbroken. I'm joking. Of course, heart broken people and this was a side joke. Well, you didn't mention it, but you were like, hinting towards adoption. And I'm going to again, go like this for everybody who's not seen. I'm just being cheeky, right, with Carter and asking him questions from the side.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+You kind of talked about adoption. You talk about mom and dad and, you know, two things come to my mind when I hear about those things. And one is, well, first of all, our mothers and fathers, you know, a lot of people are like, oh, crypto is not adopted because my mom can't use it. Jesus people, your grandparents, I’m not talking about you specifically, but in general have used punch cards to code.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Believe me, what we see now is much more UI friendly than what it was before. Second thing, which I do, and this is the question, about adoption in your opinion, because I hear different opinions in my personal opinion, adoption has happened. Everybody knows what a Bitcoin is, literally, not just in Europe, not just in America. You go to Latin America, to Africa, to I've travelled, I've asked people, to Asia.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+People know what it is. The usage hasn't happened, adoption, the people, okay, it exists. We might not trust it for the reasons you just said. Right. But that has happened. And my question is, do you think adoption has happened in your opinion or do you think adoption is only when everybody will use it? And that's what you will say.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Adoption is when.
+
Carter
+I joined the space, I had a vision that I would be able to go to any coffee shop and buy coffee with crypto. I had a vision that these smart contracts would fundamentally replace services in the finance sector, and I think to date a large percentage of crypto has purely been speculation. They’re vehicles for speculation. And to be honest, the reason Bitcoin is known so well is not because someone came to me and said, Hey dude, you got to use this Bitcoin thing.
+
Carter
+It's way easier to like pay for your rent or buy groceries. That's not why we discovered the tech. Most people, they discovered the tech because they heard, you hear that bitcoin went to 22 K, did you hear Bitcoin went to 40 K and until people are discovering the technology because it actually impacts their lives beyond just being a vehicle for financial speculation.
+
Carter
+Until we've reached that point, we haven't achieved adoption. And the reason I believe we haven’t achieved adoption and there's a couple of things. One is the gas user experience, the concept of like in order to pull off a transaction on certain like blockchain, in order to use an app on some other blockchain, I have to have the underlying gas token, right?
+
Carter
+I think that's like so much friction from most normal people. That problem has to get solved and I think that’s problem number one, a lot of these apps the gas. Problem number two is privacy. There is a reason crypto hasn’t bridged back to commerce because, you need some form of auditable privacy. I should be able to go to a cashier, buy a hot dog with crypto, and the cashier should be able to check a block explorer and be like, I know how much money that person has in their crypto wallet.
+
Carter
+That's a security risk. That's a real world, tangible security risk. As a business, if I'm engaging in lending on a blockchain or those payments I was talking earlier, I don't want competitors to be able to snoop on block explorer data and be like, Ooh, he had 40 customers today at this time of day, they bought the product and this is how much they spent.
+
Carter
+Total transparency. It's not like commerce. Commerce needs a degree of privacy. Simultaneously, you can't have a black box of privacy. You can't have so much privacy that you're incapable of being audited by a government. Total privacy can lead to nefarious things, right, in terms of how companies use it, like money laundering. And those are the things that these regulators are rightfully concerned about.
+
Carter
+I believe the end game in order to achieve adoption would be a world where I'm on some blockchain, I have encrypted transactions, encrypted app interactions, but my auditor comes to me, says, hey, I need to look at your transaction history. I can hand them something like a viewing key. They can decrypt. They can see all of my stuff, but my neighbour can't see all of my transactions.
+
Carter
+My neighbour can't see my crypto balances.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I'm sorry to cut you out there, but I want to like get into that. This is a good conversation. I like it. That wouldn't stop the auditor from sharing that information with anyone that he wants to. Okay. That would be and not following the code of conduct, but if he wants to, he can share it. Right.
+
Carter
+There's truth to this. And so, this is where there's a really interesting trade-off. So I always said privacy and sovereignty are intimately intertwined. And what I mean by that is until you hand over the keys to your data, you're in full control, right? Because it's all encrypted. In an optimal world, you could hand over a viewing key that expires in 10 minutes, Right?
+
Carter
+They have 10 minutes where they can view the data, or maybe they only have access to a certain subset of the data. But you are correct, at the point that you've given someone the ability to view your data. They could store it, they could be nefarious with it. But what I do know is ultimately, we have to try to find a technology where people have the sovereignty to comply.
+
Carter
+They should choose to comply, probably. That's up to the users, up to the citizens that want to be compliant with the governments that they benefit from, the countries that they're a part of. And we need to give regulators a path to trust the users and for users to trust the regulators. And I think we at least need to get the tools in place to do it. Fundamentally, as you've pointed out, whenever you relinquish control to someone else, custody of anything, you're trusting that actor.
+
Carter
+And it's a fair observation.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I really like your comment of it's by choice. Privacy is a choice. And if I choose to hand over my viewing key or any other, so to speak key, to anyone, of course, I know that I'm making the choice. I like that answer. But you mentioned the regulators, I mean again comes to mind. But isn't it kind of easier to get rid of the regulators?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I mean, the last 5000 years I really have not heard one person stand up and say, Hooray to the regulators, they really did a good job. I love my government, really love them. And, you know, it's kind of never happened. I mean, it's a double-edged sword for a lot of people. Privacy, they straight away go into the extreme of, okay, if I'm private, that means there is no regulator, there’s no government is pure, I don't know, chaos, destruction.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I'm not saying anarchism on purpose because that's got nothing to do with chaos and destruction. But on the other hand, I guess what you're talking about, and correct me if I'm wrong, isn't that you're talking about, okay, we need privacy, we need privacy by choice. And if somebody wants to be private, they should be private. I mean, I'm kind of the first person to be honest with you.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+That gets rid of everybody, go into chaos and destruction. That's why we need privacy. But I guess you're more referring to the privacy by choice, not about having privacy and hiding everything from anybody. So it's just but okay, we need it because it's our right.
+
Carter
+The example I like to give, so Secret Network is actually really cleverly named. That's the network that Shade Protocol is built on top of. Because if you think about a secret, a secret as a piece of information that only a subset of people know about, that you've let them in on that information. A secret implies sovereignty. You chose to potentially share a secret with someone and you didn’t share it with the whole world, you shared it with one or two other people.
+
Carter
+And ultimately you had the sovereignty. It's not like someone forced you to share the secret because only you know the secret. They won’t know that you can share it in the first place. And that's kind of what I think privacy should aspire towards. Sovereignty for the user. A path to share and an education around the risks of sharing.
+
Carter
+Now, on the regulatory front, your comment on like when have regulators, I guess in terms what is the purpose of a regulator? I would say the purpose of a regulator is to put in protections and guardrails that are ultimately supposed to protect consumers. And consumers don't necessarily have the time in their life to know the risks that they're interacting with.
+
Carter
+That's the original goal of a regulator. That's at its purest heart, it's supposed to be protections for people that don't know they need to be protected. Now, how often is that actually instantiated properly? How often is regulation done in a holistic and productive fashion? Very, very rare. But I do believe that we should build tools, that if that type of regulator does come into fruition, that people have a path to integrate with that.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Definitely, definitely Carter. I'm smiling because, well, what you're describing is the work, how the Mafia works. They protect you for money. You know, it's true. There is no difference. A lot of people don't think about it, but there is no difference to the model of government or to the model of the Mafiosi, right. The mafia says, Oh, you need protection, so give us money, we'll protect you.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+The only difference is that the Mafia doesn't really protect from itself. Mafia protects from everybody and itself. The government protects only from itself. And not somebody was like, Give us our money. If you don't give us money, we’re going to put you in prison. Which we build a using your money, by the way. And if you don't give it to us, we'll put you there. First, we’ll beat the shit out of you, and then put you in the prison.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And that's all of the countries, developed, non-developed, you know, unfortunately. But that's not the point. I just wanted to hear your opinion there and to understand like how you define privacy, because that's very important to me to understand that. You mentioned the Secret Network, and I want to ask you like I guess, let's go into the technology a bit here that you guys use.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+How do, how does the user and I guess this is coming back to the question I had previously, knows that what he's doing on a blockchain is private and not necessarily Shade Protocol. But of course, please do explain how it works with you guys. But Monero or anything else. How do I know if I don't? I don't want to trust the other people who check the code.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I want to know that what I'm doing is private. How can I do that? Is there such a way or I have to be able to audit the code?
+
Carter
+You don't have to be able to code. I think the simplest example is like for Secret Network. You go to a block explorer, you can look at your transaction you just sent and in the body of the message, you'll see a bunch of mumbo jumbo, essentially the body of the message that holds like, Hey, where did they send it to?
+
Carter
+How much was sent that's encrypted and anyone can go on the block explorer and look at other people's transaction is be like, I don't know what's going on there. Right. There's still some block metadata, like the block number, timestamps. There are things that exist as it's a network and it has to be like shared information. But at the end of the day, you can verify for yourself that this data is encrypted and you don't have to look at the code to be able to acknowledge and see that.
+
Carter
+Now in order to trust that the network itself and the nodes on the network can't sneak peak or somehow have like unpermissioned access to data, that takes a deeper level of skill. That does take like a coder to like truly, because it's the rules of the game are clearly outlined. But not everyone can read the rules, right?
+
Carter
+Being able to read a block explorer is kind of watching the game and seeing the outcome, but you don't know the rules that defined the game, if that makes sense. So you can get halfway there, just not with as much nuance and depth as if you could actually read the rules themselves.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I absolutely agree. Again, I guess this is going to be the same question, but I'm going to go to another one. In your opinion, are the privacy sort of field or the privacy readiness? I don't know if I'm putting it correctly, of course. I'm probably not in terms of English, but how is it looking right now? I mean, the blockchain?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And to what extent are blockchains private today? To what extent a user can be sure that what he's doing is private? I mean, you already said that it's not. But there is you, there is Monero, there is other projects out there. How safe is a normal, how am I an average user? And you know how often do we use privacy instead of thinking we use privacy?
+
Carter
+It's pretty bad out there. I've talked with folks from Chainalysis. I've talked with employees from Chainalysis behind closed doors. If you're on a public blockchain, you can't hide. It's you're in a desert perfectly flat. You can't dig a hole really. You can't fly away, like it's all there transparent. You're competing against extremely intelligent programming that draws correlation between exchanges and wallets and app interactions.
+
Carter
+I always like to tell people, like every time you make a Google search, you're up against incredible artificial intelligence. It's a completely unfair fight. People don't even know. It's not an even playing field with what you're up against and totally transparent blockchains are similar in that sense. It's all there. You're naked. And first off, I want to say that I'm a firm believer in supporting all the different types of privacy.
+
Carter
+It's going to be a spectrum, eventually. It's going to be a full spectrum all the way from Black Box to like maybe less secure, but more compliant. There's going to be a full range that emerges. And for now, I support privacy in all of its forms because right now we just don't have it in blockchain and crypto. That's my starting point.
+
Carter
+It's like I support it. There's going to be trade-offs, there's going to be a spectrum. What's unique about Secret Network is that it's encryption on the smart contract layer, so things like Monero and Zcash is purely transactional privacy. That means A to B is obfuscated. With Secret Network, It's not just transactional privacy, it's also app interactions. So if I go and swap the metadata tied to trading from A to B, if I did that on Uniswap, Chainalysis could look at that and be like, mm, I can see all the parties interacting with this pool.
+
Carter
+I can draw correlations, something like on Shade Protocol, a Shade Swap, your trades are protected, your lending positions are encrypted, your stablecoin transactions are encrypted. Right? So that's the fundamental difference why Secret Network is special is back in 2016, a group from MIT set out to say, can we do more than just transactional privacy? And we went on miannet in 2020 and we've been live for two years and really no other network that I've seen has live privacy preserving smart contracts.
+
Carter
+It's been two years. We're still kind of waiting to see that. Secret Network doesn’t claim to be the king of privacy in terms of transactional privacy? I trust Monero's privacy more, transactionaly. But in terms of proof of concept and pushing the boundaries of what I call functional privacy. Secret Network really is a trailblazer, in my opinion.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+What about Dero? I know they're not in the mainnet yet, but I didn't believe they were going to build it. Sorry to the Dero folks out there, but I've been watching that for four years and I was like, Wow, they actually really did manage to build something. I was like, Oh my God, it works.
+
Carter
+Yeah. So Dero is an interesting one because so Secret Network uses hardware level encryption for essentially all the nodes on a network are running something called secure enclaves. They're all essentially the encryption happens, the decryption happens inside this enclave, and the nodes themselves can't even look inside of this hardware level environment. So the trust assumption that Secret Network makes is tied to hardware.
+
Carter
+And Secret Network’s actually migrating away from hardware level encryption and it's going to be heading more towards a combination of fully homomorphic encryption with hardware level encryption. We actually want to combine the best of both worlds because they both have their own trusted option. And to my knowledge, with Dero, I believe they've achieved Homomorphic encryption, but not fully Homomorphic encryption.
+
Carter
+And I have to rereview the full depth of the difference between fully Homomorphic versus Homomorphic, but we'll just say that fully Homomorphic encryption is the Holy Grail, if you can achieve that end state. It's really hard to get there with something that's also computationally efficient and scalable. It might be something where you make one transaction and It takes 10 minutes for it to go through because everyone computing that computation, it's so computationally complex versus Secret Network.
+
Carter
+We have six second transactions, right? We're ripping through all these different absoluted transactions. And I believe what we're going to have one day is a bunch of different privacy preserving blockchains, with different trust assumptions, different use cases and different speeds and performance and scalability. And all of them should be able to talk to each other, and we're able to kind of create the full spectrum of like, how much security do you need, how much privacy do you need?
+
Carter
+And you'll kind of find that given tech stack. So Dero’s great, excited to see them continue to evolve the technology and for Secret Network, I'm excited to see us migrate away or at least experiment outside of the trust assumptions that we've originally made on the privacy side.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Would love to see more and more development. I mean, I could even imagine like a layer one and then like another layer one for the computation. And one question I did ask Tor in 2020 when we had Tor on, was about he did mention also the hardware encryption and I don't want to make it hard, but as far as I understand you guys use an Intel piece of tech and as far as I'm aware, Intel hasn't been the best friend of privacy, especially, you know, if we're talking about like chips and burn in chips on motherboards and stuff like that.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+So you did say already that in your opinion, right now anything goes, we have to cut some corners. But the question is about the future. In the future, are you guys still planning to work with that? And even though that's partially like come out there, it's not open source? Of course not. But or is Secret got other plants and Shade Protocol included to ditch that.
+
Carter
+Yeah so the way I like to think about this is the difference between maybe like an engineer and a mathematician. A mathematician strives for purist solution, proofs, theorems, permanency, an engineer strives for a functional product that solves a solution and that usually they have a model. And when you have a model, you're inheriting the assumptions of the model.
+
Carter
+And so the way I view it is like fully homomorphic encryption is the mathematics that we're trying to achieve. That's like, man, if we can get there, we're going to have mathematical proof that we're fully safe. But in terms of engineering, in terms of getting something to market. Trusted execution environments, whether it's from AMD or from Intel, are incredibly useful products.
+
Carter
+These are flagship products for these institutions. They use it all over the place. So, if these trusted execution environments break, they're losing billions, right? Like because they have huge clients that are blockchains that are also trusting the privacy of the tech. So, there's a lot at stake for them. We're inheriting the assumption of, hey, we have to assume the hardware is safe.
+
Carter
+It's a big assumption. We'd like to eliminate that assumption, but it's an extremely useful assumption to hold because if it stands true, you have this very scalable, very performant private blockchain. And so like I said, I'd like to achieve a world where we don't have to just trust the hardware, where we can have some sort of key rotation schema that combines fully Homomorphic encryption, working with hardware level environment, and that that would be the beautiful mathematics plus engineering solution that gives you the promises of mathematics with the scalability that we all need to have an actual functioning blockchain.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+You mentioned UI UX before when we were talking about adoption and about other things. And what stage, in your opinion, because obviously Shade Protocol is a defi protocol, right? Not just the privacy protocol, it's also defi. At what stage are we currently in the industry, not necessarily just the Cosmos ecosystem, but in how you guys solve it in Shade Protocol?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+The whole thing about UI UX Defi, adopting more users and so on and so forth.
+
Carter
+So, I mean I think there's really two or three pieces that are involved in this and two of them are kind of out of our control and one of them is in our control. The first one is wallets. Wallets are what users touch. It's them, it's their account, it's where their stuff is stored. And we have seen wallets really, really improve over time from just like sending money from A-To-B or staking on Cosmos.
+
Carter
+The part we can't necessarily control is like wallets need to be built to be integrated into apps and that kind of interface, that type of interlocking intimacy between app builders and wallets has a long ways to go. Just being honest. Like the Keplrs of the world, the Leap Wallets of the world, like the Metamasks to the world. That's going to be something that over the next ten or 20 years, the tools can get so much better as an app builder to like, fully leverage the wallet in a useful and coherent way.
+
Carter
+But that's kind of out of like a Shade Protocol since we're building Silk, our privacy preserving stablecoin, Shadewap, Shadeline, all these things. We can't fully control the Keplr and these wallets, we can try to work with them. The second piece is gas UX. This concept that like I go to some layer one and in order to be able to use an app, I need that underlying gas token, you know what I mean?
+
Carter
+Most people want to be able to like trade, kind of like an Osmosis, right to osmosis’ advantage, like to be able to make a trade without needing the gas token. I think if we can solve the gas problem, which I think wallets are probably going to have to solve or apps are going to have to find some sort of workaround where like you can interact with the app and you don't even need to know that you're using a gas token in the background.
+
Carter
+If we can fix that, that's going to be a huge leap forward. Wallets, Wallets integrate with apps, gas, UX and the final one is on the apps. The final one is when you go to shape protocol dot I O, what's actually presented before you. How easy is all that interaction? And to be honest, that just takes an obsession with quality, that takes the user's prioritizing because you vote with your money.
+
Carter
+If everyone's putting all their money on some crappy UI UX, everyone's happy with that. Then like people are kind of signalling we care more about functionality than the UI UX. But I think what should happen is the capital will slowly follow improvements in UI UX, in terms of help desk experiences and tutorials, documentation, and we're part of that. You know, we're part of front running and trying to push the industry forward and it just takes time, takes alot effort.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Could you a little bit talk about the differences between Silk and other privacy preserving stablecoins and what does exactly a privacy preserving stablecoin for somebody out there and how does exactly Silk work in this case?
+
Carter
+Absolutely. So Silk is privacy preserving for transactions so you can send it from A to B and you're going to have that metadata obfuscated versus if you have something like DAI or FRAX or USDC, when you make a transaction, all that information is totally publicly transparent and that's the starting point. Silk is private. Silk is also stable, right?
+
Carter
+A lot of stablecoins like other privacy preserving tokens like Zcash and Monero, they fluctuate in value. People are very speculative on them. They do not have the economic levers designed to keep them at a target price, like a stablecoin. And so we believe that you need more than just privacy, you need stability, you need to have something that can function as a medium of exchange that's stable and not subject to all the volatility of crypto.
+
Carter
+And so that's the goal of Silk to be used in everyday commerce and to be private. Now the really interesting thing with Silk is what it's pegged to. Everyone keeps pegging things to the dollar over and over and over again. And how can you claim that we're building a decentralized future if our decentralized stablecoins are pegged to a centralized monetary system?
+
Carter
+Right? And so this is the final attribute of Silk that makes it unbelievably fascinating and differentiated. Silk is pegged to a basket of global currencies and commodities. So we have all these different currencies selected. We also have gold and Bitcoin included. There's a weight tied to each one of them and when you summate across them, you then have this target peg that's slowly moving over time and all the stability mechanisms are tracking that basket.
+
Carter
+And the net result is that if you hold Silk, you are essentially in a perpetual hedge against global volatility and inflation. It's the equivalent of like holding an index fund in stocks. But this is the currency version. And so we believe that Silk will be an interoperability hub between global currencies. It will be used everywhere in commerce, and it will have that privacy and performance.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+How are you planning to make it usable and especially explain it to people? Because in 2016 we had an experiment where in one of the networks were launching the stablecoin was tied to one milligram of gold. I believe it was gram or milligram. I don't remember. I think it was milligram because one gram was expensive and it wasn't easy to explain it to people, even though it sounds like, Oh, I mean, what's the difficult part here?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Now we're talking about a basket of things, including Bitcoin, including gold, you said. How are you guys managing to explain it? I'm bringing back mom and dad now. You know, from the beginning of our conversation, how did they understand it?
+
Carter
+Absolutely. So my first call actually posed a question for you. What was the name of that Stablecoin?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It was GBG, Golos Backed Gold. It was one milligram of gold, back in Golos tokens, which were the tokens of the network. So imagine if it was like one milligram of gold back in Secret tokens or whatever.
+
Carter
+So as a word, do you think your parents know what GBG is?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I hope not, because it was a Russian audience, so they definitely didn't know what GBG was, no.
+
Carter
+Do people know what, if I ask my parents what UST is, as an acronym, would they, IST, USK, Dai, Frax.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+No, I don't think so. No, no, no, no, no, no. No. Acronym.
+
Carter
+Do you think they would recognize the word Silk?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Well, the first thing I would think of Silk would definitely not that it's tied to a basket of world currencies. I would recognize the word Silk, but, um. But I see where you getting at, and I like it. I like it a lot.
+
Carter
+So a lot of thought was put into this word because Silk has global significance. It was involved in trade in Asia, Europe, Africa. Silk is something that flows. It's inherently sounds smooth, kind of fast, kind of premium. And so even actually, if you look at the Silk logo, it’s a circle, and there's a little kind of U-shape in the middle of it and Silk is actually, stablecoins have to represent stability.
+
Carter
+And so, if you look at all the other stablecoins out there, you'll notice that they have jagged edges on the logo. So, Silk's logo actually has to solve a problem where we're supposed to represent fluidity, but then you also need to represent stability. And so, Silk has these two, this middle section, it's fixed to the outside edge and it's connecting two points.
+
Carter
+So, it's represents a transaction, a river, a trade route in the middle. Long and short, without me falling down this rabbit hole too much. I believe that the naming component will be one of the strongest advantages of Silk, that there was. We were brave enough and bold enough to use a word that everyone globally recognizes. You're not buying some weird three letter acronym.
+
Carter
+You're buying Silk. You don't need to fully understand, like, Oh, I'm holding this very complicated basket full of global currencies and commodities. I think what happened is the first subset of users, the first 10 million people will know, Hey, I'm hedge against inflation and volatility. That's why I hold Silk. I think the next 90 million people will hold Silk because they know their friends are holding Silk and that word gained traction.
+
Carter
+It gains, just like Bitcoin as a word gains reputation over time. How many people actually know how the internet works? But how many people use it? How many people know how Bitcoin actually works, but how many people use it? And I believe if the utility is apparent enough, if the brand is apparent enough, then after we onboard that first 10 million, it's a network effect and network effects are the strongest thing you could ever achieve.
+
Carter
+So long and short. We still have to solve the education for that first 10 million. We still have to make it very clear what the attributes are. But I think some of the, a lot of stablecoins suffer from a brand problem. They suffer from not being attached to something in our real world that people already understand. And that's what we're really going to be leaning into.
+
Carter
+We'll see how well it works. But to your point, of course, it's an uphill battle. It's the most absurd uphill battle to create a currency scratch and to get millions of people to trust, get millions of people to use it. We are up to the task.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I'm loving the optimism with the 100 million users. I like it already. This is good. Something to pay attention to, of course. And we had this interesting discussion, well, partially discussion on the liquid staking debate. Think we did and I guess this is a lot about Defi and this is something I would love to hear your thoughts here. What is your idea about appearance of value inside of a protocol?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+You know, I mean, a lot of the times we look at a protocol or a token or anything else and it seems that the only value it accrues, sometimes it’s not even fees. Sometimes it's just inflation and, well, not monetary supply, sorry, rather to speak. Right. Inflating the monetary supply and hence pain outs or burdens. And sometimes we don't even have fees in built into protocols, let alone other things that we can think about.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+So, the question is this, in your opinion, what is the way for Defi protocols to move in order to attract more real value to the underlying tokens that are in those protocols?
+
Carter
+Value comes from providing a service, fundamentally. To have real sustainability for a protocol, you need to be consistently providing a service beyond just, I'm giving you a portion of inflation. What problem are you actually solving for users? I think lending products do a great job with this. They essentially allow you to do more with your collateral. I get to lever up on my collateral, get to mint out this liability in the form of a stablecoin.
+
Carter
+I mean, I'm in a leveraged position, but the protocol empowers you to do that with your assets without having to like, give you some inflationary reward. Right? It's just a genuine good service. The lending and the borrowing, people are, you know, borrowing out their assets. People earn yield as the person lending and the borrower gets to go and do something valuable.
+
Carter
+These are all real genuine financial services. I think decentralized exchanges will eventually there. They suffer from a problem of you can't create a good trading experience, you can't create a good service unless there's liquidity there. So we somehow need to attract liquidity to create the service that users will use. But what happens if attracting that liquidity is more expensive,
+
Carter
+than the value derived from providing the service to users with trading. And this is something that all dexs are struggling with. It's a difficult model. So in summary, I think protocols have to be laser focused on where are we actually creating value in the form of service to users and how do we make it sustainable. A lot of protocols, 95% of protocols are just kind of inflationary beasts that do a great job of attracting yield, TVL and providing a service.
+
Carter
+But if push comes to shove, it's not actually sustainable. It's harsh to hear, we live in a space built on speculation. The capital is here to speculate. The capital is not here because it gets to be used in a useful way, but give it a decade and we start to capture traditional finance and people bring their capital here to use it as opposed to like yield farm.
+
Carter
+And I believe the sustainability will be there. And the protocols that were always focused on sustainability will be the only ones left standing, to be honest.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Will that capital be non-speculative? How can we? I mean that capital could also be speculative, right? As far as I imagine. Let's hope not.
+
Carter
+But I guess what I'm saying is like the end state and I think Uniswap is getting closer. Essentially what they do with like with V3 is that people bring their capital, they create a pool, there's no incentives, there's no like emissions at them to make the pool. But so many people want to use that trading service and the liquidity providers happy to take on the risk.
+
Carter
+That's like boom, capital was provided. People are using the service. Value is generated without ever having to emit a token to attract that value. It's just like the ability to plug into Uniswap and create markets was the service and we didn't have to spit money at people for the capital to come and start providing that service for users.
+
Carter
+That's what I mean, is like the tech has to be good enough to plug in that people come and make their own markets, people come and bring their own capital. And it's not just because they're chasing a yield, that the protocol is dangling out in front of them.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I think definitely the value of sometimes is overlooked. Sometimes the value is much closer to us. I think the value of not having to give my data to a centralized exchange is something already included in the Uniswap price, in my opinion, you know. Kind of a resume Blitzs for this conversation in particular because definitely I feel like we need to dive deeper into Shape Protocol.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+But of course, I think that what could be done on a different format. So, for sure we need to because I would love to understand how you guys work and all the features you have. But for this conversation, kind of small Blitz. Give me three projects, preferably outside the top 20 that you follow and you think are interesting to watch.
+
Carter
+Absolutely. So three projects that I found particularly interesting outside of the top 20 is Umee. Umee is not a super well-known Cosmos blockchain, but Brent over there is doing some great work trying to create essentially a risk free rating crypto, like how much is one Atom worth per day? And like how do you actually define that? And they're kind of creating these whole markets around Cosmos tokens and staking with lending and borrowing, I think.
+
Carter
+Umee has this really beautiful Multi-Chain vision. I actually just got off a conversation with Jack Samplin yesterday. Once IBC fully comes into play with Multi-Chain smart contract calls, I envision Umee being like the rails for lending and borrowing for all of Cosmos, and I envision that being the case in a really interesting way. It won't mean it's the only lending product.
+
Carter
+I just think it's going be a very interesting one. I think Kujira is doing some great work with their order book model, with kind of the real yield adopt defi narrative. What I most appreciate about them is their emphasis on sustainability. I think they're one of the first to kind of push in that direction. I'd like to think that Shade Protocol has also been a part of that movement too, but we really came at it from a privacy is sustainability standpoint, less so from like, Hey, this yield is fake standpoint.
+
Carter
+So, I think we've learned a lot from Kujira and we're really, really big fans of them. And then the final one, this is going to be a controversial one. I'm a very big fan of Luna, specifically the community and specifically the builders that built on top of it. I think that that ecosystem and I've talked with like the White Whale team, for instance, Kujira was a post Luna team, Mars protocol is another like post Luna team.
+
Carter
+I think those builders have been battle hardened. They realize that they were part of an unsustainable ecosystem and now they're all building with sustainability in mind. So, I think history will look back on Luna and it'll say that it was it was a failed experiment. But we learned so much from that experiment, and I respect all of those builders that are continuing to build despite that catastrophe that happened this summer.
+
Carter
+And everyone's memory is so short, right. FTX happens, it's November and people are already starting to feel like Luna was forever ago. Folks, that was like four or five months ago. That was not that was not that long ago. So those are really the three ecosystems that I'm keeping my eye on. And then dex wise, another one that's coming out pretty soon is Duality.
+
Carter
+Keep your eye on those guys. That's another Cosmos chain that was recently announced. Brilliant team working on the dex side. And then I just also respect Osmosis and Crescent because they just, there are some of the first in the Cosmos and they continued to have a lot of users and paved the way on UI UX. So I just gave you like six answers.
+
Carter
+But those are, those are the ones I'm really interested in.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+The more the better, the more the better. What about two motivational things that keep you going in your daily life?
+
Carter
+I have this unrelenting vision that we can build futuristic currencies. We shouldn't settle for dollar stablecoins. We shouldn't settle for recreating the existing financial rails and ecosystem. That's not what we came for in 2008. It's not what we came for in 2016. The tech gives us attributes that open the doors. They really do, of permissionless, participation, censorship resistance, scalability, privacy, like it's all there at our fingertips.
+
Carter
+And what I sense our space is a hesitancy to fully lean into those attributes in the name of plugging back into the existing system and so what keeps me up at night is this vision for a protocol that pushes the boundaries of what's possible, even if it's uncomfortable. And I think still with privacy, decentralized collateral, this decentralized peg, it's so radical.
+
Carter
+It is the most absurd thing I ever could have dreamed of. And we're months away from kicking off that experiment, and we might fail. Like Shared Protocol. It's, I think we’re like 30 plus builders across all the different teams. We might go out there and in a year we close up shop because the liquidity didn't come, the apps and products didn't get adopted.
+
Carter
+But what I know in my heart of hearts is that what we're trying to do is so radical and that we will have pushed the needle forward for the next builder, for the next youngster to come along and look at what we're doing and say, hey, they were 80% of the way there and I'm going to take it 100% when I go and built my protocol.
+
Carter
+And what keeps me motivated is like, I know there's other builders out there that are hungry to keep pushing the envelope, even if we fail. We all understand these are experiments, but it's going to take the continued bravery and courage of builders to not settle. And that's what keeps me up at night. It's two things. It's the what if?
+
Carter
+What if we could actually pull this off? What if we could actually build something with as much adoption as Bitcoin, but with privacy and with stability? What would that do for the world? What would that unlock? What if we can actually pull it off? And then the second piece is, of course, is like, how can we push the needle forward even if we fail?
+
Carter
+How much can we help the space and move the ethos forward? And I hope as community members and as users and as consumers, people make the decision to park their capital in protocols pushing the boundaries. Of course there's risk involved, but yeah, that's my answer.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And the final one, give me one person, doesn't have to be a crypto person. It can be a book, it can be a GitHub account, it can be a Twitter account, it could be a Medium account that you recommend people to read or to follow.
+
Carter
+I would definitely say follow Guy Zyskind on Twitter. He's like one of the original privacy founders. I really respect the work he's done with Secret Labs. There's been a lot of highs and lows for Secret Network, but these guys continue to chip away and then to just like, rattle off a couple of other names that I really respect.
+
Carter
+Jack Zampolin, Zaki, Sunny, Tor Bair, Ethan Buckman, you know, these are all people worth following, all the Cosmos folks that saw this vision and still see this vision that the world doesn't fully understand yet. And that's very exciting to be a part of..
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Carter, thank you very, very, very much for joining. I hate time because it's too quick. Carter, thank you very much for finding the time to answer, joining us. And thank everybody else for listening and tuning in.
+
Carter
+Thank you so much for having me on. It was awesome.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Bye bye.
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:
In this episode, Citizen Cosmos talks to Jonathan Caras, dragon rider, proffessional magician and computer science prodigy. In this episode they cover a range of topics, including dragons on Mars, the Hostory of the Sheckle and the collapse of empires. Jonothan has some insights into stablecoins and why it is essential we wrest control of currency away from government.
+They also explore what could be the catalyst for broader user adoption and give some great reasons to buy NFT's.
+
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Good space-time, y'all. In this episode of The Citizen Cosmos podcast, I speak with Jonathan Caras, currently working on Levana, collateralized trading platform. We discuss inflation, stablecoins, NFT’s in gaming, collapse of empires and the history of the Shekel. We also talk about dragons on Mars, the life cycle of living organisms and trust in money.
+
Jonathan
+I’ve worked for a company that built a fashion app called Screenshop for the Kardashians.
+It’s verifiable, you can store it in your head, it’s not sizeable by the government, it allows for arbitrage of electricity, it crosses borders.
+Do thought of it, like a year before me.
+
+
Citizen Cosmos
+He was the better magician. He made it all disappear.
+
Jonathan
+The hyperinflation is like a giant theft. It’s where government essentially just steals money from the people.
+When I look out my window, I see the remains of multiple fallen empires that lasted much longer and had much more influence than the United States.
+When you can control how labour happens and what the compensation of labour is, that is mass slavery.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Before we rocket off into today’s podcast, here is a round up of the latest news from the sponsor for this episode, Cyber. Cyber Congress DAO has been primarily working on improving the Bostrom hub, This work includes, the testing of the contracts, new UI features, verification tools for on chain governance and polishing the Bostrom DEX. Adding mass protection, new web front and bringing indexing of chain swaps. To try Bostrom, head now to over sig dot ai.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Hi everybody. Welcome to a new episode of the Citizen Cosmos podcast.
+I have with me today, Jonathan Caras, head of communications at Levana. Jonathan. Hi. Welcome.
+
Jonathan
+Hi. Thank you so much for having me on the show.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Yes, very glad. We met, if I'm not mistaken, I hope my memory hasn't died completely yet in this bear market. But we met in Atom Lisboa and yeah, it was fascinating. How was it for you, by the way, Atom Lisboa?
+
Jonathan
+It was great. First of all, I think Portugal is my favourite destination. It’s just the weather, the people, just everything about it, the culture, and then the fact that it's such a crypto hub. So, I'll take any excuse to go to Lisboa and to get to talk to people from the Cosmos community is also particularly valuable because I think Cosmos in general is confusing to many people in crypto.
+
Jonathan
+They don't get it. The idea of self-sovereign chains that all kind of share as part of a larger mesh is just such an obscure concept that, you know, if you come from the world of Solana or like I went to the Salona event, you come from any of these worlds, it's you're just like, I don't get it. Are you an app?
+
Jonathan
+Are you a layer one? Are you like, what is how does all of this work and what am I supposed to do? And like, where's my USDC and what is Axelar? And you know, I have to deposit into the Osmosis AMM. Like there's so many paradigms that we, you take advantage of or that that are just a given when you come from the world of Ethereum defi that had been mimicked in every other ecosystem.
+
Jonathan
+And what I love about Cosmos is that we're constantly trying to say, could it be done differently, and could it be done better?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I finally, finally understood why that design happened. It was just when you go to conferences and people ask you what you are just to say, I'm an L1. I’m Cosmos, you know, damn it, you don’t need to explain it finally. No, joking. That would be a good reason to do it right. I was actually at Break Point, not at the event itself, we did record with a few guys, and I did meet a few guys outside.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I didn't go in, but I must say we decentralization kind of maximalists and we support not just the Cosmos, Ethereum too, and projects from other ecosystems as well. We talk to and know we're out there, but I'm yeah, it's feels different. It's not like the people was different atmosphere different. I don't know. The whole thing feels very different, but happy to hear about Portugal.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Of course, living in partially in Portugal. So, I'm happy and glad you should come visit Madeira. It's a beautiful place.
+
Jonathan
+I will. I will. I'll take you up on that. You have a comfortable couch I can crash on.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Yes. Well, a couch. Yes and no. I have a floor. A lot of space. I’m one of this, minimalist people. So, but we have a lot of space.
+
Jonathan
+I'll bring a sleeping bag.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I have a airbed. So I can just. Jonathan, would you care to please to talk a little bit about yourself? What do you do? Of course, the typical question, how did you get pilled by blockchain? And a little bit about Levana as well maybe.
+
Jonathan
+Oh gosh. Okay, let's do it. I was born, you know, David Copperfield. I'm about to turn 40 and which is a big number. It feels a lot older than I feel, but I've been building software since I was nine years old. I was writing basic on a 286, probably 386. With like Q Basic and TI-82 calculator. I knew I was going to be a game developer since I was probably ten and, you know, my mom sent me to like summer camps and stuff for web design and things like that in the early nineties.
+
Jonathan
+And then I moved to Israel after high school. I went to Jewish seminary to learn to be a rabbi. I didn't become a rabbi. I was, you know, passionate about technology. And I started my first company in I went to, I formally trained as a computer engineer. I'm also you know, I was a professional magician in high school, and I did a lot of theater, you know, for like performance arts.
+
Jonathan
+And I built a software house focused on mobile software development. In 2008, I had early access to the iPhone SDK. In 2007 from relationships that I had with Apple, and I built out a team. We were about a dozen engineers and we would do soup to nuts App development before app development was cool and we did a lot of like P2P and like early childhood education apps, about 60 apps in total from 2008 to 2012.
+
Jonathan
+2012, I patented a video streaming protocol which had optimized nat traversal for 3G networks. I created a video streaming company called Glide Video Messaging. We took off in about 2014. We got about 26 million subscribers. I sold my portion of it in 2015. I did a Kickstarter for a camera. A wearable camera on your wrist. Did pretty well with that.
+
Jonathan
+And then I actually I worked for a company that built a fashion app called Screenshop for the Kardashians. So, I worked with Kim and we designed a product that got a couple million users. It used AI to turn your Instagram feed into a shopping cart, and then we were acquired in 2018 by Snapchat and during that time period and Kim was actually a pleasure to work with.
+
Jonathan
+I met Kanye once. He didn't say anything, but you know, he seems like a nice guy. So, I was first introduced to Bitcoin in 2011. I helped one of my college mates set up a GPU mining rig, like at the end, the very end of GPU mining and I threw away like a Coinbase of Bitcoin. So, like I don't know whether it was 25 or whether it was 50 at that.
+
Jonathan
+I mean, it was either one or two, but it was just it was valueless at the time, at least I thought it was. And then I never read the white paper. I just was interested in the application really around BitTorrent because I was really excited for reputation management and I thought that Bitcoin kind of combined with BitTorrent in order to create reputation management that was decentralized through how many tokens that you had so that you would know how to prioritize between seeders and leachers.
+
Jonathan
+And then I was reintroduced to the White Paper in 2016. And, you know, my father's a libertarian and I was actually researching online like to buy gold, you know, and that's how I stumbled upon the Bitcoin white paper. And then I just fell down the rabbit hole and I was like, I was like, this is so much better than gold, from all of the attributes.
+
Jonathan
+Like, instantly, you know, it's verifiable. You can store it in your head. It's non seasable by the government, it allows for arbitrage of electricity. It crosses borders, it can be used by anybody with a cell phone. It just did everything that I wanted gold to do but better. And so I just fell in love with it. And I actually sent half a Bitcoin to one of the investors in my streaming video company and said, like, you should just check this out.
+
Jonathan
+It was, I think Bitcoin was trading at around $900 at the time, and we just kind of fell down the rabbit hole together and we he ended up creating a fund he put together like just small fund like 50 K.Then I just kept getting pinged about research, about different ICOs that were happening. And so I started falling down the rabbit hole.
+
Jonathan
+That made me very anti Ethereum because I was like, none of these projects make any sense. None of them have any economic viability. I don't need hamster coin in order to buy your hamster or lemonade coin buy your lemonade or dentist coin or vegan coin or any of these. Like what the heck are people doing here? Like, that's not how money works.
+
Jonathan
+And so, I spent a lot of time from the first bull run as a Bitcoin maximalist. And so, then we had a fund together and I'd say I was like head of research of this fund Lionchain Capital, and I fell in love with MakerDAO because I recognized that we needed stablecoins and we needed decentralized stablecoins. Then when MakerDAO switched the MakerDAO Foundation and then when they came out with Multi-Collateral Dai, I was just kind of like done with the project, like whatever.
+
Jonathan
+And I actually went out to breakfast with Eyal Hertzog from Bancor, like before he launched Bancor and he explained to me how the AMM worked and like how it solved the liquidity problem and simplified market making. I was like, this is amazing. Why do you need your own token? What are you doing with your own token for this?
+
Jonathan
+Just launch the product. And so then, you know, I saw like when he was forced to buy Uniswap, you know, with Hayden, and then that kind of opened up my eyes to what could be done with viable economic principles through smart contract platforms. And then I fell in love with the Ethereum. So, I realized it wasn't really a Ethereum that I hated.
+
Jonathan
+It was really just all of that whole ICO bubble. Then I met Vitalik and the Starkware team then elements Ellie Bets’ son, who created Zcash and the father of zero knowledge proofs at the Scaling Bitcoin Conference in Tel Aviv University in 2018, I think. And then I ended up just falling in love with zero knowledge proofs. And all the while I was, you know, anytime that a new stablecoin came out, I tried to like, get in on that project.
+
Jonathan
+So, like Ampleforth and Olympus, ESD, you know, all these things, but you know, none of them worked, I was really into Haven also. I don't know if you know Haven, it was merge mined with Monero and it was a two-coin system where there was a stablecoin and a speculative coin and it used a senioric based minting and burning. So, I saw that, and I thought like, Wow, wouldn't this be awesome if you could build smart contracts on top of this?
+
Jonathan
+Because who's got time to merge mine Monero? And so, I thought like, okay, the best way to do it would be to take Haven, just rebuild it on Cosmos and then be able to build apps on top of it. And, you know, and then that's what made me fall down the rabbit hole of Terra, because that was basically the same idea.
+
Jonathan
+So, I thought I was the first one that thought of it. But no Do thought of it like a year before me.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+He was the better magician. He made it all disappear. I’m joking, go on please. Sorry.
+
Jonathan
+So sure. And so, I worked for Starkware for about two years. I led business development there. We had two major projects that we brought on for StarkEx, which was the single sequencer, single operator, zero knowledge proof system. So, they've matured now to Starknet, which is much more decentralized and that was ImmutableX, which produced NFTs on Layer 2 for Gods Unchained, and then now is a platform with ImmutableX and then dydx.
+
Jonathan
+So with both of these projects, I really got to see like I hung out with the head engineer at Immutable. I was big into NFTs at the time, you know, I remember like when the first Punks were minted and then when that 721 was standardized, I minted. I did a whole masterclass at Starkware like walking them through how NFTs work and going through the mint process.
+
Jonathan
+I flew out to Berlin to meet some of the teams that were making like I met the Rarible team, and I flew to New York to meet Devin at Opensea. So, it was like really exciting to kind of see this concept of digital assets and the lifestyle and brand space really come to life. And then I did a lot of technical sales for Immutable to explain how zero knowledge proofs work.
+
Jonathan
+I got to work with a bunch of gaming companies and that was like amazing. And then once the guy that sat next to me in the office at Starware was the guy that wrote, rewrote the contracts from Solidity to Cairo for dydx. And so I got to walk through how dydx worked And then I fell in love with perpetual swaps.
+
Jonathan
+So then there was a team that was being formed and incubated, which later became Mars through Delphi labs, which they had created. And I, I worked with Delphi through my time at Starkware. I'd gotten to know the team pretty well. I had met Tom. I forget what country I met him in. Maybe he was in New York, maybe he's in Florida, maybe it was in Europe.
+
Jonathan
+But I met Tom, and when we got to know each other, I joined the Lao, which was a DAO based investment firm, and then Flamingo, which became the largest investors in the crypto space and NFTs and then Delphi was putting together this like all-star team of suites of products on Terra, which I was like totally down the rabbit hole for Terra.
+
Jonathan
+And so, I got an opportunity to kind of jump ship at Starkware and to join one of these teams. And so that ended up becoming Levana. And Lavanya is perpetual swaps. Today, it is the version two of Levana, which survived the Terra crash. It's called a well-funded perpetual swap, which means that it is fully collateralized, so it can't go insolvent even with strong market movements.
+
Jonathan
+And if you're not familiar with insolvency like the reason that we're sitting at a $16,000 Bitcoin is basically because of insolvency, because of all this, like cooking the books of like, that I use debt that I have from another platform in order to collateralize a loan that I get from another platform and then people can't repay back their loans.
+
Jonathan
+So, everything's under collateralized and then everything crashes and then we're in the situation that we're in with all this downward pressure. So, the idea of having an a fully collateralized leveraged platform is incredibly pertinent to the space today. I should also mention that, you know, I got to know Do. Do is a hurricane. I have the utmost respect for him.
+
Jonathan
+I do not believe that he is a scammer. I think that he's brilliant. And I was invited to work with him on revamping UST from being fully algorithmic to being semi backed, under collateralized. And so that project was called LFG. So I worked with, you know, I was on there on the advisory board with about seven, six other people, five other people and Do.
+
Jonathan
+And then that was our goal was to essentially to turn UST like into a form of, of like a MakerDAO or really like a FRAX, not a MakerDAO. And I also, you know, I got to work with Sam, and Sam is also brilliant from, from FRAX and I know the Orai team, and you know, the fee and whatever. There's the whole rabbit hole of, of struggle, of stablecoin like, but if you don't build like if we just pause for a second, if you don't have a real decentralized stablecoin then you just reinvented the like what did we really do in terms of censorship, resistance?
+
Jonathan
+Like that's a whole other conversation and you know, we can have that or not have that. Then Terra crashed. But before Terra crashed, I'm a storyteller and like a big sci fi geek and very passionate about NFTs. And I wrote a story for Levana, which was about dragons on Mars, and that ended up taking up a life of its own.
+
Jonathan
+And we did the Levana, the largest NFT mint. We built like eight different mini games, and we had a huge community and recently just because of, you know, I told you I had like this week was rough. I spent I hadn't slept in like three days straight and we basically were put in the situation where Levana doesn't have funding to support building gamefi while at the same time building perps and perps is a bear market product and can potentially keep the organization afloat.
+
Jonathan
+And so, the tough call was made to wind down or to, you know, to stop effort on the gamefi, which really broke my heart. You know the that in the story of Levana, the main character's name is Zehava which is my daughter's name. And if you ever come to Jerusalem, you can come see my house.
+
Jonathan
+You'll see how it's just decked out in purple dragons at this point. You know, from the just the influence like this whole gamefi approach and kind of like combining NFTs and Defi has been really like a life's work and something I've been very passionate about, but it's something that's going to just have to take the back burner, you know, as part of like bear market blues.
+
Jonathan
+But I'm optimistic that there will be greener pastures moving forward. But you're kind of catching me at somewhat of an emotional point and kind of like a hard pivot as to what we're doing. But we've given over the gaming assets to the community, and I'm hopeful that the community will be able to accomplish what I wasn't able to accomplish or what the team wasn't able to accomplish.
+
Jonathan
+So that's kind of my background and Levana’s background and what we're doing. So happy to unpack that and to talk about whatever it is that you'd like to talk about.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+What I love the most is that you beat my record. I took me three years to read the Bitcoin whitepaper since I started using it since that first 2011, it was exactly as well. I was leaving Israel to Russia, and then I was in Ben Gurion Airport and I had a call from a friend who told me about it.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And then we did get into mining, but I did not bother to read the white paper until 2013. But and I felt I had the record. But to do it in 2016. Well done. Yeah. You mentioned a few things out of curiosity, considering I'll be honest with you, I love listening to people's stories, especially in blockchain and seeing, Oh, I was there too.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+We probably met before, we probably met before there and there, and there. Out of curiosity, you said you had a fund, and you were looking at Ethereum. What was your worst buy?
+
Jonathan
+My worst buy. Oh, well, I lost the most money on Luna.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Oh, no, no, no. Worse buy, worse buy, like, something really terrible. Like something. Oh, my God. I don't to talk about that, like I didn't touch that.
+
Jonathan
+That. Oh, okay. XRP.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+XRP.
+
Jonathan
+Yeah, XRP.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Not that bad. I've done worse than that. Come on.
+
Jonathan
+Like, you know, Look, I bought XRP with strong conviction.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Okay? That's better. That's better, I like that. Yeah. We did lose a lot of money on UST but it's funny, I've got several recordings this week and that the conversation of UST keeps on coming up more in the bear market. And I keep on saying that actually I think the Do Kwon unknowingly did everyone a favour and people are likr,.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+What do you mean? I was like, well, for example, we had I don't know why, but so happened we had all of the projects, money a lot more than five or six years worth of money in UST. And having all that gone two or three months before the bull market is over or before the bear market really starts, did get us kick alive three months before.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+So we were working already and you know, we're already been working half a year now since it happened. So. So it's all good.
+
Jonathan
+There's, you know, sometimes you just have to… there's a phrase in Hebrew, Gam Zu L’Tova, like.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It’s also good.
+
Jonathan
+Yeah. You know, everything has a good side to it.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Yeah, for sure. There's actually a lot of things I want to talk to you about, but I guess I'm going to try and pick at more the defi kind of and then gaming kind of style. First question first, you said you were interested in stablecoins and you were involved in several in one way or another. You know, you've spoke to several developers, a lot of developers out there, but by the sounds of it and a lot of founders, first question, why are we pegging stablecoins to fiat money and is it something we should be doing?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And what is the future going to look like for stablecoins? Are we still going to be paying them to USD and Euro or we should change that in your opinion? And if he yes, to when?
+
Jonathan
+It is a good question. I think that there is potential for a Bitcoin standard. I think that what we would see is a hyperinflation like. It's actually interesting and I see this as a first-hand experience that the first Israelis that I ever met, which was in Baltimore, you know, where I was raised, had left Israel because of the collapse of the economy in the eighties around the first and maybe was the end of it.
+
Jonathan
+But for those that don't know, the Shekel is called the new Shekel. And then actually the economy. There was hyperinflation twice in Israel. They launched the country with the Lira that hyper inflated. Then they had the Shekel that hyper inflated, then today there's the new Shekel. So the first the narrative that I had about hyperinflation, like actually meeting somebody that went through hyperinflation was, you know, talking to Israelis in Baltimore that left the country because essentially you wake up one day and all the money in your bank account is worth nothing.
+
Jonathan
+The hyperinflation is like it's a giant theft. It's where the government essentially just steals money from the people. And then when I moved to Israel and they had the new Shekel was rather young, nothing large was priced in the new Shekel because there wasn't faith in it. So if you were to rent an apartment, you rent an apartment.
+
Jonathan
+It was priced in dollars. If you were to buy a car, it was priced in dollars. If you were to like a long hotel stay, anything that was like a significant amount of cash, it was always priced in dollars. And then as the economy improved in kind of like the high-tech scene in Israel really took off and you had you know, you had economic stability, you had waves of peace and prosperity.
+
Jonathan
+So then we saw a mind shift of the population that it became less reliant on pricing things in dollars and more reliant on pricing things in shekels. Now, that was a very interesting psychological, economic, eciopsychological. I'm not sure if that's a term change to to watch and to actually see it as a not going from a 19-year-old to a 40-year-old to watch that change happen.
+
Jonathan
+So that's kind of what I see is the path of a Bitcoin standard and a hyper Bitcoin ization. I mean, it could be that it's Bitcoin, it could be that it's something else. But I do see that there's a path where we go from defining assets in what is felt like just economically as secure because of volatility index and because of reflexive nature, because of Lindy effect, because of multiple mass psychosis, psychological aspects that over time as the volatility of another storage of value, the volatility of a storage of value as it drops down, so then it becomes easier to use as a means of exchange in unit of account.
+
Jonathan
+And I think that that's the transition that will have to happen. And again, we can get into proof of stake, we can get into proof of work, we can talk about the deflationary aspect of Ethereum and we can talk about minor extracted value of Ethereum or the Ofac compliance and what that means. And America having jurisdiction over validation and Coinbase’s, you know, headquarters in San Francisco over there and all of that impact and stuff.
+
Jonathan
+I don't have a crystal ball as to what it looks like, but I do know that every Empire Falls, Rome wasn't built in a day, Rome didn't fall in a day. The Ottomans, they fell. I literally when I look out my window, I see the remains of multiple fallen empires that lasted much longer and had much more influence than the United States.
+
Jonathan
+And so I know that if it's not during our lifetime, maybe not during our children's lifetime, maybe it's during our grandchildren's lifetime, but at some point America will fall. And I'm not wishing that on anybody because I think it's going to cause lots of pain. I think it's just the nature, you know, a nation, it's an organic living thing.
+
Jonathan
+And no organic living thing lasts forever. And, you know, everything is born, grows, matures, becomes fat and lazy and dies. And so at some point we're going to see the collapse of America or and it probably will be like Texas secedes, you know, California secedes. And then, you know, and then other states, you know, I don't know what the collapse of America looks like, but I think that it will be largely driven by economic collapse.
+
Jonathan
+And nobody would have believed this four years ago. But when you see that over the course of COVID, just first of all, the lack of let's call it faith in our supervisors and faith and trust of the what they tell us, and then the willy nilly printing of 40% of the volume of U.S. dollars, and then having that on the back of the of 2008’s, the economic collapse.
+
Jonathan
+You know, we're seeing the cracks in the walls already. And I believe that there will be an opportunity and it's probably not going to come from China and it's for sure not coming from Europe. So there's an opportunity for there to be a new sovereign global currency. And then I think we'll have that same shift that I firsthand experienced in Israel of things going price from the dollar to the Shekel.
+
Jonathan
+We'll see that on a global scale as things will be preferred to be priced in a new asset. And it's something that just naturally happens. But until then, we need stablecoins.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+We can create Stablecoins today by not pegging them to. I mean, it's not very hard to I mean, we experimented with the first and created stablecoin, which was called the Gold Backed Golos, and it was backed by a token, but the stability was to one milligram of gold. So like, I mean, we don't have to wait till America falls down, Right.
+
Jonathan
+Okay. But now you're just making it hard to have it as a unit of account. So do I really want to convert? Like, you're right, we could make it to the Peso, we could make it to whatever. But it's like most things in the world are priced in dollars. And so, if you're going to make a synthetic, you know, stable currency, make it stable to the thing that most things are priced in.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+What would you say helps the general public? And I say it with a lot of respect right now, I don't mean it in a bad way. It is just what people call mass adoption. In my opinion. Mass adoption happened a long time ago with NFTs. But what helps everybody to start trusting money? You mentioned several times that trust is a very big thing for money.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Is that the, you know, the trade, the fact that a lot of things are being traded or services being sold or are there no great developers, great founders, great supervisors, what's in your opinion, helping people to trust money more?
+
Jonathan
+Well, you asked one question and then you followed up with a different question.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I'm Israeli as well, so come on.
+
Jonathan
+Exactly. So, you first asked about like what causes mass adoption and then you asked what causes trust of money? So, I can address those as two different questions. So, what causes mass adoption is drastic increase to UX to user experience with an emphasis on onboarding and then that and that's a prerequisite. And then the use case of mass adoption is through lifestyle brands and entertainment because most people don't feel a pain when it comes to their financial ecosystem.
+
Jonathan
+We're very happy with Apple Pay. If you're not using Apple Pay at this point, you're a chump. It's amazing. And you know, credit cards are already digital currency, and you don't even have to swipe anymore. You just kind of like, you know, I like just hold my phone up and it just works. And so, we've got to have a wallet that just comes in our phone automatically and we don't even need to set it up.
+
Jonathan
+We don't need to download an app. It's just there. And then there has to be mass adoption through the existing media outlets that we already use. That could be your annual subscription of Netflix is an NFT. I don't know. Like the I don't know how to say this Gucci, Gucci, Gucci, Jovana, Gucci. Your I don't know your Versace handbag comes with an NFT certificate like the Beanie Baby that you get.
+
Jonathan
+We're already seeing the floodgates open in terms of use cases and understanding around Nfts. There's just this nasty association with like there's the whole woke culture apparently took an anti NFT approach. But I think in the next cycle we'll be smart enough to go against that. And you have to usually to battle woke, you have to be more woke than them.
+
Jonathan
+You know it's like a it's a pissing contest almost. So we've got to be super eco friendly, super inclusive, you know, yada, yada, all that great stuff. And then NFTs, is a lifestyle product and then NFT as club membership because really what an NFT like the most successful case of NFT, like, like Bored Apes and Punks and stuff, it's a club membership.
+
Jonathan
+And you know, we see that like Levana, that's very much a club membership, the Rekt Gang, it's club membership. You know, all this, Joe, is, you know, is showing that people want to be part of a club and they want to experience camaraderie. And it's also like for males in your adult life, it's very hard to make friends, you know, like you need a sports team that you're surrounded that like you both support.
+
Jonathan
+And so NFTs is, I'm not into sports, but I feel a lot of like similarities when I own an NFT that somebody else owns and it makes me. It at least I suspect it's a similar feeling as if it's like the same sports team. If we liked same sports team and we could talk about that and like root for the same sports team or at least dunk on the same sports team that we don't like.
+
Jonathan
+So, number one is we've got improved UX, especially around onboarding. Number two is we've got to get the haters on board to love NFT is and brands to embrace it and then to be integrated as utility NFTs through gaming and entertainment and now everybody's got a crypto wallet on their phone and then it's just natural that I will be able to just send you stablecoins through cryptocurrency.
+
Jonathan
+The same way that I use the cash app to send you things. And then we'll also be able to actually use it at point of sale and essentially, it'll be invisible. Like crypto will succeed when the people that use it don't know that they're using crypto. The same way that cloud computing became the winner and like World Wide Web became the winner when people didn't even know that they were using it.
+
Jonathan
+Like my mom doesn't realize that she's using World Wide Web when she watches Netflix, she just is using it and she doesn't care what chain that she's on, whether it's like the servers are on Azure or on Google Cloud Compute or on AWS, like that doesn't mean anything to her. She just wants to watch the Good Place or another season of the Office.
+
Jonathan
+So, I think that's where adoption will come from and that's what it's going to look like.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I remember one book that made an impression on me. It is. I'm also a sci fi geek a little bit. And it is a Russian sci fi author, Sergei Lukyanenko. I don't remember the book specifically so many years ago, but one little passage made an impression on me. From what you say, I did remember now. And that's going to be the question from the passage.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+But I have to say that first, in the book there was like a set in the distant future and one of the characters was being described as living in the city, and it's in the future. Humans don't have nails, hair or teeth. Well, they do, but they're not real, so not to waste time and all the money on that.
+
Jonathan
+So just to pause you there. I've thought about that. It's like, why don't we just all get dentures? But it's such a like it's such a I hate going to the dentist. Like every time I go to the dentist, I'm like, there’s got to be something better than this.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I've been putting that off for so long. Like I need to know good again now. And I've don't get me started there. But anyways, you know, there is this belief that there's only one city left on earth, and that is. Well, the civilization was destroyed some thousands of years ago, whatever. Hundreds of years ago. There is like this dome around the city and blah, blah, blah.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Long story short, this guy, everything is in the city is seamless. It's like you described this very important. Everything. Like they don't know how things happen. And then long story short, he manages to realize that it's not the only city that's left. He manages to get out and the world is not destroyed. There is actually like a whole country village kind of out there, and he manages to find some small village or something like that where when he's talking to people and here is the question, sorry for the length.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+They talk about a light bulb and then the light bulb stops working and they talk about how it's working. And his first reaction is, well, what the fuck do I know? You know, it's a light bulb. But then, you know, it's interesting because they get into this whole point and show you from the other side that the guy think that's a guy from the Village fixes the lights and what they kind of tried to show.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And then later on with the discussion, I'm not going to get into that. But the point was that when and I agree with you, but I will be devil's advocate here, because I agree to some extent. I have to be honest. If everything will be seamless, I hate that word. And we already have tracking devices in our pockets.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And if one company like Google, I hope they're not listening to this, installing phones, apps on everything now the mobile sorry wallets on every phone. And essentially what we're going to have is people not back to where why crypto was created. No like I mean the whole movement was partially created on philosophy and philosophy and blockchain ecology, separate things.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+But if that will happen like that, you know, complete an understanding of what's going on. We don't know what we're using. We don't know what we're doing. Aren't we just going to go back to square zero where why we created crypto was in order for us to be more responsible for what we do and, you know, to understand the monetary system better and to be free from our supervisors, so to speak.
+
Jonathan
+You make an interesting point, but I'm going to, partially disagree because I think at the end of the day, most people want to be supervised. Let's look at Web browsers. Okay. We'll take it from that point. With a Web browser, it comes on your phone and it's got lots of surveillance on it. But what it does is it enables access the World Wide Web, which is permissionless and gives access to everybody to be able to plug in.
+
Jonathan
+And then that's and because of its ubiquitousness, it has it's powerful. And because it's open source and permissionless, it allows for anybody that wants to unplug from the surveillance part of it to get something like Brave or DuckDuckGo or some other type, you know, to connect through Tor or through use a VPN in order to be able to access this permissionless network without the surveillance that comes by default on your phone.
+
Jonathan
+And I think that that's going to be the same path that we'll have with crypto. I think the path starts where most people don't own their own keys, but the fact that you can own your own keys makes all the difference. They're going to start with a custodial or even semi custodial using multipoint computational technology. You know what ZenGo is using and other services like Argent is using where you have a key recovery without managing a seed phrase because seed phrases suck.
+
Jonathan
+So, I think that you'll end up with a point where it starts as a very Web 2 experience for everyone, but then those who choose to break out of it have the option to. And that's what makes all the difference. Today, when I use PayPal, there's no option for me to have self-sovereign, self-custodial PayPal, and that's where we need to get to.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I see your point here. I know also that you're short on time, so I'm going to get to the Blitz because I call it Blitz, but I know it takes 5 minutes and I know you have 5 minutes, so there's going to be three questions. Give me top three blockchain projects that you're curious in in terms of what they're working on right now.
+
Jonathan
+Okay, I'll answer that. I actually have a list.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Well done. Prepared.
+
Jonathan
+I didn't know that you're going to ask that.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Be woke. Be woke. I like it.
+
Jonathan
+So I am, what am I interested in, LQTY with L,Q,T,Y.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I was going to talk to you about that, but yeah. Okay. LQTY. What else?
+
Jonathan
+Okay. So interested in that. Also let's say no, I'm very interested in Kujira in Kuji. I think it's a great team and it just does, you know, is just the ability that they have to deliver so quickly. I've just never seen anything like it. So I think that that's interesting. And then let's see another one that's interesting.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Could be two. It can be two doesn't have to be three. Check out chicken bonds on LQTY when you're going to research it. So, second question, then Jonathan, two things that motivate you in your daily life and keep you to help build well, not just Levana, but whatever it is out there that strikes you day by day.
+
Jonathan
+So things that motivate me. I believe that there's an opportunity for us working in the cryptocurrency world to prevent a seemingly inevitable dystopic future where it is impossible for economic wealth to be acquired by those that are not currently in power. And the main attack vector that the people that control economic wealth today is centred around being able to create a digital currency that has no mechanism storage.
+
Jonathan
+Because if you can't store wealth, then you can't acquire. What is money? In a nutshell, money is being able to store work because you can deploy that work. The amount of labour that it takes to farm a field, there's no way to store that and then to store it during the Summer. So that that way I can have it during the Winter.
+
Jonathan
+And so we use money as a derivative product to store work, and then we value different types of labour, sometimes incorrectly, by the amount of money that can be acquired in a certain geography for that labour. Now, if you could create a money that was impossible to save or was only possible for some people to save because, you know, and we're seeing this in China. Like money that if you don't spend it by the end of the month, it just gets pulled from your bank account, or money that can only be used at the grocery store but can't be used for buying liquor or whatever it is.
+
Jonathan
+So, if the government can control money, then they can essentially control labour, they can control what labour can be stored and what labour can't be stored. And when you can control how labour happens and what the compensation of labour is, that is mass slavery. So, we're on a path, just the default path of society in humanity is for the current administrations to be able to enact a form of mass slavery on our children and grandchildren.
+
Jonathan
+And we working in the crypto currency industry, are the only people that have an opportunity to be able to build the technology today, to be able to prevent that slavery from happening. And so that's one of the major things that makes me passionate about staying within this industry.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Last one, one person to follow doesn't have to be from crypto. Could be a book, could be a writer, a technologist, a magician, anyone, one person to follow.
+
Jonathan
+I'm going to say. Elon Musk. But I will. Yeah. You know, I will say that, you know, somebody that you probably are not following, that you should be following is Tyler Reynolds. He is a big inspiration. He just all of his he's so on point. And also Jason Cho is also just so on point like everything that they say,
+
Jonathan
+I just want to retweet. Both great guys.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Jonathan, I know you have to run, so I'm going to wrap it up and let you at least have a glass of water between your next call. So, thank you very, very much for joining. We must find a time to retake it, but we will for sure. Other than that, thank you very much for joining and find the time.
+
Jonathan
+Thank you so much. It was great. And I look forward to seeing you again in person. Bye.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Bye.
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:
In this episode, Citizen Cosmos talks to Zarko Milosevic, CTO of Informal Systems. In this episode, they explore how an organization that expands can manage to stick to their core founding values and have it drive growth. This episode is also packed full of Alpha and hints at more to come. Zarko is passionate about all the new potential developments and unpacks details of Informal becoming the stewards of consensus engine, Tendermint Core.
+
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Good Spacetime yall. In this episode of the Citizen Cosmos Podcast, I speak to Zarco Milosevic, CTO at Informal Systems, core developer of everything Cosmos. Zarco makes two big announcements, revealing Quint, a TLA+ inspired specification language for blockchain protocols and he updates the news on Informal’s work on the Tendermint code base. We will also discuss Informal’s vision, governance in Cosmos, Verification tools and their importance, advanced indexing and scalability issues.
+
Zarko
+It’s like the programming language but with some nice superpowers.
+
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I’m gonna tell you guys a secret right away, listen to this episode.
+
Zarko
+That’s one of the things we have exclusive announcement to make here in this episode.
+
Zarko
+It was clear for us from the beginning, it doesn’t make sense to separate the two, they need to coexist with each other and be in love.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I hope that the new consensus engine let’s call it like that can handle more drama per second.
+Before we rocket off into today’s podcast, here is a round up of the latest news from the sponsor for this episode, Cyber. Cyber Congress DAO has been primarily working on improving the Bostrom hub, This work includes, the testing of the contracts, new UI features, verification tools for on chain governance and polishing the Bostrom DEX. Adding mass protection, new web front and bringing indexing of chain swaps. To try Bostrom, head now to over sig dot ai.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Hi everybody welcome to your new episode of the Citizen Cosmos podcast today I have back with me because the last time we recorded was actually two years ago, Zarko the CTO of Informal Systems and I’m going to tell you guys a secret straight away, listen to this episode this is going to be a really good one. So Zarko, hi. Welcome back.
+
Zarko
+Yeah, hi. No pressure so
+
Citizen Cosmos
+No pressure, no pressure, I’m sorry.
+
Zarko
+Okay no pressure. Yeah I’m really happy to be here like has been quite some time and a lot of things has happened in mean time and
+I’m really happy to like chat with you about about this and whatever…
+
Citizen Cosmos
+whatever else comes. But before we go into it, Zarko first things first, considering that it's been a while and we have new listeners, I hope, would do you mind reintroducing yourself a little bit more than just the CTO of Informal and tell me and everybody else about what you're working on and what is your role a little bit
+more at Informal and everything else you want to add to that.
+
Zarko
+Ah so I’m still Zarko Milosevic, that hasn't changed. Last time we talked I think I was still researcher, so my kind of technical background is in this with the systems I did my PHD thesis EPFL in Switzerland. Actually in the area of pesantinfoltor and consensus protocols, this was before before Cosmos and like I’m not sure we can say
+really before crypto but like clearly it was before consensus was used in the production system at this scale and so I’m really happy that that I was sort of like giving a chance to have some follow up on that research in a kind of real world. So, my current role at Informal is CTO formal, I’m overseeing technical work at Informal. Informal is doing like lot of stuff so I’m more trying to catch up with all the stuff we are doing but still in Cosmos still trying to help with public goods infrastructure, still trying to improve the
+security of the systems we build and rely on. Trying also to help with Informal on the business side, creating a sustainable business and also offering interesting services and building cool products for other people.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+You make it sound so simple, I like it. so before we go into the cool stuff, I guess, just some general chitchat, considering that Informal works a lot on as far as I know on work ethics and work structures. I’m curious whether Informal is still bound to all the same end of the year trouble as all the other projects in the world are, because I know we tried to meet and you were saying, no there was loads of things end of the year and I was like but you guys have some cool structures, I know that. To be honest the question is more about, how is that thing progressing? I know we talked about it with you, we talked about it with Bucky, we talked about it with Yelena, about that you guys trying to work a lot in that direction and I know it's not your topic of course but in two words is that something that touches your work? Is that something
+influences you?
+
Zarko
+Yeah, I was kind of like involved, so Informal has grown like pretty significantly
+in the course of last year and since we discussed last time. So we around sixty people now and there have been also some change in terms of like responsibility of Informal
+in Cosmos. So since last year we took the responsibility of being steward for Tendermint Core repository and the and also for Cosmos hub, in addition to the work we're doing on on IBC, and also like what has happened in the last quarter which sort of like made the end of the year a bit like terrible end, was creation of like TAB, technical advisory board at ICF, where I’m member and the ICF is trying to put more structure in the in the way the work on the core infrastructure of public goods is being organized and funded and so this was sort of like a new structure and as Informal is the biggest contributor to the Cosmos public good projects, we were of course like affected by this change and so it
+just took some time to like put things in place. Apart from this like we are still, how to say, we are cooperative, we are still focusing on our members and delivering value to them and also like trying to trying to play ethically nice to people around us.
+We're also trying to build in parallel with work on public goods. We are trying to build as I said like sustainable business and there are several business verticals within Informal, just like taking care of like this this different concerns is challenging and that's why like the end of the year we were summing up and making plans and budgets for the next year is always a bit challenging so…
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I’m just checking that you're still human you know this this is all.
+it was just like, na, joking.
+
Zarko
+No, we are. We suffer we cry like the rest of ah… yeah absolutely,
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Last and considering what you just mentioned about the creation of a technical board where you part of it, you mentioned some business verticals and last time I think, if I’m not mistaken and I'd be honest I did have a look of course. I couldn't remember everything, but we chatted a lot at the end about personal values the alignment of personal values and company goals and I’m curious whether the changes that have been well to your own position and I know that it's just a title, but at the end of the day I think for somebody who does the work that you do, those things could be important. Well at least it is like that for me and you know you mentioned a lot of things and I’m still curious whether until today those alignments with the values that you have and the goals that Informal have are still in the same place and whether you feel that what you're doing corresponds to those values?
+
Zarko
+I haven't really like checked what we talked last time so l can just say then from where I stand right now, values are still there. In terms of like the company mission and vision, I think like that we manage to like even solidify things even more so we are, I would say even more ambitious. So, like the current way we phrase what you're doing at Informal is trying to transform the three major pillar of society. If you talk recently with Bucky, maybe he said this, but like it's money, software, and organizations. And so this is also related with like the business verticals we are doing . So there is like a
+project on collaborative finance which we are boot strapping at Informal so that fits into the money side. On the software side we probably talked last time about like the
+work we are doing on the formal verification tooling and in general like the security tooling and improvements.
+That’s related with like the software. We believe that the way we develop critical distributed systems is suboptimal and we believe that we have something to say on that front and on the work side excite like we are coop and we are trying to innovate like in house how we govern organizations and also like are trying to participate in the hub governance in general, in Cosmos governess um and trying to sort of like lead by example there. There is the particular the methodology we're using for collaboration called workflow and it's on our website, some people might be reading about this. That's just one element of it, but that sort of the plan. So, like so in terms of the core values I hope that this sounds like similar to what we discussed last time but maybe just like packages in a more structure way.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Last time you were talking about Lambos, no, I’m joking. Of course not, I don't know for me, I’m going to be honest with you. because the reason I’m asking and it was a personal thing because for me for example even though I still work a lot with the same projects I kind like separated myself from a few projects, because over the course of two years my values and their goals kind of separated so I was curious whether you're still there and you are and I’m really glad to hear that and you mentioned straight away formal verifications and this was a big big topic we talked about, insurance out its formal verifications and you mentioned on Twitter, verification tools and I would be very curious to hear and I’m sure everybody else who's listening would be very curious to hear about what are what type of tooling in that direction you've been working on and what is the progress that has been happening in those years and what new things there are.
+
Zarko
+So that's that's one of the things which we have sort of exclusive announcement to make here, in this episode. So this year we were like the verification tools at Informal were working hard and at the end of the year, I think in the last days of last year we like open sourced released verification specification language called Quint, which is like one element of the tool chain we were building last years, but Quint is important because the challenges of verification tools in our view and our experience are mostly on like adoption and developer friendliness side of thing. We were lucky to have like some really amazing people and experts in verification formificational fortificational distributed systems and they were able to demonstrate over years that they can bring value with their methodologies and tools but we were not really able to scale that beyond like the small group of people with like that formal training and this is in our view also like the challenge with like most the existing tools out there. There is like a trend in the last year of like trying to like address this issue and there are several other projects which are sort of having like very similar objectives. So if you listen to the the intro talk of like several really strong you know verification groups, or like companies, the first five, ten minutes are almost the same. What differ is the way different teams are approaching these challenges.
+It's always about like making like tools more developer friendly, making it
+more efficient, making it more more flexible, making it more like kind of domain specific
+and so what essentially we have to offer on that front is Quint which is a new specification language. It is inspired by TLA+, so like TLA+ was like our starting point and like we have been developing for years model checker called Apalache, which
+is involved model checker for TLA+ and have been using it like in our projects successfully but the challenge with TLA+ was that it was like having very
+steep the learning curve and it was like very different like experience working with like
+TLA+ compared to like modern programming languages and Quint is trying to address
+this. So Quint has like syntax which is like very similar to modern programming languages like Scala or Rust. It has CLI so inter active repel which you can use to like explore the specification of the protocol it can be executed so it's like the programming language but with some kind of nice super powers. It has a built in simulator and it is integrated to the Apalache Model Checker and so you have now possibility to fully type checked. So it has like vs code plug in also so it's really like the feeling of working with Quint when you design protocol is like you are writing your program you have all nice features developer are expecting and in addition to this then you can choose also like how far you want to go in terms of like guarantees. You can track the variance and properties using built in simulator which is super-fast but like does not have the strong
+guarantees. There is a second mode which is Simulation using Apalache, which is a
+bit solid in terms of coverage and a bit faster and then the full model checking its kind of
+the last element and then also like the challenge with TLA+ was that the feedback loop
+was pretty long and now you can sort of like use the tool in real time using like simulation mode and Apalache simulation mode and then you can leave the full model checking maybe to run as part of continuous integration and so that's sort of like kind of one of the main value proposition for Quint. There are some other stuff but maybe we can, we can pause here. There are a few other stuff we are developingin the toolchain but maybe we can so stop here so you , I give you a chance to ask questions about Quint.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I am making notes of course as you speak but thank you, that is something I was going to ask for. My first question was whether Quint is already released and is it on GitHub already. Is it, can you go and use it already.
+
Zarko
+yes exactly
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Okay
+
Zarko
+Informal systems on GitHub, slash Quint and
+it's already there we are working on documentation, tutorials. And like that's the main focus. There is already something there so I hope that like people are already able to go there, download and try the stuff there, like a set of examples but like in the Q1 the plan is to improve the onboarding material and we are also working with some core Cosmos teams to sort of like try to replace the existing specifications with Quint and also like then to try to connect this with like the model based testing tools were also developing parallel. So the idea here is like, if you look at for example at Tendermint or IBS specs, normally the way we were like writing specs is like there is some English description to give like a reader feeling of like what the protocol is all about and we were then normally trying to capture, to write like some you know, in good specks we write like properties which hold and we write like a pseudocode to like give reader or an
+engineer who is like trying to implement a protocol idea how like this should work
+like what are the basic mechanics. So I always have like these two elements like
+the very special cole and like the pseudocode which sort of like shows how things should work.
+What with Quint want we want to do is like we want to replace this and this is just like English, so the pseudocode code is something which cannot be sanity checked, it cannot be type checked, it cannot be executed and it gets it normally gets like very fast out of date. No matter how you know developers are eager to keep it up to date after there is a reference implementation, implementation becomes source of truth ah and this is particularly challenging when we are starting to have like implementation in multiple languages or framework and also for onboarding it's always like challenging because like give engineer something and then we say like but you know implementation is slightly different, So what we want to do to instead is to try and replace the pseudocode code which is essentially like English with Quint as our hypothesis here is that like the learning curve for Quint will be like very low as that's something people are get used to and so writing like the logic in Quint should be like similar compared to that pseudo code, but then you have like a full tooling support on top of this.
+
So you can make sure that it's indeed like works in very unserple. We also captured in Quint so you can track that you're your spec is sane like you know there are there are no like issues with it and then we'd like the other tooling we were developing you can
+generate like what we call model base tests which are essentially scenarios which are trying to exercise the core in variants and they are like expressed in the abstract form
+in a form of like traces there is like we have like the format formal, cole, informal ITF I think which is like essentially Json and that's something then different implementations can use almost as a set of like you know based tests protocols should implement. And it's language agnostic and so like if you have implementation of IBC in Agora Rust or whatever then you can have like some basic set of like tests which should pass so you can be considered implementing at least like a bare medium of implementing protocol.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I guess so like one thing it comes to mind and it's kind of silly but
+I cannot not help to say that because it just springs to mind and I mean over the past years you know working not just with block chains but generally with anything that requires a certain level of verifiability or auditability and I don't know if I’m pronouncing those words correctly, never mind. There is always kind of I don't know like developers don't like to be verified. Developers like to think a lot of developers they hate that, from my experience like oh I’m going to be using that, that's going
+to verify me no way I’m going to be using what I know. Is that an obstacle that you guys have been like thinking about keeping in the back of the head because I know that this is amazing right, but like maybe you know some people just like oh I don't need that you know, I know what I’m doing you know, I know what I’m going to be doing and I don't care about verifications.
+
Zarko
+Absolutely that was really the main driver for this work, because like that was exactly what was happening with like the TLA+ and original set of tools. Just like
+everyone like need to be frank there like, people hated this and so they were not, although they were able to appreciate the values just the cost of learning and using tools was so high that they were not able and also maintaining it after. It's a very valid concern and that's something we're trying to address so, the way how we are currently working on like adoption at informal is that informal is offering security audit to our partnership services. We are currently primarily focusing on Cosmos and exclusively working on Cosmos project at the moment to help them you know be more secure and correct and there we have like the model we like most is the partnership model which is like a long term collaboration where we have like a dedicated bandwidth to work with the core teams trying to be almost like you know embedded in a core teams and
+then trying to like understand and listen their needs and then bring like our expertise and knowledge to address the real concern and sort. That’s like a super helpful
+like validation point for us and also like a playground to see like what works,
+what doesn't work that's just sort of like the primer adoption vehicle right now.
+We haven't liked tried Quint yet. With TLA+ we were having like sort of this
+concern but with TLA+ we realized this pretty fast and then this was more
+something like we were writing almost like as a kind of back end implementation but what people were seeing was of like this non trivial traces they can run against their code base to sort see there might be issues there. In almost all projects we try to use this methodology, we were able to find like nontrivial, I would say like critical issues. The depth of the scenarios, that sort of what is interesting goes up to like twenty and so that's something which is like I think, it's sort of hard to argue against because it's very hard for developer to manually create test scenarios which are kind of so deep, so that's really like the power of tools or for computer assisting us thinking about security where you can declaratively say like what should hold and you allow tools we explore the space. As a developer we are having like, we are biased and so we normally are having like picture of the world and normally when we test stuff, we are how to say we are constrained you know you're always like are making some assumptions implicitly. With these tools you cannot make implicit assumptions, that’s the beauty you know
+it forces you to say even obvious things like you know, I should always be able to reach the state. If you say like declaratively with Quint or TLA+, I should always reach the state then the Apalache in like a bunch of test scenarios which you can run against your
+code to see like even like sometimes we will check your chase like you know you cannot because this is in this case we're not able to reach. This is counter example, and so that's the beauty of the stuff. Even like you know no matter how confident we are in domain and how confident we are in a code base it is very easy considering you know complexity or just like we are humans. As you said at the beginning to make mistakes
+and these tools are here not to replace us but to actually assist people in like hopefully doing their job with more fun and like faster and in more than you know safe and correct way.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Before we moved to the other stuff that you wanted to mention, I do have one more question but before even that I’m just going to say something that I would never say two years ago but this is compliment to all the listeners. Really I know there is developing teams that develop on top of Cosmos that listen to this podcast, I know that so that would be a call to action guys. If you out there still working on a
+project, go to Informal talk with the guys, it's not very hard to find them. If you’re struggling and go to the description of the episode and because I know for sure I know it kind of sounds big headed but I have had teams before coming to me and say, we listened to this and then decided to, for example Stride is one. I’m really proud of that you know, they told me about that so if there are other teams like that, guys go and collaborate, because this will definitely help not just you but think the whole
+echo system. One last question about Quint before we move on to the other stuff.
+Can Quint corporate with CosmWam or…
+
Zarko
+Yeah absolutely. So the Quint is like language agnostic and so we on purpose there was a lot of push to do the stuff which are like language specific. Like that's sort of like the signal we're getting like very consistently from our developers. They are writing tests in the same programming language they write they write the system and like ideally you will just add some kind of library or support there. However, like the problem with that approach is that it's really hard to do the stuff like on the model checking side. We need something more scope than constraint and also like if you
+think in general about like the semantics, capturing semantics at that low level is probably not like the best idea. But, like we are working and that's something
+I also wanted to mention that like we don't want like to have specification even
+if they're executable and implementation isolated from each other. That's something like which was our, it was clear for us like from the beginning that doesn't make sense to separate the two they need to like co-exist with each other and be in love
+and be maintained in sync and that's why like we were having like a problem track. We like model-based testing tools and this is also something we also like made a release towards the end of the last year, the model based testing tool call Atom Craft and Atom Craft, I don't know maybe you heard for it.
+So Atom Craft essentially allows you to like take the abstract test scenario, which is generated from the spec using Apalache and then you have like a way to spawn like a test net and then execute the scenarios against the real chain code either over RPC or CLI and that's something which is currently the way we are interfacing with the code, but that's the level at which we believe it's important to like integrate in the language specific or framer specific stuff and sort of that's where we hope to invest and work with our teams who has interest to like collaborate with us on this to make like the language or framework specific integration points and CosmWasm is one of the
+frameworks which is on that list so we are we're doing something internally like
+atom craft for CosmWasm, there is already like a version we were trying to trying to
+improve the stuff and in show case it on example smart contract
+which actually provided to us by Confio so it should be like a good representative.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+They know their smart contract hopefully. Sorry, you mentioned that there are some more stuff that you guys have been working on and that you wanted to to announce, I would be happy to hear that.
+
Zarko
+So the second I would say the big things is that during the course of the of the last year Informal has become steward of the consensus engine, Tendermint Core and i before Informal it was taken care by IG for a period of time and I am taking this opportunity to thank everyone who was like working hard on the project and so since 2019 or 2020 when Informal was created, we were always like around like the consensus engine. We were like involved in some protocol design work. We were
+trying to like also contribute on implementation side sporadically, but we're not really
+deeply involved with project and since like last year this has changed and now we are the main steward of the project. There is a completely new team and I need to say it's like of course I don't know like if I can be objective here but it's really very very strong team. Have like a very strong like leadership in that team it is really like a group of people who are like super motivated, have like a very clear vision how to evolve the project into like really you know like state-of-the-art consensus engine.
+A lot of people in that group have like formal training in state machine application and so they know the academic side they also have like very strong industrial and engineering experience. So it's really amazing mix of people and so sort of like we are we're transitioning into a new generation of the consensus engine. The world has changed so the project was like existing for years but like fundamentally there haven't been like a major changes in the in the code base and you also like consensus protocol if you want since creation, so like between 2016 and 2022, essentially we can say that it was more in a kind of maintenance mode. There was like continues try to improve
+the stability and performance but there was no like major really like change in
+the way what the framework offers and last year after like a long time and
+long period of research there is like there is like one big change it's like
+is probably like people know in Tendermint there is application block chain interface which separates consensus engine from the application and this is something which was like from the beginning like very appealing feature of the framework as it allows like applications to be written in different languages and not sort of like delegate the like low level implementation details to consensus engine and last year after like as I said like long time of research and development, we have finally reached the point that there
+is a new version of ABCI, which is called ABCI++ and which essentially change pretty
+significantly the way application and consensus engine can interact with each other and so this is like a major change the way also like application developers will be like thinking about like building block chains on top of consensus engine and it opens like a lot of new interesting use cases.
+So that's just like a first step the team wants to also address the needs of the you know like the world has changed, we have like many new projects which comes with like different needs and different requirements and what we want to offer is like more
+modular stack, which allow more experimentation. We want innovate both within a team but also allow people to innovate in a safe way on the consensus core on the like
+mem pool, on the RPC level on the gossip level so now team is essentially having like a two major responsibility of like improving Q A processes and that was already like something I will say the major improvement in in the last release there is a very clear and I invite everyone to take a look at the Q A process in the report there is essentially very sort of clear expectation in terms of like what the release should satisfy and will
+continue to invest like strongly in Q A, and the second thing is really cleaning up the internal interfaces so people can more easily experiment and like replace or swap like some components, because right now we still have like plenty of forks, because it's just that's the only way for people to like change this thing, things they need.
+That’s sort of on a technical side on a more administrative side there is the Tendermint brand is owned by All In Bits and sort of like the All In Bits essentially has the different perspective on like where the consensus engine should evolve or Tendermint and how it should evolve and there is like, Jae the already was for some time maintaining Tendermint 2, so it's a different implementation, the same consensus protocol but like lightly different like how to say implementation of it and based on my discussion with Jae my feeling is that like he wants to keep the implementation more minimal so it's like
+more like a kernel which is like having like the minimal set of features and then it's like you know very solid and like secure. On our side we believe that like we need to evolve and we need to better address the needs we also want to treat IBC and cross chain
+as a more like native or first class citizen in the report and Jae decided to essentially archive the existing Tendermint correpository we're a bit forced to like to fork and re
+brand essentially what was the previously considered as Tendermint core and that's something which we have like a new name but we are in a process of like actually
+essentially doing legal work to properly brand this and so it will be announced in the
+hopefully the following days or weeks, but that's more on a kind of administrative side.
+
I want kind of you now to be positive about this and I hope that people will be excited about like this. I heard a good joke that like that you know in Cosmos everything is decentralized and full torrent and now we are having given like full torrent implementation of the consensus engine, so there would be like you know more teams working on this. But informal and ICFR are committed to still supporting the project and you will hear about like new name and you know the team and everything we are
+preparing communication materials. Also sort of like also kind of a big announcement
+there. So like you know you should expect some really cool research coming from this
+team, innovation on the consensus core innovation on the P2P level, innovation on
+like testing and Q A. Using of formal verification tools. So yeah a lot of really exciting stuff there.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+To keep up with the Cosmos jokes, I hope that the new consensus engine let's call it like that can handle more drama per second because the drama per second rate in Cosmos is known to be high. You mentioned some of the use cases, different use cases and some of ways to interact that are might be different. Can you give me a couple of examples of what you're thinking about?
+
Zarko
+Sure, so like the with the existing ABCI interface the way consensus engine
+was interacting with the application was pretty much that once block is formed it is
+being like sent to the application in a serialized way and then application execute this like sequentially, this is how like the gerministic execution was taken care of. But like application was not having like a good way to inform what is the content of the block
+or to try to do any sort of optimization in parallel with consensus execution, so
+ABCI++ last came with like a slightly different set of API and so first it allow consensus engine to propose or what we call prepare proposal where the set transactions from the mem pool before being proposed as a candidate in consensus are being pushed to the application and application has essentially full freedom to like modify, delete, even add transaction and only then after application essentially respond, the consensus proceeds
+and this is being like proposed.
+On a reception side before participants vote for a block which is being proposed they
+also consult in a process proposal API, they also consult application and give application chance to validate transactions and then only if like there is sort of everything is fine we proceed and so the kind of trivial consequence of this is that you cannot have like a block full of crap which is currently possible as essentially the original consensus engine care most about like just like that we are agreeing on the same thing consistently but like how you know what we put there and also like if application wants to
+re order stuff that was not really available and there was some idea to with prioritise main pool, to give some flexibility to application but we never really manage to like
+to see this as a kind of interesting and viable option in production. That sort of
+like one kind of basic example, the other one is that like instead of serially
+submitting transaction will be there's like only finalized block now as sort of like
+the API at the end of consensus execution where you essentially give a freedom to application to execute transaction potential in parallel and this is the part
+where I was saying that now it's more on developer to be careful as parallel
+execution will still need to be deterministic, and now as also with the
+prepared proposal application will be aware of the block candidate application developer can start optimistic execution, in parallel while ordering and so this
+will as in most of the application to the best of my knowledge consensus engine is
+not both alike, this will be like super cool because you can sort of like start doing and processing stuff while consensus is progressing and before block is finalized you can
+already like essentially prepared the new state and then when you see decision then
+you can instantly finalize block.
+And the last feature which is experimental future, is called vote extensions and this is essentially way for applications to piggyback on like pre commit messages which are like the last stage of voting in the Tendermint consensus. To piggy back application specific data which will then also be tracked by the application on the reception side and then only essentially if there is two third plus voting power confirming voting this data which are signed by validator then this will be passed to the next block as a sort of
+like extra data and this for example make possible to have implementation like oracles more natively implemented or like to do like threshold encryption or decryption because now you can you can do like these things natively within the consensus engine.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+As a developer you might hate my summary, but I guess it could be like called like a very in depth indexing of the data and that allows in my opinion for a lot of things, flash loans come to mind, right. Like a lot of economical like possibilities I
+think defi applications from what you said. I’m pretty sure that it will be possible to achieve I’m not sure if it’s possible to achieve now.
+
Zarko
+So here, you sort of like give application developer possibility to get like signals
+from the consensus engine during the consensus execution and it's really like it's a lot
+of flexibilities also a lot of responsibility on application developers.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Yeah
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Yes
+
Zarko
+But I’m sure that there would be like and this is like talking with people, with application developer, like everyone is having a different use case so it seems really like
+something needed also in a request for this change is coming from the community and
+and I’m sure that like we'll be hearing a lot of really cool use cases enabled by this change, by this new P consensus engine API.
+
Just even like on a more theoretical side if you look at the the state of the art in terms of
+like state machine application. There is no really any innovation which goes in this direction like all existing like approaches are just like pretty much like you know like agreeing on something and then passing it to the applicational level and then you were having some approaches where you could sort of like maybe execute things in parallel but justreally opening the consensus box and allowing like information to flow during execution is something I’m not aware of and so I think like that how combining this with like optimistic ordering, with like parallel execution, are even like some stuff which I hope we'll see like some really cool research, like fundamental research, because like it has a potential too to change the usability and also performance of why state machine application engines.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+That is fascinating, I really also have not heard. I do keep an eye of course unlike yourself in depth, but I do keep an eye on those things and try to read some papers that I understand at least in that direction but I have not really seen anyone working and I know already I can already think of teams that I can definitely go
+to and say hey guys you need to listen to this because this might be interesting for what you are building and especially all the teams that are building even like assets economical stuff but social stuff lot of the social stuff that can really like increase the scalability I think of what people are trying to achieve. I know I don't like numbers and none of us like statistics and numbers and show of things but there is one question that has been on the mind the, I guest of a lot of people who have kind of got pilled by Tendermint since the 2016 and one of them has been the amount of validators that Tendermint can handle. Has that at all is going to be influenced by all those changes or is that one of the changes or currently that is something that is still on hold?
+
Zarko
+That's actually really good question so in principle on the scalability side of the consensus engine we haven't really been making significant progress, in the previous period. There are some teams outside the core team that were sort of doing some really cool research on that front and that's one of the things we plan really to like focus
+like trying to upstream some of this cool research if possible and also
+like do internally stuff there. ABC++ on its own like should make things like more performant but in terms of like number of validators, I think we need to do more research and like changings also at like a different levels of the stack. Right now the team is focusing on the P2P, peer to peer part of the consensus engine as this was for
+a long time the part of the code no one really understand and like everyone was afraid to touch and there was even like internal joke that whoever you know like work on this left you know abruptly. Really like are now trying to address this tech depth and to enable like to experiment like with new implementations there.
+At the level of P2P, an introduction between P2P and consensus there is almost no research existing, like I was involved in some research where we look at the crestalarm
+systems and so that was like to the best of you know my and our knowledge that was like first research or paper of that kind where you try to look at like how like gossip protocols and peer to peer protocols and consensus protocols, how they interplay because you have redundancy at both levels and it's not clear you know like what is the optimal way of composing the two and to really make like the large scale scalable instances of like these kind of consensus systems, we really need to look carefully what like we are doing at a P2P level what we do at the gossip level and what we
+do at a consensus level and then how it all interface with applications. Even existing
+implementation there are projects which we're using it with like thousands of validators with like still order of seconds latency or finality block time so I think even existing like
+system is able to like be used at a scale but you were mentioning you know this is like social use cases like that something which we are at informal like super interested in and I’m sure that you know Bucky was talking about like supporting local communities. Having used cases which are not justify for those projects the existing implementations are like probably too expensive running like the Tendermint like full node right now is like not cheap it requires like say expensive hardware to run and if you want to scale this to have like good decentralization you probably need to have like at least tens of validators and for like the small socially impactful project this might not be feasible.
+So that's something we also need I think pay more attention on those use cases, is if you really want you know to make impact to the society we need to allow people to like
+be able to use the stuff in a secure and decentralized way but still you know with a reasonable price and that's one of the like big themes the team will be focusing this year like we want to sort of clean up the API, we want to make things more modular. Hopefully this will allow us to like significantly lower operational costs of Tendermint and also be able to like experiment with like making as I said like new APIs or supporting news cases and also making everything much more performant.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Since we last spoke you know I think we were just starting to be a
+validator when we last speaking and since then you know we haven't grown much as
+a validator because we don't want to but because well it's more about personal values
+and about what projects I really want to support as a validator, but one of the main reasons to be honest is of course because of those values that I have and because of the amount of work, I want to put into the infrastructure I’m holding is the cost of the infrastructure. For example I remember this other format where we do like live streams with validators to get to know them and I think it one node or something
+like that and I think it was them and the guy there he is actually from the Balkans if I’m not mistaken or Romania I think it's Romania but anyways and he is also very much like into bare metal and a lot of things and he when he was telling me their Cosmos, I thought I have a complicated Cosmos set up. When he started telling me his Cosmos set up was, I like oh my god how much the fuck does that cost, of course we didn't talk
+about the prices but like just hearing those things I was like whoa and considering all the news now with all the cloud providers and nobody really wants to be in a cloud provider in the first place, but considering all those news you know and looking for data centres and yeah those things are really really really not cheap and that is of course I mean on one hand it's good but for the decentralization and for social purposes of
+course that is not something that is a good thing.
+
Zarko
+As I mentioned like one of the projects we are also like boot strapping right now is like collaborative finance. That sort of cofi that's the code name and this team it's like we're lucky to have like a group of really well known like researchers in this economics theory and also the guys were like having like successful implementation
+of this idea in like Slovenia and Sardinia, both on credit clearing and mutual credit
+side and they are all supporting like various small communities so there are like communities project which are keen to like using like ideas and these techniques and
+they would really like to have them also on chain but like it's not really
+clear what is sort of like you know can we do this with existing technology
+like because probably the cost would be too high and so that's sort of I think really something to keep in mind and I hope that like will have you know like benita and like chance to improve something on that front.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+We haven't mentioned anything on the economical side let's leave it for the next time of course. Well of course if you have anything else to add I’ll be happy to hear and I’m sure everybody else is as well. Before that though, let's do a
+quick blitz.
+What are currently well at least two or three projects that you are
+well you kind of mentioned already twenty while we were talking but still maybe you
+could some projects that you think are doing really good work in terms of R and D currently, that you are interested in that you are inspired by could you name a few to share with us a few.
+
Zarko
+Okay so I’m really bad with names
+
Citizen Cosmos
+it's okay a lot of people cheat
+now I’m joking I’m joking it's okay.
+
Zarko
+On the consensus side one of the project that we're also looking at is
+Narwal, Bullshark so it's a paper and the reference implementation which I think really really clever implementation of like I would say relatively aold ideas of like like separating ordering of transactions from like or like doing pre ordering of transaction in some form of mem pool and then agreeing on ideas it allows for like high throughput, significantly high throughput implementation, using tags in that context is really neat and there are really some nice ideas there and we are also looking at this work. We are also involved in some cool consensus work which also opened last time we talked about like consensus design space and I was saying that it's pretty much you know like clear what we can do there. I was wrong, apparently, and there is still I would say
+room for you know for things to be added there.
+
I cannot say unfortunately more about this because things under submission as there are there are some university students involved, but as soon as it's ready I’m happy you know to talk more about this. It's really cool. There there is s for example Psy has done
+really cool work on performance improvements, it goes along kind of the same line like being more careful how like we disseminate block parts and sort of separating like this dissemination of transactions from like order and trying to order just on ideas so this is on a kind of on the consensus side that what I see is as really cool. Anoma is with Typhoon, also doing really cool work. So it’s more a research project at a stage they are
+like investing to the best of my knowledge also a lot in this like gossip layer and like
+looking at like heterogeneous like gossip networks and how like we can reason and
+like design protocols in in a smart way. There it's also employment in in Rust
+and I need to say that you know we still have this like this kind of hope that there
+will be at some point in time Rust implementation of consensus engine and we might be
+able to contribute to this. So that's sort of on the consensus side. On the formal verification side. Okay we stop here
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It's good it's good it's good it’s good because you can go into more but the thing is it's cool because I’m talking to Chris next week actually and me and Chris aren't actually familiar with each other but apparently I’ve been following him and i've heard good stuff from the other side so on we kind of finally managed to get a
+recording out so I’m going to be recording and then talking to him about Anoma and a lot of the work that they did.
+
Zarko
+Chris is like one of the most smart and amazing people in the
+space so very lucky, He's also part of TAB and so that's probably one of the one of the major achievements of TAB that like we managed to convince Chris to sort of like
+be somehow formally contribute the he’s of course part of the Cosmos and but this is like somehow bringing him more close to the core but yeah I’m looking
+forward also like hearing your discussion with Chris.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And I’ve actually ironically I spoke to Don just a while ago about say Sei, and we were talking about the performance it was just just as recently so the frequency is working you know it is it's the same frequency wait there are still two more questions in the Blitz they new they're much quicker so the second one, give me two things which motivate you in your daily life too this and this is a strange one I know but that that keeps you motivated in your daily life to keep on you know researching building and changing the world.
+
Zarko
+I was actually you know thinking about this like over break because last year
+was like very challenging and alot of work and like significant stress with all the work and I realized that like I’m really lucky you know being surrounded with like the group
+of people I am working with that was sort of like you know my dream when i
+decided to to like leave industry in Switzerland and sort of like I was always
+like hoping that we can we can have like a small R and D team where we can work on a cool stuff and being this bridge between the academia and industry and Informal is not so small but there are really like some brilliant people and I really think that we are you know we're trying to do things which sort of makes sense and that is sort of what drives
+me and what keeps me essentially motivated to work so it's really like you know
+the people primarily and then also the ideas or you know teams on which we
+are working.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Last one, one person dead or alive
+doesn't matter it could be a developer it could be a writer it could be
+an author it could be a blogger I know could not even be a person could be a fictional
+character that somebody could follow and get inspired
+
Zarko
+Maybe I can mention Fernando Perdone here. Fo Fernando is a professor at UC Legano, he's one of the rock star of distributed system researcher and we were lucky to also have him involved with the interchain foundation so he is also like official role there and I was also lucky to you know collaborate with him and do some research together and so his way of like you know picking topics and like working with people on this is really something which which inspires me so I kind of encourage everyone to like look at the publications of Fernando's group there really very solid like papers there and I have some ideas that you know there might be also some news coming out which will also be like super cool.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Cool. Zarko, thank you again, very very very much. Hopefully next time will not be so far away maybe you will come visit islands and we could either do this in person
+
Zarko
+Yeah, next time in person
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Yes, it has to be. Thank you very much Zarco.
+
Zarko
+Thank you, it was happy as always, being here and talking to you.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Thanks everybody, bye.
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:
Episode name:
+Eric Waisanen, game theory, inflation & token value.
+
In this episode, Citizen Cosmos talks to Eric Waisanen, tokenomics lead at Phi Labs. In this episode, they delve into the nature of inflation, how it is dealt with in different systems and how it can eventually lead to the death of economies if managed poorly. Â Eric explains at length how the rewards are structured at Astrovault and how they plan on building a sustainable rewards system. Citizen Cosmos and Eric have a heated discussion on how content creators should be compensated and Citizen Cosmos gives a beautiful bit of history on how one used to have to apply for funds in the good old days.
+
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Good space time yall. In this episode of the Citizen Cosmos podcast, I speak to Eric Waisanen, tokenomics lead at Phi Labs Global, helping to facilitate economic innovations and Archway the Cosmos L one, designed to reward developers, along with Eric we discuss counting cards, token utility, monetization, innovation versus Ponzi schemes, economic philosophy, game theory, rewards and liquidity.
+
Eric Waisanen
+Just trying to find a nice niche in a place with great tech and terrible economics.
+
We were having developers build economies and that is not their forte.
+
What they were doing to print money was not different to what the US government does.
+
I don’t think everyone is going to make it, but what does make it out of this dot com bubble, will be the next Amazon or the next Google.
+
+
Citizen Cosmos
+because you had to do a photo of your arse and a fingerprint of the head of your penis. Send them that and then maybe, maybe, maybe they would give you like 2 or 3 k.
+
Before we rocket off into today’s podcast, here is a round up of the latest news from the sponsor for this episode, Cyber. Cyber Congress DAO has been primarily working on improving the Bostrom hub, This work includes, the testing of the contracts, new UI features, verification tools for on chain governance and polishing the Bostrom DEX. Adding mass protection, new web front and bringing indexing of chain swaps. To try Bostrom, head now to over sig dot ai.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Hi, everybody. Good space time to
+yall as I’m used to say welcome to a new episode of Citizen Cosmos and
+today I have with me a guest from Archway and from Astrovault, Eric. Eric, hi, welcome to the show.
+
Eric Waisanen
+Hi, seriously, thanks for having me brother.
+
Eric Waisanen
+It is nice to have you. It is a nice evening for me and a nice daytime for you, so, it's good time on the time zone converter thing. I don't know if you know when you put different times zones there's little smily faces and for both of us it's now show a smiling face so we should be happy and it's great timing Eric can I please ask you to introduce yourself and let us know what you're working on currently or anything you would like to add about yourself in general. It’s all yours.
+
Eric Waisanen
+Yeah, thanks man. Yeah, I’m Eric Waisanen I am a co founder of Astrovault,a new AMM being built on Archway and upon meeting the Phi Labs team at Cosmoverse in Columbia recently joined Archway as well as their tokenomics lead. but aside from that I also do quite a bit of tokenomics consulting in a lot of the Cosmos space and beyond. A bit of background, I studied economic philosophy in college I do some masters courses lecturing for tokenomics as well. so just trying to find a nice niche in a place with great tech and terrible economics.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+That is not easy,but you have found it right after all.
+
Eric Waisanen
+Yeah, so far so good I’m just working with Phi Labs has been amazing. Astrovault’s development is going fantastic and we all know that we're where the future is going to be it's just a matter of how to build it properly and sustainably amid so
+many crashes that we're finally seeing and will continue to see, the way things are currently set up.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Absolutely man, absolutely and I have some questions for you about Astrovault and Archway a little bit down the road but first you mean mentioned one very interesting fact which I also want to talk to you about the economics and philosophy but before that, how did you even get to that point? How did life end up so… I’m joking but how did life lead you to where you are today, I mean what did you do apart from studying and then suddenly working for Astrovault? Was there definitely, there was some route in between you know whatever else again you want to add in there throw in there feel free.
+
Eric Waisanen
+Yeah, great question so while I was in college studying economic philosophy and a lot of other things I had good a scholarship so I just dabbled and took my time during my four years. I started working at a casino you know applied game theory, why not. I started dealing cards, found some issues and applied game theory at some of their games. Solved some of their problems and got into game auditing, game creation, everything game theory. I got banned from card counting from all the casinos which was my side hustle and so I was looking for a new side hustle and got into defi so it was 2016 when I got pretty much banned everywhere from card counting and so early 2017, I started getting into crypto and I’m like hey this is cool look at all these Ponzi’s that I don't have to invest in to capitalize on and did okay as a trader and it was just kind of frustrating seeing things not develop while developers kept doing brilliant, brilliant things and technology kept getting better and better.
+
The economic attempts being tried were just, like Olympus DAO gaining popularity and crashed. Look at Tera Luna like things weren't growing economically and we were having developers build economies and that's not their forte and so I worked quite a while to show case different projects where issues were they didn't recognize and also show them how they can solve them. Networked my way up and eventually got the opportunity to work with my business partner Ethan for a Master Vault to build Astrovault which will be lunching on Archway shortly after they go main net and get quite a few consulting opportunities to help develop the space to match economically where development’s going technologically.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Nice well a lot of things talk there about and let's start with counting cards. let's start with two thousand seven, of course of course, I mean, I had it prepared but you know it had to come from you know. I’m joking you know, but all the good stuff has to come from the good people. So, you know I remember the 2017 early 2017 in crypto. I remember very well, and I had a buddy back then, he would run private consulting and funds and it was a small private fund based on some up to like twelve ten people. I don't know really to be honest how many people there was but the
+point was that all of these clients who were new who came 2017 were all card players well or poker players and I was like well now you say that it must be some, there was a whole, I think they had like a server on Discord where there was just like card players who would like talk crypto trading and crypto stuff. I mean people who can count cards obviously have to be good at trading or is that just a misconception?
+
Eric Waisanen
+There's definitely a strong correlation there actually. Downloaded Discord the first time to link up with other advantage players, which is the generic term for people who gamble to invest. I mean gambling and investing are the same thing with different connotative ROI but if you can use gambling to have an expected positive EV then it is investing likewise you can invest all you want with a negative ROI and have it really be gambling it is all the same. So, yeah people that figure out how to be net positive poker players and net positive blackjack players some people can do it with gaming different, different give aways or what not with things like video poker. Any way you can consistently beat the house, anyway you can consistently make profit investing good on you.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+But can you consistently beat the house. I mean how consistently can, how often how far would it go right. There’s got be a stop to that.
+
Eric Waisanen
+Depends, there are ways casinos mess up, banks mess up. I mean card counting like you're not cheating it is a legal way to beat a beatable game
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And if you were to if you were to take this from that to I mean I know it's not a direct correlation but you did mention Luna of course and you know I think, and one of the sentences. I’m going to take a slightly different way. There was a sentence you say, I even wrote it down, Developers not equal economies I like that. Let's go into that because I mean, and I don't know what to call Do Kwon here a developer or a bad gambler. I don't know I’m not the one to make the decision. I mean even though I am kind of affected I was but what’s your take on that what's your story here? Is that an example of bad economy or is there an example of bad gambling or what else?
+
Eric Waisanen
+It's a great developer that's dabbling in economics that took off because it didn't really have you know, it did have proper auditing just the people that were doing the auditing weren't invested so you create your own echo chamber. I mean what they were doing to print money is not different than the US government does to print money but it is at scale a direct competitor, if Luna can be burned for UST and UST could be spent at a store then Luna is an alternative to the Fed and if your goal is to be a Fed competitor, then go for it. But any time you're self-collateralizing, that’s assuming that your entire market cap is collateral for this token, but realistically the only money you have access
+to is the liquidity provided against your token which is far far less than the market cap for absolutely anything. So that's necessarily under collateralized and we're going to see more issues as we see new stable coins set up and arise. Any time you want anything over collateralized that's incredibly inefficient use of funds and it's very rare for incentives to align line for somebody to do that properly.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+When you say properly, let's talk about properly and I mean you're welcome of course to mention how you guys do it at Astrovault. I mean this is what would be a good example, but what's properly out there in your opinion?
+
Eric Waisanen
+So what it would take to properly collateralize or over collateralize a stable coin like right now, you see with like maker they'll use things like Ethereum. Well Ethereum has access to far more liquid ty therefore if it has a market cap of sixty something billion dollars but it has at least one or two billion dollars’ worth of liquidity then now you're really collateralizing it with that much which makes it under collateralized, but collateralized enough to make the token work at least like a scale for a decent amount of time. An ideal overcollateralized coin would literally have more dollars backing it than dollars printed but why would people choose to just leave dollars in this basket not really doing anything other than backing this new dollar they create. It doesn't really align incentives but if that's what people want, somebody has to figure out a way properly pay for that. Astrovault is not launching a stable coin but would be better positioned to than pretty much any other group I’ve seen because we will have a basket of treasury slash liquidity that week could liquidate in order to redeem this token which other groups don't really seemingly have or if they set up would seemingly be set up really crony, like I don't have a great view of stablecoins in general.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I think you're giving a very great overview and so thank you, for that I think whenever a person underestimates what they saying usually it's good. So, even though you said that sentence I’m still going to try go a little bit more down there like one more question if you don't mind.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+For them, I mean I’m going to use those those words, for the average degen out there right, even not a degen but you know like a normal crypto trader who doesn't jump into any any any crazy whatever farms or whatever. We're not necessarily talking Cosmos here I think we can talk in general crypto. You have just in theory described a very good way of how you could do like an audit in a way to understand here's the liquidity, here is the basket, here is the liquidation points that that you know but what can an average person like even if they know all that you know it's quite difficult to find all the data to understand it yourself unless there is somebody helping you to analyse a lot of things. What can the average user do in order not to get themselves deep in debt if they have chosen the way, I mean of course one is not to gamble, not to trade what you don't understand. But you know we're talking about crypto so we are already here. What would be the advice to those users?
+
Eric Waisanen
+My advice is understand the actual business models because there aren't many we have lots of businesses in the shape of DAO’s now and these businesses don't earn revenue but they do have perpetual debt in like whether it's team operations like infrastructure provision like there's perpetual costs that need to be decentralized but there's no revenue to back it and there's this idea this speculation that there will someday be revenue but if they ever get to that point how much revenue will that be and will that justify the current valuation and the answer for most things is no. The reason that we build Astrovault is because we want defi to be accessible to everybody we don't want like right now in the United States you have to have a quarter million dollars in order to invest your
+own funds and lose them. Like right now if any but regular person has to pay somebody else to lose their money it's ridiculous. Give people the freedom to do what they want with their own funds and not have it be trusted by these third party businesses that will just steal your funds anyways leave you with nothing like we're seen with FTX.
+
So I love the ethos but it's not built sustainably and large DEX’s with a nine figure valuations earn zero dollars in revenue and then in order to work they have to have this high valuation governance token which doesn't govern anything, it doesn't earn any rewards, it doesn't have the potential to earn any rewards and even if it did would it even justify its current valuation let alone a potentially gaining value and it's frustratingly dire if you truly look at the business models of most things being built. So as a consultant, as an employee, I’m trying make sure that the products that I’m working with not only do contribute and create substantial value but properly capitalized on that value with their token kind of driving in value to the token stead of to equity in companies which is why people would continue to use this token that truly does have utility at scale.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Would you say that you understand right now what would be, in at least how you see not the perfect model right but at least a good model to change that I mean you talk About ways to drive value, about how capitalize on the token you know about a lot of things really and those are really important things, things I think a lot of people in crypto especially if you're in this industry you know for more than five years. I think you understand that even if you're not an expert on that you kind of begin to see those things and you think okay there is a problem, there is nothing to feed this chain nothing to feed this, there’s no capital out there so how do we change that, what do we do?
+
Eric Waisanen
+Yeah, I think as far as layer ones go, so I’m not a huge believer in app chains in general, note that we are launching Astrovault as a layer two on top of on top of Archway not only does Archway have fantastic incentive models to reward application creators which still won't be our primary revenue model but also if you just look at the economics, hosting individual ap chains is just higher overhead for perpetual infrastructure provision costs and like if another chain already hosts this infrastructure for us and we don't have to pay that, might as well cut costs. That's not how it's currently viewed by investors but I’m trying to think more than a year more than two months in the
+future. I’m trying to look at the ten, the thirty, the fifty year plan and currently I think that's the better way to go.
+
As far as Layer Ones go, if you're going to have this high inflation you have to be able to counter this high inflation with some kind of combative deflation through utility of the token EIP-1559 did a fantastic job with Ethereum. I think that is the best current market standard for a Layer One. In Cosmos people aren't going to like to hear it, when you get compared to Ethereum, Ethereum has lower inflation with actual deflation and general token utility we get compared to Polcadot and it's like at least Polcadot’s making revenue from the software they created. At its base Cosmos created absolutely brilliant software and gave it away for free and if you think of that as a legitimate business model like that that's not what happens if people are software developers they sell software as a service, they rent it out, they do something to capitalize from that's utility and the beauty
+of the decentralization of Cosmos is also what's drive this frustration as you see voiced in Atom 2.0, Atom 1.0, attempt to give the ATOM token more inherent value because it doesn't exist, other than governance and that's really common for a lot of things in all of crypto right now.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+TCP/IP doesn't have a token right and I mean it works.
+
Eric Waisanen
+Yeah
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I’m just saying, I’m trying to be devil’s advocate here a little bit to be honest I agree with a lot of what you said you know and in fact with probably everything pretty much you said. I would go even further to say that the businesses that are built on those Layer Ones and Layer Twos often don't run themselves as businesses and often don't understand the costs that they have to incur over that, I’m sorry incur over years and years and then suddenly they kind of disappear and people are like where did that validator go, where did that project, go where did that guy go well, because they need to cover that somehow.
+
Eric Waisanen
+And the users don't understand as well, I saw Twitter thread recently people comparing Kujira and Osmosis and they're like well even if you're only getting so much of the Osmos staking rewards you're still getting two hundred and thirty dollars a year, no you're getting more Osmo. There's still only so much liquidity provided against it and now Osmo has a ton of liquidity the way they position themselves with the Osmosis DEX, which is fantastic for them, but you still only we have the amount of liquidity pitted against it. If enough people wanted to sell you can send the price to zero there's only that much money available and so not everybody is earning that two hundred and thirty dollars or something, they're all earning more Osmo. They're all earning more opportunity to be the one to siphon a way that liquidity.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I understand where you’re coming from, actually we had debate one of our formats that were do for YouTube, is like a debate format, and who only did like two episodes so far, one was the Atom 2.0 paper and one with liquid staking and the liquid staking there was it was actually there was a very interesting point about what you say now. You know the guys were talking about rewards or rather I asked them the question about what is the future holds and we had people from Persistence, from Stride, from Quicksilver and from Lido, from Lido finance and my question was but don't you guys kind of like when they were explaining it was like what I mean all the rewards are coming from
+inflation, all of them, like one hundred percent. That is like bound to fail model sooner or later. It’s a bit of…
+
Eric Waisanen
+It's worse than that and I’ve seen Jae Kwon come out and talk about the governance risks or the protocol of risks of these liquid staking programs. It's worse than that it's completely non-viable and we actually Just went public with our white paper if you check the Astrovault white paper section six we go into the math behind auto compounding liquid staking derivatives and then what we're doing with Astrovault which will have a liquid staking component that does not auto compound but liquid staking derivatives will always trade for so much underneath the underlying asset and it's just it's mathematical like there is no like, oh this is an arbitrage opportunity, this staked Atom is trading at four percent underneath it's underlined value and then four months later, the same account like oh what an amazing arbitrage opportunity this staked Atom… like maybe you're eventually going to realize it's just going to trade at four percent underneath its underlying value and if that's the case then it's not liquid and if it's not liquid then why are we using it, how is it better you can have something auto compound and not add a governance token which isn't really earning rewards if something is earning more rewards that means it's taking more from its users and everything is just really really extractive and it's just not economically feasible.
+
So we're trying to coin the term protocol earned liquidity and have have protocols actually gain value from the TVL they associate with what we're doing with non-auto compounding liquid staking derivatives in order to justify evaluation of the AXV token where if users liquidity farm on Astrovault and they earn AXV. Now you can stake AXV to earn Atom, you can stake AXV to Earn Juno, to earn Archway and you can also use the AXV token
+to have the liquid staked assets governance power in those layer ones directly which right now we haven't seen DAO’s have massive control over layer one networks and the AXV token will actually, the more liquidity we generate the more service we're providing to the Cosmos ecosystem and beyond this we expand to Avalanche, Moonbeam, Polkadot the more governance power the AXV token has. Meanwhile the way the proof of stake’s
+set up we earn rewards from them directly to our DAO and sort of like you keep your staking rewards you get AXV, AXV gets this set up as a Panamanian foundation so that the token holders are legitimately the beneficiaries that own this DAO owned treasury
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Aren’t the staking rewards still coming from inflation? so like we're kind of still going the same direction no?
+
Eric Waisanen
+Yes, but it's one thing to earn your own staking rewards it's another thing to earn somebody else's staking rewards. So, we will be earning staking rewards from other protocols which would then count as revenue for us. Now it's still up to them to justify having a high valuation, but I mean, right now, one of the top DEX in the Cosmo eco system has like two hundred and fifty million in TVL or so and like twenty million daily volume give or take. We'd be earning seventy-two seventy three million dollars in annual revenue with those numbers and our tokenomics and the error being zero. So there's a lot that's economically possible without making technological advances that we outline pretty well in the whitepaper and then at that point as we build this autogenic treasury we're earning these staking rewards that go to liquidity provision helping decentralize his payment for liquidity provision which all these layer ones have it's then Astrovault’s job and any other DAO that uses this model of protocol earned liquidity to be a VC that helps justify, helps make connections for these Layer Ones because if these layer ones do fail,
+if they don't sustain their valuation, if they do rug then there goes that part of our treasury.
+
So, we're actually we actually need them to succeed where incentivized to go and pro bono help them succeed, because that's what our treasury is based in. Right now there's this idea of we're all going to make it in Cosmos which I’m sure you can tell I don't think everyone's going to make it, but what does make it out of this dot com bubble will be the next to Amazon, the next Google and things will do great and so we think Cosmos has the best tech it also has this opportunity of proof of sake that we can easily utilize and as long as anything in the Cosmos eco system is what succeeds long term then Astrovault and the AXV token will justify its value by having that in its treasury.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I think that a lot of like seen with three or four bear markets, well this is the fourth one I believe that I’m seen since the 2011. So I mean you know that was the first one right eleven, twelve and then from there… it's interesting that so far the revenue and survival haven’t been going hand to hand. So far you know haven't revenue you didn't
+well or rather not having revenue didn't mean that the project is going to die. I mean but it was always more or less the tokenomics. Tokenomics model really really does play an important role and if at least the system can’t survive on its own juice kind of so to speak for several years it just dies out and we’ve seen it already a lot of times. What is in your opinion the best or one of the some of the ways as somebody who works with tokenomics in your opinion to incur more value to Atom rather than the proposed solution that we already mentioned.
+
Eric Waisanen
+Yeah, Atom has to develop something that other people want to use and charge them for it. If they're going to give out these massive grants or what not they need to make sure that there's an air drop to token holders. If the purpose of Atom is for an airdrop, then great. If they want to be this collateral, they have to make sure that Atom is the primary on and offramp for the rest of the Cosmos which also petitions them to have constant sell pressure from the more things that uh that are developed. like something has to be that fiat gateway and right now that's what Atom is best served at. Theoretically I think if they are able to set up some kind of like super relayer set for IBC that people want access to, kind of like Polkadot has these limited spots and they can incentivise people that use ICS for that reason. Like right now I’m nervous about ICS. Why wouldn't people do is somewhere else, if they choose a do ICS, like I don't think that it's going to provide the value for the Atom token that they think it will and frankly I think that quite a few other ecos like quite a few other tokens are better positioned to profit off of what Atom wants to do than Atom is itself.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I don't know if you know I mean I know and I guess it's because of atom 2.0 and that's why I mentioned it I mean because I haven't spoken about it for two years until the last month and I’ve mentioned it like I think twenty times, but I cannot not help to mention it again. It’s prop twenty-six I believe behind, I was aye, it was rejected was the prop for 2020 where we came with the I used to help cyber and system develop in Bostrom and our proposition back then I think it was fifty thousand dollars an Atom for them to send to multisig dadada in order for when Bostrom will launch they will transfer a certain locked value during that deal right then tokens to the treasury to them to the treasury, whatever, community pool doesn't matter of Atom, and we spoke that our main proposition of value behind that was of course the diversification of the money that the chain has and of course to build incur value that proposition, that prop failed actually, didn't fail heavily and a lot of people since then who have voted no they came out and said now I kind of get it, what you were trying to do but kind of you were like two and a half years early with that and we're like well but fuck like you have to understand that if you have nothing to back what you do, sooner or later the food is going to run out and yeah but you said one very amazing point, I mean interchain security.
+
Cool, but why wont I go somewhere else and hire interchain security over there especially let's say if I’m a close small chain I’m probably going to go to Binance or somebody like that. I don't care about KYC regulations. I’m kind of the guy who, let's imagine for a second right, probably I will choose them because they will probably provide more safety nets then Atom can, right, Osmosis, Juno, you know.
+
Eric Waisanen
+Osmosis, Juno, Archway, Neutron, like anybody can launch their own ICS and then they can offer more incentives and they can bring more like, they can have gates of like this is only accessible, you can only have access to this if it's with us and Cosmos by being so neutral and by giving everything up for free, has less that they can reserve to people that choose to use them. I agree with all the points that like there should be a neutral hub and it is in everybody's best interest but in a laissez faire society nobody wants to pay for the neutral hub but it's better for everybody if everyone pays for it, which means it has to be mandated and they can’t now.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+This is like me you know, jumping around here was talking was talking rubbish for most of the time, myself. Is there such a scenario where the Atom token doesn't to have all those things and it stays the TCP/IP kinda thing, were we're okay but having this token gives me access, well to nothing really but it kind of gave birth to this whole great IBC thing which then developed and had its own value but Atom, the scenario where atom has some value just because well like Bitcoin for example does but let's not go there but I don't know are the are there scenarios where it doesn't happen that the apocalypses that we're talking about.
+
Eric Waisanen
+Yeah, I mean it's never too late to save almost anything. Just Atom needs to develop a really really strong…
+
Citizen Cosmos
+But without that. Without developing an incentive model I’m talking about like let's for a second not incentive model is the right word.
+
Eric Waisanen
+I’m talking new software, something new. That without developing something new that's for sale or rent, then no.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+No okay okay that's what I meant. I was saying let's try to keep out of the picture sale or rent here but so you're saying that is the only way okay I see. Let's not back to but kind of skip forward from this to Archway because I’m curious also to hear on the front because last time we had Archway we had two or three, three people from the team I guess and it's been a while since then and I don't know I assuming because you guys are building on top of Archway you will be more familiar with the current scene and what's going on and if you could update as would be cool.
+
Eric Waisanen
+So yeah, first and foremost none of my opinions are those of Archway, Phi Labs or anybody associated with them. I am an employee of Phi Labs, I’m their token economics lead but there are plenty of other people higher than me there doing more. They wanted to separate their platform with being focused on economic innovation and they're doing a great job and I just had the experience of being able to help put that on spread sheets, on papers and what not. To help iron it out and help lead them in the direction that they were already going. So their, Archway is far bigger than I am but what I love about them is from an economic philosophy perspective which is my background. Economics is focused on optimizing the systems in place. Economic philosophy is understanding why the systems in place were created and then ideally optimizing those systems before then optimizing the system that is in place and the idea of this pretty token… What does inflation mean to you?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Well, I think to me personally and I’m going to cut corners of economics here and there is two meanings to that word one is of course inflating the monetary supply. So inflation as in literally blowing into something and it's inflating, and I guess if we're going more into economics inflation is when something loses value because
+of something that is not there is no ying and yang or balance so to speak I’m gonna like again cut very much corners and go into philosophy as well so something is losing value and that's basically a result of inflation and it shouldn't lose value at that point so two meanings I guess.
+
Eric Waisanen
+Yeah, you are one hundred percent spot on and so the second one you're talking about as something loses value is like what in the US where I’m based they'll have the CPI and they'll measure basically how theprice of the dollar depreciates compared to commodities and global assets and those, oh gosh inflation’s at nine percent oh gosh, it’s at ten per cent that's really high, but at the same time the first one you mentioned it's called monetaristic inflation or inflation of the monetary supply and we've printed fifty percent or one hundred percent of the dollar supply since then so realistically the price of the dollar has not depreciated even close to how much the monetary supply is increased. We're basically raising the arbitrarily inflating and raising the market cap of the US dollar because the price isn't depreciating enough, which it might eventually but I am much more a proponent of looking at monetaristic inflation instead of the price effects which is how we naturally see things in crypto like oh we’ve got Atom token has a seven to twenty per cent inflation rate. Well is a monetaristic inflation according to the US the inflation would be how the price changes arbitrarily because we can't audit the Fed.
+
So, the purpose of monetaristic inflation is to decentralize network goods, to decentralize payments for things that everybody needs and requires and when you look at how the Atom token was set up the idea behind it was to incentivize decentralization in the security of the network but it doesn't actually do that. It gives this inflation rate to these validators so now you can run a computer that costs you like eighty bucks a month and profit a hundred thousand dollars a month, if you're like one of the top validators and by doing so you're lowering the Nakamoto Coefficient and not securing the network. What they actually did and I like where their mind set was but again it wasn't economist. What they actually did was they set up infrastructure costs to be decentralized through this monetaristic inflation and they did it incredibly inefficiently.
+
So there are a lot more costs than just infrastructure, but infrastructure is the only thing that it was really optimized for and it was not done efficiently and so what Archway had in mind is now setting this up like more things than just infrastructure, like security of the network is integral obviously we're still going to be giving like this monetaristic inflation to decentralized payments for infrastructure. We will be giving these staking rewards to these validators, but maybe we should do it in a way that's not just incentivizing the top validators more than the bottom validators. What we have to do some kind of price of risk formula or negotiation or what if we want to incentivize more than just infrastructure provision. So part of Astrovaults purpose was to decentralize the payment liquidity provision retroactively for all these networks. which we do. For Archway however we need developers to get paid. The whole thought process behind it was like why go build on Ethereum when it brings value to the Eth token which is held by whales and doesn't bring value to the people actually building it.
+
So everyone's grant farming, we wanted them to get rewards from the gas directly as well as reserve some of this monetaristic inflation to help subsidize payments for these developers so that regardless of your current economical status, regardless of having to buy your way in, everybody is incentivized to go and build something new, build something useful pretty, that actually gains traction on Archway because right now everyone's grant hopping. They don't really usually have the incentives in place to have their app really be used and so we see a bunch of apps that don't get used. But now if somebody comes in and they're getting constant rewards from the utility of their protocol, perpetually. Then things that previously have not been marketable or profitable now finally can. Tooling, DAO’s, things that are network goods that nobody wants to build because you can maybe get a grant for a while but that's it can now be built and used indefinitely to progress Web 3 in a way that it hasn't been done before.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+and what is the latest because the last time we spoke with Archway this was more or less the idea and the guys were just before another release. This was a while ago I believe this was over a year ago and I’m curious to know what has been the progression since then like how is the network looking now. Is there a lot of for example yourself you're an example of L2 building on Archway. Are there many other projects
+right now that you are aware of that are building anything on Archway? Are there a lot more active users than there were a year ago and so on and so forth? In general, not in numbers of course but in your
+own perception.
+
Eric Waisanen
+I’m aware of a good couple of high-profile high-quality applications that are building out there and so far, it seems their focus is more of getting a few really good teams instead of just a ton of teams that are going to build something to not really be used, which is what we've seen a lot of in general in this space but things that will
+get adoption and traction because it makes sense for them to build an Archway will have more content calculators to see like kind of rewards you're looking at through the utility of your apps coming out pretty soon. I built them. But yeah it's gaining a lot of traction as well as what they're offering with area fifty two and these new CosmWasm contract classes and partnerships that they're making with block chain clubs at universities. More talent is being on boarded to build on Archway and they're really seeming, I don’t want to put words in their mouths, but they are seeming to position themselves as a profitable access point for the interchain hub.
+
As more app chains come out and more brilliant things are developed and there's more that needs to be done than is allotted in one chains block space. As interchain accounts become a thing if you access everything from Archway it's more profitable for the builders. So, if you go build something Secret Network or Injunctive or Axelar and you want it to work inter chain, then have access it from Archway. Set a premium for it and you can get paid for people using other chains without with a seamless user experience which will be built out on Archway.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Since we mentioned ICS, interchain security and you mentioned something like, well if you know Atom creates ICS, anybody can create ICS and you know I can then go to anybody who offers me ICS we do talk to a lot of chains and of course I mean but by the way area fifty two is something I personally retweeted the shit out of, just recommend to anyone who wants to get into smart contracts and doesn't matter if it's CosmWasm or anything else but of course if it's CosmWasm specifically because it is about CosmWasm. Area fifty two guys, it's fucking amazing website done by I believe guys from Archway right and really really great tooling like to learn what's going on be behind CosmWasm under the hood sorry of CosmWasm. But back to the question sorry for that moment of advertisement. It was coming from deep inside the heart I swear. You mentioned like well anybody can go to ICS interchain security right and it's true, anybody can really do that, but then the same we can do with what Archway proposes right I mean you can divide and create as many multiple pools or community pools, developer pools. Whatever, you're there reward of the token you can divide into a million different small partitions and actors. Why will I go to Archway as developer? Why would I choose that over other changes that are already now starting to offer similar incentives?
+
Eric Waisanen
+A lot of it will be how good and resourced the team is. They raised twenty-one million dollars. They are a lot of the core members of the Ignite and Tendermint teams, so their connections are fantastic. They're well resourced, they're also well purposed and they know what they're doing. They know why they're doing it. It's not like oh let's go do something and we'll figure it out along the way. They are taking a very like top-down approach of like this is what we need to do to get where we want to go, in a way that's regulatorily compliant and safe and I for one really appreciate that.
+
From my experiences in defi and crypto in general but yes there needs to be some kind of stickiness, some kind of user retention and if no other chain can offer substantially more or something substantially unique than Archway and Archway is the first mover to build out this kind of, not Cosmos hub obviously but potentially like developer hub, then it will gain the traction. Why do people still build in Ethereum when it's one of the really like one of the worst tech wise of the smart contract platforms, because other people are doing it because it's what's known and it will still be profitable even after even well after Archway is established. It will still be rewarding to go and building new application on Archway in away that’s not the case for something like Ethereum. So barring somebody else offering substantially more in some kind of unforeseen non-economic way then Archway will have a very strong level of stickiness in my expectation.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It will be interesting to watch those developments in terms of the battle of L ones especially like related L ones. So like let's say so to speak para chains or zones or whatever or rollups or on the same play ill be interesting how those competitions will develop and I mean you mentioned validators making a hundred K per month, that is by definitely not the top of the numbers to where they can go during bull market and I’m talking at one zero is very very modest and I know personally because as well I mean
+
Eric Waisanen
+To run a computer
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Yeah yeah, I mean we've never been a big validator of a word we were a small validator we ran like four including Cosmos hub, four chains I guess but even for us during the bull market it was, of course we never saw numbers like that, but nowhere near close but it was numbers that were substantial and that as validator you understand your business on the specific blockchain your idea is to try to put the capital back into using the capital again into the cycle and that's one more question actually where I’m coming from is, I mean you said Archway is heavily focused on developers. I mean validators and other actors still do exist. So will Archway as far as you know again of course and I’m taking into account what you said before that you're not a member of the team but still
+
Eric Waisanen
+I am
+
Citizen Cosmos
+well
+
Eric Waisanen
+I am now, but I’m not speaking as one.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I’m sorry Eric, I meant you don't represent the opinion
+and I’m sorry, I apologize
+
Eric Waisanen
+yeah
+
Citizen Cosmos
+let me correct that here you don't represent you mentioned that you don't represent the opinion of the Archway team but still, in your opinion, personal opinion, is that heavy focus on developers around development and I’m kind of wanting to remember Ayota here in a way with the very heavy focus on scientific like thing of course different things question down the road sorry for the long thing because of the heavy focus on developers, can that cause a problem to attract other actors around the eco system?
+
Eric Waisanen
+Yeah, coming from my experience working in the token like as the tokenomist, it's not something that's gameable in a way that can hurt the security or sustainability of the network we've made sure of that and we'll have more releases coming close as we get closer to mainnet which should be nice and eye opening and good conversation starters for the rest of the Cosmos eco system. Yes, I suppose validators will earn less tokens proportionately compared to a network with higher inflation where all of it goes to the validators but that doesn't make it not profitable and even then, validating itself isn't very hard. What these validators do to earn and attract business usually is something else but that's because we've had to adapt to the really the poor economics that have been in place where now like oh well, my business is marketing and being an influencer but my funding for it is coming through delegations since like if you're going to be an influencer or get paid for being an influencer. Have it be paid from the community pool like why do influencers have to run a computer when that's not there expertise which might make it a little bit less secure. Why is everything so tied into infrastructure providers being the only ones getting paid. It’s kind of weird.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I think that the point here for my personal opinion here and I will speak from the other side of course. I don't think that the amount of influencers today are who are validating is anywhere near as high as those who have started validators in their own garage you know not even in their own garage but in their own mom's bedroom fifteen years ago well not fifteen years ago sorry but, that was of course 2016 yeah it was a thousand I’m not going about like 2016 you know, like first like de post nodes kind of thing, pictures. And then from there, I would personally and of course I’m biased here but our business at first was always content and then becoming a validator because we realize that getting grants for example for various things or back then it was literally impossible to go to the community pool and the best example is prop twenty six there because people would not give you one penny back then from the community pool unless you were a developer and you going to the foundations was pretty much impossible because you either had to do a photo of your arse and you know a fingerprint of the head of your penis send them that and then maybe maybe maybe maybe they would give you like you know two or three K and you'd be like okay well where the fuck do I get the money from to create the content?
+
I’m having the team you know so I think a lot of the influencers and I understand what you're saying but I would rather see some of those influences run validators than, I’m going to be honest I have seen some… I’ve personally run my first node in the 2016 and I remember how it was and what it was and you know sometimes those guys at least their business focus they take that as a business and they run it and they put the value back into networks where the other guys well all they care about is like you said attracting a little bit of rewards getting a hundred k down demands putting it down get changing that to another token and changing that to fiat and you know buying a couple of lambos. So I’m not sure which one is worse here.
+
Eric Waisanen
+I don't disagree and I’m not attacking content creators who are running validators by all means they should that is the current way to get paid for this kind of stuff. I have also done it. What I am saying is it's weird that that's what they have to do. If what you need as a network is perpetual content creation, then that should be a network good that stems directly monetaristic inflation and now that's difficult to do and to potentially quantify and so it's simpler to do from validator but it is weird that like literally the entire monetaristic inflation is going to infrastructure providers in a way that does not optimize for raised Nakamoto Coefficient. It does not optimize for actual decentralization, does not prevent against civil attacks like things currently like from not looking at anything subjective but from an overview perspective are not set up in a way that's logical or that one would set things up in a vacuum without any names or faces attached
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Of course I think that that's the best example of a free market. When the market offers an opportunity that's what you do. I mean in an ideal world would it would be I mean I’ve launched the first… I had the experience of launching the first in like 2016 and since then you know I’ve seen a lot of economics, tokenomics, validators, come, go, up, down, you know like do different things think that what they doing is the number one thing unfortunately though, end of the day in my opinion what turned out to be like the most realistic model that really does make sense is actually what you're saying that in your opinion you don't think it's the way it should be.
+
It's interesting that the we come in here from different perspectives but I do honestly think that currently and I actually it's funny that you say that because a lot of them, you call them content creator as well I say ecosystem developers there's a big difference between you know creating I don't know YouTube videos and between actually being able to use your network in order to bring value to the system whether it's via partnership. Why are, I don't know connecting the founders with the right marketing team or with the right developers or getting the right developers coming to develop on the specific network. So to me that model still seems very and by no means I’m kind of I am defending it by no means I’m taking it as an attack but I’m just kind of trying to base to be fair and show two sides of the medal because you're saying one and I’m kind of okay there is another side of the medal and the other side of the medal is that there is literally no other way to accrue value for those people right now. So that is reality and that's yeah well we'll see of course in the future how things going to change.
+
Other than that it will be of course of course interest to see what like I said already what would new models what kind of actors they would attract I was talking to one of the founders of Like Coin the other day um not the biggest project of course in terms of capitalization but very heavily in development and it's interesting that we were talking about very similar subject about the subject of validator sets and the diversification of the people who validate in those sets and you know she would saying very interesting point that it's cool to have a set where you know fifty of your validators are professional node runners but you've said yourself a very good sentence developers not equal economics and I think here to have a good chain okay if your chain is really apps, if you're an app specific chain maybe you want to focus but even then you want to be able to have like an opinion in my point of view of wide range of minds and that would create the decentral well as much of the decentralization as we can go I don't know if agree with that.
+
Eric Waisanen
+Yeah, decentralization is a net good but it's not the only thing that's optimized for a lot of things that get overly decentralized get nothing done so some kind of fine line needs to be walked, but we're making good progress general in the entire Cosmos eco system but also Archways making good progress at ways to better what is currently in place. Lots of big thinking even if there's small changes that will have a large impact and I’m excited for it the kind of economic revolution that we're starting with Astrovault, where we're getting protocol earned liquidity and show casing solid business models with dapps will hopefully cause a wave or more going for protocol earned liquidity instead of copying croniistic or ponziistic things that have been done in the past. There is innovation, there is success in future in crypto in defi, in gamefi and NFTs but it's not what's been done you have to take those next steps, you have to develop them in away that's sustainable. You have to have tokenomics that will drive value to the token through the utility of whatever you build and that's being built in quite a few places and that's encouraging.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I definitely agree with you as long as it doesn't end up like what Do Kwon because he also promised it all but that didn't work out very well. Eric a quick quiz, a quick blitz quiz it's not very quick but it's up to you of course know which depth you're gonna answer the questions you welcome when feel free to answer as much as you want. Three projects outside the top twenty that you find technologically interesting.
+
Eric Waisanen
+In the cosmos echo system Dimension you briefly mentioned rollups. I think dimension is brilliant and really really interesting I’m not a huge fan of the ap chain model currently being pursued and think that that might be the real way to vertically scale the Cosmos eco system. I mean Archway is a lot of the basic Cosmos SDK stuff but they're launching their technical paper soon show casing what models that they added to the Cosmos SDK which it is a lot of the original builders as well but it kind of takes some of what exists in Atom that hasn't really been able to be properly utilized and it expands upon it in a way that's economically brilliant so I care much more about the economic innovation, obviously Astervault but Alter’s doing some really cool things as well
+if you've heard of them right now they’re a private uh kind of like communication platform that uses technology of Secret Network, but they're doing a lot of really brilliant development work. Their CEO Oscar Yepsis, truly a brilliant mind in the space. So he's one to watch for.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Two things that motivate you to do what you do in life
+
Eric Waisanen
+Oh my family I’ve got a wonderful wife of eight years and three beautiful daughters and well yeah I like putting food on the table for them and I like my wife being able to be stay at home mom and to teach them I want to be able to do something that they can look back on and say like hey like my dad helped to make a difference my dad helped better the world in some way shape or form.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And last one, one person. Doesn’t have to be from crypto, it could be a developer, could be an economist, could be a content creator, could be a writer of a book, anyone that you recommend to follow that would help people to achieve their goals and be successful in whatever they do.
+
Eric Waisanen
+You know what, follow Griffin Anderson, CEO of Phi Labs on twitter he actually as a really small following right now but he's going to be more active, coming pretty soon so that would be a good person to start following early because he's a really really brilliant person that has often preferred to stay behind the scenes that I’m excited to see a step out of his shell more. The dude is fascinating to listen to.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Eric thank you very very very much for your time let's be hopeful in your development and your launch guy sorry and not just the development but also launch of course and then further the development of the protocol and its life and Archway included not just Astrovault. Thank you very much for finding time to join me. Thanks
+
Eric Waisanen
+Thank you Serj love hat you're doing
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:
Episode name:
+Valerie Tetu, empathy, market strategy & public good.
+
In this episode, Citizen Cosmos talks to Valerie Tetu, GTM at Lido. This episode is fast paced and is packed full of information. Valerie’s enthusiasm and detailed explanations make this a great interview. It has excellent technical information on Lido and liquid staking as well as discussions on ethics and Philosophy, and as always Citizen Cosmos asks the tough questions and plays devil’s advocate.
+
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Good space time, y'all. In this episode of The Citizen Cosmos podcast, I speak with Valerie Tetu GTM Strategy at Lido Finance liquidity staking provider across multiple networks, including Cosmos and Ethereum We discuss startups, Defi public goods, data storage, onboarding new users with empathy and the semantics around pegged assets. We also make a deeper dive into liquid staking how it works, the associated risks and pros and voting rights
+
Valerie Tetu
+Immutable storage that is under my custody that can't go away. They're valuable records. I can transact them anywhere is very, very powerful.
+
+
Citizen Cosmos
+What is go to market. What does it mean? Like go and buy vegetables. Go and buy fruit. Let's get deeper in it.
+
Valerie Tetu
+So becomes this passive environment. And that's not a healthy economy.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+People start to rip their hair and sell their shirts and their wife shirts and whatnot. So that's what I mean by de-peg here.
+
Valerie Tetu
+Take ownership. I guess if your perception of your experience, I think it's really empowering.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Before we rocket it off into today's podcast, here is a round up of the latest news from the sponsor of this episode. Cyber. Cyber Congress Dao has been primarily working on improving the Bostrom Hub. This work includes testing of the contracts, new UI features, verification, tools for on chain governance and polishing the Bostrom DEX adding Protection. New Web Front and bring in indexing of chain swaps to try Bostrom head now to over cib.ai
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Hi everybody. Welcome to your new episode of the Citizen Cosmos podcast. Today with me is Val from Lido Finance Val. Hi, welcome to the show.
+
Valerie Tetu
+Hi. Hi everyone. Nice to be here.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Nice to see you. Because we tried last week and we couldn’t to do that rather, but we managed to do it. Yay. So we are here.
+
Valerie Tetu
+Yeah. I'd be happy to redo whatever.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. But still, it's nice to feel rewarded for something that is going on. It's like, yeah, it's finally happening. Anyways. Val, can I ask you briefly or not briefly? That is. Depends on what you want to introduce about yourself. Introduce yourself for me and for the guest, for the listeners, and let us know what you're busy with right now in terms of work and what is your focus right now and where is it?
+
Valerie Tetu
+Yeah, so to give a bit of background, my neat style, I'm originally French Canadian, studied in the United States and in London. I was focus in business and kind of like tech entrepreneurship during my studies and I actually learned was introduced, I would say, to blockchain technology approximately in 2016. So I was taking it an options class at the time called Leading Trends in Emerging Tech in University.
+
Valerie Tetu
+And the research project at the end of the class was basically, okay, choose an emerging technology that doesn't have any applications on it and write your thesis about what you think that technology will evolve into. And in terms of like applications use cases and business applications. At the time, when the professor basically asked us to did a research project, I had just picked up a book from the bookstore and it was like that book like Intro to Blockchains of like Blocks on it.
+
Valerie Tetu
+For those who have read it, very basic in 2016, and I love to do that sometimes to like pick books in the bookstore and like to see, okay, I don't know anything about this. And I like, let's see. So I had this. I was like, Well, okay, great. This is a perfect example. I'm reading this book. Might as well, kind of like, do it on that.
+
Valerie Tetu
+And then from there, what I started kind of like thinking about this more like deeply. I was like, This is really, really powerful. And for me, the idea that really kind of like stood out was really in terms of like disintermediated systems and having like, value flow straight to like where from one person to another and thinking about all of the inefficiencies between and the, you know, like humans love to intermediate processes, whether we see that I'd like D to C commerce with dropshipping, we see that with, you know, agencies, brokers, things like that.
+
Valerie Tetu
+So see blockchain and like disintermediating through code, I was really, really interesting. That application that really got my attention was actually not Bitcoin or money at the time. For me it was ipfs. And the reason for that is I was studying in the United States and had to transition my medical records over from Canada to the U.S. and the whole process was basically, I realized a had no custody like control or even like permission to access any of my records that were in siloed databases and probably paper databases also across my medical providers.
+
Valerie Tetu
+And basically they have to communicate with one another from Canada to the U.S. to basically chapter records and some records actually, for example, vaccination records or something like that were a bit scattered. And I had a provider be like, Okay, oh yeah, I think you got this one. I was like, Wait, it doesn't work like that. That's not how it works against biological data.
+
Valerie Tetu
+That's really, really important. If you're to make decisions. So when I saw that, I thought, okay, in immutable storage that is under my custody that cant go away their valuable records, I can transact them anywhere is very, very powerful. So that was kind of like the first spark for me. Now I could see my studies and everything I actually diverted a little bit, went into AI was in a B2B South company, did technology partnerships, and then I transitioned to M&A because I was when the company went public, because I always missed kind of like that start up feel like I always love entrepreneurship and love to support entrepreneurs.
+
Valerie Tetu
+So that's why I was going. But I was starting to see the applications of blockchain emerge. That was probably in 2019 where you saw Defi kind of like emerging and started using it. And then I was like, Wow, this is becoming like really real. And like, they're actually like consumers and users that can use this. So obviously, like many others, it started to consume a lot of my mind, started reading a lot of white papers, had way too many tabs open on my computer.
+
Valerie Tetu
+I was thinking about building my own project. And so I thought, okay, this is kind of like the opportunity to leapfrog. Had a few was going around opportunities and then essentially, Lido I got in touch with Lido and they told me about their vision and what they wanted to accomplish and where they wanted to take it essentially.
+
Valerie Tetu
+And more about liquid staking. And when I heard that, it was like a no brainer where I was like, this is really, really important. Actually, it's more important than what people think I can liquid staking is if we talk about the new proof of stake system that we're building, it's a very key piece of the infrastructure in order to properly align incentives with the chain with Stakers and with also the defi ecosystems in the applications that are being built on those on those and those layer ones essentially.
+
Valerie Tetu
+So when I heard that vision for me, I was like, Wow, this is very powerful and this is something that I think is worth doing. So that's why I came into Lido my specific role is go to market at Lido So I focus not on the development side, but really like how do we bring this to our different segments of users.
+
Valerie Tetu
+It's a different question then like what you would asking Web 2 because in Web 2 go to market, there's like sales, there's like kind of like marketing, all of that and there's like cycles and you're intermediating a little bit to access your product. And in this world, basically LIdo is just a permissionless protocol. Like anyone can use it.
+
Valerie Tetu
+People don't need to interface with us to use the protocol. So our job is to say, okay, what's a role you're like your role is essentially to make it as easy as possible to onboard, to educate, to provide the right resources in infrastructure. So that we can build this protocol as a public good that can really kind of like serve the financial infrastructure that we're trying to build essentially with a lot of other protocols.
+
Valerie Tetu
+If you bought this new financial system to really serve everyone in the right way, then we have to think about the different people that are using it. They're different needs, they're different technical proficiencies and everything like that, and kind of like try to create a system and strategy around that. So that's kind of like my role at Lido and a bit about my background.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I love when guests give a full story rather than, Oh, I work at the Lido finance. Okay, where is this story? Come on, guys. You didn't just wake up working there already. Do you remember the name of the book, by the way that you were talking about? The one you both in 2016, the Bitcoin book. Do you remember the name?
+
Valerie Tetu
+So it was Introduction to Blockchains, actually. So it was not a Bitcoin book.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Okay.
+
Valerie Tetu
+It's it's a white cover read like it was like Lego bricks on it or something. Primary colors.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I think I've seen it.
+
Valerie Tetu
+Yeah. Yeah. I exactly.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+When you said about the biological that was like, I mean don't get this every time I think I've been involved with and maybe this is of course a professional like bias, but I think since 2015 or roughly 16, every time I've been involved with lawyers or anything to do with medicine, you're like, Oh my God, Guy is really like, we really need to do something about this stuff.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Like lawyers, medicine, notary work. Can you like guys, what the hell is going on? Why are we so stuck in the past? Why is that there? I can totally see what you're saying about moving medical records. Definitely.
+
Valerie Tetu
+But I think even beyond that, like you're talking about lawyers and everything, and I think especially like right now we zero knowledge proofs are are, you know, nascent. But there is the disintermediation that is that I mentioned, but also verifiability, which in regards to medicine or law or notary or anything like that, verifiability is important. And also disintermediation in human to reduce error is very important.
+
Valerie Tetu
+So when you think about that, when you see the advances in AI, then you pair all of those together. I think like this ledger, whether that is, you know, like even beyond Defi is very powerful in many ways.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Val you mentioned the abbreviation go to market GTM Can you L5 that for me and for everybody out there like let's imagine we are not from the marketing world which I'm sure not everybody is What is go to market? What does it mean? Like go and buy vegetables, go and buy fruit. Let's get deeper in it. Let's like, what is it?
+
Valerie Tetu
+Yeah. So I kind of mentioned it briefly, but basically best way to think about it, it's literally how do you bring something to market Now, your market is different depending on what you're building. And in Web3 we have different market segment. So you can think about for example, like in Web3, there is like often a big part of that is your community.
+
Valerie Tetu
+Another part of that, if you're in defi, it might be funds, institutions or like investor fees that make want to build that you may want to use your protocols, then you might have just, you know, the unbanked, you might have different types of personas with different degrees of financial literacy and all of that. You need to think about the different personas that you're going to market with.
+
Valerie Tetu
+And then essentially it's to think about the strategy for onboarding for kind of like distribution, for promotion and for for positioning is actually. So it's all about how do you get the right product, the right frameworks to think about it and the right kind of marketing strategy around it. So I would say like if you want concrete examples, for example, it's like you can choose one specific segment, so what would you do, for example, to onboard institutions to a defi protocol?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It's a rhetorical question or a question. I try. And so it's very transparent. I'm going to let you answer that.
+
Valerie Tetu
+I was going to answer.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Yeah, please do. Please do. Please don't put me on this spot Please.
+
Valerie Tetu
+I was going to say so if, for example, you're thinking about that, you want to think, okay, so what do they care about? That's kind of like the first question that you want to ask is you always like when you're building a product. And I think this is really important because in Web three, sorry, I need to make that intervention because I think it's it's important interjection sorry is to say a lot of there's so many features on your being built, so many like new functionality, everything like that rarely do we see solutions instead of just building kind of like, you know, features.
+
Valerie Tetu
+So rarely do we see solutions to problems. Well, I mean, that's obviously debatable because there are solutions, but having like a very targeted kind of like need and being problem first versus just like building something out like another. Oh yeah, like I'm doing this other thing that like introduces more leverage with like another pools of like you can do this other strategy and whatever.
+
Valerie Tetu
+Like it's super fun, but what are you trying to serve and what are you trying to do? Kind of and like what kind of like user need or desire are. So you need to think about that first. So like, first of all is like, okay, for an institution, for example. So they may want to put their capital to work.
+
Valerie Tetu
+So you think about ways to do that. So okay, different. Defi That's kind of like checkmark. They could put their capital to work is certain what different like criteria. Some of them will want more volatility, some of them will want more long term investments and more passive, more active. It depends on like your user base. Depending on your protocol, you're going to cater to one profile more than another.
+
Valerie Tetu
+You might cater more to like a hedge fund and like for a derivatives exchange, for example, or but Lido my, for example, a staking protocol might cater or more to a fund or a Dao Treasury, something like that where it's more passive. So you have to think about, okay, so what what do they want? What they didn't looking for, and then what do they care about?
+
Valerie Tetu
+So, for example, if you're depositing money, you would want it to be secure. So you wanted to be secure. You would want it to be trustworthy. So what do you need in order to do that, to demonstrate that, for example, like audits or like having transparent code, everything like that. And those are all like important checkmarks to do.
+
Valerie Tetu
+And then in terms of infrastructure, so what are they going to use to how are they going to access your protocol? So they don't need to like specific custody solutions, They need a specific UI, probably because like they might not understand everything you might find and find that intimidating in the more friction that you cause the more the less appealing it is.
+
Valerie Tetu
+And then what else do they need? Like we need liquidity. So how are you going to enable that? Well, you need to integrate across tons of different markets. You need to find partners, you need to be integrated within other protocols and everything like that. So then it's like, okay, now that you know, all of these things that you've gathered, all of that data, it's like, how do you execute on?
+
Valerie Tetu
+So there are different ways to do it. So the first piece is to say, okay, what do they need to know? How do we communicated? How do we express all of those things where those like to educate about the buying proposition that meets those needs? So that goes to marketing. So for example, like you'll do campaigns of education, you might do webinars for them, like because there is a way to like nurture, you make specific relationships and all of that.
+
Valerie Tetu
+Now for infrastructure, you might say, okay, what are the right partners that I need to integrate into my protocol? What kind of wallet providers do I need to like onboard them in terms of liquidity? If you want to optimize for liquidity, well, you want to say, I want to integrate everywhere. I want to integrate into all the defi protocols.
+
Valerie Tetu
+So you're going to talk to all of them. Try to get that started and they get that right infrastructure in place so that when you can basically onboard them, you have the right kind of like structure ready and you meet their needs, you meet their wants. And you've also communicated to them and the last piece that I would say in terms of go to market, which actually precedes all of this is you need to know what is your unique value proposition, for example, in terms of a liquid staking protocol.
+
Valerie Tetu
+And I'm seeking because it's from Lido perspective, but is to say, what does liquid staking do differently and unique? That is not necessarily the same with traditional staking and Why is it relevant? Why does it matter in so liquid staking, for example, you can see it makes staking more simple because abstracts all of the complexity. You don't need to run a node.
+
Valerie Tetu
+It makes it more accessible. You don't need a minimum investment. For example, in the case of Ethereum, where you need 32 Ethereum you can stake any amount. Also it is liquid, so it eliminates the opportunity cost of locking up assets and not be able to participate in Defi, which makes it more capital efficient, which is another kind of pillar where capital efficiency is super important because you want to put your assets to work, you want to optimize for returns.
+
Valerie Tetu
+And so to be able to say, hey, you can earn passive staking rewards while using your liquid, staking assets in Defi is also a huge benefit. And then knowing all of these pillars like what pillars you stand are unique value proposition will inform all of your strategy. This is kind of like what needs to permeate throughout everything that you say, everything that you do, the people that you talk to, who you want to target, everything like that.
+
Valerie Tetu
+Because those unique things that you're going to bring to your users, you're going to want to find even the users that find that the most valuable, because not everything is as great for everyone. So all of that is to say go to market is at a high level thinking about all of these things and then putting an execution plan together.
+
Valerie Tetu
+And obviously you work with a team, you have big, you have marketing, you have all of that. That kind of comes together to go to market, to go to market properly essentially
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Can we hire you? No, I'm joking, I have not. But a serious question that comes up from all of this, the first thing that springs to mind is the first thing this brings to mind, I guess to everybody. But it's something that resonates within the experience that I have personally with doing what I do now. And it's interesting that as I was making my notes to ask questions, you were actually answering those notes as I was to go.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+But one thing that you didn't mention that I would love to ask you, and I know you like the topic because you mentioned it on your biography a lot as well. How do you align everything that you said with the philosophy and the values, like the philosophical values that you have? Because a lot of the time, what I see and this is mistakes.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Of course, I think it's mistakes, at least personal mistakes. And I'm sure every founder, every project out there does that. It's like a lot of the times where we believe in something and our personal beliefs or our philosophical beliefs to say, okay, I have to follow this path. But then when you line your problems, your strategy, your desires, your needs, everything like your yours, and you're like, Yeah, but I cannot do it because it just doesn't align with my philosophy.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+So how do you find that yin and yang balance between doing what needs to be done in order to achieve everything you just said and between internally feeling satisfied and feeling that Zen of saying, okay, I didn't harm anyone, I didn't, you know, kill a fly, I didn't do anything bad or whatever, whatever.
+
Valerie Tetu
+I think that's a super relevant question, especially in the context of everything that's happened with FTX and with all of these things, like you realize that a lot of these things might not be like, you know what I mean? Depending on your values, to want to judge everyone, but depending on your values, it might not be the best alignment.
+
Valerie Tetu
+So first of all, I think the best way to reconcile this is work or contribute to a protocol that aligns with your values. I think that that's the first step. If the protocol aligns with your values, there shouldn't be any issue because it's very intuitive. You're working for something that makes sense to you that you want to contribute to, and eventually that goes into that direction.
+
Valerie Tetu
+I think that values in any kind of organization is people can say whatever they want. We saw it in the case of the recent failures that happen. People can say whatever they want, but you can only demonstrated in actions really. And I think it's a really important thing to talk about. Actually, I'm happy that you bring it up because in crypto there's a lot of like narrative culture in hype culture where people actually put a lot of weight on narrative versus like actual even the actual products and actual like use cases in actual applications.
+
Valerie Tetu
+And a part of their strategy is actually just building narrative and building and sharing words and or hype or anything like that, which is very vulnerable on the long term actually, because like narratives change. Like we know this from history and like human history and all of that. And like humans, we are attention moves to one place to another and all of that and like, but value stays, stay grounded.
+
Valerie Tetu
+But if you just act like in alignment with it, then I guess like you don't even need to say anything. People will just it's like funny because I was reflecting on this the other day and I was like, you know, like it's good products. They stand for themselves. You don't need to explain why your iPhone looks great. Like it's like the interface is so well designed that it abstracts the design because it's so well done.
+
Valerie Tetu
+You know exactly what you need to do. And I was so and obviously not to be too controversial, but I ask myself a lot that question. Even in the case of, for example, Bitcoin, which relies a lot on a narrative, it's like, I don't know, sometimes like, okay, well, if it can't stand alone like a wall, I mean, it can
+
Valerie Tetu
+It's a great technology, but it tech there's involved a lot there is a lot of like alternatives now and now there's like kind of narrative around it which is a pillar. But is, is that fundamentally super strong? I don't know. So anyway, but does it really answer your question? I kind of went on a tangent there, but I think I think going back to what you were saying is in terms of executing all of it, you know what you're contributing to.
+
Valerie Tetu
+You know what the protocol, what the vision is of the mission is. You deduct values from that if it aligns with you, you like. It's fairly intuitive in the sense that like how you're going to execute on it because the mission just aligns with it naturally.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I know what you mean. I am a decentralization maximalist, but I am definitely not the biggest Bitcoin fan, so feel free to say anything you feel. In fact, my personal opinion about Bitcoin, I've mentioned it on a podcast several times is a lot worse than the most people. So yeah, but it's just a natural topic, you know, those values thing.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I've noticed that a lot of like lately, the further I that, the longer I work with what aligns with my values, the more that question keeps on coming up. Am I really doing the right thing? Am I like really going the right way? But I totally hear what you're saying. I totally agree with 99.99%, definitely of what you say Val
+
Citizen Cosmos
+One question I had from everything that you said, or rather one thing that I highlighted about unique value propositions. And of course, you've explained the one of the unique value propositions of liquid staking is being simple, what it's offering and giving you the opportunity to do other things to move your capital more efficiently. What about the dangers of liquid staking?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I mean, I must ask that, and I think hearing it from you, from the person who works with liquid staking will be the most like fair and it will align with the values we just spoke about because you work with it. In your opinion, what are the dangers of liquid staking, if there are any? Of course.
+
Valerie Tetu
+Yeah. I mean, there's always a risk somewhere, you know, like someone that will say there's there's never any risk or anything like that. So definitely that is the case. I think liquid staking provides a net benefit to the ecosystem. I think I mentioned it a little bit about why it's important, but I think I reiterate just before kind of like seeing the risks of like at least why I think it matters, maybe just personally, but why I think it matters so currently
+
Valerie Tetu
+And maybe we can talk about Cosmos, actually, because I think it's a really relevant example. For example, in the Cosmos ecosystem, if you're an atom holder, the current staking yields to stake Atom in your Kepler wallet, for example, is from like 18 to 20%. So of course, as an atom holder, that is an amazing yield. So I definitely get a lot of stake in my Kepler wallet.
+
Valerie Tetu
+Now, that's great because it incentivizes a lot of people to stake and participate in, like the chain security. And for those who kind of like are unfamiliar with how that works is just that, you know, when people stake it increases the pool of capital non that that is at stake. An incentive is is it actually like Validators to remain honest because like if they're not honest that the capital goes away so prof of stake systems so essentially I'm super incentivized to stake now all great but in the case of Cosmos now I'm securing the chain but defi protocols that are building on cosmos need in liquidity.
+
Valerie Tetu
+They need people to use their defi protocols and like interact with them and deposit their atom to earn yield to basically so that there's enough liquidity to lend so that people can borrow and also in liquidity pools so that, you know, people can swap and actually perform defi activities and all that because that's the purpose of it, right?
+
Valerie Tetu
+Like if you want to build apps on it, then like you need that. But the problem is like these defi protocols are like, well I can't compete with the 20%, it's so costly. I'm going to have to like basically either create a new token and inflate the supply just to basically be able to compete against the staking rate.
+
Valerie Tetu
+So a rational investor would always like stake out the base layer. So apps, if I'm an app builder I'm going to say, well, I don't really want to build on Cosmos because it's going to be so costly. It's going to cost me way too much. So a the current defi app suffer from adoption because people are not like providing liquidity the for the users it's not as good either because you don't you don't have the liquidity, you don't have same offering.
+
Valerie Tetu
+And then also the development is also a lot slower because for new developers they're not going to be incentivized to come in if it's super costly for them to maintain it. So the current apps suffer. The the new ones don't come in and then the user also only stake so becomes this passive environment. And that's not a healthy economy.
+
Valerie Tetu
+So it's kind of like say, okay, well how do you resolve that problem? So liquid staking kind of came in as a solution and said, Hey, you know what we want the priority is to decentralize, is to get the chain secure. We can't compromise that like, of course. So because that's a purpose of like the public blockchains, right?
+
Valerie Tetu
+Like we want to create decentralized systems that have honest validators that are decentralized enough so that, you know, no one can censor our full control over it and all that. So we want people to stake so liquid staking says Hey, you stake on chain, but as a result, I'll give you a token that represents a receipt of like your stake on.
+
Valerie Tetu
+Atom that you can then use in defi. So you have like this kind of representation that you can use in Defi and then afterwards you can earn additional yield on it. Participate, provide liquidity, use as collateral, borrow, lend all of these things So you fuel that economy in the cosmos ecosystem while the chain is secure. And then when you want to redeem your Stake well, then you use that liquid staking asset to redeem your state.
+
Valerie Tetu
+That's how liquid staking works. So it enables these like economies to kind of flourish, and it incentivizes users to stake, developers to build and basically apps to thrive. So it's a fundamental piece of infrastructure, in my opinion, of like why it's really important. Now, there are risks, as you said, kind of like, okay, what could go wrong? What could go wrong?
+
Valerie Tetu
+Well, it depends on the we the liquid protocol. The liquid staking protocol is designed because different liquid staking protocols have different risks. If you're saying if I'm me, I'm Val, I'm by myself, and I'm like, I'm providing a liquid staking protocol, everyone's stake with me, and I'll give you liquid staking assets. Well, I'll be staking all of the assets and I'll have control over the whole chain which is actually really, really bad.
+
Valerie Tetu
+Right? So you wouldn't want that. So a better way to do it would be to say, okay, the liquid staking protocol, for example, in the case of Lido, Lido, we don't operate nodes. Lido is a set of smart contracts that basically you stake in this Lido smart contract in the liquidity pools. And the smart contract distributes your stake across Lido node operators.
+
Valerie Tetu
+So not only is it like the state kind of a distributed, but also, for example, you're reducing your central point of failure risk by not staking with one provider that may go down and then you get Slashed and you're like, No, I trusted this person. So that's also for the user. And the other question is, okay, well, sure, for example, if I do that with Lido that's better than staking with Val
+
Valerie Tetu
+But who are these node operators like behind the light of protocol and can I trust them? Are they decentralized too? So that also depends on like how what's the node operator, kind of like management and selection kind of like process different liquid staking protocols have different views on this. Some of them say we want permissioned sets so that to make sure that they know how to operate a node and so that user funds don't get slashed and that we can trust them.
+
Valerie Tetu
+And that may be a bit slower of a process to like on board and completely decentralized and node operators set But that's why we do it. The other way to do it is completely permissionless where anyone can become a node operator and in a validator and then you can stake with them, can choose your pool or you can distribute the assets across them, or you can have like a mix of both.
+
Valerie Tetu
+You can have permissioned or not permissioned. You can have different degrees of permissions and different ways like that. So those are different kind of like tradeoffs that you want to think about. And then the other piece is like in terms of, okay, well, if you have that, how is the protocol governed? So obviously, if, for example, the team that is building the protocol makes all of the decisions on the protocol and they can shut it down tomorrow or change the smart contract code or anything like that.
+
Valerie Tetu
+Well, you don't really want that because if it scales and it holds a lot of the Stake like you have to think about the stake as like the security of these Layer one networks, which is really important. So you can't compromise that. So that's one of those use cases that actually, like decentralized governance is probably better. I think Dao’s in general, it's a very like broad concept and it's been adopted in many different ways.
+
Valerie Tetu
+But if you think about having a specific set of decisions that are validated and executed by code with like a vote and it doesn't need to be every decision, like kind of like, oh, what color do we choose for the background of our landing page, but like, do we upgrade this smart contract, Do we onboard this node operator and things like that that are more important is to say, can we make sure that all of the stakeholders of the network and of the protocol are involved Now?
+
Valerie Tetu
+Obviously it's not perfect yet, like governance structures and models are still being experimented with. And one thing that I'm super excited about though is in for Lido on Ethereum, we discussing this on the forum actually. So I would invite anyone to take a look but at the duo governance proposal and it's essentially enabling stEth holders which are the liquid asset holders to have a veto over the vote of just like for example, the node operators.
+
Valerie Tetu
+So basically the power is distributed across also liquid stakers which is great because it's more representative of like who's actually staking the capital versus just the node operators. So going back to that, I think there like the centralization risk can be real because these do have economies of scale, liquid staking. It does have an economy of scale advantage because when you think about it as a user, you want to be able to use the protocol that is the most liquid, the most integrated in the safest and what that means is that if it's the most liquid you want to be able to trade it anywhere, you want to be able to access the capital and the
+
Valerie Tetu
+most markets possible to be able to exit your positions when you want and on as many Dex’s as possible and you want it to be the most composable as well. So you want it to be have like the most defi strategies to be able to use because that's like the whole utility of it. Like that's, you know, that's a whole buying proposition.
+
Valerie Tetu
+Different staking protocols are not as well integrated as others. So if you have a liquid staking asset, you're like, Well, I have a liquid staking asset now, but this one is not integrated anywhere, so I can't even use it in Defi. Well, that kind of defeats the purpose a little bit. Well, not totally, but partially. You don't get the full benefit and then you want it to be super secure.
+
Valerie Tetu
+So like, you know, you want it to be audited and all of these things. So it tend to gravitate like towards a provider where the liquidity is concentrated similar to Dexs, for example, like why do people go on Uniswap? It's because your order is like there's so much liquidity there that your orders can get executed and you'll get you'll be able to trade your positions fairly easily, fairly efficiently as well.
+
Valerie Tetu
+It's much more efficient. So yeah, that's what I would say. I don't know if you have any other questions like to go deeper into that.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I have a lot I have a lot believe me, I have I have them all lined up. No, no. But we you spoke about several types of centralization risk and you mentioned security risks as well. What about de-pegging risks you didn't mention if I'm sorry if I missed it, but I don't think I heard like, what if the that the asset de-pegs the liquid staking assets?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Can that happen?
+
Valerie Tetu
+Actually, I didn't mention it because I don't consider that a risk. And the reason for that is actually so liquid staking assets. Peg is the wrong word. It's actually backed. So the way to think about it is your liquid staking asset is always going to be redeemable, the 1 to 1 with the stake. So as long as you have that staking asset, you can always redeem it for your stake 1 to 1.
+
Valerie Tetu
+So from the protocol is the protocol issues, it issues the asset, it's mints. The asset once you deposit, so say you deposit one token of atom and return you receive the liquid staking atom, you receive one. So the protocol mints it when you redeem it in the protocol, when you want to like get your state back, put it back in the protocol, the liquid staking asset, and then you get your out and you return in the protocol.
+
Valerie Tetu
+It burns that liquid state asset that you were using. So essentially it's redeemable, it's backed by your Stake The peg is interesting because it's true that the market price might be different. It tends to not be the case for protocols that you can have liquidity both ways. So, for example, if I can like unstake and stake and like all of that, I'm withdrawing all of that.
+
Valerie Tetu
+There will be if markets are efficient, then their arbitragors that quickly make sure that it's always kind of on a 1 to 1 ratio. Now in case of Etherium, that is not the case. And we've seen there is a gap between essentially the value of stEth which is specifically like Lido Liquid Staking Asset and Ethereum. And it's also the case for like CB ether, other liquid seeking assets.
+
Valerie Tetu
+The reason for that is actually you can only do arbitrage on one side because withdrawals are not enabled on Ethereum. So for people right now, for example, like especially in this market, there are some people that has staked Ethereum that they need liquidity now because maybe a part of their portfolio is down, maybe they're a big fund. And for example, what happened with Celsius is like they were going under and then all of a sudden like they needed to access liquidity.
+
Valerie Tetu
+So in a way thank God that liquid staking was there because they could exit their ETH position, which they could have not done otherwise, like their capital would have just been locked on the beacon chain. So until withdrawals are possible, that's still something that we're going to see on the market. But the way that we have to think about it is like these liquid seeking assets are a market of their own, so the market is going to price them accordingly.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+One more question to dig into that I think would be fair enough to mention before we we were talking about the dangers. You were explaining the use cases for liquid staking and you mentioned capital efficiency and you mentioned, you know, all this Defi protocol that made liquidity better than it does. So let's now imagine a system. And the reason I say de-peg, and I totally agree with you, de-peg might not be the right word, but there is a reason I do use that word.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Imagine if we had a system and let's think of a domino effect here and imagine my assets that I'm using the initial asset. Yeah, backed 1 to 1. But I know nobody's saying is the fault of this or this protocol. I'm talking in general about the dangers So imagine this asset is backed 1 to 1, but then this asset is used here that is used there, that is used there.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And essentially somewhere along the chain, one of these guys that didn't align with the values that we were talking about before, because he could care less about the values because he's just all about the narrative. They don't do that. You know, they offer, I don't know, some kind of premium or some kind of, I don't know, X5 or whatever, some bank multiplier on one of those assets that is in the chain where initially the liquid staking asset is backed by original asset.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+So as soon as something here in the middle of the chain falls, of course this is a hypothetical situation, but wouldn't that cause the whole chain I mean, the market will go panicking. Of course. Essentially our last stop is still backed, like you said, 1 to 1. And those guys are all fine, but the market doesn't really care about that.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+The market goes into panic and into a domino effect and everybody shouting, starting to sell. End of the day, these guys that have, you know, had their liquid asset, that kind of, oh, we are okay because we are we still backed one by one and we can redeem it. We don't care that the market fell. But the thing is, if we were talking to talk about their capital in USD, for example, own euros, which again I don't think should be discussed here, but I do want to have the hypothetical question and I do want to understand it.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Wouldn't that in your opinion, can cause like I mean, we've seen that with Luna, we've seen it with FTX within it many, many times, not just in crypto. People panic, people start to rip their hair and sell their shirts and their wife shirts and whatnot. So that's what I mean by de-peg here.
+
Valerie Tetu
+I guess if there is like kind of like a degen Defi pool or whatever that they provide yield, then I don't know what I said they would provide yield in but something like that, it's not an algorithmic stablecoin We're not minting burning anything like that at all. Like the stake is staked, the asset represents the asset and it's actually floating in a market.
+
Valerie Tetu
+So there are traders, there are two sides to the trade. It will just flow in and out of the protocol or be sold now if that everybody starts to sell Ethereum and the value goes down, then people might sell just too because they need liquidity and sell. But that would affect the value of ETH and stEth for example. But there's no like mechanism or nothing.
+
Valerie Tetu
+Like even if people sell it's just it's the same as like the token itself. I don't know if that answers your question. Another question that could be asked, though, is like, what if, for example, which was the case for Celsius, they use the stAsset as collateral and for example, the value of the collateral goes down because the discount starts to widen, for example, which was the case in Celsius, and that they can get liquidated faster, for example.
+
Valerie Tetu
+So that could be a risk. That is a risk, for example, because if you're saying, okay, well, I assume that my collateral is always going to be 1 to 1 with ETH, but actually the value of the collateral goes down because there is a discount and then you get liquidated in a protocol that could be a risk. And I think that the best answer to that is really like and I think we're all learning from this terms of like the right collateral ratios, the right way is to evaluate risk and to mitigate against that in defi protocols essentially like how, you know, with credit, I don't know if the answer will be credit score blockchain.
+
Valerie Tetu
+I don't know if it will be like other higher even collateral ratios or what it would be like, but that's something that is valid to think about is to say, okay, maybe collateral ratios need to be adjusted for liquid staking assets, but it depends on how efficient the markets are. And as you said, if there's a greater demand for liquidity and for anything else, people might exit more of their liquid staking asset positions, which does create more of a discount.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I think where we like with any and you are emergent technology, right? I think we are all here to learn to experiment and for sure we will see something that will close collapses we definitely never are going to be able to see. Hence that's why it will cause those problems. Right. But and I guess we are all here to create something and to build.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And this is the main thing at Valve before we move on, like the Blitz, quick question and this is something more commercial, not commercial. I don't know what would be the right word about Lido and the structure of Lido and neutron and cosmos and P2P, like just a quick 101 I mean, I'm personally more or less familiar, but just again, for myself and for the listeners, whatever you can share.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Of course, just in like a couple of words, how does the structure look and who's who, where is what?
+
Valerie Tetu
+Okay. No, that's a good question. So for those who are not familiar, so Lido was intubated by an entity called P2P, which they do, they run validators on different chains, but Lido itself is actually a DAO. So Lido is not a company, it's a DAO and there are different kind of. For example, like the Lido protocol is kind of like the smart contract that we're referring to that provide liquid staking.
+
Valerie Tetu
+And so there are different teams that build on Lido like that contribute to the DAO to build on different chains and all of that. Lido is actually not a part of P2P, and so it's actually its own kind of entity and it's governed by LDO holders and obviously it's operated by the core DAO like it's operated and maintained and all that by the core
+
Valerie Tetu
+DAO that's like how it works. And Neutron is a part of P2P, so they're building kind of like a chain which is separate to Lido But Lido is going to build a liquid staking protocol on Neutron. So it's kind of like separate in terms of like the entities.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+That makes sense, makes perfect sense, the way you explain that. Thank you. Val Blitz. I can't say it's really a blitz because a lot of the guests choose not to answer the questions Quickly And I love it. So feel free to choose to answer either really quickly or depending on the amount of time you have. You can go into details, but there's going to be three questions.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+So the first one, three projects, protocols, applications, doesn't matter what outside the top 20. Please don't say Ethereum bitcoin cosmos that you are curious. And in terms of what they do, you think it's interesting? Emergent or not, emergent technology in any case is something that you think it's really cool technologically that you follow. Doesn't have to be three, but let's try.
+
Valerie Tetu
+Yeah, that's super interesting. Oh, I actually really like this question and yeah, so I think one that I find really interesting is and Axelar and I think that the problem that they're working on is really interesting. I like the fact that they're tackling it with a proof of stake system. And I find it really interesting that they maintain the state like different chains.
+
Valerie Tetu
+I think it I don't know in my mind like the my mental model for it is kind of like this like yes it's like, you know, the routing like interoperability protocol. But it also kind of acts like an oracle when you think about it, which I think is really fascinating about having that extra layer of like validation on top of it, which I find really interesting.
+
Valerie Tetu
+So that's one. The other project that I think is will be really interesting is I'm actually really interested in learning more about Mina. So I wouldn't say that I'm the expert on Mina, but I think that what they're working towards is really interesting and I think that they're they've been working on, on their project for a while, like Raging kind of like seeking proof that the very, very late blockchain, like I wonder where that's going to go.
+
Valerie Tetu
+And then the other piece I would say is also I really admire what the guys are doing at Polygon ID and in terms of providing that piece of infrastructure to the ecosystem, I think is very, very needed and valuable. I find that their approach with ZK proofs is great and I really wonder how they're going to integrate it in scale.
+
Valerie Tetu
+From a go to market perspective, I really hope that they can turn up their bid team to really make it kind of like an sso versed in Defi and across all of Web3 because I mean my personal opinion is that wallets are not an authenticating device and they probably should not be. So I think that's something that I really support and want to move forward.
+
Valerie Tetu
+Okay. And actually I would add one to that is reserve I think reserve protocol, what they're doing is really interesting. So they're enabling anyone to create like Stablecoins based on a basket of assets and to have a marketplace for that essentially. And I find that super interesting, even as like a thought experiment to think like, what do you consider kind of what like a good denominator?
+
Valerie Tetu
+And to have that as a can. A general Yeah, I guess collective experiment, I find that really interesting in the way that they did it with kind of like a marketplace where people can adopt different standards. I think it will be interesting to watch the.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Second one do daily activities that motivate you to keep on doing what you do in your life.
+
Valerie Tetu
+I could just say, okay, if it goes into like what energizes me, I would say like for sure, huge breakfast and morning yoga or Pilates for sure.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I love the breakfast. You want me over it at.
+
Valerie Tetu
+That event in your day and your winner?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+That's it. I agree. I'm a huge breakfast person. I'm one of these weird people who can just eat like this breakfast, and I don't have to eat for the rest of the day. I'm with you. I just want one person Doesn't have to be from the crypto space. It could be a writer and painter, an artist, a developer, a content creator, a co-founder that you would recommend people to follow or to read.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+If it's a writer that could help their to succeed in their lives and to do whatever they do again.
+
Valerie Tetu
+So I think the obvious answer for me would be Marcus Aurelius in terms of like reading about philosophy, I think it's really important understand like how to focus on what you can control and focus on your agency in your ownership and like your how to basically modulate and like take ownership. I guess if your perception of your experience, I think it's really empowering is really important.
+
Valerie Tetu
+But I would say another one that might be, I guess more under the radar is Allen de Bottom. So for those who haven't heard of him, I would recommend following on YouTube this School of Life. So essentially it also goes into kind of like philosophy and self-development in history a little bit. But he provides these like short clips on YouTube, like from the School of Life that are literally like, why you're not, you're good, you're going to marry the wrong person or like things like that.
+
Valerie Tetu
+And it's like very short clips that really, like elucidate the truths of like human nature and. I find them like really, really useful to think about. If I can add one more, it would also Robert Greens book Laws of Human Nature, which basically he every chapter is like a different law of human nature and also like exemplifying that law as human nature with a historical figure and why it matters.
+
Valerie Tetu
+And you start to recognize these patterns across humans. And I think like whatever you're doing in your life, whether that is building relationships, even building a product, understanding the fundamentals of human nature is like a constant that you'll always be able to kind of like anchor in and rely on. Yeah, And it will help you be more like self aware of yourself about those of your environment and to build from there.
+
Valerie Tetu
+So those are the three that I would say.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+On the second one you were like, Oh, that's unexpected. I was like, All three of them were unexpected, so that's good. I like it. I really like Marcus Aurelius. Definitely going to be hard to follow, but for sure it's possible to read that I was. I'm kid and I'm kid and I'm just kidding. Well, wow, this has been really great.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+A really, really huge thank you for finding the time and going to be watching what a Lido is going to build on Neutron with excitement and not just a neutron. I mean, I'm saying neutron because like a lot of people do listen to us from Cosmos, but it's not just Cosmos community. There is a broader community as well.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+So everything of course, you mentioned there is in the show notes. So guys, please do go check all this things that Val is suggesting out and thank you very much for joining us.
+
Valerie Tetu
+Thanks so much for having me.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Thank you. Bye, everybody.
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:
Episode name:
+Chris Castig, Bots, Startups, & The new web.
+
In this episode, Citizen Cosmos
+talks to Chris Castig, co-founder of Console.xyz. Chris and Citizen Cosmos
+discuss education and its importance. They delve into a possible future where bots
+may be recognized as people and look at the now where people are already behaving
+like bots. Chris gives a wealth of information on Console.xyz and I for one
+will be making an account, just to see if it is as beautiful as described.
+
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Good spacetime y'all. In this episode of The Citizen Cosmos podcast, I speak to Chris Castig, founder and console, X, Y, Z, a Web3 chat for Decentralized Communities. Along with Chris, we talk about digital identities, good and bad. Robots and Humans, personal rights, startups, education and product market fit. We also discuss the dangers of wrong funding the Golden Billion onbourding users and the original vision of the Internet.
+
Chris Castig
+I think if we could understand the original vision for the web and then understand how it failed or the challenges with it, which I would say are the powers of centralization that came in the early 2000, then I think you can start to understand what a better future might be. There has never been a more exciting time since maybe the nineties with the web.
+
+
Chris Castig
+What Web3 does really well is I think of it as like a bunch of different Lego blocks that we can interconnect. It's open, transparent. It's on the blockchain.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+They turn people into bots, into the bots you describe in.
+
Chris Castig
+They turn people under bots. Yes. Okay. You don't have enough money now. You have to give up your like eye retina scan.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Before we rocket off into today's podcast. Here is a round up of the latest news from the sponsor of this episode, Cyber. Cyber Congress has been primarily working on improving the Bostrom hub. This work includes testing of the contracts, new UI features, verification tools for on chain governance and polishing the Bostrom Dex adding MEV protection new web front and bring in indexing of chain swaps.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+To try Bostrom head now to over cyb.ai
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Hi everybody welcome to a new episode of Citizen Cosmos podcast. Everybody I have with me Chris from counsel X, y, Z today on the show.
+
Chris Castig
+Chris Hey, Serj Happy to be here.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Happy to have you. First things first, the most typical thing in the world. Let's introduce yourself, please, for everybody, for me and the listeners. Tell us about what you do and anything else you want to include in the introduction.
+
Chris Castig
+Yeah. My name is Chris. Most people call me Castig like C A S T I G . So that's where you'll find me on all social and everything. Castig and I am the co-founder of Console. We started a console in the summer of 2021, so it's a little over a year now. And console is. It started as Web three chat, and we're really evolving it into so much more with really everything that, like communities need.
+
Chris Castig
+We think of it as like the future of creative community. So I'm sure we'll get into a bit more of that. But that's the main project that we're building right now. There's a team of ten of us and we're pretty well funded and have a pretty great vision. In addition to that, I am an adjunct professor at Columbia University Business School.
+
Chris Castig
+Right. Of course, coding and Web three. So that's a fun project as well. And before this, my last company was an education company, a technical or coding education company called One Month. We met through Y Combinator, and prior to that I've been involved or helped start up a handful of other startups. So I think startups, it's mostly been my journey was the developer for a while now, basically heading product the team.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Nice. What did you say you teach? I missed.
+
Chris Castig
+Columbia University. Wow.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Wow, cool. And you teach computer science. Is that an introduction? Of course. Or a basic or what is it?
+
Chris Castig
+So it's in the business school. So imagine it's a bunch of people who are MBAs and want to start companies, and they need to know the foundations of coding of Web three of databases of all this stuff. So it's like a foundations class of like the least amount that you need to know to, like, hire or manage and get started.
+
Chris Castig
+That's what the courses.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And how do the students like are interested in computer science? I'm curious, the business guys.
+
Chris Castig
+Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's no, this the class is very heavy. It's very popular. It usually sells out or they bid. They have a bidding system about 70 students every semester. And yeah, I don't know that they care so much about computer science, but they love building things, you know? And so they want to just like, build tech and hire people to do it, manage people to do it and co-create.
+
Chris Castig
+So the class called Digital literacy, that's the focus of it.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Cool. And I know you started in Berkeley, right?
+
Chris Castig
+Berkeley. Just to my dreams. Berkeley, California. It sounds beautiful, but no, I'm from the New York City area. Yeah.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Why did somebody feed me this information? This is. This is what happens. This is like now I'm joking. But for some reason I saw somewhere that and I don't know how that's going to here. There is. And I was going to ask that I'm less Cards on the table is I have noticed that a lot of crypto people are from Berkeley.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Like there is a huge, huge community. And I was like going to go into all conspiracy theories right now. But that said, I'm not going to do it. So but it's still a topic I do have for you is that I wanted to ask your opinion about to be more precise, is education and the role of education in society today, and how do you see Web3 fitting into all that?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+So I know it's a kind of a vague, huge subject that you can probably gone for weeks. But in general, do you think that today Web3 is an educational enough space? Does it need to be more educational? Do we need more people to educate people or do we let people educate them by themselves since it's the free market?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+How what's your opinion on all this topic? What do we need to do to improve the literacy? Let's say about three in general, in the community, in society?
+
Chris Castig
+Yes. Education is a large part of what you're doing here, right, with Citizen Cosmos and the podcast, everything. So I really appreciate that. I think education is the key to a better, happier future for everyone. I think as a teacher myself and as someone who I don't know, I read pretty voraciously, like I just love reading. I think just ideas to me are just like so exciting.
+
Chris Castig
+And I think Web3 itself is like at this moment built on a lot of ideas for the future with a lot of money from mostly Andrews & Horowitz That's kind of a joke, kind of true. And I think a lot of just really talented people. And so I'm excited about the movement and everything that it stands for. But to answer your question specifically, I think we need education about how we got here and the problems that today's Web, because as I kind of just painted this picture, I think people are arriving at Web3 for the first time and kind of seeing this amazing future that it could bring for us.
+
Chris Castig
+But I feel like without the past, we repeat a lot of the problems in the future. And so specifically, for example, understanding that the Internet itself, which was invented in the sixties and seventies, was built for decentralization, was built for the people. Right? A lot of the principles that we're talking about web3 really came from kind of near Berkeley, kind of California, San Francisco, that whole area right during that time.
+
Chris Castig
+And I think if we could understand the original vision for the Web and then understand how it failed or the challenges with it, which I would say are the powers of centralization that came in the early 2000, then I think you can start to understand what a better future might be. So this is a very broad picture that I'm painting here, and I think this is a lot of what I teach as well with trying to understanding the past of how we got here and where we're going.
+
Chris Castig
+But I think when we talk about web3 and education, I think understanding the problems, how we got here and then understanding the solutions and not the other way around.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+What are the problems that you're talking about? Because this is like, I think, the main elephant in the room, right? Those problems.
+
Chris Castig
+Yeah. Well, one thing that people on the Web understand, I think today, especially if you're on discord or social media, is that these platforms are overrun by spam and bots. Right now, if I go on Twitter, my inbox is full of just like a bunch of bots trying to sell me some weird CryptoKitties or something. So spam robots are a big thing that face the internet.
+
Chris Castig
+If we could understand the way that like identity works right now on the internet, you have an Instagram account, you have a podcast account, Riverside account, you have a Facebook account, you have all these accounts, and with each one of them you have a username and a password. So the way the web is designed right now is your identity is stored with every website that you go to Facebook has part of your identity, Instagram as part of your identity, and because of that, it prevents that.
+
Chris Castig
+It provides a lot of challenges. One of those, as I mentioning, is the amount of spam and bots we get. The reason those two things are linked is because when we have our within, let's say we use like Instagram, right? When we have, when it's so easy to just spin up accounts and have no history and just kind of show up on Instagram, it's really easy to just not know who is real and who is basically, you know, a scammer or bot or something, right?
+
Chris Castig
+And so we have this problem of like personhood on the Internet and those are some of the challenges that Web three are looking to solve with some people call it proof of humanity, or there's different metrics for how we can show that people are there. But I think one of the main ideas to look at in the future, which I think is going to really take off in the next year, is removing identity from the platform so that there's one global identity.
+
Chris Castig
+I have, for example, my Castig.Eth my ENS name, and my ENS name can be my global identity that I can go and then use and access hundreds of websites, but then I can leave those websites. And no one that works at those websites knows I was there. I don't leave a huge fingerprint. They can't deplatform me.
+
Chris Castig
+I am just using them like a platform and leaving with my identity and leaving with my data. I think that's one of the big shifts in how things have been and where things could be going.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I think the whole DID topic is decentralized ID topic is a really interesting one and I've had several guests throughout the course of the last few years that we've discussed this with. And I think one of the most common questions I have for them, which I will definitely want to hear your opinion on, why do we need all that if we already have a public and a private Key Pair
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I mean, isn't that enough to have understanding of proof of any identity? There is a private public key. We don't need to collect any more data. That's it. There is the whole deal solved. Is that enough or do we need more?
+
Chris Castig
+Yeah. The private public key is a really great first step and I think in some ways you're right. You mean there haven't been, to my knowledge of the research that I've done, I haven't seen so many bot accounts with private public keys, although it definitely exists, but it hasn't really infiltrated kind of my daily Web three experience. And at the same time, I think that's just because the scale is so small.
+
Chris Castig
+But I would be concerned that with just a private public key, there's not enough friction. I would say that you could you could create and people have created them. They do exist like ways of just spinning up private public keys, like automated, right. And so I think we could see a future where that's not enough. I think you're right.
+
Chris Castig
+Right now it's enough by adding friction. By friction, I mean, in some ways, like a cost can be a type of friction by making it a little bit harder to interact with me. Like if we have a conversation on an app or we're chatting by having to purchase like a domain name, right? like an ENS name or something. That right there, it's just $5 a year.
+
Chris Castig
+Removes 80% of bots, but it won't be cost effective to have thousands of millions of bots if you got to send them up for $5 and then they immediately get banned with email emails free. Right now we just spin up a bunch of emails, right? So I think it's in combination. Having that friction can be a big game changer that will really, I think, just help help me.
+
Chris Castig
+I think that's what Elon Musk is trying to do right now. You know, that's exactly like his move with the blue checkmark. His idea is like, look, if somebody is paying $8 a month, it adds a certain type of friction that shows that this person's real. And not only that, but they value the account. And I think it's a similar shift in how we can how we can see the web not only as the user.
+
Chris Castig
+So I'll just add one more thing. I don't think it's the user who has the blue checkmark or the ENS name and Web three, But think about that on the other side, the receiving side, I can then set up my for myself parameters for who I can talk with and who I can let to talk with me. I can say hey and so on console what we're building.
+
Chris Castig
+I can say I only want people to randomly dm me who have an ENS name and six months of on chain activity. Right. Like that becomes the level of friction that makes it difficult for automated bots to impersonate.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+So private and public key with economical incentives.
+
Chris Castig
+Yeah.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+But I mean, okay, but let me be a bit of devil's advocate. I'll definitely have more console questions for you. But before we get to their you said couple of things and of course we talking and stigmas here but devil's advocate in me is being loud You said for example it's $5 per year and this is one thing in crypto there is to me, you know, we spoke about decentralization, we spoke about things.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And this is a question to you that for me is very hard to understand. And I always ask my guests, well, two thirds of the world, or roughly a third of the world, live about a dollar per month. So $5 per year is a lot is a hell of a lot of money for some people. And a lot of the folks in crypto sometimes forget that we are not making a product just for the golden billion.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+You know, we're making a product for the whole World Bank. Band the unBanks in my opinion unbank the banked. You know, we don't need the banks. We need the unbanked people to go out there. I mean, I don't play devil's advocate right now, but this is kind of the point. But I said it's a lot of money, $5 per year. Shouldn't we, like, strive to the point of eliminating that cost and letting everybody use not just that one golden billion that lives in the western northern Hemisphere?
+
Chris Castig
+Yeah, you're totally right. So. Well, the way I see a lot of tech solutions or just like a lot of progress in the world. Is during the short term and longer term benefits. And I think it's easy to look at the short term innovations and then say, hey, it doesn't work for every single person in the world. Fuck it, this is stupid.
+
Chris Castig
+I think we see that with anything that happens in American politics where I am right now, where it's like some achievement happens, but it affects one part of the population directly. And we nay say it, or I think it happened with Bitcoin in some way, or I'm still really bullish on Bitcoin, you know, but it has this environmental impact.
+
Chris Castig
+And I think the way I look at some of these situations is if you zoom out, I think with those two cases I just mentioned politics and Bitcoin, I think there are people who are working on these problems and there are potential optimistic futures for improving those paths and making them so that they are more scalable and are more efficient for the world to actually accept.
+
Chris Castig
+If that didn't exist, I would 100% agree and just join that crowd and say, Hey, you know, this doesn't make the entire world better. It's not. So I feel the same way about the $5 ENS example. I just shared. I feel like it's a milestone. And then there's more work to do with the milestone that it helps to hit is it gives us some data on proof of personhood and proof of humanity, and it helps us eliminate 80% of the bots for a large percentage of the world.
+
Chris Castig
+We could probably say what there's like 8 billion people on the planet. We could probably say at least three or 4 billion could afford that. Roughly. It's making rough numbers up. So I think that is a large part of the world. But you bring it you bring up a good point. How do we then scale that? I think from there, over time, these technologies will get better.
+
Chris Castig
+And there are I could list a few alternative ways that are other ways to add friction that aren't $5. You know, whether it's like sharing your ID, whether it's like I haven't looked at world coin enough, but I know that World Coin is working Sam Altmans project, working on looking at giving tokens based on eye retina scan, which is I mean, I feel like I could play devil's advocate to this myself, to you, or I could say like, you know, so okay, you don't have enough money now.
+
Chris Castig
+You have to give up your like eye retina scan of privacy. I think there are tradeoffs that all different levels. But I think if we come at it with a good mind for like how we could scale it long term, I do think that is an important piece on the table. And I so I don't think we should stop this, but I don't know all the answers for sure.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It's definitely a spectrum, you know, definitely like as far as anything, concerns as a spectrum. And I'm not talking just about decentralization. I think life is a spectrum, right? Anything on it is just another spectrum for us to zoom in, zoom out. Like you said, I'm going to be devil's advocate. One last time because I really want to hear your opinion here.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And you mentioned it like a few times. You mentioned bots a few times. I'm personally connected with several AI projects and there are a few that I'm really curious. I'm not talking about just crypto right now. I'm talking about in general artificial intelligence and I'm curious as to your opinion. As somebody who's creating the central social network? And I personally was involved in the launch of a decentralized social networking 2016 and there was a lot of failures that we did.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+A lot of the experiment didn't really work out. One of the biggest questions we had and you mentioned it several times today, a bot and a person, why is it such a big problem? Why do we need to eliminate the bots? I mean, at which point the world suddenly decides a bot isn't an entity who is allowed to exist by itself, really without being proven that it's not a bot.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And I'm not talking about, you know, stupid. I mean, of course there has to be, like we said, a spectrum, some gradation, probably. But somewhere along the line in ten years time, maybe even less, I'm sure that bots are going to be capable of proven to be human, right? So this is the question Why are we so afraid to make that step and to say, Hey, any account with a private or a public key is an account, whether it's a bot human, there is already a difference story.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+But was the reason we are afraid of that is humanity.
+
Chris Castig
+Yeah. When I describe bots is a word that I'm using to describe accounts that are I would say, detracting value from communities. So I think on Twitter that tends to be accounts. So I'm using bots to describe sock puppets, which is to define that, which is essentially when you masquerade as a different account. Right. So, you know, I can have like a computerized thing saying it's Chris and you're talking and you think you're talking to me.
+
Chris Castig
+But but it's kind of masquerading kind of like a sock puppet on your hand or bots that are just spamming or bots that are just like even retweeting and just commenting and liking and stuff. Now what they do is they detract from the authentic value of the system. And I think in some ways most of the world politically leans toward a liberal democracy.
+
Chris Castig
+This is the kind of generic state of the world right now, like the default. I would say a lot of people share those values. And I believe we also tried to create those values in the programs in the digital world. We want Twitter, for example, to have these qualities of a democracy, which in a lot of ways mean one person should have a voice, right?
+
Chris Castig
+They should have they should have freedom of speech. There should be not censorship, but a reasonable if somebody basically screams fire or, you know, or is basically like saying something malicious that we can, you know, to have these triggers. And I'm just kind of reflecting what, for example, Twitter is just as one example. But I think we try to follow these habits when we create ecosystems online.
+
Chris Castig
+So bots come in and they are able to manipulate that usually at the expense of one person can spin up thousands of bots and then create and manipulate public opinion. So that's what I mean by bots. So I don't think that that is helpful. It tends to, yeah, really just break communities and you know, in the case of discord, because that's something we've studied a lot over the past year, also steak hundreds of millions of dollars in funds by masquerading as other people.
+
Chris Castig
+So they don't create value in that way, but they bot being just in the most simple way, like an automated thing to reply to. I agree. Like there is a it can be helpful to help with automated tasks, but it's when it's being controlled like a puppet that I think and can be manipulative in these kind of ways, that it really erodes the value of the ecosystem sometimes without us even knowing that that's happening, which is really nefarious.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I'm going to make a cruel joke. When you say manipulated like puppets, you mean like Cambridge Analytica did with millions and tens of millions of humans and influenced the election of every single existing election on the planet? Is that what we mean?
+
Chris Castig
+I 100% mean what Cambridge Analytica. Yeah. And the and specifically to add to that the Internet research agency in out of Moscow which is like a troll factory that basically helps create a lot of this manipulation and bots
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I’m Saying they use real people not just bots they turn people into bots, into the bots you describe in.
+
Chris Castig
+They turn people under bots. Yes.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I said the scary thing, right, Chris I did mention that I was involved in the experiment with trying to launch the decentralized social networks in 2016. well not try, we launched and we did it essentially exist today without any team and it exists by itself. The biggest problem we faced was the economical side of things. The economical side of things for us was a failure.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I'm not talking about budgeting and management, but I'm talking about simply we couldn't find a model that wasn't able to be milked by the users and at the same time was beneficial to the users. So how do you guys solve this at console X, Y, Z, and what do you do? Do you completely eliminate the economic side or is there some economics involved?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And how does it work in console?
+
Chris Castig
+You mean, how do we make money?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm sorry. My apologies. What about the users, The incentives? What is the incentive to use console X, Y, z? And how do the users keep engaged in using console X, Y, Z?
+
Chris Castig
+So one important thing to share is that we are in this data period right now of co-creation with the communities that are on console. So what that means is if you are a console or you want to come to console and you're a part of our data, not only are you benefiting from being able to use our platform, the better security, beautiful design, but you're also able to share and grow with us.
+
Chris Castig
+And we are trying to learn from the communities that we're working on. So what are we learning? One of the things that we're learning that I think is super interesting and relevant to your audience is that onboarding right now for new community members is really broken across different Discord Telegram platforms. We're noticing how by watching communities, if you have your starting up a new community or you have a community and you send people the link, a lot of people who are new, especially people who aren't used to these platforms, come into discord and they're so excited and they want to contribute and they want to learn their buy your NFT and they get in the
+
Chris Castig
+middle and there's just so much noise and it's just like, what is happening here? So one of the benefits that we're able to learn from the communities that are using console is to have a better onboarding experience so that you can give a link and then they can have just like a beautiful experience of that first moment coming on the platform.
+
Chris Castig
+We have a doc feature which is token gated docs. So that now if someone is click the link they've signed in or signed with their metamask if they need to and then they're able to read the docs kind of come through the flow and learn about the project. Think of it as like an operating system for Web three.
+
Chris Castig
+So you come in and you're onboarded, you understand what the community is about. But not only that, you could understand where all of the different component pieces, like what Web3 does really well. I think of it as like a bunch of different Lego blocks that we can interconnect. It's open is transparent, it's on the blockchain. The blockchain is essentially like this database that we're all sharing, right?
+
Chris Castig
+That never goes down, hopefully. And that's really powerful for us to tap into that. And that's what we're doing at console. So we provide chat, we provide that onboarding, and then we allow communities to use all these Lego blocks to help build their community as they need. If they need a treasury, we'll provide access to that. If they need voting, we provide access to that.
+
Chris Castig
+We can help work with these communities to help them grow as they need.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Another thing that I guess I saw as an obstacle not during that time, but actually with another project. And I'm curious how you guys solved it. Was the whole idea of creating a social network, a decentralized social network, which would have the same level of security as blockchain kind of thing, and I've seen the projects and I want to go like into names of course, here.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+So not to take the focus of you, but the idea was that the problem sorry was that people were just not ready for that. Like, you know, web three using a ledger to make a tweet or something like that. They're like, What's going on? People were like, mind blowing. They were like, okay, that's why I'm going to use that, of course.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And at the same time, you saw people on Twitter saying, Oh, we really need this stuff. You know, Twitter has been hacked. We really, really, really need this stuff, you know, and like stuff like that. So how do you guys solved it? What's your solution here?
+
Chris Castig
+Yeah, to let you in on some of the thoughts that were conversations that we're having right now internally, we think it's really important. Number one, important to make an app that solves people's day to day problems. It needs to be a beautiful, usable app that people can get onboarded to because, you know, a lot of these things that you're listing there and that Web three chance about decentralized private open source ownership, like these are all a lot of the key principles of Web three.
+
Chris Castig
+I do believe that those are really important and I do believe those are a foundation for building the future of communities. And at the same time, the whole basket for many people, for me and you, it might be enough. But for most people that baskets not enough. Most people are struggling right now to build their grow their size of their community, to monetize their project, to have outreach with the people who are in their community.
+
Chris Castig
+And the first discord of Telegram, they may not know even who's in there, who's active, you know, all of these things. So at console, the way we're approaching it is like that really is the number one problem. It is figuring out how to help people grow their communities, to focus, to have essentially like a CRM to manage the most active people, to reward those people.
+
Chris Castig
+All of that is really like the sweet spot. And we know we need to do it on that core foundation of all those Web three principles, because that's where the future is going. And I think this recipe, any startup who's listening, I think really needs to adopt this in the next year because this year to me really proved that that market, if we talk about product market fit, having a market for a product that's going to create value for your project, the market for people in crypto is so small that people who are actually active, I want to say it's less than 100,000 people.
+
Chris Castig
+If you just use the number of people who are active on crypto Twitter. Right? And so that's not enough to really build a business to grow a future either. We onboard more people into our tribe. Possible it is growing it will continue to grow or what I think is the winning solution. We take what we're doing export it as the foundation to just amazing apps that people can seamlessly use.
+
Chris Castig
+And and in ten years from now, I think if they don't even know it's on the blockchain or identity, that's even better. I don't think people have to know this just as Today, when we switched on the web from HTTP to HTTPS I think most people can't name the date when that happened or why that happened, but it is like a huge innovation in privacy.
+
Chris Castig
+But we're all benefiting from that and you can benefit from that without knowing it. I think Web three has to be the same way.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+A lot of the things that talk about content and privacy and you mentioned content before at the beginning, not right now, but it's a big thing. Obstacle for myself personally, I have a team and often people in the team change. So every now and again and it's very hard to explain to them why we want to own our content, why we I mean, we are using Spotify while using Google to put out the to the podcast, but it's really hard to explain to them, why do I need to start that file an IPFS or why do I need to like, you know, go on and do some crazy thing, which doesn't really make sense
+
Citizen Cosmos
+because like you can go and do that, but there is not the internet that we kind of own. So I totally understand what you're saying. The and from that, like a question from what you were describing and you mentioned the words operational system, I don't know if you heard of such a project called Urbit because you mentioned communities and operational system.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And I'm curious at all, are you guys connected? Are you doing like in terms of what you're doing in console? Is it any how similar the vision to to what Urbit has or.
+
Chris Castig
+Yeah, I don't know enough about Urbit so maybe you can tell me more. I've heard a lot about the project, but yeah, tell me a little more.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+As far as I know and I'm definitely not affiliated with any how anybody there, but so it's going to be a very subjective personal opinion. Well, it's all about private servers, but a lot of the rsync is built on communities, like about owning your server, and it's not actually a blockchain project as per say, but identity in there is using Ethereum and a lot of it is about building your own community in a decentralized space and the like.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Very, like you said, building blocks by blocks all of their operational systems, so to speak, and adding part to part to it. And from what you were describing, it sounded like you have guys a lot of similar growth ideas.
+
Chris Castig
+Cool. That sounds amazing. Have you interviewed them in the podcast or.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Unfortunately, not. Unfortunately, I have not, no. But I guess I need to go out there and do it.
+
Chris Castig
+Yeah, I've heard a lot about it, so I'm excited to learn more.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+For sure, Chris another question you've seemed to make a large journey with what you did and you said the project is only a year. But from what you're explaining, I mean what you guys are doing in doing are very like slow steps that make based on experience of what you want to see or what you would expect to see or something like that.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+What would be your advice apart from the one you said a couple of minutes ago to people that are building web3 projects and trying to grow their communities and trying to succeed in this space?
+
Chris Castig
+Yeah, having run a few startups in Web two, let's say, or before Web three and coming to the space, a lot of the same principles apply as far as growing a project. For example, like I mentioned, having product market set. I mean there's a lot that I think users could read about that and learn about that. But really one ingredient of that would be just growth.
+
Chris Castig
+And so having a metric for growth, whether it's people coming and using your app or paying for your app, is still really important. And I think that that starts with just observing how people use these tools, understanding the problems and experimenting and hopefully iterating on those experiments until you hit something to make something that people love and that that's essentially like the startup framework.
+
Chris Castig
+If you read Paul Graham's blog or the Lean Startup book, you know, this is essentially that playbook. And in a lot of ways, I don't know that that has changed all that much. To me, launching a NFT or launching a token is largely fundraising. If you're paying for it, it's largely a way of bringing funds to the project.
+
Chris Castig
+It's largely way of bringing in some of your first users, but that it alone is not a business plan, you know, or like a goal. Like that's not like the end goal you have like the startup, you know, the bootstrapping goal. And so I would like to see more projects. I think hitting the real problems that real people have.
+
Chris Castig
+I think we've spent a lot of time working on infrastructure and there's a lot of people working on infrastructure and the lower level stuff and it does still need a lot of work. And at the same time, I feel like there's a lack of real world utility for how we use these apps, how someone who is not into Web three could benefit from a Web3 app.
+
Chris Castig
+And I think we’re close I think there's a lot of projects that are starting to get closer to that every year after year. I think we get closer and closer to that, but I think that's the equation is just finding growth in users and solving real problems. And then I think people will come and I think together it's a small space thing.
+
Chris Castig
+Together we can raise a lot of awareness for what I like to call a user owned Internet. I mean, that's essentially what we're making an Internet that's owned by the people use it as opposed to just the handful of corporations that as we have it now. I think that is the future. And I think we're on our way to that.
+
Chris Castig
+And so I'm excited for anybody who's stepping up to build in that space.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+What about the one thing to avoid?
+
Chris Castig
+Oh, man, so many things. I think building too long without having a customer is a similar kind of advice, but literally finding that first customer could be such a unlock. And I think building because I've seen people build for years and so maybe nobody's using it. I think I think if you build without out customers, it's really bad. I also think fundraising can be a mix.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Maidsafe Maidsafe came to mind i know if you know the project. Maidsafe The guys are also building a similar thing to you, but they've been building for like 15 years or something like that. So sorry to interrupt you there.
+
Chris Castig
+So no, I hadn't heard of that. But I guess that's the point of what you're trying to tell me is that it exists. But yeah, the final thing I was just saying is that I think fundraising can be like a pro in a con. As someone who's come through fundraising rounds, I think seed round can be nice as a way to kick start the project, but it's also to be careful about taking too much money or relying too much on that because sometimes, often incentives can get misaligned and then you end up building something that even you don't want for sure.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Chris, I know your short on time, I noted, so I'm going to go to the last question to the Blitz. The Blitz is three questions. You don't have to answer a super quick, but I know you have almost no time, so it depends on you. Three projects outside the top 20. Please don't say Bitcoin, Ethereum or Cosmos or Polkadot that you are curious.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And in terms of what they are doing and you're curious, the technology they're building.
+
Chris Castig
+Yea, ENS comes to mind. I don't know if that counts, but yeah, ENS doing some pretty great work with coming up like a global identity for users on the Internet. I think that's really powerful. In addition, I think a lot of the stuff Protocol Labs is doing is still early days with Ipfs and Filecoin and decentralized storage. I think we're moving storage from centralized servers.
+
Chris Castig
+This is really a huge innovation, but it's so early days. I think that's coming along. But it's still early days and a third project.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Doesn't have to be you don't have to push it out of yourself. So this could be 2 you know. Yeah, I here.
+
Chris Castig
+Yeah, Those to come to mind
+
Citizen Cosmos
+What about two motivational things that keep you going in your daily life to build on the products that you are building? I know you're writing a book as well, and I know there is a lot of other things you do. So teaching, for example, what are those two motivational things you would share with other people to help you to do those, everything that you do?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Sorry.
+
Chris Castig
+Yeah, I'm inspired by I don't know if you're familiar with Stuart Brand. He started the long now, which is a way of looking at humanity and kind of a zoomed out way. There's a really beautiful book that he wrote called The Clock of a Lot Now, which I really love. It's just a handful of essays like less than a hundred pages, and the idea of long term thinking is looking at problems that you can work on in your life that might not be solved even in the time of your life.
+
Chris Castig
+Right? Like, there's some really big challenges, like climate change, for example, is a problem that will still be a problem. I'm certain, you know, 80 years from now, I won't just have gone away. I don't think it may hopefully be less or we will have got away, but I don't think it will. I don't think it was you know, I think this will be a challenge.
+
Chris Castig
+So I think there's something. Yeah, really inspiring and optimistic of zooming out, thinking about children and our children's children and what we can leave and leave a better world for them. And so I'm just yeah, I'm just kind of endlessly I don't know where I got it from, but just optimistic about the future. And I think that we right now have the ability to create the future right now.
+
Chris Castig
+Why wait for the future, like when you can create it? And I think there's never been a more exciting time since maybe the nineties with the web right there, the first web that there is now, or there's just all of these technologies, not only Web three, but also AI. There's just been such a leapfrog. You know, there was like ten years.
+
Chris Castig
+I feel like most of the tens, the 22 and 20 tens like 2018, where they're like wasn't so much innovation. There was like APIs and there was like some stuff. But but now there's such an array of technology where if you started learning AI right now and you studied single day and you start building something like a year and a half from now, you'd be like in the top of people you got today, probably like the top thousand or maybe ten would be like the top people because it's so new.
+
Chris Castig
+There's so much you could have different ways you could travel with it. So I it's hard not to be inspired by it. You just think about the future and think about the impact you can have and just think about. It's never been easier to get started, you know, I think it's pretty exciting.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Last one and you kind of already answered, but you might change your mind. One person that you would suggest to follow writer GitHub account I don't know. Crypto Founder Non-Crypto Related Person. One person that you would suggest to everybody to follow up to read.
+
Chris Castig
+I am really a big fan of Stewart Brand, who I mentioned I think is his book now is is a really great one. And Stewart Brand helped kickstart the Internet itself in the 1960s. So there is this kind of angle of tech and and humanity, I think, in all his work. And I'll also give a shout out to Kevin Kelly, who is, I would say the right word, like he learned under Stewart Brand like I'm an apprentice or whatever.
+
Chris Castig
+So Kevin's a little bit younger and his book out of Control, I read when I was in college and Out of Control came out in the nineties. It was a funny kind of trivia about the book Out of Control. It was like required reading for everyone in The Matrix movie, so it's like a weird trivia. All right. Yeah, yeah, that's cool, because in the nineties, Kevin Kelly saw the power of decentralized systems.
+
Chris Castig
+And if you look on the cover, there's it's all BS like in, like a technological hive But he basically saw the decentralized movement and how we would all be kind of creator bees and that's what the book's about. And a lot of the lessons still are true today and I think a lot of it has seeped into the a lot of the products and founders over the past 20 years.
+
Chris Castig
+So that book in particular is also another one. And I guess it makes sense, the two of them, both of our blog now and our because they're both think about a lot of the same things which I think are relevant for Web three.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I think, yeah, definitely. There were Shevchuk brothers back then. Yeah, they had a fantastic vision sometimes. I'm not sure if that was the vision they had because it's too perfect. It's like, how the hell did you manage that? Wow, I think it was a mistake. Like, no way you could have envisioned that. Like, no.
+
Chris Castig
+Way. It's like, but yeah, I know.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It's crazy. Chris Casting all of them together. Thank you very, very much. I still have some questions for you, but I know you're out of time and I know you have to run. So thank you very, very, very much for joining me. And hopefully we will see how involvement of console X, Y, Z more and more and more.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And I'm hoping that you will be able to onboard a lot more users than other social networks before that managed to do. And I hope in this will help you in that journey.
+
Chris Castig
+Thanks, Serj Yeah, it's been great to get your podcast. I really appreciate you coming in asking questions today and just feel really lucky to spend some time with you today. Thank you.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Thanks. Thanks, everybody. Bye.
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:
In this episode, Citizen Cosmos talks to Jaya Klara Brekke, head of strategy at Nym. They discuss the nature of man and if we can overcome our innate greed and embrace the more altruistic aspects of human nature to build a better tomorrow. Jaya discusses privacy and decentralisation and how she distinguishes between the different iterations of each. Jaya also gives a lot of detail regarding Nym and Nyx. And as always, Citizen Cosmos plays the devil’s advocate at key times.
+
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Good space time yall In this episode of The Citizen Cosmos podcast, I speak to Jaya Klara Brekke, Chief Strategy Officer at NYM Project Privacy Platform, working on infrastructure at the network and application layers. Along with Jaya, we discuss decentralization and its origins, trust networking. Privacy is a fundamental right and who needs saving. We also talked about some anticorruption, criminal activity, pain as a catalyst for change and drone strikes.
+
Jaya
+Was super curious about the totally crazy mix of people that was in this hall. It was everything from dreadlocked anarchists to people in the financial sector all the way through to kind of devs and hackers.
+
+
Citizen Cosmos
+The blockchain industry, doesn’t need saving is the greediness in the people.
+
Jaya
+You look at some of the techs from the eighties and nineties and they talking about how this infrastructure is going to turn into a vehicle for mass surveillance. And that's pretty much exactly what happened.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Bridging ecosystems with bridges isn't enough. You have to bridge communities as well.
+
Jaya
+Equality means everybody should have the same rights despite being completely different. That's the promise of political decentralization. There is no technical infrastructure without humans.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Before we broke it off into today's podcast, here is a round up of the latest news from the sponsor of this episode, Cyber. Cyber Congress Dao has been primarily working on improving the Bostrom hub. This work includes testing of the contracts, new UI features, verification, tools for online governance and polishing the Bostrom decks, adding MEV protection, new web front, and bring in indexing of chain swaps.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+To try Bostrom head now to over Cyb.ai Hi everybody. Welcome to a new episode of the Citizen Cosmos podcast. And today I have Jaya from the NYM project with me. Jaya Hi.
+
Jaya
+Hello. It's very good to be here.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Yes, it's nice to see you. We've been trying to get Nym for a while, actually, and the podcast is going to be about you, of course, but I have some questions about NYM as well. And because NYM has been a little bit in the background. No.
+
Jaya
+Yeah, it has. I'm happy to give the full explanation for why, but we're very happy to kind of come out and be a lot more public. But yeah, let's get into that coming out.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It's good.
+
Jaya
+Coming out.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Let's take it easy, though. So first thing is, first I would like of course, I didn't introduce you properly. I would like you to introduce yourself. Tell us everything that you do. Anything about yourself, Anything you want us to know.
+
Jaya
+Yeah. So my name is Jaya and I am the head of strategy at NYM That's a kind of very fancy title for saying that I work with connecting the kind of deep work that's being done on the tech level to everything that happens externally in the world, right? So whether that has to do with understanding why privacy is relevant in terms of current affairs or why privacy is relevant for specific events that are happening in the industry or kind of tying it to people's personal experiences of navigating digital and our digital lives today, That's kind of my role.
+
Jaya
+So it kind of spans everything from narrative to marketing to indications and figuring out how to make sense of the NYM project within a kind of broader ecosystem. In a broader context. What else can I say about myself? I guess my profile is a little bit for some time. I've had a foot in a few different industries, so I actually came into the whole blockchain space quite a few years ago.
+
Jaya
+I think I initially read the Bitcoin whitepaper maybe already in 2013 or 2012 and ended up writing a PhD, which was a political analysis of the Bitcoin protocol and the Ethereum protocol. So when I wrote the PhD, it was kind of right at the early, early days of Ethereum. I think I went to the first Ethereum DEVCON in the city of London, was super curious about the totally crazy mix of people that was in this hall.
+
Jaya
+It was everything from dreadlocked anarchists to people in the financial sector all the way through to kind of devs and hackers. So that kind of got me interested and hooked immediately. But generally my profile has also always been as a someone that sits in between the kind of crypto skeptics and the rest of the industry. So I'm a little bit of a crypto skeptic.
+
Jaya
+I think the industry needs a lot of healthy criticism and healthy skepticism, but I'm also always looking for how to make sense of this in a kind of generous way. So how to kind of understand what are actually the possibilities of this technology and where does it make sense in terms of use cases and so on to build the types of distributed decentralized systems that we're building today?
+
Jaya
+Yeah, I think that's kind of good enough as an introduction for now.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It's amazing. But I want to call you down straightaway because you said your title, you know, and sounds fancy. Mine is the chief manager of looking busy, so there is a lot. And then.
+
Jaya
+So absolutely.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It's like damn bitcoin white paper. I have a question. You said you read it in 2012, 13, a little bit around the same time I did, I did a little bit earlier even, but it took me three years to understand it. Did you understand everything that was in there straight away? And it just made sense, you know?
+
Jaya
+I mean, it took me quite a few years to understand as well. But I think understanding the Bitcoin white paper is I guess one thing that I've always found fascinating is like for me, the Bitcoin white paper, I see it as a piece of incredible literature, right? So it's incredible storytelling, just a few pages that just gives a kind of certain narrative and perspective on the world, which, you know, many parts of which I actually disagree with, you know, the kind of analysis of how the world operates.
+
Jaya
+But as a piece of storytelling, I find it to be absolutely incredible, absolutely baffling. So for me, it was. And that took a little while to realize the reason why. It kind of got me interested was because before reading this, I was involved in a lot of political movements and activist movements that were heavily decentralized. And I came from a kind of generation that was super into the Pirate Bay and BitTorrent.
+
Jaya
+So our versions of decentralization were kind of quite explicitly anti-capitalist, and they were kind of quite explicitly like post scarcity ideas around the digital world and then like seeing kind of a lot of the technologies that I was kind of used to from that background being kind of repositioned as something that can construct digital scarcity was something that I was like, Okay, wow, this is a totally different turn on things that I think I'm not happy about.
+
Jaya
+But on the other hand, it's opening up all these new possibilities, and a lot of my friends got involved from there, were involved in like alternative currency movements and started to play around immediately, right? They're like, great, We can bring, you know, social currencies and alternative currencies to the Internet by making use of this new kind of technological advancement.
+
Jaya
+So it was kind of this weird twist of things where it's like some part of me became was quite critical of this new turn on the agenda for decentralization. But part of me was also super fascinated by all the new possibilities that came out of it. Right? And I'm still very much in that state. That's exact that kind of describes me still today.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It's just very cool because you don't meet many people who are, let's say I don't like the word OG but okay, let's go with it. I hate those terms like OG tokenomics. I'm I'm sorry. I just it doesn't click with my internal being. I do use them. But anyways, I mean, it has a level of understanding. There's a second thing, which is obviously the highest point and is skeptical for so long.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It's good. I like it because it's not very often that you meet somebody who can do constructive criticism. It reminded me a little bit of a You remember George Carlin for sure. Yeah, the comedian. Yeah. And he had a sketch on Save the Planet, I think it was called Silly Planet. And I think his main point was it's like if the planet doesn't need saving, it's the people, right?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Because in the blockchain industry, this is need saving is the greediness in the people. That's what I'm trying to get at. And you mentioned the possibilities. I think it creates. And one thing it didn't or it did create the effect of a lot of people presumed it was private and still do and it didn't really did. That. Is that one of the reasons why you're still skeptical?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Because privacy is such an important concern or other reasons?
+
Jaya
+Yeah, I mean, there's other reasons, too. I think like a lot of the core promises. So like both. Yes, privacy, absolutely. Also decentralization and also the idea of trust. So in the early days, there was this idea that we can solve the problem of trust, whether it has to do with money or with the law or with politics or whatever else, by creating these decentralized trustless systems.
+
Jaya
+Right. And over and over and again, we see the actually the idea of a trustless system just never quite plays out that way in reality. And people, in fact, have to trust a lot of different aspects of the architecture, which then leads to the possibilities for new types of scams and so on, so forth. And so the kind of gap between the promise of a kind of trustless architecture that can solve the problem of of politics, the problem of economics via technology, through technological infrastructure, you know, that promise kind of keeps being broken and it's and I think this year it's been a kind of real a wake up call for people, right?
+
Jaya
+There's only so much that people can take before it's like, well, come on, man like and of course we can get into the fact that like FTX wasn't really decentralized, blah, blah, blah, this and that. But the fact remains that like an industry that kind of prides itself on making these types of promises around trust, around decentralization and around privacy at some point has to kind of live up to them.
+
Jaya
+So, yeah, that is the kind of the continued criticism. And when it comes to privacy, I think it's like it's one of those things that like was you know, it's been around since, you know, as a kind of core principle and pillar of the industry since the very beginning. And I would argue even before that, because if you look at the kind of technological history of blockchain and of Bitcoin, it of course, ties back into the whole kind of cypherpunk history where privacy was really a core part of the cypherpunk analysis of how the Internet was likely to play out.
+
Jaya
+And unfortunately they were correct, right? You look at some of the texts from the eighties and nineties and you're talking about how this infrastructure is going to turn into a vehicle for mass surveillance. And that's pretty much exactly what happened. So that's why I'm working with with NYM today, not just to correct an error of the past, but also because I actually think that privacy is one of those topics that strikes at the heart of a lot of the problems that we see in the Internet today.
+
Jaya
+And so I think it's not just solving from the past, but it's really laying the foundation for a radically different future and a radically different set of possibilities for online life and how online life might look like.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I think it's astonishingly ironic that in industry, which one of the biggest labels is Trustless, the biggest mistake that would do is trust people to do so. It's like, wait a second, The whole idea was not to trust these guys. The ironies there and.
+
Jaya
+The irony is there. But I just want to make one correction, which usually gets lost here. People love to say like it's the problem of the human right. People love to say like, Oh, we continue to trust humans when we should. It's the trustless infrastructure. That's the point. But that keeps obscuring the fact that there is no technical infrastructure without humans, right?
+
Jaya
+So this idea that we can solve all the problems through a technological solution is also a bit of a problem, right? So there's something else that's missing here. It's always going to be a combination of people and code, right? Not just people or code, because the problem of trust, we saw that with a DAO hack. Right. In Ethereum initially, right.
+
Jaya
+It's like, okay, you don't just write a bit of code and then it's neutral and then it's perfect. It's like, no, that code needs to be corrected all the time because there is hacks there's errors and that.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+So I was actually going to say in a way a little bit into the same direction. I was going to say my not the actual tag name, but you know, like on Twitter, you can put also a description. the user name has been decentralized decentralization for about five or six years now. I think so like I totally on the same line here with you.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It's interesting. But you know what I have since obviously you have been in this movement for a while and a question I have for you might seem strange for you, but this is why it might seem too simple for you. But this is something I really like to get to the bottom of with guests who really are. You can see that it's their values.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+What is the decentralization for you? But I don't want a textbook example. I want like your own. What does it mean for you? Is it a spectrum? Do we need to achieve the decentralization? Is this decentralization of must? What is the decentralization? How is it going to help people? Like a lot of things there?
+
Jaya
+There is a lot of things. And you've actually touched on a super interesting question, and you've also asked me something that I'm kind of doing a bit of soul searching about right now, because there is this tendency to conflate A lot of different ideas of decentralization, right? So to my mind, there's actually a very big difference between technological infrastructural decentralization, i.e. a decentralized network and decentralized network routing from how we understand Paul Brandt's original diagrams of the Internet and so on.
+
Jaya
+Big difference between that and then when we're talking about political decentralization or decentralized decision making amongst human beings. Right. And I think the fact that people conflate these things causes a lot of confusion. And one of the big confusions that it causes is, you know, you look at Paul Brandt’s like network routing, in essence, all the nodes need to be the same because like, you need kind of full tolerance of some networks get knocked out, the networks, some nodes get knocked out, you still need the networks to kind of operate as intended.
+
Jaya
+So all the nodes look the same. It's a kind of horizontal network of equally shaped nodes. Operation this and that in order to route packets effectively through this thing. Right? When it comes to human beings and it comes to the way that politics operates, it's almost the opposite of that. No human being is the same. People are not equal in their capacities.
+
Jaya
+And the purpose of decentralization is exactly to deal with that fact, right? It's exactly to ensure that there is some kind of representation of all these different voices and these differences. And it's not to equalize everybody and turn everybody into the same. And I think this is a big misunderstanding when it comes to political decentralization. It's almost as if, like decentralized infrastructure understanding has kind of reshaped our minds.
+
Jaya
+And we now think that, like in order for people to be equal, everybody has to be the same. Actually, equality means the opposite. Equality means everybody should have the same rights despite being completely different. Despite being radically different. Right. That's the promise of political decentralization. But so for me, this is kind of the important thing around the word decentralization, is to start to make some distinctions between whether we mean technical decentralization, whether meaning political decentralization, decentralized decision making in terms of management, and kind of a cybernetic understanding or what.
+
Jaya
+Right. And we have to sort of to be specific because there's a lot of damage that happens when we start to assume that political decentralization has to mean everybody operates and speaks the same and thinks the same, because that's political violence right there. And in fact, it should do the opposite.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I think politics in itself is kind of presuming violence like the rule over another person or the rule of a somebody is opinion already automatically kind of presumes some use of violence, no?
+
Jaya
+So it depends how you understand the word politics, right? If you understand the word politics as automatically meaning authoritarianism, then yes. But in fact, the word politics really all it has to all it means is the negotiation of incompatible differences. Right. So politics is what happens when people have to negotiate certain things that where someone is likely to lose out.
+
Jaya
+Right. So we need to start having a debate. Okay. If we go if we go this direction, this person might not gain as much as if we go this, you know, and then you have to have a negotiation. So that's all politics really means. And then the form of how that politics takes place is, you know, it can be authoritarian, democratic, decentralized, centralized, whatever else.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I love it. I love it. I'm going to carry on being devil's advocate here. I'm going to go with your analogy. So if politics is a negotiation, considering it's not a brainer that we are social creatures, we are social mammals, to be more specific. Now, if we look at nature, social mammals don't negotiate very well. They negotiate with the use of power all the time.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+The stronger one always wins. So doesn't that mean that negotiation would be violence and all the time and we are not capable of doing that?
+
Jaya
+I think you should watch more nature programs. So apart from animals killing each other, you also have animals like different colored feathers. You know, birds that do a little dance, right? You've got like, I don't know, monkeys grooming each other.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+So but it's showing off something better than the other. It's showing off like even in nature, whether it's plant or monkey or doesn't matter as regards to trees, for sure. I mean, they compete for light without even. But I'm not talking about trees I’m talking about monkeys now in birds and the same feathers. But again, the company is devil's advocate.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I'm just curious to what extent is a human being capable with his program? mammalism, I'm going to call it animalistic. So so to speak. And he's on the other end of the scales. He our social capabilities that arouses our logical capabilities. Are we capable enough to use those to overcome that binary, yes or no flight to fight decision or no?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+That's the question I'm kind of gets in.
+
Jaya
+It's I think we do that all the time. It's just that people tend to focus on the fighter flight and tend to focus on the extreme competitive and violent examples because those are the ones that hurt, right? So those are the ones that grab our attention. And then we tend to ignore all the everyday stuff where we never resort to those things where it has much more to do with, you know, do you have a crush on that person?
+
Jaya
+You know, are you in love with that person? Do you feel sorry for this person? We have such a kind of like breadth of feelings that and ways of empathizing in ways of negotiating our social relationships that actually are the norm, the kind of hyper competitive and violent experiences and approaches are tend to be the exception, but we tend to focus a lot on those because those are the ones that are more spectacular.
+
Jaya
+Those are the ones that demand an immediate response because they create a shock factor and because they put us into the fight or flight mode. And I think because those are the ones that hurt the most. And when when something really hurts, then you remember it. All the bits of kind of pleasure, boredom experiences that happen in between.
+
Jaya
+It's it's easy to gloss over those. But I think if we pay more attention to those, we can see that humans have a huge breadth and capacity for other ways of living together that are that tend to function as a norm. And in fact, trees don't compete well, they might compete for light sometimes, but they also use mycelium networks.
+
Jaya
+Exactly. To feed each other if another tree is sick. Right. So there's plenty there's plenty of examples.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Yeah, they do. Absolutely. For sure. It's like other whales raising whales through the top of the think to breathe water if they cannot, you know. And so there are many examples of animals.
+
Jaya
+Things like that.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I'm just trying to think, are we capable of being the whale who lifts the other whale up or are we kind of the white shark that feeds on a seal always. And always.
+
Jaya
+I think we are different things in different moments, right? I certainly am right. Sometimes I'm the shark and sometimes I'm like the butterfly. You know, it really depends. But I'm not the kind of person that kind of wants to appeal to people's goodwill and kind of like hippie vibes to wish for a better world and some kind of abstract future.
+
Jaya
+I actually think that in many ways, the circumstances that we're heading into as humanity is going to force us into that mode of operating. So this is not a kind of choice of luxury. This is not a kind of fluffy choice of kind of morality or or ethics necessarily. It's a real politic almost. And a new type of reality is like when you're faced with climate crises, you're faced with economic crises, you're basically faced with crises that are far beyond the individual.
+
Jaya
+And without cooperation and without understanding for the conditions of other people, including animal life and plant life, we simply cannot survive. So it's not like a kind of fluffy I hope everybody's a good person type vibe. It's like step up, right? It's like step up or die. Kind of like, Yeah.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Well, this centralization is responsibility, first of all, right? People don't want responsibility. I mean, you mentioned interestingly, you mentioned pain and a lot of experience, pain in a lot of sorry cases. Pain means experience. I mean, I remember they they had this interesting study on one of the Tibetan monks who voluntarily the one with the Zen meditation. I think he recently died a few years ago, if I'm not mistaken.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I might be mistaken. I hope I didn't just bury a life person, but I remember they connected like a lot of wires through his brain, and they realized that he can actually literally about the flight of fight mode. He was literally able to attack his own amygdala kind of thing with happiness. And that because of the way of the knowledge of meditation, he would actually change completely.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+The naval transmitters work and it was fascinating what they were like, what the hell out of the possible. So humans definitely capable of great and good things. It's just a matter of I think, I don't know. It's like that's what I'm trying to understand from you. Like, how do you see us, you know, getting there? I mean, if blockchain technology is which was one of the most promising things or is one of the most promising trustless technologies for a long time, you know, even though it's nothing new, it's just the right bits and bobs put together in the right order kind of thing.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+But if that's also not going to help us, what's what's going to help us then? Well, what are we to do like to get to that state you describe in?
+
Jaya
+Well, you know, nothing is going to save us, but a lot of interesting things will happen along the way. Oh, well, so I so yeah, now, I mean, I.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Remember going I was just going to say before you started the if you remember Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, when the beginning there was like, are we all going to die? Shall we put some, you know, tinfoil paper over our heads? It was like, you can if you want, you know, I'm going to help you. Anxiety going on television.
+
Jaya
+Exactly. And it's the same with the blockchain. Blockchain is like a tinfoil hat is like not going to save anybody, but it can do interesting things along the way. So coming back to this kind of point about pain, I think there is a tendency for people to really want to find an answer Exactly as a reaction to pain, right to painful experiences either in their own lives or in terms of how they understand the state of the world today.
+
Jaya
+Right. There is this kind of immediate reaction to like, try and solve it. And it's like, when are we going to yeah, let's solve it and kind of let's arrive at a kind of final state, right? So people hope that they can solve the problem so that we can finally be free of all our problems. Or people think that there's kind of like an end moment where it's like we end up in dystopia or we end up in Utopia.
+
Jaya
+But I think it's time to kind of grow up a little bit and realize that there is no end stage, right? We're continuing along a path and there's lessons to learn along that way. And and with each step we take, there's new lessons to learn. And it's kind of as simple as that. So when it comes to ways of dealing with pain, the traumatic events at the individual level or in the actual industry.
+
Jaya
+Right. Which I think is relevant to talk about too. And the blockchain industry, it's important to not end up in the fight or flight mode that looks for a final solution and it looks for a final state of being. It's like, No, no, no. Let's carefully analyzed what's happened and take the next step. And it's as simple as that, really.
+
Jaya
+But that does require calming down that kind of fight or flight reaction and reactivity to something that can be a little bit more considered and something that's a little bit kind of wider in scope and less trying to solve the whole world's problem in one go. Because what usually happens then is that you create your own version in your own head about what the world's problem really looks like.
+
Jaya
+And then, you know, you end up with this kind of like you try and roll out some blanket solution across all kinds of people in places that are like, Oh, it's not relevant to them at best. And at worst it's actually damaging to them because they really didn't have that problem to start out with. So it's important to kind of calm down the ego, both on the level of humanity and on the individual level and be a little bit more.
+
Jaya
+Okay. You know, it's not a grand narrative where we end up in heaven or hell. It's a kind of step by step process where we're working out some really interesting shit in the meantime, and if we pay attention, we can realize just how interesting that shit is.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Absolutely. I think the spectrum of things and like what you what you say and reminds me actually of. I don't remember which school of religion it belongs of the school fold, but it's the Japanese thing about perfection. And the whole idea was that they were trying to explain why stress such a big problem since ever. And why do we all stress is because well, we always think of perfection, but perfection doesn't exist.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+This is just a word you. That is just something. And perfection exist for one state. The second and the next second. You're right. Not in that state. You cannot achieve what happened a second before in your head. So it's a never endless game of cat and mouse. So yeah, Jaya lets slowly move to privacy. I can see that both of us can probably go on for this centrilization thing for a long time.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+But I still want to ask you this one about privacy, of course. And about NYM and maybe before privacy, a few words about NYM I mean, I met Harry last I don't know if you would remember me, but we met when you were launching the first public Testnet, I believe for him it was during CCC in 2019 and I was doing a speech as well.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And he was doing a speech in the same decentralization. what was it called was the Manero never mind what was it's called. But and actually, ironically, I just remembered you were talking about the first DEVCON. And I remember that the girl who was in the picture on first DEVCON, she was also there. I don't know if I should say her name or not, because I don't think she would like that.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+But I did remember that as well. And they also knew each other. They also knew each other. So since then, to be honest, it's been what, one, two, three years almost. I'm going to be really bad. I know I shouldn't say this, but I don't know much is what's been happening with you guys Great. And this is my fault.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+But maybe you could fill us up.
+
Jaya
+And no problem at all. Yeah, exactly. I'll give you the full story. So, yeah, after CCC this is before I joined. I joined probably about a year after that, right at the end of the last Testnet. So what happened was the first public testnet was launch at CCC Like you said about three years ago, we then had two other Testnet, one called Finny and one called Milhon which were, you know, just trying out the kind of different, you know, the token incentives and this and that internally.
+
Jaya
+And then we finally launched the live network early last year with a live token. So the NYM token. So for those who don't know at all what NYM is decentralized, mixed net and what a mixed net is, it's a kind of overlay network where Internet packets get wrapped through several nodes that then mix those packets together. So all the traffic in the Internet gets, the traffic goes through, it gets mixed together.
+
Jaya
+There is timing, obfuscation. So the packets of a micro delays that make it impossible for an observer to analyze patterns of communication. So why is this important? Why is it interesting? The fact of the matter is that right now, both VPNs and even Tor, for someone is actually looking at the kind of traffic moving through the network, it's possible to trace the packets.
+
Jaya
+Right? So, you know, with Tor like the packets, there's kind of slight distinction in their sizes. And this not so and there's no timing, obfuscation. So even though it's routed through a few different hubs. So if you have the right kind of methods of analysis, you can still more or less trace who's speaking to who by looking also at the kind of, you know, do what's called an end to end correlation attacks and looking at the kind of entry and exit of that network.
+
Jaya
+So what NYM does is it protects metadata, IP and patterns of communications from any kind of surveillance. In other words, a super powerful privacy system that provides privacy at the network layer. So at the kind of one of the lowest layers of the Internet, the actual packet layer as it's routed through. So that's the NYM mix net. Now the interesting part, of course, is that we're here and the podcast is called Citizen Cosmos.
+
Jaya
+So the question is how does this relate to the Cosmos ecosystem? And this is where I would say, okay, we can talk about this step by step. Let's take a step by step. We start with a mix that great. So that's the update. That's the update of NYM the mix net, which runs on a Cosmos blockchain.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And I was just saying it wasn't the next question. I'm sorry, but please go on. I was just saying no. As in, it wasn't like not to speak about it. I was like, No, no, no, it's not the next question. Like, Go, please go on. Sorry.
+
Jaya
+Okay. Okay. So basically the NYM mix net is a tokenized mixed net. So what that means is that the mixed nodes that do the work of mixing traffic and providing privacy, they get rewarded through NYM tokens. And those rewards also operate as a form of internal quality control. So a form of internal reputation system. What does that mean?
+
Jaya
+That means that anybody that holds native NYM tokens can stake on mixed nodes that they see as performing a good job of providing privacy. So it's a reliable mixed node. And by staking that mixed node, it means that makes it has good reputation and it means that it earns higher rewards and people who stake on there earn a share of rewards as well.
+
Jaya
+So it's a tokenized mixed net. The token is a utility token that operates as the reputation system, and the token is run by a smart contract on our Cosmos blockchain, which is called Nyx. So the Nyx blockchain exists in the Cosmos ecosystem. This is our native chain. And what we were saying earlier in the podcast that we've been a little bit in the closet is basically that we have it feels a little bit like we haven't fully come out about the fact that we've got this basically general purpose fast finality blockchain in the cosmos ecosystem that any developer can take advantage of.
+
Jaya
+And that's something that we really want to focus a lot more on next year because the mix net is kind of more or less up and running now, we're optimizing it and making it kind of more user friendly and there's going to be a lot of integrations and stuff. We're going to push the network towards mass migration next year, but we also want to focus on Nyx blockchain and make that available for the developer community to take advantage of.
+
Jaya
+So I guess the way to think of it conceptually is that the NIM mix net is a super powerful privacy network that runs as the first application on the Nyx blockchain. Now the Nyx blockchain also offers additional privacy features and that's something that we're also going to start to get into a lot more next year. And it's something called Z K Nims, and that's basically anonymous credentials.
+
Jaya
+So what's interesting here is that Nyx validators will be able to issue anonymous credentials via the Nyx... So they'll be kind of issuing authorities of credentials and hopefully, you know, by kind of putting out that library we're going to see a kind of a whole new set of applications taking advantage of that, which is something I'm personally really looking forward to because I think there is so much to still be worked out around the whole area of anonymous credentials.
+
Jaya
+And I think zero knowledge proofs in general is something that's going to be super fascinating over the next year or so in the privacy space.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I have a couple of technical not technical technical questions, but just like a very high level in terms of you mentioned contracts, you guys use Cosmwasm
+
Jaya
+Yeah, exactly.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Okay. Okay. I wasn't aware just the way just for the record, Citizen Cosmos is a good name. We are focused on Cosmos, but we also work with Ethereum, with other ecosystems out there. I think our goal is more to decentralize decentralization and help people understand that, you know, bridging ecosystems with bridges isn't enough. You have to bridge communities as well.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Yeah, I think that's a lot our goal kind of thing that has to be there. But back to the NYM you said the words mass migration. What does that mean? What does it refer to then?
+
Jaya
+I say mass migration. When I say mass migration. But when I was explaining NYM
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Yes, you were saying that we are getting ready for migrating network mass migration next in the wild and.
+
Jaya
+Mass adoption
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Write that down. But drive mass adoption. Oh, yeah, Yeah. Well, this is okay. Okay. Okay, well, okay.
+
Jaya
+But I like the idea of mass migration. I am actually planning a mass migration as well, which might be interesting to the listener. The mass migration is, you know, half of the industry organizing is communities on discord. Right. Which like from a privacy perspective is like, terrible. So this is a community mass migration that I'm planning to stage next year, but that's a completely separate topic in terms of the plans for NIM next year.
+
Jaya
+When I say mass adoption, it's basically, you know, the story this past year since we've kind of launched the live main that has been very much like getting the token economics up and running, right? So one thing is like the testnet that we've had, but like there is a reason to have a token and that can't be kind of set into gear until you have a token that has a real value and you don't have a token with a real value until you actually have made that right.
+
Jaya
+So we launched main Net earlier this year and since then it's been a process of kind of, let's say, educating the community of mixed node operators in how the NYM token economics actually functions, because this is a mixed net. It's not a blockchain right Nyx is the blockchain, but NYM is the mixed net and the token economics work just a little bit differently.
+
Jaya
+So it's been a kind of year of, on the one hand, optimizing the performance of the mixed net, and we're kind of starting to reach some really good speeds now and that's going to can't wait for next year. We can show you just how fast and powerful this thing can be, but also really getting people used to the token economics and use of things like delegating stake on onto mixed nodes, understanding what the reputation means, but using the various interfaces, looking at the mixed node explorer to understand what is a good performing mixed node, what's not.
+
Jaya
+So that's kind of been very much what this year has been about. It's like putting this thing out into the world and then kind of tweaking it here and there to make sure that it's kind of really in shape. And then next year, in terms of mass adoption, it's really focusing on integrations. So the mix that is going to be something that for a lot of people is going to operate in the background of existing applications that they're already using.
+
Jaya
+Right? So it'll be like your usual chat apps and so on that will just run, you know, traffic via the mix that are going to be kind of rolling out a whole load of partnerships for people with various wallets. And basically it's going to be wallets and chat apps to start off with and then also kind of improving the experience of users who want to use it more of the kind of VPN service.
+
Jaya
+So that's the plans for the mixed net next year. And I it's going to be super exciting to see tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of users.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+So you've noticed I like playing devil's advocate, so I'm going to carry on tornado cash.
+
Jaya
+Yeah, let's go.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Tornado cash. Thats it thats all i have to say...
+
Jaya
+You just dropped the bomb. It's like a band like.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Mike, like one zero deejay. Spin that shit. No, I'm joking. Come on. I think we have to do it.
+
Jaya
+We have to. Do we have to find out if there is a huge problem with the criminalization of privacy and privacy technology. It's part of the task of NYM and other privacy projects to really intervene in the debate that can then shape regulators and the media's way of portraying these stories. Right. So to come back to like what we were talking about earlier, people like sensationalism, right?
+
Jaya
+They like the pain. They like the kind of big story, the big stories tend to be the horrible headlines. Right. And so one thing that we're told that we're doing it NYM is here. We founded something called the Universal Privacy Alliance alongside Menta secret network and a whole bunch of other really good projects electric line companies, Zcash, Aztec mobile coin.
+
Jaya
+Yeah, and I'm probably forgetting people now because there's a lot of people that have joined the alliance, but one of the main focus of the alliance is to intervene into this narrative, right? And to turn privacy from something where people immediately associated with crime to something that people associate with something that's normal, something that should be available to everybody.
+
Jaya
+I was on a panel earlier this year with a basically a kind of law enforcement agent from the United States who was, to put it mildly, like very anti privacy. Right. And he kind of works with chain analysis and this kind of thing. And it was interesting on the panel that the moment, you know, there was something that clicked for him, the moment that me and one of the other panelists started talking about health data.
+
Jaya
+Right. Like in his mind, all he could think about when it came to privacy was like criminals trying to hide something. That's the only thing he thought about. And I think that's often the case, right, is that when people think about privacy, preserving communications is immediately about crime. The moment we mentioned health data, all of a sudden he was like, Well, yeah, okay, I get it.
+
Jaya
+I mean, maybe you should come in and talk to some of my colleagues about this. You know, we're like, well, you know, this looks so not go that far, but but it was an interesting moment.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+The keep forgetting about cash. They keep forgetting that cash still exists. Right. Exactly.
+
Jaya
+Exactly. And so there is a lot of work to be done on basically a game of associations. So it's like putting out visual material, putting out sentences, narratives, memes that just like, pushes people's mind in a different direction. So when they think about privacy, they think about fundamental human rights, They think about how things are supposed to be.
+
Jaya
+They think about an Internet that is not full of like, bullshit crap because an Internet is purely a competition for your attention, you know, purely based on profiling and targeting to an Internet that is like, man, it's like more quiet, more secure, it's more sensible, it's more real because privacy is there as the default, right? You're not open to be a target from, you know, at every moment.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It's a very point about fundamental rights. I actually had this written down to ask you because I'm going to carry on with the devil thing. Does it have to be a fundamental right though Because I mean, I'm coming from this point. I'm coming from the point, by the way, the speech I gave when I met Harry was about privacy and digital slavery, just so you understand.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+But still, I'm going to ask the question. I mean, you describe the Internet and the way it works, and I totally agree. I have done for three in one of the first three courses several years ago was modern four years ago, and both privacy was as well. But still, what I come across is that people are kind of happy with the Internet today.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+They kind of like don't feel that they need to be saved. And they say, well, your subjective perception of whatever you believe in is not my subjective perception of it. And here my morals start to kind of play out because I'm thinking, well, but they need to be saved But did they really saved if they don't want to be saved?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It's like, so what do we do? Like, what does it have to be a fundamental right, end of the day or not?
+
Jaya
+So no one needs to be saved. I don't like saving people either, but I do like paying very close attention to reality and what's really happening around me. Right. And try and kind of analyze realities as best I can, also to understand the likely dynamics as they're going to play out in the future. Right. And let's be honest, like solving privacy is not something that happens from one day to the next.
+
Jaya
+It's a long term project of transformation. And again, it has to do with also like one thing is that an individual is like, yes, I'm happy with the way the internet works today. I love it. I get fed ads about things that I really like. So this is perfect. I love giving my data away so that the algorithm can know me better, which is like, you know, fair enough.
+
Jaya
+But I think it's important to understand for that privacy should not be something that's going to like block things, but instead opens up new possibilities. So for me, it's like, you know, there's arguments around things like, okay, imagine if the information that was fed to an algorithm was even more sensible and you had a little bit more choice in the matter about what you get fed and when and in what kind of scenario.
+
Jaya
+So it's like has more to do with the ability to exercise some control than like blocking and shutting down everything that exists right now. The other point that I wanted to make is that I think the kind of the consequences of the lack of privacy is only slowly dawning on people, right? So like with Edward Snowden revelations, it was very much like, oh, outrage, you know, And a few people kind of felt it to be kind of outrageous.
+
Jaya
+But it was like at this very abstract kind of like meta, like societal level, Right. Where it very easily becomes a kind of question of morality and whatever else. But the consequences of what Snowden revealed then are still playing out Like we're still kind of getting to know those consequences. And some of those are more violent than others, right?
+
Jaya
+So some relate to directly drone strikes, right? But for others, it's more subtle than that. It's more like mental health problems, depression, loneliness, like all of these are consequences of a digital environment and the kind of these sub sumption of a lot of social relations into the digital environment that's so heavily based on profiling, targeting a manipulation, right, and sorting people into categories, so continuously sorting people into categories and breaking society down into categories, that's what happens?
+
Jaya
+And so a lot of the narrative work is about drawing the lines between these things, right? So it's like now when people think about privacy and not many people think like, Oh yeah, I need privacy because it's going to help me with the fatigue that I'm feeling or the mental health problems that I'm having. But like, the more we start to articulate those things, the more people will start to get it.
+
Jaya
+It's like, Oh yeah, actually, maybe the reason why I have, you know, some of these health issues is, is literally because I'm provided through digital interfaces. I mean, there's lots of things that we could go into here, but like, I guess that would be my response.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I love that you're going into consequences about privacy. I think one of the first things that came into my mind, I moved to Berlin actually during when a week before COVID, the whole thing started. This whole shitshow and toilet paper, lack of toilet paper should show up. But anyways. And then I'm like one of the first thing I did, and I think it was like a week after I came to Berlin or a week after the whole thing started was I think I wrote an article which was consequences of privacy laws passed during that.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And I think people didn't understand of the amount of anti privacy laws that have been passed. Unfortunately, they don't see that during the last three or four years of being absolutely astonishingly crazy under that SOS. And like boop, it's like in the First World War, right? It's like, hey, now the government is going to intervene and then do any business whenever they want.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Of course we will remove the laws after the war is gone. No, you haven't. It's been 100 years, guys. Yeah. So. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely agree with you. It's crazy the adaptability that sometimes our killer feature in Survival, amongst others, is sometimes killing us as well. Like getting used to those like Web 2 to advertisement models, you know, like they're the only thing that could ever exist, as they call it has to be like that.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I feel you. I feel you. Totally. Yeah.
+
Jaya
+And it's about opening up their imagination, right? It's about, like, you know, articulating for people that it doesn't have to be this way. It's not normal, right? We can do things differently.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It's crazy how people put together responsibility and privacy and lack of privacy. They kind of like for some reason, people think if you're private, that's unresponsible to others. It's like, what? Why is it like, what? What? What are you talking about? What's what's what's going on here? How does it how did it connect? But the reason, by the way, I was asking before, validator not validator?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I didn't get to that, but I wanted to get to that because I would assume that a lot of our listeners are some to do with validation and have to do something with validation We are validators ourselves.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Ourselves. But I guess the tornado cash case could. Could it affect I don't know, the people who want to validate Nym or that's not the case. And this story. Do you know what I'm getting at? Like I could see.
+
Jaya
+Yeah. With NYM Re really try to toe the line here. Right. So, like, we we're not a kind of project that's like on some kind of kamikaze mission against all the governments of the world. Legal compliance is is important to us because we think that there is, like, a lot of different fronts to take this debate on. Right.
+
Jaya
+And we don't want to end up in a situation where what we're building gets shut down immediately just because we want to kind of like be loud and confrontational with governments. So, you know, we are quite careful around compliance and we're quite careful about taking the debates and taking the confrontation in a kind of reasonable manner that doesn't put people at risk like that.
+
Jaya
+You know, at this stage of the project, absolutely important for us because it's important for us that this that we have a chance to realize the system, you know, I think it's possible to get to a point where like the adoption and use of the NYM mix, net becomes something that that, you know, not just a few kind of like crypto wallets take advantage of, but that there's actually institutional adoption.
+
Jaya
+Right. So like some you know, another piece of interesting NYM history is that actually like the technologies that or the use and NYMhave come out of European Commission funded R&D projects. Right? So it's not a far stretch to imagine the European Commission actually like integrating with and using the NYM mix net, for example. And so like for us, what we're hoping to see is a kind of wide, broad spectrum of both institutions, traditional companies, crypto companies, chat apps and everything, integrating with the NYM mix net Exactly.
+
Jaya
+In order to prove the point that this is a system that is for everybody in order to protect the network layer of communications in general. Right. So and then at that point, you kind of get out of this like immediate association or kind of use only for some kind of headline crime situation that is like, you know, we're trying to kind of move away from that.
+
Jaya
+So, yeah, in terms of kind of like valid that like legal risk to validators, like if anyone does have any like specific concerns around that, like absolutely feel free to reach out individually. But I can say, you know, compliance is actually pretty important for us because we want this project to survive and be real.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Absolutely. Understand what you mean. Still, I think definitely I have seen interest in privacy projects I think arise since since the whole tornado cash thing happened. And I think that's the obvious response of the market, right? It's like, well, guys. But anyway, it's not, not the point because I think again, it's I would love to, to discuss this more, but I'm going to get to the final question because I just realized I don't know.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It always happens always happens whenever you have an interesting conversation with a person so cool and our is going, we need to invent something for those extending hours in a day or something like that or. Jaya Blitz Three questions. They're not. BLITZER Such you feel free to answer them in a very long way, in a very short way, up to three projects outside the top 20 that you follow in and you think are interesting in terms of what they developing
+
Jaya
+Oh, you know, you do you know, you caught me in like a really tight spot because, you know, have you ever had when someone is like, what's your favorite music? And then you just go blank cause you.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Don't have to be really favorite, favorite. You know, you could just say three interesting projects that you follow in outside of the top 20 by Markets Cup. And I hope not Stablecoins but of course, feel free to say them as well.
+
Jaya
+So I don't know where gnosis is in terms of market cap and if I'm allowed to mention gnosis, but I actually think like gnosis and kind of multisig, you know, multisig wallets. And I know that that crew are actually they're working on some kind of private voting system right now. So for me, I find that project to be super interesting for a variety of reasons.
+
Jaya
+Like first of all, like Multisig wallets have turned out to be like a major tool for the whole industry and beyond, right? So it's kind of the core of most daos and it's like I think it's like it as a tool not just for people in the blockchain industry, but even beyond is something that kind of sparks a lot of imagination.
+
Jaya
+And so, you know, having multisig wallets that, you know, includes some form of private voting, this not I think is fascinating and I think this is is a project that everybody should follow and tinker with and play around with. And then, of course, I would also mention manta because they are not just great collaborators in the Universal Privacy Alliance, but also focusing on chain privacy is like super important.
+
Jaya
+One of the big kind of contradiction in blockchain is obviously that there's like people emphasize the importance of privacy, but are building public ledgers, right? And so the possibility for and the tooling for on chain privacy, I would say is probably absolutely my my second here and then secret network as well. So opening up the design space for customizable privacy, it's another fantastic project with a super sound group behind it.
+
Jaya
+So yeah, I'd probably say Gnosis is probably like pretty major already as a it might not qualify for your like not so well-known project, but you mentioned a.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Singles.
+
Jaya
+Anything goes.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Yeah, it's perfect. I think on our podcast I would say there's probably Secret Network is more known to the listeners than than I would assume because we did like several episodes which cover either Secret network itself or a project built on secret network or somebody validated Secret network, even though we have some fun with Gnosis as well. But that is for the very careful listeners to find.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It's buried within 15 minutes of one episode. You have to really like go out there and find that it's not easy, but it is with the founder, I believe, of or not the founder. So it's one of the guys from Gnosis. Second question sorry to daily things that motivate you to keep on building privacy and to keep on doing everything you do in your daily life.
+
Jaya
+To daily things. Is my team at NYM Absolutely. And then and the NYM community, you know, when I see the NYM community, kind of like posting and talking about the reasons for being involved and why they find the project important and inspiring, those are the things that that keep me going. You know, it's like I love getting DMs, I love getting people contacting me on various platforms when they're interested in what we're doing.
+
Jaya
+So I'd say those kind of feedback from the community and the motivation and work of my team. Yep.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Last one. One person doesn't matter or dead or alive. Well, it'd be hard for that one to follow that person, but one person that you recommend could be a writer or a developer. I don't know. It doesn't matter. The an account or a project to follow for people that might help them or to read the book of that might help them to succeed in life and to be happier and life.
+
Jaya
+Or again, this is a tough question. I have so many favorites I choose.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Any one doesn't have to be your favorite favorites. It's one that's helped to change you. Maybe.
+
Jaya
+Obviously you should follow NYM right? So NYM will change your life, follow all the NYM accounts.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And then one 1%. Okay, good. 111001. Okay.
+
Jaya
+Yeah. And then in terms of following accounts, like I find Meredith Whittaker, the new president of Signal Super inspiring, and partially because, like, she comes from a background in A.I., right? So from someone that has moved from kind of AI and the ethics of A.I. with Google to privacy, it's like you suddenly realize, you know, she represents the full data pipeline, right?
+
Jaya
+It's like privacy is an intervention into the kind of industry that's producing AI in in deeply unethical and fucked up ways. So it opens up the imagination of what you can do. If you have privacy as the default, you can actually build artificial intelligence in a way that's much more closely related to people having some decision making over what data is, input it and stuff.
+
Jaya
+So yeah, I would say those two.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+That was a fascinating last answer that goes for a second. Like continuation of the.
+
Jaya
+Another, our.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Realm of.
+
Jaya
+Another.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Myself. Yeah, I'm going to hold myself. I'm going to hold myself Jaya, Thank you very, very, very, very much for updating us. What's going on with NYM and having the time for this fascinating conversation. And I know people are busy building and you yourself probably as well. So and it seems like you are. So thank you for finding the time to join us.
+
Jaya
+Thank you for the invitation. It's been a pleasure speaking with you.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Thanks, everybody.
+
Jaya
+Bye. Thanks, Chao Chao.
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:
In this episode of Citizen Cosmos podcast, the host interviews Jae Kwon, the founder of Cosmos and author of the Tendermint white paper. Kwon discusses various topics, including censorship, resistance systems, truth, misleading narratives, and division in society. They also delve into the importance of discourse, fiction, semantics, the power of history and languages, and smart contract systems.
+
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Good Space time yall. In this episode of The Citizen Cosmos podcast, I talk with Jae Kwon, founder of Cosmos and the author of the Tendermint Whitepaper. Along with Jae, we talk about censorship resistant systems, truth in instincts, misleading narratives and division in the society. We also discuss humanity, the importance of discourse, fiction, semantics, the power of history and languages and smart contract systems
+
Jae Kwon
+We have to create alternative financial systems because the system we're living under seems captured. It feels more like the wormhole between our physical world and the completely different kind of world. What makes a smart contract system good is going to be the language itself. It's really an ongoing battle of getting the truth out so that the things that were hidden become known and compellingly known in a way that is digestible to people so that they can say, Oh, that's crazy. That's actually a real.
+
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Before we rocket off into today's podcast, here is a round up of the latest news from the sponsor of this episode, Cyber. Cyber Congress Dao has been primarily working on improving the Bostrom hub. This work includes testing of the contracts, new UI features, verification, tools for online governance and polishing the Bostrom Dex adding MEV protection. New web front and bring in indexing of chain swaps.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+To try Bostrom head now to over Cyb.ai. Hi everyone. Welcome to a new episode of the Citizen Cosmos podcast. And today I have the founder of Cosmos Jae with me on the show. Jae Hi. Welcome. Hello.
+
Jae Kwon
+Nice to be here, Serj
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It's a pleasure to have you. I mean, it's a bit weird that our podcast with the name Citizen Cosmos only has you three years after the existence, but I guess that's a problem that we sort of solved earlier.
+
Jae Kwon
+It's entirely my fault.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Jae Could I ask you to introduce yourself in the way that you would like to be introduced for the audience, For the public? Anything you want to say about yourself?
+
Jae Kwon
+Well, I'm first and foremost programmer who wanted to create a platform to better our humanity, and I got interested in Bitcoin in 2013 and decided to commit my life to it 2014 because of financial crises that happened twice in my life. So, you know, through my parents, I've experienced that both in the IMF incident in Asia and when I was living in Korea, but also during the 2008 housing crisis and I realized we have to do something.
+
Jae Kwon
+We have to create alternative financial systems because the system we're living under seems captured. And then along the way, I discovered a lot more about how the world works and the and said world is what it is and decided to go even further. Let's create beyond financial platform to create a censorship proof social systems on the blockchain and so on.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+This is something that straight away points me to A couple of questions I've prepared though. I mean, I'm kind of the person who prefers to go with the flow, but I'm not going to lie. I have some prepared and one of Those questions is going to be completely probably out of the blue right now. But since you said financial crisis and you mentioned a couple of things, I mean, I probably should go into the intro, but before we even go into your intro on technology and how you became a programmer, I remember a few years ago something that made me I mean, I don't have icons.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I don't have people who I think I should pray to or religious. But that is something you did a couple of years ago, which I must say personally really impressed me. And that was your speech about the world is on fire. Right. And I really connected with you then, like a lot of the values that I live for and a lot of the values that I have been building and I have been also in blockchain since 2011 that I've been doing.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+You have said there and I want to ask you, what was it what was it for you? Why did you decide to do that speech? I don't know if the listeners out there have heard it, but if you haven't, there will be no links to this podcast episode. But regardless, right now, why did you decide to say those words?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+What was it for you?
+
Jae Kwon
+So that was in relation to the Virgo Project, the code name was Virgo. And the point is that it goes beyond Cosmos. It's part of Cosmos, but it's also beyond it because it's not about financial systems per se. It's more about censorship Prof communication, social systems that we need. What happened was it seemed like Cosmos was going on a good path.
+
Jae Kwon
+Everyone knew what they had to do and everyone was on board of the cosmos. So I figured, okay, this is a good time to consider. What else should I focus on? Because I'm much better at starting something based on needs than necessarily than everything else. Just best at starting something. So within the company, AIB, I decided to create a new project or department called Virgo.
+
Jae Kwon
+The idea is to enable social applications, in particular. There was a project called Dither, which we abandoned for reasons, but we're coming back to now with gno land and Dither was intended to be an alternative to Twitter and but okay, I'll talk about why I decided to kind of sit for like a whole month and just meditate on what's wrong with the world, because there was a lot and I didn't understand what was going on fully, but I could see where we were headed.
+
Jae Kwon
+It was pretty clear just browsing the news and what the narrative wasn't public, that we were being driven to division or being fed a lot of lies. Whoever it is, whatever it is, various forces were causing us to be divided. And meanwhile we have we're not addressing the issues in a way that is constructive to humanity. So at the time, I was particularly concerned about the climate issue and environmental issues.
+
Jae Kwon
+There were fires raging around us, and now I have a slightly different theory on what exactly happened there. But it was clear that we as a species don't have our shit together and that we're at a precipice. We're at a fork in the road, so to speak. If we can figure out our our junk, if we can figure out how to move forward together peacefully and constructively, then we would be able to expand beyond even our planet.
+
Jae Kwon
+Then we will be able to touch the cosmos, expand out there. But if we were to try to go and the path that we currently are led by capitalism and led by all these forces that are more selfish and less concerned about the long term, then we would end up destroying ourselves, that we would end up wasting an opportunity to escape the solar system and go beyond because our infrastructure is largely based on fossil fuels and we've spent a lot of it extract a lot of that, and our infrastructure is crumbling now.
+
Jae Kwon
+And if we then enter into a war which we have and this war continues on, then then we would destroy our infrastructure and we will not be able to get back to the point where we can explore space and so on. That was a big concern and realized this is the fork in the road for humanity. We have to get our stuff together and in order to do so, first we have to figure out the truth.
+
Jae Kwon
+We have to have constructive conversations among different, diverse factions of society. And instead of just butting heads and being led by those who want to sow divisions, we have to create a system that enables constructive discourse despite our differences. That insight I learned just working on Cosmos when I realized that even within our own ecosystem and even within the company all in bits at the time, there were factions and people were not talking to each other.
+
Jae Kwon
+It's so easy to say, Oh, like that group or that person is evil, you know? And then to construct a narrative that's, you know, half true or false and or to be misled by rulers and then to stop communication. And it became clear that this was a big factor enabling division. And that but once we start communication and trying, then, you know, it's really easy to resolve things.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It's astonishing, in my opinion at least, how people underestimate the power of censorship because we are social creatures, we have to communicate. And when people censor, it's astonishing how people underestimate how many people it actually leads to be killed at the end. And there are so many examples. I think, in history, but not to go into my own views before I ask you questions, to open up a little bit about what you just said, I guess I'm going to do one boring question, which I apologize for, because I did jump ahead like with with the whole like, boom, let's go straight into it just to understand you a little bit better.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And I'm going to make some assumptions here. Correct me if I'm wrong. Now, you mentioned that through your life because you had some financial crisis that you went through with your family. And as far as instead, not only with the family did that essentially lead you to the programing of the question is sorry is how did you get to blockchain?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Not to programing, but to blockchain. I know the 2014, I remember that paper, I remember it very well. But still, what Path led you there? Was it the financial crisis? Or was it seen the world being fucked up or what led you there?
+
Jae Kwon
+Those interested in programing and emergent systems, decentralized systems. And I remember university when I was still going to Cornell, my professor was Emin Gün Sirer and he started an avalanche and one of the projects he had us do was to create, recreate a portion of a free net and other decentralized systems. And that's when I really got interested in decentralized systems and programing.
+
Jae Kwon
+And for a while, you know, I always wondered what would it be like to create a metaverse? I was just kind of interested in creating metaverse because as a concept, it's really fascinating to have something that is real, as real as an object, you know, something that takes force to destroy, difficult to destroy that’s how real it is.
+
Jae Kwon
+And it affects how our world intersects with our world. And yet it's not physical. So I had these interests and then 2008 happened, and then I started looking for alternative financial systems. I went to conferences and looked at other projects that were related to finance, alternative finance. I looked into time banks, alternative local currencies and studied a bit about them.
+
Jae Kwon
+But it was pretty clear that they weren't catching on as much, right? I mean, of course, local currencies, some local currencies have been around for a long time with ... and so on. But there wasn't something that was really going to change things until I discovered Bitcoin. You know, when I first saw Bitcoin, I was like, Oh, this is cool, this might work.
+
Jae Kwon
+But it wasn't clear that it was going to work until 2014, during the bubble, yet another bubble. And then I realized, well, this is a system that is going to work. It's going to change the world. So that's when I decided to commit to the crypto space at first all in bits. The software company. The first thing I was working on this was like way back when it was just me I was going to create.
+
Jae Kwon
+I was working on a Bitcoin crypto exchange called Fort Knox FTNLX and the source code is still up. It's kind of cool. It's a pretty simple exchange, and I think the cool thing about it was that it also had proof of assets. So there's there's actually a Merkle root to the assets of all the Bitcoin UTXO’s in this exchange I think more exchanges should use published things like that.
+
Jae Kwon
+And then I was learning regulations, I was learning about how money transfer laws work and how you need to place a need to post a bond in order to participate in this financial system. That's where the bonding idea came from for me as I was learning the regulations around how to launch a crypto exchange, I started to learn concepts that eventually led to proof of stake.
+
Jae Kwon
+Anyways, one day, as I was just about to launch this exchange, I was just browsing on the internet and found some white papers from decades ago that described how to create byzantine fault tolerant algorithms without proof of work. And and everything kind of clicked and I said, okay, forget this exchange. This is way more important because we need a world with many chains, not just one Bitcoin.
+
Jae Kwon
+So I decided to commit to tendermint the rest as I think more familiar.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It's a good thing you didn't decide to call the exchange FTX because the name was taken. And the thing is that I don't go that.
+
Jae Kwon
+Yeah, no, no, no, not it wasn't FTX, it was FTNLX.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+But listen, I have a kind of a personal question for you that well, it's a personal non-personal. It's not personal about you. Personal for me. I mean, you mentioned the metaverse. And there is one thing I hate about that word, and the only thing I hate about the word metaverse is what the marketing companies try to sell. That is, to me, the metaverse and the Internet are more or less a synonym.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+There is some variations, but I would like to know your opinion. Could you agree that the words metaverse and the internet are more or less a synonym of would you say those are two separate entities?
+
Jae Kwon
+Understand what you're saying? It makes a lot of sense to call the Internet the metaverse, and there's aspects about it that is its own universe. I guess it's a little different when you have BFT systems that are securing this alternative digital universe because it's more real in that sense, in the sense that it's not subject to the laws or physical universe as much, even though it is because albeit these systems are still vulnerable to a degree, but it feels more like the wormhole between our physical world and a completely different kind of world.
+
Jae Kwon
+So I see both sides. I guess a lot of people think of the metaverse as being 3D Meta. Facebook changed their name to Meta and then they tried to commit to the metaverse. But I see it in different kind of way. I think that the more plausible and real, more real metaverse is one that's based on symbols like a digital world.
+
Jae Kwon
+It's all about symbols. If you imagine Ethereum or the smart contract system, we're creating like gno land, but it starts to feel really more like its own universe, full of symbols and logic and code. I think on top of that as a platform, we can build 3D systems, an interactive systems. But to me the fundamental basis of a metaverse will always be language itself.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Semantics is a super powerful thing, right? It's crazy how our brain applies so much things to just the simple words, right? Which is just simple connection of lines. And then, I mean, try calling somebody an asshole on the street, right? And then for straight away, you know, it's not going to be passed. So you see how semantics works, right?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And second, it's amazing Jae I have a question to you. I was going to ask it later on, but I'm going to ask it now. I know that religion plays a big part in your life, and it's fair enough, in my opinion, in a world that you're speaking about the decentralized world, the decentralized metaverse, there is no place for such sentences as let's destroy the bank, so let's kill all the religious people, or let's burn all disease, because it's not a decentralized world.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+A decentralized world is what people have choice. So I know that religion plays a big part in your life. I even know that you tweeted about like the chosen, the Christian series. I did actually go and check it out for it was I was curious. I have a weird question for you. If today you could change the world, politics and religion, what would be the first things you would change in the world in terms of the political situation, which is also important to you and the religious situation in the world today?
+
Jae Kwon
+Oh.
+
Jae Kwon
+Yeah. I mean, a big part of the motivation for Virgo as a project was not just environmental issues, but also seeing that, oh, there are these factions of religions, not just within the Abrahamic religions, you know, Christianity, Judaism and, you know, Islam, but also others too, and came clear that this may be and this is a large force or a large obstacle to uniting humanity towards constructive action.
+
Jae Kwon
+So in short, what I realized was we need to come to a conclusion or some progress in the narrative of religion to bring factions together so that we stop fighting each other. And I realized that all that is needed in order to accomplish that. It's not all but the major thing that we can do that we're not doing is just to help elucidate the truth of the matter, because in reality, these religions are not especially the Abrahamic religions, they're not working against each other.
+
Jae Kwon
+They are actually creating a joint narrative together with a plan to come to a resolution. And if enough people see what that plan is and how it's supposed to come to a resolution, then perhaps we can get over the stumbling block of factions or religion. That's really the motivation for me as to why I talk about religion, because I start to see what could be and I start to understand how religion was being distorted systematically in order to create and so divisions and to confuse people.
+
Jae Kwon
+Like most of all, we think about and know about Christianity. It's not even what I would call true Christianity. And a lot of people would disagree with me. But I would say from my research, it seems like the institution of Christianity had maybe always been subverted, even since the year like around 180 or so. But the problem is it's hard to talk about any of this stuff without appearing like a kook, a crazy person, and without attracting negative attention.
+
Jae Kwon
+It's so easy to just say, Oh, he's just talking about religion he is conspiracy nut, he's insane or whatever. So, you know, it's pretty clear we all need a different approach to this, right? So maybe what I need to do is disassociate myself from, you know, this idea of what could be. But in either case, I think it's going to happen.
+
Jae Kwon
+It has to have.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I think the words conspiracy and a definitely were not in my head when I was asking that because, I mean, today it's enough to I mean, even if you talk about, you know, two years ago about COVID or anything, you would be like, oh, you talk about aliens, you’d be a conspiracy nut right? But come on. It's like I think the label conspiracy nut is being labeled on anything by anybody who feels offended by something because of their semantics.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And then there is a question there in the chat about the religion and what is the Abrahamic religion called that unites all the religion? It's called ..... This is just for the listeners out there. I don't know if you heard about that, actually. It's a religion that recognizes all the nine monotheistic religions.
+
Jae Kwon
+I know a little bit about it. I don't know enough about it and say I haven't seen from Bahaism enough about the points that I have seen about Christianity and the conflict and the controversy there. I can't say that Bahaism has the answers. I haven't looked at it enough. It's possible. I would say, though, that probably nothing that ends with ism has all the answers, right?
+
Jae Kwon
+Like no isms is kind of what I go for. There's various denominations of Christianity that have like portions of their truth, and some are more true than others. But like, as far as I can tell, nobody has all the truth. It's just difficult to arrive at.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Absolutely. Absolutely. I think the truth is very much about the perspective, right? I mean, look at Socrates and what happened to him, Right. For asking questions. So, Jae, if we were to play that game a little bit more, I mean, I know this is going to be a bit more controversial, but what if you could they could single handedly change anything in Cosmos and I'm talking about the Cosmos Hub today.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+You know, you wake up and I don't know why, but for some reason you have all the voting power personally or whatever. I don't know. Let's just say theoretical situation, whatever. What's your first things that you do? Would you change?
+
Jae Kwon
+Okay. I mean, if I had all that voting power, I would make sure it's decentralized. That's that.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Makes.
+
Jae Kwon
+Sense. Yeah. But, you know, I said, See what you're asking? Of course. I think the biggest thing that I saw from Prop 82 the Atom 2.0 push was that the narrative for the original plan of Cosmos Hub was not well preserved. And what I mean is it was always the plan to create interchange security, to solve scaling, and thereby to make the story of the Cosmos Hub, the Atom story in terms of the business model is to enable as many transactions as possible to solve a scaling problem.
+
Jae Kwon
+But politics happened various infighting and factions happened, and somewhere that message got lost and people were led to believe that there is no story for Atom, but it's entirely not true. So that's one aspect. So if I were to change that, what would I have done differently? I would say probably it would have been better to start with the Constitution to make clear what the hub is about and what business model is.
+
Jae Kwon
+And another thing I would do differently is have an explicit plan to make all the operations of the ICF, the entertainment Foundation, public, transparent and accountable to the Cosmos Hub. So just to be clear, for example, the Interchange Foundation, which I did most of the legwork to found, right. And so the purpose of the Interchange Foundation was originally to make sure that the atoms are spent in order to create a well-functioning, diverse, decentralized ecosystem for the cosmos Hub.
+
Jae Kwon
+You know, regardless of the mandate of the ICF itself, the if you read the fundraising terms, it's pretty clear that the reason why the ICF got the atoms is in order to develop software for the Cosmos Hub. There are some issues with what the ISO is doing. I feel like there's not enough transparency and I feel like it can do better in terms of technical leadership and what I mean, there is specifically things like ensuring that the development of software around cosmos and specifically the Cosmos Hub is aligned with the long term vision that makes sense, that is coherent and, and it's not just about popping the atom price and so on.
+
Jae Kwon
+So the problem, though, is that we didn't have the right infrastructure for creating accountable Dao systems. The Cosmos Hub is pretty good. It's good for what it does and allowing different Dapp chains to be built. So if we've proven that many blockchains are using the cosmos have developed, but it still isn't quite as easy as what is theoretically possible.
+
Jae Kwon
+And what I mean is it would be better, in my opinion, if we had on top of tendermint a smart contract platform. And the reason why a smart contract system is better programing and go into cosmos SDK is because the logic can be in order or two magnitudes less. So there's a lot less boilerplate. You don't have to program it in a way that ensures determinism.
+
Jae Kwon
+And those are the main things. You know, the fact that there's so much boilerplate when you try to create something outside of a smart contract system and the fact that you have to program in such a way that you have to ensure determinism, you know, and the fact that you have to read, decode and manipulate an object and then encoded and then write it to disk and it creates all these layers that are not necessary if you have a specific kind of virtual machine.
+
Jae Kwon
+Now, Ethereum, as far as I know, still the only other smart contract system that actually tried to solve this problem and did it well with solidity. But I think we can go beyond solidity and do even better. And that's what we're trying to do with gNoland. The GNO virtual Machine is very unique in the world, I suppose. I haven't seen anything quite like it, and it enables really the theoretical optimum of succinct type checked smart contracts in a language that is it's well established, let go.
+
Jae Kwon
+And I think it's going to change the landscape and we'll see that the demand for applications is going to be more and more on top of the smart contract system, whether it's gno land, gno lang or some other language, you know, it's going to be about languages and how well that language is integrated. This smart contract system.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Will have a couple of other formats. One of them is like a debate format. We call it the Knights of the IBC round Table. And we had the Cosmwasm one recently. It's lovely, right? It was Ethan, Sunny, me and Dean from Agoric And at one point the discussion even for me. What for me, even for Sunny.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It was a little bit technical with one point Sunny and me were like, What the hell is Dean and Ethan talking about? We don't know. They're just like shooting each other. But long story short, why not cosmwasm Of course we will get to gno VM in a second. But why not cosmwasm?
+
Jae Kwon
+It is a virtual machine. Wasm is a virtual machine? But it wasn't designed for blockchains. It was more designed for like the environment in the browser. So that's one. And that's why even if you were to support languages like go on Wasm which there is, there is an experimental version of a go compiler for Wasm but it's not well maintained.
+
Jae Kwon
+So let me start over. What makes a smart contract system good is going to be the language itself. First and foremost, you have to choose the right language and you have to provide, integration between the language and what you want to do with blockchains. Okay. And Wasm doesn't let you do that. Whereas if you look at the gno VM it has features that are not really available in other virtual machines.
+
Jae Kwon
+even Wasm for example, after every transaction, everything in memory in the gno virtual machine gets automatically persisted and it's also automatically Merklized So anything you create, any object that you instantiate, any structure, primitive value, even a closure that you create in the gno VM at the end of the transaction, you can prove the state of your application by through the Merkle root the local tree, and nothing provides anything like that.
+
Jae Kwon
+So why not Coswasm? Because, you know, you can't do the same thing. You have to program your practically you have to program your thing in rust at the moment, and it doesn't provide the language, features and integration between language and smart contract platform. That's possible. And so you'll find that for any application it's going to be much more succinct to express it in gno than in anything else that's said.
+
Jae Kwon
+You know, I'm not saying there's no place for Cosmwasm I do envision a world where, you know, it's not just the gno vm it's not just one language, but we need multiple systems in different languages and different even non VM systems that interact with each other. So there is a place and a need to bring smart contract platforms together to make them interoperate.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+By the way, a strange question, not not in terms of verifiability here and the semantics that gno can offer. But in terms of the name. gno, I was was curious, considering the location of the first office of Tendermint and Berlin, together with Gnosis and the name gnoland, is this me going crazy or there is something that is I don't know why, but gnosis always like somewhere appears when we're talking about tendermint like with gnoland?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Not, of course it's not. Like, is it? Where is that? I mean, coming from. Sorry. Simple question. Where does the name come from.
+
Jae Kwon
+From a it's a modification play on the language from what's inspired from go right. And it's like the opposite. No it's do you go or or no but also maybe more so even more so than that. The reason why gno stuck is because what we're trying to do is create a system that enables everyone to know the truth, to understand more about reality, to debate the facts and permissionless, to create application.
+
Jae Kwon
+You know, systems, different algorithms that enable the truth to emerge from conversations because there's so much fake news out there, so much misunderstanding and half truths and intentional misdirection. We need to create a way and find a way to sift through that. The best way is probably going to involve combination of various things, including reputation systems, right? And then scoring.
+
Jae Kwon
+But but we don't know how best to do this yet. And gno as a platform will enable that experimentation so that we can know how to move forward together.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+That's a very big challenge, in my opinion. Like challenge in terms that you put for the team and for yourself and well, I mean, if you can solve that, I guess we're going to have like some Lego blocks leading us to a vision of a world where people, you know, actually can make it together, get their shit and make it together and not fight over who said what, when, and at which point.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+But a little bit like a question that I had related to that was, you know, we're talking about big things. Well, specifically now you're saying, in my opinion, things maybe for some people I'm really apologizing to anyone who's listening to this. I'm not underestimating the listening capabilities. But sometimes when people talk about the truth and trying to find, you know, things like that, it's underestimated, in my opinion, the value that those things have.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I'm going to ask again a strange question. So when I look today in the crypto world again, let's bear in mind, you know, like in mathematics, let's remember as we're talking about the truth and solving debt and building for a world where we can get our shit together. Now, when I look at the world today and I look at especially I look into the crypto world, into the crypto world that I'm involved in, that I'm part of, I see a lot of things like multisig wallets, enforcement of rules, like people say, Hey, let's make all the validators.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Well, I was going to say a rude thing, but you know, do this, let's make them do this. You know, nobody wants to look for a solution. That open market will make people do that. That will create a situation. You know, people create multisig like, and they say, oh, a multisig is way more efficient, you know, And you don't need on chain governance because there are too many people or you need it, but they need multisig.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And it's like, but isn't that reverting backwards? Isn't it reverting backwards from the truth? I mean, didn't we get to this point? Didn't we come to blockchain and get all these tools out there in order to stop doing things behind closed walls in order to stop multisig or to stop writting rules that are cemented in the universe, You know, isn't the goal is to evolve to go explore a space like you say.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And to me it seems that those things that we're doing sometimes in crypto kind of take away from that rather than actually build, get us towards closer to that.
+
Jae Kwon
+A big problem is that our tooling is not there and it hasn't been so far. And so gnoland wants to change that and show an example of how things could be. Here's an example. Like if you've been listening to the Twitter files, that scandal, you know, there are various things that were exposed with the Twitter files, but even before then there were and all throughout, you know, just four years, it was very clear that Reddit and Facebook and most of these social services were censoring in very sophisticated various ways.
+
Jae Kwon
+The big thing that comes to mind when I think of Reddit is it's not just like Subreddits randomly being closed for like reasons that don't seem to make sense, but just seem to align with censorship. But also the fact that it seemed like Gislaine Maxwell was also perhaps the moderator of the World News subreddit, which the most popular subreddit did you know.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+That I was not aware of that. That is crazy, bro. Are you serious?
+
Jae Kwon
+Oh, yeah. Are you serious? I'm serious. And if you look. Yeah, the countless called GMAC's work. And if you look at the things and she went to, like, Reddit parties, you know, she was well connected with the Reddit crew. And if you look at the kind of news stories that were being censored by this account, it makes sense.
+
Jae Kwon
+It all aligns. Okay.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+That's crazy. That is really fucking crazy.
+
Jae Kwon
+We're being attacked from just from the very basis of our ability to communicate and share information with each other. And yet we don't have a killer blockchain application. That solstice steam, it was pretty good at Steam. It was an approach to provide a blogging platform. But we don't have alternatives that are serious. When are we going to have social media really on chain?
+
Jae Kwon
+And you know, the answer is it's hard to program. It's hard to make those things right just as is. Now, imagine trying to put that on the blockchain that's even more difficult. And imagine trying to create like a subreddit system on Ethereum. You know how difficult that would be, right? But if you go to gnoland, you'll see source code, pretty simple.
+
Jae Kwon
+Smart contract, just a few files, very bare bones that demonstrates a Reddit like communication system and you can see the code for yourself. It's very simple. And by having better tools that enable succinct expression of social communication protocols, we can create more experimentation and start to solve these problems that are all necessary in order to get to the point where we have DAO governance systems that actually work.
+
Jae Kwon
+Because if we can't even have a communication system, we're not going to have useful DAO system, right? Right. You need communication the very least among so many other features.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It's really interesting that you mentioned Steemit because, well, I was a lot heavily involved with Beecher's and in fact, along with some other people, we launched the first official fork of Steemit, the Golus Steemit was back then. Their Genesis block wasn't public. We were the only project that actually paid them for it. And then they made it public.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Well, they changed the license, so to speak, right? And it was like a Russian based social network back in 2016. Well, not Russian, but Russian speaking primarily. And yeah, the project is actually still alive. It doesn't have a team today or anything like that. But yeah, it's interesting that you mentioned that. So I have a lot a lot of history with it and I will stop right there on Steemit for about three months or something like that.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It's crazy, crazy, crazy history.
+
Jae Kwon
+I'm curious, I wanted to ask you a question, if you don't mind going. All right, are you still active there? You were a top contributor. Are you still active? And if not, why not?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+You can still see my account, of course, because it's blockchain. Of course you can go and you can scroll down. Why not? I guess when we launched well, this is changing the clocks. Okay. I was very much into steemit. But then when we launched golus and after some time after I quit, like first my attention focused Golus and I stopped writing completely.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And the biggest obstacle that I saw there and that I still see today in that is on chain proof of stake reward. The economics are just not there. The tools to build people don't understand free on chain rewards. I don't think they should be free. I think people should understand why they're getting that reward. And those economists were milked very easily.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Like you could have a two or three not even smart people. And I apologize to say that, but I really do mean it. Not somebody like a genius, not somebody who's, you know, like was that movie called Big Short Right? You don't need somebody like that. You just needed somebody with a loud enough voice and a great example, you know, back in Golus, back then, before you implemented the proof of stake, which had slashing back there, the witness nodes, they didn't have that.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And, you know, one of the things you had to update price feeds and on purpose, me and the other guy who was the founder of the project stopped updating a price. It's just to see what happens. And people didn't care. People would still delegate to us all the time. And that was for us, like the quickest proof that this shit doesn't work.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+You know, people were milking the economy. All you had to do was just be a little bit more. Loud the tools like you say, the tools were not there. Today. The situation is changing and I would love to see a place like I mean, I was following D3. I mean for a while a few years ago when I forgot the name of the...Yes Pung, sorry, when we spoke with him a couple of years ago and he was telling me about that and it was very cool.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+But again, when the tools are there, it seems that people are not. For example, there is this other crazy project, Cosmos based project, you know, and they had a version of Twitter where you had to use your ledger to tweet anything out at one point. And people were like, I ain't going to do that. You know, I'm not going to.
+
Jae Kwon
+Yeah, yeah, we need better tools and we can we're actually working on on solving that. So you'll see a solution to that problem. But you're absolutely right that UX has to be there. You shouldn't have to use a hardware signer just to be able to post a comment.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It's crazy. Crazy. Jay You mentioned your vision a couple of times, and I know it's coming up to an hour already, which is crazy, but you mentioned the vision, the truth, the reality. I mean, those three things are super biased, super subjective. How does one person, does it matter if it's you? But in your opinion, how does one person how is one person able to deliver what's supposed to bring truth to people objectively without subjectively sticking his own opinions and subjectively putting his fingers everywhere in there?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+You know, how can that be objective ever? Or it shouldn't be at all.
+
Jae Kwon
+I don't think one person can do it. I don't think one person can fully know. Everybody has biases and perfect information. So whatever the system is, it's not going to be something that gets everyone to follow this one person, because one person has like a better idea and grasp of reality, but rather, I don't know the full answer.
+
Jae Kwon
+But of course, you know, if you combine the perspectives of multiple people and you and I mean, here's an answer, a partial answer. Back in the days before Google, we didn't know what websites were reputable. It was hard to know because people were gaming the system and they were trying to create SEO kind of in order to get promotion on search engines and all that.
+
Jae Kwon
+But there was an algorithm based on what is it? It's page rank and it's based on matrix, you know, algorithms that was able to distill eigenvectors or the views, mathematical views of what might be most real or truthful. And we need those kinds of algorithms to help us select among, I would say, not just perspectives, but also people using reputation of correctness, of people who are able to distill truth, get to the point where we can distill truth from ... you know from the whole collective to see something more true than what any individual can understand.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+If you were to try and I know it's hard to summarize something which is dear to you because, well, I don't know about you. It is for me definitely when somebody says I love music or What's your favorite song? I don't have one favorite song. What's your favorite writter? I don't have one. I love a lot of books, but if you want to try to summarize that vision that you're talking about into that reality that you are keeping, you talking about the truth, we need that.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And I understand what you mean by that. But if that vision was summarized in a paragraph or two paragraphs, what would it be? And one small sort of comment in there, could you say it in a way that anybody that's listening to that would be able to understand those right now, even if they didn't have any financial or technological background?
+
Jae Kwon
+There's something maybe a little more concrete than what we've been talking about. You know, we've been talking about truth in the abstract. But really, I think the question is more about there are certainly groups of people in organizations and ideologies that are working to confuse and divide everyone. Who is it? What is it? How do they work? What have they been doing?
+
Jae Kwon
+And what is the thing they are trying to bury? And if we can get better insight into that, I believe the entire charade that's put forth before us will dissolve and we'll see what is today very upside down right itself quickly. So it's not just this abstract notion of finding something true. It's really ongoing battle of getting the truth out so that the things that were hidden become known and compellingly known in a way that is digestible to people so that they can say, Oh, that's crazy, that's actually real.
+
Jae Kwon
+That's actually what's happening.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It's astonishing how quickly people forget when those things happen and when things like charades, you know, start to be more of a circus like show. It's amazing how quickly people forget who's the master of the circus, so to speak. You know, so it's crazy. It is really crazy. And sometimes people forget that to invent something and to put something together are very different things and take very different mind skills and mindsets to do.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And, you know, there are not that many people, in my opinion, in the world that can invent something and invent something that is used by other people, regardless of whether it's used in the way they were thinking about it. And yeah, spliting an Atom and Einstien I'm not a great example here, of course, but still, more realistically, there are technologies that are being invented and used by a lot of people and people kind of forgot.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It doesn't matter who invented it, you know? I mean, this guy, he's out there, he's doing the charades and we should listen to him. It's crazy. Jay, considering you're huge, in my opinion, experience in building products, could you give, like, a couple of words of advice to anyone today building on Cosmos or looking to build on gnolan, for example, trying to look in the gnolan VM code?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+What would you say to them? What would you advise them to do or not to do?
+
Jae Kwon
+One is to step out if you can, if you're in a position to to step a little bit outside of the box of Defi, because while there's money in Defi and it's exciting and it will potentially be rewarding, very rewarding, it's not necessarily the thing that we need. We can get by with very far with very simple defi tools that we already know how to build.
+
Jae Kwon
+What we really need are solutions to the problem that go beyond the surface level of finance, but help tackle the problem that at the source. It's impossible to do that if you don't understand history because once you get to the point where you are making a difference, you will encounter people who will manipulate and steer course for you.
+
Jae Kwon
+Because this is how the world works. This is actually how the world works. You will find and meet people even inside of your organization in the very least that just have a different idea of what they want because they want something different. Perhaps they want money and fame. So it's really important to understand history and to make sure that you align in vision with the people that you work with from the very beginning.
+
Jae Kwon
+And it's really important to try to be very methodical and slow in how you give up control. As much as it is important to give up control, ultimately how you get there, the devil is all in the details and if you're not careful, then you will end up losing control to people and forces that you don't agree with.
+
Jae Kwon
+And so listen to your gut. air more on the side of breaking the relationship off than trying to save something just because it's too convenient to too at the time because you'll pay later.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It reminds me of I mean, I think I've said it before. Ready on the podcast. But Isaac Asimov writes, The biggest weapon in history invention is history, because whoever controls history controls everything else, including, well, everything technically. So definitely Jae I mean, seriously, I want to keep on asking you questions forever, and I haven't asked you nothing about Atom 2.0 and anything but I don't know how much power of course, you have in you.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Or would you rather carry on talking or would you rather do a second go sometimes else and finish this round here? Or would you carry on? Or do you want to carry on talking
+
Jae Kwon
+Okay, let's have another one. So another one. I think we're going to have a lot more to talk about soon with ICS and gnoland. And I think we can go to a technical dive for the next one, and I love to do that.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+So then if it's okay with you, I'm going to ask you like the blitz question. It's three questions, so you can answer them quickly. You can answer them slow. If you're going to surprise you. A little surprise. Everybody says they're surprising. The first one is shit, the other two are better, I promise. So the first one, it's going to go down 3 to 1.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+So the first one is Shit question give me three projects, not Cosmos, not Bitcoin, not Ethereum, not Gnoland. You cannot say that that technologically impressed you in the past two years.
+
Jae Kwon
+One thing that I really like to do in solving problems is like to get to the root of it and to try to transcend the problem. Amino was like an attempt to do that, to transcend and get beyond protobuff and beyond the need for even in coding systems. And I see that kind of spirit from a project called the telescope, and they're also working on a wallet at the telescope project.
+
Jae Kwon
+It's pretty impressive a lot. What else to more.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It doesn't have to be three, really. It could be one. Really.
+
Jae Kwon
+Okay. All right.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+But no, go on. If you want to say one mark on.
+
Jae Kwon
+Yeah, I don't. I can't take anything at all.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Let's go get cool. Cool, cool. Don't push it out of yourself. And it's true. That is something that if it impressed you, would have stuck in my opinion. Okay, second question. And now it's two things. You are obviously, in my opinion at least, and I'm sorry, this is not an offensive thing. It's is a very like compliment. You're you're a sensitive person.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+You're a person with a lot of knowledge, a person with a lot of. Anyways, long story Short And this is the question that I think you would have a good answer to. Can you share with me and the listeners two things that motivate you in your daily life to keep on searching for the truth?
+
Jae Kwon
+That's really good question. What keeps me going? I won't lie. There is an aspect of what I experienced discovering the message underneath, like the New Testament and especially the last book and the Book of Revelation that was really fascinating. So many things come together in those messages and the book that it makes me wonder, like how it could be to the point where it almost does almost seem supernatural, like it cannot be explained, and the divisions and the prophecies are disturbing and difficult to comprehend and difficult to accept.
+
Jae Kwon
+And yet, in many respects, we see it unfolding behind and before our eyes, you know, according to the millenniest interpretation. And I think it's really fascinating, especially in the context of global organizations that I've mentioned in the past and Twitter and understanding the power dynamics of the world, even including more secretive organizations, understanding of why the world is in how it works and why these things are happening.
+
Jae Kwon
+Curiosity is a big motivator, but also the desire to transcend the gridlock, right? The problems of today, and the hope that we can actually get to a better state where we can feel more at ease knowing that, you know, certain things are have been resolved, the hope for that kind of world and what kind of world we could be living in like 50 years from now, you know, and our dying.
+
Jae Kwon
+beds sure. Right. But like for our children, the desire to make a better world for them, that's not as crazy as the one we have right now is probably the biggest motivating factor.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Hat off for saying Curiosity, by the way, because you're not going to believe it. The amount of people and very smart people who have been on this show, no one has ever mentioned curiosity. I was always surprised. Why? Because to me it's also my driving force. It's curiosity. I mean, I like Why? Why? Why not? Why? Yes, why?
+
Jae Kwon
+Why is this beautiful? How does it work?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+What is beautiful? Right. Well, what is beautiful? What is why does B E A U T I F U L make beautiful? Like why does it make images in my head like it's. Last question, Jae. I promise. Go on, go on. Going on. You were going to say you were going to comment. Sorry.
+
Jae Kwon
+I was just going to ask one more, which is what is our role in the universe? What is our role? What can we do? Why are we here?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+The million dollar question to explore, To be curious, I think there is the actual answer in my opinion. You know, to build to make sure that we can expand. And it's last question. I promise dead or alive. Doesn't matter. One person that inspires you could be a coder, an author, it could be a politician. Well, I'm going to say that, but I hope it's not a politician like anyone in the world.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It could be a cartoon character. So dead or alive, real on the single person, somebody who inspires you is not the only person but inspires you. It doesn't have to be a person it could be a ghost.
+
Jae Kwon
+Say, in tech between like Tim Berners-Lee and all the way to Steve Jobs. You know, regards to just this Giants, that affects our lives every single second today. And if it weren't for them, it would be a completely different world. A lot of the heroes, though, seem to have fallen in some sense. So in some sense, you know, we're always disappointed by them.
+
Jae Kwon
+But Steve Jobs still, you know, feels like there's something missing with the world because since he was gone. So this is the last thing I would say it is. Yeah. Let's let's leave it up there. Okay. Cool.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Cool. Jae Thank you very much. First of all, just going to thank everybody who has been listening and thank you for listening to this podcast. Citizen Cosmos, and join us next time.
+
Jae Kwon
+Bye bye bye.
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:
In this episode of Citizen Cosmos podcast, the host interviews Denis Fadeev, developer of Ignite. They discuss the importance of valuing developer’s time, providing users with a feedback loop, and the necessity of tutorials and documentation in building a blockchain. Fadeev shares his passion for building for developers and the role of the CosmosHub in the ecosystem. They address the issue of tribalism in crypto and how Cosmos is working to fix it. The conversation then shifts to Ignite, a marketplace of sovereign blockchains, and how it helps projects build. They highlight the motivation to keep on building and the flexibility of Cosmos that keeps it interesting.
+
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Good space time, y'all. In this episode of The Citizen Cosmos podcast, I speak to Denis Fadeev ex VP of product at Tendermint and creator of Ignite CLI. Along with Denis, we discussed time and value developers Users and feedback and the passion to build tools working remotely, and the steps in building blockchains. We also talk about the Cosmos Hub, tribalism, marketplaces and sovereign blockchains, motivation and flexibility.
+
Denis
+And this is the crucial thing, I think in the beginning you need to make the developer experience as smooth as possible. Building a blockchain is not everything you also need to build end user applications. If something doesn't work, you are free to create something that is better, that has functionality that he wants, and you don't have to ask anyone. The decisions made through governance actually change the course of events.
+
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Before we rocket off into today’s podcast, here is a round up of the latest news from the sponsor of this episode, Cyber. Cyber Congress Dao has been primarily working on improving the Bostrom hub. This work includes testing of the contracts, new UI features, verification, tools for online governance and polishing the Bostrom Dex adding MEV protection. New web front and bring in indexing of chain swaps. To try Bostrom head now to over Cyb.ai.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Hi everybody. Welcome to a new episode of the Citizen Cosmos podcast. Today I have with me Denis Fadeev the creator of Ignite, Denis Hi.
+
Denis
+Hey Thanks for having me. Excited to be on the podcast and.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Glad to have you on because we have had the connection with you over work. Well, sort of a work, I guess, right? For a while now and we've been talking so much and you've been doing so much in terms of building and everything. And finally we have you.
+
Denis
+Yeah. .
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Would you like to Tell all the listeners and myself what is going on in your life right now? What are you busy with? What are you working on? Maybe what you worked on before as well for people who don't know you, please?
+
Denis
+Sure. So I'm going to introduce myself a bit, give some context, some history, and then we'll talk about current situation, what I'm doing. So I joined Tendermint in 2019 as a front end developer. I worked with the design team Pong ..... websites and Web applications for Tendermint Core and the Cosmos ecosystem in general. So we built websites and then we worked on a documentation system which was used by pretty much all the projects in Cosmos ecosystem in 2020 and 2021.
+
Denis
+So it featured some functionality that wasn't available at the time with popular documentation systems. So we had that and just recently switched to Docus.Rs because nobody has the time to maintain our own documentation system. And yeah, basically I worked on web related projects for about seven or eight months and then at some point I looked into building blockchains.
+
Denis
+We had this idea of building social network kind of application. We're just exploring kind of R&D work to that, and we wanted to use Cosmos Hub as essentially the memo field of Cosmos Hub blockchain transactions, right? So every transaction we have this Memo field, I think that was recently renamed to note, at least on the CLI so that people don't insert mnemonics in this field and expose themselves.
+
Denis
+But yeah, we thought about using this memo field to contain extra information basically encoded as Json and put it there. But very quickly realized that that's not at all what you should be doing because even on the the website Cosmos dot Network it said building sovereign blockchains and we were taking a blockchain and shoehorning something that wasn't supposed to be there into the application.
+
Denis
+So I decided to look into how to build my own blockchain and discover that what wasn't actually all that straightforward. So the only tutorial that was available back then was a name service tutorial, which which is a good tutorial. It was very long in that you had to dedicate time to go through it and it didn't explain all the details about how to build blockchains.
+
Denis
+Right? It gave you a glimpse of what it takes, but wasn't a foolproof tutorial. So I looked into cosmos SDK and and I didn't see I mean, it wasn't obvious how to how to build a blockchain from cosmos SDK because it just had the docs that described this framework and there it was no Main dot go, no way to start a blockchain cosmos SDK
+
Denis
+And I looked into Gia and it didn't have any modules and cosmos SDK docs specify that you need to build your functionality in modules. So it's very, very confusing. I spent a couple of weeks kind of learning or reading the docs and figuring things out, and then I realized there has to be a better tool for Cosmos developers that didn't require you to go through all of this and read the documentation in its entirety and understand what's the difference between Gia and CosmosSDK like it should be.
+
Denis
+The experience. Developer experience should be similar to what developers in Front end world enjoy, right? Where they have a framework and they also have a companion CLI tool that essentially guides you through the process and at least takes some of the burden when you're just starting And this is the crucial thing. I think in the beginning you need to make the developer experience as smooth as possible because what people do is they dedicate a weekend, for example, to learn Cosmos, right?
+
Denis
+And they only have a weekend. And it's actually very valuable, right? We as people who are building frameworks and enabling developers like we need to really value their time and not require them to jump over hoops and spend countless hours figuring things out right. So we need a very straightforward onboarding process for developers. And once I figured out how to build a basic custom blockchain with Cosmos SDK, I decided that I CLI tool that would help people like me to start their Cosmos developer journey and have this tool.
+
Denis
+So I spent a couple of months working on that, featured some, so I decided to understand like what makes a CLI tool good, right? And I came up to a list of features that I wanted to have in the very beginning, right? It should create any blockchain, which is pretty trivial operation, but blockchain should be complete, right? It should be.
+
Denis
+It should spit out a software project that you can build right away. You don't have to make any modifications. No, nothing. Just run a command. You get a blockchain and the next thing that people would do is they would start their chain, right? So I wanted to have a command that will start a blockchain node, initialize it, install dependencies, build it, initialize it, do all these things that you typically want to do.
+
Denis
+We could have done this with Makefile of course, but at the same time, this iterative approach to development that is very common in front end development and I wanted to bring that to blockchain development as well. So you have the source code and every time you make a change to the source code, everything restarts, rebuilds, re initializes and you can, you can experiment very quickly.
+
Denis
+And that was crucial, right? So having the command to create a blockchain, having a command that will start a blockchain node of your custom blockchain without any configuration required, that was very important. The next part was providing users with a complete feedback loop because what took me long time and I apologize if I'm going into details, but I just wanted to describe the functionality of the first version because I think it's quite important.
+
Denis
+So the next piece of functionality was a complete feedback loop. So when you're building an application, I think it's very valuable to be able to get to a point where you can submit data to your application, to your blockchain, read it back up data, delete it, these sort of things. So .... operations on a very simple data type.
+
Denis
+So I added the functionality to generate that code. So you would be able to, to say back then and right now the project is called Ignite, but back then it was called Star Port. So you would type star port scaffold post with a title in the body and it would generate all the code you need to write blog posts to your blockchain to read them.
+
Denis
+Right? And that gave you like a micro application that you can study, modify and you can see how the changes that you make to this small application affect the outcome. So maybe you would add you would create this type with two fields and then you would manually add a third field just to know how it's done. And since all the code was there is very easy.
+
Denis
+So it functioned as a quick prototyping tool because this is something you would do as a developer when you need to build a project. But at the same time, it also worked as an educational tool because you would create something and then you would study it, modify it. So that was these pieces were very important. Then of course added a web template because we all know that building a blockchain is not everything writing it.
+
Denis
+You also need to build end user applications. You need to make it possible for users to actually interact with what you build. And I use Cosm.js as a library from confio and shape a first templates based on view and cosm.js So that was basically the functionality of the CLI when I first released it in late July 2020 and after it's been released, we've seen people using it and several big projects actually use the first version to scaffold their own chain.
+
Denis
+The CLI didn't have that many features besides what I talked about, but it was still a very convenient way to get a new blockchain up and running. So crypto work used the CLI sifchain Mid-Corner in some others. It also wrote tutorials to help people get onboarded because you can write the best tool in the world, but if you don't have tutorials, if you don't have documentation, people really not, you're not going to know how to use it.
+
Denis
+You're not going to spend time exploring this right? So I prioritize that as well. Yeah, that's how it started. And after we realized, well, back then it was just me. But once we realized in the company that this was this was cool, this is valuable, people are interested in using it. We decided to create a whole team around it, started hiring developers to essentially implement the vision that we had for, for the tool.
+
Denis
+And yeah, after that I focused solely on the on the CLI and team was called Developer Experience Team because even though our project, our main project was the CLI the mission behind the team was to improve developer experience of blockchain developers.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Then why did you I mean I'm going to get to ignite in a little bit, but I have some questions to get to know you a little bit first. So first of all, why did you decide to concentrate on building for developers? I mean, I understand the importance of foundation, but if you were to draw an analogy, you know, I mean, any work in the house is important, not just the foundation, right?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Building the doors, the windows, working with the wood, with the stone. Also important. So why did you have this passion to concentrate? Because what you did before was also kind of building for building. So I'm curious, where did this passion come from that you have to concentrate on the developers, on the builders, and not the people who come already after?
+
Denis
+Sure. So, well, first of all, I think I saw the opportunity like this area was really lacking. Of course, back then. But really even right now you can focused on great many things. You can focus on on building wallets, on the building. I don't know. End user dapps, there's just so much stuff you can build. But I just realized that this area was really lacking and this is something that I think prevented Cosmos from growing because you need to give the tools to people to to let them experiment and build.
+
Denis
+And if you don't have that, you're limiting the potential of the whole system, right? So Cosmos SDK is great, but at the same time, if the barrier to entry is very high, then we're kind of artificially preventing people from experimenting with cosmos and building. The more people who get engaged into building, the more dapps eventually you will have.
+
Denis
+So to be honest, I think the reason why I also decided to focus on this because before joining Tendermint I actually participated in a hackathon during Paris Blockchain week in 2019 and we built a blockchain with Cosmos SDK actually, and it took us forever and it was very difficult and it was very unintuitive. And we won the first prize of this hackathon, right?
+
Denis
+We got first place, but I also saw how other teams were doing and they weren’t doing great. So some teams, most teams basically were just able to go through half of the tutorial like that's all they did and that's why we won. We were we didn't build anything great. We we just managed to build something that compiled and worked.
+
Denis
+It was a two day hackathon, so it wasn't that much time. But still you should be able as a participant to go through, I don't know, a 30 minute tutorial and get to a pretty good understanding how to build with a tool. Hackathon is only two days. So basically one year later I focused on fixing that problem.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I get it, I get it. Then I also saw like from your history that. But the thing is, I'm going to try to dig in these questions. I know, I know when you ask guests the question and they answer, you're not supposed to re-ask them. But I really want to get I'm really curious. So because I know that working for Tendermint that you did when you did design like you also build for builders over there.
+
Denis
+So the company I worked before, Tendermint was a decentralized CDM for video and product was in a way for builders, but I was a front end and before that I focused on prototyping for enterprise companies and I think that experience also kind of helped me understand the pain points that developers face in enterprise. You get to experience that quite a bit, right?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It's interesting how sometimes the reason I'm asking is it's a cool thing. Like I, I'm older than I look. We'll probably some more or less the same age, but I'm older than I look. But anyways, quite a bit older. And I realized over the time I had a couple, a couple of careers which at first seemed completely different.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+But then I was having this conversation once with somebody and I realized that there was just like an obvious thing from inside my head that connects all of those things together. And this is when I was looking at your history, trying to do my homework a little bit, I noticed that you almost always concentrated on creating a tool that will help somebody else to create something.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+So it's like I was trying to get curious Inside You head where is like the passion maybe when you were two and you're putting already Lego blocks together, you know? All right.
+
Denis
+So I had basically a dream before I learned how to code. I really wanted. After I started learning how to code, I realized that I wanted to build something that other developers would use. So I thought that would be a library of some sort. I started learning actually with Ruby and Ruby on Rails. And Ruby on Rails actually was the inspiration for this CLI tool because it had all this functionality, but for traditional applications, and I, after going through Cosmos Docs, I realized like, yeah, it's, it's actually very similar to traditional applications except in Web 2.0.
+
Denis
+We had the tools and here we you don’t have the tools. So. So yeah, I always wanted to build something that other developers would find useful. And that kind of that was just a good opportunity for me to build something that is totally needed and also will fulfill this kind of desire to build something useful for other developers.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It makes perfect sense. I understand totally what you mean. I have a bit of a strange question for you, which is not actually work related, but I would like to ask you and you feel too free to answer however you wish to answer. So I know that just for listeners who don't know, a few years ago I was trying to was as one of the community members.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I was helping out the guys at Cosmos Hub with some of the Russian things and translations. And one of the things we did with another team was one of the hackathons, which was concentrated on the Russian audience developer sorry, not Russian, but Russian speaking developers, should I say correctly. And Denis was actually the key person to help us.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And this is why the question is going to be asked. So I'm curious with all of the latest and we hate politics here, but this is not a politics question. This is a question about your work and about your experience and about general like observation of things. How does it I don't know if you still are based within Eastern Europe, but regardless of whether you are or not, you don't have to answer that because I know you were for a while.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+How did it feel lately? Is that a problem for work to to to work in this field in Eastern Europe? Did you have obstacles? Are you still if your base there have been obstacles? I'm very curious about that.
+
Denis
+Yeah. So I left Russia in February 2022. I lived a while in Armenia and then I took some time to travel Europe and now I'm based in Istanbul, Turkey. So I mean, I'm not going to comment on politics, but personally I'm just working on the same projects, but from from a different location. And what I love about decentralized nature of working because Tendermint inc has always been a decentralized company.
+
Denis
+It's well, we had an office at some points in Berlin, but we've always been working remotely and I created a team also remotely. So for actually two years I hadn't seen people that were working with me for two years, right? So that was an interesting experience. So nothing changed from relocating That's all I can say. Yes.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Oh, no worries. Like I said, it's a personal question, so feel free to answer as many detail as you want. I totally understand because I've been working remote with teams, managing remote teams and working for remote teams for over six years now. And it's strange, you know, sometimes, but then you get used to it and you like and I actually for the record, for for everybody out of like a fun trivia fact, the first ever episode of Citizen Cosmos was recorded in the Berlin Tendermint office, uh, during COVID in 2020.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It was with remote guests, but it was in that office, that recording.
+
Denis
+So I well, yeah, I remember. I remember this office. I it was, I didn't have a chance to visit the office because, well, because of the lockdowns. So it started. So the only time I got to visit people from Cosmos was in late 2019, before before the pandemic in San Francisco and during the hackathon. So that was a great experience for me as well.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Here's a question for you just came out. Now, I'm curious, while we on the same topic, how do you feel now, considering you've spent working, you know, I mean, I know my experience, but I'm curious. And yours, of course. And you know, you just said you've met these guys in 2019, then you met them, I guess, during Cosmoverse
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Right. Like because I did see you talk at Cosmoverse. So how does it feel to work so much with people to create so many things? And considering Cosmos is not, you know, projects on the 10th page of Coingecko? You know what I mean by that? I mean, it's a lot of stress still to be working for something which is bigger.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I guess it feels a lot more that you need to not to at least for me, this is like how I would feel if I were you. How does it feel not being seen, these people, but working so close with them? And you know what's inside?
+
Denis
+Yeah. So I always been comfortable with remote work and I think the events in 2019 and 2020 changed the way many people work. So initially it was not surprising. But I guess I mean, before that I worked in an office and then when I joined Tendermint the work was all remote. So I guess there was like a period of one month where I had to adapt.
+
Denis
+I don't have to go anywhere and meetings and there were people in everything is in English. And it took me around a month, I think, to adapt to this. But after that it's pretty much the same thing, except it's more efficient because you don't spend time. You can have short meetings without going anywhere and you really focus on the code or on documentation or on supporting users.
+
Denis
+So I just think is generally a better way of working. However, I would say that's after two years of leading the team, what I realized having occasional meetups and time working together is incredibly valuable. So I wish we had more opportunities to do that, but we couldn't because every everything was lockdown. But now I would advise to remote teams to occasionally, like every quarter, have a week where everyone can be in the same room and can really discuss things and just socialize.
+
Denis
+This is a crucial element of team building, but it's also very important for the product because there is a difference between meeting a person on a videoconference and in-person.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And then you spoke to work back to reality, you spoke about Cosmos Hub mentioned several times and of course you've been involved within the Cosmos Hub since the very beginning, almost or since the very beginning. Apologies if I underestimated that the Cosmos Hub, a role in the ecosystem has been spoken about, But I don't know how many times by many people, and it's changed over the last couple of years.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+The ideas, and especially though with Proposal 81, 82, 83 that recently were and regardless of their outcome, regardless of what we think of them, not the point. I'm curious about your personal opinion for the Cosmos Hub, especially somebody who well, it's partially your child kind of thing. So like, you know, I would like to know, what do you think is the role of the Cosmos hubs and what is your personal vision, if you can talk about it, of course, for the Cosmos Hub.
+
Denis
+Yeah, just a small correction here. I actually joined the company, I think, after a month after the launch of Cosmos Hub. So Cosmos Hub launched I think in April 2019, and I joined actually a couple of months later. So just to set the record straight, I haven't participated in the development of the original Cosmos Hub. As for Cosmos Hub as it is right now, I think it's an incredibly valuable and important project and it will hopefully forever remain a heart of the ecosystem.
+
Denis
+I think it's incredibly important to understand that it doesn't have a CEO and it doesn't have a single company behind it. It has a community of people and they're passionate. They're ready to express their opinions on very controversial questions about how it should be developed, how the how in which direction it should go. And these directions are very different from one another.
+
Denis
+Right? People have different visions. How it should expand, should it be a minimalistic hub with almost no features at all? Should it have a specific function in the Cosmos ecosystem? Should it be a blockchain for for everyone with all the features? I don't think it matters all that much. What I what I believe Cosmos Hub should be, because Cosmos is more than Cosmos Hub, and that's why I want to focus on the project that is my metaphorically child, because I want to give developers the tooling to be able to expand the cosmos, right?
+
Denis
+And experiments and not have to be confined to a single chain because that's what Cosmos is all about, right? If something doesn't work, you are free to create something that is better, that has functionality that that he want. And you don't have to ask anyone and you have to pay anyone. That's true importance for me. I like to say that Cosmos has no competitors, not because it's better, but because the goal is not to outcompete another ecosystem.
+
Denis
+It's actually to connect all the ecosystems and expand the applications of blockchains in general. So going back to Cosmos Hub, it's really up to the community. And we can I try to vote as often as possible unless I say forget or unless the issue is irrelevant. But but yeah, what I do love is the passion of people who are voting.
+
Denis
+I think Cosmos probably has Cosmos as an ecosystem, has the most active governance systems in crypto, and these governance systems are actually consequential, right? The decisions made through governance actually change the course of events, right? It's not just the forum post with thumbs up and thumbs down. It actually changes how the blockchain will be upgraded and what features it will have.
+
Denis
+And I think I just love to watch this system evolve. And that's also one more interesting aspect of Cosmos is that it was designed, but not all the bits of Cosmos were designed the way they are right now. Some things evolved, right? So we at some point we saw that there will be hubs right there. All the zones will connect to each other with hubs
+
Denis
+But that didn't happen exactly this way, right? Because this has been evolved differently. And the fact that Cosmos allows for that is incredibly powerful because you can see how the system involves and and change what you're building based on that. So maybe the hub idea and I'm not talking about Cosmos Hub specifically, I'm talking about the idea of blockchains acting as hubs.
+
Denis
+Maybe that will change as well. Maybe right now we just didn't get to a point where blockchains are hubs because they're only 50 plus blockchains. And when you have thousands and I do believe that we will have thousands and tens of thousands of blockchains, eventually the hub idea will become more important because you cannot connect all of them to each other.
+
Denis
+But what will remain unchanged, hopefully, is that people will still need the tools to expand this ecosystem. Tools might change the way people build, blockchains might change. But yeah, I really like this idea of an expanding ecosystem where you don't have a single blockchain, but rather you have a network of blockchains that you can contribute to and you don't have to ask anyone for permission.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Well, I always make notes. While I we speaking the first note when you said the word hub, I was like hubs, comma yet. And then you said, Not yet. And I was like, okay, okay, okay. So I don't have to discuss this now. Joking. This is actually something I would like to hear your opinion about because, well, you already mentioned it, but just to reflect on what you said, I just don't think that the tools are there yet.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I agree. Like the communities are not there yet. The tools are not there yet. I think that we will definitely, as those blockchains develop, like from a personal perspective, I feel like we will see those blockchains become hubs and more applications, kind of like being built on top of these blockchains rather than separate blockchains separate. But IBC enabled blockchains with other connected blockchains.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I think it will get there. I kind of have the feeling, but I'm not sure it's then. Do you then think that tribal is the worst enemy of the community that we could encounter in this case then?
+
Denis
+Well, I think every community eventually gets to a point where there are kind of coalitions and they compete with each other. I think the problem is not that these coalitions or tribes exist, but rather situations where you cannot really participate unless you belong to a tribe. Again, this what makes Cosmos different is that you can so if you have an idea of an application and you can't find a blockchain community, that would accept it, you can just do your own thing and launch your own application.
+
Denis
+So this way of kind of going around these tribes or coalitions is just building our own thing and attracting people to your own idea. And what you basically need is good idea implementation and you need to convey this message to validators. And if they are convinced and users are convinced, then you will have your own saying without having to join any tribe or coalition.
+
Denis
+If you don't want to, you can do your own thing. And that's very cool, I think.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Absolutely. I think we have exercised it so far to an extent, but one of our goals, I think, is to be the bridge between layer zero. So in this case, layer zero. So the community, not the the underlying technology, because I think that is very important because a lot of the bridges that will exist and as they get stronger, I mean, the technological bridges, these communities have to talk to each other.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+These communities have to coexist in one big ecosystem. And I'm not talking about just IBC, I'm talking about generally, you know, whether it's grand power or, I don't know, Near or IBC or whatever, they somehow have to coexist. And so some have to develop things. And this is actually a very good point to come to ignite, I think, because well, before I ask any questions, maybe you can introduce Ignite in like two words what it is, and then I can ask a couple of questions about launching communities and launching blockchains and the importance of it.
+
Denis
+Sure. So Ignite is a tool for building and launching sovereign blockchains. That's basically the shortest description I can give. But it's made up of two projects. One is the CLI that lets you build blockchains and the other one is the ignite chain which is currently under development. So the CLI was released in August of 2020 and actually three weeks after release I came up with the idea of a blockchain to launch blockchains.
+
Denis
+So we kind of started working on that pretty soon after and we demoed a proof of concept in late 2020. And for a while we've been working on chain as well. So the chain, the purpose of the chain is, is very simple. It's to coordinate launches of new blockchains. So instead of using centralized services like GitHub, you would use the CLI or web interface to publish your blockchain on Ignite.
+
Denis
+Validators will see that, and if they're interested, they will apply to become validators. And there are many interesting pieces of functionality that we added to the system, for example, incentivized test nets and you could essentially distribute your token supply to validators and users even before your chain is live, which is something you can only do by using a blockchain, which is why we built this system as an as a blockchain.
+
Denis
+So of course we're using the ignite CLI to build the ignite chain. We've announced the ignite chain and Launchpad, which is a graphical interface web interface to the Ignite chain in September, at Cosmosverse and it's already available, so it's not yet in main net phase, right? It's currently running on just a couple of servers, but soon we'll entered the testing phase.
+
Denis
+But what's important is that the functionality is and has been available for months now, so people are actively using it to launch the test nets we're getting feedback and we're iterating and making sure that the system works well for both for coordinators. So teams who are launching chain as well as validators, because those are two groups that we want to build our product for, right?
+
Denis
+Those are main audiences that we want to cater to.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Can I try to look at it, if you don't mind, from a different angle? So is the whole like I know the launch by CLI the chain are different products. I understand it just for the sake of conversation. For some stigmas, if we were to put that this one product, could you look at it as some sort of like a marketplace to launch your chain?
+
Denis
+Yes, it can be considered a marketplace. And you have two sides. One side is coordinator, so a team building a chain and they're announcing a chain on this marketplace and they're trying to attract validators and validators supply ends. They launch test nets and they get tokens in return for their participation and for their trust. So, yes, it's it's a way to match good projects with good validators, right.
+
Denis
+So if you build something, you can publish this on on Ignite and expect validators that validate for other projects in the Cosmos ecosystem to apply and become validators for your project. And the key point here is that it's for initial, it's built for sovereign blockchains because we think that this is something that is truly aligned with the Cosmos vision.
+
Denis
+So it's not an it's not a shared security story. It's it's all about empowering developers and teams to launch their sovereign chain. So once you launch from Ignite, you actually are not connected back to Ignite chain, which I think is very important because it's like commercial launchpad is a blockchain is a rocket and it takes off from the launchpad and then it travels independently.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+You said there was no connection and there are controls and independently can I ask, is there an economical connection?
+
Denis
+No. After blockchain is launched, it's no longer owe’s anything to ignite. It's not connected. But we kind of realized pretty early on that it's not about launching a single main net right rarely does a project launch a main net as the first network, right? That like that never happens. You build a project then you launch a very rough test net just for your friends and family where stuff is not working and you want to make it public, then you make a better test net and then you go through a series of test nets and that's what Ignite is built for, right?
+
Denis
+So when these test kits are launched, they do have connection to Ignite. Well, some of them, if you want to incentivize validators, Ignite keeps track of who signed which blocks straight. So if Validator was performing well and they were proposing blocks and signing blocks, they will get rewarded. So during testnet, during incentivized testing period, your testnet is connected to ignite.
+
Denis
+And that's one of the ways Ignite Token will accrue value and show you I'm not going to talk about the token, but there is an economic system behind this because Ignite is going to be an independent proof of stake blockchain. It's going to have its own token and their tokenomics system behind it.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Sure, I'm not going to ask anything questions about a token plus we don't usually do. So if you do want to mention anything else, please do one more question though about Ignite. And we are not in Citizen Cosmos. We don't like legal things, but I know that a lot of developers do find those things important. So I'm going to ask will ignite as a launchpad.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Also help teams on that side of the questions. Or is that the kind of things that the teams are? This is a building tool. You guys build the blockchain and everything else, whatever it is you do, economics, legals, I don't know, whatever it's out there, we can help with the validators, we can help with the CLI with a tool, with a chain, but that's it.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Or is it a bit more than that?
+
Denis
+Yeah, I think it's important for Ignite to also help teams build. So we started focusing on the tooling because that's what you need, that's what skills best for a team. We built a tool and literally thousands of experiment projects used it, right? We're built with the CLI and dozens of projects are in production right now thanks to the CLI
+
Denis
+But eventually I think is going to be very important for us to also support teams that want some help from the people who are experts on building blockchains. Right? So we have an accelerator program right now and you can learn more about this on the website. And we are looking into providing more help to developers and teams who want to get more from the CLI
+
Denis
+But I think building the tooling first was the right approach because we've been using the CLI for building the chain every day and that's what allowed us to improve the CLI and that's what allowed us to build the chain so much faster and iterate quicker.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Quick original blades than is. Because I know your you have timings. So three questions. Feel free to answer the sharpness up to you. Three projects. This is the first question outside of the top 20 Technologically, you're curious about.
+
Denis
+Three Pro... within the Cosmos ecosystem.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's not that easy. Come on, let me see you. Make it harder. Come on.
+
Denis
+Okay. Well, I'm still very biased towards the cosmos ecosystem.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Let's go in Cosmos.
+
Denis
+Okay, so aside from .... obviously, obviously, I think Celestia is doing great work. And again, this is not endorsement of any project purely on the technological merit. I think Celestia is doing exceptional job. They're doing roll up some Cosmos data availability layer. It's a different way of thinking about building decentralized systems. So I have huge respect to that team and their project stats are very interesting in terms of how fast they were able to implement their vision.
+
Denis
+So I have a lot of respect to this Stride team, for example, for building a liquidity solution. Liquid staking. Yeah, it's just I just really enjoy watching this project kind of develop from from 0 to 2. STATER And right now, other than that, I would say actually cosmos SDK itself. It's not a chain, but I think I just want to give props to the decentralized group of people working on these technologies that make all of this possible, right?
+
Denis
+Introduction of IBC and interchange counts and soon Interchain queries like all of this opens so many possibilities that will make it fun to build in Cosmos for years to come. So I really appreciate the work that's different companies are doing to push the state of the art forward.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Two motivational things that in your daily life help you to achieve results and to keep on building and, create and things.
+
Denis
+Well, that's an interesting question. I guess the first one is that we're building open source and decentralized systems that hopefully will outlive us, not in the way they are right now, but the fact that what we're doing is not going into some proprietary system, black box sort of thing that someone else, some for profit company will benefit from.
+
Denis
+But everything we're doing is is in the open and it's valuable and people are using it to build other cool things. And that's what's motivating for me, right? The fact that no effort is wasted, everything is invested into building this open system and we don't know what it's going to be used for. But the fact that Cosmos is so malleable, right?
+
Denis
+So so flexible and can be adapted into different use cases, like that's that keeps it interesting for me for more than three years now. And I think that's the main thing that motivates me.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I love that answer. Last one one person to follow that will help people to stay cool and happy. And it doesn't have to be developer. It could be actually a dead person that wrote the book. It doesn't have to be a social media account. Could be a GitHub page. I don't know somebody you think that you would recommend to follow.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It doesn't have to be a number one priority, but somebody that inspires you.
+
Denis
+Hmm. That's an interesting question. Well, I don't think putting like this pressure on a single person is is wise like, I don't have an idol, I don't have idols, I don't have people that I believe in unconditionally. And this changes so changes quite frequently. So if you want to know who I follow, well you can just go to Twitter dot com slash my surname and then you will see a list of people I follow right now and any changes.
+
Denis
+And I think there are bunch of smart people in this list and that's my I understand that's not exactly an answer and kind of.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It's a perfect answer. It's a perfect answer. I think I think I love them. Guests have a different way to answer the question rather than just the typical answer, because it gives a whole different perspective. But my idea is not to give the person you follow is to get your answer. So just perfect. Thank you. And then if I like I said, I know you have certain time.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+If I didn't ask something and you want to mention it, please do. Other than that, thank you very much for this conversation. But please, if I didn't ask something and you still have some minutes left, please feel free to mention it.
+
Denis
+Yeah, I guess if what I talked about was interesting for you and you want to explore more about how to build in Cosmos, you may be a developer, maybe, or not even a developer, and you want to get into this. Is it GitHub dot com slash ignite slash CLI or ignite dot com and read the documentation. It's all free and open source and we'll have it will be happy to see you on discord answer any questions we're just building the tooling for the Cosmos ecosystem and then we would love to see more people building and exploring with us now guys.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And just for everybody, all the links Denis is mentioned, it will be in the description to the episode. So if you don't catch anything, just look at the description of the episode on the website and you will find it. There Denis Thank you very, very, very much for finding the time and thank you very much for answering the questions and for clearing some things up.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Thank you.
+
Denis
+Thank you for having me.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Thanks, everybody. Bye.
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:
In this #citizencosmos podcast episode, Benjamin, co-founder of ArweaveNews, permacastapp, and decent.land, discusses various web 3 and decentralization topics. They talk about creating web 3 social media with current tools and debate the readiness of web 3 for everyone. The conversation also covers decentralized identities, merging account identities, friction in using web 3 tools, and the possibility of decentralizing everything and everyone. They further debate how to incentivize users to move to web 3 and why users should use Areweave instead of IPFS.
+
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Good space time yall in this episode of The Citizen Cosmos podcast, I'm joined by Benjamin, a.k.a. xylophonezy. He's the founder of Decent Land a Tool for Building Decentralized Communities Arweave news and Permacast podcast Storage Protocol. Along with Benjamin, we discussed storage development Dao tooling, decentralized frontend, the state of web2 and web3, and the adoption of the latter. We also spoke about interoperability and whether or not decentralization should be the end goal of everything.
+
Benjamin
+I kind of felt uncomfortable about the fact that we were like all about decentralization, price is almost like a crutch for, you know, a project that might just be an EVM fork that can't offer anything else. Having your DAO discussions on Web2 puts the transparency at risk. The incentives in Web2 are anti-user Social media is pretty much controlled by five or so companies, all of which use closed source non interoperable protocols.
+
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Before we rocket off into today's podcast. Here is a round up of the latest news from the sponsor of this episode, Cyber. Cyber Congress Dao has been primarily working on improving the Bostrom hub. Its work includes testing of the contracts, new UI features, verification, tools for online governance and polishing the Bostrom Dex protection new web front and bring in indexing of chain swaps to try Bostrom head now to over Cyb.ai.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Hi everyone. Welcome to a new episode of the Citizen Cosmos podcast. Today I have Benjamin with me, the founder of Areweave News and Decent land. I hope I pronounce them correctly. Benjamin Hi. Welcome to the show.
+
Benjamin
+Did I? Yeah, you did. Yeah, absolutely fine. Most people call it descent land, I don't know why.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I almost said Decentraland, of course, but then I was like, Nah, nah. Well,
+
Benjamin
+Yeah, that’s another one.You nailed it.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Benjamin, you know, let's get the first thing out the way. I mean, I mean, I did say produce you as the founder of Areweave news and Decent land, but please, could you elaborate a little bit on that? What do you do? What are you busy on with working on anything else you want to add and make Like a cool introduction for me and for all of the listeners, please, if you can.
+
Benjamin
+The backstory is that I kind of came into the Areweave ecosystem off of a job where I was working in like marketing and and development like so a 5050 split between the two and I sort of had met the founder of Areweave like two years before I left my day job and found Areweave news and he kind of said, Well, if you want to leave your day job, then there is an opportunity to come in like co-founder Areweave News, which somebody has already like set set a bit upon.
+
Benjamin
+So I was one of the first journalists like previous to that in my previous jobs to cover Areweave like before we had done a launch before even main net launch. And I guess Sam remembered Sam being the founder of Areweave remembered that that I’d like, you know, been involved for quite a while. And so that was like my first professional step, I guess, into the Areweave ecosystem, kind of setting up a new source which would do longform articles on on everything that had been happening in the ecosystem, started then looking at like how we can decentralize this because honestly, it was just a WordPress site that we found.
+
Benjamin
+We kind of felt uncomfortable about the fact that we were like all about decentralization, but we were actually running this off of like a, you know, super centralized, vulnerable site and we realized that, you know, there are already other Areweave based CMS is like WordPress competitors like Mirror, but so we would go after podcasting instead. So we actually decided let's like make podcasting on Areweave sort of spun out what we had built with Areweave news, partially at least like some of the teams like forked and went off to build permacast which was, you know, just a way to get your podcast onto Areweave then feed it off to
+
Benjamin
+any distribution source that you might need to like via an RSS feed, like a really pretty simple offering. During that time I was working with Darwyn, his who at the time was going through like the initial proof of concept for decent land. He originally needed somebody to that wasn't afraid of getting on the phone with VCs to raise seed money.
+
Benjamin
+And so I, I kind of came on board as like the person who will do the talking for decent land. But in all of the talking and in all of the thinking and, you know, telling VC's this and that angle, I realized, you know, I really don’t understand the product and was able to like, influence its vision and joined the CEO shortly after that, you know, found myself being able to hand Areweave news off to this like core team that we'd built over the previous like 18 months, which is now all running smoothly.
+
Benjamin
+Similar with Permacast like that has its own dedicated team and now I would say 80% of my time is focused on building out decent land, which started from a vision of how can we do decentralized social media pivoted to like, Oh, wait a minute, like decentralized social media needs, so much infrastructure needs, like DID’s it needs, you know, cross-chain stuff to verify your identity regardless of like which chain the dapp is on and all that.
+
Benjamin
+All of these kinds of pieces came. And we eventually, where we are now, sort of made this pivot to where we can be infrastructure, social infrastructure for dapps, that want social elements in them that could be like a DAO tooling thing, or it could be like, you know, an NFT marketplace or whatever like that. Like from the beginning I would say my, my focus has always been and before I even knew about Web3, like I was always upset with how centralized and walled.. got walled off.
+
Benjamin
+You know, social media was and gravitated towards like, why is this not just like an open protocol rather than, you know, permissioned thing? I didn't know that Web3 social was kind of where I was going to end up. But like looking back, it was clear that that that was where it was all like leading to.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+You mentioned a day job before. Before I go into all the other questions, what was that day job? I'm curious.
+
Benjamin
+I had a couple of roles in in early stage startups. Like I came my first role, like straight out of university. I was I worked up to at least head of marketing at a SAS company software as a service in Silicon Valley. That was like pure marketing stuff. Then I my next job was another Silicon Valley SAS company, but this time I kind of bargained in the interview that I didn't want to just be doing pure marketing because I'm I'm, I actually was really just interested in writing code and doing product side stuff.
+
Benjamin
+And so they said, well, you know, we know what you're good at, so let's like take you on at least for the marketing with possibility to, to work on, you know, development stuff that supports the marketing. Over time I kind of became the head of growth analytics implementer slash like you know, customer implementation engineer for this is a small company.
+
Benjamin
+So we, we kind of all they all did a lot of different things. But generally my role, my most recent role before I left to join the Areweave ecosystem was a growth engineer. So I would be coming up with ways that we could get the product adopted by users and then running like code experiments like as to change the front end in this way or like, do this and talk to the users like this and etc. in a way that where if I were to just have marketing skills, I wouldn't actually be able to carry those things through to the final stages.
+
Benjamin
+I was able to like, you know, come up with the idea and implement it on the front end and measure the analytics that I'd implemented as well. So that was the kind of the role that I was in that sort of workflow.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Before you, you started to do. I mean, for web projects, have you done any community management work? The reason I ask is that I noticed that a lot of the times, the journey for a lot of CEOs in Web3, especially when it comes to social media, social networking and and this is my journey was my journey as well is starting with like community management and going to CEOs and it looks like it works really well as well in a lot of cases.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+That's why I asked.
+
Benjamin
+Yeah I would actually was terrified interacting with end users. I always kept myself at a distance with it and to be honest, in a B2B SAS role, all I really had to do was it was kind of abstracted. You would interact with companies and whoever represents them. It wasn't very much a community thing and actually it was a system shock coming in to Web3 because it's entirely community.
+
Benjamin
+It's like everything's B2C, even if it's B2B, that that was really different and it made me like completely, like rethink as to as to how things work, what I was used to, which was, you know, getting adoption via maybe like SEO or like search marketing. These things are all like completely out the window. It's like, what discord is this person in and what like thing are they look into?
+
Benjamin
+Like how are they looking to farm this protocol? Right. Is like totally different.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It's really like interesting you talk about it because, I mean, I think those questions have changed like over the space of the last like ten years. But have they remained the same in terms of the community and the social aspect of field, you know, of of of blockchain? I mean, blockchain is communication, right? So, I mean, it's not a surprise that it's all built around the communities.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+But, but absolutely, like I also noticed that and I think that it's really cool though that you spoke about journalism and and everything like that, because I think that's what this industry's missing a lot is like really a place where I'm I'm not against all like, you know, content creators kind of thing. But there is a specific field in blockchain and crypto industry of content creators that seem to go kind of one way and talk about prices and stuff like that.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Instead of talking about journalism.
+
Benjamin
+Definitely. I was completely like, I just had an intuition that when we started out, we knew that that is not what it should be about, because when you've got more to talk about than price, as in like, look at this amazing piece of infrastructure that does things that has never been able to be done before. You don't really need to talk about price.
+
Benjamin
+Price is almost like a crutch for, you know, a project that might just be an EVM fork that can't offer anything else.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Absolutely. Absolutely. No, I absolutely agree. Let me go a little bit. I mean, I do have questions, but the thing is, in your intro, you said some kind of things which are noted down. And I was like, but I would like to talk about those, not about the questions I have damn I was like, Those are the cool things.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I'm really curious about them. You mentioned a decentralized social media and this is to my ears are a very touchy feely subject that I would love to ask you some questions about because I have some experience with that. I have had the personal experience in 2016 with launching a fork of Steemit, the first, the first fork of steemit the first and the only official fork of steemit because then they open source them.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And I mean the code was always open source, but the block, the initial the the genesis block wasn't MIT sorry not MIT so it wasn't open license. And then when we did, the fork it wasn't open and after we did the forum completely open. But anyways, the point, the point was to question to you and the question to you is how do you find the journey of creating the centralized social media?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Because from what I have experienced and from what I have seen over the last like, let's say ten, 11 years, that for now I internally don't have a feeling that it's possible to create with the infrastructure and the tools that are in place today. What do you think?
+
Benjamin
+MM Yeah, there's this, there's loads of different points that I mean with the infrastructure and tools part. So you see there being issues even for like lens, which is a big one. Right. They exist on Polygon, even with Polygon being as fast and cheap as it is, it still needs like this centralized relay piece in order to make it so that you don't have to sign a transaction every single time that you post something or like something more like, you know, do a micro interaction that would, you know, need blockchain confirmation.
+
Benjamin
+So from that perspective, like a lot of the existing models of Web three social are just like more of a difficult thing to do do than than to use Twitter. I think people are very conditioned to how simple their social media apps are. And so if you're trying to add something into it, which could be any level of friction and then try to push it off to a mass market, then it becomes really just too much friction to bear to switch when there is something is good out there already as Twitter.
+
Benjamin
+And so that's that's the reason why we both took an why we took an infrastructure first approach and also why we took a DAO specific approach. And so the way the way that I'm seeing a lot of Daos operating right now is that they do their communication and collaboration in Web two and their actual proposals and all of that sort of stuff in Web3.
+
Benjamin
+And I'm not going to name ecosystem names, but there are some where having your DAO discussions on Web two puts the transparency at risk. So it's actually possible for moderators to hide threads and comments. So it's possible for the trail of history to get lost and and for it to, you know just kind of become a black box when really it should have all been happening on chain in the first place.
+
Benjamin
+And so what Areweave enables is you're able to store a huge amount of data very cheaply on chain forever. That's perfect for DAO tooling. And so there is a tool on NIA called Asteroidal, which is a very typical barebones, robust Dao tooling thing, saying proposals, reaching quorum, doing token votes, all of that kind of thing so it doesn't have a conversation feature or any kind of user identity pieces to it.
+
Benjamin
+It's like, well, it addresses votes, did it execute, did it not? And so what we're trying to build a decent land is something which could hook into that, or it could hook into any other kind of down tooling piece like that, which is going to be able to provide a on chain decentralized discussion feature with identities with all kinds of different features which could tap into, you know, just the basic mechanism of a proposal to add more, I guess, reliability to it because it's on chain also to add more color to it because you can, you can discuss, etc..
+
Benjamin
+So I think that that is the niche in social that we're attacking. It's not trying to make a new Twitter, it's more trying to make infrastructure which existing dapps that need that on chain feature for their social can plug in and take advantage of.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Absolutely because like I have been also part of a of a team and I'm still as ... today as it is in Cosmos, as a validator and as an ecosystem developer. We still help that team, another team out there not building social tools or social infrastructure, and I don't want to like shill that at all. But the idea was that they have something similar to Twitter already kind of working.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+But in Web3. And that thing is not really used by people because people are terrified. I mean, it's like it's really extreme as well. It's like kind of the thing you have to use with a ledger. It's super extreme, like you have to tweet with a ledger. So like, it's cool, but it's extreme and obviously people don't go that way.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+So I absolutely understand what what what you're getting at there. I have a question for you as to before we go in a little bit deeper into all of the discussion, what is your opinion on I mean, if we were to abstract right now from from the state of Web3, right. I mean, you already already kind of been like talking about it.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+What is your opinion on the current state of the whole social infrastructure and media? I mean, obviously this is why we're here and obviously you're not happy with it, but if you can elaborate on what you really think about what's happening in the Web two world, I mean, and what's what's your opinion on all of that big, big, big subject?
+
Benjamin
+Yeah, I'd say, you know, just right now, social media is pretty much controlled by five or so companies, all of which use closed source non interoperable protocols and make a living off of locking people in and hiding information away. It's completely the antithesis of what the Internet was supposed to be. Even, you know, the original, as clunky as it is, like protocols that powered emailing at least talked to each other, at least could have data retrieved from from different, you know, user interfaces or whatever.
+
Benjamin
+Now even in the last few years, it's got worse. You know, Twitter has shut down API access, which means you can't get third party clients. I don't know whether Facebook ever had anything like that, and neither neither did the rest. I mean, Instagram has always been very locked down from the start. It's that business model, really medium that went haywire as well, prioritizing Paywalled content, making it so you can only read a few free articles a month, all of this kind of thing.
+
Benjamin
+They're realizing that if you don't want ads, which nobody wants, then you need to start locking things down, which can be a really great revenue model for some creators. but I don't think that it should apply to the whole of the Internet. What I was really interested in and didn't realize that I was kind of having web3 tendencies at this point was Mastodon came back in, I think around 2017 or something.
+
Benjamin
+I discovered it and I thought, okay, this is this is actually really amazing because it's built on the activity pub protocol, which is like this is the standard. It's a it's an app app agnostic standard. Instead of being interoperable with itself, you can create all kinds of different apps on it. So there was like Mastodon, and then there's like Ploroma, I think, which is like it's a different app with different everything, but you can still like pull Mastodon posts into it and you can vice versa.
+
Benjamin
+You can have one identity that's consistent across both it just from the ground up. It's a much more scalable and sane way of doing things. Companies want to make incompatible standards just because it benefits them, because it locks you on the platform. And so that's kind of my my take on on the whole of the Internet almost nowadays, the incentives in Web 2 are anti user and that they're making it very they're making it very difficult on purpose to to to build things which users might want.
+
Benjamin
+You know whether they want to expand, whether they want to filter the thing, make a different UI for it, even something as simple as literally making a Twitter that has a different UI is like made deliberately difficult because then that means that you could hide ads on the platform. Well then that means that you could change the algorithm in a way that might not be favorable to Twitter, HQ, etc. And you just, you know, you get get it get lost in that.
+
Benjamin
+And the apps themselves are dictators almost.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And I think end of the day, like the problem is for the content creators who are like, like myself, for example, who are curious, not curious, but because I'm not curious in Web3, I work in Web3 and for many years, but you know, for me what I realized that I still have to use like 85 to 90% of Web two tooling because either I'm sacrificing because this is what we are talking about.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Yeah, Web two is fucked. In fact, two two completely fucked. But today I have no idea how to get my message across to my target audience without using web two tools. Like it's just literally impossible in my opinion. And I've tried for years, you know, and I've put I've been put in some of the citizens of Citizen Cosmos on IPFS and retrievable and IPFS for a while.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Then I stopped and, you know, and then I use like different tools here and there. And, and I've tried and I've tried and I've tried and I've tried. But what I came to realize is that end of the day, if you today are podcast, then you're not using, you know, all your aggregators, you're not using, you know, YouTube for God's sake, I mean, or something crazy, like even even stupid, like Instagram, which I have never had Instagram in my life as a person.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+But then I realized that I have to ask my marketing team or the person who's helping with marketing to create it. It was like, Whoa, that's a shot in the head because you're really like, you sell yourself. You feel uncomfortable because you're kind of like, Hey, I'm kind of talking about this. But then, I don't know, like, what do you think about it?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Do you think it's a appropriate for projects that that try to like, let's use that scary word shilling to shill web, two use web tools? Or do you think that we should all move to Web three tomorrow? You know fuck how difficult those those products are. You know, what's what's your opinion there?
+
Benjamin
+Yeah, well, my opinion is, unfortunately, that's why the audience are it's probably where the general audience is going to be, because it's just where you expect the information to find. Like you you expect to find information on Twitter, therefore you post it. They're expecting other people will find it there I get my podcasts on Spotify. But that's also different because I don't really know whether it's podcast hosted.
+
Benjamin
+They could actually be hosted on Permacast They they could. They could indeed be secretly Web three RSS feed. are one of the last bastions of decentralization that the Internet has, everything else has been made proprietary and locked down. But but yes, I think podcasting is like it's still relatively decentralized. You know, you can you can get your content wherever.
+
Benjamin
+And so for audio, I think that the state of things is pretty good for video. I mean, there is peertube, there is Odyssey, there are these kind of very niche self-hosted or decentralized services. But really the killer is do they integrate with Web two? Do they integrate with where my audience already knows right now? I don't think that there are many people in the world, if any, where the majority of their audience knows them on Web three only.
+
Benjamin
+And that's really nothing like that is going to happen for the next decade or something. When you get your killer apps where people really can get more value, whether it's monetary or whether it's attention based value off of posting on Web three purely than on Web two. But there are lots of stuff where it's like this, you know, blends Twitter bridge.
+
Benjamin
+We do imports on Permacast so you can import all of your existing RSS feed stuff onto Palmer Cast and then switch the RSS feed URL over, So it's using something decentralized, but then it's delivered through all these different web to clients and the web to clients for now are a must have. It's just too ingrained right now.
+
Benjamin
+Like until super mass adoption end user focused things come through, then that's just the reality, I think. But it doesn't mean we can't use better infrastructure to actually hold the stuff.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+This is, this is actually like a good point about infrastructure. And you mentioned before or in my opinion, a crucial part of the infrastructure, but I seem to have a different opinion from what other people have to have. And what I wanted to ask you about is DID’s decentralized identities. Right. And I have had numerous guests on and all the guests that I have that talk about decentralized identities.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I like to ask one question and hence I would like to ask you as well, do you think that considering we're talking right now about decentralization of infrastructure a little bit, right. And we're touching on such big things, do you think that a pair of private public key could be more than enough? You have an identity and you don't really need more than that.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+You have a private key and a public key. We have cryptography. They match fantastic. We don't need anything else. Why? Or rather is. Let me ask you the question, why do we need anything beyond that? Why is there a need for a lot of infrastructure to create a bigger identity than just the private and public?
+
Benjamin
+Key Yeah, it's a great question because like for one, you've got no lack of metadata in a private public keeper, which means no universal way for a Dapp to know who you actually are. They may be know, you're wallet address, which is fine, but they maybe don't know your username, your bio, etc.. And then another thing is that private public key is, well, I imagine from the way that you're describing it, locked to one chain only we right now, at least that might be this might be funny point to make in ten years time when when things are a bit more chain agnostic.
+
Benjamin
+Right now we split our web three lives across multiple different chains. I have history and assets and identity on a whole ton of different chains. I've got my Areweave dot ar name, I've got my dot eth name, I've got I've got NFT Holdings on near my dot near name. All of these things are scattered all over the place. And if I want to, you know, use my DID even just in net in any kind of sense of the word on one of those chains, it doesn't reference my full existence on other chains.
+
Benjamin
+And that that's just a fundamental flaw. And also like an actual technical flaw, if if I were to want to do token voting with my eth crypto punk on near or if I were to want to join a guild that requires a certain amount of tokens and the guild, you know, Dapp was hosted on a chain that doesn't even know what my private public key pair means on another app.
+
Benjamin
+Right all in non interoperable again. And so I think these I've got to just a general problem with things that are not like built to be interoperable with other things like you know iPhone chargers and like that That's the stupid simple example but it's almost like what what a lot of things are and well, web3 protocols are built to be composable or at least they very much should be.
+
Benjamin
+You still got the issue of what chain is it on? Okay, it's on this chain. Well, then it's not composable with most with 90% of the world of the web three world that would be my thesis of of why it's not enough to have just that you can have a protocol on top of that. So ark protocol, which is a decent land identity attestation protocol is a way to take your Areweave private public
+
Benjamin
+Key pair just your Areweave address, and use that as the master key for all of your other things as well. So attached to my Areweave address on my near address, my Ethereum address, my address on evmos, and as such, all of my asset holdings are able to be verified back to my key on an account which actually would not be able to otherwise talk to those chains.
+
Benjamin
+So it is enough, but it does need something to resolve those, you know, that matter data. So so that can be that it can be broadcast between apps which might not otherwise be interoperable. Otherwise we kind of end up with silos everywhere again. And the reason why I said this is funny is, you know, in the in the late nineties there was like wars over which database technology things used like do you use like post-crash, do you use microalgae Cassandra or whatever it may be that is going to be as like nerdy as blockchain was.
+
Benjamin
+All right. Now, like, does it, does it matter? Like what base layer this data lives on? It might not in the future or it really might, but it depends on who wins.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I think we will see a lot more things. We don't expect when it comes to database wars and to, you know, database decisions. So to call them, I think we still have something to see that we haven't. But to go back to you to play a little bit devil's advocate, you said, you know, the problem with public and private keeper is technically not having metadata.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And, you know, like let's say I have one identity account on the Ethereum and then another one on I don't know, on Monero. They're not the same now, the question I have to you is I mean, let's go back to the iPhone Chargers and okay, don't get me started on Iphone Chargers. I personally prefer Android, but I do have one iOS device and it's really annoying because that iOS device has a separate charger.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And if I don't have the charger, then I can charge this and when I forget it, it's a pain in the ass. But but that iOS device is still a separate device that has its own existence and has its own kind of like digital soul, so to speak. And what I'm trying just to be devil's advocate, what I'm trying to say here is that like, okay, so we have all those identities on all it's like hallucinations right?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+That happen in my head. Is it real or not? Well, my brain says it's real. It says it's happened. And, well, lately, like if you look at like all the psychological studies of DSM five, you will see that it is now not considered unreal. It's considered real. Now, those things, because, hey, they happened, the person experienced them. So being devil's advocate, my question is, well, all those separate silos and all those separate accounts and all those separate chains, well, they are real aren’t they
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Even if they're run by the same person, they have an identity, they do something. Why cannot they be considered real? Why do they have to be combined into one account? Why does it have to be one identity that says, those are all my accounts? Why cannot those accounts exist as separate organisms?
+
Benjamin
+Mm hmm. No, they for sure can. And in a way where I have four different transfer accounts in a in a way where I would want that to be the case, even that totally makes sense. But in a case where you have a niche chain, like here is already a concrete example as to as to why this maybe doesn't need to go as philosophical
+
Benjamin
+as that because it already has technical need to exist? So an example is there is a nifty collection on Aurora, which is a EVM. I guess it's I guess it's an EVM like EVM compatible contract. It lives on the near blockchain and there's those can actually talk to each other apart from on a really low level. So if I own a NFT on Aurora near doesn't know that I own that and it can't know.
+
Benjamin
+And so the Dao tooling on near is unable to take my Aurora NFT and use it as a membership criteria for this Dao. So now if I decide right, well I want to associate my near account with my Aurora EVM address so that I can use this token as a as an access pass to this Dao on near, then I can using something like that.
+
Benjamin
+Now obviously the choice is up to the user as to whether they decide to attest that they own this. But it has. Yeah, definitely has, you know, technical underpinnings rather than this sort of idea that you sort of like maybe identity separation or something like that, that that's completely valid as well. And I agree with that. It's like it's all up to the users choice.
+
Benjamin
+Like we don't use this to detect who you are between chains, where you use it to facilitate somebody wanting to attest to who they are.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Absolutely. I love I love the bird sounds, by the way. No, no, no. This is I really do. I like I like. Is that is it like are you to someone next to nature? This is like a serious questions. This is not a joke question. I thought it was a bird of birds.
+
Benjamin
+They all it's I'm signed my my garden and loved animals in the.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Desert It's lovely but it's lovely but it's lovely. It's a question that I have. I have to you the next question is and this is something you mentioned and in Cosmos, in my opinion, this is a very big discussion considering Cosmos is all about interoperability and about function and interoperability, which is a big surprise, I think, to everybody, even to to everybody who was following Cosmos for years when it started work.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And I was like, Oh my God, it actually does work. Really. Look, to go to detail.
+
Benjamin
+Of my my Cosmos history is patchy.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+We can talk in detail on that. But before we do, like you mentioned something really cool there, which in my opinion is really important and relevant to Cosmos today. And I'm sure that everybody who is Cosmos cosmonaut and listening to us will will relate to that. You mentioned governance threads and you mentioned projects that use and this is, in my opinion, atrocious in my opinion to be able to use sorry to not to be able, but to still use things like.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+But anyway, let me ask the question and then you voice their opinion because I really want to understand what you think about this. So we spoke about, you know, the difficulty of using Web three tools when, you know, Web two kind of offers you much easier solution. But at the same time, you know, well, we want to target the audience, which is on web, too.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+So that's why we use in Web two still. So the governance is kind of in a way the same, but it's not because those users are already aware of Web three tools. They're already aware of what onchain discussion can look like. And in Cosmos, that exists the most I mean, any blockchain, you can create an easy on chain discussion.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It's not very difficult at all today. And still people keep on not just using forums and and other tools to to discuss governance, but they insist on that. In fact, I've seen chains making proposals like on chain proposal to say, let's go and use this web two to discuss our governance. And if you don't use it, we will not consider you part of our community.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And you're like, What the hell are you doing guys? Like, can't you see that this is really like a step backwards? And this is my this is I know I'm kind of like being loud and opinionated about this right now. And I guess I have been a little bit today. But still, what's your opinion of that? Is that in your opinion, okay, in order to get people who cannot use Web three, but it's a bit strange because.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Well, they already are Web three users, Right. So what's your opinion here?
+
Benjamin
+It's yeah, I think I think we might be in a strange transitory period where early software developers in the seventies making operating systems that and they enforce that things needs to be sent over mail right and put this to me in writing that there were very much like you know, the magazines are like Linux zines with things. It wasn't all done online immediately.
+
Benjamin
+And I would say it's probably just this adoption barrier of, you know, what we want to get like so the incentives of the thing. So we want to get people involved in this forum. We want them to engage in it as much as possible. So let's here's the easiest thing with the least friction so that we will get the highest turnout on this proposal that so we'll get the best user engagement.
+
Benjamin
+It purely to me speaks to the fact that these Web three tools are not ready yet to take on like an to basically be an analog to these to the web three solutions. It might be anything from slow UX to it costs me a few pennies to post my comment, whereas it would cost me nothing otherwise. One possible solution is the exact opposite of what you mentioned, where instead maybe protocols should enforce that things are done on chain instead of trying to get people off chain onto web.
+
Benjamin
+Two things. It might just be a matter of like the leadership needs to take a stance of like, let's get this on chain just the same way they took a ... took a stance to say, let's get this off chain. But yeah.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Absolutely.
+
Benjamin
+It's kind of my my diagnosis of it.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I think it's a person I definitely go I mean I mean, there was the whole Ava talk right on Ethereum recently about the centralized frontend and yeah I'm absolutely all for it I think that.
+
Benjamin
+Yeah, me too.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Them.
+
Benjamin
+Me too. Having that, that's really all, all I can say is, is it should be done in a way where the data is able to be pulled into any frontend. It's it all kind of comes back to these shared publicly accessible protocols rather than you know, having some some tool own the data on a database somewhere.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+We kind of like a little bit harsh, I guess, about the centralization in the last like 40 minutes. Do you think that decentralization is a spectrum or in. I don't know, in ten years time everybody must be decentralized? Or is that even a decentralized thing to say that everybody should be decentralized? I mean, what's your take on that?
+
Benjamin
+Yeah, no, it's a good question. I think it's again, sort of like having to look at the incentives of the thing. So I'm not sure, you know, if you're if you're a corrupt Dao, you might want to be able to hide people's comments in the forums. But you know, in general there's a huge necessity, decentralized finance stuff, you know, that's why that blossomed so early.
+
Benjamin
+You know, there was there was nothing like it previous to that. I mean, there is there is social media still. And the fact that it's decentralized is almost hidden from the user. There's no obvious benefit. It's not like now now I don't have to go through a bank to do my things. Now I can just like do it with a wallet on my laptop.
+
Benjamin
+I could go on Twitter, on my laptop, or I could go on a decentralized social media thing on my laptop. So it's sort of like the incentives of people, people maybe aren't quite there yet, like in there on the on the adoption curve in order to like fully see the benefit of like my history lives forever. I'm on chain.
+
Benjamin
+Or this is as transparent as it possibly could be with no tampering able to happen, etc.. Yeah. So I mean, I think there's still going to be stuff that's that's that is centralized. Probably always like I imagine just for like legal reasons, stuff like Spotify and Netflix may well always be just because you can't have that content, you know, publicly available because it's a copyright infringement.
+
Benjamin
+But you know, there are some arenas of the Internet that could be far more decentralized than they are and should be.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I have one question. You mentioned the word incentives several times. I'm one of those people who believes that incentives are kind of in built into the you know, we have the rewards cycle. And if you don't have the rewards cycle, you'll be just in a mobile, you will be a plant. So it's kind of been built into us.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And I think one of the biggest issues that I told you, I was part of a team as early as 2015/16 to launch decentralized social network and experiment sorry. And the biggest issue in my opinion, and I had the biggest issue in my opinion to till today with social networks is the economical and incentive side. How do you guys solve that?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+What's your approach on that matter in terms of economy behind all that and incentives?
+
Benjamin
+Yeah. So as far the actual is the as well. Okay. So for permacast, I can, I can give you a straight answer for decent land not so much so for Comcast, what we do is we do a system where the amount that you spend uploading on an episode is dropped back to you. In our native token relative to the amount that you spend.
+
Benjamin
+So it is possible to earn back either the same less or more depending on the token price at launch. Then you upload it. That is one of the incentives essentially earn to decentralize, earn to earn to upload. But then also we plan on further than that having token economy basically within that where if you buy somebody NFT episode using these tokens that you get from uploading, then it could be something like you get access to like a private feed of that podcast or something like that.
+
Benjamin
+And so that kind of gives you an economy in there. Now, decent land is definitely more difficult because you want you don't want is people doing incredibly low cost actions repeatedly and just basically farming the protocol in order to get tokens out of it, it has to be based on quality. And so I'd say that's an unsolved question right now.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Rather worry about it.
+
Benjamin
+Yeah. One incentive that we have for decent land is actually ANS which is Areweave named services dot AR domains. So you know I'm sure you're familiar with dot eth domains they expire and they really need the incentive to hold them is because you hope to sell them at a later time. Now what we have with ANS is a different kind of incentive mechanism.
+
Benjamin
+So say I meant Benjamin Dot AR that is then written into the blockchain that I own this particular string of characters. Somebody comes along and mints like Benjamin one or Ben or Jamal or any of these these puts plots, sort of some strings within it apart a portion of the minting fee would be attributable back to the original owner of that substring based on, you know, how close of a match they are.
+
Benjamin
+So you're incentivized to hold your username in order to accrue these percentages of minting fees back off of of of new mints as well. So this is this is kind of identity incentives rather than social incentives the way we're talking about here on the on the social incentive side. Now actually what we've what we've realized we've more created is almost like a disincentive for bad behavior, like slashing around the social things.
+
Benjamin
+So on the social model in decent land, it's possible to create a token gated community, but where you would need to own a particular NFT from a collection, maybe even filtered by traits in order to get into this community on decent land. But to be a moderator of that community, you would need to be staking tokens on that community's contract in order to continue being able to moderate it and to keep it open.
+
Benjamin
+And so what this creates a disincentive from kind of like rash hand of God Reddit style moderation that could actually help, you know, keep more of a balance in these decentralized communities. Because, you know, I referenced Reddit. The moderators are able to, you know, basically run wild with that power. The same with Twitter. You can get suspended and you have no recourse.
+
Benjamin
+Say enough people get enough, people get suspended from particular decent land community, they have recourse to be able to vote to slash that moderator and reshuffle the governance and take a vote as to who should actually be the moderator. And so there's kind of a built in rebellion mechanism for these for these kinds of communities. Now, as the actual incentive to do that, I mean, we hope that is that you can use the tooling rather than say that you can get money.
+
Benjamin
+And yeah, I mean, obviously there's still more thinking to be going to be to be gone into that. But that is one of the cool things that we'll be the as far as like the token economics of it from.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+A perspective of a person who has been around it for the last like several, much more years, I think you're on the right track. I think that the things I'm surprised, the things that you're saying, for example, you know, NFT episodes or you know moderator tokens, this is things that in my opinion are like make common sense.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And I'm surprised that I haven't seen those implemented on a big scale yet. I'm really I'm like, it's just makes perfect sense in my opinion, what you say. So, Benjamin, there is one more small thing I want to ask you about before I go into the Blitz, which was about storage and ipfs and Areweave. And my question is why Areweave and why not IPFS?
+
Benjamin
+Yeah, sure. So as we know, IPFS is free and that makes it a pretty attractive option for many, many use cases. But I don't know whether many people do now. But it's not. There's no incentives for the for the hosts to keep it around. It's almost like you're asking a stranger and holding them on trust that they're going to keep your files.
+
Benjamin
+The incentives, again, are very important and there is essentially for IPFS, I believe, no incentives In the case of all we've what we have is a 200 year guarantee of data availability based on the amount of people who are currently mining AR people who are mining AR token. They have these huge rigs with multiple terabytes of space.
+
Benjamin
+They store, you know, the whole blockchain multiple times on their machines and they are incentivized to be able to quickly provide the piece of data that you want when you ask them for it, when you pay for storage on Areweave you slightly overpay and and the slight overpay goes into a wallet called the endowment fund and the endowment fund where I get 200 years from is that if nobody ever uploaded anything to all we've ever again, there would be enough money to incentivize miners to keep mining for 200 years, at least at all times.
+
Benjamin
+Now, that was the figure from a while ago. I've heard 500 years, 1000 years now, Areweave, keeps growing. So essentially what it creates is a, you know, cryptic cryptographic assurance that that your data is going to be there. Right now, we have, I think, between the hundreds and thousands of nodes, which all all store multiple copies of Areweave blockchain and are incentivized to do so monetarily.
+
Benjamin
+And even if they were to stop receiving rewards from blocks because the blocks are all empty, they would still receive rewards from the endowment for many, many, many years to come. So that's that's why I find Areweave to be extremely robust and waterproof. It's like if you were to have an incentive layer on top of torrenting that would keep people seeding because it's keeping is making them money.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I see. I see. Makes sense in that case. I guess I mean, I have questions like when you say 200 years, you know, when you say the amount of money there is, it's an AR token. And what would be the cost of AR token in 200 years? But I guess that is very speculative and we can discuss this for a long time.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And of course, you could change whatever currency you keep in that in. So I guess it's it's kind of makes sense. Let me, if you don't mind, like going to the Blitz too, too quickly, ask a three questions. Feel free to answer them short and quick like a blitz or feel free to open the answers up and go into detail.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+So the first one is could you give me three projects outside of the top 20, preferably that you are interested in What they are developing and currently and working on.
+
Benjamin
+Outside of the top 20 are? I don't keep up with with rankings. I think I think around the 30 mark Areweave round around 70 at this point. I'm quite interested in in Ton the telegram network because it's got this built in web two identity link to your telegram username which which which we find to be an interesting part of identity.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I've already seen projects. One of the projects I was talking about today, I was actually I was in purchase identity link. It's interesting. I think you guys might have crossings that are give me to add two things that motivate you to keep on doing what you do in daily life.
+
Benjamin
+My my family very much. And generally the goal of turning things into a protocol rather than a walled garden.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+That is actually very cool answer I like that. The last one person that you think that for anybody who will, if it's a book, they will read it or if it's somebody they will follow, that they will benefit in their daily life and will help them to be more concentrated, motivated, more successful in whatever it is they do.
+
Benjamin
+Okay, Got it. Yeah, I think there's a book, The Cathedral and the Bazaar. It is a book, I can’t remember who's by first names, Raymond? It's a book written, I think maybe 20 years ago, maybe even older about open source software being having inherent virtues. I suppose it would almost be said against closed source. The idea basically being that when you are there's a great quote from it, something like with enough eyes on the problem, all books are shallow.
+
Benjamin
+I'm essentially talking about how that once you open source something, once you get the community's eyes on it, problems are basically the solutions to problems that become decentralized. And the problem is one that can be decentralized almost. When you take it out of the corporate sphere, the whole thing is kind of talking the cathedral being something like Microsoft Windows, this huge proprietary, impenetrable black box of binary verses, the bazaar, the free trade market of different pieces of software, different components here and there, each of which are, you know, adopted and used.
+
Benjamin
+And they have got a lot of eyes on the code themselves, which means, you know, you can you can more easily debug them, you can more easily reuse them, etc.. I think that book has been like one of the most influential. My thinking.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I love it. I love it. I absolutely will definitely find it and definitely included to the podcast notes for sure. Benjamin Is there anything else I didn't ask you that you would like to mention?
+
Benjamin
+I don't think so. I feel like we had a really good, freeform, wide ranging conversation that's pretty much covered everything that's been on my mind lately as well. So nice job.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Cool. I like hearing that. Thank you, by the way. And thank you for your time, of course. And thank you for joining us. Thank you. Everybody else who's listened to the episode and tuned in. Thank you very much.
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:
In this episode, Citizen Cosmos has a conversation Pedro Gomez, co-founder of Wallet Connect about his journey starting in traditional FinTech and how regulators and a hackathon helped to being him to where he is now. As always, the devil's advocate has some great questions around, safety and privacy that always raises it's head in Web 3 conversations. Pedro has some wonderful insights into what he hopes the future will be. The conversation spans a wide range of topics, including physics, sociology, economics, motivation and Web 3. Pedro also gives a run down of what we can expect at WalletCon, you will not want to miss it.
+
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Good space time, y'all. In this episode in the Citizen Cosmos podcast, I spoke to Pedro Gomez, the co-founder of Wallet Connect, a web wallet and a communication protocol. Along with Pedro, we discussed the dark side of fintech connections between physics sociology and Web 3 and what can be considered as a crypto wallet. We also spoke about account abstraction, developers, responsibility decentralization spectrum and adoption of Web3.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+At the end of the day, this is communication tools, and if the communities will not communicate, there will be nothing. I think semantics does definitely play a huge role in understanding to everything.
+
Pedro
+An address on the blockchain is a reference to a blockchain account, and a blockchain account itself is not even a wallet. When you have money in a bank account, you don't technically on it. You have a contract with the bank.
+
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Hi everybody. Welcome to a new episode of Citizen Cosmos podcast. Today I have Pedro Gomez with me today, the founder of Wallet Connect. Pedro, Hi.
+
Pedro
+Thank you. Thank you for having me. Hi. How are you doing?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I'm very good, man. I'm glad for having you because even though you know, not everybody knows yet about wallet connect, I think that it's been, in my opinion, very under the radar for some time. In my opinion, it should be. It's not everybody knows about it, but it should be. A lot more known And I think my goal here today is not that is to get to know you, of course.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+But I think by getting to know you and the audience, getting to know you and the listeners and everybody else, we can get to know Wallet Connect more as well. So if my first thing to you, just introduce yourself. Tell us about everything you do. What are you working on? What are you interested in? Everything you want.
+
Pedro
+Yeah. I mean, like, wallet connect and me are kind of one in the same, and it's been like that for quite a while. I mean, I started, like, programing into, like, online shops and e-commerce, that was kind of the first thing that got my hands into writing JavaScript. But then one of the things that interested me the most was actually payments, because once you actually complete the order, you have like this whole process with like Stripe credit cards and like PayPal.
+
Pedro
+And that started getting me really interested. And at the time I was living in London, so I applied to like this very neobank at the time and there was like kind of targeting a youth audience. So when I joined them, it was really cool because you had this experience of what it was like to work in the finance industry or fintech, as they call it, but it also kind of like revealed a lot of the dark side of it.
+
Pedro
+And I think that's really what brought me into crypto. I actually did a I had heard of Bitcoin, but I didn't really pay much attention. I got to just like, Oh, internet money cool by and I didn't pay attention for it for a long time. And then I joined FinTech and I was like, Damn, this could really use some change.
+
Pedro
+And I was working on it and it was really annoying to kind of like build features in them that have the regulators essentially cool it down to like basically nothing. And all of the innovation was like dead There was like nothing you could do. So in 2016 and I heard about Ethereum and I was like, Oh, smart contracts, this is this completely different than Bitcoin?
+
Pedro
+Like, this is actually something you could do, something you can build like savings accounts. You could build like people like sharing expenses and everything. You could create some interesting financial products. But for me, the personal banking was always the most important thing. That's why I started working in wallets. And in 2017, I went on full time into crypto and I was just trying to build the wallet.
+
Pedro
+I actually joined the project back in the day. That was called Balance. It's no longer around, but Balance was trying to build both a portfolio manager and a wallet, and we ended up having this issue very early on of like, Hey, how do I connect my wallet? Then everything was Metamask Metamask here, Metamask there. And it was essentially saying, Oh, the normal user is just going to go into your desktop and download the Chrome extension into the Chrome browser, and this is Web3.
+
Pedro
+And it was quite a disappointing because I didn't really see that taking off. If you think about the Internet, one of the most successful applications on earth is Instagram. And Instagram was a mobile only application from the very start. They didn't even have a browser app for a long time. So if you didn't make the experience mobile I thought Web 2 didn’t stand a chance.
+
Pedro
+So I essentially designed Wallet connect as a protocol for that. I was lucky at the time, back in 2018 when I started working on Wallet connect to get a grant from the ... Foundation, and that's when I went solo to build a project. And yeah, the good thing about Web 3 is that there's a lot of support for open source, so I was able to focus on it for a long, long time.
+
Pedro
+And then in 2021, that's when I took it to the next level and we raised our seed round, then turn it into a company. We went from 1 to 2 to 10 to 25 and now we're 25 people working on this. And it's such a huge project. And I kind of skipped one of the most important parts, which was was when I started getting into Cosmos, because I actually in 2019 was spending some time in Berlin.
+
Pedro
+And in Berlin I had some tendermint people in the office because I was working at the full node and they told me about the Cosmos hackathon that was happening and I was like, Damn, this is interesting. Let's let's do something that not Ethereum Let's, let's go to the Cosmos hackathon and work on it. And I, I kid you not like I got lucky getting the team.
+
Pedro
+I got the winning team. All I did was like, build the cosmos wallet and a front end interface for that Dapp you will not believe. The winning team was the one who designed CosmWasm which is now such a huge project, and that was like damn. I was in the same room with that hackathon project, so I'm really glad to have met all those folks who built that and they've done something so impressive with CosmWasm
+
Pedro
+But what I liked about this hackathon is kind of like open my mind of what blockchain should be like. It's so different, though. The Ethereum ecosystem, and I have to say that, like, it inspired a lot of my work for the walletconnect version 2 today. Like bridging from Ethereum to Cosmos was probably what made Wallet Connect version one, go to version two.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+So just for the record, I am a decentralization Maxi So the name is Citizen Cosmos. We have the podcast. Yeah, but we cover Ethereum ecosystem and our goal is to bridge the layer zero, the community and our, you know, I mean, we can go and build all the tools we want, but at the end of the day, this is communication tools.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And if the communities will not communicate, there will be nothing to do. So is this for the record? And by the way, what fascinates me, the reason I was smiling all this time was you would like telling your geography like London, Madeira Full Node. 2019. And I was like, Why don't we know each other? Like, what the fuck, man?
+
Pedro
+Like, it was a huge coincidence.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I was there in full node in 2019 before we started to record this Lisbon and then. Now what's going on, man? It's this fascinating.
+
Pedro
+I don't know. Like even the. The lead investor for Wallet connect was based in full node, and we didn't know each other when I was at full Node. Yes. And then we just, like, ended up they ended up investing in Wallet Connect in 2021 and there was like, Oh, you were in the office in 20 2019, so were we.
+
Pedro
+And then that.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Laugh
+
Pedro
+We didn’t even know each other
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Hilarious hilarious man, Hilarious I recorded my our first episode in Full Node actually the first ever episode of Citizen Cosmos three years ago was recorded in full Node. There was nobody there. It was dead. But and the episode has really bad sound because we took one of the glass rooms with like, Yeah, it was this, this like not working.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+A very well. Pedro Before I go into all my favorite stories, because you mentioned Cosmwasm as well, and Cosmwasm is like one of my favorite and let's not go there. So lets taks about you and wallets And before we get to wallets though, before we talk about wallets and what does it mean for you and what does it mean for the industry?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I have actually some personal questions, and one of them is physics. I know you studied physics, and physics for me is again, a very, very kind of topic. I'm all my life evolves a lot around that. And I'm curious is if you see connections between the world of physics and between the world that you were trying to build in Web3 I'm purposefully not put in any specific questions.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I want to ask you that very vaguely and see your opinion if it's possible.
+
Pedro
+I haven't talked about physics in so long. It's quite the refreshing topic. Like I have to say, I forgot most of it, but one of the fields that I was like mostly interested was the electromagnetic fields and lights and optics, because I think that you could draw so many interesting parallels between like sociology and psychology with electromagnet fields because electromagnetic fields, essentially you could sense that like if you have a bunch of nodes in the same frequency, they will eventually create a higher intensity field, and that would influence a much bigger field.
+
Pedro
+And you could essentially learn about this electromagnetic just in general and understand sociology in general. Like for me, I learned more about sociology through physics than reading about sociology. And I think sociology is one of the most important topics because we always talk about economics, And economics definitely drives a lot of the incentives for people. But as human beings, we're extremely social, and a lot of things that we do are not financially rational.
+
Pedro
+So finance and sociology is what makes economics. But I would say that sociology makes more out of economics than even finance itself. Finance is just a number in economics.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Can you move back to Madera? So I have someone to go to coffee with and have a conversation with. Like it doesn't work like that man and like I need to. Yeah. Yeah. The listeners sorry, the audience. And so Pedro originally is from Madeira, where I live now, and Madeira is a very small place and definitely the I don't want to pull the quilt but just to, you know, to just say that out loud, that the unfortunately the players in the, in the web3 industry that Madeira has attracted haven't been the most was the right word.
+
Pedro
+Not builders.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Not.
+
Pedro
+Developers of buildings.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Yes not that yes I love I like it. I like we are on the same page.
+
Pedro
+Yes. And same frequency.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Even better same frequency. I love it, Pedro. And so the thing is, was physics is fascinating. I mean, I have personally, I think, not just in my interviews, but over the course of the last like ten years working with blockchains, the amount of people who I met that come from the physics, the chemistry world, the biology world, go into blockchain and then see all those connections where, you know, there is a lot, there is really, really, really a lot of things.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And it's fascinating that you are seeing that as well. I really like that.
+
Pedro
+Yeah. I would say like what's interesting about blockchain is because of its decentralized and permissionless nature, it's not just decentralized because to some extent Google is decentralized. Google is a massive organization that has data centers all over the world that keeps the Internet's running, but it's not a permissionless open system. So if you make it that decentralized, open and permissionless system, what you end up having is that you have a virtual or digital world that actually acts like a natural world.
+
Pedro
+So you can actually immolate the rules of physics and biology and sociology in the actual digital world. And that's what makes this technology so impressive. Why I came to blockchain because of finance, because I was working fintech. But this has a much, much bigger impact than that. And I would say like one of the my biggest interests today is decentralized identity and how that's actually going to influence daos and organizations in the future.
+
Pedro
+So I think that it's really natural that we see all of these different academia people getting attracted to what it would look like, not just simulate, but actually putting in practice all of these models and theories that they have been working on for so long.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Absolutely. And, you know, just again, for the record, for the audience there, and especially today, because we have a few people in the audience who are asking questions and I will ask them at the end. But we have another recording tomorrow with a very cool academic guy, and there is a lot there that could be like the dark side that academia sometimes would bring that.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+But there is a lot there that we can, I think, explore and and then definitely put in and I will have some questions with you about DID’s But first, I have a question for you about wallets. And this is not going to be a question, but rather a comment on which I would love to hear your thoughts.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And so here is the thing. Long story short, I was talking was it two days ago to somebody about wallets and about blockchain? And this is a person not from this world. And I was trying to explain and yet again, like I've happened over the last seven, eight, ten years, you come to the point of a wallet and blockchain isn't really a wallet because, well, you don't really have a wallet.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+You interacted with a database where you have 24 words and that's your access and it's what does a wallet mean for you? What is a wallet for you? A For a person who is definitely built today one of the two or three biggest like open source Web three related because not all of the Web three three big ones are Web three, in my opinion, if you first says so, what's your opinion on wallets?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+What is it for the industry and what is a wallet essentially in the blockchain world for you?
+
Pedro
+I love this question because there's always a lot of misunderstanding. I really does. Like when I see people online saying, Oh, this user has this wallet, and then they what I actually refers to some address on the blockchain. An address on the blockchain is a reference to a blockchain account, and a blockchain account itself is not even a wallet.
+
Pedro
+The wallet is actually the software or even hardware that actually manages the keys that control different accounts. So at the end of the day, what wallets are are key managers. And then these key managers have logic associated that control accounts. So you could even go to the most basic scenario, which is the seed phrases, which is the most common, I would say is like 95 or even higher percent of what wallets are today is essentially the seed phrase is just a form of you recovering the wallet.
+
Pedro
+And the wallet will be instantiated as a form of software that manages multiple keys. And for each corresponding key, you have an account. And then those accounts are referenced in a specific blockchain as an address. But then the same accounts could actually mean something different in another blockchain. Therefore it gets a different address. And this is a little bit more confusing when it comes to Etherum because Ethereum created this pattern where the same account does reference with the same address in all the blockchains, and we've done some standardization around this to kind of solve this problem.
+
Pedro
+And it's very confusing because people kind of just assume, Oh, it's all the same, but it's not because if you have one key in one chain that gives you a different account than the the same key on a different chain. So essentially you have two accounts and one key. And then people kind of get confused with all of this semantics.
+
Pedro
+And that's like, which one is the wallet? While the wallet is the control of the keys that give you access to accounts and all of these blockchains. And then the addresses are just way for people to Identify as public information of which account is yours.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I think semantics does definitely play a huge role in understanding to everything, and especially with wallets. We've seen that for sure, mix people up completely, right? Yeah. Okay. Back again to wallets though. What do you think about when you kind of really started to speak about it? And I'm still, though, like in a more open and detailed way.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+What's your opinion today on I don't want to name specific projects, but there are a lot of projects out there posing as Web3, and a lot of those projects are wallets or some kind of infrastructure for Web3 which are under the hood unfortunately don't really well, they're shit. So there's just like, say, like that, Yeah. What's your opinion on all of that and how can we move the industry forwards?
+
Pedro
+Well, I think the way that Wall connect tries to move the industry forward is to lower the barrier of entry for wallets by being a company that builds open source software. What we're doing is we're democratizing the access of developers to build better experiences because I think that given the open and permissionless nature of blockchain, it's inevitable there will be thousands of.
+
Pedro
+Wallets. Like right now, on Wallet connect alone, there's 200 wallets that's supported. I expect this number to go ten times more in the next 3 to 5 years. And this is actually a good thing, not a bad thing, because everyone will have a very different experience of how they manage their keys. And at the end of the day, what makes a good wallet?
+
Pedro
+It's how they manage their keys. So if there's a project out there claiming to be a wallet and you do not have control over your keys, then it's not a wallet like it does not fulfill the promise of a wallet. It's a bank account. And the analogies are very clear in the traditional financial world because in your wallet you have cash.
+
Pedro
+Cash which you control as a bearer asset that it's yours because you own it. While when you have money in a bank account, you don't technically own it, you have a contract with the bank to potentially give you back. And now there's regulations that protect you so that banks can steal from you. So the definition of a wallet should be that those funds or those assets are in a 100% control of yours.
+
Pedro
+So a wallet must fulfill this premise. So if you have something like custodial, like at Coinbase account a Binance account, a kraken account, or a Gemini account, these are not wallets because they control the keys. But if there's a wallet out there that gives you a seed phrase or even gives you control over a smart contract wallet, or they have some form of authentication where you control the shards of a multi-party computation, those are wallets because at the end of the day, the user has the control of what this key does that what a wallet definition should be.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I think for anyone out there who has ever came into contact with trying to launch crypto project, a blockchain project, especially an open source blockchain projects, and I'm not talking about infrastructure, I'm talking about like, you know, blockchains. I think it is quite not obvious, but it is a very big obstacle signers and wallets. It's a huge, huge obstacle.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+If you want to keep open source, if you really want to keep Web 3, it's a pain in the ass, you know. What's your advice for startups out there that are trying to today to build Web3 open, verifiable blockchains and are looking for a good place to onboard users with signers and wallets and whatnot? Whatever. What's your advice to those teams?
+
Pedro
+Yeah, so I think that is something that I always followed was there's so many new blockchain, like not just like blockchains as and they spin up like a new Ethereum chain or Solana or Cosmos, but like they actually build a brand new ecosystem from scratch because they're trying to innovate into something different. They don't want to build on the same building blocks as the existing blockchains.
+
Pedro
+What they have always missed is the actual user experience, and we don't need to create a dedicated blockchain to change the user experience. But there are certain primitives that should kind of just become the default for new blockchains. And one of the things that has been taught for so many years, like Vitalik, has been talking about account abstraction as this concept.
+
Pedro
+And now we have matured to a point where we understand what Account abstraction means. We actually have standards for it. We just have to implement it. But I'm surprised there isn't a blockchain out there that just started from the get go with the account abstraction built into the protocol, because if you had account abstraction built into the protocol, that would mean that like a lot of the wallet design would have completely change.
+
Pedro
+You don't need to kind of like find all of these alternative solutions that go around to make the wallet experience easier because the protocol would support it. So having account abstraction support at the protocol level for a new blockchain would be my best advice I could give, because you would have what it takes to onboard the next million users which current blockchains don't have.
+
Pedro
+And I think that's something that it's still unexplored. And I would like to see it like being more developed by now. So for me, the biggest ask for like new blockchains and I mean like completely new blockchain, that's not just another cosmos based blockchain or a like an Ethereum based blockchain is that they would build into the actual protocol some form of account abstraction.
+
Pedro
+And as I said, the like, I was quite surprised to see that account abstraction has been talked about for like years. It's not something as a new concept, in fact it's been for long. So for that long that there are standards, there are implementations today about accountable traction, but having it built into the actual blockchain would completely change because a lot of the things that we see today are regarding NPC wallets, like kind of building shards of keys or even smart contract wallets, which has delegates, keys.
+
Pedro
+This could all be like first class citizen into the actual blockchain because it shouldn't be something that we hack away around the blockchain. The blockchain itself should already come with this pre-built in there would completely change how wallets function and it doesn't even change how wall connect with function is just like makes key management significantly easier because it's only hard because the blockchain kind of just took a step aside and said, Oh, I don't care about key management.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Do you think that's a responsibility? Because key management is a lot about responsibility, right? And I understand what you're saying, which of course helps adoption and it helps onboarding and it helps solves a lot of problems. On the other hand, if we starting to take responsibility again, are we not getting back to the point where we came from, where we take too much responsibility and then the user is kind of left of hoping that, well, they will do the blockchain will do everything for me?
+
Pedro
+Well, I think it's more about like creating enough primitives into the blockchain that makes like the wallet design much easier. At the end of the day, the purpose of wallet design is to make key management secure and easy and trying to balance those two together. But a lot of the things are kind of impossible or just limited by the actual blockchain design, like something as simple as delegates.
+
Pedro
+Keys like delegate keys is something that should kind of just come out of the box. But what has been done today with smart contracts is that you essentially build an application and now you immolate the experience or what an account would look like directly from a key. But now you have the application, which is the smart contract owning your assets, and then you have like multiple keys that actually can control those assets.
+
Pedro
+Why is this not just built into the actual protocol, like you would make so much more sense that you can have multiple keys controlling the account and you have some form of registered method where you can add new keys. This is like pretty standard like everywhere in the internet, but then blockchains kind of just oversee that and then really take care of it, I.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Believe Bitshares was well Grafanna right and and Steemit I believe had some solutions to that. And of course I remember like launching a fork of this in 16. And I remember you had we had four or five sets I think it was four sets of keys active key. Then the master key. And, and I think we're coming back to it now.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I've seen a lot of that and this is how I guess slowly moving to the DID topic, right? Yeah. Let's go with the question. I go with everybody who loves the DIDs and I love to hear opinions on this. And again, this is a bit of a devil's advocate question, but it's a question that, in my opinion, should be answered.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+So I'm the kind of person and I think a lot of people are out there can see that sometimes over complications, create certain necessities. And, you know, the most simple example of the DID is a private and a public key, right? We have a private and a public key. Why on earth? And this is a question, do we need anything beyond that to identify anyone?
+
Pedro
+Well, I guess the problem is how you actually associate data to that private key and public key. I think one of the things that kind of took DID in the wrong direction was they wanted to have as many entities and organizations involved into the project, and then everyone that was involved was kind of unwilling to coordinate like some standards and best practices.
+
Pedro
+So what they created was an abstraction of saying like, Oh, whatever form of authentication you have in your system would be compatible in DID we just like prefix it add the new method, and now all of the sudden we created a whole new branch. So the problem is that the fragmentation became extremely overcomplicated and it's a little bit inevitable because everyone will have a slightly different use case, but it's, it's also kind of our job to create like working groups to find that common denominator between, yeah, those use cases.
+
Pedro
+At the end of the day, what DID brings that a simple private public key doesn't bring is linked data is how can I take some form of data, sign it and then add some more data. And instead of trying to sign this new data, once again, I can create this web of trust which I can link back to the original data that I signed and essentially scale the trust from that first signature to far more data than the user needs to sign.
+
Pedro
+It actually tries to reduce the amount of signatures the user needs to control by then delegating responsibility to a third party who can use and attestation from the first party to then go to another party. And it creates this web of trust, right? That's what DIDs try to eventually achieve, is creating these attestations that can link data across the whole Internet.
+
Pedro
+And we can even use the blockchains as the roots of this trust. Actually, one project that does this very well is ceramic. So ceramic builds the roots of trust in a particular blockchain and then builds with DIDs. What they've done is they kind of standardized like the data models around DIDs and created this route of trust from one blockchain accounts.
+
Pedro
+And then it can link to much bigger data sets and you can actually search data much more easily.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I mean, it sounds all cool, but, you know, like how do we well, I guess we cannot avoid like things we cannot know in the future. But where is the guarantee that, again, that data, even though it's for Cryptographically encrypted, you know, but it's a cat and mouse game, right? Always between security and cryptography and whatever. Where is it
+
Citizen Cosmos
+agian the proof. The guarantees sorry not the proof that in ten years time or 20 years time there will be no cool way to decrypt that data. And you know, we will not create another Web 2 on top of Web 3.
+
Pedro
+Well, yeah, I guess that's a fight that we always have to fight, right? That's we want to be pragmatic and you want to build something that works today without actually compromising the values of what it would actually build a more decentralized future. You know, every company has this internal fight, you know, because you don't want to get left behind, but at the same time, you don't want to compromise the ethos of the ecosystem.
+
Pedro
+So I think what we are going to eventually achieve is we're going to find a good balance between what goes on chain and what goes off chain and finding that balance that can scale every everyone to kind of work on use cases and applications that people care about and are adopted worldwide, but at the same time utilize blockchain as a way of forming trust, right?
+
Pedro
+Because at the end of the day, a web of trust is nothing without the roots of that trust. And Blockchains are the best source for that, the roots of trust. So that's what Web3 means. Web3 is how can we have cryptographically ensured data that is trusted by proofs on chain? How much on chain do we need to put proofs on?
+
Pedro
+And finding that balance is something that is still yet to be decided. I guess ten years from now we'll see whether we have succeeded or we have just created a new web too, with slightly less trusted parties. But you know, it's moving the needle forward.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Where is the border for you personally? As for a founder of not just a big but an important project, in my opinion, too, today's at least infrastructure, infrastructure for sure. Where is that border that the ethos? I mean, for example, I'll give you mine, I'll give you my border. And for example, right now, you know, we're talking about all these things, but we're using, you know, Riverside and you know, where we're kind of like, I'm going to go and use Twitter today and, you know, so my border doesn't obviously stop here because I understand that I cannot reach I am producing educational content.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I cannot reach the people. I'm trying to help to understand what this all that stuff means, you know, without going to those platforms. So I guess. But where is the border for a project that, of course, has a lot more meaning in terms of to the whole industry? I would say.
+
Pedro
+So I guess like I would start with like what? What does it look like for engineering to evolve in a completely modular system? Like if you think about computers, like you had to get the hardware and the software from the same vendor and eventually hardware became commoditized and now we don't need to get the hardware and software from the same vendor.
+
Pedro
+You can just get any hardware and get any software and then inside of that software, then they get even more modularized. And even in server architecture, like we've seen this explosion ten years ago of microservices, which meant instead of building a monolithic server that has all of the features and this is what the app looks like, then we started building mini servers that had very clear specific responsibilities that eventually kind of modularized and you could actually distribute the risk or even the trust across different services.
+
Pedro
+They kind of optimized for different use cases. So that's what Web3 is going to do. We're going to slowly split out different parts of the Internet and bring more trust lessness into each one of them, and the most valuable ones are going to get first. That's why finance was the first one. Then we started seeing speculative assets like NFT and art.
+
Pedro
+Eventually we'll see like actual organizations, which are probably the most valuable ones, like nonprofit organizations on for profit organizations actually get a decentralized and not actually living under some form of jurisdiction. And I think that kind of you always have to treat each case very different, like, let's say we're using this streaming service. What is the primitive behind this that would, if we decentralize it, would allow to have like multiple clients instead of this client would be the official client.
+
Pedro
+There would be a lot of unofficial clients. That's a form of decentralization. If we you just break down the service into microservices and then one of the core microservices becomes decentralized, you have taken a step forward into the centralization in this case of streaming, it would be a Transco there. And there's already projects working on this. Like life Peer is essentially a decentralized transcoding service.
+
Pedro
+So if we could make multiple clients for the Life peer transcoding service, then you essentially have decentralized what's it as a streaming service and at Wallet Connect we do the exact same. We basically broke down everything that makes what Wallet Connect is and we came down with like a publish and subscribe network that essentially routes messages between peers and the other components that are not so easy decentralized.
+
Pedro
+We just allow people to self-hosted so you can self-hosted yourself or you can use our cloud hosted version. But at the end of the day, we all kind of bind together through the same decentralized relay network that routes messages between peers.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And what about I mean, you mentioned, you know, decentralization and you mentioned it several times and this is another one of those like, you know, not tricky, but a question that I think should decentralization be always everywhere or is it not very decentralized to say that everybody should be decentralized? They know what I mean. Like, is there room?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Like what I'm asking you, do you think that in a world from that we will see in ten years? Because what have been speaking about ten years, Let's go with ten years, Is everything going to be decentralized or is there room, in your opinion, for services and for companies that are not decentralized and might not even ever become decentralized?
+
Pedro
+Oh, absolutely. Like it. It's important to note that, like decentralization will come to the most valuable services and assets and products that impact people's lives. But there's a lot of satellites, assets, services and products that will not decentralized because we can't justify the cost. For example, like if you go back a lot of time, like democracy, they got a little bit decentralized By creating three powers.
+
Pedro
+You have the executive power, the legislative power and Judicial power. So by breaking it down, you decentralized what was a governance to some extent. And you kind of have to start with the most valuable parts. And I think right now we have decentralized currency, which was very core to a lot of social, economical causes. And how humans operate and eventually will decentralize other components.
+
Pedro
+In the case of I, that's essentially what I was trying to give. The example is like we, we decentralize the most core component, but everything around it, it's still centralized because the cost does not justify the decentralization and trying to decentralize it would actually become inefficient and someone else would just like put out there a centralized version that people would use because it was cheaper to use.
+
Pedro
+So we need to always find the cost to decentralized versus the value that it brings. So if technology hasn't met that mark, it will not become decentralized. So it's a matter of time that more things are decentralized, but it's inevitable that some things cannot be decentralized.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+You mentioned that decentralized currency and my my nickname on Twitter, not the actual NIC, but a description of the NIC has been decentralized decentralization for about six years now, five, six years now. And, um, do you think with decentralized like currency, do you really, like ready to say that, hey, it is decentralized today? And do you think that people who use currency think that currency's decentralized?
+
Pedro
+Well, I guess there's a lot of currency. So when I say we decentralized currency, as with the centralized cryptocurrencies, like the most basic functionality of currency for cryptocurrency has been fulfill. If you wanna send some funds from A to B between two parties who are pseudonymous across the Internet without any geographical limitations, we have achieved that. There's no trusted parties in the middle like we can do this.
+
Pedro
+I think what we've done once we introduced smart contracts into the picture is that we have gotten way, way more ambitious. It's like, why stop at currency? Let's do way more, let's decentralize the whole Internet. And once you decentralize the Internet, you have essentially decentralized one of the most core components of society today. The next one would be the governments themselves.
+
Pedro
+But that's even more ambitious.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I think we should start there. But the semantics, I think, is the last step. No semantics, decentralizing semantics and understanding that the mind the ego the yeah, I think we we can we can go as far as actually there are project working on that. It's crazy but there are already projects trying to work on that shit as well. And it's absolutely fascinating this industry.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I'm talking about the industry though, and I did say I'm not going to name projects and but I will name one and I will ask you your opinion about them because I think there have been actually a good light in my opinion. And I think for anybody who's listening, this is by no means any shilling. It's not an advice to use the wallet.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+But I'm curious about your opinion on Frame and what do you think about frame in comparison to all the other wallets Web three wallets out there?
+
Pedro
+Well, I think what Frame did really well was that they tackled the managing the wallet like or the keys at the operating system. I that's something that's like everyone tells me what would be like the ideal wallet. And I would always say, oh, the ideal wallet would be no wallet. And the operating systems would just support it because we don't currently manage like a wi fi app or a Bluetooth app.
+
Pedro
+You don't go to your computer and be, Oh, I need to install the monitor app so I can actually use my monitor. Like it's not something that you do right? And eventually wallets will be the same thing. You will just come built into your operating system. So Frame tried to emulate that experience as much as possible by having a desktop app which lives at the closest as possible to the operating system, and then it would talk to multiple browsers.
+
Pedro
+So it's not even secluded to, let's say, Firefox or Chrome or Safari. It would work anywhere within your operating system as a desktop application, but it still does not inherit the same security guarantees as if it was built into the operating system. It's close enough, but it's not perfect. But what I kind of preferred is that we could do this on the mobile level.
+
Pedro
+As I said in the beginning, my focus is on the mobile experience frame is a desktop experience. So essentially, like you could say like frame is like the counterparty to Wallet Connect frame is to desktop. What Wallet Connect is to mobile? And they're trying to achieve what it's like to be the fork to wallet. The experience for desktop and wallet connect is the de facto experience for mobile.
+
Pedro
+Having operating systems actually build wallets, SDK’s and, having it built into it. It's completely changing wallets and so Frame is good for the desktop user.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Have you are you familiar with orbit by any chance, a project called Orbit?
+
Pedro
+I'm familiar with the brand, not familiar with the technical details.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It's an interest. I'm not going to go into that if you're not because there's no point. But it's an interesting thing because it's like an operational system and a wallet. I was curious about what you think about what they doing, but do check them out and then for everybody who is listening differently do check them out. Again, not shilling, but they're not really a crypto project as far process.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+So anyways, what about Wallet Connect though? You mentioned that you guys have an upcoming event in Denver. What about non-market plans? But like plans in terms of development, of course you're focusing on mobile and I don't think it needs an explanation beyond what you already explained. What is the reason for that? What are the other grand plans that currently you have?
+
Pedro
+So Oh, yes, we're hosting the first wallet focused conference March 1st in Denver, which is just the day before, Eth Denver which starts on the second. And we're creating essentially a platform for all the wallets to showcase and shill their best technology in terms of user experience, security, identity and communication. And obviously Wallet Connect as the hosts will also show there on stuff like we've been working on Wallet Connect V2 for a long time and we did the stable release back in November and then we announced also that we would sunset the version one in March.
+
Pedro
+So Wallet Con will be like the pivotal moment where we move away from V1 into V2 and what I like the most about Wallet Connect V2 is that a modularized is the communications protocol because a lot of people misunderstood Wallet Connect as just a wallet provider or a form of aggregating multiple wallets. But the way it actually functions on the backend is a communication protocol that allows to peers send end to end encrypted messaging.
+
Pedro
+And then with the adoption of Wallet Connect we're talking about 200 wallets connected to the same network sending end to end encrypted messaging. It's kind of an understatement to say that, like signing transactions is all you can do with end to end encrypted messaging. What we started doing is creating different APIs built into the same core network so that you can send different types of in the end to end encrypted messages.
+
Pedro
+For example, we created a dedicated one for sign in with Ethereum, so if people want to log in into websites instead of using sign in with Google, you could sign in with Ethereum, so we created the dedicated API for that would focus on that experience rather than connect your wallet to sign a transaction. All of that. Then we created the chat API that allows essentially 2 wallet connect wallets to message each other.
+
Pedro
+So users that have, let's say, a trust wallet, the name token the these are to wallet can take wallets they're both connect to the wallet connect network. Why can't these users message each other. So chat API enables that experience and it would essentially build what web two has been trying to build for a long time, which is like a shared messaging protocol.
+
Pedro
+If you had the ability to have WhatsApp Telegram and Signal messaging each other, that would be the perfect scenario. We can do that with the Wall connect. Network because these walls are already doing that form of communication, we just needed to create an API that focus on that scenario. And finally we have the PUSH API, which would allow Dapps to kind of reengage with the users that have visited their application.
+
Pedro
+So right now when you connect the wallet to a dapp, you kind of just do some transactions and you leave it there. But there's a lot of a synchronous activity happening on the blockchain that it's relevant to the users. So with the push API you would be able to send a notification to kind of bring them back to relevant events.
+
Pedro
+And I think my favorite scenario is when you have like DAO proposals and then people vote on it, they want to keep up to date with the status and receiving an email or a telegram notification doesn't seem right. You voted with your wallet, so the notification should go straight to your wallet. So yeah, we've been building a lot of open source software, but what we really care about is building the communication tools for a better wallet experience, and we're going to showcase that a lot.
+
Pedro
+And if they ever at the Wallet Con conference as well, and we've been doing it a lot and we have some new products coming in Nice.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Do we need to decentralize APIs?
+
Pedro
+I mean, it depends, depends what you mean by decentralizing API. So one of the APIs that we have is the relay API, which is where you can publish and subscribe these messages to get. Rather that one is getting decentralized, but some of the APIs are not decentralized.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I guess I'm not really. I'm more referring to stuff like Infora, I guess at the moment, and I'm not really talking about APIs, but I think the whole thing about when did Infora announced that they will be able to track the user and the IP .... and then you kind of like, Oh shit, you know, like we did actually get here, we did get here way before ten years.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+You know, we, we, we came to this point and I guess Wallet Connect kind of protects you from the doesn't it, in a sense, because you go through the network of wallet connect right. Or it doesn't our on my mistake in here.
+
Pedro
+I mean it depends right because at the end of the day what Wallet Connect enables you to interface with adapt from your wallet but then the actual choice of a node provider, it's always split between the dapp and the wallet like we've tried in the past to kind of enforce a more user controlled node selection. But it wasn't actually a very successful because as we talked before, like people want to be pragmatic, they don't want to be left behind and there would be a wallet out there that allows you to select the exactly the node that you want.
+
Pedro
+But there's a wallet that shows NFT’s people chose the wallet that shows NFT’s over the one that allows you to show the select the node. So the ideal scenario is that the user can control the node, that it connects to the blockchain from their wallet, and then the dapp would follow and use the same node provider.
+
Pedro
+But then that wasn't the scenario because we still need to find the use cases that people care about. And something like NFT’s kind of took off and brought a lot of people, even if you didn't have node selection. So it's something that I know that people are building some EIP’s so Ethereum improvement proposals for it. So maybe we could see some improvements there.
+
Pedro
+But I wouldn't be so confident like service providers, like infora are still here to stay for sure.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+One, I guess like last question before the blitz is I mean, considering you mentioned mobiles so often and you know, definitely I think a lot of people, you know, building today, I had recently released an episode. The guest was actually quite a while ago maybe you, but Boris Mann is a guy who yeah, maybe you know, the guy they work close with IPFS and they're also building a lot of open source software.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+They're not blockchain builders. The built in tools and libraries and, you know, we had this conversation with him about mobiles, and I fully agree with the opinion of you and him. The thing is, what do we do in terms of and this is more of a devil's advocate question, but still, what do we do in terms of, you know, all that population whose phones are ten, 15 years old?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And we have to be realistic. There is the most of the world's population today. Are they still going to be able to use all the products that we are creating or do we need to somehow update those two or 3 billion people with with their old phones? And how do we get them on? How do we build them into the blockchain?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+That's the kind of question with old equipment they have.
+
Pedro
+That's a that's a hard question, right? Because to what threshold do you accept to be compatable? right, we actually had this question internally and then at Wallet Connect what we've decided is that we would follow what the operating system vendor would decide. So for example, if iOS, they say like up to this version number of iOS, we have long term maintenance, then that would be the same level of maintenance that Wallet Connect, would fulfill.
+
Pedro
+And the same thing happens for Android with Google. So whatever Google says, like this is the oldest Android version you can use with long term maintenance, that's what we're going to use. So I think that it's inevitable that other project will follow that because you can only do as much as your operating system can do. And we can't give guarantees to someone who's using, let's say, an Android version three, which is no longer supported by Google.
+
Pedro
+Therefore, we don't know if it works like it may work like technologies that we use that Wallet Connect our pretty standard for like the last 20 years. But we have no guarantees whether it's going to work. And that you could say like, Oh, what about people don't even have smartphones. That is a completely different conversation because if you don't have a smartphone, then you don't have a way of generally computing into your device.
+
Pedro
+So I can't even sign a message like there's no form of decentralization if I can't get the most basic functionality, which is like signing a message. As long been someone has up to date smartphone with whatever is the minimum requirement by the operating system and it can sign a message. We can give decentralization to them now.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Because I know there is a lot of guides now all around the internet, which is really cool. I love those guides that show you how to turn any old mobile phone into a signer, you know, to strip away all the all the crap and just and I've actually been trying I'm not going to, I will say, because it's not like a big secret there is somebody gave me an iPod, the very first iPod, and I've have a mission to make that shit into a sign.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+All right. I want to know if I'm going to succeed or not. But let's see, I still didn't to get to that Pedro. A Blitz, it doesn't mean the answers have to be quick. Call it the blitz, because it's kind of like three questions, one after another. But feel free to answer them in the way you want to answer them.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+So give me and you kind of already named ceramic, but give me three projects outside of the top, like 20 projects that you are very curious in. What they doing? You think that what they're doing is essential for the Web three industry and might actually change something for the best? Not yourself, of course. Please.
+
Pedro
+Yeah, of course. It's hard. It's hard to name projects like I think that.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Could be one.
+
Pedro
+Yeah, like one project. Well, I recently I've been looking into how can we improve like Wallet experience beyond just like the key management and one of the things that always comes up is how do you actually protect users from malicious activity? And I've learned about this project called Blowfish that protecting users from phishing and malicious activity on chain by having the transactions analyzed before you sign
+
Pedro
+So that's one project that I think it's going to be really powerful because we really need this kind of form of technology because wallet's kind of put a lot of pressure on the user. A user has to make an informed decision whether or not to make a transaction without actually having the information. So making the information available is quite important.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+We must be on the same frequency because tomorrow I'm interviewing the person who is going for sure to talk to me with formal verifications and formal verifications for smart contracts. It's a guy from the main research of informal systems, and for sure we're going to be talking about how to check code before it. So yeah, it's it's the frequencies there.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And give me two things in your daily life that keep you motivated to build wallet, connect, and to keep you motivated to do build open source software.
+
Pedro
+I guess like the number one thing that keeps Wallet Connect for me interesting is that I don't think I ever seen something so organically grow as much as Wallet Connect like the ability of building an open protocol is that it's essentially sells itself. Like sometimes people would come to me and over like, Oh, it's so great. You partner with this Wallet, your partner with this stuff.
+
Pedro
+And all I did was write some docs and put out there an SDK that anyone can use. So that's really interesting. And the other part about being open source is not only that anyone can use it, but also anyone can contribute it. Like the amount of times I had like something in my mind that I wanted to do, but I didn't have the bandwidth or time to do it.
+
Pedro
+And then someone just kind of showed up and gave me a PR or showed me some open source repository on GitHub and said, Oh, here's this project I did over the weekend because I was bored and it was exactly what I wanted. It's something that you cannot achieve with like a project that's closed source for sure.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+For sure. And one last one, one person to follow dead or alive. And I know it's hard to follow a dead person, but, you know, for the sake of semantics let's leave it like that, that you think whoever that person is, whether it's a writer or a GitHub account or a Twitter account or a medium account a book will could help people to succeed in life.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And whatever it is they're doing and whatever it is they're building out there to inspire them, let's say them.
+
Pedro
+What's an inspirational figure, either dead or alive for me.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Huh? Apart from the dog. Because I know you have a dog. So apart from the dog.
+
Pedro
+Yeah, Yeah, the dog is very inspirational. That's a really hard question to pinpoint. The single person, I don't know, like, can I get another one?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I know it's good. You don't have to. It doesn't have to be. There is no more questions. Yeah, but you don't have to be an answer, you know? I mean, the answer doesn't have to exist. It's not.
+
Pedro
+Like it. I think everyone. Everyone kind of brings a little bit of light there now. Like, everyone has their, like, own, like moment where they bring something so unique and innovative to the world. And it's always great when they put it even in form of like arts or technology or even just an opinion in an article and they inspire the next person.
+
Pedro
+So I think the most inspirational person is all of us who kind build like this, like hive mind that like build the best world that we could do. Because it's I, I can't say like, who's my biggest inspiration? Like, I kind of met so many inspirational people and they all contributed to the person that I am today.
+
Pedro
+So I'm grateful for all of them.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I love it. I love it, I love it. That was a very fucking cool answer. Thank you for that. Um, Pedro, if there's anything I didn't ask you and I know we had, like, technical crap in the middle, so I apologize for that, but is anything I didn't ask you? Please feel free to share other. And that's been very, very, very thankful for your time and for your answers.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+But if there is anything I didn't. I didn't ask you that you want to share, please do.
+
Pedro
+Well, all I want to share is that I can't wait to. See Wallet Connect everywhere. Because Wallet Connect already exists in so many places. But there will be this pinpoint moment where. We will see Wallet Connect become the next Bluetooth and people will just like, forget about it. Like when we forget about Wallet Connect think I've succeeded to do my job because we just assume that the web 3 experience includes some form of Wallet Connect technology on the back.
+
Pedro
+And yeah, that should be the success on any decentralized technology. It's to become boring, but that exists everywhere.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I like that. Pedro, thank you very much for your time. Again, everybody out there who's been taking the time to listen to us. Thank you very, very much for listening to us and see all next time. Thank you.
+
Pedro
+Thank you for having.
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:
Episode name:
+Bojan Peček, Mass Adoption, Stablecoins & Web3.
+
In this episode, Citizen Cosmos speaks to Bojan Peček, Operations Manager at Liquity. In this interview, they discuss how the current banking crisis and the state of traditional finance is driving adoption of Web3 and how it will hopefully lead to mass adoption. They also follow the journey of a freelancer and ponder as to why more people don't take this route. Bojan goes into detail about Liquity and why it is the best borrowing protocol in his eyes and what the future holds for the project. The age old debate around stablecoins continues in this episode as well. As always Citizen Cosmos poses some tough questions as the devil's advocate around education and the nature of money and it ends with everyone's favourite, The Blitz.
+
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Good space time yall In this episode of The Citizen Cosmos podcast, I spoke with Bojan from Liquity an Ethereum based borrowing protocol managed by Smart Contract. We discussed the value of traditional education of Web 3 freelance and the catalysis for mass adoption and the points of failure on project. We also spoke about people as currency, future of Stablecoin, the security of Multisig and the structure of liquity versus other similar platforms.
+
Bojan
+I think that Defi itself is not sufficiently interesting for the common person for us that financial systems actually help via their incompetence to push non trustless financial systems. Why are you building this? What problem is it solving? Who needs this? And if you can't answer that, then you shouldn't build a web 3 product they are providing defi and wider with reliable price sources, then they have I think a multisig 4 of 9 which can crash and burn all of defi.
+
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Hi everyone welcome to a new episode of a Citizen Cosmos podcast. Today I have with me a guest from Liquity and Ethereum Project Bojan the Biz Dev. Hi, head of Operations, I should say as well.
+
Bojan
+Hey, Serj Yeah, no worries. We're a small team and that we do a lot of different stuff.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+How are you man, First of all,
+
Bojan
+Thank you. Business as usual. Quite busy with the recent news and announcements and turmoil in the team, especially, but Good. Thank you. Yourself?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I'm good. It's nice. It's perfect time. And I was going to ask you about it. Time as well. For me, it's perfect. It's just the start of the second half of the day, so it's good. Before we get into all the turmoils of Ethereum and all the pains, you know, of of whatever it is there, because there is a lot, of course, in crypto.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+So it's not an easy day any day I'm going to ask you to do a small intro for yourself, like tell us everything you think we should know about you. What are you currently working on specifically and anything else you would like to add for introduction about yourself?
+
Bojan
+Cool. Yeah. As you already said, my name is Bojan I'm based in the south of European in Macedonian more precisely. And I am a freelancer as since over ten years by now. So I did all all kinds of jobs for the last almost two years signed with Liquity which is the borrowing protocol on Ethereum. And before that I did all kinds of VC and startup related gigs.
+
Bojan
+I really love this type of work freelancing, being independent and really suits my needs. So would you like to hear anything else from my side.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+You know, since since you already said an interesting topic, you said you're a freelancer for ten years and I've quit I'm trying to think I think it was seven or eight years ago, like corporates work. I was around 30 at the time and I'm I'm curious like a person like yourself, you know, Your Biz Dev, which is, in my opinion, one of the most busiest positions.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I would say, you know, maybe not demanding in terms of physical work rights, in terms of like you don't have to put in carry heavy things. But yeah, it's a demanding position and I'm curious, like you said, that it's been ten years for you now, you know, and yeah, I have of course he has some questions about your past work as well, about the VC experience, but in a bit.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+But before that, like I'm interested, a lot of people today, especially with all the financial situation around the world, right. And trying to look for alternative ways of earning money, a lot of them turn to web3, but again, freelancing doesn't necessarily correlate with Web three. How is it been for you, the journey of ten years or being a freelancer?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Is it better in Web three being a freelancer than in Web two? Or is it the same? Is there no differences?
+
Bojan
+In terms of Web three versus Web two? There is no difference. People value with work, and that's the same for Web tree and web two. How I started this was funny because I was in not such a good financial position and I somehow stumbled over Upwork, which is a big, probably the biggest freelancing website, and I just applied to some gig.
+
Bojan
+It was 2 hours testing of a mobile app for my country. So I'm from Slovenia originally, so they needed some local. I applied, I got hired at that's that an app for 2 hours and I got paid. I remember that's still $22 for that, which was at that time probably four times my hourly rate. So that's also inflation for you there.
+
Bojan
+So I thought, hmm, that thing actually works. And I started applying. I started out with customer support, jobs, various research jobs, and then just expanded on that. So because I was in my school years interested in all kinds of things, just not in finishing school, I don't have a university degree. So I had to improvise and I had to find my way around to how to make money.
+
Bojan
+But everything worked out well in the end.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Interest and you mentioned uni degree and I can really relate to that. I'm the same and the only thing I was interested in school was not being there. I wasn't actually interested in finishing it. So that's a good one. And I'm curious, there's another topic that is kind of, you know, a lot of people point the finger at Web3.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+As for a lot of the time you hear this stigma and I'm curious as to what your opinion on that. The people who say that Web3 isn't ready, you know, that's.
+
Bojan
+It's not it's just.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+A big speculation. And the you know, it's all a scam. You know, they say one of the reasons so that is because, well, the people who build web3 are are not educated, not not the good enough educated. And here is a question. But isn't it's kind of like a double stick thing because, I mean, a person who goes and again, this is like a devil's advocate kind of thing to say, but what's your opinion who goes and does an education degree in finances, right?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Or an economics? Isn't that kind of already a problem for them? Because if they have that information to go into Web 3 they already go with some prepositions and things that they wouldn't have if they didn't do the degree. So in a sense, I'm trying to say maybe not having that and not being exposed to that system, especially.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Right. Because that's what university gives you the most, is that systematic thinking, Is that a good or a bad thing in Web3? And should everybody who works in Web 3 go and do you know, economic degrees or that's that's not necessarily in your opinion?
+
Bojan
+I think the most important thing to start working in any industry is being interested in that industry. So you have to have a passion for that. I don't think that we attract uneducated people or anything of that sorts or traditionally not educated but not having degrees, etc. I think it attracts a certain type of person in the either they are kind of libertarian, either they had some kind of lacking of experience with the financial system or live in an oppressive country either or They worked in Web 2, and and saw some innovative approaches which couldn't be done in Web 2 or in or in traditional finance.
+
Bojan
+And there are dozens of other reasons and examples. Why would someone choose Web 3 over other industries in my experience when meeting people at events, at conferences, they are all very approachable, very nice, very good people. I get along with the vast majority of them, so I haven't had any bad personal experiences and I think more and more people would join.
+
Bojan
+I mean, you see the people from Google or from the FANG companies are moving over into crypto. Some of them maybe have quick money, wishes or plans. Other are genuine, there will be more and more people coming into the space. And if I revert back a bit to the freelancing question because I haven't fully answered your question there, what I do think about often is, especially in Global South Country or first world countries, it's really very easy to get a freelance job on your computer.
+
Bojan
+You can do very basic jobs like data entry or customer support, and there are probably three or four times what you earn, what you are in that country or even more. But I still see such a huge migration of young people from, for example, south of Europe into Germany and to Switzerland, into whatever, while they could live, in my opinion, better life at home, working on a computer.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I personally based in, well, you could say South Europe. I mean, it's an island, but it's a Portuguese island and not even that. I see a lot of young people moving to France and Germany for physical jobs and it's sometimes not a disappointment. I don't want to say that word because it's not the right word, but like it's bright people, you know, bright minds, bright young guys, girls that are doing what they're used to do for many years, other people.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And the thing is that they are a bit wary in Discovering. And this is I think again and talking about adoption or usage. Right. And I notice though that people it's very hard for me. For example, I've been based here for two to something years and especially this is kind of correlates with the growth of the project, our own project.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I mean, and at the time, you know, we'd been looking for we've been struggling to get local guys and girls to work for us because they prefer something physical and that they can touch with their hands.
+
Bojan
+Yeah, I think it's also a question of a certain blueprint as to how you should work or where one can get money. I guess from South America, everyone wants to go to the States from Africa, everyone wants to go to Europe. Here in the Balkans, it's more to Germany. And they don't even allow the board to penetrate that.
+
Bojan
+They can make money at home. Everyone is a scammer. And I don't know politically affiliated if you drive a good car or something. So it's a bit of a mind thing as well and we should try to change that. The thing also for the Romania for the benefit of the countries.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Absolutely. And this is there is a very good couple of points. I think you mentioned there, you know, that it reminds me of that experiment, you know, where they put five monkeys in a cage and put the lot with the bananas. Have you heard about that?
+
Bojan
+I don't think so. Can you tell me?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+So the scientist put I don't remember who it's done by. I don't remember what year it's done. But the idea is that you have a ladder with bananas and five monkeys. And every time a monkey goes up the ladder to get the bananas, the other monkeys get sprayed with really cold water. So essentially, every time a monkey goes up, the the monkeys beat up the monkey and then let him go up the ladder.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And then the scientist changed one of the monkeys, which of course, sort of the way it goes up for the bananas. But of course he gets beaten up and then he gets used to doing that. And then they change one by one, the other monkeys to the point of five. The original monkeys are changed and the five new monkeys have never been punished with cold water.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Yet because everybody was doing that, they are also doing that and they are still beating up the other monkeys that trying to climb up the ladder. And we are talking about, you know, people getting used to do what other people get been doing for years, not really understanding why. And this is like kind of bringing me, I guess, to more and your favorite topic and I guess one of my favorite topics, decentralized finance, right?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And why are we still stuck in a rut? But you know what? Let me go completely different. Wait, something for you. That is, I'm going to I'm going to go straight to the harsh question. Okay. Why Peg to the US dollar? Why are we still in cryptocurrency, in the Web3 world where our goal is to build One of our goals, I guess, is to build a different alternative financial system and not just an alternative financial system a lot more.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I'm not going to be loud right now, but I think we all understand that's what I'm talking about, at least. Why are we still pegging to fiat currencies? What is the idea behind that? What's the reason?
+
Bojan
+Well, we are mostly pegging to the U.S. dollar because that is the global reserve currency and that is what people are use to value things in the fiat currency and they they most aspire or desire. We saw experiments with pegging to nothing with reflex or finance and they're array coin and we saw experiments with pegging to other currencies and they just lack direction.
+
Bojan
+People are used to the dollar. People want the dollar. People understand things in the dollar. And for the time being it's going to be the dollar. It's pretty much it in my opinion.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Let me play devil's advocate since we just spoke about was herd mentality in and people want the US dollar but does that mean that that's the solution? I mean, let me ask you your opinion. What in your opinion gives value to a currency at all, not just today's dollar, but what would your personal interpretation be, not a book interpretation, but you know, what would this Bojan how does how do you see what gives any currency value?
+
Bojan
+I mean, that's a bit of a monetary theory question, something that I'm not too strong in. I think a certain degree is just the belief in it. But the other thing is adoption. So if it can be easily used as a unit of exchange, where and how easily and but also some kind of backing, I mean, we don't have a gold standard or anything really backing to the dollar at least anymore, but there is the backing of the US government, the US military, the US financial complex and all of that together still make USD the strongest offering.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Do you think that things that you said like the US government, the military can be replaced in the in the digital form like infrastructure? I don't know. Smart contracts, whatever.
+
Bojan
+If there is a critical mass reached, then yes.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+But that is what is the point of this critical mass. Sorry to interrupt you. I don't know.
+
Bojan
+But we are still far from it. In my opinion. I dont know where is the critical mass. I guess we need to see a lot of financial turmoil, a lot more than than we saw now. I mean, there are different currents pulling the monetary system, not only crypto, there is the the BRICS countries which supposedly want to do a commodity backed currency and I don't know if that's true, but there are some papers floating around.
+
Bojan
+There are probably others which want to do something, I don't know. Gold backed or cryptos which want to do something with gold, but so far that is still far from challenging the dollar status and it won't be easily easy to execute I mean the U.S wont just stand by and get steamrolled.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I'm not sure that's something that I mean, as much as that's one of my dreams going to be honest, but I don't think it's possible within the next. Yeah, I agree with you. I'm not. But let me You mentioned adoption several times and I recently, you know, I was using like everybody I guess mid journey and chatgpt and I'm like, I don't know, not, not everybody, but I guess a lot of people have want to use it and I'm one of them also.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And I noticed one thing I have we have a designer on the team and shout out to her. She's listening and she was using me journey and I notice because she's a person not from the computer world she's an artist, like a real artist, you know, in one day or not, not one day, one hour. I think she started using prompts like, but the command prompts.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And my first thought was like, oh, so, you know, NFT’s did half of the adoption for crypto, which wasn't expected, and now AI's doing the adoption for codeing also not expected, but you know, people using these prompts that technically sending you know, a query to a database which basically that they doing some coding which before they didn't even think about it.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+What do you think is what's going to give Defi and I'm not talking adoption in the Web3 world I'm talking adoption outside of the Web three world. What's going to are do we need adoption in the first place for Defi, like as it is today? At least?
+
Bojan
+That is a very good question and I think that Defi itself is not sufficiently interesting for the common person or whatever you want to call it. In the same way that stocks and ETFs, etc., etc. are not too interesting for the common person. I don't know how the percentage of people investing is in the US, but I saw just recently some data for Europe and for example, Slovenia was 22% for traditional finance.
+
Bojan
+So 22% just one in five. Invest in any stocks or bonds or anything. Bulgaria even less. Cyprus 10%. There were some of Switzerland's and some of Sweden's with 40 50%. This is kind of the outlier for Europe. So Defi, I don't know if it will bring adoption, maybe, maybe working as a bank, as a savings account and you can get 3%.
+
Bojan
+You're very easily on board with your wallet. So onboarding and account abstraction will be very important for adoption, security will be very important for adoption. But then, as you rightfully said, Nfts did a huge favor to crypto or also to Defi, even though I personally have no affinity for it, I just don't feel any need to do anything with NFT I dont know why.
+
Bojan
+Even though I like pretty things I guess, but not just let NFT is when this will happen. You give great examples of it midjourney and chatgpt. I think it will happen when the things that people can achieve with them are so mind blowing. They just can't resist. Similar like with the mobile phone. All of a sudden you could phone your mom from anywhere.
+
Bojan
+You could go on the web browser and look things up and receive emails sent, send messages on telegram. So when things become so mind blowingly good and such an improvement and so easy to do, then a bigger mass adoption will happen for sure.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+But you mentioned an interesting thing. You said you started comparing numbers from the Balkans and primarily from the Balkans and investing in traditional instruments. And, you know, one of the first things that springs to mind, one of the reasons for that is because in the U.S. or the numbers are higher because, well, the system helps you to trust itself more, whether in the Eastern Europe.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I mean, I spent some time in the Balkans as well, and in Eastern Europe as well. Of course, people don't trust the system. That's why they don't invest in traditional instruments. And the question is, can a trustless instrument and this is a this is going to be hilarious. But here is the question. This is the paradox. Can a trustless, you know, project like Liquity help people to establish trust in something that they should have had originally entrusted financial systems?
+
Bojan
+Yes, I actually do think that is the case and that is happening and trusted financial systems actually help via their incompetence to push non trustless financial systems. And the same research I mentioned earlier with TradFi it's actually checked for TradFi and crypto adoption. And I think for Croatia it was very similar crypto and TradFi around 16 17%.
+
Bojan
+I remember Cyprus was even higher crypto adoption than TradFi So it's already happening and it will just accelerate from here. I think especially now with all the banks and centralized exchanges blowing up, etc. etc., that people will wake up to the importance of resilient and decentralized applications and use cases.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It's been a while since we've been talking about with several various guests on the podcast that um, you know, the Next Circle or Binance or whoever is going to go down is going to be the probably the biggest push for the next adoption leg of bridges between the interchange, which will help, of course, to hopefully to transfer liquidity in a trustless manner between blockchains without, you know, multi sigs and uh, you know, because a lot of the bridges are like that.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Um, regardless of that, those security maybe a bit later I have a question for you, something that you mentioned that I didn't ask you. You mentioned about 10 minutes ago, maybe 15 minutes ago, the word passion and this is another big topic that we always discuss and with the way that Liquity is is shaped right where the smart contracts are kind of in charge.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Right. Of of what's going on. Why what made you guys as a team at least, what is your personal passion for doing for working for such a project? Because again, I'm being devil's advocate, but I want to ask you in that way specifically, why aren't you afraid? Like a lot of the people out there that are saying, Oh my God, we do that and we're going to get, I don't know, like we we we cannot build tools like that.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+This is going to create a universe with murderers and killers because they don't exist now. Right. But so like, well, what is the passion of the team behind liquidity and your personal passion for trying to decentralized something yet at the same time kind of understanding that you know, that responsibility. You said yourself the world isn't, you know, the way that Defi is today might not need adoption.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+So, I mean, why okay, I'm just going to shut up and ask why.
+
Bojan
+So yeah, I think I will answer that by explaining why Liquity did what it did, because it's pretty much aligns with my moral or passion or whatever you want to call it. So short interim Liquity If some of the guys, some of the viewers don't know it a Liquity it is a borrowing protocol, not the lending protocol, but the borrowing protocol which launched two years ago on Main net.
+
Bojan
+It is very similar to Makerdao you deposit collateral, you mint a stablecoin. Makerdao was actually the inspiration for our founders, but also the motivation to build something better because they saw that they can and did improve on the Makerdao concept. And I did watch Stablecoin pod you a couple of months ago and there were a lot of Makerdao fans, so I'm interested that I would be interested to hear what they think about Liquity if if they know it at all.
+
Bojan
+Anyway, Liquity is a boring protocol at this for a decentralized, fully immutable. When we launched the contracts two years ago, we relinquished any control about it over it. No one can change it, no one can influence it. There is no governance. There is no DAO. Everything is governed algorithmically, not algorithmically, as in the case of Terra, but as in governed by code and nothing else Liquity
+
Bojan
+The issues a stablecoin, which is called LUSD and is over collateralized. And now I can come to the topic of improving on Maker Liquity is the most, as I mentioned, or decentralized protocols. Also because we do not run any from ends ourselves, not only because of the MIT abilities, etc. So the most decentralized protocol, the most capital efficient protocol, and the cheapest protocol to borrow again, though, some people will be challenging that.
+
Bojan
+So why is it most capital efficient? Because while maker offer a loan to value of 75% liquidity, offers 91% with deposit, 10K of Eth you can borrow nine K of LUSD tho doing that probably is not smart because it can easily get liquidated and it is also the cheapest way to borrow. So you there is no interest rate, but there is a fee which is almost always half a percent, so pay half a percent when taking out a loan and never anything again.
+
Bojan
+Why with decided to build something like that because I think we wanted to build something in the spirit of cryptography and Ethereum how it is supposed to be done or how is this ideally done, meaning in line with the crypto ethos, so to say, so decentralized, immutable, governed by by code, very resilient and just, I don't know, in line with that ethos that all of us in Defi are striving towards, but not many can achieve.
+
Bojan
+And that is also in line with what I like and what I am passionate about. And that's why I'm happy that I'm a team member here in Liquity
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I actually stumbled upon Liquity about one and a half maybe. Yeah, roughly about two and one half years ago because I was searching with some colleagues of mine for projects that don't like that are that that have the smart contracts. Independence or independence is a loud word but you know, as much as we can say that and it's interesting because in Ethereum you know the conversation of of of I.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+In your opinion, should a smart contract have the fees and not the creator? I mean, should the money technically go back to the smart contract the gas that that it's a waste and to set with smart contracts and self and then led the smart contracts in the future decide what it wants to do with the money.
+
Bojan
+I mean, if you built something good, you should be paid for it. I know that this via fees or via some kind of token you build on top or at least on top? So I see nothing wrong with being getting something out of your work. I mean, that's that's a case for everything how that should be done.
+
Bojan
+This really up to the builder to the founder. Of course.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+You mentioned a token on top and correct me if I'm wrong in the Liquity protocol, their rewards are paid out in Ethereum right?
+
Bojan
+Yeah. So there is a secondary token apart from the Stablecoin, which we call, which is called LQTY and we call it a revenue share token because there's no governance usually call. You call that the governance token. And that token, if at this stake, will receive 100% of the revenue of the protocol revenue. There are two sources of revenue in Liquity
+
Bojan
+One is the aforementioned borrowing C but people can also redeem or swap their LUSD against Eth that is actually a peg maintenance mechanism. Yeah, that's the other source of revenue and the revenue is a stablecoin So LUSD and Eth when people redeem. So that is what has been recently called real yeild
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I'm going to go again devil's advocate because we had this is a topic that, well, in my opinion, very important and I think not enough people are paying attention to it, but not about me. Right. So we had this stream with the liquid Staking a debate when we had I don't know, this was I think a little bit before liquid staking started to be popular.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I think it was it's what was cosmos focused, not not Ethereum focused. This was when liquid staking about 3, 4 No, maybe a bit more. It was still like building up and the Lido course, was there actually, of course. But Far From that was a Cosmos projects. And one of the questions that I had for the four speakers and that I want to ask you is what do you think about Defi in general?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+paying rewards out of inflation. Isn't that kind of like hitting yourself in the head with a hammer or something like that or no? Or is that a me being extreme.
+
Bojan
+Is just the most convenient way of doing it. I guess it I mean, every project needs liquidity and needs adoption. It would just print some money and that's the easiest way to do it. That's what started Defi summer with compound. There was an improvement, a good improvement on that via buying POL which was introduced by Olympus Dao and Liquity to the team behind Liquity they actually made another improvement on that with chicken bonds.
+
Bojan
+Well that's a totally different topic. Uh, and I don't know if you want to go into that. It's, it's rather complicated. [...] I think that it's it's okay and cool to distribute your tokens in kind are inflated to a certain degree if it's within certain terms and if with time you are actually building towards generating real yield, sustainable yield.
+
Bojan
+And you just kind of use those tokens to kickstart things. That's the thing. Cool.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+From my perspective, what are the other ways that a protocol can generate real yield today apart from fees or apart from, you know, having I dont know defi tactic, some other projects. But then again they would have to avoid projects. If they are after real yield, right, then they would have to use projects that generate fees which aren't that many.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Right. So are there really any other ways to generate real yield from, I don't know, selling goods, physical goods and fees in Web three.
+
Bojan
+Thing that.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Maybe land? I don't know. Decentraland. Sorry to interrupt.
+
Bojan
+Yeah, I think there's nothing wrong with fees. You pay a fee to a bank to manage your account or to your funds to to manage your, your finances, whatever. So fees are fine, in my opinion, but first and foremost, there should be a product market fit. There should be a reason for someone to to use your product and for you to build that product.
+
Bojan
+That's kind of the usual VC question. Why are you building this? What problem is it solving? Who needs this? And if you can't answer that, then you shouldn't build the product. You should think about how the product can sustain them itself via some type of revenue. And if that math doesn't work out, then maybe you need to explore things a bit further and deeper.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Consider in your a VC experience. Here's a question for you What's the product market fit for Liquity, Is it a decentralized? Well, let me divide that. Is it a stablecoin or is it a project that, uh, where the where the code is law or whatever smart contract kind of a rule. And there is no that. I mean, who is it's aiming at, who's the prime audience, People who want to use Stablecoins are people who wants to use something which is decentralized to the extent that it can be.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Of course.
+
Bojan
+Even though that we received a lot of attention recently, especially recently because of certain events like Paxos not being allowed to mint BUSD anymore and more recently, and then USDC and core depeg even though we we received that because of our stablecoin LUSD first and foremost. We did not want to build a stablecoin we wanted to build the best borrowing protocol on Ethereum or in Defi, and that was the motivation and that was the goal.
+
Bojan
+And that is what we succeeded in, I think. But the Stablecoin is just a side product. So to say, if I maybe don't play it a little bit, but that's, that's not fair to the token itself. But we wanted to build first and foremost a borrowing protocol where people are bullish on Eth because only Vanilla Eth can be collateral in Liquity
+
Bojan
+Didn’t mention that yet I think so people bullish on Eth can hold and continue holding their Eth So continue being exposed to the upside while getting some liquidity on the side either to buy something to pay for expenses. What I like the most would like to see most is people not yield farming even though we all do it, but kind of using using the stable coin for real world purchases either to pay your expenses, to buy a car or to buy a house.
+
Bojan
+All of that we had with our users. So that's what I hope to see more in the future and that's what I like to see the most.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Do you think that, you know, in terms of all the regulatory crap that the European Central, the financial regulators like to get involved in? And, you know, of course they're primary targets to some extent after Bitcoin and Ethereum is stablecoins, right? Oh my God, they're printing Stablecoins Oh my God, what are we going to do? So and I understand why.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I understand why because like you mentioned yourself, right? If you have somebody that everybody trust, like the U.S. dollar, but without all the crap in it, of course people are going to use that and not the real U.S. dollar. But with that in mind, do you think and what you said before, you know, with people actually using LUSD for a purpose, do you think those two things will not contradict each other with the recent, like all the bureaucracy that's going on in financial regulator world.
+
Bojan
+I think we are getting close to some kind of inflection point. It's easy to see if you follow the industry. And yeah, there was a lot of crap shoveling going on both sides of the Atlantic. Um, I hope because finance and crypto is, is a very lucrative business, I hope that the decision makers kind of think more of their own pockets, what kind of money they can make with crypto, then kind of what damage it can done to their current revenue streams.
+
Bojan
+I don't know if that makes sense. I think that the decision makers in the Western world are playing this very old people and they have a certain mindset which can’t be changed. And I hope that with the time as new people come into position, I think I know that that will this should be beneficial for crypto, that also the regulatory aspects won't be so damaging and won't so be so inhibiting, but is getting really tight, really, really hot.
+
Bojan
+So I don't know what will happen. I just hope that no really stupid decisions will be made.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+But I think we should expect stupid decisions to be made, right? I mean, it's it's normal. Let's get just.
+
Bojan
+Yeah.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+But it's good. The more crap they're putting from one place to another, using the shovels or crap shoveling. Right. I think the more you said yourself, the more adoption that gives our world.
+
Bojan
+Yeah. And I guess this gives adoption gives also leverage to this use case. And if the masses kind of rise up and demand some kind of different paying system, though, of course they're trying to counter that. CBDC’s that much power to to crypto if we have more Adoption
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I noticed over the last when was I pilled, about ten years ago or something like that. Of course I didn't understand straightaway what I was doing. Took me three years, I think to read the Bitcoin whitepaper, but I'm like, I noticed over the course of those ten or 11 years or so that if I want to talk to somebody especially, doesn't matter what age really am and try to explain what is this world needed for, then the best way to do it is not to talk about blockchain, but to explain to a person how the financial system works and then are people are in shock.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Usually they are like their eyes go, go really like what that, no that can be true. And they start to Google things and they're like, Whoa, it is true. And they're like, and what they believe a Google. Yeah, absolutely. It's interesting. You also mentioned, by the way, about the time and I don't know if you know, there is those, of course, you know, Deutsche Bank, you've heard of them and they do those.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I think it's them if im not mistaken. They do those reports every now and again and on big macro topics. And one of them was actually what you mentioned before that about the who are the decision makers and they were saying that this decade, especially in the years between some like 25 to 28, are very interesting because it's the first time in the history well, not the first time, but this time in history.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It's where the shift in decision making, if you take all of the voting power of the world, is going to shift from one generation to the next generation, and it's going to be roughly between the 25 and 1928, 2028 where this will happen. Of course, this a count in all of the world population is one big voting power.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And it's interesting to see. Do you think that we will see more places like I mean, I don't know what to think of it and I don't know. Some people are going to hate me for saying that. But like, you know, El Salvador and other crazy decisions like this, I mean, yeah, it was whatever people make out of it.
+
Bojan
+Depends on how that goes for El Salvador. I heard the adoption was pretty bad in terms of El Salvadorians and Bitcoin adoption, which I can understand because it has been kind of forced upon them and I like Bill Keller from what I can see, his approach and his stance and his mindset. I think especially now with what the IMF or enough was responsible to to Russia with seizing their funds, a lot of global self-confidence.
+
Bojan
+Start thinking about should I be keeping my money with the West or rather not? And I think they come to the conclusion that rather not is the better way to go. And that's why you see more and more countries applying to BRICS be it Egypt's be it, Saudi Arabia, be it Iran. All of those are very populous countries with very good natural resources and young population, which will be the hard currencies in the future.
+
Bojan
+I think population, demographics, natural resources. I actually forgot what was the question, but now more adoption of Bitcoin and contries So yes, more of that in the future, but slowly and then Suddenly I think
+
Citizen Cosmos
+the thing there was no real question. I think it was just more like a reflection of some thoughts but it was just us talking about what will drive that, if anything, will drive that. And you know, I have like quite a few more questions about USD. But one thing I would like to ask you, which is again, a bit of interesting topic, unusual topic for sure.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Um, when this is the last question, the direction for sure in terms of Liquity and the team behind Liquity, the team is still there and the team still communicates. I mean, anybody can go on a website, go to the About us page, have a look at that. And even if it's not there, it's not that difficult to follow the team
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And my question is this again, considering all of the you know, I mean, tornado cash and everything else, that sometimes happens very suddenly and then very unexpectedly and very stupidly, I should say. Right as well, that that should be very important word to add aren’t the Liquity team. Or are is the Liquity worried that they could be the back door or the kill switch in any way to the success of Liquity?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And of course, this brings that the bigger way of can this be the same for every decentralized projects? Will the team always be a failure point for decentralized projects?
+
Bojan
+Definitely. It's a it's an easy and it's a big attack factor for everyone who wants to do that. Specific Liquity we tried to remove ourselves from the protocol since day one or even before we launched, and not only by relinquishing control of the protocol, but also via our communication on. The other side. We also work with legal teams and trying to comply with Swiss regulation.
+
Bojan
+Those two companies established in Switzerland, but also of course with uh, mainly U.S. and European regulations. So we don't want to do anything stupid. We don't want to go against regulation. But yeah, I mean it's an impact factor, even though our Liquity cannot be stopped. Well, it can be stopped if Chainlink decides not to serve the Eth price anymore or if Ethereum main net gets taken down.
+
Bojan
+But those two options are the only options to stop the protocol or to stop LUSD Of course we can get blacklisted or have a medium media campaign against us, etc. etc. Things that happen closer to tornadocash. And so that's a possibility. We try to minimize the chances of something like that happening. As mentioned earlier, I hope that regulators will act.
+
Bojan
+I know reasonably, but time will tell.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+You mentioned and I guess I'm going to start to slowly resume. But you mentioned kind of price oracles and price oracles, you know, and ever since Sergei created which respect, of course, but it's not exactly decentralized. What is, in your opinion, the next vision or the next step for decentralizing price oracles? Should it be a completely different design, or what's a how do we proceed here with this part of the infrastructure?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And in web3?
+
Bojan
+Oh, technically, I'm really not the person to be asked about that, to be honest. It's a very hard problem, not only from the technical standpoint, but also from the point of chainlink being so dominant. They are doing a good job, they are providing defi and why they are with which reliable price sources. Then they have a think multisig four of nine which can crash and burn all of Defi.
+
Bojan
+It's very hard to tell how likely something like that would be. I know that there are several teams working on new Oracle Solutions, but how likely or how good their solutions are and if they can even gain adoption because we know that they are that that very hard. There's not impossible to say that.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And so going to go move to the blitz kind of thing. It's three questions. You don't have to answer them in a blitz way. It's not, uh, I call it the blitz, but it's not like a blitz blitz.
+
Bojan
+That.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Three projects outside of the obvious answers like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Polkadot, chainlink Liquity And it doesn't have to be crypto by the way that technologically or in Europe case it could be like a defi projects or anything in that way that arouses curiosity and you've lately been inspired by and again, it doesn't have to be crypto can be crypto doesn't have to be three.
+
Bojan
+Okay, so I personally use a like another Swiss project which is actually on offramp on ramp at is called [...] you can find it it's an offramp which is non-custodial and you can send your funds from your web3 wallet to your bank account without any third parties involved. They are actually non KYC up to 3k think.
+
Bojan
+So that's my off ramp of choice lately. They also integrated LUSD so that let's good one project in the similar vein which is about to launch this week or launch at this week. We are what are we..? end of March is called Holy Hell this is non-custodial debit card and can again fund the debit card from your web 3 wallet.
+
Bojan
+No third parties, no intermediaries involved, and then you can actually use the web wallet and the monolith or other anon KYC or KYC, a non-custodial wallet, because you have all the Binance cards and coinbase cards. You can use it. But on top of that you have defi integrations, native defi integrations, also Liquity also you're also alchemix. So put some ether on your credit card and take out the loan against it and drink with it or whatever.
+
Bojan
+So that's really cool. Holy hell, what else do I like? I can think.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It doesn't have to be like three specific great answers, but of course, feel free to add if you wanted.
+
Bojan
+Yeah, I think very cool product. Or is it just aggregators or apps which simplify things for people like most recently llama swap by the defi llama team or or which try to improve the user experience and user access of wallet. I like this Robbie by de bank or frame or the new avocado by instep though I haven't tried that yet.
+
Bojan
+And also last answer projects which build and expand on the protocol itself. Like Defi saber the defi the position management that really call app as well
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Frame by the way. Yeah. Big shout out for creating that. Yeah so far the only probably wallets for me but not the only one I use of course. But anyway it's a good job the guys did. What are. Give me two motivational things that inspire you in your daily life to keep on working on Liquity and the web three and everything else.
+
Bojan
+A main motivation is my family, my kids, my wife. That's number one. And following above everything else. The other thing is might sound cliche, but I really think that Defi can improve the lives of people around the globe, especially in countries which are more repressive, which have bigger inflation issues than we do here. Just of trying to build in line with the ethos of cryptopunks as close as we try or can get and just improve the lives of people pretty much.
+
Bojan
+Yeah.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Nice last one. One person or personas or characters. A dead or alive coder writer, poets, blockchain engineer doesn't matter made up of a cartoon character that inspires you.
+
Bojan
+So over the years from high school and even before and above, I liked all kinds of people, but I was never a really idolizing person. I remember. But I would like to give a shout out to and bring attention to Alex Patrushev, the guy behind tornado cash and kind of bring attention to his case. I'm not fully up to date on the situation right now, but I hope everything works out well for him because writing code, it's not the offense, it's not the crime.
+
Bojan
+Yeah, that's what I wanted to say.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And hopefully this attention will go further. I'm not saying I personally actually know Alex, so but hopefully this goes further to Ross and, and everybody else that does what's happening. I don't know the personal case. I know personally the person from some years ago back in Kaliningrad and the days of like 20 1617. But I don't know what's happening personally to the case now.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Unfortunately. Okay. Hopefully, though, Alex and you know, Ross and everybody else who is currently Virgil, right. There is a lot of other people out there who.
+
Bojan
+Ross as well. Yeah.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Snowden It's not a lot of people there who should not be where the what are the are I guess that positive note. But in all honesty, this is what we face, right?
+
Bojan
+So this is the reality. Yeah. And shout out to a few people who are trying to push regulation in the right direction, like [...] from Kraken or Eric Voorhees and others just wanted to mention that.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Well, definitely, definitely. Bojan thank you very, very, very, very much for your time. Thank you for answering all the questions. Hopefully going to see Liquity expand its reach into the interchain and beyond, not just, in my opinion, Ethereum, but there are many, many other protocols out there that I would love to see Liquity to expand to.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And hopefully the infrastructure in the future would allow for that to happen. So thank you again for your time.
+
Bojan
+Definitely. I was a big user of Cosmos a while back, so I am doing all the ecosystem to some degree at least, and I like it a lot. I like what it stands for. Yeah, thank you for having me. And it was lots of fun to talk to you and yeah, I wish you all the best.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Thank you. And thank everybody who tuned in. Thanks.
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:
Episode name:
+Governance in the Era of Technology: A Discussion on Syntax and Privacy with Chris Goes.
+
In this episode, we interviews Chris Goes from Anoma. The interview is both technical and philosophical and it covers a wide range of topics, including but not limited to; monetary theory, shortfalls of government, advances in hardware, mass adoption and the needs and wants of the people, to name a few. Chris also shares his initial journey that led him to Anoma and his passion for privacy.
+
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Good space time, y'all. In this episode of The Citizen Cosmos podcast. We had the pleasure of speaking with Chris Goes from Anoma a project dedicated to providing privacy and governance on the blockchain. During our conversation with delved into some thought provoking topics such as the importance of privacy and governance, a polycentric conception of law, and the cultural context in which money operates, we explored how semantics can lead to dystopia and the dangers of gradient descent.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+We tackled the nature of money and what people truly want or don't want out of it. Furthermore, we discussed the solutions to the shortcoming of blockchain governance, democracy, social equilibrium, using technology and the consensus building process.
+
Chris
+Maybe it's like a perfectly coordinated dystopia. There's a lot of what I would call like gradient descent, and Defi could sometimes slip into this. And if we wants to build, you know, products that people, you know, in 100 years are still going to remember as opposed to being consigned to the annals of some Wikipedia page editing debate, We need a theory of what people want financial systems to do when lightspeed delays become real, like a multi-planetary species, and how that changes the dynamics of cultural evolution.
+
Chris
+I Pay American taxes and I am forced to pay that under penalty of guns.
+
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Hi, everybody. Welcome to a new episode of the Citizen Cosmos podcast. Today I have with me Christopher Goes, I will introduce him as the founder of the Anoma Project. But Chris hi and welcome to the show first of all.
+
Chris
+Thank you. Thank you for having me.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+My pleasure. And second, I will ask you to introduce yourself in however way you would like that people to know you. I mean, I said founder of Anoma but I know you're a lot more than that and there's a lot more. But it's up to you, of course. So please introduce yourself. Tell us everything you do these days.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+What are you interests, what do you work on? And whatever else you want us to know.
+
Chris
+I don't know if I'm all that interesting, but I try. I got involved in the cosmos Project, which just got my first introduction to this space from a serious perspective back four four and a half years ago now, before the launch, about a year before the launch of the Cosmos Hub, I initially joined because the idea of IBC sounded very appealing to me.
+
Chris
+I hadn't done sophisticated research at that point in time into what all of the technical constraints or economic constraints of blockchain protocols were. I just like the idea of kind of allowing for free interoporation. At that time, I was interested in sort of what you might call polycentric conceptions of [...]so how we are. Different communities have some rules on which they agree internally and internally.
+
Chris
+They accord to those rules and they agree on some, but not all rules with other communities. And so they kind of you need a very flexible system to capture what you agree on, what you don't agree on, allow for interaction, where you agree a sort of separation or sovereignty or freedom of different choices wherever you don't. And so IBC certainly doesn't solve that problem completely.
+
Chris
+But it seemed to me at the time like a step in that direction, protocol design perspective, which is also a technical area that I was at least somewhat familiar with. So I joined at that point in time, it was All In Bits incorporated or Tendermint the company and moved to Berlin, Germany to work for Tendermint I worked for Tendermint for two years.
+
Chris
+I first worked on the launch The Cosmos Hub, then on IBC, and when the engineering team spun out of Tendermint to form interchain [...], I was part of that effort. I stayed with interchain [...] until the launch of IBC and then left to a follow on Adrian, who is also a co-founders of Anoma Together. We had also been running Cosmos Validator [...] Labs prior to that.
+
Chris
+That's sort of the Cosmos centric introduction. Yeah, I would say that, you know, I've started in the definitely started from a very technical perspective. I was the first software engineer then kind of a protocol designer and to try to broaden my understanding in, you know, areas which I'm really personally very unfamiliar with, at least from an academic perspective, like anthropology and economics and sort of cultural systems, since those seem to play such a large role in how these kind of equilibria of technology and human interaction end up working out.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+There's two facts I love about your introduction. One is how you are completely like denying your own importance. I love that because I know the work you did for IBC and I know It's kind of things you've written. I love, this is great. And second, it's fascinating to me that everything you say, you mention communication because in my opinion blockchain is a communication tool, right?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+We are social creatures. We cannot survive without communication. So I'm excited that a developer on your level, somebody who's contributed so much to IBC, is talking about polycentric conceptions and consensuses, and that's what got them interested essentially in that technology. Why in the first thing is first, you mentioned that IBC doesn't solve those issues and yeah, I have my own opinion.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Why doesn't. But I would like to hear yours. Why doesn't IBC solve the issues you were mentioning about polycentric concepts and communication and consensus.
+
Chris
+Right? No, I mean, I think maybe IBC is a necessary but not sufficient component of a solution, as in it's part of the technical substrate you need for a consensus systems to interoperate. But that's not the technical substrate is very insufficient to determine a social equilibrium. Right. So if you think of like what social equilibrium, I'm some proper theorists are going to kill me for this.
+
Chris
+Right. But if you think of what the social equilibrium of a system is, it's some combination of the technology. So like what the system does, it's something could think of it as a syntactical level. So like language has syntax and semantics. The syntax determines what's grammatical, it determines what are like words. It determines how you tell one word from another.
+
Chris
+But syntax alone doesn't have anything to do with the relationship between the language of the word. So in our language, banana means, you know, yellow thing that you put in. At least I do an apple means, you know, a red round thing that you chomp down At least I do. And we could have another language where apple means long yellow thing and banana means round red thing.
+
Chris
+Right. And that would be a difference in semantics. Right. But association between the word the correspondence between the words and reality has changed, but kind of the same syntax. So similarly protocols are basically syntax like TCPIP Most blockchain protocols describe how like what are valid states of the system and how you can transition between those states. And they, you know, they can have informational syntax like private keys or, you know, you can authorize users by whether or not they know particular information was a very powerful protocol side primitive, but it still doesn't it isn't sufficient to determine semantics like how a system is used.
+
Chris
+So in another analogy, you could have a monetary system and what happens as a result of the monetary system is in part a function of like the technical side, like what is money, How does it flow between people? Is it privately owed, collectively owed? What are the mechanisms of issuance, stuff like this? But the other part depends on what people do with the money, like when you have money, most of the time you're doing something with it, you're spending it, you're giving it to somebody else.
+
Chris
+You could have a monetary system that had like some currency with some currency issue. It's policy and everyone used it to buy sandwiches. You could have the same currency issuance policy. Everybody uses it to buy weapons. Those are two very different. Social equilibrium rights system alone is not sufficient to determine social equilibrium. So IBC is the technical part or the syntactical part, right?
+
Chris
+But it's not number one, it doesn't go all the way in the protocol design perspective. It doesn't include stuff like, say, tokens of the specific units of the system, which she wants potentially to correspond to features of the real world. And number two, it doesn't include the kind of cultural or sort of use praxis part of equilibrium.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I mean, you mentioned semantics. Another topic that I'm absolutely well, not even fascinated, but I'm obsessed with semantics, to be honest with you. How do you unify semantics in your opinion? I mean, you spoke about a great example of bananas and apples. And I mean, one of the most common examples, you know, is the Bulgarians. Yes or no.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Right? I don't know whether you're familiar. Right. Is complete. Exactly. So just for the listeners who are not seen as the Bulgarian, yes and no are different moments of the head to what we're used to. So exactly what Chris was saying. So how do we unify semantics? How do we get to the point of that? Everything that we say means everything for everybody.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+The same thing for everybody.
+
Chris
+Right? To be honest, I’m not sure that it's possible. I was not even sure that it's desirable. I mean, in some sense, if you think of a completely unified semantics for everyone wants the same thing. It's you know, to me it's a little bit dystopian. Maybe it's like a perfectly coordinated dystopia. So for the inhabitants, maybe it's a utopia insofar as it's perfectly coordinated with what they bought.
+
Chris
+But it sounds like really boring, I guess. My objection is not not so theoretical. It sounds boring. What would there be to do in such a world? Everything would already be done. So I think one of the ideas behind, for example, polycentric law is that you have to accept that semantics is not going to be unified, or at least that what people will want to do.
+
Chris
+Maybe preferences, you know, semantics like the correspondence, but preferences are not going to be unified and work under that assumption. But still, then you face the kind of opposite question of how do you coordinate at all? And then you're kind of answering that at the slightly derivative question of how do we figure out if we agree on semantics and are what we want?
+
Chris
+And if we have figured that out, how do we like, actually coordinate what's there? And if you have a faithful mechanism and if agreed on these things, then it seems like you should be able to get to a mutually preferred.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I totally agree. I think, you know, it seems that whenever we talk about, you know, semantics or syntax, we're talking about consensus underneath it all. So going back to consensus and considering you did so much work on IBC and you already mentioned, what are, in your opinion, you know, some of the issues with IBC, but how do we improve upon that?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And I mean, you know, not necessarily technically, maybe again, feel free to answer the question and however you hear in it, but how do we improve upon it?
+
Chris
+Right. I mean, I think there are two interesting versions of this question. One of them is technical. Another one is, as may be more product oriented or sort of cultural, technological to just as a brief shout out to the technical. Answer to the question after working on IBC for a few years, I've come to the conclusion that IBC and Tendermint should be unified because it cleans up a bunch of the abstractions and it allows IBC does a whole host of things like handshakes, which are extremely complicated, hard to get right, and props to the brilliant engineers at at interchain and informal for getting it right despite it being complicated.
+
Chris
+But I think some of it's unnecessary if you unify IBC and Tendermint into more content address naming, which basically gets sort of handshakes. So I think that there are technical improvements that could be made which would achieve the same functionality for applications which use IBC while simplifying the protocol stack walk [...] from informal has a really good proposal that I keep trying to promote.
+
Chris
+So we'll do it on this. You can ask him to the second question, you know, and that said, even doing that kind of cleans up some of the technical stack, but it doesn't and it adds some new features, but it doesn't change so much what IBC offers to applications. IBC already is quite generals and asynchronous cross-chain message passing protocol, so I think we can answer a question one or two independently to the second question.
+
Chris
+I'm not sure that it's precisely IBC that needs to change, but what I would like to see, you know, from the Cosmos ecosystem and other blockchain ecosystems is a much more thought out theory of product. And what I mean by a theory of product is, you know, to think about there's a lot of what I would call like gradient descent and Defi could sometimes slip into this.
+
Chris
+But where and what I mean by gradient descent is where product designers are. People who are actually building blockchains seem to be asking themselves the question of something like, What do people want now? Where can I like take this existing thing and make it like better in this specific way? And maybe people will want that. And I don't mean to that kind of innovation is fantastic.
+
Chris
+My concern is that that is 99% of what's happening and the danger of gradient descent is that it's gradient descent, that it tends to fall into local minima and that you tend to end up with something that like maybe a small segment of people in the world who have tokens and want to trade their existing tokens once or not.
+
Chris
+Even that just to like some specific maybe some specific gaming thing or something like this. But you don't, you know, when you're just looking at these very now, very present time indicators, you don't necessarily get a sense of what like a much broader swath of people would want or what people would want in the long term, absent some very specific conditions that are likely to change.
+
Chris
+So I think, you know, in terms of what I mean by a theory of product, there are I want to give shout outs to some groups who really are doing this. I would say the Circles project in Berlin, the grassroots economics project, some of these folks have thought about, you know, what is money, how is money embedded in cultural contexts?
+
Chris
+What do people want or not want out of money? And how do maybe blockchain systems as a design tool change some of these equilibrium or enable things that weren't before possible? AT I think more experimentation in that direction, but also trying to come up with a more serious mathematical language for describing what it is that we want financial systems to do is it would be really helpful.
+
Chris
+So by contrast, sometimes it seems to be like there's this really strong two cultures divide where there are brilliant engineers, mathematicians, distributed systems, scientists, cryptographer that come up with very well specified definitions of the syntax of the protocols, how they work, how they're received from a distributed systems perspective, how their privacy, preserving cryptographic perspective, etc.. But then there's this line, and on top of these protocols, they're like smart contracts, they're apps, and they don't have like often they have no theory whatsoever.
+
Chris
+Right? They have like there's a token and it does something that first will make a token because that's how we fundraise. And then we'll try and come up with a theory to make the token valuable. And I mean, one of in part this is like, I don't mean to critique people too much because in part this is just because our current economic system is so broken that a lot of people have kind of given up and don't even try to come up with theories anymore.
+
Chris
+And I could totally empathize. But on the other hand, it's still like going to work. And if we want to build, you know, products that people, you know, in 100 years are still going to remember as opposed to being consigned to the annals, some Wikipedia page editing debate when you the theory of what people want financial systems to do and whether or not we are accomplishing that
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I'm going to, you know, play devil's advocate now. But if you just said, you know, unified Semantics, man, of course, that doesn't mean unified agreement and unified consensus is boring. Right? But isn't unified consensus on what all those economical theories would achieve would also be boring? Because if everybody was believe in like all we need is just, you know, I don't know whatever to build the next Eiffel Tower.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It would be the reward. That's we get it. And so wouldn't it be kind of boring as well.
+
Chris
+Right? That is a good question. To be clear, I'm not advocating for one economic theory to rule them all. I just advocating for more theory because that seems like that's the direction in which things need to go. But still, I think there is somewhat of a distinction here in that. So when we talk about, for example, a system of money, we could agree on the mechanisms, we could agree on the mechanisms of of a system of money, and we could agree on a theory of correspondence like how we want to use that money to represent things in the real world without agreeing on what we want in the real world.
+
Chris
+And when I'm talking about maybe I'm talking here about unanimity of preferences, I don't think it would be boring for what wanted the same thing. But there are some things on which consensus is kind of like free and doesn't seem to cost anyone very much. Like, for example, TCP IP is a good example of this. More or less everyone benefits by adopting the same standardized set of internet protocols.
+
Chris
+TCP IP is maybe not like perfectly efficient, but it's 90% efficient for what it does. And it does, you know, the only thing you could replace it with is something like 10% better for the specific thing, which it does in organizing messages between computers. Right. So I think there's similar, you know, not necessarily all the way to kind of the end product or interface, but there may be some similar points in between IBC and like user spending money that we can come to consensus on.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+So it's interesting. I mean, I know I'm kind of like dragging you another way a little bit, but I'm just, you know, I want to get into your head a little bit more. Sorry about that. And to me, it seems that, you know, I mean, you're mentioned in like clear set examples like TCP IP which are easy to understand for people like myself, you and a lot of the listeners probably of this podcast and probably a lot of other people as well.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+But, you know, this is something that I was trying to ask people a few months ago in Lisbon. I was going around and talking with steak, fish and with it was taking a, you know, swan. And a lot of the guys from that and the set of questions I had for them was always like, Do you guys honestly believe that what we are doing here is the problems people are trying to solve?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And what I mean is, you know, you mentioned semantics, you mentioned things like unification. But there is one thing like tradition, for example, which really is a pain in the ass because, you know, for a lot of people that belief in whatever is religious tradition or any other taboo topic, you know, which which could concern economical things as well, like Shariah law, for example.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Right. Or the 10th and Judaism or whatever, is really creating a problem for us to have consensus and to move on forward as humanity? I think So again, we kind of coming back to consensus, right? It seems that it's always a fucking issue consensus.
+
Chris
+Yeah. I mean, I think this will quickly veer beyond the domain of blockchain, but there's an interesting question here as to, you know, where do my freedoms infringe on yours? Right. You know, if I'm observing different religious practices in the privacy of a home or in some private way, it seems like that doesn't if I'm attacking you with the rifle, it seems like it does.
+
Chris
+Right? So there are differences here. I won't try to draw and attacked line, Right. But there's some spectrum. To me. The question, though, I don't think that's a problem that blockchains can solve, as in at least not directly because the most blockchains can do is change the economics ... help change the economic system so that there will be less reason for, you know, maybe less possibility for military industrial complex to capture government money printing facilities and manufacture absurd amounts, unnecessary arbitrary arguments.
+
Chris
+But if there are like, yeah, blockchains don't stop guys with guns and they don't change that fundamental question of when some freedoms infringe on others in the use of force, I think yeah, we should limit that or try to see clearly. That said to me that's not the important question because it's not number one, it's not particularly tractable, it's just like fundamental and number two, or rather that has to do with different questions in physics, like the cost of attack versus defense.
+
Chris
+I think then there's an interesting question. When you when light speed delays become real, like the multi-planetary species and how that changes the dynamics of cultural evolution. But maybe you just won't go that far tangentially for now.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+No, no, no, no. It's good. It's good because I just want to say thank you for what you're saying. I'm sorry to interrupt you because I think it's very important to say that blockchain doesn't solve this because a lot of people have this belief that it does. You know, and you're right, you know, guns don't kill people. People kill people.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+You know, it's how very old the old song from, I guess mine in your childhood, roughly. But, you know, so go on as far as you can is you want because I think you're right for by saying this I absolutely agree with you on that. Yeah.
+
Chris
+I mean, to me, the question is, you know, I for example, I am an American citizen. I pay American taxes and I am forced to pay that under penalty of guns or indirect guns. And I am pretty unhappy with some of the things the American government spends money. And some of the things are nice, like social programs. Some of the things are maybe marginal.
+
Chris
+Does the education system work? I don't know. Kind of like prison for kids, but at least it's there's some some positive benefits. Some of the things are terrible, like drones hitting civilians in the Middle East and, you know, guns to lock up whistle blowers in jail or threaten them and prevent them from entering the country and am like in any other situation, I would never pay money to an entity which did this right.
+
Chris
+Like what's coming in there is the force and that I want to be able to see my family in the United States again right. But that's pretty you know, to me, it feels like a pretty terrible decision to have to make to be honest. So, you know, independent of I'm not I'm not making a case against taxes specifically, but more and more generally, I think it's important to ask the question of is the financial system doing what we wanted to do, like as humans, as people, you know, both at a sort of very micro-scale like for local communities and at a broad scale for global communities, is the financial system is not.
+
Chris
+Sometimes I think especially here I'm going to be maybe slightly spicy, but especially in disciplines such as economics, people take aspects of the financial system as law or like physical law. They're not physical law. The financial system was created by people. It was usually, you know, what we currently have is an amalgamation of many different choices made at many different times, at many kind of systemic evolutions that were not, you know, even chosen by any one person or group, which they just with the accumulation of multiple actions, a lot of it's contingent.
+
Chris
+And, you know, it's difficult, of course, difficult to apprehend. It's very complicated. You can't, like, understand every interaction. But on the other hand, you know, to me, the operative question, especially for people interested in signing blockchain protocols, is what do we want the financial system to do? Does our current financial system do it? And if so, or if not, how could we crafted alternative system which did it better and how much better?
+
Chris
+You know, how does that system work.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And seriously like this is, I think the first times im agreeing with the guest in three and a half years and a ten out of ten scale like I mean, just one thing to say, I don't know if you knew, but the irony is that one of the guys who contributed I mean, you said financial laws are not laws.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Absolutely. You know, but it's the irony is that John Law, the guy with a surname law, was one of the biggest contributors to the more than what people call I mean, you said taxes. I call it theft. You know, like the very similar it's irony, You know, the government how does the government work? It asks you for money and gives you protection.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I know one other entity that works exactly in the same way. It's called the Mafia. So if you don't pay, it doesn't protect you. You know, it kills you. So man. Okay, but let's go back to money for a second. Let's go back to money. So, you know, because it seems that everything we're talking about that can be done, it can be influenced, you know, because consensus is it seems that a bit more difficult to influence.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+But at least we can influence with Blockchain's money. Okay, so let's talk about that. So how do you first of all and this is going to be more of a project question, but we'll go into detail about that. And I want to know, I don't know if you want to talk about Anoma or a little bit like towards in a couple of minutes, But still, I would like to know maybe how you guys approach economics.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I hate the word tokenomics I'm not going to use it. Sorry, but how do you approach economics in Anoma? But with it I'm going to ask maybe like what are, in your opinion, some of the obvious things at issues that blockchain economics have from what you've seen already, and maybe mention how you guys approach and solve them.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+in Anoma
+
Chris
+Right? So I think there are two categories of blockchain economics questions. The first category is kind of internal system designs. This is most commonly what goes under Tokenomics, but even stuff like proof of stake system designs, I would put in this category. So things which have to do and what I mean by internal system designs is that proof of stake is supposed to serve a like pretty clear function in the context of a proof of stake.
+
Chris
+And [...] it's blockchain, namely it's supposed to assign staked validators so that they can be given voting weight and BFT-systems it's supposed to somehow discourage validators from behaving differently than the protocol says they should behave. And in particular, it's supposed to, you know, minimize or try and disincentivize the particular BFT threshold risks like one third and two thirds.
+
Chris
+Right. Those holds true kind of independently of like what the blockchain itself does, like what the product is. They're just more internal systems, just like questions. You have a question of, you know, if you have transactions which are more valuable to reorder than the proof of stake system itself is that maybe you have some security problems. You can kind of separate these things by an abstract barrier.
+
Chris
+The second question, which yeah, maybe is a bit relevant to my earlier point, but is a question of how do you want the state of this, what I call maybe a theory of correspondence. So what state are you interested in, the real world or in some other system in representing on the blockchain? This doesn't have to be the real, quote unquote, real world across the game, right?
+
Chris
+A theory of like what? There are items in the game and there are things people can do with them and we want to represent them in this and this way. Right? But even there you have interesting questions like, boy, I think it was some Second Life clone ended up implementing land taxes or something like that, like Georgian land taxes because they found out it ended up it led to more people staying in the game because the wealth didn’t concentrate so much so they're interesting questions even for stuff like games.
+
Chris
+Yeah. So how do we approach them? We approach them by first bucketing them into kind of those two categories so we can deal with them separately. Narmada I would say does not greatly innovate on the second front, as in the product is very simple. The product is just transforms. Nomada innovates a little bit on the first front in design system called Cubic Proof of Stake, which is a sort of spiritual descendant of the cosmos spotted prof of stake system that features similar style of bonds.
+
Chris
+But it has something called cubic slashing where slash rates change according to what stake of validators committed in a faction within a particular interval and the formula ends up being cubic, hence the name. And that's designed to discourage validators centralization so that if you delegate to several smaller validators, have uncorrelated setups, even if they get slash, the slash amount will be much less than if one large validator gets punished
+
Chris
+And the idea is that captures some of the risk to the protocol of having many or a small number of or high power validators There's some maybe some interesting work there that we're hoping might be. The system is quite general. It could be adopted by by the cosmos SDK or by other cosmos chains. And we're hoping to see, you know, some unfortunately prof of stake system design kind of died two years ago was a big thing.
+
Chris
+You know, around time of the launch of the Cosmos hub, everyone was trying new proof of stake systems and then everyone just concluded that they were good enough and stop designing new protocols. I'm not convinced the timeline we care about is longer and also maybe this is a public service advisory, but if you are running a Cosmos blockchain and using the Cosmos proof of stake system, you should read the code.
+
Chris
+Not, I think the SDK maintainers do a great job, but the system design was designed for the Cosmos hub launched by like three junior engineers. It's not the proof of a perfect proof of stake system. You could probably do better. So some innovation there would be great to see in the second front. Or to the second question, Anoma is I would say has been tried to articulate a better theory of correspondence or theory of products.
+
Chris
+This is the part that we didn't know how to do. We knew kind of the technical stuff. You know, if you read the Anoma original Anoma vision paper, which we don't delete because you know, censorship resistant, no deleting history, but you will find that it contains a lot of wildly speculative language, which I would now disavow.
+
Chris
+But it was, you know, it conveyed the direction of investigation that we were interested. And we have since made a fair amount of progress. You can look at some of the new specs still not done yet. I mean, I think we've had to you know, personally, I've ended up reading a lot of app topology. We've had to dive into a lot of different disciplines to try and better understand, you know, what we should think of as a theory of product.
+
Chris
+We've learned a lot from some of the folks circles, from informal cooperative finance team, from, you know, lots of other people in the ecosystem who have different specific perspectives. So we're kind of we're interested maybe in the more theoretical side because we're trying to build technology that will work for all of these maybe different community currency schemes, stuff like this.
+
Chris
+So we're trying to work on that Part of the problem.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I just remembered when you talk about anthropology that I once [...] written an article, part of which was how to fix anthropology with digital consensuses. But yeah, I just remember that. But regardless of that can we, I think I skipped one part of Anoma. Can we kind of go back a little bit and once second let me see if I wrote it down here because I like doing this.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I know that it might not be like, you know, the best thing to do, but I like doing this. I'm going to say a sentence from a website that I think every person who would open the Anoma website will see this sentence. I think it's on your Twitter as well. I mean, the Anoma Twitter and I want you to help me like really pretend I'm really not understanding any word at all.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And so Anoma an intense centric privacy preserving protocol for a centralized counterparty discovery solving and multi-chain atomic settlement. Now let's pretend nothing zero like I want you to choose if you can. Of course, different words to tell me what this sentence says. So and I don't want grandma to understand that I'm really like not this kind of person.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Let's do adoption for grandmas. No, let's not do adoption for grandmas, because that's going to happen when we going to be grandmas. So let's just try and explain this in a bit of them if you can like really ELI5 that sentence.
+
Chris
+Right? Let me try try one. I should say that we're definitely going to change that tagline. We know that it's terrible, it takes time, but we'll find something. It's still accurate, but we've had maybe a dozen. It's good taglines. The hardest thing, you know, it's like the bike sharing, a bike sharing a protocol sign. But I guess what I would say is this.
+
Chris
+So to us, blockchains are interesting. Like we like talking about them. We like reasoning about the protocol design. We have long you know, I like having long debates about how to do something or another interest in the internals, how the systems work. Perhaps slightly sad, but also probably good discovery of mind that to most people, blockchains are boring.
+
Chris
+They care about what the system looks from the outside. They want to do something right, like, you know, and I see this too, and I've ended up learning more about how the financial system works. And boy, like, I really kind of don't want to like, I don't care how the Fed works. So what are these theories like some very elegant.
+
Chris
+You know, it's not esthetically appealing. Right. But I've learned that because I kind of want to understand what's going on. But part of Anoma’s thesis is that we want to build a system with very clear abstraction boundaries so that users can use the system based on what they want to do with it. And it's the system's responsibility to figure out how to do that
+
Chris
+Or to fail, right? So that's what we mean by intent centric. The users describe what they want, which could be something as simple as sending a transfer, right? That's a very straightforward instruction. But it could also be something like finding someone to trade with. Which brings me to the next part of Counterparty Discovery. And so. So most blockchains right now deal with settlement.
+
Chris
+Settlement is what happens when you have a transaction, when you know what you want to do and you just need to settle it you know, who you're interacting with, you know what you're trading, you know what's going to happen. Basically, you need it to be ordered by a blockchain so you can confirm it in history. Update your sort of consensus state, right?
+
Chris
+Settlement is generally the second part of a process. And the first part of the process is counterparty discovery. So for anything more complex than a transfer where you already know who the counterparty is by some other process like going to the coffee store, you want to usually find a counterparty. So when you want to barter, when you want to do some sort of exchange between different currencies, when you want to do some kind of economic interaction involving your heterogeneous units in multiple parties, you need to discover counterparties.
+
Chris
+I mean, at the moment in the blockchain ecosystem, this happens in a kind of ad hoc way. There are, you know, for example, Opensea, you know, some other zero X protocols like this. Run a server to store orders which are signed messages, so they do counterparty discovery through a server. I mean, to start centralizing this is not necessarily as bad as centralizing settlements.
+
Chris
+The server can't steal your assets, but it still has usually full view into all of your data. So it's not very privacy preserving and the server can front run you because it has some control over ordering it censorship abilities in there. Other sort of Uniswap does counterparty discovery on chain? In a weird way, there are I think, some Cosmos blockchains which maybe DYDX, which seem like they're going to do it by sending things around in the mempool Anoma just to build a general layer for doing this.
+
Chris
+So it's like a kind of gossip network, like the mem pool. But the difference in a mempool like the tendermint mempool you gossip around transactions which all validators need to eventually receive, and all of them need to be like included in history, right? So it's like a, it's a very simple gossip network because everyone is the nodes are homogeneous and you want all of them to receive all of the messages.
+
Chris
+Whereas in internet gossip, you're many, most of the time your gossiping intense, which might not necessarily be matched because maybe you don't have a counterparty. And it's important that's trying to discover whether or not you have a counterparty is very cheap. So for that reason, the [...] gossip network is sparse. As in you send around your like I want A, I have B, you basically turn that into a signed message, sends it around.
+
Chris
+So if anyone has B wants A we could do ring trades more complex things. But the basic pattern and then once some kind of if in fact there is a A for B, B for C in the C for A, we can someone solve our it, combine those three together, turn it into a transaction and send it to the regular blockchain.
+
Chris
+So the first phase that the gossip finding matches the solver does, that's counterparty discovery. Then second phase is solid.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+That's quite a few things that you said there. Definitely need a new tagline just saying. It's just saying. But I like that because of those taglines and the reason I like to ask about them was definitely not to tell you. You need a new tagline. I'm really bad with those things, but it really helps to understand like what the people behind the project try to put into that too.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And when you explain it like that and I'm going to go from here to Anoma and economics and you already started to talk about it. So I'm going to go back to it slowly. And but I think before that, even before that, I have a note here from when you're speaking user centric and this is something I wanted to ask you about as well.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It seems to me that a lot of the things you talk about and a lot of the things Anoma have puts out there, I mean, I must say I'm not that familiar with Anoma, but from what I know, from what I've read, from what I've seen, it's a lot about decentralization, a lot about some of the values that blockchains originated.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Let's just play this use. That's right. If we were to talk about user centrism, can I say that like that's and about what is going on with governance and blockchains and I want to know your opinion. I mean, we can take it to Cosmos. Let's I mean, I don't know if you want to like shoot at anybody feel free, go.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+So in my opinion, I think that the way the governance, blockchain governance is designed today, especially in proof of stake systems, well not especially but in especially but in proof of stake systems and particularly in cosmos, is definitely not user centric. So I want you to comment on that and tell me what you think and tell me how can we solve this in your opinion or if it needs to be solved.
+
Chris
+Right. Yeah. I mean, I would certainly I would didn't go further than that and say that the way governance is currently described in most Proof of stake blockchain systems is random and not based on any coherent theory of much whatsoever. Well, there are a few of like factors here, and some of them are not bad. So one factor is, I think, a sort of misinterpreted good intention of more democracy.
+
Chris
+Everyone likes democracy, right? Democracy is the one word which still universally good. Every country in the world is like People's Democratic Republic of the United States, of a lot of prisons, whatever. But that's the one word surprising so many. It is surprising to me because almost everything has been politically polarized now and then linguistic sphere. But democracy is still universally good.
+
Chris
+Everyone wants democracy. No one knows what the fuck democracy is. So in particular, a lot of blockchain systems signers have taken it upon themselves to implement democracy. You know, maybe there's some initial thing of like need to coordinate hard forks, which is true. But and, and they've like made voting systems and them historic thing you could do is to make voting systems where everyone could vote.
+
Chris
+So maybe you have one layer of delegation to go to validators or something like this. The problem is that this solves solves the easy part of the problem, which solves the part that doesn't matter very much what makes democratic society. I think there's a good like historical record on this. If you read like to talk about democracy in America or something like this, what makes democratic societies work is not the voting mechanisms.
+
Chris
+What makes democratic societies work is the systems of consensus building. I would say like where people discuss whether many different layers of groups which come to sort of independent consensus these and then negotiate with each other and in particular, democracies also work as a check on the elites when they provide a credible threat. That's if you know, you do such and such will be voted out.
+
Chris
+And when they change the incentives for elections in ways that at least kind of, you know, democracies are not particularly good at selecting for extremely good leaders. But there are like sometimes okay, it's selecting against really awful leaders that, you know, maybe it's the most we can expect. It was system of government. Luckily, blockchains aren't solving a problem that is that hard.
+
Chris
+They're solving a much more extreme problem because they're not governments. They don't control armies yet. Please don't make them control armies. So we don't need to go that far. But you know, to me, the key question in. Right, another exacerbating factor just to yeah, go through the analysis here is I think it's interesting is that often someone launches a blockchain projects and then they do some things and then they don't know what to do after that.
+
Chris
+And so they like say, oh, governance can figure out what to do. This doesn't work. It's never going to work. The you know, it's like creating a board solve a problem which already doesn't work except that you're like creating a giant board composed of random people can all exit any time to solve the problem, which is even less likely to work.
+
And it's not necessarily I mean, from the perspective of an individual blockchain one, [...] makes sense, but from the perspective of like an ecosystem of blockchains, I think that we can have a much higher risk tolerance. Like I think that we could tolerate structures which have frankly, smaller numbers of parties making decisions as long as it's easy to exit the system because, you know, if you can move your money, maybe move your assets out of a system freely, then different systems can experiment with different things.
+
Chris
+There more some sense, you know, many blockchains as it stands are more like companies which are de facto dictatorships than they are like states. And, you know, insofar as blockchains have that structure that I think we should be optimizing governance more for a lot of like quick experiments than for conservatism and large numbers of stakeholders voting to approve things is going to lead to conservative, not American conservative, but like classically conservative in the sense that risky changes are not generally dont go through more conservative governance.
+
Chris
+Yeah, but I think then there's a separate question of like, what do you actually need to design a governance system and how do you think about the various actors involved and what's the information flow? Who's kind of, you know, what is the purpose of the system In the first, you can't design governance like absent of a purpose. States are maybe a slight exception to this, but they are an exception grounded in different historically contingent reasons and they don't apply to blockchains.
+
Chris
+So I think it's unlikely to if you don't have a clear product definition for your blockchain unless you have a community with some other bonds, like if you have a localized community, I think that's different. If you have a community in some economic you who has some like other reason than the blockchain for coordinating with each other and maybe a governance system makes sense, then the governance system could be used by that community to like agree on what they want the blockchain to do for the community.
+
Chris
+But if the blockchain is the community and the governance systems versus decide what the blockchain, i.e. the community is for, then there's no purpose to the system anymore and it will eventually probably fall apart.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Will we ever come to a day where blockchain governance is going to become efficient, in your opinion, on chain governance?
+
Chris
+Right? To me the central question is always is governance supposed to be doing so? You could have a very narrow definition of governance, which is like.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Be efficient, right?
+
Chris
+Efficient at what? Right. Efficient is always towards some kind of purpose.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Anything. Anything.
+
Chris
+All right. All right.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I'm being devil's advocate, of course. You know, I have to be a little bit so I have to like.
+
Chris
+Fair, fair, to use some examples. So and I'm not the most plugged into the cosmos governance ecosystem. But as I understamd in Cosmos, people have used governance proposals to agree on some hardforks, to discuss potential protocol changes, roadmaps, and to sometimes distribute funds, usually at some kind of form of public goods funding or funding open source work funding, Commission's work, stuff like, I actually think these are very different problems, so they probably should be treated by different systems.
+
Chris
+So the problem of funding public goods or funding works that's relevant to community or a project is very interesting and important. I think it is considerably easier than whole different space mechanisms than most current cosmos governance systems because you don't need total consensus. So you need total consensus for something like a hard fork, because if two different, you know, 50% decrease in hard fork, the 50% decrease in the other hard fork, the, you know, the system will fork
+
Chris
+So governance, if you want governance to kind of act before hard forks, then you need total consensus. But just for spending funds, you know, you can mint more funds, right? Or as long as they fall under some caps on count. Maybe the decisions themselves are not necessarily conflicting with each other. So I think you can build governance systems which are much more oriented around like, you know, sufficient quorums to do things but which don't go through, go through everybody and for, you know, public goods funding in particular, there are interesting science frictions and quadratic public goods funding.
+
Chris
+You could do some kind of liquid democracy. There are kind of many different options that don't, you know, don't look like proposal voting. I think retroactive public goods funding is a really interesting candidate I hope some people try that. There. I think like a lot of mechanism experimentation would be a good way to go for specifically coordinating on hard forks in general where the hard forks like extremely technical, like they're fixing a bug or they're like fixing or optimizing some existing existing feature.
+
Chris
+I think the proposal process works fine. You know, it could be optimized somewhat, but those don't seem to be controversial validators. You know, the tooling could be better. But like the kind of structure is okay when the hard forks are sort of changing major things or there's like some strategic question, then it's not that relevant. Like what's relevant is the process in the community beforehand to come to consensus and you know what the actual voting mechanism is, is kind of subsidiary to that.
+
Chris
+I think that sometimes for example, with the cosmos hub and atom 2 there was there were a lot of different camps with kind of longstanding, different ideas about what what the cosmos should do. And I honestly, you know, the important question is, can we come with some like more economically reasonable way of forking so that those camps and experiments independently instead of being so tied together?
+
Chris
+I think being tied together is what's inefficient. It would much better if we could just like you're supposed The Cosmos Hub has some like value, right? Like in part what what enables people to collaborate on it is that, you know, they can exchange items for other currencies or like there's some people who want to use system. I think it would be nice if we could come up with a sort of different way of forking that was not just like creating two tokens or maybe different ways to coordinate integrations.
+
Chris
+So the fork can be palatable so that you know, different camps who want different incompatible protocol changes could just split. I think there's not necessarily been a lot of mechanism work in this so far. I mean, that's tricky because a lot of value is like name recognition or something like this. Like it's how exactly do you can you automate this from a protocol perspective?
+
Chris
+I'm not sure, but there could do some like exchange rate agreements or something like this. There are options. So I think that would be interesting. I think the final part of governance system design that I'll cover that I think is relevant is privacy. Privacy is very important because it allows people to make decisions in a way that is resistant against cherrypicking.
+
Chris
+So let me explain what I mean by this. I would say privacy is like a tool in the Governance Resilience Design toolkit. So privacy doesn't really change like what your governance system should do, and it doesn't change the voting mechanism, but it can provide resilience. And what a lot of blockchain governance systems lack is resilience, as in it's very effective for outsiders to attack the system not by sort of proposing constructive alternatives, but by kind of sometimes [...] like saying that it should be $19 and instead of $20 and sometimes, you know, attacking specific parties based on how they vote or stuff like this.
+
Chris
+I think about like the theory of voting systems. Usually what you want to do is elicit true information from participants as an elicit their honest preference about which alternative would be better. And if votes are not private, then if participants know that their vote votes will be seen and they vote due to some other reason than you're actually not eliciting that information anymore.
+
Chris
+You're eliciting like the others system information or in other in more direct terms. If you know everyone can be bribed to vote, Then when you conduct a vote tally, you're not learning what people think about this proposal. You're just learning who had the most money, which is fine. Maybe you're fine with learning that, but you've ended up with a different system, right?
+
Chris
+So I think privacy is a very useful tool for designing more resilient governance systems, especially because of the how configurable [...] groups are. You can really like whatever balance you want to strike of, okay, like maybe the votes are private but the output is public or something. Aggregate totals are public wherever you kind of want to draw the line between individual actions or private, some collective outputs for public or something statistics are public, you could do that at least eventually with these these kinds of very configurable privacy technologies such as ZKp’s and some whole encryption.
+
Chris
+I think there's a lot of room.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+homomorphic encryption is the Holy Grail, right? So we don't go into that because I know it's a topic you're interested in, but definitely for another time because it's a huge, huge topic. I just want to ask one more thing about governance and do you think it's fair that especially without some tools like privacy, that centralized, biased and self-interested entities are allowed to publicly vote on important things?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I'm talking about validators, of course, and I'm a validator, by the way, and we validates Cosmos Hub. Of course, we are a self-interested, centralized, biased entity that I don't think should be able to publicly vote.
+
Chris
+Interesting. I mean, I guess I think it's a matter of degree. I mean, everyone's a centralized, biased entity. That's what makes them people or organizations, and that's what gives them preferences. And if there weren't such things, then there would be no point designing any blockchain systems in the first place. So to some extent it's always a matter of degree.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I like.
+
Chris
+It. I think there's an interesting question as to whether to what degree it makes sense to align validator voting power with governance power. And at the moment the answer the Cosmos ecosystem answer is like very high alignment. Delegators can override but validators have the default votes and there's not a separate delegate in general, I think maybe that's too high.
+
Chris
+You can make it somewhat less like give people be operation ability to delegate different votes. Folks. But on the other hand, validators do have some incentive to align with the network as a whole. Often they hold the token, have some stake bonds. And I think you could end up with a system that's kind of if you end up with a system where those two groups are not coordinated at all or not correlated, at all than you might have different problems, like then maybe governance votes to do something, but validators don't want to do it and the validators are the ones who run the codes.
+
Chris
+They always kind of have the final say. So I think you want a complex question. Actually, I think there is more room. I'd be curious to see. Like in a system where the choices were free, where you can delegate your vote to validator or you can also delegate your vote to Someone else who's not a validator but just a delegate.
+
Chris
+I would be curious to see what equilibrium would look like.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I think I've seen some experiments on ether projects, but I'm not sure, So I'm not going to go into that. By the way, just for the record, not everybody likes the word democracy. In my opinion. That word associates like really Red Bells. And just like I think it's a really, really bad thing. I mean, Tendermint to me sounds like a much better consensus than the word democracy.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+So and it's not perfect for sure, like we've just been speaking about. So but em Chris I know I'm really fascinated because I really want to get more into your head, but I know that I want to keep it still up to the hour. And so I'm going to go to the Blitz. I'm sorry. Okay. Three questions. Feel free to answer a bit more.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Not not as fast as you can. Feel free to answer how you want. And one of them you already kind of been answering because you've already been mentioning a lot of projects that you're really interested in. But this is the first question. Give me a couple, three projects that you're really interested in terms of R&D and research and development.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+What are they working on? What are they doing maybe in consensus, maybe ZK proofs or something like that. So a few projects if you can, please.
+
Chris
+Sure. I would say, let's see. I think the Circle's project is doing some really interesting work in economics product design. They're trying to work on a private web of trust now based on Berlin. I'd say I've always inspired by Henry [...] and Penumbra has kind of tight engineering designs that are very purpose driven and very elegant to accomplish their specific product of a private, interchain Dex.
+
Chris
+So looking forward to see what happens there. I've read some really good consensus papers, mostly focused on Dex. Unfortunately, they all seem to be being implemented by Facebook ex Facebook teams who have brilliant consensus researchers and God awful products. Sorry.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I like this. I like this.
+
Chris
+Yeah, I think they brilliant consensus researchers should work on a product which deserves them instead of like defi clones. It doesn't deserve their consensus research.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+What about something like one project in terms of privacy? What have you seen? Anything this makes you aroused in terms of research and privacy or research of, you know, maybe eliminating or lowering the cost for ZK proofs or something like that? I don't know. Whatever something interests you.
+
Chris
+Right?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+In privacy.
+
Chris
+I mean, there are some people working on hardware acceleration for ZKp’s which is great, I think. Yeah, I kind of just expect ZKp proof cost come down. I think there's enough ecosystem momentum that we can rely on that for several years. Hardware acceleration will give you another few orders of magnitude. There's still, you know, this kind of a convergence [...] for improvements.
+
Chris
+I mean, I think private architectures actually seem to be converging to me, like elio Anoma at least very sexy, although I don't know exactly what it's supposed to systems is doing, at least the sort of private components of that architecture have ended up looking very similar. I think it's pretty constrained by using ZKp’s So maybe there's actually some more opportunity for shared code there.
+
Chris
+The kind of application stacks of these protocols look different. They have different features, but some of the core like privacy technologies, similar, any specific I mean, they're that's good. I would say people work in FHE but I do not personally. I'm still a neophyte to that area of cryptography. So I don't know enough to like, understand how feasible the research actually is.
+
Chris
+But I think there's sunscreen, there's some others, you know, even if it's early, if there's money towards going towards making that cryptography faster and more practical, then I'm excited to see what happens.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Cool. Second question am and this is going to be an unusual one, gives me two things which motivate you in your daily life to build on. Well, I guess if I was to summarize what you say. Well, to build a better financial system, right. But give me two like motivational things that you do in your daily life that if you want to share them, of course, that keep on helping you doing this.
+
Chris
+Yeah, I would say I guess I try to read like especially perspectives of people who are reflecting on this question but are not in the blockchain sphere. You know, there's always you want the right amount of cultic ness, right? Like you want to be a little bit culty so you could develop interesting ideas without just ending up at mainstream consensus.
+
Chris
+But you want to be not too culty that you go completely off the deep end. So I'm not sure if I maintain that balance or not but atleast I’m trying. I've been reading a book called The End of Finance. I can highly recommend it. Very good book, Perfect best so far for my understanding of like what an Earth is the current financial system and why, or at least how, even if there's no why start in terms of inspiration.
+
Chris
+Yeah, I'll start talking to people, you know, people who are, you know, both in and outside the ecosystem and trying to understand, you know, what they want, how their perspective on things especially. It's always encouraging when you sort of I would say you learn that you've been thinking about the same problem, but you didn't know it. That moment is always very, very inspired.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It's always a boom when you've been like, Oh damn, I've been thinking about this for ten years. You kind of already just said that answer to your last question, but I'm still going to ask it because you might say something completely different to what I'm hearing. Give me dead or alive one inspirational person to follow. I know it's very to follow dead people, but it could be a book, it could be an author it could be a GitHub account, it could be a medium account.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Anything you want.
+
Chris
+Yeah, I would say probably moxie marlinspike from signal, because I think signal has struck the very hard practical balance of building a protocol which is sort of cryptographically secure and correct and building a product that exposes the features of the protocol in a way which on balance makes most users safer. You know, it's not perfect, but it's like close.
+
Chris
+And it's very hard to strike that balance. Blockchains have failed so far. They have not yet allowed so far anything like the reach or kind of effectiveness this at cost. So I would say, you know, slightly scoped in this area. I find Moxley's work very inspiring
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Thanks, Chris. It's been fascinating. And the least I can say, unfortunately, I don't know. This always happens. Like I want you to have like somebody you want to talk to it just like that said men, though. Thank you very, very much for finding the time to join us today. And thank you for sharing all your views. Man. It was fascinating to listen to them chatting.
+
Chris
+Thanks for thanks for the great questions and good luck with Citizen Cosmos.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Thanks. Thanks, everybody. bye
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:
Episode name:
+The Web3 Puzzle: Decoding Scammers, Web3 lending, and Scalability with Chad Barraford
+
In this episode, Chad Barraford The Technical Lead from THORchain is interviewed. Chad gives us his story behind the birth and ethos of THORchain, as well as giving details on their unique lending product. Chad explains how he managed to get a super user account at Twitter. There is also a discussion around scalability of chains, as well as what it would take to get THORchain to consider being part of IBC.
+
+
Citizen cosmos:
+Good Space time yall and welcome to a new episode of a Citizen Cosmos podcast. A source for educational insights into the world of Web3. In today's episode, we are speaking with Chad Barraford, the CTO of ThorChain. We delve into a wide range of Thought provoking topics, including the early applications of AI and their potential impact. Explore the concept of a ten hour work week and discuss the shifting landscape of web3 lending, including the dangers of Defi designs.
+We delve into the importance of separating money from the state and address the challenges surrounding scalability. During our discussion. We also touch upon the role of crypto in advancing human rights and the significance of ethical development practices and the need for the crypto community to continuously explore new possibilities.
+
chad_barraford:
+You want the next evolutionary step in your product, ask your customers if you want the next revolutionary step, ask yourself. In nature 97% of all life is extinct, right? Only 3% actually exist in the world today. That's because of, you know, trial and error trying new things. Whoever is a validator or a relayer has to do it in an altruistic fashion because there's no way for that person to make an income.
+Now, that's a scalability issue, because obviously, if you're doing one swap every 30 minutes, it's like, you know, what are you even doing? I was like, Oh, what's this about? I looked into I'm like, Well, that sounds like one of the worst things ever, One of the worst designs I've ever heard of,
+
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Hi everybody, welcome to a new episode of the Citizen Cosmos Podcast. And I have with me today Chad from Thorchain, the technical lead of Thorchain actually. Chad, hi, welcome to the show.
+
chad_barraford:
+Hi, how are you? Thanks for having me on.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Yes, I'm glad having you on. I'm very good. How are you?
+
chad_barraford:
+Good, good, good.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+I hope it's a good time. Not too late, not too early, not too cold, not too hot, not too...
+
chad_barraford:
+We're right in the middle of the row there. We're doing well.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Yeah, Chad, let me go with the traditional thing. I'm going to ask you to introduce yourself. And when I say that, it's not just to tell me and all the listeners, what's your name, but feel free to add anything you want to that. What you do, what keeps you busy at daytime and nighttime. Well, nighttime may be safe, but all yours, all yours.
+
chad_barraford:
+Well, yeah, so my name is Chad Berreford. I'm technically on the Thorchain Project. I don't know what else is about me. I'm a world traveler, like the climb. I used to run, although not so much these days, don't have time for it, but, you know, do whatever I can to get along with life.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Let me help you out. Let me help you out. What's going on technically? Not just technically, but in general, what is currently keeping you busy at work at thorchain? What are you working on these days?
+
chad_barraford:
+These days, it's primarily, a lot of my time is focused around a lending design and protocol that we're trying to put out there. So that's very exciting because this lending design is just very different, structurally very different than everything else we've seen in the space. And this one actually uniquely has the ability to do 0% interest, never liquidates, there's no liquidations whatsoever, and there's no expiration of your loan as well. You can keep it open for as long as you want. And so like that's a very unique... attributes to a leanding design. And it's just fundamentally the way it's designed and structured is very, very different than everything else we see in this space. So it allows us to do things that most protocols can't.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+When you say, I'm sorry, I'm gonna go, it was supposed to be a bit more chit chat, but you know, let's dive into it. When you
+
chad_barraford:
+Yeah.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Two things come to mind. First, the word lending as in the lending page. And I remember way couple of years ago, Thorochain had the craziest lending page. I might ask you about that, but feel free to, it's like a relevant thing. Another thing, when you say lending as in to lend with zero and blah, blah, blah.
+
chad_barraford:
+Mm-hmm.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+straight away, like kind of, you know, being a cosmonaut and all that, you know, alarm bells, ah, ta-da-da, what do you mean 0%? What are we going to do? We're going to die
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Can you maybe explain a little bit?
+
chad_barraford:
+Yeah, I get what you're saying. It's good to have healthy skepticism. So I always encourage people to actually read about the concept of the design. I know it doesn't make sense because, in the traditional DeFi sense, if you have no liquidations, for example, what you hear is, oh, there's no liquidations, and then it becomes insolvent, and the whole thing collapses, blah, blah, blah. That's the thinking. I get that. But it's just design and structure very, very differently. So it's like when When Elon talked about creating a new car that had an electric motor instead of a gasoline one, a lot of people are like, oh, what do you mean? There's no pistons. Like, how would the car ever be able to go? Like, how can you, you know what I mean? Like this, it's just like, if you're applying the old logic of what you think about like automobiles, like, you know, and then you're talking about something completely different, although they structurally do the same thing. They're both cars, they get you from point A to point B, but the way they work fundamentally is different. And so you try to apply the old thinking to the new design and just becomes, you know, just breaks your... breaks your brain in a sense. So this design is structured very, very differently. So it's able to do things that nobody else can. So we talk about no liquidations, no expiration, and no interest rates. That is literally what it means.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+a joke comes to mind, I'm sorry, I'm gonna go with it, I'm sorry. It's a terrible joke, I really apologize to everybody for saying that, but the idea was something like a university, engineering university invites all of its professors for a free flight, let's say, I don't know, New York to California, whatever, you know, just before the board, everybody up, all the, all the professors, all the engineering professors and all the flight school professor and everybody, just before the flight takes off, there's an announcement. Oh, by the way, we forgot to tell you this plane was designed by your students. So suddenly you see like everybody running out the plane, you know, and just
+
chad_barraford:
+Hahaha
+
citizen_cosmos:
+one guy standing there, just one guy, just one professor, he stays. And, you know, they come up to him and say, so why didn't you run? He says, well, if my students are going to design this, this ain't taking off. So I'm safe about it. You know. So... Yeah, of course it's a joke, but...
+
chad_barraford:
+Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, as a project, we've done some pretty incredible things in this space. We actually did deliver cross-chain swaps in a completely decentralized way. We delivered on single asset yields, for example. We delivered on proving the slip-based fee model, which we created, worked very effectively. So we have the track record to say that you shouldn't just like just cut this out the door.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Absolutely.
+
chad_barraford:
+Do the research, read about it. I've created like an hour long video that we can link to in this show notes or whatever
+
chad_barraford:
+later on that digs into some depths, not to the nitty gritty, but just the high level explaining how it all functions and work, which is a very complicated concept unto itself. So do your research. If you think it's too good to be true, excellent. Come on by, read about it, explain to me why it doesn't work. I'll be happy to listen to you. I've already heard a hundred people try this thing and almost no. Nobody's been successful to actually understand how it wouldn't work.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Perfect. No, no, it's good. It's good because like our goal is always to try to get the guests to be with more more passionate About what they do. So I like I like that you're coming up with the answers. Those answers.
+
chad_barraford:
+Hahaha
+
citizen_cosmos:
+I love it and definitely Let's let's link that up. But but what generally Chad because I know I know you you I know I've heard I don't we haven't met personally But I've heard interviews with you before and actually you have done an interview two years ago for Jack Zampolin on our YouTube channel And I've read other things from you and I know how passionate about you, about those designs and about your work. And let me take the question a bit more general maybe. At what point in your opinion is a DeFi design or a DeFi design, whatever way you pronounce that, becomes too dangerous? Like at what point me, a user, you know, I forget about Thorough Chain, for example. Let's
+
chad_barraford:
+Mm-hmm.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+go general here. What stage am I saying to myself, wait a second, stop. This is not, might work, might not, but at which point is it too dangerous?
+
chad_barraford:
+Yeah, that's a good question to ask. I think it's the imperative of us as a community, as a crypto community, to experiment and explore. You might think that some designer idea is too dangerous, right? And if you hold that position, you hold that position, there's nothing wrong with that, right? That just means that you don't invest in that particular token. But we should always encourage people to say, like, I don't really agree with what you're doing. I don't think it'll work. But I think it's worth trying. I think it's worth to exploring it. And if it doesn't work, we'll find out why and how it doesn't work. And if that happens, we learn a lesson as a community, right? Like Terra was doing their UST design and there are a lot of people saying it would work and a lot of people saying it wouldn't work. And, but the reality is we don't know which one would, which one's correct and which one's not correct until you actually do the thing and try it out in the real world, right? And either it'll float or sink, but in either case, we will learn a breath of information and knowledge that the rest of the community can say. You know what? That algo stable design didn't work because X, Y, and Z. And that other algo stable design didn't work because of A, B, and C. And every time somebody tries something and fails, we always learn something from it. So we can, we can grow and evolve. This is what's great about the DeFi is that we don't have to ask permission to experiment and try new things. We will grow as an industry, like exponentially, we will evolve so efficiently and so quickly, much faster than the TradFi world could ever even dream of accomplishing. We can do that because of the freedom of experimentation. So I always say there is no limit to what is too dangerous of a design. As long as you're a very clear and honest and transparent to the community about what is happening. If you're hiding information, if you're like this little secret bit of codes being skewed over here that nobody knows about, or like this kind of thing, or it's like owned and operated by a single entity, they can just rug pull the whole fucking thing over. Like that's a completely different thing. But like even with Terra, like Do Kwan was clear. The design was clear, the code was open source, everybody was available to know all the bits of information and if you invested into it and it didn't work out, that's just what investment is. Sometimes you get invested in projects and they don't work out and that's okay too. I mean, it's not okay if you lose a bunch of money, obviously like I feel a sorrow for those people who did. But like, you know, other than Do Kwan's kind of attitude on Twitter, which was a little bit kind of harsh, I think what he did was experimenting an idea and a concept and it didn't work and that's okay.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+I absolutely agree with you. I agree, I agree.
+
chad_barraford:
+Like take for example, take for example that like in nature, 97% of all life is extinct. Right? Only 3% actually exists in the world today. That's because of, you know, trial and error, trying new things. Some things work. Deer with bright pink spots does not really work so well. They're all going to die out. Right? But that's okay if things are failing. What we care about is what things are. What we're learning for and how we're growing as a community.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+I absolutely agree with you. I think that, well, personally, I have lost like a bit of money. The project has suffered a lot with UST, but still, and I've been around crypto for a while since pretty much the very beginning. My saying always goes the difference between a scummer and not a scummer. And this is what
+
chad_barraford:
+Yes.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+blockchain has allowed us to do is saying I'm a scummer. Like if I'm in blockchain, which is completely open source and everything is open and not just the code, but if everything you're doing is exactly what it is, and I'm saying, Hey, I'm planning to fuck some people over. This is what I'm planning to do. If you're following me because you're greedy and you want to make some money, don't be calling me a scummer later. Yes, that says I'm a scummer straight away. Of course, it's not the correct thing to do. I wouldn't do that, but
+
chad_barraford:
+Right, of course.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+I think we should all be responsible for our own actions. So I totally agree with what you say there. Um,
+
chad_barraford:
+I mean, FTX would be the opposite of that, right?
+
citizen_cosmos:
+gone.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Yes. Yes.
+
chad_barraford:
+That's a scammer, that's a rugging bunch of people, that's completely horrible. That's very different from what I consider Do Kwan, which was trying an idea and it didn't work out, unfortunately.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Do Kwon is an ass. Do Kwon is an ass. I must say that because I've been in contact with him for some years and you know, some things I've seen him change say and personally to me at least. And he's a bit of an ass, but I don't think he's a scammer. Definitely not.
+
chad_barraford:
+Yeah, yeah,
+
citizen_cosmos:
+He's
+
chad_barraford:
+yeah.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+a bit of a...
+
chad_barraford:
+I can see that.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+In fact, it's funny, me and a friend of mine in crypto, we did like a scammer ladder and we had like five or six layers of how to understand the... But
+
chad_barraford:
+Hahaha!
+
citizen_cosmos:
+anyways, anyways, anyways, wait before we get to go into that, I want to go back to you.
+
chad_barraford:
+Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ha
+
citizen_cosmos:
+I want to go back to you. So talking about dangers though, I know that this might be a bit of a strange question to you now, but I know that back in 2011,
+
chad_barraford:
+Mm-hmm.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+you were already working with smart homes. And I think it was called Jarvis, right? This is what I managed to find on the internet. This is going to be a very strange question. And of course, let's talk a little bit about it. I would love to hear how you got from that to doing ThorChain. You know what, let's start with that. And then I will get
+
chad_barraford:
+Okay.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+to the question. So first of all,
+
chad_barraford:
+Okay.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+how did you get from 2011 from Jarvis at Smart Host to Th orChain? And then I will go with a danger question. So, how did you get from 2011 from Jarvis at Smart Host to TorChain? And then I will go with a danger question.
+
chad_barraford:
+So Jarvis was kind of like an AI that I built a long time ago, back in 2010, 2011, where it was. And that was like really my first real software project. Like I was actually wanting to learn how to code. And at that time, the language that I had learned was Apple script, which was kind of a funny little language, right? And so I had to learn how to like, you know, code in other languages. It's like my first time getting into it. And so I had seen the movie Iron Man in 2008, right? With Robert Downey Jr., right? And so there's a Jarvis character, if you may remember. And I thought that was really fascinating. And I thought it was really cool about having a, you know, what I call a PDA back then, a personal digital assistant. That's what I referred. This is like pre Siri, this is like pre, you know, like all this kind of stuff, right? So I had coined this phrase of a personal digital assistant. And so, you know, I could talk to Jarvis, to my voice. through text tweets, I had remote controls, I had all sorts of different things for them. And so it just was an exploration of like, if your house had a Twitter account, what would it tweet, what would it say, right? Like, and it was just kinda like, as I came in contact with things like, oh, I wanna track a package being mailed to me, oh, I'm getting a migraine, I want drivers to help me with my migraines, and oh, I wanna know when Netflix sends me a new, this is back when DVDs were like a physical media, back a few years ago. And so I would let me know when, you know, when small things happened on, on, you know, my internet accounts, whether it be Netflix or my bank accounts or like this kind of thing, like, hey, Chad, there was a deposit into your bank account of $2,100 or something like this. And it was like a fun little exploration of just like computational science, right? I kind of got fascinated by the idea of computational science in the sense of like solving really difficult problems. And so that was my first one. I got my 15 minutes of fame, quote unquote, I was in Gadget and Gizmodo and I was, I think Cracked wrote an article about me. I was invited to speak at various universities and colleges in the Northeast just to kind of share the thing that I spent a year building. And then I moved on to other projects. I started to get into like, what are other some kind of fascinating topics to do? So I got hit a bunch of times for some like, you know, Twitter spam, you know. asked me to click a link to some scammy thing, whatever the hell it is. And so I built what I call Twitter spam assassin, which was just like processing the main timeline of Twitter and analyzing individual tweets for the likelihood of them being spammed. And so I started reporting on mass quantity to Twitter, like all these spam accounts, and they reached out to me. The security team reached out to me. They're like, hey. Whatcha doin'? I was like, I don't know, I was annoyed by all the spam on your network. I wanted to just, you know, report it all.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+This is hilarious.
+
chad_barraford:
+So I wrote like, this is where I learned Python program, by the way, for this particular project. I built a multitude of servers all working in 10. This is like high performance Python computers. This is my exploration with my academic sandboxing of high performance Python computing with a multi- on a distributed system concept, right? Because there's a lot of time, there's a lot of stuff. So they reached out, we had a conversation. They wanted to know what my heuristics were, like what are my algos, you know, and I just gave it to them, I don't really care. I don't know if they actually used them or not, or whatever, maybe they did, maybe they didn't, I don't really know, but I just gave them how I structured my design.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+This is fascinating.
+
chad_barraford:
+And then they gave me like unique access to their API, like my Twitter account has like super access to like... you know, like, like high, I can do high throughput. And so once they gave me high throughput of like API access to it, I could start like really, like, cause I had a problem with, I would hit the eight, I've got rate limited by the API. So I had to be very smart about, you know, which ones, which tweets do I want to get more detailed history from that particular user, which ones I do not, because I don't want to waste an API request. But once they gave it to me, like, like advanced access to their API, I just like, all right, let's turn this shit up to a fucking 11. This would crank the fucking dial. In the end, I think I found almost like a million spammers on their network or something like this. It was actually a really fun project. Before I shut it down.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+It's crazy. It's crazy. But how did you progress then from finding a million spammers on Twitter, getting like a super access account on Twitter to Thorchain? Wait, we lost there. Wait.
+
chad_barraford:
+So after that point, I started to actually work in the, I was actually working in the tech industry before that point. I mean, I worked in the IT industry, which is a little bit different. And so I got a job at a place called Brightcove, which was kind of like a YouTube for business. Let's call it that for simplicity's sake. And I got hired there as a job as an infrastructure guy, actually, not as a coder, but as a, doing like servers and infrastructures. what we call system engineering, right? I did that for a few years before I got bored of it. And then I went on to another company, eventually going to a company called RStudio, which was actually my first time doing dev work professionally, being paid to actually write code. Before that, it was mostly infrastructure, which is again, infrastructure as code is still technically code, but like it's a little bit different. And so I worked for a company called RStudio for about six years and I helped build their flagship products. And so RStudio Connect and what was called Shiny Apps I.O. at the time, although I think it's called RStudio Cloud today, I wrote all that code with one or two other devs and that was kind of my first time building things professionally within a corporate environment mentality. And, you know, eventually I quit just because I got into crypto. In 2017, I discovered. cryptocurrency and Bitcoin, all this stuff. And I quit the job. And I worked for a higher dev for like basically 10 hours a week because I was living in Southeast Asia at the time, for the most part. It's cheap to live out there. So I didn't really do that many hours to work. I could just work a few hours and live life and explore other countries and such. And then eventually, actually, this is... This is a slightly embarrassing, but it'd be an interesting story. So
+
citizen_cosmos:
+drum rolls.
+
chad_barraford:
+drum rolls. So I was working 10 hours a week, and I don't know if you know this, but American tax law, if you live outside of the country for 330 days of the year, you don't have to pay income tax, right? So I was living on 10 hours a week of income, not really expecting to pay much income tax because as I said, the country for 330 days. And then I realized later on that that only applies to W-2 income, does not apply to 1099 income. Oh shit, I'm fucked, right? So I was actually living in Germany at the time, I was in a startup competition for a friend of mine who asked me to come out and just build their prototype for him. And I owed the government some taxes, which I wasn't expecting to owe them. I didn't have much money at the time. I was basically pretty close to broke. And the government went in my bank account, took everything I had. This is a true story. Literally put my bank account into a negative balance, my checking account into a negative balance. Because I just woke up one day and all of a sudden, literally every dollar I had was just like gone out of my bank account, right? So I'm like panicking. So I like go on my PayPal and my Venmo, like random places like this on the internet to try to like, to get my bank account back into a positive. So I think I had like 600 bucks at that point, right? $600 to my name, this is true. $600 is my name. I'm in Germany. I'm working at a job that doesn't actually pay me because I'm just doing it as a favor for a friend to build their prototype. So I didn't even have an income at that time. They just give me a place to stay and this is the life that's Germany. So like, all right, shit, I got $600 to my name. I'm kind of fucked.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Fuck man.
+
chad_barraford:
+So thank you government for taking out my money.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+hahahaha
+
chad_barraford:
+I appreciate that. That's a very... That was great. I started looking for a job, but of course I was in the crypto space and I wanted to stay in the crypto space. And so I started looking for stuff on some Angel List website, whatever the hell it was. And I found this CTO job for a company called Sky Network, skyy.network. And they were looking for a CTO to help them build what they were doing, which is basically like... air traffic control on a blockchain. That's the simplest way to probably explain it. So like the drones could fly in airspace and have agreement upon who's gonna occupy what part of the airspace at any given moment so that they could communicate with each other to figure out like how drones are gonna fly in the sky without, you know, ramming into each other, you know, in a hypothetical future. And so the CEO of that company and the advisor of that company were gonna be in Berlin at the time, and I had just moved to Berlin. like a few weeks earlier. And they were like, oh, we're coming to Berlin, we're doing this Cosmos hackathon. This is in July, 2019. Why don't you come out? And this will be like your job interview. Like, this is like, you know, we'll come out, we'll hack for a couple of days, you know, we'll see how it goes. Like, all right, this is very convenient. So yeah, I'm already in Germany, y'all see you next week. Let's do it. And at that time, I actually didn't know anything about Cosmos, I hadn't learned about Cosmos yet, right? And so I read the Cosmos documentation like the day before the hackathon, just to kind of- brush up and try to understand the SDK and how it all works and functions. And so the advisor and I were just, we really spent the most time together. Him and I were hacking away at some things. And he kind of asked me like, Oh, what do you want to build? And I was like, I don't know, what should we build? And he says, Oh, I had this idea last year that didn't work out. This was thing like this cross-chain swap concept that the special signature is not existing yet, all that stuff. And it's like, what do you want to work on this? I'm like, yeah, actually sounds like a really good idea. So we hacked on it for two weeks and we were one of the winners of the hackathon from that event. And that was the first, like that was the birth of Thorchain in a sense, right? That was the first lines of code we committed at that point. The BEP2 token was created and minted, I think a week later, two weeks later, something like that. We got a few investors. We had about 1.5 million, I think initially, or 700, another 700, like a few weeks later, something like this, uh, of investment. And that was all we needed. Like we don't, we didn't ever hired a big team. Like we don't have a hundred devs, like some other projects in the space. The most we've ever had within the original team was maybe nine, right. At the, at the height, right. Which is still quite small. Like
+
citizen_cosmos:
+It's not a lot, no it's not a
+
chad_barraford:
+not,
+
citizen_cosmos:
+lot.
+
chad_barraford:
+it's not a lot. Like the actual chain itself, the Thor chain. chain was built by myself and one other dev. And that was two years of work to get it there, to even get it to what we call single chain chaos line, which was just an alpha release. Let's just connect with Binance chain only and prove the technology works, prove that the economics of the slip-based fee model, prove that all this stuff actually works in reality and then we'll scale up to main net, which took us another year and a half or two years to get there. Right. So it's been a long road to get where we are now, but you know, it's been a lot of energy and effort.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+We were in Leipzig and Berlin at the same time. I was around there a thousand. And in fact, a lot of my guests that come on the show ended up in Germany in 2018, 19, 20, obviously due to the same reasons.
+
chad_barraford:
+Yep.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+So ironically that a lot of us have only meeting years and years later, but it's, you know, the, the wheels of, of, of life, I guess. But wait, wait,
+
citizen_cosmos:
+I have a question now back to the question because
+
citizen_cosmos:
+now. Now that you gave me more of your background, I'm more and more sure that this question is very good for you.
+
chad_barraford:
+Okay.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+So considering you have DevOps and infrastructure experience, not just experience, not any experience, I mean, but, you know, particular experience building even your own things like Jarvis. Considering myself being a validator and considering a lot of validators these days, and some of them listen to this show, I know that. try to move away from cloud
+
chad_barraford:
+Mm-hmm.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+and slowly start more and more experimenting with not just in the name of decentralization, but also in the name of security and decentralization
+
chad_barraford:
+Mm-hmm.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+with bare metal. And by bare metal, I don't mean bare metal in the cloud. I mean, you know, home bare metal. Considering though our lives now, a parallel second thought, you know, more and more in our lives, smart devices. and things like, you know, lumps or Jarvis or, you know, its future, well, today's ancestors,
+
chad_barraford:
+Yep
+
citizen_cosmos:
+sorry, not ancestors, but the children, you know, more and more in our life. So long, long, long story short, you already probably guessed the question. The question is, how are people who are either trading cryptocurrencies, you know, holding validators in the houses, of course, they should be aware of those things. But how do you make sure that smart network devices don't become a danger to the house network and cannot be accessed especially if you're doing something sensitive like validating like trading and so on and so forth. What is your advice in that direction if any?
+
chad_barraford:
+Oh, that really is a networking question, I suppose.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Yeah, it's a bit of a networking question.
+
chad_barraford:
+Yeah, because within your house, you have lots of devices. Some are IOTs, the internet of things, like your refrigerator might be an IOT device, for example, or your fan or whatever, right? Baby monitors. And then you have your devices, right? Which is usually your laptops and your iPhones and your iPads and things of that kind of context. And then you have other kind of... systems in there like might be an Xbox, PlayStation, these kinds of things. And then you might have services you're running that are what you want to secure. It might be a validator, it might be a full node, it might be, maybe you're hosting, if you're hosting a validator, it means you have a public IP address that's kind of communicating with other validators. And so you have an entry point into your network. So if there's an exploit within that validator, whether it might be like an overflow or something of this nature, whatever you can do, and break through one of those kind of ports in a matter you know, an RCE, that's obviously a problem. So the trick to all those things is all those things can become malicious, right? An IoT device can be exploited because their security and those things tend to be very, very small. And we've seen Russia do that many times. You can download malware or some sort of thing on your laptop or your phone that could cause something. And also this service you're running that needs external access. can also be a point entry into your network. So the cleanest way to do that is just creating what we call VLANs or virtual networks. And so that you isolate the traffic between things. So you don't actually allow your IoT devices to get direct access to your laptop, but your laptop can access the IoT devices, or that kind of stuff. So anything, if I was running a bare metal node in my house, if something like this, then I would... I would probably just make sure that the network is actually separated entirely. And I may even go the extra step of actually creating a second ISP for that purpose, just so that the bandwidth that I'm utilizing my house when I'm, you know, bit torrenting something or using something that uses a lot of network, it doesn't infringe on the network of that validator and it caused validator slow down and maybe collect slashes or something like this. Like it's a difficult thing to do and it does require a technical knowledge understanding to do that in a secure way. And there are. If you don't do it in a secure way, you're running your own risk.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Yeah, it's crazy how much time and effort those things require, especially when, you know, our lives become more and more involved with smart devices. Sometimes you don't understand you have a smart device until you sometimes go on your network and you're like, whoa, where is all that's coming from? Of course,
+
chad_barraford:
+Yeah.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+being a validator, you're more aware of those things, you know, being like technically up to date, so to speak, but You know what? What? I think what you're saying is very important for anybody out there who isn't just a random validator. But I think if you're doing crypto, I think having separate networks, like you say, you know, for for doing your business with crypto is, in my opinion, essential, you know, and just it's I don't know. It's getting more and more and more and more and more and more becoming part of our life, I guess. What
+
chad_barraford:
+Absolutely.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+about? What about scalability and tendermint and how you guys solve this? Maybe in thorchain? Because I mean, I've been, I mean, Tendermint has allowed for many, many, many, many, many, many things that were not there before it.
+
chad_barraford:
+Mm-hmm.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Well, IBC being one of them, you know, which is another thing topic I will want to get with you before we finish. But I don't know because I'm going to be honest, I am with Thorachain. I don't have as much knowledge of Thorachain. I have experience using Thorachain. But. It's not as much as I would like to make a comment on. So my question is, I know that you guys have had some twitches to this colorability, or am I wrong here?
+
chad_barraford:
+Well, so in single chain KS, we had a limit of validators. I think that limit is at 35 or 36. And the reason why that is is because when it's securing external assets, extra genius capital, that's Bitcoin, Ethereum, like layer one real assets on some other blockchain, it needs a wallet to store in that connects to their BC1 address or an OX address, something like this. And the way that ThorChain does it, these are something called threshold signatures, which is a relatively new cryptographic It's kind of like a multi-sig, but a little bit different. And with a threshold signature, the more members in that group of people that are signing, you have a quadratic relationship to the time it takes to sign and the number of people. So if you have 36 people or so in a threshold signature, it'll probably take about 15 seconds or so, maybe 20 seconds or so to sign. But if you were to scale up to 100 people... which you totally can, it would take minutes, maybe 15, 30 minutes, right, to sign a transaction, a single transaction. Now that's a scalability issue, because obviously if you're doing one swap every 30 minutes, it's like, you know, what are you even doing, right? It's like, it's pretty much useless. So in the initial version of ThorChain, all the validators also had to be a part of the same, what we call an Asgard, the same threshold signature in order to be, to do this. We had a limit on the initial thing to be 35 to 36 validators. That's not true today. Today we have just multiple threshold signatures. Each one has 20 members per what we call an Asgard vault. I think there's about five or six in total, something like this. And so we have close to a hundred validators on the threshold. So we can scale up to whatever tenderment will allow us to, whatever the max that tenderment allows, which that's debated in the community. Some people say 150, some people say 250. It's probably around that area somewhere. I think Cosmos Hub has the most. Whatever that is, I think it's like 200 something, I think.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+I think it's 175, 175
+
chad_barraford:
+Yeah, almost just shy of 200. I think they have the most validators on any given set.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Omniflex, Omniflex, I think went on their testing, they went to something crazy. Like, I don't know how they did it and how it worked. But it was something like 500 600. I don't ask me, don't ask me questions.
+
chad_barraford:
+Yeah, yeah, yeah.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+I will not be able to say anything. But I know they were doing experiments. And I actually, I would like to talk to them one day about it to see what are those experiments and what are they doing there
+
chad_barraford:
+I was talking to a guy named Michael O'Rourke, who's the guy behind Pocket Network, and he was telling me that he forked the tendermint, Cosmos SDK, and I don't know what he changed. He didn't explain it to me. That he could get like 30,000 validators. I don't know what he actually...
+
citizen_cosmos:
+30,000.
+
chad_barraford:
+This is what he told... That's what he said to me. So like maybe I misunderstood him. Hopefully I did. But like,
+
citizen_cosmos:
+How did it test it?
+
chad_barraford:
+excellent question. I don't know the answer to it. But
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Uh.
+
chad_barraford:
+he did tell me he was going to rip it out though and drop Cosmos and use another framework that's called Hot Stuff that Facebook created,
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Okay.
+
chad_barraford:
+which I've never used that one personally or know that much about it. But he said he was going to rebuild Pocket Network off of Cosmos and move to this other thing called Hot Stuff.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+I've heard of pocket network. I've never heard. I
+
chad_barraford:
+Yeah.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+mean I heard hot stuff the song. I know this song hot stuff, baby the same hahahaha
+
chad_barraford:
+I think it's a bit different.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+damn
+
chad_barraford:
+It's an open source blockchain framework that Facebook came out with a
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Yes, yes, yes,
+
chad_barraford:
+while back.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+yes, yes, yes, yes. I don't know much about it. I've heard the name.
+
chad_barraford:
+Yeah. Yeah,
+
citizen_cosmos:
+I've
+
chad_barraford:
+yeah, yeah.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+never read the
+
chad_barraford:
+I
+
citizen_cosmos:
+documentation.
+
chad_barraford:
+never looked at it. Yeah, me too.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Okay, cool. Cool to know the cool something to explore. Maybe I can go and try to talk to him to invite him on to see if he wants to talk about it. And you know what other topic I've seen that is you kind of touch on a lot. No, no, before we go to that. Wait, wait, wait. Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. Before we go to that, I will I will be not myself if I don't ask that. Thorchen and IBC, can you briefly give me like a 101 on the whole deal of why and I'm sorry if I'm getting anything wrong here. But as far as I'm aware, thorough chain doesn't want to be IBC enabled, right? I have heard this somewhere before. Could
+
chad_barraford:
+Mm-hmm.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+you give me and all the listeners like the 101 as to why that is?
+
chad_barraford:
+Yes. So, IBC was something that myself and other people were actually very interested in integrating for a long period of time. And we worked on it for months, myself as well as the Nine Realms team, which is another kind of dev team that's associated with Thorchain. And we found that it just didn't really do what we needed it to do, right? In the sense that it didn't uphold the standards of what we require for decentralization, right? Because in... IBC requires a relay, which is oftentimes one of Jack's servers and his strange stuff, which there's nothing wrong with that. For us, we wanted to make sure that we did not rely on any single entity to do anything. It also came with some security issues around, like, whoever is a validator or a relayer has to do it in an altruistic fashion because there was no way for that person to make an income and as well, they have to spend gas, I think, on both chains to make this whole thing work. There's always the risk of them getting spammed with just, you know, burning gas. And so there's just, there's some elements to it that didn't make sense for us. Uh, and I think they'll fix those things. I think they're already down the road of like fixing those issues, those bugs. And I'm sure, I'm sure IBC is going to get a lot stronger and then in the future, uh, as well as the other thing was that we already have a bridging model that we designed called Bifrost, right? And Bifrost is very different in terms of how it's structured, how it works than how IBC works. And. There are a lot of advantages to IBC over Bifrost, and there's advantages of Bifrost over IBC, but for our purposes in case what we're trying to accomplish, we want to be able to connect with any chain in the world. Didn't care if it's an IBC, a Cosmos chain, or a Polkadot chain, or a Crypto Note, or a UTXO, or EVM, or like whatever. It could be even something, you know, crazier, like, you know, IOTA is not even really a blockchain in some sense, you know. It's structured very differently. So... We wanted to be able to be much more flexible to connect the world because if we just connected a bunch of Cosmos chains together, that wouldn't solve the problem that we're trying to solve, which was true cross-chain connectivity. That makes sense within the Cosmos space, but for us, we wanted to not forget about Bitcoin first. Bitcoin is obviously the elephant in the room. Obviously, that's the most valuable asset. That's the one people want to be trading the most. That's the one we wanted to help. IBC for the Rune asset specifically and not using it for the pools and the swaps and that kind of thing But he's like just for the Rune asset, but then that became a couple problems with that in the sense that It it goes against some of the security concepts of the postures of Thorchain. So Thor chain does delays its outbound transactions up to one hour to say to say as a safeguard to protect itself from some sort of Exploits so if somebody were to exploit Thor chain right now and try to steal, you know $50 million, the outbound transaction to receive that $50 million would be delayed for an hour. That would give the community time to be like, whoa, hey, there's alerts that go on in our Discord that notify the community when something kind of weird like that happens. So that's there for security purposes so that funds are never lost. And IBC becomes a problem in that regard because then you can leave the network very, very efficiently and quickly. We don't want that. We want to have a more secure posture. And then if that's not enough, then we can't do that. to support multiple bridges on a network, it just creates more surface area of exposure, right? There's a dev you that understand how Bifrost works, there's a dev you have to understand IBC works, you have the surface area of security issues with both Bifrost and IBC. I mean, IB C had a security issue, you know, not too long ago. Again, I'm not like judging or anything like that. Everything's gonna have security issues because everything's just code that's being baked. But like, we don't wanna overexpose ourselves to more surface area or risk because we already have... such extreme surface area risk to begin with, with Bifrost, with Bitcoin, with Ethereum, with Litecoin, with everything else, our own chain, our own math and logic. There's already enough surface area of security to be concerned about. To add another bridge on top of that just seems like unnecessary.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Do you think that after IBC will fix the things that you're mentioning or some of them, or it might have another look, will you guys be open to... Well, you guys, when I say you guys, of course, we're talking about a whole network governance. But in your opinion, we're talking right now, Chad, we're not talking about Thorchain
+
chad_barraford:
+Yeah, so I'm open to doing that. I would not want to do it for the layer one assets. I think how the Bifrost works is the way we want it to work. I'd be open to do it for the Rune asset and sending the Rune asset external, or maybe one of our similar Synths or other assets on the network to have synthetic Bitcoin, for example, or synthetic Ethereum or Ether rather. That I'm open to doing so, but we also need to have a customized that IBC because I want to make sure we ensure the security. So I want to delay those up on transactions. So if you want to send Rune to some other chain, I want it to delay it up to an hour based upon some mathematics that determines how long it's delayed for. So there'd be some kind of custom rolling that would need to happen. And when we need to figure out how the relay would be run, like, you know, we can't just have me run a relay in my basement and that be the relay, like that just doesn't, you know, adhere to the centralization requirements. We'd have to get each individual validator to also be a relayer, so that if any one of them are around... then everything would still work and function just fine. So if they fix all these kind of like things we should, I know and I think they already are, which is great. I'd be open and open and doing it, but again, it's not my choice per se. It's up to a larger community.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Devil's advocate question. You mentioned like the dangers of relays sometimes and it's kind of obvious, but you mentioned validators in the same sentence.
+
chad_barraford:
+Hmm?
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Same thing, isn't it? I mean, validator is still the same centralized dangerous entity, isn't it?
+
chad_barraford:
+Well, no, it's different because most of the time there are relayers just like, there's only one relayer in most scenarios, maybe two if you're lucky. And so one of those relayers goes offline for some purpose or if that one realtor says, I don't like this address for some reason, and I want to block this address because I'm going to adhere to the OFAC something or other or it might be, that's different. But a validator is different because anybody can become a validator. Anybody can leave as a validator and most can come right back in. And there's all close to a hundred of them, you know, lying around.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Okay.
+
chad_barraford:
+So if, if one relay goes down or one really says, I don't want to transact this address and blacklist this address, then some other relay will do it. So I hope that they actually change how IBC itself works and that validators are the relayers either that, or everybody becomes their own real layer. Like I can go to a UI, do a transaction and I become my own relayer between the two chains. That would be another. valid way of going and hopefully they're going to be doing that at some point in time. But get rid of, and I don't mean this negatively against Jack, but get rid of Jack and Strange Love in that sense. Like they should not be running relays for the entire community. Like that just, if that doesn't set off red flags in your head, it probably should. And so
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Thanks.
+
chad_barraford:
+we should instead improve IBC's design to allow the validators of individual networks to do it or for everybody to be their own relay or for their own transaction that they're doing in the, whatever you will. you either interacting with, do one of those two things and you solve a lot of the issues of.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Are you referring to a little bit what IOTA is doing?
+
chad_barraford:
+I don't know what I always do, maybe I am, maybe I'm not.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Okay. No, no, no, no, no. I'm not gonna go into it because technically, well, they are, but then they have the, what's it called? What it's called? The thing that is actually helping because it's not scalable enough. Basically, when you do a transaction, you have to validate two transactions next to you. And that basically creates that each device, like this is in a very cutting corners right now, right?
+
chad_barraford:
+Yeah.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+And then basically creates a network where you have to validate transactions. in order to make a transaction. So that's kind of everybody being a relayer. And yeah, it doesn't really work for them. That's why they're still solving all this problem. And then they have like, I forgot what they call it. But it's a centralized kind of relayer that does those things.
+
chad_barraford:
+Yeah.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Yeah, but I understand what you mean. It would be interesting to see that. I'm hoping that, to be honest, I'm hoping to see a very good proof of an implementation of some... type of proof of work on top of proof of stake. That will help to scale because I can think of them, but yeah, I haven't seen anything like that yet. Not with today's cryptography.
+
chad_barraford:
+It'd be fascinating to see someone come up with a design that kind of mixed multiple...
+
citizen_cosmos:
+No.
+
chad_barraford:
+I mean, it'd be complicated to sell for obvious reasons, and the security would be hard to keep tight,
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Yes,
+
chad_barraford:
+but...
+
citizen_cosmos:
+the cryptography is not there. Yeah, for sure. For sure.
+
chad_barraford:
+Yeah,
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Chad,
+
chad_barraford:
+maybe
+
citizen_cosmos:
+because
+
chad_barraford:
+one day.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+we are like a bit of like,
+
chad_barraford:
+Yeah.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+so fun time, I'm going to go to the last question. It's a blitz of three questions.
+
chad_barraford:
+Mm.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+So you don't have to answer them super quickly, but it is a blitz. So one first one, give me three projects that you technically interested in. Please don't say Thorchain, please don't say Cosmos or Bitcoin or Ethereum. but three projects
+
chad_barraford:
+Hahaha.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+that you're technically interested in, that you saw and like, wow, that's pretty cool.
+
chad_barraford:
+Um... I'm hesitant to come on, to speak about other projects just because I don't want to put my weight behind something.
+
chad_barraford:
+Oh, from a technical perspective, I'm interested in Lightning Network. I think that's one of the most important projects in crypto. I think that's really kind of fascinating. I actually started working on a new project myself outside of ThorChain that's called Archeo, which is decentralizing the node, access to node data, right? To get access to Ethereum full nodes and Bitcoin full nodes without going through being KYC or asking permission or any kind of centralized service whatsoever. That's another one I'm obviously interested in. I'm trying to think of anything else that's really fascinating. I mean, I always see things happening in this space and 99% of the time I'm just like, yep, that's not going to work. That sounds,
+
citizen_cosmos:
+I know what
+
chad_barraford:
+that
+
citizen_cosmos:
+you
+
chad_barraford:
+sounds,
+
citizen_cosmos:
+mean. I know
+
chad_barraford:
+that
+
citizen_cosmos:
+what
+
chad_barraford:
+sounds,
+
citizen_cosmos:
+you mean.
+
chad_barraford:
+or maybe it's going to work, but it's just because it's a fork of something else and it doesn't really offer anything interesting or unique. And so it just becomes, you know,
+
citizen_cosmos:
+People forget
+
chad_barraford:
+like I'll,
+
citizen_cosmos:
+about
+
chad_barraford:
+I'll
+
citizen_cosmos:
+computing laws when they talk about blockchain sometimes, you know.
+
chad_barraford:
+I was looking at like Canto yesterday, cause it was kinda, I saw a bunch of tweets in my feed or whatever, I was like, oh, what's this about? I looked into them like, well, that sounds like one of the worst things I've ever heard. One of the worst decides I've ever heard.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+I haven't checked it out yet, but I have seen my Twitter feed is starting to like Cantor's got more than a hundred thousand accounts! Cantor's got a million accounts! And you're like, okay,
+
chad_barraford:
+Nah
+
citizen_cosmos:
+yeah,
+
chad_barraford:
+man,
+
citizen_cosmos:
+I see where it's going.
+
chad_barraford:
+nah man. I
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Okay.
+
chad_barraford:
+read up on, nah.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Okay, okay, okay, okay. I feel you. I feel you, bro. Second
+
chad_barraford:
+Yeah.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+one, give me two things in your daily life that keep you motivated to keep on building, you know, the decentralized world to keep on building DeFi tools and designing new things. Something that keeps you motivated. Two things in your daily life.
+
chad_barraford:
+For me, it's like, so the value of crypto in general to me is not about money or getting richer or these things, although obviously those things are a thing too. I mean, for like Eric Voorhees, for example, he talks about separating money from state, which is a very noble and valuable thing to do. But for me, what makes me excited about the space is not so much that also that is very important. For me, it's about human rights.the idea granting new financial instruments or usability of services that are just public goods. They exist purely to support humanity and allow humanity in a way to interact and empower them. Right? Like doing in a way that does not know or care what your, you know, if you're old or young, black or white, male or female, polka dotted or whatever, like there's no way to actually to treat those people differently. than anybody
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Absolutely.
+
chad_barraford:
+else. And so when I talk about crypto, what I talk about often is like, we are literally granting inalienable human rights for the entire planet all at the same time. Not just these group of people who are born in these borders and those people who were born in those borders, but across the space, across the spectrum, across every man, woman, child, across this entire planet. And granting them access to yield, checking in savings accounts, loans and lending. access to, you know, Archeo's node data. I don't know, it could be anything, right? That is so critically important. So that's what gets me excited about the space. It's when I like think about things I want to build. That's what I think about. I was like, how does this, what hair on fire problem are we solving by, you know, that we're trying to solve? ThorChain did that by getting rid of centralized exchanges from being required to move across chains, right? Archeo is doing it by removing, you know, Infira and similar services from being able to spy on you. You know, even that project wants to move forward and decentralize the rest of the application after the protocol, right? Including getting rid of domain names, including getting rid of, um, websites and, and centralized points of, of UIs completely decentralized the entire stack of every DeFi application from the, the protocol, the smart contract or whatever, the cost most chain, whatever it might be. to the front end and literally everything in between of those two things and decentralized everything. Because just a few weeks ago, Congress was talking about, you know, KYC in the front ends. Fuck no. Fuck that shit. And fuck no. Let's decentralize the front ends the way that cannot be, you know, KYC. Let's do that. That
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Absolutely.
+
chad_barraford:
+seems like a really valuable goal. So to me, that's what I think about like, what are the hair on fire problems of this industry that we need to be solving that better improves human, like humans access to empower themselves. This is why I'm so excited about the lending protocol, by the way, because the lending protocol is giving you no interest rates, no conditions, and no expiration dates. Now you can actually buy a car. You can go on a vacation. You can buy a house with your crypto without dumping your crypto and selling it and removing your exposure to it. Because if you do that with Aave or Compound, you're just going to get liquidated. People get liquidated. Anybody who's taking it alone knows how stressful as fuck that is. Ethereum's price is going down, you're just dumping more eth into it like, oh my God, am I going to lose all my ether? It's stressful and you really can't have a... It's great for degens to degen it up, but it's not a really good useful thing to actually improve your actual life to go out and buy a car. A guy actually told me on Twitter basically the other day that he had 44 emails between him and a bank trying to get a $10,000 loan that he still hadn't gotten yet. And he tried to get a loan on Aave and he got one, but he felt so stressed out about it, he just like closed it and like, I can't even do this. I'm just going to be like, I won't even be able to sleep at night. Like, you know what I mean? And he's trying to buy a $10,000 car so he can get to work. And he was telling me like that this loan is the exact thing he was looking for, because you can't get a loan like this and TradFi, CFi, or even DeFi. And it allows him to actually buy a car with his Bitcoin, right, and be able to know that his Bitcoin is available to him tomorrow. so that he can buy back his Bitcoin whenever the fuck he wants to do so. That's super empowering. That changes so much about this space in such a significant way, in my opinion. That's something to be proud about. It's something to be excited about. We all should be excited about the idea of being able to do that. Not only just do that loan attributes, but also do it in a cross-chain way with every major asset, including Bitcoin. That's so important. So that's what I think about.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+That's lovely. I hope that, you know, some from the beginning remind me of Pale Blue Dot, Carl Sagan, you know,
+
chad_barraford:
+Yeah,
+
citizen_cosmos:
+and
+
chad_barraford:
+oh yeah.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+empowering, understanding that the problems we have are not really, you know, the problems, but we should think of the bigger things. Last one, Chad, last one, I promise. Give me one person, dead or alive, that is an inspiration to you. It could be a developer, it could be a writer, it could be an influencer, it could be a Degen, it could be a book author, it could be a movie maker, I don't know, dead or alive, Julius Caesar, I don't know, one person that inspires you.
+
chad_barraford:
+One person that inspires me? I don't know, man. I look to people like, one of the things I love about Steve Jobs, not just because he was obviously a great innovator and an inspiration for me and for countless other entrepreneurs, is that the way he thinks about the problem is so different. He thinks about, he used to say, if you want the next evolutionary step in your product, ask your customers. If you want the most revolutionary stuff, ask yourself. It's the idea that all the things that do exist today around us are just temporary walls that can be knocked down anytime. Oftentimes, we think about those things as just walls that exist, we can't go through them. But he was saying those walls were erected by people just like you, and they don't have to stay up. I just love this concept of go back to first principles, what are the problems you want to solve? It doesn't matter that nobody else has solved it or thinks it's not possible to solve, right? Thor Chains solved the problem that people yelled at us that it was literally not possible to solve. And go out there and innovate. Think of new ways, creative ways to make it work. That stuff is so inspirational. And I think Steve Jobs helped me to see that.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+I love it. I love it. I love it. Absolutely in the spirit of the podcast, I would say for sure.
+
chad_barraford:
+Yeah.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+In spirit of crypto, you know,
+
chad_barraford:
+Yeah,
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Chad,
+
chad_barraford:
+absolutely.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+thank you very, very much for coming. I know went a little bit over time. I hope it's okay. Again, my gratitude for finally we made it. Thank
+
chad_barraford:
+Yeah.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+you. And thank you, everybody for listening. Join us next time. Thanks.
+
chad_barraford:
+Yeah, thanks for having me.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Let me just stop that. Wait, wait, wait.
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:
Episode name:
+The Power of Community: Exploring possibilities, Building Communities & Introspection with Sistla Abhishek.
+
In this episode, Sistla V Abhishek, the founder of OmniFlix is interviewed. He discusses the culture around education in India and how this contributed to his success and India's dominance in the area of computer science . He gives his perspective on the importance of community building and content creation in web3. Sistla gives his vision for the future of Omniflix and what they are trying to build.
+
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Hi everyone, welcome to a new episode of the Citizen Cosmos Podcast. And today I have an OG content creator with me, Sistla, the man, the one and only man from Omniflix. Sistla Mann, hi, welcome to the show. How are you?
+
Sistla:
+I'm doing great. Glad to be here on the Citizen Cosmos Podcast. Been hearing it, been following it, know all the builders that are coming down week after week and glad to see you continue even after all these years. So I'm pretty excited to be here
+
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Thanks.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Thanks. Man, again, for all the listeners out there, I must say Sistla is in my not opinion, but I would say, of course, it's an opinion, but it's something that I see has been a Cosmos OG creator since pretty much day one. And there wasn't many content creators when Sistla and his team already had the idea of creating a whole blockchain dedicated today, which of course we will talk about today and ask, but first thing is first, Sistla, can you introduce yourself a little bit? Tell me about who is Sistla? What does it do in life? What are your interests? Why blockchain? What happened? Who are you, man? Tell us all about it.
+
Sistla:
+So yeah, I mean, I got started with computers back in about 2007. That was when I was in high school. And yeah, like academics were one. But you know, I was more involved in, as soon as I got access to the computer, played a lot of Counter-Strike, you know, dealt a lot with awkward communities, right. And almost actually failed one of my, you know, annual exams as well. because like three months before I got the computer and I was hooked and you know, yeah, that happened. But after that, like, you know, I found my love, you know, doing things that that would never explode, exploring, you know, what could be possible. And because of that, you know, started off on Orkut being involved in communities like I rose to being a moderator back then, not not many like Orkut is the equivalent of Facebook. And this was primarily in Brazil, India and some of the other countries. It was by Google, but they shut it down, you know, after a while. That was where like I learned how to code because you could like modify your or could you know page you could do a lot of things with JavaScript and that was my introduction to coding as well and exploring. So, you know since then like for the last you know 13-15 years, you know, I've been hooked on to computers, freelance my way. During college, built websites here and there, educated people about tech, people didn't care, some cared, hung out with them. I was pretty interested in speedcubing, so I've competed at a national level, held a few national records and that was what interested me. Even in college, I worked part-time at a test assessment firm. where we used to handle recruitment drives for like 6,000 students from multiple colleges. I was part of those ops. Again, I quickly rose to lead multiple teams there and that operational experience helps me even till today. So that is something that I've been thankful for. And I'm just now an extension of how I was during college, but 10x where I am.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Headshot, this is what I know from Counter-Strike. Headshot. This was like a sniper shot story. Man, I didn't know that you participated in competitions and that you did all that. I know you have a computer science degree, but I wasn't aware of the competition thing.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+But I wasn't aware of all your competitions man of all your national competitions and participation I know you have a degree in computer science. I knew that but I didn't know you managed to achieve so many things in terms of competition. Let me ask you a question, Sistla.
+
Sistla:
+Yeah.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+I know it's a stigmatic question, but
+
Sistla:
+Mm-hmm.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+it's a good stigma. I know that India is one of those countries that has a very high level of computer producers, a very high level of computer engineers. And one of the reasons for that from what they say, from what people say in general, is due to a very hard educational system that is dedicated to study a lot, a lot, a lot. How was your experience studying computer science? How did you, was it like that, or is it different in reality?
+
Sistla:
+Yeah, I mean, I'll have to keep it real. It is hard. The competition is too high. People are like, you know, they really take their academics seriously. And for those that don't, they to some extent get left out if they can't figure things out by themselves. And, you know, everyone, like most people are like really good at math and science, not just like physics and chemistry, but also biology. So, you know, that has been... Personally for me a bit difficult to navigate. I was always like, you know, the average kid, you know, like the 10th Friendliest rank or something like that in a class of say 40 50 people But yeah, like personally I chose computer science because this is what I was interested in and you know for me like I really I scored like out of out of 80 I think or 75 I scored no, sorry out of 100 I scored like 16 units and I was using
+
Sistla:
+Linux for like three years before that, right? And everyone else that never even
+
Sistla:
+interacted with the Linux system or they got like 80 or 90 in Unix. So the education system, like the, the system is like to an extent favors like a different set of people. Definitely not for me. I was like more the average kind, but I was interested in other things actually executing. And hence like even in 12th or, you know, yeah, like. just into college, engineering college. I was already working on various projects with other universities and built robots, went to competitions even before I got into college. So there's a summer break before you get into engineering college. Even before that, I participated in competitions using my identity as a college student. So yeah, these are things that I did. Luckily, they turned out well for me. But I personally chose computer science because I don't think I could have done anything else better than this. So yeah.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+You say you chose computer science because you don't think you could have done anything better for sure. I think that's a lie. I'm sure you have many other skills, man. Come on. When you
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+build communities, that's already one skill you have. So you have a lot more skills than you think. But I mean, I mean, I understand
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+that, you know, that was one reason to succeed, to do something that you like. But where's there what drew you to computers when you were a kid? You said that you participated, you know. Before college with that, what was the initial attraction? Why computers? Why not philosophy or psychology or English or I don't know, Hindi or anything else? Why that particular subject? What made you fall in love with it?
+
Sistla:
+Yeah, I mean in simple words, you can create something that doesn't exist. I know art is also like that. Yeah. I
+
Sistla:
+know like, you know, being able to like, you know, create something out of nothing is exists like across multiple like industries, but here I was like extremely fascinated, the most fascination is when, you know, like I could like interact with the command line or write a small HTML file where I could like see the output on a browser. It is like really, really simple right now, but these were the things that actually motivated me to do more, learn more and get involved.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+That makes sense, man. It's crazy to think now that we have all those AI tools, right? That just like
+
Sistla:
+Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+let you do it in second, right? What we started. What do you think? What do you think, man? As a computer engineer, what do you think? How is it going to evolve? Where is it going? The whole AI thing.
+
Sistla:
+Wow, like I am thrilled. You know, I just want to like live for as long as possible to see everything that, you know, that actually like, you know, progresses the world. Like I think like the current set of like AI has been around. Like even when we interact with Google, we just don't think that we're interacting with an AI. Right, like it's a search query that we are like typing. But you know, in this case, right, like no one when they use Facebook or Twitter, they... They don't think that they're interacting with AI systems. But when they're utilizing chat GPT, they're thinking that they are interacting with an AI machine, like something that is responding to them, and so on and so forth. So I think that shift has made people more conscious about something that is intangible, but is now finally tangible, and people can wrap their heads around it. And this, I believe. will lead to quite a lot of interesting possibilities where AI is not just restricted for the smartest of the smart people, but even accessible by everyone. And yeah, initially there'll be a bit of hassle when people might need to rescale, upscale, and so on and so forth. But this will improve productivity by 10x and just like how we start remembering phone numbers or something like that, you'll, like a lot of this. information that we are gathering right now and remembering and things like that. Of course, it is helpful to remember important phone numbers, but now you can offload that to your phone. Just like that, people will probably start to offload a lot of the activities to an AI, which is tailor-made, just like our app chain, Cosmos app chain is tailor-made for one specific purpose. You can have an AI also be tailor-made for one specific purpose. And we'll probably see... much more advancements in industry specific AI.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+I have a cheeky question for you now, Sistla. How many phone numbers do you remember? Ahahaha! Ha!
+
Sistla:
+I think I remember like 10 or 15 and these are the people that I've been interacting
Citizen Cosmos:
+I mean, when I was a kid, yes, yes, when I was a, no, when I was a kid, yes, when I was a kid, I remember like, you know, before mobile phones even, I mean, I'm a child of the 90s, I grew up in the 90s, I'm a child of the 80s, I grew up in the 90s, but I remember remembering house phone numbers, you know? And then at some point, mobile phone numbers, but not too many, but wow, 15 numbers, man, you must love numbers. because I don't remember 15 numbers, Muro, no way, no way.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+I hope my girlfriend isn't listening. I don't even remember her phone number. I hope she's not listening to this because I don't remember her phone number.
+
Sistla:
+I mean the numbers I remember
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+I'm sorry.
+
Sistla:
+like they didn't change for like a decade so hence I remember so yeah yeah
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Nice, nice
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+man. Man, I have a complex question for you. Now you said that the reason you fell in love with computers was the ability to create something. And that essentially led you to go and study computers and essentially, you know, participate in all those competitions, succeed, prove to yourself that you can do it if I understand correctly, and then go on to building what you're doing today, which we will talk about. But before we talk about that, Do you still think that, you know, your original desire of to build and create things with the use of computer technology, can you honestly say that this is what you're doing today? Is this is something you wanted to do?
+
Sistla:
+Actually, yes. I mean, I could have done more. I mean, these are like, there are things that I could have done better. But no, 100% like, I mean, I'll just give you an example. I bought my like, I have a Mac, Mac laptop, Mac Pro, Macbook Pro. And I bought it in 2020. And this has like, oh, not 2020, 2021. Sorry. And you know like, like buying that gave me like a sense of like, like I felt empowered, right? And more than that, like I finally could buy what I was like looking for, like for a decade or so, like you know, over a decade. And I'll tell you why this is important. Like even today, like when I start to work, I still feel excited. Like every day morning, I just can't like wait to wake up. That's why I don't sleep a lot. Like I'm usually excited. And every morning when I wake up, as soon as I like, like the first thing that I try to do, even before anything is to like, just like catch up with where we are at, like with work or, you know, where the team is at, because, you know, we have like a global team. So I'm like, usually I'm pretty excited. And, you know, I fresh up and like do all those things a bit later, but, you know, I'm pretty excited every day. So... At least that in essence, like, I mean, I had to think when you ask that question, but definitely this is where this is what we've always dreamt of. Like, you know, I knew that we could always start a business or a company or things like that. I did, you know, I did like I trained people on Rubik's cube. I had that skill. I did do
+
Sistla:
+that in college, like held workshops,
+
Sistla:
+earned some money, trained people on open like FOSS, free and open source software, things like that. But, you know, like that I knew was possible but today like I personally think like this is where we wanted to be and we can we could have been gone further but definitely like this is you know this is on track and you know I'm pretty excited every day you know to be doing whatever I'm doing yeah
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+When you say when you say you could have gone further where where is that further dream where the you Sistla
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+I want to know share with us
+
Sistla:
+Yeah.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+where is the ending point where where is it if you want to of course you don't have to share it with out of curiosity.
+
Sistla:
+I mean, I definitely do not see an end. So I think of things as like perpetual,
+
Sistla:
+but definitely they are not perpetual. What I wanted to convey there was there were a few decisions, choices over the past decade that I personally took that led me to being here and nothing is, I don't regret anything. I think like every decision, small, big, you know, it was important to being where we are today. But at the same time, I personally think things could have gone better in terms of, say me, managing finances well, or things that I could have personally learned to do whatever I'm doing even better. So I never did an MBA or those are things that are never gone into formal training of anything. But I think I... I mean, it's always in hindsight, right? You know, I think having some of those skills, like, put in, not skills, but some of those frameworks learned even before, like not now, but like before, would have probably helped me take better decisions, but I don't know, right? Like it's a butterfly effect. So, you know, all of these things lead to where we are today. So I mean, I'll say I couldn't be happier, but definitely want to do more, you know? That's the idea.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Nice, nice, nice, nice. No, it's always, in my opinion, this personal opinion, I think it's always cool to understand that people envision and dream things, and what is that vision and dream? I mean, there are some, I can tell you that over the last three and a half years or whatever, some of the founders that we speak with, Sometimes you found out very interesting things which you would never expect from people to say. You're like, wow, that's cool, man. There is
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+like something and it shows a really different side as well. I have another stigmatic question for you. I hope that's going to be the last stigmatic question I ask.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+But it's an interesting, I'm sorry, man, but it's
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+an interesting one because India is becoming, I mean, you live in India and India is becoming, as recently overcame China in terms of population. And India has always been to the outside world, a very different country with a very different set of culture, a very different set of rules, you know, the castes, you know, all those things, you know, there was a lot to it, which fascinates people and scare people and make people fall in love with India depends on who you are, you know,
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+I want to I want to hear your opinion as as not just somebody that was born lives in India, but as a person. with such ambitions because you were talking about ambitions and they're not just ambitions, you have created already a project which is, you know, running and helping others to create more things. So, you have achieved all those things. In your opinion, as somebody who did all that and as somebody who's working with that, what is the current situation in terms of India and adoption? Because in my opinion, India, well, at least by the population size, It plays a huge role in adoption, right? So what's your opinion on that? And I'm sorry for the stigmatic question, but I would really love to hear your opinion on this.
+
Sistla:
+Yeah, I mean not at all and what adoption? Internet, blockchain?
Citizen Cosmos:
+I was in my own. I'm sorry. I just really, you know what? After I asked that, I was like, oh shit, I forgot to say what adoption. Sisla is probably going to correct me. So Web3, of course I'm talking Web3. I'm really apologize for being silly. Sorry. Web3, of course.
+
Sistla:
+No, no, not at all. I'll say I attribute that to like, you know, I think about 50 or so years ago, no, people will kill me if I get this wrong. 70 plus years ago, we got independence in 1947. And since then, since then, like, you know, India has like focused a bit or like a bit more than that on education, right? Like just before independence to You know, people like India was ruled by the British and English was a common factor in India actually like adopting English because even with the person that's from a neighboring state, I do not know their language, they do not know our language, we all know English. So that has played a huge role in actually say English medium education in the 70s, 80s and 90s. And by 90s, like everyone like English medium became a default. More or less like 80% of the country had access to English medium or I'll say 70% of the country had access to English medium education. And over these years, even if English was not your first language or even if whether or not you had English medium education, you could like have access to all the resources. Right. Like, and the thing with India is that we missed a couple of revolutions. I'll. tell you what happened. There was the phone, the landline and the cordless and there was no laptop or computer revolution. We missed that and directly moved to mobile revolution. Like and we were like
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Mmhmm.
+
Sistla:
+India was like the fastest like 2007-8 you had like you know China producing mass like mass producing phones you know like dumping them all over the world. India was like quick to adopt to those
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Mm-hmm.
+
Sistla:
+because you had what was like you know Nokia or Blackberry. or a Chinese phone
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Mm-hmm.
+
Sistla:
+and
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
+
Sistla:
+you know people are like that preferred quality but Nokia, Symbian OS and people that didn't care about that bought a Chinese phone you know like it was low cost but had internet right and people didn't even get data packs until like say 2009 right and then you had companies like DoCoMo from Japan that partnered with an Indian company and introduced like what is a per second billing and so on so forth hence mobile penetration like grew by quite a lot and then you had an Indian company that got started with yeah this is 2010 and once everyone had access to internet there was like a huge influx of digital media so YouTube, Facebook all of these like grew by like by quite a lot which your platform had a presence in India or like among Indian audience those grew like by quite a lot between 2010 and 2015. And that was the time when, by 2010, we were the guys that were talking about digital, asking companies to get their own websites. Computer science education was trending, if I can say. And all of that put together, 2010 and 2015 saw massive adoption. And 2020? But yeah, 15 to 20 was when we had like an influx. Like there was, I don't know if many are aware, but there was a demonetization event in India where in 2016, like all old notes were banned in four hours. Like four hours later, no old note could be used. Right. And this led to and like a massive, massive adoption of digital payments. And India has what is the UPI, where it is like a blockchain network. But I, I, I'm really not sure if they're using blockchain or not. But it exactly functions like a blockchain network. Every bank is on UPI. UPI stands for Unified Payments Interface. And UPI works
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Mm-hmm.
+
Sistla:
+exactly like a, like you have what is Google Pay in India, which is like a metamask. web like mobile app, you have multiple clients,
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Hmm. Heh.
+
Sistla:
+you know, there is the UPI network, all the banks are like serving the UPI network, part of the UPI network. And then there are multiple clients like Google Pay, you know, like everyone WhatsApp, everyone supports UPI, right. And once like this was in place, like India was onboarded to digital, right, like you had digitally native services, you had digitally native, like finance, like apps, you had digitally native like, you know, yeah, everything that the world has to offer was accessible. And companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, all of these companies, they took advantage of this, built services, products around this. And right now you can, I'm in a city where if I want groceries in 15 minutes, I can actually get them in 15 minutes. Yeah, there are services where that is possible.
+
Sistla:
+And yeah, it is possible in about at least 30, 40% of the country, you have such services available. So you don't have any problem and also like India in like 2004, 5, 6 or 7 like you had access to the fastest internet like I do not know how that happened like I think like India cracked like good deals but like it was like fucking fast like you know no like developing developed countries also did not have like that fast of an internet access and you know like downloading a GB or you know like in 2010 downloading a GB was nothing. In 2007, of course, like you had a dial up not dial up, but like 56 Kbps or 64 Kbps or something like that connection, 500 Kbps. And you had to probably wait for like half an hour or more to be able to download. But yeah, like buy and buy like things improved like so much that you know, people could not even catch up like people could not catch up. And everyone that was like over 40 or something, they all got on to WhatsApp. You know, like everything, like they now know QR codes, they scan, they book a cab. You know, all of these things happen normally and no one like bats an eye and no one. And even people that do not know English because of icons and all the optimizations, uh, you know, everything is accessible. So no one really localizes in India. Like I never accessed any app that was in Hindi. Like I don't even know Hindi properly. Right. So, yeah.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Really?
+
Sistla:
+Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Are you serious? Wow.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+But so do you think do you think the same thing will happen with Web3 in India? Or it's already happening?
+
Sistla:
+Yeah, it
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+quick adoption.
+
Sistla:
+is happening. Actually, before there was there is now like a blanket, not like a blanket ban, but I think it is not. It is in dark gray area. You have like high taxes and so on and so forth right now in India to deal with crypto. But you know, earlier when that didn't happen, how should I tell you? There is this league called IPL, Indian Premier League, which is for cricket. to what I don't know like Super Bowl and all those are for football right like oh no like here in the Europe right EPL. EPL. IPL is to cricket in India what EPL
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+I
+
Sistla:
+is to
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+I I
+
Sistla:
+football yeah sorry.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+I actually, I actually, no, I was going to say I was going to, no, don't be sorry. This is, this is me pulling the quilt. Me interrupting you. Sorry.
+
Sistla:
+None.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Like I was going to just say that I grew up in the UK. So
+
Sistla:
+Oh
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+I actually had a lot, a lot, a lot of Indian, well, mostly from Punjab, like a lot of friends when I was in high school.
+
Sistla:
+Night.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+So I, I know a little bit more about
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Indian, let's say like
+
Sistla:
+culture.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+India. Yes. Then most people. Yeah, like the culture. Yeah. And the preferences. I even played cricket. I don't understand fuck all about cricket,
+
Sistla:
+Ha ha!
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+but I even played it in high school, but I don't understand what's what's going on. I need I know you need to run. I know I know that much but That's what I remember.
+
Sistla:
+But yeah, no worries,
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Sorry, sorry, man. I'm not good at cricket.
+
Sistla:
+like me neither.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+But I know how big it
+
Sistla:
+Me
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+is.
+
Sistla:
+neither. You know, I look at cricket as like
+
Sistla:
+entertainment,
+
Sistla:
+like what a massive franchise like cricket has built. So I look at all those things. But yeah, like in like IPL had crypto ads, like at one point in time, you could not like there was a there
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Wow.
+
Sistla:
+was a break. And during that break You only saw fintech and crypto ads. You didn't see FMCG. You didn't see Amazon's. You didn't see those ads. You saw like crypto exchange, crypto product. Do this with crypto, do that with crypto. You saw fintech products where you could like get a policy, get like loans and things like that. But you see like that, like because people, because the population is typically young, they are like into, you know, I'll just tell you an example, like, you know, vouchers, right? Like gift vouchers. There's like a... huge business around people like collecting those and these are digital vouchers, coupon codes and they resell those and things like that. All of these things happen and they game like VC funded startups, make a lot of money on those apps, you know and do all those things. So people are smart, they just don't like, not everyone gets crypto or like they still are a bit afraid because to operate in this ecosystem you actually you'll have to come down to the internet with money. 99% people don't come down to the internet with money. They want to be able to navigate. They pay once for internet and that's all that they want to do. They might not even want to pay for subscriptions, but the ones that really get it, they're already involved. They're getting involved rather quickly.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+I think the reason in my head, at least personally, that I'm so fascinated with what does India think, even though I'm an anarchist, right? And I don't like the whole concept of countries and that, but why India fascinates me personally is because in my opinion, India with the diversity of its languages and communities is actually the closest example to a centralisedly run, decentralised country. The amount of cultures and languages and nations inside of India is exactly that example of loads of decentralized societies
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+that came over years and thousands of generations of rules of under different mandates, regardless if it was Chinese or English or Mongolian or whatever, to exist what it exists today. And I think we can, by looking at India... in the decentralized world learn a little bit of what to do correctly and what mistakes we can expect already because India, with its being all those great cultural examples that are, like you said yourself, many things could have been better.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Everything could be
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+better. And I think that's why I'm so fascinated with India because I'm fascinated with decentralization. I think it's a very good example of decentralization in India. It's interesting.
+
Sistla:
+Nice.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+And I'm not talking about on the national level of the national government. I'm talking about, you know, those
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+communities inside of India. And yes,the people, the real people, the real people, not the government.
+
Sistla:
+Correct. There's a famous tweet by, I mean, I know that tweet, I remember it, by Balaji Srinivasan. He's pretty active in the,
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Yes,
+
Sistla:
+yes,
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+of course.
+
Sistla:
+right. So, Balaji says, I'm bullish on Indians, not on India. That changed
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Yes.
+
Sistla:
+the perspective quite a lot
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Yes.
+
Sistla:
+for a lot of
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Yes.
+
Sistla:
+people. And they wanted
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Yes.
+
Sistla:
+people to be bullish on India
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Yes.
+
Sistla:
+as a narrative. The current Prime Minister also does... push that quite a lot. Our state government also encourages technology, innovation. The place where I am, we have Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon's largest data center, Microsoft's largest warehouse, Microsoft's largest data center, multiple other banks, tech companies. All of these are there. And this was like a result of like, say 30, 40 years of, I'd say, not planning. people could not have planned for this, but they were prepared for this. Where like they've doubled down, tripled down on education. They, they just like focused on the most basic things like education, infra and that like that led the long way into like, you know, being this, uh, I'll say, I'll say like powerhouse or like an influx of people because like people got people ready and they didn't know what, what they would all do. But people got ready for something
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Mm-hmm.
+
Sistla:
+that they wanted to do. Yeah.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+I think I would carry on ... sentence here. I would say I'm bullish on people, not on governments. So, you know,
+
Sistla:
+Yes.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+this is what I think. I'm not bullish on governments, I'm bullish on people.
+
Sistla:
+Okay.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+But wait, man, let's get back to you and not inside of my anti-governmental head. Wait. Now, let's talk a little bit about Omniflex. But before
+
Sistla:
+Mm-hmm.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+that... I'm going to play devil's advocate. I'm a content creator,
+
Sistla:
+Yes.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+so I'm not just a content creator, but I'm primarily a content creator, but my next question is going to be very devil's advocate. A lot of people, especially considering that the blockchain world is, can be argued to still today be a highly technological universe space for people who are coders and yourself, you know, you're coming from a computer science background. So there is a lot of people out there. And the reason I'm asking you that, we still haven't touched on Omniflex too much, but Omniflex is a platform for content creators and for communities. We will talk about it in more in a second, but first the question. Some people in crypto still today, and I understand where it's coming from, but I want to hear your opinion. They see content creation and value as not exactly in the same league. So people say, oh, you're just a YouTuber or, oh, you're just,
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+I don't know, a designer or, you know, you're just a meme guy. And what do you, what would you say to that? What would you, how would you reflect on that sentence? What is it? Does it, why, why content creation? I mean, why did you decide to build a platform around communities?
+
Sistla:
+Yeah, I mean, this is the backbone of the internet. Like without a community, like your, whatever you build is like almost like however smart, however, you know, effective it might be. Like, you know, it just can't like sustain. Microsoft had all the resources,
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Yes.
+
Sistla:
+Linux had the community, they now power 98% of world servers. Like that is what I see as community. And you know, for the people that don't believe... I don't know like where you'll publish this, but I'll ask them to f off, right? Like I don't care because like being able to like articulate what you innovate is the most important skill set that an innovator can have. Like even though his innovation might not be the best, you know, if he can articulate if he or she can articulate that very well, you know, they can then present that idea generations later like how you're using Tesla's concepts, you know, right now. Probably if Tesla would have had a better, you know, I don't know. people that helped him communicate, you know, that made sure to, you know, be in those like power circles and things like that, world would have been different now. So it is probably, you know, like, yeah, these are some of the reasons like I personally think content creation is also creation from scratch. I am not a creator myself, but I can't appreciate creators enough. Like beat anyone like create someone that creates a meme is, is actually putting together multiple perspectives into one static image without writing like thousand words and then presenting it like what like what better can it get right
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Yeah.
+
Sistla:
+it's a unit of thought
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Yeah.
+
Sistla:
+like a meme
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Yeah.
+
Sistla:
+is like a unit of thought it represents a fraction of thought so right from the smallest possible unit to like macro things like a video like a live stream you know all of these are like important like we we went to cosmos 2022 but like cosmos 2021 We were doing it offline, from India. And we heard people, there were people that came up to us and said OmniFlix, you're doing a great job this year, but last year, due to those live streams I really was motivated to come down to Cosmo Awards and this is my first ever IRL event. I shared that this was my first IRL event as well, from a Cosmo standpoint. I couldn't have been more excited and we are very glad that we could present all that was happening to the world outside because you know, like that is the power of that live stream. The same is the case with, you know, your podcast or a video, you know, something is happening in the Celestia ecosystem. How will Ethereum people know they don't follow GitHub? They don't probably care about, you know, the team or the company or the community of Celestia, but one idea that someone has that an effective thread can communicate is far, far, far more effective than You know, right? Like building a kick-ass app that no one utilizes. So, yeah. That's my thought.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Thank you for saying that because it correlates personally with our mission at Citizen Cosmos. And our mission is to bridge layer zero with layer zero being the community.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+And this is what I refer to as layer zero.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+And I think that no matter how many L1s, L2s, L3s, L27s we build,
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+of the day, until AI replaces all of us, we're still here and we need to communicate. And blockchain is a communication tool. And somebody needs to bridge that. And this is what, what, and it's fascinating by the way, you know, I'm going to give you, I'm sorry, but I have to give you this example because it happened to me yesterday,
+
Sistla:
+Mm-hmm.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+um, the, the power of semantics, the power of what words mean to us, you know, I live in, in, in, in an island and people here speak Portuguese
+
Sistla:
+Mm-hmm.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+and, um, I, I, I am learning Portuguese and you know, I've learned one phrase, of course I'm learning from, from, from my girlfriend, you
+
Sistla:
+Mm-hmm.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+know. And, you know, she teaches me, of course, sometimes funny things, sometimes a bit, you know, not, not, not good to say, you know,
+
Sistla:
+That's
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+not,
+
Sistla:
+how
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+not,
+
Sistla:
+you learn a
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+but
+
Sistla:
+language.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+at, but I realized, but, but it is, but what I realized about semantics, man, was a very powerful thing. I was, I was, I was, we were at, at, at a barbecue with our friends. It was a couple of days ago yesterday or the day before yesterday. And, um, they were kids there and they were saying that sentence,
+
Sistla:
+Yeah.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+which is just. There is no swear words in it. It's just using normal words. But because I learned it in a way which my brain memorized
+
Sistla:
+Yeah.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+it as used, you know, in a kind of funny, like adult way
+
Sistla:
+Yeah.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+to me, even with the kids were saying that I was like, oh my God, why am I thinking this is like wrong? You know, my brain is makes that stupid connection. And this is the power of semantics,
+
Sistla:
+Yeah.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+how powerful words can
+
Sistla:
+Yeah.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+be, you know, like boom. It's like,
+
Sistla:
+Exactly.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+wow, crazy, man, crazy.
+
Sistla:
+100 percent.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Let me ask you something about Omniflix
+
Sistla:
+Hehehe
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+man. What is the mission of Omniflix? I want to know what is in your opinion, in your opinion, what is the mission of Omniflix?
+
Sistla:
+So it is pretty simple, right? Sovereign publishing platforms are a sovereign way for you to manage, distribute, and monetize your content. And this is pretty fixed. It might sound too vague or it might sound as if it is a larger than life mission. Yes, it can be, but sometimes it's not as well. Because. You know, we've seen platforms like WordPress grow. We've seen what YouTube does, does even now, did earlier, the total amount of revenue that they take. And this is also again, like Google AdWords revenue, right? And you know, all of these things, like when we see how all these systems, when we saw how all these systems function, we appreciated them for various reasons. We also did not like a few ways in which they operated. And we felt that, you know, Working on Omniflix will help us improve that. And we found our community in the blockchain ecosystem. We already did this. We were working on this even without blockchain. We were helping teams or organizations manage their content, distribute it effectively, get the right word out at the right time, and be able to monetize that effectively so that all they can do is just create content and still survive. But it was all in a web two centric way. When it came to web three, there was this additional super part that we felt was part of web three infrastructure, which is sovereignty and Cosmos like displays demonstrates that like no other technology, piece of infra. So, you know, hence utilizing Cosmos, like I'll say, being able to provide those sovereign management distribution publishing and monetization platforms, you know, is at the core of what we're doing at OmniFlix. So. If you complete this in say 10 years, I'm very happy to like say, let this, I won't say let this go, but if at some point in time, there is someone better or if there are like, you know, better people that can do this and take the mission even further, like nothing like it, right? So this is what we are aiming for. And, you know, we want to make sure that, you know, over a period of time, this infrastructure is built at various levels, right? For a small creative. to a larger organization that deals only with media, to an organization that doesn't even care about media. So all of them should have the tools. And you know, if they're all on a level playing field, like how the internet changes things, like I think a lot of things will change.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+I absolutely agree with you and hope that it is what it's going to be. I was in Lisbon during the blockchain week and I interviewed people from Chorus One, from Steakfish, I don't remember if P2P was on that. No, I don't think so. But there was are successful founders within the Web3
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+world and beyond it. You know, some of them,
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+definitely those numbers can be taken into the real world. You know, and I was asking all of them the same or a similar set of questions. And one of them was, and this is what I'm going to ask you as
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+well. Of course, Omniflix is still young, but I want to ask that anyways, because you don't have to think only about Omniflix. The question was more or less this. Do you think that what you are building and doing... Okay, but not from a high point, but do you
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+really
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+think that people out there, you know, with everyday lives, you know, because, you know, we are all we all live in a different parts of the world and you yourself, you know, I, you know, how it can be,
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+you know, you know, how it can get.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Unfortunately, do you think that we are here, all of us and of course, not just we because it's about you today. But do you think what you are building will really help people? Will it really solve something for them in their everyday life? Will they even care about that? Why, you know, do you think that this is something that is realistic, what I'm saying, for them to care about that?
+
Sistla:
+Yeah, like actually good question. Like if we would have built for everyone, like we would have failed on day one or like day 100 or day 1000. Here we are not building for everyone. Like that's why I think, I personally think even in the Web3 space, or I don't know, like even in the cosmos, some people might not really understand what we are talking but at the same time, like the ones that actually talk to us that actually are feeling this problem or you know, will have this problem in the future, they see like. true potential in what we're building. So I'll say this is for a subset of people that are actually looking to create, like manage, distribute and monetize content. And for all the consumers out there, right? These tools will help them see like better content, you know, help them manage. So I've known like, you know, open source projects that died, you know, too many tokens like in the crypto space, like Web 3 space that, you know,
+
Sistla:
+did not like make it. I hope we are not one of them, at least like that's what we're working towards. But regardless of our Web3 side of things, what are we doing on the media tech side of things? This can be reused by any community, Web2, Web3, even in the future, if there is any other community. We're pretty sure that these frameworks will help them utilize. So this is like an algorithm, but scaled to a framework, which will enable people to implement in any language. I mean, just letting you know about that analogy. But you know, in our case, like I'm I perfectly or rather I, I believe 100% that what do we do, whether we are able to distribute that in the best possible way or not, we are 100% sure that this will this can be used and we'll identify distribution channels, not just in us or like, you know, our team or like Omniflix community or something like that. But we'll identify distribution channels to make this work. Because until that day, I don't think our work has ended. Just building something and praying that people will use it makes no sense. And for people to actually find value, they'll have to know how Omniflix infrastructure can add value. So, yeah, I believe that this will be used whether or not like Web3. And Web3 is making sure that we incentivize the right people, we align incentives to the right stakeholders. That is what we're probably utilizing the Web3 layer or the Web3... Yeah, the Web3 layer for to be able to align incentives to the right people. Because like, you know, you can run a live stream, whether or not Web3 infra, you can run a server, whether or not a Akash net you can run. Yeah. You can do all of these things. Like, I don't know, right? Like without the blockchain, you could sell art, but why NFTs? So, you know, all of these things put together, like are. Like are shaping up content as we know. And like this infrastructure we believe is the first step in like, you know, Enabling people run their own like, you know media studio Why should only at times or like whoever it is like a BBC or a Fox should run an empire, right? There are hundreds of thousands
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Yes.
+
Sistla:
+of independent creators that have like far more Content like quantity and we never know quality because we don't see it on those channels, right? So that is something that we are aiming for him, you know, we believe this is like outlast whatever we're doing And specifically web 3 or not You know, this would still be something that we would be up to. No. Yeah.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+I think Joe Rogan, by the way, is a great proof to what you say, right? I mean, Joe Rogan per average has... I'm a bit scared to get the numbers wrong right now, so please don't quote me on that, anyone. But if I'm not mistaken, on average, Joe Rogan has two to three times more viewers per episode than CNN News or Fox News or anyone else. So what is mainstream media?
+
Sistla:
+Yeah.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+That is a good
+
Sistla:
+Ha
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+question.
+
Sistla:
+ha ha ha ha ha, yeah.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Who is the mainstream?
+
Sistla:
+Exactly.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+So, but it's cool and it's proof to what you say that it's working, man. Absolutely. So, and, and hopefully more and more creators, not just Joe Rogan with kudos to his work, you know, can, can achieve that with the help of a three, man. I have an uncomfortable question for you about OmniFlix.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Um, it's not uncomfortable really. It's devil's advocate question, but you know, um, we are in the content creation business now. I'm joking. I'm joking. I know that way. Um.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+About Omniflix and USD, you know, there was a lot of talk about Omniflix and, you know, using prices and quoting prices in USD and in some, why USD? Why peg things to the USD, man?
+
Sistla:
+Ha ha ha.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Why not use peg things to Atom? I don't know.
+
Sistla:
+Correct. So the thing was that like, you know, threefold.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+haha
+
Sistla:
+I'll give you a three, like three point answer to this. First, like
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Please.
+
Sistla:
+we were already
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Please.
+
Sistla:
+like going ahead and like displaying NFT listings in whatever they were listed in, say Atom or Osmo, Juno, Huawei, KT. So these were the listings that were supported. Now what happened was like people wanted first something stable, which we could not offer if we didn't support a stable coin. And at this point in time, like we were too afraid to like, you know, say support bridge tokens, you know, Luna, USD, Bridgehacks
+
Sistla:
+and everything else afterwards. You know, we only wanted to like support native tokens, you know, that was like another point. But that didn't help because like people could not like plan for, you know, specific things if they didn't see values in USD. So, and the other fact was that because of too many tokens. We were like collectors were not able to like list or not list but like do their research or do their due diligence and identify an NFT or you know yeah an NFT that was listed uh you know because they had to like navigate between multiple tokens and so on so forth so the common denominator right now is USD where the price is shown in USD but is still listed in Atom and going forward We aim
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Mm-hmm.
+
Sistla:
+to integrate other currencies as well, where we are seeing traffic from. We do see traffic from Europe, we do see traffic from actually Africa as well, but that traffic is again, it's like too many currencies to support, so we did not take that initiative. Even in the, even like I'll say the Euro specific traffic, we did not think or consider supporting Euro at this point in time. But with demand, we are very open. The same applies for multiple other currencies, like the Korean won or Japanese yen is also something that, like a community. There are creators that spread the word about their collections in Japan. They have their community sorted. Now, the same is the case with China as well. But in our case, we just went ahead with USD because people could filter everything and like... quickly access but we have no affinity towards USD like everyone you know if there is demand for USDC you know we'll 100% go and add that we've had that demand like people asked but we did not like you know we were like too anxious to support a bridge token right now and you know like revoke support and things like that later so you know never got to supporting USDC or AXL USDC but like actually we are connected with Axlar like relaying technically connected with Axlar and You know, we also like bridged AXL-USDC into the Omniflix ecosystem. NFTs can be listed in AXL-USDC even now and transactions can happen. We just did not go down that route to support it yet.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+It makes sense to be honest that the visibility isn't something
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+people are used to. I totally understand
+
Sistla:
+Yeah,
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+that.
+
Sistla:
+because like,
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+It was
+
Sistla:
+no,
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+more of a devil's advocate question to understand.
+
Sistla:
+no, like, like you like we have Chihuahua being supported, for example, and say 99,000 Chihuahua or something that the NFTs listed for, you know, doesn't pop up in like a low to high search, you know, or a filter or a sort and things like that. But, you know, if you end up saying five or ten or twenty dollars, you know, it's easy for all those NFTs. And you know, it's clear that as soon as someone like start like clicks on collect, they see the token that the native token that the NFT is listed in. So it's not like we are hiding that token completely, the details, but just like using USD as a common denominator.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+I can tell you by a secret that when we were building Golos in 2016, the fork of Steemit, we were doing the same thing.
+
Sistla:
+Mmmmmmmmm
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+We had an internal currency, but the prices were shown
+
Sistla:
+Hmm.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+to the people either in dollars or in rubles or in euros. So they chose, we were doing exactly the same thing you guys are doing and that is the correct way. I was just wondering, in my opinion, at least I was wondering like how does it work behind the background.
+
Sistla:
+I mean, I have a... sorry, sorry. Like, I have a quick question.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+No go
+
Sistla:
+Sure,
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+on
+
Sistla:
+sure,
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+sorry sorry no no no go on go on please please
+
Sistla:
+sure.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+please go on Please
+
Sistla:
+I have a question for you then. Like, if we... like, in future, we'll build
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Oh.
+
Sistla:
+Omniflix TV where people can like publish VOD videos, like live sessions can run and so on and so forth. If someone wants to tip, right? How is it... like, how do you want people to tip? Do you want people to tip? say 5 or 10 or 15 or 20 dollars or do you want them to tip one or two Atom?
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+I think it's not about, I will answer from a very, I will try to be very objective.
+
Sistla:
+Mm-hmm.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+I think it's important that those tips will be in crypto. And I think one of the main reasons is to avoid any bureaucratic issues, because when you're tipping the person in dollars or in
+
Sistla:
+Mm-hmm.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+euros, you kind of playing around with bureaucratic issues that there is no need to play
+
Sistla:
+Hmm.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+with.
+
Sistla:
+Mmm.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Luckily for us today, that doesn't mean anybody for anything. So anybody can accept cryptocurrencies, like accepting,
+
Sistla:
+Yeah.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+you know, because some content creators, not
+
Sistla:
+Yeah.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+us, particularly, but some content creators, they stick with legalities.
+
Sistla:
+Mmm.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+And I totally respect and understand that it's their choice.
+
Sistla:
+Yeah.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+I will not be the one to tell them no, but especially for them, you know, instead of going through the whole process of accepting dollars as tips and making money
+
Sistla:
+Thank you.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+in that. They can say, well, I'm accepting whatever, whatever, not to slug them off, but you know, it's not regulated by anyone. So when it's like that, it's already then up to them whether or not and what they do with it. But at least it will save. At least this is how I see it. Now I might be totally wrong,
+
Sistla:
+No,
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+but that would be my
+
Sistla:
+no, no.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+opinion.
+
Sistla:
+I mean like 99% we won't support fiat. The thing is that like if they'll have to like choose, so you can imagine it to be like this. They'll anyways like consider that they'll anyways tip in crypto. But the first screen
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Uh huh.
+
Sistla:
+that they see, like as soon as they hit tip, the options that are presented to them might look like $5, $10, $50 or $100. As soon
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Mm-hmm.
+
Sistla:
+as
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Ah,
+
Sistla:
+you
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+okay,
+
Sistla:
+click
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+okay, okay, okay.
+
Sistla:
+on
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Mm-hmm.
+
Sistla:
+five. It might ask you for say atom or Flix or whatever, and then like send it to your address. But do you want to see the USD value or do you want people to see a crypto tokens directly?
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Now, again, if you're asking me, Citizen Cosmos, I would say I would like to see the
+
Sistla:
+crypto.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+crypto values, but I'm assuming and trying to be objective that I think that for a lot of people that would be uncomfortable. The reason I say crypto is because my personal goal in life and also with Citizen Cosmos is to try to... to make things better, to build a better world. And I think one of the problems is fiat currencies. And I think
+
Sistla:
+Mmm.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+the more we educate the world about the existence of other things, the more people will accept it. But with that, I'm objective. And I think that that might be very uncomfortable
+
Sistla:
+I'm
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+for a
+
Sistla:
+sorry.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+lot of people. So I'm assuming that people would prefer seeing... But you can overplay it. You could overplay it very easily by in the settings of an account,
+
Sistla:
+Yeah.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+let's say a person has the settings. And they could choose the default currency and somebody could choose seeing in Bitcoin, somebody in dollars, somebody in atom. And then everybody gets to see the customization they want to see. Right.
+
Sistla:
+Correct, correct. At this point in time, it is like that default is tokens. So to the top right corner of the market place, you hit what is like a toggle between USD and tokens. And then only then you'll see values in USD because like sometimes people don't think in USD. Okay. Like crypto folks, Web3 folks, they
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Yeah,
+
Sistla:
+think in USD, but yeah, I
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+I
+
Sistla:
+mean
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+don't.
+
Sistla:
+like the prices and all
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+don't
+
Sistla:
+are usually.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+man I think in ether I think in ether and
+
Sistla:
+Oh
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+atom
+
Sistla:
+yeah, of course, of course. You know like NFTs are not thought of in dollars. People would like, you know people would go crazy if they think of NFTs in dollars. Yeah, they'll probably think of them in ETH or you know like the native token, you know, Flix or any other token.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Sometimes I look at the price of things in the shopping mall and I'm like, that costs 0.1 ether. Are you guys serious? Like I would not pay like 0.1
+
Sistla:
+It's
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+ether for that, you know? Oh man, I'm serious though. I'm like that when I'm crazy
+
Sistla:
+No,
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+when
+
Sistla:
+no,
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+it
+
Sistla:
+no,
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+comes to that.
+
Sistla:
+you're absolutely right. This is what happens to us as well.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+It's okay. It's
+
Sistla:
+Yeah,
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+okay.
+
Sistla:
+yeah, yeah. Yeah. Sure.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+It's normal. Sistla, man, the Blitz. Let's get into it. I have three questions for you. So first one. give me a three projects
+
Sistla:
+Mm-hmm.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+that are interest you technologically. They don't have to be crypto projects.
+
Sistla:
+Mm-hmm.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+It could be any project in the world, something three things that interest you as projects technologically.
+
Sistla:
+Okay, like there are these GANs, like video AI GANs that I'm personally, I was fascinated with them since like 2016-17 when the first set of research came out. Even now it hasn't like fully materialized but you can imagine a text to video, you know, that can be created but you know like well done, right? Like and those, like those GANs like Generative Adversarial Neural Networks, they have been like evolving. quite a lot in the last five years. I'm like as research, I'm like personally bullish on that because I personally think that it will solve like a lot of problems, not just in the media space but also outside like for cellular biology research. You know, it can be anything because these are all like thousands of frames under a microscope and you put them together to form what is like a video, all these frames and then you do your analysis, like go ahead with your analysis. So these are things that like. Like this fascinated me quite a lot. Been following that research. Of course, did not build anything myself. But you know, I've been following the research and you know, quite bullish on that as a tech. Right? Like GANs. And you know, specially GANs in media. Right? So... That is one. Hahaha! I should say I'm like... I really like Celestia.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Next one.
+
Sistla:
+Yeah. I really like Celestia for what they're doing.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Okay.
+
Sistla:
+And you know, I... I... Like I believe I'm... I'll say like I don't know, aligned or I like what the founders also think of, how they present things and you know,
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+I understand.
+
Sistla:
+yeah, like I like what is happening there,
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+I understand.
+
Sistla:
+right? So that is like, you know, from a crypto native standpoint and you know, something like technology, internet technology and crypto native, but moving out of like internet as a whole, right? I really like companies that have huge distribution channels that build their distribution channels from the ground up. There is a company in India, it's called IDC, they are extremely massive. I can't compare it with any other company. It's like a Philip Morris plus a Marriott plus Stedler plus a few companies put together. It's like a public... private corporation. It started like way earlier but their distribution channels are like extremely unique and I've seen that strategy get implemented time and again. I mean in the internet realm they're called growth hacks, but you know they exist in the real world too and you know, yeah, I'm like personally, you know, like I really like what they're doing I'm not like probably a fan of the company or whatever IDC stands for like Indian Tobacco Corporation. So they sell cigarettes but they're like massive and you know their distribution goes as Like further than any government right like any yeah You get you get IDC products in like the remote remotest parts of India Right and that is a strategy that has like and to be able to get there They used a lot of strategies and there are like quite a lot of case studies as well So, you know, I'm like extremely bullish on you know companies that identify their distribution channels and build them double down and build them. So, you know, yeah, that is, you know, those are three things that I'm like, personally bullish on.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+That was a surprise. I liked, I loved that answer, by the way, by the way, this is a very good answer. Thank you. The last part, fantastic man.
+
Sistla:
+Thank you.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Um, second question, it gave me two motivational things that you in your daily life that exists
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+that keeps Sistla building, um, not just Omniflix, but keep Sistla going. Keep Sistla trying, you know, to, to uphold the values that you were talking about. And, you know, Just getting on with your daily life. What are those two things that help you keep going?
+
Sistla:
+I mean, if I have to talk about like the zero index in the array, like array my zero, like the first thing, I'll answer that, you know, it is the people around me that, you know, yeah,
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Mm-hmm.
+
Sistla:
+and this might be like common, but I personally, like I have like friends that I've known like our friends since like... the last say 15 years, 10 years, like over a decade is like pretty common. What does that mean? Like that means that did I not make any new friends in the last few years? Obviously not. Like I did make friends, but at a personal level, you connect with a few people. And you know, that, if that is like one, I read a quote when I was in 12th on a college prospectus, like an admission test that I had to take, and that like changed the way I saw things. Like. I do not know, it was by Aristotle or Plato or Socrates, one of these guys. And the quote goes like this, you are what you do repeatedly, therefore excellence is not an act but a habit. That was mind blowing to me. I don't know why, those set of words, they just changed the way I saw things and from then on, it was a long game. I never did anything for the short term, fortunately. Like even now if you look at like how I do not know like Omniflix operates, none of the things that we do are like short term in nature. So like that, like that has changed the way I saw things. Right and that has led me to being able to like, you know, be at be like excellent. That is not a destination but a journey. So I'm aware of that. But you know, I just do my best personally and I try to push everyone else. to do their best. So you know sometimes people like me for that like sometimes they don't but at the same time you know end of the day like when everyone sees that output like the way actually is meant to be everyone is happy they'll forget all their worries like all the effort all the sacrifices that they made and seeing that in action seeing that get to life is like you know mesmerizing you know personally for me so I like that is another quote that I live by and Of course, like I said before, creating things that do not exist, that definitely motivates me. And creating things that don't exist, not just means new tech, but a new way of doing things. Auctions existed, internet existed, then came eBay, and then Amazon took over eBay, and then XYZ happened. So, combination of two things can lead to far more, it can be far more effective. The results can be exponential. These are the things that I think, you know, like, I'm motivated by. Like no one has asked me this question. So I had to think, but if you ask me quickly, like these are the things that I think I'm like, uh, you know, yeah, pretty inspired, take inspiration from.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+curiosity, exploration, I think it's what makes us intelligent. By the way, it's an Aristotle quote, but
+
Sistla:
+Uh...
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+I know that there's a story behind that quote that they say that it wasn't really Aristotle who said it, it was somebody who was trying to explain it and the Aristotle quote was similar, but it's an Aristotle if I'm not
+
Sistla:
+Ah,
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+mistaken.
+
Sistla:
+okay.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Last one,
+
Sistla:
+Yeah.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+A writer doesn't matter. It could be a cartoon character. It could be a github person
+
Sistla:
+He he.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+you follow could be you Anyone in the world and it doesn't they don't have to be real that inspires you doesn't influence you but inspires you
+
Sistla:
+Hmmmmmmmmmmm So, No, I do not know. Like, I think inspiration from my dad is good. Okay. I mean, I should say I do not know because, you know, I have been inspired equally from what, say, a Bill Gates did or what a Steve Jobs did, you know, like like a few things and do not like a few things. I mean very hard. Like, yeah, like that role
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+It's okay,
+
Sistla:
+model type,
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+you don't have to answer.
+
Sistla:
+I mean that persona in my head doesn't exist, but although it exists, like it's a combination of different personas. So, you know, quite a lot of people, like I've read, I've got into reading biographies, I don't read fiction, I read like, sorry, sorry, I don't read
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Mm.
+
Sistla:
+fiction. I only read non-fiction. Yeah,
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Fiction.
+
Sistla:
+right? And biographies are pretty interesting because, Those are like real stories that happened and like how people like, I don't know, in some sense, like overcame some of those difficulties, you know, thought about perspectives that people didn't. So, you know, in that sense, the most common, you know, inspirations would be like role models in that sense would be the people that like that invented created things like, you know, the, the, the steam engine, the cars, the industries, you know, the automotive. You know, like, yeah, things like that and the internet electricity. So these inspired me. Like I cannot like name names, like too many to name, like Linus Torvalds, like creator of Linux. Like he inspired me as well, in some sense that, you know, he proved that like at 20 you could do anything and that could change the world in like 10 years. And, you know, that was actually something that we had, like we needed, you know, because as, as a kid, I never saw someone that changed things like in front of my eyes, right? Like for real. I heard stories, I always knew history was corrupted by the people that wrote history. But
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Yes.
+
Sistla:
+all these things put together,
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Yes.
+
Sistla:
+we had to have those validations, those real examples. I found the internet to be inspiring enough. I could see the bad as well. I found Bitcoin for other reasons. But at the same time, internet as a whole has inspired me quite a lot. Sorry for the long answer and not like a straightforward answer. But
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+It's
+
Sistla:
+yeah.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+beautiful. It's beautiful, man. I love answers like that. I love the answers like that. And by the way, I think it was Isaac Kazimov, right? Who said that the most dangerous weapon in his history
+
Sistla:
+Hahaha!
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+invented. It's not the will
+
Sistla:
+Yeah!
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+or machine gun. It's history. Whoever controls history controls all of
+
Sistla:
+Yeah,
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+the universe.
+
Sistla:
+yeah, yeah.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+It's interesting. Sistla man, it's been a huge pleasure to finally record with you. Really is really has. I'm glad too that we are finally connected. And thank you very much, man, for your answers.
+
Sistla:
+No, thank you. Thank you for those questions. Like I personally had to like think a lot before when I said anything. And this was, yeah, like before, like off record also, we talked about, you know, maybe me and like, you know, talking about these things. I definitely was myself during all of this interview and, you know, pretty glad. I'm like really, really glad that we got on together. And after all these years of hearing Citizen Cosmos. Now I get to hear
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Yes.
+
Sistla:
+myself on Spotify
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Yay!
+
Sistla:
+and all the other distribution channels. So thank you for having
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Thank
+
Sistla:
+me.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+you. Thank you man, and thanks everybody for listening. Thanks, bye. Bye.
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:
[00:01:29] Сitizen Сosmos: Welcome everybody to a new episode of Citizen Cosmos, and today we have a very special guest, his name is Sebastien, he's the host of two podcasts:
+Epicenter.tv and Interop. It’s remarkable to me because I’m a fan, and I started Citizen Cosmos because I was listening to Epicenter. Hi! Let’s start with Epicenter.tv. When it began, it was a huge event. I still love and enjoy
+it and listen to most of the episodes, but in my opinion, it has become smaller. Do you want to comment on that?
+
[00:03:25] Sébastien Couture: Hi! It’s nice to be on here, and I'm not often on this side of the river. Considering your question, this is something that I've come to terms with, and I think a lot of us, hosts, have come to terms with it. I co-founded Epicenter with Brian Crane in late 2013, and back then, there weren't a lot of crypto podcasts. There was Let’s talk Bitcoin, which is why we started Epicenter because we were in their contest. So, there weren't a lot of podcasts back then, and certainly, there weren't a lot of podcasts that covered a wide range of cryptal projects.
+There were a lot of Bitcoin podcasts, and many of those don't exist anymore, but we've been through several cycles, and I think Epicenter grew to its peak around 2017-2018. Then, things have flattened out, and I think every cycle also
+has its new entrance to the space, including podcasters. So there's been a ton of new podcasters coming into the space that perhaps feels more native to the people who enter a specific point in the space. So you have guys like Bankless
+and Peter McCormick, who are great media people. They've built massive media empires. Epicenter is unique because there have always been many hosts, and we've tried to bring a lot of different viewpoints to the show, so none of us
+have full-time on the show anymore. It’s not our main gig anymore. Epicenter remains an institution for many people, and we will keep it that way.
+
[00:05:33] Сitizen Сosmos: Now, when you’re answering the question, I realized I got a little bit excited with you being on, and I didn't ask you to introduce yourself, and I was
+starting the conversation as everybody knows you. Maybe you can talk a little bit more about what you do?
+
[00:05:55] Sébastien Couture: My name is Sebastien, I've been in crypto for about ten years. I found this podcast called Epicenter, I’m sure you are familiar with it because of our
+proximity to Cosmos. I've done a couple of other things. In 2015 I founded a company in France, it was one of the first companies here to raise funds for building blockchain projects. Since then, I've also been on the
+policy side of things here in Europe, co-founding an organization called Adan, which advises and helps promote good sound blockchain and crypto policy in France and the broader European space. I've been working on a new Interop
+ventures project for a couple of months. It's a fund that will help back teams in the Cosmos ecosystem that are building protocols and projects that adhere to the interchange vision of interoperable modular sovereign proof of the state of
+blockchains. In that same way, I’ve started a new podcast called Interop which isn't its eighth episode now. It is more focused on the Cosmos ecosystem. I'm organizing a conference next month which we could also talk about.
+
[00:07:09] Сitizen Сosmos: Thank you for the introduction! Before we move from Epicenter, I still have another couple of questions about it. Was it on purpose that you
+have Brian, Sunny? It seems that half of the Cosmos OGs were started from Epicenter. How did it happen?
+
[00:07:37] Sébastien Couture: I think it's just a confluence of people with like-minded individuals meeting. So Brian and I met in a Skype call which was a very chance meeting, and we met
+on this skype call organized by Adam Levine, former host of Let’s Talk Bitcoin, he's now at Coindesk. So we started Epicenter together, and the space used to be
+small. You could fit all the blockchain and crypto people in Europe into a big conference room. We had been closely following this guy named Roy, who had at
+that time written a paper called “The Internet of money,” and we had done a podcast episode about this guy and later brought him on as a host. So for a
+while, it was the three of us, and then after some time, Brian worked at Tendermint for some time in Berlin and helped co-found Full Node. Then, Sunny
+was also at Tendermint, and we hung out at events. At some point, we thought, why not invite him. The same thing was with Friederike. You’ll notice that most hosts are in Europe, and that’s not an
+accident. We move around fast and thus meet often.
+
[00:09:15] Сitizen Сosmos: I have to claim that the first episode of Citizen Cosmos was recorded in Full Node with Sebastien in the studio. So, the last question about Epicenter. I
+guess, considering you just mentioned all the hosts have their projects, what is the future for an Epicenter? Are you still planning to run it, or is it a sidekick?
+
[00:10:33] Sébastien Couture: We all sort of run it together. In the last, Friederike has taken a more critical role in the operating inside of things, but we still produce episodes, and as long as we all want to do it and there's
+enough of us that want to do it, we're going to keep doing it.
+
[00:10:52] Сitizen Сosmos: That's good to hear because it provides a lot of insights, and we cross a lot of guests, which I like because I like to hand-pick the guests, but I’ve
+noticed we have a lot of expected guests. You mentioned France and that you’re on a policy side now. I read about France's policy regulations and wanted to
+discuss them. In your opinion, how is it developing in France?
+
[00:11:30] Sébastien Couture: I'm not so involved in that world anymore, but for about a year and a half, I was customer director of a non-profit called Adan that helps promote sound
+crypto policy and represents the industry towards policy makers in France, and it has taken a vital role also advising a lot of the EU policymakers in the
+drafting of Mika. So this European market and crypto assets regulation is coming. Much of the work in terms of regulation and how to adapt that Adan made
+regulation in proportionality to the risks. I was there for the beginning, and we overgrew that team to five or six people, and Adan is now an organization with about 150 members.
+
[00:12:37] Сitizen Сosmos: What's your take on regulations in crypto in general? Do you think it's something that should be regulated?
+
[00:12:46] Sébastien Couture: My view here is a little bit nuanced. I think some regulation in the space would be beneficial, but the amount of regulation and the speed at which they
+come is frustrating. Mika was passed faster than some of the other financial regulations we know in Europe. There's a feeling that European regulators want
+this to go quickly. Things like this are not conducive to creating positive narratives around this technology, so I think a certain amount of things need
+to be regulated. Still, the amount of regulation and scrutiny being put on crypto is just out of this world compared to other financial services. In
+France, for instance, the amount of KYC and AML is far beyond what is required for any bank account. It's just making things harder for a lot of people, and I
+think what the regulation misses as well is that a lot of regulation in the existing financial space is meant to create protections and systems in place to
+protect people and to create transparency around a certain number of things like where transactions go and so on. A lot of that stuff is built-in into
+crypto, so if you have self-custody, you don't need to have a custodian. Some of the regulations miss what the inherent properties of crypto provide as a
+base layer and add these unnecessary rules that make users’ lives harder and service providers and all the companies being regulated.
+
[00:14:31] Сitizen Сosmos: My biggest question here is, in a way, exactly what you said - transactions. So all of us remember the origins of crypto, and one of the main
+things you always hear is that every transaction should be routed with regulation that puts a big nail into it. We always hear that financial freedom
+is one of the most important things and that every transaction should be routed no matter the purpose. So if somebody sends a transaction from point A to B, it
+should go from point A to B and not be stopped at point C. It doesn't matter what the purpose of the transaction is, but if you put regulation, we’re getting the question of should it arrive at point B or should we first regulate the transaction?
+
[00:16:05] Sébastien Couture: TCP IP doesn't care what goes through the packets. Those considerations are held at higher levels in the stack. With crypto, I don't know if regulators are
+trying to control what transactions are going through the chain. A lot of the regulation is happening at the edges. There's a risk regarding exchanges, on-off ramps, and things like that. It becomes harder for people to move in and
+out of off-ramps, so regulation would create barriers where certain types of assets wouldn't be welcome at a centralized or regulated exchange. Things like
+traceability of funds would make it prohibitive for people to send transactions because they would have to tag each transaction with providence, including
+their information. There are also privacy concerns that the regulation brings to light. In a traditional world, if you want privacy for whatever reason, you
+always have cash, and you can always go back to that means of payment. But as we've moved to more digital forms of payment, what ends up happening is that all of the means of transacting are now, by definition, not private. Crypto allows you a form of payment that is anonymous. It’s this globally coordinated
+attempt by the financial sector to have KYC on every transaction.
+
[00:18:03] Сitizen Сosmos: I agree. By the way, I'm sorry to go into a different topic here, but how did you end up in France? I don't know if you were born in France. Can you tell
+your story?
+
[00:18:15] Sébastien Couture: No, I wasn't. I was born in Canada, I grew up in the province of New Brunswick, it’s on the East Coast. When I was 21, I decided to study abroad for six
+months, then came to France, and 16 years later, I'm still here.
+
[00:18:33] Сitizen Сosmos: Where did crypto happen in these 16 years?
+
[00:18:37] Sébastien Couture: I worked as a web development project manager after my studies in the North of France, doing responsive email design and stuff like that. I was always a bit
+technical, although I didn't study computer science. I’ve been coding for as long as I can remember, so I did HTML, CSS, and some PHP web development. Then,
+I stumbled upon bitcoin and started looking into that. Here's one thing I will say about crypto origin stories. I've interviewed enough people and have asked
+this question so many times, and the one thing you rarely hear is, “I got it in the crypto because I wanted to make money.” Most people will tell you they got
+in the crypto because it resonated with them, etc. On the contrary, I thought I wanted to make some money, and then later, all these philosophical and ideological things that people were talking about started to resonate with
+me.
+
[00:19:50] Сitizen Сosmos: By the way, talking about making money. You mentioned that you have a company that does some funding for Cosmos. So let's talk about that.
+
[00:20:32] Sébastien Couture: Yeah. I think a lot of folks that have entered the space in the last couple of years. We’re investing in some projects in France because of my proximity to the ecosystem
+here. There's a vast Etherium community here in France and many high-quality engineers and people working on exciting projects. I invested in a few of
+those, and I made a few investments also in Cosmos space. At the moment, I am in the process of raising a fund that will invest in pre-seed and seed rounds
+in the Cosmos and entertain ecosystem, and that fund is called Interop ventures so at the moment I haven't talked about this publicly because I think people
+know about it. I’m getting a structure, talking to investors speaking with teams, and aligning up all the decks here to start making my first investments
+in a couple of months. It's my first time creating a fund. Maybe it’s a little late to enter the game, but I feel it's a good time for the Cosmos ecosystem.
+My goal is to back teams building excellent protocols, products, and primitives as provided. The value that I bring is the network that I have and my media
+expertise. Then we will also have several advisors who can provide expertise on other things like tokenomics, operations, and some technical things.
+
[00:22:23] Сitizen Сosmos: For anyone listening out there, what's your focus at the beginning going to be? What type of project specifically?
+
[00:22:28] Sébastien Couture: The focus is quite broad within interchain. I know interchain is also becoming a bit nebulous because as the interchain starts to connect with another system
+through bridging or through interoperability protocols, that kind of grows. Still, I think my focus stems from the interchain vision. The focus right from
+the get-go you will be investing in protocols and some d5 primitives that are coming up in the space right now. Our main driver is that this project embraces
+the interchain vision of sovereign interoperable modular proof of state blockchains. The team aligns with that philosophy over the long term and how much value they can bring to the ecosystem.
+
[00:23:14] Сitizen Сosmos: So if dock one comes around in a year and says, “I have an idea for a project idea for luna 3.0.” Yes or no?
+
[00:23:25] Sébastien Couture: My opinion is not yet formed but let's just put it that way.
+
[00:23:33] Сitizen Сosmos: That was a joke, of course. What's the worst investment that you can think about? Considering you’ve been in crypto for a long time.
+
[00:23:46] Sébastien Couture: Here's the thing. For a long time, I wasn't actively investing in crypto. I held a handful of layer1 tokens for a long time and wasn't investing too much.
+During the ICO craze, I did Adan and Tazos. I didn't do all the ICO and fell into this craze. And also, maybe to my demise, I was focused on building a company. At the time, I was building a company called Stratum. We had
+investors, and I was also running a media company. I felt that I needed to hold a certain amount of integrity to continue doing the podcast and do it well.
+That meant not being all-in on all the projects we had on the show. I should have a spreadsheet with all the episodes we've had on all the l1s we had tokens. I think I've taken a step back and have a little more maturity about
+all that and realize that it's possible to invest but also have intelligent conversations, and that’s where I’m focusing my time now.
+
[00:25:11] Сitizen Сosmos: It's funny what you said. We did one of the project managers I had worked on before the war in Eastern Europe started. He did that a couple of times, took
+all the projects he mentioned, deposited about $1000, and even though there was a market fall in the summer, he had like x50, x60, or something. So it’s nice
+to hear that the focus is not on that rather intelligent conversations because one of the scariest things crypto has created is terrible journalism I’m happy
+to hear there are more people out there who are focused on creating good media intellectual based good media rather than go and sell this token and that’s really bad home journalism and I'm happy to hear that there are more people out there who are focused on creating good media rather than go buy and sell this token and that's I think what Epicenter has done at the beginning, and I'm sure that's what draws a lot of other people. As I said, I don't have a financial background, so investing for me came sometime. This passion I've cultivated on a personal level is now meeting this business I'm starting, Interop Ventures. So hopefully, if L1s will give me money, we’ll enter a new level.
+
[00:26:44] Сitizen Сosmos: Let’s talk a bit about Interop.
+
[00:28:02] Sébastien Couture: The Interop podcast started a couple of months ago, and it's all about understanding the decentralized economic networks that make up the inner chain.
+My goal here is to have deep and technical conversations with folks in the interchange ecosystem. We've interviewed a couple of folks by now. The website
+is https://theinterop.show/. You can also find it on YouTube and SoundCloud. We also have live streams on YouTube. Usually, I upload the video first and later post it as
+a podcast, which is the opposite of Epicenter. We did an episode last week with Ishmael Kofi of Celestia. We've done Christopher Goes. We had Joe Bowman, Jack
+Sampling, and other representatives of creme de la creme of the Cosmos ecosystem. Hopefully, we'll keep doing these at a rate of twice a month or something.
+
[00:29:30] Сitizen Сosmos: I'm sorry if I'm wrong here but is Interop also a validator?
+
[00:29:35] Sébastien Couture: It’s not a validator, but there's probably going to be a validator, so this is something I've been struggling with, and if there's anybody out there who wants
+to help me set up some validators, I'd love to get some help.
+
[00:30:00] Сitizen Сosmos: I would take credit for this, but I will a little bit. Many people who came on the podcast, including, for example, Cryptocito, and many others, did go
+through here. And I was always telling them to start their validators because they’re ecosystem developers and building the whole community. So I would love
+to see if in a month's time you also start some validators. I wouldn’t say we were the first to do that, but the way that Citizen Cosmos has built is
+ecosystem development. If there are networks that we can support, we give them the instruments. And then say we also run validators, we don’t want to work with contracts, and that’s our model.
+
[00:30:52] Sébastien Couture: That’s cool. I talked to a lawyer who also had a similar model, so instead of bolling you for counsel, he would ask you to delegate to his validator, which I
+thought was cool. By the way, do you run it yourself, or do you have people who help you run the validation?
+
[00:31:13] Сitizen Сosmos: I have a guy who helps me on the technical side of the course. I’m like you technical, but I can start up a validator. I would prefer somebody who's
+professional would help me. There is a couple of more people who helped me with project management. I hope to grow.
+
[00:31:48] Sébastien Couture: I think I'm sort of similar to you. I can spin up a validator like I've done it before, and that's not the issue it's more like running it in production is
+another thing.
+
[00:32:50] Сitizen Сosmos: Let's talk about the Nebular event you're doing, which is a Cosmos-based event.
+
[00:32:59] Sébastien Couture: I’m so excited about this event. So it's called Nebular summit, and the website is https://nebular.paris/. This is a conference that is about celebrating the Cosmos
+ecosystem. So we're going to be having talks and panels and even technical workshops, so there could be a ton of developers and researchers and entrepreneurs there. They'll be discussing all the challenges facing the
+interchain and also thinking about the future and where the ecosystem is going. Before we started this, I was getting ready to push the schedule online, so I’m
+sure the plan will be online by the time you release this. Anyway, the list of speakers is there, so we've got about 40 speakers. I'm not going to list them all, but,
+for example, Sunny Agarwal and Julian Butler and many others. Tickets are $35. The venue is an old fire station. It is a beautiful building with a massive
+courtyard, and there's a rooftop terrace like this fashion incubator, but they've got some rooms for events, so the venue is super cool. So if you’re in
+Paris or in Europe, get yourself a ticket and join us!
+
[00:34:33] Сitizen Сosmos: While you were saying that, I just thought I would love to see the first conference that starts to accept the ticket in the old USD. That would be fantastic.
+
[00:34:50] Sébastien Couture: Yeah, that would be great, but we only accept euros for now.
+
[00:36:07] Сitizen Сosmos: Are you going to Cosmoverse this year? What’s your plan? Are you going as Sebastien or as Interop?
+
[00:36:12] Sébastien Couture: Yeah, I think so. I always go as Sebastien. I’m unsure if I will go for Cosmoverse plus Devcon because that means staying in Colombia for three weeks.
+Are you going to BuildAsia?
+
[00:36:41] Сitizen Сosmos: I can’t because I’m stuck in Madeira for bureaucratic stuff for now.
+
[00:37:28] Sébastien Couture: I’ll also have to skip.
+
[00:37:28] Сitizen Сosmos: It will be lovely. There are so many big conferences now; I think that’s great because most of them were terrible several years ago. Another question,
+Sebastien. You’ve been in crypto for 10 years and recorded so many episodes. What keeps you motivated? What would you suggest to our listeners? It could be reading or meditating, dog walking, whatever.
+
[00:38:41] Sébastien Couture: When you've been through so many ups and downs in the space, that's it's a good sign I think that the space is super resilient, and the people who are
+dedicated to building meaningful value of this technology are like in it for the right reasons, and I was talking about this with someone this morning. The correction we've seen recently has brought a lot of sanity to the space. It's
+brought valuations for everything down to sane levels. A lot of people left in 2017-2018, people who are passionate about building meaningful products and creating value. To me, what's been motivating all this time was creating
+amazing content with Epicenter and the other podcast I'm doing. The next chapter for me is creating value by helping teams with capital, marketing support, operational support, and security, hopefully by having a validator. I
+think it’s also helpful to take some time off and disconnect for several weeks. That's what I did a couple of weeks ago when I was in Bali, and it felt great, and I feel recharged.
+
[00:40:12] Сitizen Сosmos: That’s a good answer. I'm planning something like this next month. Is there anything else you would like to mention that I haven't asked you?
+
[00:40:29] Sébastien Couture: Anybody interested in building some cool stuff, please reach out, whether that's you having a chat on the podcast or having an investment from Interop,
+or setting up a validator. I’m looking for cool and interesting people to collaborate with. And please don’t forget about the Nebular conference and come check it out!
+
[00:41:25] Сitizen Сosmos: Sebastien, thank you very much for coming. It’s been a great pleasure!
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here)
[00:00:00] Anna: Hey, it's Citizen Cosmos, we are Serge and Anna, and we discover Cosmos by chatting with awesome people from various teams within the Cosmos ecosystem and the community. Join us if you are curious about how dreams and ambitions become code!
+
[00:01:03] Citizen Cosmos: Welcome to the new episode of Citizen Cosmos, everybody! Today we have Federico Kunze Kullmer with us, the co-founder of Evmos. We’re excited to have you!
+
[00:01:15] Federico: Hi, everyone! Thanks for having me today. I’m excited to talk with you about Evmos and the rest of the Cosmos ecosystem.
+
[00:01:30] Citizen Cosmos: There recently was a Cosmoverse in Lisbon. How was it? Did you guys get the attention at those conferences and hackathons? I mean development and user attention.
+
[00:01:52] Federico: Yeah. Many people were excited about the project, especially with the recent announcement of the recent partnership we've been publishing weekly with different infrastructure providers. So people realize the potential of the project. During the hackathon and the Cosmoverse conference, we got a lot of interest from developers. We got a few outstanding projects, the two winners. First was a wallet that directly integrates AVM smart contract and metamask so you can see your erc20s and also Cosmos on IBC tokens. In the second place was a balancer fork, it's going to be one of the first natively built AMM directly built up on Evmos. So we’re excited about all the support from the entire community and developers.
+
[00:02:42] Anna: Let's start with the very basics. Could you explain a bit from scratch what Evmos is because it’s not super easy to understand? What’s it all about?
+
[00:03:08] Federico: Evmos is an application-specific blockchain that allows you to run smart contracts the same way as Ethereum. It supports AVM. You can use your erc20s directly
+on Evmos. Still, on top of that, it runs on Cosmos, which allows you to have interoperability functionalities, especially in building interoperability between the more minor contracts on other blockchains. The main goal is to make intelligent contracts scalable and scale the entire
+ecosystem by connecting chains that might not run innovative contract platforms directly interrupted with smart contracts. This brings a lot of different use cases and the whole ecosystem. For example, Somalia or another region could interact directly with the smart contracts deployed on top of Evmos through the composability functionalities we’re enabling. It’s all about smart contract interoperability, our main selling point. We will be working with developers, infrastructure providers, and the entire community to make the economics of Evmos appealing for developers to start migrating and deploying their projects into Evmos.
+
[00:04:25] Citizen Cosmos: What would you classify Evmos - as a smart contract interoperability platform? Layer 1 is Cosmos and Ethereum. Is it infrastructure or a bridge?
+
[00:04:42] Federico: I'll consider Evmos as layer 1. It has its own validator security set. It doesn’t depend on Ethereum, so we don’t need to roll up to Ethereum or any other EVM-based chain like Cosmos Hub. It’s a fully sovereign chain and a platform because it allows you to
+support and deploy the smart contract and interact with contracts directly deployed to the Evmos AVM. We also build the bridge on top of Evmos. For example, all the AVM bridges connecting Ethereum with EVM chains like Mpolygon, Moon Beam, Moon River, etc., and the other l2s can also be deployed using our EVM. That also comes with the IBC components that allow developers to interact with all these different other blockchains and thus get more access to liquidity from various sources like Osmosis or the Cosmos Hub. It's genuinely like a fully interoperable sovereign smart contract platform with its own
+validator set, and the stakeholder of the platform entirely governs it.
+
[00:06:00] Citizen Cosmos: At the time, it was like a protocol for other bridges, which makes
+it a bit different. It’s interesting to see how it's going to develop. I would love to hear how many
+layers we can handle inside of the blockchain. For example, let’s say Evmos is AVM on top of Cosmos but you can build something on Evmos, which will be another layer. Can you make another layer? Or is there a limit?
+
[00:06:45] Federico: Well, that's not the project's scope. It's more like enabling full smart contract functionality with fast finality as well, so all the smart contacts for all the transactions that are involved in smart contacts are executed after the block is committed so it's faster than Etherium in terms of finality because it's running BFD also the securities guarantees are different from Etherium - one third versus 51% to perform an attack so that's
+more like the trade-off between BFD and consensus. The topic of building on top of different layers is something that we are going to work with Celestia to support an optimized EVM for roll-ups as well. That's something that will be working closely with the Celestia team next year and we recently announced something on our blog post. It's going to end up being the most team-working project where we’re going to do what we’re best at which is EVM and smart contract interoperability components and the Celestia team is working on the data availability solution which is what they were building before - an optimistic tendermint fro consensus.
+
[00:08:07] Citizen Cosmos: It's good that you mentioned it because I had a question about it, and it sounds like what you guys are basically doing - a collaboration with them, it sounds like the Web3 OSI model and equivalent to that where you have a data availability layer, smart contract layer, and communication layer. So is it an OSI kind of thing?
+
[00:08:32] Federico: I think in the future, once Celestia is out, we won't see many other l1s. Celestia will effectively be the last layer one solution, providing data availability for all these blockchains and the data availability layers. So instead
+of the blockchains checking if the blocks are valid, it will result in the bltheming if the blocks are available or not on the Celestia data availability. The chains themselves, instead of being l1, will be the settlement layer. So that's how I see the ecosystem evolving. What needs to be figured out as well is a migration path for the existing blockchains.
+
[00:09:35] Citizen Cosmos: Do you think this will cause problems? We see now some Web3 projects that are trying to move data from Web2 to Web3 and a lot of ipfs or crawlers, and you know there are many different ways to take data from web2 and upload it to web3, but we're seeing that people are not incentivized to do that. Is it still a problem to transfer all the data from the existing blockchains and get developers to share existing blockchains to Celestia?
+
[00:10:15] Federico: That's a great question. I think, in general, the migration path is still not clear. I’m not an expert in terms of data availability, so this is a topic the Celestia team is working on the migration pass for existing blockchains but what we're building with them is sort of like this collaboration for optimized EVM that access layer in terms of cost this new chain that will act as a settlement layer and will be connected directly connected with Evmos and use Evmos for security as well. I think that’s the first step in terms of using the same token for a potential migration but we’ll have to see how the technology evolves. Celestia just announced their initial developer net which is earlier than just a public net, so once we see that technology
+publicly available will be able to see how other projects are reacting or how the challenges of migrating the existing solutions to Celestia would be.
+
[00:11:15] Citizen Cosmos: Obviously the goal of l1 is to get developers to build projects and users
+to use those projects but do you have any specific targets at Evmos in terms of numbers? If you want ten developers and $100 market projects in 1 month, who are you going to attract?
+
[00:11:50] Federico: We’re trying to track projects and we want to leverage the interoperability functionality from Evmos and also the token economics and get a new user base. The Cosmos ecosystem, even though it has IVC interoperability between different blockchains in the ecosystem, has generally been very isolated from the rest of the Ethereum in general EVM ecosystem. So we wanted different projects trying to get a new user base from the Cosmos community. Terra has a few bridges: third chain and a few others, and now with the gravity bridge as well, but we want to be the point of entry for all these different projects that want to expand and have a different cover and access to the entire ecosystem. So our token economy is being built with the thought of how can we create the right incentives for developers to migrate on to the smart contracts on Evmos and thus expand their user base onto the entire ecosystem.
+
[00:12:58] Citizen Cosmos: Talking about tokenomics, do you want to share about direct airdrops?
+
[00:13:15] Federico: When trying to design the urge the first thing that we were discussing was how do we get up a broad token distribution and how we incentivize Ethereum users to start working on deploying their contracts to Evmos and for retail users in the Evmos ecosystem to interact with contracts directly? We decided to have different categories. The first is the Cosmos ecosystem which involves Cosmos Hub and Osmosis. We're going to reward and stake a few different pools on Osmosis. We want to bring and incentivize all these different uses to start migrating but we didn't want to take the token holders and have a not fair distribution, but we want to make sure that users that we care about from Ethereum are the ones that are actually using Ethereum and that's why we roll up with the concept of the gas drop. The gas drop is when you filter some of the most used applications. We created a list of the applications with high TDL or a high volume. Then, we’re rewarding users based on the amount of gas they spent. The whole narrative behind the direct drop is that all these users are getting wrecked in terms of like how much fees are they expending. So, the more gas you spend based on the number of tokens, the more gas you spend because the gas price for Ethereum is really high right now if you're getting some tokens back because of all the gas you spent on Ethereum. That's kind of like the concept of the drag-drop for the users and also because we wanted to follow this narrative and create a lot of discussion in the ecosystem we wanted to reward victims for different projects that have been hacked in the ecosystem, so we collected the addresses from several hacks on vulnerabilities in the Ethereum ecosystem. We were rewarding the victims of those projects. If you’ve been a victim of an attack of the product that we mentioned in the direct drop announcement, you will be eligible for tokens as well. So that's kind of the whole concept of the narrative behind the direct drop. The token price has decreased significantly over there past few months as well.
+
[00:16:17] Citizen Cosmos: Could you share any more details about the economics apart from the drop?
+
[00:16:28] Federico: We thought about Evmos being a two-way marketplace where users and developers meet together. For example, developers deploy their decentralized applications and users interact with these apps. For token economics in general we're discussing different ways of incentivizing both sides of the marketplace so that users and developers are incentivized to use the applications. The other thing that I could mention is we’re another column of the token economics. We’re adding fee rebates for IBC relayers and transferring all these packets between two connecting chains, in this case, Evmos and Cosmos Hub. Once a new fee model for IBC transfers will be out, they’ll also be gaining fees and rebates for the transactions.
+
[00:18:07] Citizen Cosmos: That’s really great that you guys are thinking about relayers because there’s been a lot of problems and people who started to talk about it, say it costs a lot of money. It’s not incentivized at all, and it’s strange how people expect it to hold on to that infrastructure. As an infrastructure provider, we’re not a relayer but we’d like to be. Is there any project out there in the blockchain space where the tokenomics design is something you think is a good example?
+
[00:19:02] Federico: I think one of those tokenomics designs is definitely Osmosis. We took this a basis for our airdrop but we wanted to expand it. We didn't really like the quadratic boating mechanism that they had because it wasn’t fairly distributed. We went instead for a pro-rata approach in which you have different things that you need to comply with. Some of them give you points that have different weights. For example, if you stake versus if you lp one pool, they might have different weights and those points assigned to each of these tasks will be pro-rata to the number of tokens that each category will have. For example, the more points you gain, the pro-rata to the total number of points of all the users. In that way, you're basically incentivizing for usage and not for large token holders or large aflp providers and that's the main difference, it's fairer for users that may be not have a large number of shares or tokens, so we’re distributing everything pro-rata based on these options.
+
[00:20:25] Citizen Cosmos: I have another strange tokenomics question. I don't know if you've followed the bribery war with Terra and Etherium and bridges giving incentivized and stablecoins. Is Evmos going to be a place where DeFi is going to enter Cosmos?
+
[00:21:20] Federico: I have two thoughts about this. One is that these different bridges have different layers of various degrees of security. Hence, it's not the same as talking about a single multi-secured bridge, and another bridge also has an optimistic mechanism that you can like clean back in case things happen. The user can choose the different bridges based on their security and risk profile. Incentivizing other users will come out come down to the end-user to preferences that they have. The bridges need some liquidity to be operational. I don't think that's necessarily bad because otherwise, if you don't
+have the liquidity, there’s not enough bridging mechanism. If on one side of the bridge there is not enough liquidity, then you want to be able to transfer. In terms of the incentives, I would
+say it's not necessarily bad for the ecosystem, and in the end, it will be resolved. There are a lot of attack scenarios that also can happen through incentives. If you’re incentivizing enough one bridge with a security vulnerability, you can get a lot of tokens through bridge farming. All the exchanges should be aware before incentivizing the different bridges, so that's my thought in terms of user security and risk profiles on incentive being another attack surface for the smart contract platforms and, in general, for the bridges.
+
[00:23:42] Anna: I’m excited about how Evmos was born as a project. How did you get to the idea of creating it?
+
[00:24:02] Federico: Evmos was born from the concept of this old project called Ethermint. The RnD project started in late 2016, even before Cosmos SDK was built.
+The whole concept was proving that you can build the EVM on top of tendermint you can run
+smart contracts using fast finality and then this project was migrated to Cosmos and there were a few teams working on it but no one even gave it new resources or support from a community point. Once these multiple parties have decided to de-prioritize the project, we saw the opportunity of not only having just an EVM on Cosmos but also expanding the scope of the project to be a fully interoperable smart contract platform in which you can build all these interesting economic models for smart contracts to be deployed. The initial scope of Ethermint was expanded in a way that wasn't there before, and that's ultimately what we want to do - to create a platform in which we support interoperability and interchange composability so that other smart contract platforms can also interact with smart contract deployed on Evmos. It doesn't have a smart contract environment. You can still interact with the smart concept that is deployed on Evmos. It’s all about interchange composability and scalability for smart contracts. The product initially started when I stopped my consulting for Chainsafe after they decided not to continue with a project. I reached out to my two co-founders Akash and Nick with whom I was friends since Blockchain Berkley. It was a blockchain community student organization from Berkley where a lot of projects in the Cosmos ecosystem were founded. Sunny was also part of Blockchain Berkley as well as co-founders of Osmosis and the whole IBC team. My co-founders were active in the Cosmos ecosystem and in the blockchain system. They were really excited to start this journey together.
+
[00:26:40] Citizen Cosmos: We had an episode with Chainsafe in 2020. Is it involved in Evmos?
+
[00:27:15] [federico_kunze_k_llmer]: No they're not involved they have other priorities with different ecosystems. They started working on other projects so they haven't supported the project since they left in early 2021. After Aragon chain pulled the plug on the project and they decided to rely on other solutions like xDai. They didn’t have enough resources to continue with Aragon chain.
+
[00:27:52]
+Citizen Cosmos: Now it’s Osmosis chain, right? They just rebranded.
+
[00:27:56] Federico: Yeah.
+
[00:28:00] Anna: I'm really interested in the Berkeley alumni group. Could you tell us a little bit about it? I guess it wasn’t that mainstream back then, why did you decide to join the group?
+
[00:28:24] Federico: I was in Berkeley for only use a semester, I was an exchange student. I studied computer science and industrial engineering in Chile. So when I went to
+Berkley, I was working on different machine learning projects and I realized like everyone was working on machine learning and AI. There was a lot of demand and a lot of general offers from computer scientists and engineers. I wanted to join and learn a new technology that wasn’t so mainstream. I chose blockchain Berkeley because they had a consulting arm. You could work with real companies that were interested in doing projects with blockchain, so I was involved early on with Qualcom that they wanted to build a network of a private blocking solution with different providers and suppliers. The other thing I found really interesting about Blockchain Berkeley is they also have RnD research and also an education arm which is really useful to get started with all blockchain lingo and everything technical about blockchain, so I started my career by learning everything about blockchain with Blockchain Berkeley. My co-founder Akash was actually the one who taught me to write smart contracts early on. It was nice to reunite and create this project. I think Blockchain Berkeley has been foundational for Cosmos ecosystem. Essential projects like Tendermint had offices in Berkeley, and Berkeley alumni created a lot more.
+
[00:30:44] Citizen Cosmos: I have a slightly controversial question. Do you think it's an issue for decentralization when a large group of people near the foundation of the projects know each other and could potentially communicate with each other or found the vector of attack?
+
[00:31:40] Federico: When we were just students, I think none of us participated in the ICO that was involved in the ecosystem. I joined as an intern so I didn't have access to any of the token sales or any of the projects. I remember while still with Blockchain Berkeley, I used to read the IBC on Cosmos as well. On the whole governance procedures, we used to have different white paper sessions and really what motivated us was building these technologies in terms of decentralization. I guess not many developers were available for other projects so I think for Cosmos and tendermint having this pool of young motivated students that we're able to also contribute a lot back to the project was really beneficial for the early stage of the project because literally, all us knew what blockchain meant on both at
+a high level and also from a technical perspective. We were doing all these white paper circles every week where we would read a new paper that came and also analyze it from a technical perspective. Back in 2017, there were a lot of white papers coming out and most of them were
+not really relevant but I guess it was very beneficial in terms of having this pool of two engineers early on for the ecosystem.
+
[00:33:05] Citizen Cosmos: I guess it is a great thing. I think it was AZ16 who was the first to talk publicly about the specter of centralization/decentralization and that it's a really good thing where the project evolves and decentralizes. It is a perfect example of how this is evolved.
+
[00:33:35] Anna: I want to ask, do you still spend some time on RnD? Or you’re so involved in the project building and development that you don't have time for that?
+
[00:33:45] Federico: I would definitely need more time to do more RnD. I’m usually up to date with everything that's going on in the Cosmos ecosystem, but it's tough to catch up with all these different blockchains that are being developed right now. I don't have much context about what's going on. I try to focus my attention mainly on the Ethereum/EVM ecosystem. It is where we can provide value. My co-founders have been involved in different blockchains and different communities so they know a lot about all these other blockchains as long each can provide value from different perspectives. I think that's relevant for the project in terms of RnD.
+
[00:34:33] Citizen Cosmos: Do you think you guys will connect to other l1s to build the connection between the two most significant ecosystems in blockchain?
+
[00:34:45] Federico: In the future, we'll see the two leading smart contract platforms - EVM and WASM. I would expect every primary l1 to have a blockchain or a run time that supports
+Most l1s widely support EVM and WASM. We'll be indirectly connecting to these ecosystems through the EVM bridges. Evmos will be the point of entry to the different EVM bridges. Next year we’ll focus on shared security and make Evmos on the EVM chain.
+
[00:36:05] Citizen Cosmos: Nice description! The last question. What motivates you in your daily life? Books, activities, music, whatever.
+
[00:36:42] Federico: What motivates me is building the base infrastructure layer for all these different products to be built. Right now, blockchain is mainly focusing on finance, and we're seeing a recent NFT ecosystem. In the future, NFT will be huge in adopting and connecting the real world with the blockchain. My motivation, in general, is to build this infrastructure layer. No one has yet built any fully interoperable smart contract, so that was my central core when I decided to make Evmos. Use cases that we don't even know
+that will exist right now will be possible through this infrastructure that will be set
+in place through Evmos and the entire blockchain ecosystem.
+
[00:37:48]Citizen Cosmos: But what helps you in your daily life not to set off your goal?
+
[00:38:14] Federico: I try to set some time for myself in the morning. I try to meditate or do sports. I like balancing my life especially when I’m in a high-stress job. If you're not
+taking care of yourself, then you're not taking care of your company, employees, and the entire community. So it's essential to be humble, aware, and mindful of the things you're doing. at times like being present.
+
[00:39:05] Citizen Cosmos: Nice. Isn't that the essence of blockchain?
+
[00:39:09] Federico: Blockchain is a perfect technology for making money in the ecosystem because it’s technology + finance. At the same time, we're building foundational infrastructure. The base layer infrastructure is usually what I care the most about and what it would enable to create all these exciting applications for users that need it the most.
+
[00:39:48] Citizen Cosmos: You're right. I was invited to a round table to speak about some things, and there were people there: a couple of guys from YouTube, Holochain, etc. Unfortunately, after forty-five minutes, I had to log off because the conversation was about price and NFTs. It was kind of boring. People only talk about money rather than data availability layers, IBC, and the future foundation for infrastructure. So I agree with you.
+
[00:40:40] Federico: A lot of investors in general, when they join your community channels, are usually asking when the token is going to be available or how they can buy the token instead of learning more about the project or asking the right questions, but I think it's okay. We will be slowly transitioning and it's our job to both educate and give more resources to people. There are different products and all these other exciting applications being built and they are not money-making applications, they are benefiting and serving coordination problems or giving access to finance to people they didn’t have before.
+
[00:41:25] Citizen Cosmos: I think this is a great note to finish up! Thank you very much! Bye!
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here)
Evmos is a scalable, high-throughput Proof-of-Stake blockchain that is fully compatible and interoperable with Ethereum. It's built using the Cosmos SDK which runs on top of Tendermint Core consensus engine.
+Evmos allows developers to make any smart contracts in the native language of Ethereum understandable to the Cosmos with almost no changes to the program code. This allows developers to have all the desired features of Ethereum, while at the same time, benefit from Tendermint’s PoS implementation. Also, because it is built on top of the Cosmos SDK, it will be able to exchange value with the rest of the Cosmos Ecosystem through the Inter Blockchain Communication Protocol (IBC), which is Cosmos's novel solution to the issue of cross chain communication.
+
+
Evmos is currently the leading Ethereum Virtual Machine-based blockchain in the Cosmos ecosystem. The key difference in Evmos is that it is not a bridge, but a full-fledged EVM on Cosmos. For instance, blockchain DApp developers may use Ethereum’s default programming language, Solidity, to build Evmos DApps.
+
According to the Evmos team, the end goal of Evmos is to bring together the Cosmos and Ethereum community.
+
The team is led by Federico Kunze Küllmer, a full-time Cosmos contributor since 2017, having worked on Peggy (former Gravity Bridge), Cosmos SDK, and IBC, and Akash Khosla, who was previously a Software Engineer at Anchorage, a digital asset custodian and bank.
+The Evmos team has been the core development team behind the Ethermint codebase since April 2021.
+The original name Ethermint was changed to Evmos (EVM-on-Cosmos) due to legal delays (a legal entity with that name already existed).
+
+
Evmos Tokenomics
+
EVMOS is the native token used by the Evmos blockchain. It has a maximum (and total) supply of 1 billion. As of the time of this writing (Jan. 17, 2023), the token’s circulating supply is 401 million EVMOS. There are three primary uses for the token — transaction fee payments, staking and governance.
+
Evmos had an initial supply of 200 million tokens at genesis. There has been no sale or premine.
+
+
50% was allocated to the airdrop (Rektdrop)
+
40% for the Strategic Fund
+
10% for the Community Pool.
+
+
+
The airdrop claimable as "rektdrop" was aimed at rewarding users that got “rekt” in Cosmos or Ethereum. So, Evmos is distributed based on activity on popular Ethereum or Cosmos dapps like #AAVE , #OLYMPUS, Uniswap, etc. This airdrop welcomes those in the Cosmos ecosystem as well as pulls in ETH users to the Cosmos ecosystem by giving them an airdrop based on their gas expenditure in ETH transactions which can be considerably high and users who were certain rug victims.
+
+
Evmos is highly inflationary at the beginning, with over 300 million tokens being issued during the first year. Under the initial token model, the new tokens will be issued under an exponential decay schedule, where the inflation is decreased every year (365 daily epochs). The target will be to issue 1 billion Evmos tokens in 4 years.
+
+
Newly released tokens will be distributed in the following way, on a per-block basis:
+
+
Staking Rewards: 40%
+
Team Vesting: 25%
+
Usage Incentives: 25%
+
Community Pool: 10%
+
+
+
As of the time of this writing, the APR(annual percentage rate) is 110%.
+Сommunity may choose an alternative model of inflation after the 4 years, such as linear-inflationary or even deflationary.
+
Evmos Software Upgrade v10.0
+
Evmos has recently been updated to version 10.0, and many important updates have been made.
+One important innovation is the automatic asset conversion between the Cosmos and Ethereum ecosystems.
+When someone sends a token native to the Cosmos ecosystem to Evmos, it will automatically be converted to an Ethereum-compatible token so that it can be used immediately on Evmos and sent to Ethereum-compatible blockchains. The goal is to simplify the use of blockchains and the movement of assets between Cosmos and Ethereum. No longer will users need to convert their Cosmos assets into their respective EVM asset types and vice-versa. This will be done under the hood for users.
+
This also means that you will be able to transfer ERC20 tokens to other Cosmos chains with IBC.
+This innovation can be applied on the user facing side for bridging assets to Evmos, in addition to serving as a useful tool for developers to abstract away the complexity of incorporating liquidity from EVM and Cosmos chains within their dApps (e.g. one click to bridge and LP).
+
Other features of the update include additional support for the Ledger hardware cryptocurrency wallet and some bug fixes.
+You can see the full list of updates here.
EvmosDomains - Evmos Domains is a decentralized name service for linking .evmos names to data like addresses.
+
+
+
DiffusionFinance - Diffusion is an Automated Market Maker (AMM) protocol and liquidity pool designed for efficient trading between crypto-assets. The trading activity on Diffusion captures fees as revenue for liquidity providers, resulting in a decentralized market and trading experience.
+
+
+
EvmoSwap - EvmoSwap is a decentralized exchange (DEX) on the Evmos.
+
+
+
EarnMos - First yield optimizer for Evmos and Cosmos Interchain Ecosystem.
KinesisLabs - Kinesis is the native stableswap of Evmos, providing users with the lowest slippage when swapping stablecoins.
+
+
+
List of upcoming Projects:
+
+
+
SpaceFi - SpaceFi is a cross-chain web3 platform on Evmos and zkSync, with DEX+NFT+Starter+Spacebase as initial product. Its ultimate vision is to connect Cosmos and Ethereum Layer2 ecosystem, exploring assets cross-chain and interoperability solutions.
+
+
+
SoulNetwork - A cross-chain DID network in Cosmos and Ethereum / EVM ecosystem. Initially built on Evmos.
+
+
+
TetraSwap by Cronus Finance - Swap between bridged & native stables on Evmos, with low slippage.
Citizen Cosmos
+And while we are waiting to do some general chitchat, A So people who do join Dont think that it's empty. So just for everyone joining, regardless whether you're listening to the recording of this or you are listening to this as you join us and this is Citizen Cosmos Twitter Spaces. Today we're going to be talking with Galactica and it's a Z K related project, and it's much more than that, to be honest.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+There's a lot of a lot a lot of look to it, and we are going to find out everything about them and what they do. Hopefully soon. In a couple of minutes, we'll start. We have some uncomfortable questions prepared as well. So guys, prepare yourself. I mean, talking about the speaker is, of course, nothing unusual. Just some questions.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I'm sure that none of them are out of the ordinary, but that some people might consider them to be uncomfortable. But that's good. And the more we can find out, the better. So let's wait maybe one more minute, and then slowly we start maybe two or three more minutes. Anybody, by the way, guys, the Galactica team and all, I think all three of you, all previous speakers now.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+So I'm going to be directing most of my questions at Sarvodoya, of course, but this not necessarily like that. So feel free to jump in and answer the questions. And they are mostly about the projects and things that the project. So yeah, whoever feels like the one to answer the question and when it's going to be there, of course, feel free to jump in and answer.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+So let's wait a couple of minutes, guys.
+
Dan
+Just your aware I think Sarv is actually pretty busy right now. So I think I might answer the questions myself and then if we need some input from Sarv, just jump on it, if that's okay.
+
+
Sarvodaya
+Sure. Thanks. A bit more sense. I'm going to be, I guess, getting a bit more. I'm going to be shedding a bit more light upon some strategic slash, maybe ideological, if you want to put it this way. Sure. So, yeah, and basically a start will be giving all the tech related answers.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Okay. A lot of reflector. No, no. For for me. For me it doesn't matter guys whichever one it I mean the whole point of Twitter space is this for all of you guys to jump in. So it's even cool. I think that this is going to be just one person, but rather a star for one galactic day for the other.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And so for something else. And also, by the way, again, of course, if you listen to the recording of this, this is not directed at you, but if you are joining us now or at any point, I will repeat this, of course, as people join and feel free to jump in, raise hands and ask questions and don't be shy.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+The microphone doesn't bite If you're feeling too shy, if you want to ask a question but you don't want to talk, I guess you could quickly. Well, not quickly, but while we are talking, drop it either to the Citizen Cosmos. Well, the best way to do it is to drop it to our DMS. They are open on Twitter and hopefully I will see it and or one of my teammates will see it and pass it to me.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And then I can ask, but please don't be shy. If you have access to the microphone, if you can speak and draw out the course of the conversation, not necessarily at the end you feel like you want to give the guy something. Please raise your hand and I will allow you to speak. So two more minutes, I think, and let's keep an e0k.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+So just a while before, I mean, of course the guys from Galactica will do a much better introduction and then I can and of course I will ask and hopefully it's okay, but I'm judging again, so I'm doing some chit chat just the way some time guys. And though I do want to say kudos for the website because the website contains sometimes it's very annoying.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+In Web three, you go on a website and you have, well, sometimes very little, sometimes no information about what the project is. So kudos for this Galactica, guys. This is really, really, I think, informative, informative. And there is a lot of information you can find here, whether this is research information, the identity information which is available there, all the papers, all the socials, all the links to the code as well.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And well, the code, we will actually have some questions about that too. But yeah, there is a lot of informative links here. So guys, if you want to find more about Galactica and not just by listening to this piece, go to their website and there is a lot a lot of information available there, which is cool.
+
Sarvodaya
+And yes, please, like a small little announcement which we're going to be dropping I guess exclusively here. Site exactly relates to a website and media one new website which has to do with somebody called campaign. And I'm going to let's close to the end of it I guess so stick around.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Nice guys please stick around and I'm going to talk less from this point on words ask more questions because my voice, I guess already I'm going too much, so I'm going to start, guys. So whoever is here is already here again. Whoever is listening to the recording. Hi. Through to guys. And yeah, let's kick in. So we have Galactica today with us.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+This is Galactica network. I'm did say that the project is related to Z K, It's a one protocol. Apart from date. I would say seven Z KYC related right advertises itself as though there is a lot about governance, a lot about citizens. And here I'm going to direct it to you guys. Does any of you want to introduce?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Normally? Not the way I do, of course. Sorry for the lame in Galactica. And what do you guys do and what are you trying to achieve?
+
Dan
+Absolutely, ma'am. And thank you. Thank you for the props on the website, too. It's a it's a very complicated protocol to to try and explain in a simple manner to people we're trying to achieve an awful lot. So in essence, Galactica network is L one EVM compatible chain. So you can do just about everything you can do that you can do on a like a normal chain.
+
Dan
+It's based on the Cosmos SDK. So big props to to the Cosmos, the Cosmos team, to the Cosmos, trying to get into this community and be a real good part of it. And basically we utilize a really synergistic zero knowledge base tech stack to try and introduce enough cibil resistance and social substrate for verifiable humans to actually transact for your reputation, as a mouthful.
+
Dan
+But essentially we want you to be able to make transactions based rather than your rather not like your tokens. We want you to be able to make your transactions based on your reputation. So like social transactions, you know, that's that's, that's like the essence of the technical part. But the kind of the the fundamentals that all this actually enables is the prospect of decentralized society on chain.
+
Dan
+So this is what we call our cipher state. So you can essentially, for the first time become a citizen to a protocol, which is really exciting. And we've got an awful lot to say on that. So yeah, that's, that's kind of like the the five that the one min elevator pitch if you if you want to go to that.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Let's let's let's stick with this a little bit before we go further let's let's let's Alex speaking with the one minute elevator pitches, as you call it. I think they reveal a lot, to be honest, because you can dig into them. And from here we can untangle the black hole, so to speak. And by black hole, I'm referring to the complexity of the project, not to bad things right.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+So you mentioned well, let's start with the beginning. The first time what you describe it sounds a little bit similar to Edena. Now, I don't know if any of the listeners are familiar with Edena. At some point it was identified also the Cosmos project, but not so sure if it's correct to identify the such. Do you are you guys familiar with the data?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Is if anything, similar at all to what you do?
+
Dan
+I'm afraid I'm not personally aware of that Project Sarvodaya, Astar maybe.
+
Sarvodaya
+Googling it at the moment.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+No, guys, it's not. It's not. This is not this was not a necessity. But basically they have been trying to solve the whole thing with identities and with real human behind the real identity by introducing different puzzles and stuff like that and by making notes. So, yeah, I remember.
+
Sarvodaya
+I remember I mean, like, I don't recall it by the name, but I do remember the puzzle the code captures and verifying you as being the real human. I remember that. Yes. So, look, I mean, I guess it's this kind of similar to an extent. So basically, I guess the the best way to put it, let me try to also give my elevator pitch just a quick one.
+
Sarvodaya
+So the initial idea of Galactica came from two different perspectives. One of them is enabling these .... So basically enabling social enabling social primitives through the stone chain, being able to introduce the concept of real world reputation into the web3 space since it's kind of needed and i will explain the motivation later. But also how about it enables a lot of use cases that haven't been possible in Web3 before?
+
Sarvodaya
+The same way like Etherium introduced the ability to build financial primitives what is today commonly known as Defi Galactic or tries to bring in the social primitives what is commonly referred to as the DSOC. So that's basically one pillar of what we're trying to achieve. The second one is the general understanding that regulation from traditional regulators, nation states, it's getting closer and closer to us, us as the Web3 community is going to come and we're going to be ready for that.
+
Sarvodaya
+So that's one idea. The second idea is that probably it's also needed because we all know in the minds of the vast majority of people, Web3 is still perceived as some kind of Wild West kind of casino. Instead of their liberating financial stack that it was meant to be. I guess. So basically the second very important motivation for building Galactica was to create tech stack such that it will be more regulated than fully permissionless defi and rapidly and much less regulated than the much more permissionless cbdcs.
+
Sarvodaya
+So something striking this middle ground. So how those two things tied together. So we have introduced ZKKYC as a concept. Basically it is very simple. You can do off chain KYC would be I mean Astar will look better than I. But overall, the idea of the KYC process happens off chain and you can prove stuff about your documents on chain.
+
Sarvodaya
+It is not limited to only KYC, pretty much any of the world documents for that matter. Just KYC is a very acute example. So then when you have the small primitive. The second one is that you can build applications that kind of which require you to prove certain things about your identity. For example, we can see that let's say a GMX fork working on Galactica would require you to be over 18 years old.
+
Sarvodaya
+Why not? I mean, like, it kind of makes sense. Otherwise you steal your mom's money and yeah, investing in high level instruments. So the other important thing is that of course, all kinds of all kinds of national what basically nationality, you can do different stuff about this and so citizens from particular jurisdictions can access your dapp, some other citizens cannot.
+
Sarvodaya
+And that's wonderful because, I mean, it solves a lot of problems that we all have in the web3 space. If you have a deal to web3 protocols, you know how much of a pain in the ass it is to well walk around this part, which is just to let them in, which not. So this is the ZKKYC component now, because you have this ZKKYC, it's kind of expensive to create many accounts.
+
Sarvodaya
+In other words, you know, in fully permissionless networks, you can create a million accounts are pretty much only there. Well, Sky is the limits of how many different identities you can create, it's kind of more expensive to do so simply because you have to, well, presumably find different sets of documents if you want to create many accounts for yourself.
+
Sarvodaya
+So in that way we are bootstrapping cibil resistance. So it's not that you need to have KYC, but just many applications will require you so it kinda make sense. So and now it's a bit more expensive to create new accounts, as I have mentioned. And because of this, people will start to tend to use one and the same private key for many different interactions.
+
Sarvodaya
+And because of these, basically you start your account, your private key starts aggregating this web3 you footprint, basically the history of interactions with other accounts, history of the interactions of interactions with other apps, etc., etc.. And from this, basically what you get is a concept of reputation. So the more you interact with other accounts, the more you interact with the defi apps, the more you interact with any others, the more and more and more, the more and what you see that is about what you have been doing on the network.
+
Sarvodaya
+And because of this, if let's say you have been a I will give you just a good example, which is going to clarify a lot. Let's say you have been with on the network for five years. Let's say that you have paid back a cumulative $1 million worth of loans that you have taken on some Defi lending applications.
+
Sarvodaya
+Then if you come to me, I could probably give you a loan with a 0% collateral simply because I know that you don't want to spoil your beautiful history and your account that has existed there for a year, just not to give back to me. And $1,000. Let's say, While on the other hand, if there is a new account which has never been interacting with the protocol before, then of course I'm going to give you one or two collateralized loan of 150%, depending on the volatility of collateral as your money.
+
Sarvodaya
+So that's the that's the idea of a very basic undercapitalized lending example which reputational onchain enables. And what you can not have in the fully permissionless pseudonymous networks. So I hope this makes sense to offer. Please feel free to interrupt me any moment if any of this needs clarification. And so in this way, kind of peculiarly, the concept of ZKKYC and regulatory compliance ties into cibil resistance.
+
Sarvodaya
+And from cibil resistance it goes to our two dsoc and basically enabling reputation based interaction subject. So I hope this makes sense.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Perfect. I'm just waiting to two for you to finish that. I want to interrupt. Sorry.
+
Sarvodaya
+That was a bit longer than one minute elevator pitch, but I hope this like no, no, it's good.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It's perfect.
+
Sarvodaya
+It's perfect. So now let me give you just a couple of extensions, just a quick one. So basically, ZKKYC, as I said, ZKKYC is just a particular use case. You can also have ZK certificates and in general, it's called ZK certs. So these are the this is the actual technological thing that galactica uses so you can bring in your real estate certificates for you and you can bring in your clearly KYC documents.
+
Sarvodaya
+And most importantly, you can also bring in the educational, for example, educational docs on chain. So, for example, I can ask you to prove to me that you have a Cs degree from either of the three Ivy League universities without me knowing your name nor your actual university from which you have recently received it, etc.. So basically I can know something about your attestations without you revealing to me anything about them.
+
Sarvodaya
+So apart from their presence or absence in this way, if I have a representation of a human characterized with his or her reputation as well as I have real world ateststations about the human, I can change your voting power or I can condition your voting power in Doa's, you know, on us on this thing. So the more you have been with the protocols, the bigger your voting power as an example.
+
Sarvodaya
+If you have a CS degree, well, clearly your vote needs to count a bit more when writing new consensus protocol changes to an existing consensus protocol. So basically in this way you can bring governance frameworks, frameworks from the old world on chain and make them much more sophisticated than one token to one vote.
+
Sarvodaya
+And the primitives that we have today, and this is the premise of the cipher state. So basically a cipher state is when you can bring political primitives as sophisticated as those we have in real world. And there is a lot of wisdom behind their design. I guess nobody is going to argue that and bring those primitives on chain, basically building a representation of a nation state on chain, not just a financial institution like we currently can do in Defi, but we can actually bring a full political system, basically of a nation state on chain, and that we basically get the question as to what do we really need nation states anymore?
+
Sarvodaya
+If you're going to have a protocol citizenship. I will explain much more about this a bit later. So let me just shut up and not I.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It's good. It's perfect. It's perfect. Perfect, man. Don't, don't, don't, don't. Shut up. We want you to talk. That's the whole point. So I'm going to start asking some questions, guys. Now it's all my questions. Might be devil's advocate, but yeah, feel free to answer them as you want. And now it's interesting that you say that because, for example, one of our mottos in Citizen Cosmos, we don't believe in nations of digital nations.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+We see blockchains as these digital nations and to me personally token holder is as a citizen now by any means, regardless, and this is the question is going to be this direction. I noticed that throughout your examples and throughout the description of Galacticanetwork and and actually I think I even seen it somewhere either quoted or either on website, maybe in the Twitter from the Galactica, maybe from your institutional setup.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+There was the words used my first question is, do you think that you know, I mean, I mean, one of the reasons that, you know, the cyberspace not not the reason it was created, but one of the reasons, you know, there was like the independence of cyberspace and a lot of the people who come into the space, one of the reason was because, well, some of them believe or most of them or some of them or part of them believe that the current institutions are broken.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And my question is this Why recreate the same institutional setup? Because that's what it sounds like on chain in Web3 rather than trying and create something new.
+
Sarvodaya
+Can I jump in, please? Yes, sir. So basically, I let me also be a bit of a devils advocate I don't think we have ever said that we will be recreating 1 to 1 an existing institutional setup. So let me if if we have, we're going to change it. I guess so basically put it this way. So in the same way, Defi is the representation on chain of existing financial primitives, even though it's done in a bit of a different way, like, you know, Amm versus an order book, etc., etc., liquidity pool versus versus well, well I guess also order books or whatever other market primitives you have.
+
Sarvodaya
+So in the same way on Galactica, you can have social slash political primitives to exist, on chain And then it's pretty much the same way like Defi has created a de facto market for capital efficiency that can exist on chain and so many different people came up with a lot of different primitives. And now we have basically, you know, Aave curves and Uniswaps of this world in the same way.
+
Sarvodaya
+What we are doing by providing you with a toolbox and based off this toolbox, you can recreate, if you want to, a Chinese autocratic state. If you want to for some reason, or you can recreate a semi direct Swiss democracy or you're going to create something entirely new. So basically the idea here, I guess, is to give a tool box and then for builders to experiment with the actual designs of these institutions.
+
Sarvodaya
+Basically. Also, maybe I should clarify the use of the term institution because it's quite a lot. It's quite a loaded word. So the way I understand it, at least Bitcoin is the first independent monetary institution, etheream and well, Defi in particular are the first independent financial institutions. that exist on chain like well on its way independent basically with Galactica.
+
Sarvodaya
+These are few social political institutions that can exist on chain, or at least not the first, but enabling much more flexibility than traditional DAO setups. I hope this makes sense. So we are not repeating a broken institutional setup. We enable you to have a design space reach and flexible enough for us to experiment with new designs.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Okay, thank you for that. And next. Oh, gone, gone, gone. Gone are something you want to add to that? Sorry.
+
Astar
+So and I would like to add to that because there are also some really nice aspects from a technical perspective, because the zero knowledge tech we're using and combining them with blockchain really gives us properties that is able to improve the concentration. So I think it's correct that Galactica will not provides that Utopia nation state or something like this, but I think it's also not realistic to get from the current state to utopian in one step.
+
Astar
+And the cool thing about Galactica is that we have this ZK proofs about accuracy data. So and this basically allows us to bring the person data on chain and proof statements with it. I only discussed the statement that you are at least 18 years old and you can do this with your knowledge proofs in a way that keeps the data private from the step, or someone that your proving it to and still allows you to be compliant so we can satisfy some compliance.
+
Astar
+It's also compliance needs to come from nation states that want to regulate cryptocurrencies and when we provide compliance, we do it in a way that is accord and smart contracts and approximate product. So it's already that much cleaner structure that can not just be overruled by some law enforcement or whatever. So also the nation states, obviously tuition's using the system and we provide contracts to have to follow these rules.
+
Astar
+And the User whenever he creates an honest process to disclose something and he has the transparency about what is this clause and what possibilities there are for these institutions.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Right. Thank you. Yeah, I guess it gives a different perspective. I think in some aspect I would feel I think we can go on just about this topic for the rest of the space for sure. But but let's just for that, you know, let's, let's just go to the more but but like I said, there will be some uncomfortable questions and the next one is also not easy.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+So you guys talk a lot and not a but I think you I mean, you talk a lot I mean like the you on the referring to Galactica in general. You know there is a lot of talk about compliance and privacy. And, you know, I think we have all been in this space long enough to see that, especially by real states, but by own chain states.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Right. But but by the states and by the state. I'm I'm referring to any institution with a bit of fog. And then I guess, you know, they classify extreme cases very differently. So, for example, you know. Aaron Schwartz Right. And the first marter of of the Internet, so to speak, was classified as an extreme case by certain institutions, although for most of us, he's the creator of the RSS and other protocols which enable us to to to be here today, I guess, at least to some extent.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And so the question is this will in extreme cases and by extreme cases, I mean, whatever the state might seem as such and again, by state, I'm referring to real nations here, will they be allowed to access the data on their network or will the data be completely private?
+
Sarvodaya
+So I guess I'll give a the idea of how we have designed this. And that's basically among the things we I guess at least I am most proud of. I think this is the most flexible possible, most the most possible set up of all of the data privacy and, well, tech. So basically and then Astar, I guess, again can say exactly how it works.
+
Sarvodaya
+So basically we are libertarians in some way in the sense that the user has to have the choice. So and I will now say one particular phrase and what I'm going to be doing with the whole picture, it will understand what it means. So the cost of your privacy is slippage. So that's probably the best way to explain them.
+
Sarvodaya
+I will try to explain why it is like this. So the way we have designed it is the following. So the KYC process is of chain, as I said. So basically the KYC provider Astar will explain the technical part about this, but the KYC provider basically approves your documents on chain, but the KYC provider can not associated documents with a given with the given blockchain ID.
+
Sarvodaya
+So even if they're hacked, no privacy is leaked. The only thing the hacker will know is that you have an account with Galactica on Galactica, but they would have no transaction history, not your balances, nothing. So now every app, every So the the link between your account and the documents is encrypted, it is split into several parts. So we're very flexible into how many parts and intellectual multisig there might be two out of three or five out of six, one out of one, whatever.
+
Sarvodaya
+that's very important. That happens on the dapp level. The that can set the exact rules for decrypting the link between the transactions you're making with this dapp and your documents. So in other words, a particular fork of uniswap can say that, okay, these institutional tools, let's say all accessible to accredited investors from the jurisdiction will be able to be decrypted with one out of one, you know, only one key required and this key belongs to us or whoever to a regulatory to regulator doesn't really matter.
+
Sarvodaya
+So another dapp which can be in a different jurisdiction instead of okay, in our case such decryption would happen with five out of six keys where one of them belongs to a friend of mine, another one, the regulatory institution, another one to the Dapp, another one to KYC. So it doesn't really matter. You can set them as as flexible as you want.
+
Sarvodaya
+So basically, when a particular user interacts with such liquidity, well, they assume the risk clearly. So in one case, let's say if it is regulated institutional pool, when it's one out of one, presumably it has the biggest amount of liquidity sitting in because the institutions have access to it. So in other words, the slippage will be minimal, but the privacy will be kind of, well, not of such high quality.
+
Sarvodaya
+I would put it this way. In other case, when there is just a very obscure rules for decrypting the association between yourself and your transaction, or your transaction and yourself rather than probably super private, but it has not so much institutional capital inside, thus the slippage is kinda high. So I would see this to be a trade off and potentially with time once we move away from the national regulatory rules towards the global ones, this trade off will evaporate.
+
Sarvodaya
+So you will have all the way away and you will have, you know, some kind of convergence. So I hope this makes sense. One very important thing to realize is that the only thing that can be decrypted is this association between transactions and the account. So no dapp can dox your entire transaction history, only those transactions that you have performed with it and by doxing those transactions, if you're following basic OPSEC rules, there will be no way to associate those transactions with other transactions you have been making with other dapps.
+
Sarvodaya
+So now maybe Astar Can maybe I have screwed something up here in the technical description.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Before you answer, I really apologize. Very quick question. Super quick follow in what you said. Can technically candidate five out of six or whatever, it doesn't matter lose its keys in a boating accident by mistake?
+
Sarvodaya
+Of course. Yes. But you can socially recovery for those things.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Okay. Okay. Okay. Sorry. It's all yours. Sorry.
+
Astar
+That's what I would like to add to the answer. This maybe a little bit of background on how the KYC is designed because we designed it, especially in a way that I'm it is not possible for, I don't know, U.S. intuitions to get persons data because the data is not actually on the chain. What you have on Galactica is just a verification hash where arbitrary is used to verify the validity of this.
+
Astar
+Proof about this KYC. So the only way that is there to allow institutions access to personal data is an indirect one. So first the user has to provide the proof, and by providing the user also sees what's happening and what is disclosed. And then they only give an encrypted message about what's provided holds the personal data, so the institution can then only go to the provider.
+
Astar
+The personal data is not onchain.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Okay, okay, okay. That makes that makes sense. And the next question still regarding the same kind of topic, but I guess we're going to more or less move on a little bit, though, from this. And so there was a lot of conversation even between us now, right? We use a lot like the four of us, I guess we use a lot of words right now ethos, compliance, regulation, national states.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+So to me, you know, I thought, I'm going to I'm going to I'm going to come forward. Right here is an announcement. It's not a secret announcement, but it is I'm an old anarchist. I'm older than I sound. Probably so this is where my questions are coming from. This is what I'm trying to decipher. And and to me, a very important piece of of of the Internet, a very important piece of the cyberspace was.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It was, I guess, the independence, the independence of cyberspace. You know, the documents. 1993. Right. If I'm not mistaken. And I do sorry if we get it wrong. I really apologize for anyone out there. You know, very short document kind of on an increasingly or unsigned, willingly accepted, which is actually, by the way, a good example of the cyberspace doesn't need the same regulations.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It does. It needs regulations. You know, it doesn't need any rules. You know, and you mentioned yourself that if this should be the users who decide things. So I guess the question is and I'm sorry for it being very all over the place, so I'm just I'm just trying to to make sense and this is so kind of to dig in more into this same direction.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And why use all the same terminology? Why use all because you said you guys are given a toolbox and then it's up to the dapp or whatever to to to design whatever they're going to design. So why not remove completely the possibility to build a compliance or a regulated state? Why not give a toolbox to build just something different, something new, something that's, you know.
+
Sarvodaya
+I have four, four components to the answer. So first of all, about calling it differently, for sure. We are open to that. So branding is totally well in the state of flux at the moment. I know that you are not asking about this, but just like in terms of the name.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I get it.
+
Sarvodaya
+So the second I guess very important thing is that, you know, in terms of like users being in control, well, clearly, you know, anything can be forked. So basically if the set up that we have envisioned is not that that users actually kind of like consider optimal in a sense that there will be somebody else with a different vision, You know, we are for open source, of course.
+
Sarvodaya
+So we have that ethos in mind for us the same way you know, any other protocol could always be forked, so is Galactica. So, so any other vision is possible. The third very important thing that I'm getting to the actual answer well, I'm not sure. Let me push back a bit because I know that anarchy is the mother of order, but I think, you know, in the crypto space we have been empirically proven that it's not exactly the case.
+
Sarvodaya
+I guess so Web3 has been built with the idea of inclusion, but the idea of permissionless innovation, but the ideals of empowering people with ideas, of giving back the privacy to the people. So basically what a lot of good ideals and. Right. So I mean, that's why it's so tempting to jump into this into the space because, you know, just it's so evolutionary.
+
Sarvodaya
+It's so evolutionary as well. So but look at what we see basically, like whatever, 13 years actually 15 years into the into its if it's leading, you know, I'm pretty sure that tree has burned more people than it has empowered through its through its existence. So basically, clearly there have been a lot of first adopters who benefit from the benefited from Bitcoin.
+
Sarvodaya
+And so Bitcoin is pretty much uncontroversial here. Good innovation, I guess. So in that on that. So but once you enable, once you give financial tools into the hands of people who could be good or could be bad people could be responsible or could lack responsibility, and you expose retail mom and pops to these financial weapons in a sense.
+
Sarvodaya
+Well, you get less. You get in any bubbly economy where people think about Web3 as a casino rather than this new and evolutionary tool. So you have a lot of institutional capture within the space. Now you have a lot of people who hate this because they have lost all their money, etc., etc.. So some form of accountability needs to be in the space.
+
Sarvodaya
+That's my thesis. You know, I'm in the space since time I left the university. So feel like for better part of their well, a much better part of the decade so almost ten years and I could see all of all of the things here since then. And so my current perspective is if you want the actual mass adoption, you do need some form of accountability simply because the groups in this space, they do more damage than builders can recover.
+
Sarvodaya
+So that's my first, I guess, point to push back a bit against full anarchy in Web 3 anarchy is cool Once you have educated people in some in some rules of the game, put it this way. So once you have uneducated people lured in buy some gains and some cheap marketing, I'm not so cheap marketing for that matter, then anarchy argument does not apply in my in my opinion, so the other thing is that look, let's be let's be honest, if we want mass adoption, we will need states to collaborate.
+
Sarvodaya
+We will need some kind of collaborative environment. So it's it's very difficult to envision a fully unregulated space where you have full harmony between nation states and .... So basically some sort of collaboration is needed. And so either we as the industry can offer a toolbox which will be sufficiently feature rich and well, flexible enough in a sense, to accommodate such demands by nation states while not giving up our freedom and
+
Sarvodaya
+Our ethos, then that's good, because if we cannot, then what we will get will be CBDC. This will be CBDC or some other like extremely dystopian form of controlling web3 and leaving, you know, some free sectors of it to a few crypto anarchists like myself and yourself, to play with each other. You know, while the majority of the people will be playing in some regulated sandbox, which will take away all of their privacy, all of their wealth, all of their aspirations and whatever.
+
Sarvodaya
+And still they will be happy right as they're as the name suggests. So, okay. And so what I see is that unregulated web3 cannot satisfy those requirements. CBDC is not something we want for the future of innovation. So you got to have a middle ground in one way or another. And so I see zero knowledge cryptography as being these very essential technological primitive that, you know, that can achieve this.
+
Sarvodaya
+But I hope this answers your question. So basically, if my if my point here is not something you if it's totally fine and that's why you can fork the protocol. So if this sounds like more or less like a plan, well, then it sounds like a plan. So clearly everybody has their own take on this so hope this makes sense.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It makes sense. So, first of all, guys, before I carry on, thank you for, you know, standing up, answering uncomfortable questions. But, you know, it's there is more born in truth born in this. And then if I was asking you, what's your marketing budget and you know, what is your. So thank you for answering the uncomfortable questions just to reflect on what you said.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And you know, by no means was I to Web 3 space is white and fluffy? No. In fact, in my opinion, personal opinion, at least, again, this is not maybe this isn't Cosmos opinion, but at least my personal opinion as Serj. I would say that the whole space is a fucking shambles. Well, 90% of it is so. So I wasn't saying, Oh, you know, like the space is so good.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I was. I was more like making sure you know that you guys are not going the same way. This was more of the question from the perspective. And by what I'm hearing, you're saying you're not. Am I totally agree with what you say? You know, decentralization. I honestly one of my biggest I think offpoots of of of turn offs in in people who themselves anarchists or decentralization maximalists are people who say that decentralization should look in a certain way
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Not decentralization should look like decentralization, decides it should look. So I totally agree with what you say. Totally.
+
Sarvodaya
+And they don't see the contradiction, right?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+No, no. Some people really don't like let's destroy the. But maybe the banks. Maybe some people like banks. So, I mean, I don't I hate them. But if somebody does, then then okay, anyway, so let's let's move on. And actually the next question is related to money and to banks. And you have a thank you my team for for for digging some of those things up.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+But you have a section in the economic paper, I believe, or an economics paper, however you want to A16z refers to this tokenology. Now I like the word inner workings and have about universal income. There. And do you want to talk a little bit about it before I ask questions and describe what it is?
+
Sarvodaya
+Yeah, like I do, but it's going to take time.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And so if you want, I can go ahead. If you want, I can go ahead with the question. And then in your answer you can describe like in short, what it is. So it doesn't go the question, to be honest, for very simple, the question is very simple. There is a talk about scoring system and who is going to decide on the current system.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+That is the question.
+
Sarvodaya
+Okay. Okay. Okay, wonderful. So let me so let me try to jump in and kind of try to explain I mean, I'll try to make it concise. I'm it's like one of my strong qualities, you know, to make.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Things right that my.
+
Sarvodaya
+Basically to put it this way. So as I told you, the there is political primitives that can be built on on the on Galactica so the simple so and basic like our well the most aspiring part of the protocol design that we have is the so-called cypher of state, which is basically the governance framework of Galactica. And this governance framework, this complexity well, has quite a negative.
+
Sarvodaya
+That's why I'm saying would really take more time to explain the whole thing. But I'm going to be happy to drop all the materials for anybody just to take a look. But overall, the idea is that we have a parliament, we have elections into the parliament, so the citizens decide upon the people who get into the parliament. So within the governance framework, we have different entities, including Academy of Science, basically, which is responsible for funding innovation and public goods within the network.
+
Sarvodaya
+And we have the sovereign, which is basically a sovereign fund which is responsible for distributing investible parts of the inflation. And the most important thing between the parliament and the other entities that basically comprise the Cypher state is that the parliament decides on the issue of inflation. So as we all know, Bitcoin rewards well the miners, the security model of Bitcoin is rewarding the miners basically the with Bitcoin inflation.
+
Sarvodaya
+So the same idea works pretty much in all of the other proof of work systems and proof of stake systems. Clearly. What are the validators idea being? Basically, the inflation of your native coin is the most important crypto economic component of your security model. So in Galactica the idea is that apart from the security, because clearly validators also receive rewards apart from well, so incentivizing innovation.
+
Sarvodaya
+So we want to reward the security of the network, want to make that a part of our tokenomics of course. And also we want to make them the innovation to be a core pillar of what the network rewards. So that part which goes towards innovation that the parliament basically decides upon the distribution of it. So and that's one of the major, major ideas behind Parliament.
+
Sarvodaya
+So and this basically really sounds like something you would have in, for example, in Switzerland or in some other nations. So now let me talk about UBI. So UBI is the way for you as a citizen to receive back the products of the innovation that have happened within the network. In other words, in a nation state or in a crypto economic system like Ethereum, basically you as a holder of the native asset, you are inflated the way your wealth is inflated the way because this constant inflation clearly in Ethereum right now this doesn't work like this because it's deflationary on that.
+
Sarvodaya
+But for example, in a nation state, I'm an Argentine at the moment. As I said, I know a lot about this. It basically works in exactly that way. So inflation dilutes your wealth as a citizen of the system. So in Galactica you do get the dilution because of course of this political inflation. But on the other hand, you do earn the products of that dilution because those money that you lose your wealth, they invest it into public goods and innovation and the yields of that innovation get fed back into your pocket through UBI.
+
Sarvodaya
+So it's like a circular system where you buy instead of, you know, they can in, in the US, for example, I guess a lot of publicly funded universities produce some innovation and then IBM jumps on board and basically takes the teams, takes IP And while people, shareholders of IBM benefit IBM, here is just a hypothetical as you understand so well the people who find funded with their taxes, they kind of dont directly because they get the products that they produces.
+
Sarvodaya
+But you know, so it's redistribution of wealth in Galactica This the products of innovation get fed back to you through UBI. In some sense it's very similar to how Norway monetizes its oil reserves by buying portfolios of stocks diversified global sovereign fund and then the citizens of Norway benefit from that. So that's a similar concept. So how exactly it works, I'm not going to bother you right now.
+
Sarvodaya
+It's all written in the documents, so if you're interested, please go take a look. But that's the idea of UBI Now very important, kind of like additional consideration to UBI is that clearly the A.I. revolution, which is ongoing at the moment and I'm really sorry I'm sorry for this tangent, but I just to say it will take a lot of white collar jobs away from, you know, not so overly qualified people.
+
Sarvodaya
+Well, you know, illustrators, designers, writers, even junior programmers. So probably a lot of them will loose their jobs. So UBI is very essential components. We have, I think, much bigger demand for work. Well, for jobs, basically, then have supply and supply will be reducing, I guess, exponentially as the time goes by, by as we all know, the world population is growing exponentially. So we're going to have some kind of sort of Malthusian problem, but not with hunger, but rather with with the drop with Jobs.
+
Sarvodaya
+That's why UBI is an essential part and the way it's distributed in Galactica is a quadratic. It's quadratic. So basically it benefits a lot to the smaller holders, not so much the larger ones. So basically the small, small holders like disproportionately benifit. So now who decides upon the distribution? So the short answer is the Parliament.
+
Sarvodaya
+So Parliament will be deciding upon the exact funk. I mean, clearly specify a particular function that would be right in the beginning, but then afterwards the function will be subject to voting by the Parliament and keep in mind that Parliament is always subject to a vote of confidence by the citizens are with forced removal of Parliament members and the replacement.
+
Sarvodaya
+So basically, in other words, the Parliament cannot really take a well, kind of like autocracy, autocratic stance on the things some go against the citizens because, well, clearly for the first thing is that citizens will lose faith in the network and the token will plummet. Another very important thing is that they could always be voted out of the parliament.
+
Sarvodaya
+And so in this way we thought this is the most balanced mechanism that can be done in a sense. it can be efficient as a representative democracy. Well, at the same time, we're not autocratic like the representative,democracy where you can not vote out the parliament. So I hope this makes sense.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Yes, that's perfect. And a quick, quick question before I jump to the next one. You personally and I guess well, again, I'm referring to Galactica, but since I'm you personally seem to be very knowledgeable when it comes to different countries economical system. Did you guys, while you were building Galactica trying to study various systems around the from different countries is that the reason there is so many of different things implemented from different places?
+
Sarvodaya
+Yes. So one very important thing is that, you know, I am mostly so I mean, we the three of us currently on this call are not the those who have the most amount of hours in this research yet. Like, you know, for I mean, it's just a general point of curiosity, I guess for anyone or must be because that's how you know your life in the sense of being shaped by this, by the processes.
+
Sarvodaya
+So I guess anyone who has to have something at a level of withstanding, but yet the person who has been deep into this is not on this call at the moment. But overall, yes, of course, we give it a lot of consideration to how these things function globally.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I know you also of finance, by the way. I don't know if it's a secret, but the Internet is full of information.
+
Sarvodaya
+So yeah.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+In general, what is currently your take since well, I mean I'm sorry for for stricken currently we talked about shitloads of things that Galactica can offer in terms of the tool box and I'm sorry to strip away the next question, but because it's going to be related to privacy since Galactica is a privacy focused network, whatever terminology I want to use, what is you guys?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Where did you take the inspiration for privacy architecture from inside of the web three space, if any?
+
Sarvodaya
+I guess I'll say a couple of things and then it's going to be a status question. So there is a paper, it's called Zk kyc, that's exactly how it's called. I think it's 2019 or something. It's outside of published. And, you know, there are very, very, very, very similar system was was described, but just theoretically.
+
Sarvodaya
+So we have put this into practice. So that's one important inspiration. So I mean, just a general idea about building social primitives around Cibil Resistance Network. That's of course D SOC. So it's up to the Vitalik. That's a wonderful, wonderful paper. So a lot of inspiration around the socio economic system. So the governance framework and the economic play of the system has been taken from radical markets.
+
Sarvodaya
+So that's radical markets very interesting thing which I encourage everybody to read. I would really argue every take they have in this book, but the piece they have this takes on stimulates discussion. So it's wonderful. And basically the last one is biologist Network State.
+
Sarvodaya
+Again, it's a very controversial thing, so articulate the points from there, but that's the stuff that startup nations and the whole concept of, you know, if you can if you can build a company by doing an ICO y community, doing initial whatever offering. And so that's that's, that's another dividing population. Now from the technological design, again, I'm sorry for the tensions.
+
Sarvodaya
+They start confused of what kind of frameworks we're using, what kind of libraries, etc..
+
Astar
+Yeah. And so regarding frameworks, obviously using our classic building, if you it's a model of it. And then we have for the knowledge for using the second framework and for a lot of the concepts behind ZK KYC and the combination of policy compliance. So is this, this paper ZK KYC component which is regret. And for me personally, that's also a lot of inspiration from other important projects being ideas so that the kinds of Tornado cash ... tech spent on those projects.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Thanks, guys. I was genuinely curious because, you know, the privacy topic theme in not just in Web3, but in everyday people's lives. Okay, for some people and I'm very envious of you, whoever you are, it's not a theme for me. It is. And I'm very into web3 space. It's a big theme. So I was very curious. Since you guys are in that, what do you consider to be..?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Maybe not good. I'm. I'm kind of putting words in your mouth here, but. But at least what what kind of inspired you to build your protocol and which technologies and guys, I have to say, I didn't realize it's it's almost an hour passed but a good conversation. But I'm I'm you know I'm glad to be honest There's a lot of questions and I would love to can ask and ask but but but I must say one thing I'm glad is it's more and more and protocols on networks.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Again, I'm I'm very vague on terminology because different people want to use different terminology. Well, many of them growing balls and seeing that, hey, we are nations. You know, we why not? You know, and, you know, you've seen, I think, crazy stuff there in the past couple of years happened in the past year, which was nothing to to the comparison of what, of course, sort of the home automation was ten years ago.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Completely different. Um, but yeah, it's really cool. And Sarvodaya, you also mentioned you had some announcements towards the end. Um, but of course I know I didn't ask you so many things. So guys, do you want to add, do you want anything public, anything in particular topics that you wanted to discuss that I didn't talk about that. Well, I kind of stuck to one topic.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Sorry about that.
+
Sarvodaya
+Not only depreciate it, but I mean, it's like, again, it's very good that you have a reminder that we actually have an announcement because the discussion was so good that I even, like, forgot. I guess so.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Me too. I had thought I was written down. I'm going. I'm not going to lie down. I forgot about it.
+
Sarvodaya
+So, yeah, basically, I guess there are a lot of things to discuss. We could maybe like have a follow up conversation somewhere down the road and we're going to be happy it because going on and maybe, well, discuss those topics that we haven't discussed so far and really thank you for questions. This I think has been one of the if not the best podcast we've been a part of.
+
Sarvodaya
+And basically yeah, but the announcement so are announcing the site for a state campaign. So basically the Cypress State campaign is the way for the first cohort of users to gain citizenships into the Cypress State. So as I said, the citizenships are a very important component of galactic network. Basically citizenship. Technically it's a white list of people who can do things on the network, such as getting validation nodes being part of the governance and or receives.
+
Sarvodaya
+UPI So basically it is a sort of a retroactive airdrop, but it's reputation based. So basically, in other words, it's a bit of a more cautious design of of rewarding social contributions than the regular L1 airdrops that we are seeing. So this campaign is basically your chance to get into the into the set of of of of citizens.
+
Sarvodaya
+It's this type of status column that's basically the website how to what do you have to get to get there there will be a lot of puzzles so some of those puzzles I think will be a quite sophisticated for people with a lot of computer science and cryptography aspirations. There will be tasks, there will be a lot of community work.
+
Sarvodaya
+I mean, community collaboration, I should say, a lot of insights, a lot of alpha, all of those things. So the cyberstate dot com, we haven't done all of that yet. Does it take because they were announcing it and it's going to get big I guess. Of course they hope so in the coming months.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+So I like it's the sci fi state of sight for states.
+
Sarvodaya
+These type of things. I think it's far too expensive.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Okay but that is this sci fi state has come and we've got guys, by the way, whoever and I know people who are listening life. Well, you are listening life. So here it is. But I'm guessing you must have listened to this is in the recording. So if you are, then you probably can see the whole well, at least if it's not today, it would during the recording.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+You can probably see transcription and links. And so if you can see the links then please go on on the website and check it out. Sounds very, very cool and yeah, but feel sorry. I was just kind of still in the microphone there for a second. Yes.
+
Dan
+Yes. So I posted its first foray into like that game in subcommittee of it. So we have we, if you join up this site, what you need to do is just join up with the discord and then start basically just verify yourself and then start doing tasks. And basically the more and more task you do and the more ranks you gain the the more opportunities you get as like an early adopter cluster network.
+
Dan
+So at some ranks you'll just get a few on maybe a what we call social identity for your participation, various various, various events, that kind of thing, and levels. You're actually going to get access to exclusive access to channels, that kind of thing. And you will actually become one of the primary like ambassadors of the the network. This is also going to offer you the opportunity to become that to gain early access to galactica network citizenship, which is hugely it's a there are some very big cities like, for instance, the very first wave of galactica networks citizenships this year.
+
Dan
+And so you really want to be early as you can with citizenship waves that you can be. And this is your best chance if you take part in the campaign. It's just really good opportunity to get to be really ...
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Yeah, guys, if you are for some reason not seen links or whatever they've great suggestion, just follow the guys this curve and from there I'm sure you will find all the links in case you are not. I don't know. Maybe you listen to part of it somewhere or something like this on Twitter or whatever. And then of course, right now there are still no description, but it will be ready for the recording.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Okay, guys, again, thank you. But by the way, while I'm saying the kind of rest of my part, like I said, if anyone has any questions, just raise your hand. Ask a I. We we will have. I hope you guys still have a few minutes to answer questions. And so, please, if you are too shy, like I said, drop it in my DM on Twitter.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It could be anonymous. So I would not say your name if you don't want me to or unique or whatever. So let me just quickly check in case somebody did follow this up. No, I'm not seeing anything. And just quickly checking the spam. No. So, guys, we will definitely I would love to follow up to this this conversation or and so I know there is somebody.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Wait. Okay. Okay. We have so hey, you are on Red Hook if you want to try. Hey, you want to try and ask? Yeah.
+
Redhu
+Yeah. So like, like questions like, you must have discussed anything between you guys. Like whenever governments have their try to take advantage of that. Arent you gining them tooks to make our lives less private
+
Dan
+No that's one of the that's one of the primary aspects of galactica network is one of our primary goals is to maintain citizen privacy all times. That is possible.
+
Astar
+So like.
+
Dan
+Like so.
+
Redhu
+So like there is element it like real life element. So we are to prove our idea. And then I don't know how we all do that, but I want the government to intervene in that. Those things.
+
Dan
+Okay, I see what you mean. So your concern is regarding the like the offchain stuff. So basically the idea is that you we utilize both. We use ZK proofs in order to keep your information private. And then when you actually go to do your KYC, they use an offchain provider to provide the KYC, but you basically have your your, your key, your private keys and a hash which splits your identity essentially so the KYC provider that you're sending your details to never actually can identify your address onchain.
+
Dan
+So all they all they know is that your address exists and that it's a found and it's it's yours. So ZK proofs is really really powerful like that in actually protecting the privacy of this transaction which allows us to have this link off chain and often on chain without affecting your privacy. The only time information is sent offchain is if through centralized governance, but there is sort of a regulatory claim, I guess like rectal only.
+
Redhu
+Thank you. So I have a.
+Lot of questions, but I let them down for now. But I'll ask you in on your discord.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Thank you for the question. Thanks for the call.
+
Dan
+To read to. And we also actually have a we have a twitter spaces they have a lot to issues that currently I can probably ask you to give me a little bit about what it is and how we are supposed to do it based on Friday as well. So I have an opportunity to actually talk to us in any way you wish and asking the questions you want.
+
RedHu
+One more thing, like I like the idea of cosmos based like this Cosmos chain of building new those consensus.
+
Dan
+We are indeed cosmos based. We'll build over the Cosmos SDK for several reasons, some of which are the IBC, which is incredibly useful as well as that more so we can build compatible.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Astar want to add anything or we can.
+
Astar
+Yeah, basically because it's this great system where we get all the tools we need to build the blockchain. So using also the tenderment consensus modules to add our own implementation features for example reputation and ... transactions .... blockchain. And of course also IBC is a really strong point because it allows the features that we add the ZK combination of privacy and compliance to synergize with all the other projects happening on the Cosmos system.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Okay, thank you for the question and thank you for the answers, guys. Anyone else want to ask another question? Well, well, we still well, the guys. Well, I'm here all the time, so you can ask any questions anytime. But if anybody else has another question, just to put a request to raise your hand, if not, while I'm talking, you can still do it if it's the very last second.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Of course, some of the guys fell off or something like that. But then I will try to answer, of course, as well. But if they if you do not want to ask now, like they've already mentioned, they have their own Twitter space, also there is a discord channel. So I encourage everybody in the name of education to study as many protocols as possible.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+For sure. So definitely follow. And if you don't have the question ready now, follow the guys Twitter space or discord and feel free to ask the question there if it's more comfortable. I writing sometimes I totally understand that as well. And okay guys, I guess let's have a I really this was a very cool conversation in my opinion.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I enjoy when people answer and especially founders and things answer the questions, you know, not, not afraid. Sorry, not sorry, not afraid to answer the questions. So thank you again for that, guys. Thank you for answering uncomfortable questions. I hope it helped. It will not help, but it will. Whoever is listening to this to understand you a little bit better, the protocol better, and make up their own mind of what they want to do with it.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+So and yeah, definitely, hopefully there will be a follow up. So again, thank you to the Galactica team and thank you everybody. Thank you. Listen to us and have a great Friday, guys.
+
Sarvodaya
+Thank you, brother. Same for you. It's a great end of friday. The meat of it, whatever, whatever.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+You're almost almost didn't understand Midland's meatloaf.
+
Dan
+Yeah. No, we really appreciate it. And like I said, guys, go on the discord. The discord is highly valuable right now, just not just for education, but also so you can get involved inside your networks.
+
Astar
+Yes. Yeah. Yes. Thank you for the opportunity. And as development, we learn a lot from these interactions with the community and and and especially grateful for the challenging questions because that's why from what we learn new things and then counsel improve our concepts.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Thanks guys and thanks everybody who listens and thanks much for the questions.
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:
Interchain Security is one of the main features being added to the Cosmos Hub as the platform transitions to the next phase of development. Interchain Security (ICS) is a complex technology that needs to be tested.
+
Game of Chains is a public, incentivized, Interchain Security testnet, which has been launched on November 8.
+
Interchain Security allows for a provider chain, such as the Cosmos Hub, to share security and have its validators produce blocks for a consumer chain. Interchain Security will allow blockchains to leverage the high security of the Cosmos Hub.
+
If the Cosmos Hub has a large market cap, smaller projects may rent its security. Consumer chains (chains that will use Hub's security) will be required to go through governance to get their chain admitted by the validator set.
+
The benefits of ICS for the Cosmos ecosystem:
+
+
Chains can spend less time on thinking about where to hire reputable and concetrate more on building
+
Validators will benefit as they can attract delegators from new chains and get a part of their tokens (delegators will also receive the extra rewards)
+
+
Game of Chains will help validators to understand ICS and help to find any bugs. It is designed to fulfill two purposes: (1) testing Interchain Security in mainnet-like conditions (2) providing Cosmos Hub validators the opportunity to build confidence around running the ICS protocol.
Game of Chains will end in the end of November. In each phase, points will be awarded to validators who complete certain tasks. In the end of campaign, the best validators will be eligible for rewards, which are funded by Prop77, with 20000 ATOMs.
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:
The Interchain Security protocol (ICS) is planned to launch on Cosmos in January 2023. To test it, an incentivized testnet program called Game of Chains (GoC) was launched.
+It’s the third public incentivized testnet in the history of Cosmos, after Game of Stakes and Game of Zones.
Q: What is the difference between this game and the previous ones?
+
As part of a brief historical overview, Udit explained what GoC is and how this game differs from the previous two Cosmos games.
+Game of Stakes was based on testing proof-of-stake mechanism, its goal was to understand all possible attack vectors.
+Game of Zones came for the launch of IBC, and people were testing how IBC packets were being relayed between the different zones, which provided an
+opportunity to actually prove that this IBC ecosystem of sovereign interoperability where we had independent zones working together was something that could come to fruition.
+
What is GoC?
+
The goal of ongoing Game of Chains is to test Interchain Security. The idea of ICS is that one blockchain (The Cosmos Hub) can share security with another chain.
+This feature was developed by Informal Systems. The format of incentivezed testnet basically means that validators come and help run this network completing
+certain milestones to surface attack vectors, bugs and other issues. There are rewards for this because it’s a lot of work.
+Also, rewards make this process a lot of fun by providing an environment where participants both compete and still help each other.
+All of this ultimately helps a lot to polish that really complex piece of technology which is ICS.
+
+
Preparation for the testnet
+
Of course, it was necessary to prepare thoroughly for the testnet launch. Jehan shared how preliminary testing within the repository was going and about the automated
+tests that ran on every pull request. One of the types of tests is setting up a virtual network with several different chains: provider chain, which provides the
+security, and consumer chains which draw security from provider chain. Another type of test is a model based test which uses a reference implementation to generate
+many different scenarios in the form of actions that different actors in the network take. But no matter how sophisticated those tests get, testnets are more thorough
+method of testing, because people are unpredictable and they do all kinds of weird crap instead of normal things.
+Udit added up that another form of preparation is social planning. What are the tasks? How people are going to hit all the criteria? What are the phases of the game?
+So significant work was done in that area of planning. Udit also touched on infrastrucure that has to be used by participating validators, since they have to run
+both on proveder chain and consumer chains, they need to be relayers. For that, GoC has to have quite a few supporting tools. And last but not least, it all requires
+communicating. Sometimes things break during a testnet running, and people should know what’s going on and how the plan is being adapted in new conditions.
+
Mitigating risks
+
Q: How do we make sure that binaries we are being given are not malicious software?
+
According to Jehan, this is one of the key things. At least for the first few consumer chains there will be a process of due diligence that Jehan’s team will go through to look at their code. There are a few ways in which consumer chains can harm either The Cosmos Hub or the validators:
+
+
A Cosmos chain is just a binary that runs on the computer, so it could delete your hard drive or use your computer to send spam out or anything a computer program would do. Jehan and the team are not expecting to have that situation for the first few consumer chains. Everyone would know who they are and who’s building them. As things become more decentralized and there’s a higher volume consumer chains running, you’ve got to run it in its own virtual environment, but validators do that anyway when they are running a new chain. So that’s not a huge concern.
+
Consumer chain could potentially steal the private key given by a validator or sign malicious messages. This potential harm is limited by the process when validators inform The Cosmos Hub saying they want to use this key for this consumer chain and they can do that before the consumer chain even goes live. If you’re a validator and you see a consumer chain proposal is going to pass, you can provision a new box to run it and you’ll go to GitHub, look at the code and try to get the full node running on that virtual server. At the same time you initialize a new private key and then send a message on The Cosmos Hub saying this is the key to be using for this particular consumer chain.
+
The largest vector is that some malicious consumer chain could have hidden the code that would send a ton of downtime slashing packs at once slashing every validator on the Hub and jailing them. Then they could register a bunch of fake validators and that malicious validator set would come in and control all the IBC bridges and be able to steal a lot of money. How to mitigate that? (1) The last form of defence is a circuit breaker which only allows a small percent of the validation power to be jailed per hour and make obvious to everybody that the attack is happening. Then we maybe halt the Hub if it’s really bad and take down the consumer chain. (2) There is a pretty robust capability system within Cosmos SDK as to what modules have the ability to send packets claiming to different other modules. When consumer chains are submitted we can make sure that there’s no possibility of the consumer chain’s own code being able to send packets claiming to be ICS module. This can be automated in the future.
+
+
As a conclusion for this part of the discussion, Jehan noted that there are some other risks too, but they are really not as much concern as those three, because they are more based on mistakes than a deliberate attack.
“There’s something called iterators, which are kind of functions in the code, which go over a collection of items and you basically have to return from the function, you have to return true or false depending on whether you want to keep going to the next item and look at the next item in the list or whether you want to stop looking at the list. And so we had a situation in our code where we had some iterators you had to return true to keep looking at the rest of the list, so it was either return true to continue or return true to stop. And so some of the iterators are written that you would return true to stop, and some of the iterators were written that you would return true to continue. And so what actually with the bug happened was basically that there was an iterator over the consumer chains running on the provider chain, so when it’s doing operations involving the consumer chains iterate over the consumer chains, and it was that function was returning the wrong thing, like was returning true when it should have returned false to continue. And what happened is that that iterator would stop after looking at the first consumer chain. Basically, the provider chain was only ever really interacting with the first consumer chain, the second one was being left out. So that was basically the bug, and so we fixed that, and we also went in and we refactored everything so we’re consistent about the stuff, and we got the upgrade.”
+
There were also some issues in relaying. These have been resolved now.
+
Phases of GoC
+
Udit gave a quick review on the Game of Chains phased approach.
+There are three phases:
+I. Testing dummy chains (Apollo and Sputnik), very basic, the most simple chains, to make sure that we can run the provider chain.
+II. Testing actual chains. Expecting to see some of the consumer chains that are going to be launching next year (e.g. Neutron).
+III. Asking anybody in the public or validators to submit consumer chains of their own.
+
In conclusion, a quick Q&A session was held, during which some advantages of Cosmos SDK were pointed out.
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:
As HackAtom VII 2022 comes in less than a month in Seoul, we at Citizen Cosmos decided to give you overview of this event. Before the event starts on July 29th, we’ll do occasional reviews related to HackAtom. Today, let’s talk about what we should expect during the event.
+
HackAtom VII precedes the BUIDL ASIA event and will host South Korea's best hackers. Teams will compete for a diverse range of prizes, rewarded to the best teams that build the Interchain vision aside from the hackathon. There will also be a series of free educational workshops throughout the event.
+
There are three main challenges that participants will have to take part in to get the main prize. The first one is called Interchain Prize: Interoperability. The mission is to build anything that would push IBC forward. The event organizers confirm that this could be an application that leverages IBC in a novel way, a new IBC application-level packet type, improvements or modifications to lower levels of IBC, or implementation in new environments. The competitors should demonstrate their skills and talents to show how interoperability unlocks ingenuity.
+
The second challenge is the Hub Prize: Interchain Security. Its mission is to spin a Consumer Chain that showcases the power of the Cross Chain Validation (CCV) protocol and experiment with the application layer. The developers are encouraged to play with Interchain Security and innovate on the application layer. The task is open-ended, and the participants should show their creativity in how Interchain Security will reimagine the Cosmos-SDK chain and how the Cosmos Hub can evolve as a chain for application development and deployment. The main requirement of the challenge is to leverage Interchain security design in the project.
+
The third general challenge is the Application Prize: Cosmos-SDK. The task here is to build either a blockchain with the Cosmos SDK, a rewrite of an existing module, or a tool that improves the user experience of developing with the SDK. The organizers are mainly curious about determining how well contestants work with SDK. The requirement is to use the Cosmos SDK repository or a codebase like Atlas, Lens, or any other tool that provides UX improvements to SDK.
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Don’t forget to apply for the Hackatom and keep reading our digests. Next time we’ll talk about the event’s sponsors and their challenges!
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Event’s sponsors and challenges (pt.2)
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The Hackatom VII is coming in just ten days in Seoul, so it’s time to get to know who sponsors this event. Moreover, we shall cover the special challenges for the participants that the sponsors have prepared.
+
There are several sponsorship categories. The main one is the Platinum which includes Juno and Osmosis blockchains. Next is the Bronze, with Celestia, Crescent, Provalidator, Konstellation, Agoric, and Persistence. The Citizen Cosmos podcast is also a sponsor! We provide media coverage for the event and help promote it. You can learn more about sponsors and their contributions on the official website.
+
Let’s look at the challenges the Platinum sponsors Juno and Osmosis have provided for the contestants. The Osmosis challenge is called “Osmosis track: CosmWasm-related challenge. Its mission is to build a CosmWasm application that will interact with Osmosis AMM using its custom bindings. The participants will have to write a contract leveraging this functionality to produce some helpful protocols to enhance the Osmosis ecosystem. Finally, the app should be deployed to the Osmosis testnet and provide a UI. The requirements for winning the challenge are pretty straightforward, but the Osmosis team also shares their ideas for inspiration:
+Maker DAO like stablecoin using Osmosis for TWAP price oracle and liquidation
+Autocompounder for Osmosis LP shares
+Futures or options on a token using the AMM for settlement
+
The Juno challenge is also related to CosmWasm. It has a mission to write a CosmWasm contract that runs on Juno testnet and demonstrates the power of CosmWasm IBC to create a meaningful product-level application (not just R&D). Juno is currently the largest deployment of permissionless CosmWasm in the Cosmos ecosystem. They encourage many projects to build on their chain and focus on governance and composability. In addition, they are looking at IBC to enable more composability of DAOs and other protocols with other Cosmos blockchains. The recommendations Juno gives to the participants are the following:
+Leverage Interchain Accounts for a DAO to stake assets on a remote chain (that doesn’t have CosmWasm)
+Write a custom protocol to move NFTs between Juno and Stargaze testnets (both have CosmWasm)
+Build an “AMM router” that swaps tokens either on JunoSwap (local) or Osmosis (via custom IBC protocol), depending on the best current rate.
+Stay with us and learn more about Hackatom VII in Seoul. Next time we’ll talk about the judges who will decide the winner of the challenges!
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If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:
Citizen Cosmos
+Did it did. Can't. Hey, Andrew. Hey, man. Can you hear me? Okay, great. So we have sound. That's good. And lets approved Dan as well. Dan Can you hear me too? Say something. I'm good, Dan. Okay, great. So let's give it, like, some chit chat to the know, because it's going to take some time until people join. Let's hope that we have live ... some people.
+
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And if not, we will, of course, promote the record in as much as we can. But still, regardless. So for before people start to join we start chit chat, maybe you guys want to tell me how you are. How's the weather?
+
Dan
+Oh, yeah, sure. Doing good. I love Fridays. Really nice weather here in Maryland. We had a little bit of, like air quality issues because of the fires up in Canada the past few days. But it's getting better now.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I heard. I heard that you guys survive in breathing.
+
Dan
+Yeah. I mean, Maraland's not very close to it, but other places like New York got hit a lot harder.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Oh, okay. Andrew, what about you? How is your. You Alive?
+
Andrew
+Yeah, I'm out in Colorado, and, yeah, we were dealing with the fires a couple of weeks ago, and now it's started to shift east. But no. Yeah, past couple of weeks, it's been raining a ton, just on and off throughout the day, which has been great to green things up. So very beautiful out here in Colorado. A nice warm day, too.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+That reminds me of that song. We didn't start the fire, but okay, let's not go into those jokes right away. Go. And that's great, man. I mean, we've been having some. What about you? Yeah, I've been. I was going to say, we've been having some strange weather for for for us, because I live on an island and in the ocean, and we've been usually like, it's quite hot for this time of the year.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+But yeah, it's been raining a little bit, which is okay I guess for subtropics. Yeah, but oh by the way, for people who slow to join in before, it's just. Andrew, sorry about to interrupt you there. This is not a weather forecast. This is just us talking. So, Andrew, so back to you.
+
Andrew
+Oh, no, no problem.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I thought you were going to add something. So, guys, for. For everybody. Who's Just starting to join in? Just to I'm going to say I'm going to repeat this probably several times before we kick off. And so this is going to be a validator focused space. And we have kindly the two Big Brains at Horcrux, Dan and Andrew.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And they will introduce themselves, of course, much better than that. But yeah, the idea is to kind of unravel the mystery, which is Horcrux seems is to a lot of validators. And to be honest, again, I will repeat this again, but but for the people who already join so it's not silence there I was having an episode with Crypto Crew a Validator team, and I realized when we were talking that it still, even to the guys who use it, can be like, you know, it still sounds intimidating sometimes.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+So and I hope that Andrew and Dan are going to help us to understand that it's not. And if people should use it. So yeah, by the way, Andrew, Dan you guys are really want to like not introduce yourself yet, but maybe just in general Horcrux, chit chat, I don't know whatever you guys want to say and.
+
Andrew
+Yes, I mean it's an exciting couple, couple of weeks for us gearing up towards this Horcrux V3 release which we released two weeks ago. We have a blog post that just went out yesterday. We're really excited to talk about, you know, some of the features that we introduced and simplifying things for validators even further.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Dan you want to add something to their you were starting to talk Yeah.
+
Dan
+I think Andrew covered it but yeah we're excited to talk about Horcrux. Some of the changes that we've made, especially in terms of like making it easier and safer.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Awesome. Let's just play the couplet on Sorry, I'm going to be one of those annoying hosts and make everybody wait a couple of more minutes so hopefully there will be more people joining in. We have left the message and several validator groups and chats. Hopefully it was noticed. Some people did actually.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Actually, there was a lot of interest, so im surprise to be honest, to see yet so little people because a lot of people are really Horcrux finaly somebody is explaining somebody is doing it now let's talk about Horcrux. So I'm looking personally forward to it and I understand how it works. I have tested it before. Now, currently Citizen Cosmos, I'm going to be honest, we don't use it.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And but yeah, this is, I think, something to be fixed. And hopefully my understanding, personal understanding will also improve a lot today. I do have some of it, but of course I'm not Dan or Andrew and hopefully there will. I think it was it Dan was it you had the name, the original, the what was it, the Muggles and the Wizards or was it Andrew.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Who was it with a name.
+
Dan
+Yeah, that was me. I like Harry Potter fan. So I came up with a little catch phrase for it. Nice. You want to you want to read that tagline? Are you ready for it? it's something like Horcrux shouldn't be a soul splitting decision. It's for all wizards and muggles.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I love it. This soul splitting thing. And it sounds like puns intended, you know? So.
+
Dan
+Definitely.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Okay, guys, I think it's like 5 minutes pass. I know there isn't that many people and some are still joining in. Let's start with the intro slowly and then we will start. I mean, it's a beautiful Friday for me. I hope it's a beautiful Friday for other people, too. So even though we are like here developing space, you know, we still want to let you people off today yet not tomorrow.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+So without due ado, guys, I'm going to ask Dan and Andrew to introduce yourself one by one. Andrew, do you want to kick in first and introduce yourself a little bit?
+
Andrew
+Yeah, definitely. So I'm Andrew Gouin. I'm the director of engineering at Strange Love. Horcrux was actually one of the first projects that I started coding on when I started. But yeah, you know, I've spent about three years within the Cosmos ecosystem as a bystander from from the Stargate and Prior, and, you know, it's been great to get plugged in and get hands on with, with the core stack here.
+
Andrew
+But yeah, I spent some time. I was, I mined ether for, for many years until that was no longer profitable and you know, did tooling here and there. But yeah great to great to be on it's great to be a part of a strong team that's contributing all around the ecosystem.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Yeah. Mean, just before Dan's going to start his intro, I just want to add. Yes, Strangelove. have been great, really. I don't think just for the ecosystem because the things you're doing can be used beyond Cosmos, in my opinion. And yeah, I've had the privilege of speaking to Jack many times and to Tyler as well. And yeah, really great thing, guys.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Well done. Sorry. Dan. Didn't want to steal your intro, please. My apologies.
+
Dan
+Oh, yeah, sure. So I kind of do two things off in a day for my day job. I'm at a strange love on Andrew Steam, so I help run the infrastructure over there. So validators and Relayer is primarily. And then for my night job, I have my own company that I'm working on growing called Defiant labs. We build one product called Sycamore Tax that focused on cosmos taxes, and then we also are trying to do some validator stuff and grants.
+
Dan
+Yeah, Andrew really taught me pretty much everything I knew about Horcrux. And over the past year I've got an opportunity to kind of get comfortable with it and understand it really well. We're actually going to be doing a workshop on Horcrux with Thor hax, so if any of you guys are interested in that. We'll hopefully get to share some more info on that soon too.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Oh, so I was going to say, when you said by night I was going to I was hoping for some Batman stuff there, but it was close enough. Close enough and I'll have it your own project that takes as much space as probably Batman takes the battle crime, especially if you're doing it at night times, guys. So I'm going to start slowly with, like, the questions and we're going to slowly go into it.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+But just before one last thing, if anybody has a question, raise your hand. I will let you, of course, speak or if you're too shy and don't want to ask a question using your voice, you can write to the DMs of the Citizen Cosmos are open. So. Right. And maybe wink at me or something like this here. So I'll look at them, but I'll probably see them.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+But just in case, I'll also that you can chat, right? Well, it's not really a chat, but you guys know how it works. So I'm not going to go into how Twitter space works anyways. If you have questions, please don't be too shy to ask them. And that is exactly the time. So anyways, Horcrux, so am I don't know how regardless whether again you're listening now or this is the recording for you.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I don't know how much you're familiar with Horcrux, but this is something that I personally discovered. I don't know, maybe last year, I believe or so, and I don't know exactly. And to me, the description that the most sensible descriptions are not sensible. I apologize for it. The most precise description, the easiest to understand is it's basically like sentry for the private key of the validator, same architecture kind of thing.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+So which what it means is basically helps the validators to improve their security by well, I was going to say twice, but it's a lot more than that, to be honest. And it's not only for the validators to be honest, because a validator in my understanding who uses Horcrux should also appeal a lot more deligatores for for a number of reasons, including security, slashing and security risks and so on.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+So this is my understanding now. But of course, Andrew, do you want to kick in and explain what the overview of Horcrux?
+
Andrew
+Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, as a Tendermint validator, what is your main concern? It's that you have this private key and with the standard architecture it means you have to run that on a single node. You know, with the minimal architecture, that single node is synching blocks with the chain and it's signing on the same machine. You can take one step back from that and introduce sentry nodes, which means now you have nodes in front of that validator nodes that are synching blocks and sending the blocks sign requests to the single validator node.
+
Andrew
+But you still have a single point of failure for your private key. And so the availability and keeping your key safe are really kind of your main concerns there as validator. And where Horcrux steps in is it allows you to take that private key, make multiple shards from it, and load it onto multiple cosigner machines. And with that you have the ability to configure a threshold of, you know, how many of those machines should be required to assemble a full signature for the block.
+
Andrew
+So, you know, this introduces fault tolerance as well as just that that key security of requiring multiple pieces to you to assemble the full key. And so yeah it's that's really you know the benefit of Horcrux is you're SRE can sleep more peacefully at night knowing that you know, a machine can go down within the architecture and you're not going to be missing blocks.
+
Andrew
+And in addition, you know, so with the key, the main concern there is that you don't want to double sign you don't want to sign the same payload for the same block twice with a different signature because that will tombstone your validator or, you know, essentially destroy your validator on chain. So validators, if that happens, that means that you have to create a new validator and try to win over the delegators to switch over to your new validator.
+
Andrew
+So, you know, that's that's a worst case scenario. We definitely don't want that to happen. So Horcrux really takes the pain out of that, where now you have a whole separate cluster from your sentries where you can manager your key shards and you know your point, your your Horcrux clusters to the sentry nodes so that any of the maintenance operations you do on the century nodes doesn't affect your your remote signer cluster.
+
Andrew
+So it lets you keep your your key material fully separate from the nodes that are synching blocks that are interacting with the chain. And you know, that lets you have that extra level of security. And so yeah, with that double sign protection, all of the nodes, all the cosigner nodes in the Horcrux cluster are keeping state of what is the highest block that that I have signed and all of those are keeping that stack individually.
+
Andrew
+And then they also have a mechanism to talk to each other to come to consensus on what is the highest block that we have assigned as a entire cluster. So with those two two gates of double sign protection, you can be guaranteed that the Horcrux cluster, no matter which cosigner is being asked to sign the block, that it will not double sign.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Okay. Now you said that people can sleep safe at night. Delegators, of course, apart if it's Dan because Dan is building his own project at night. I'm joking Dan do you want to add anything to the intro about Horcrux that Andrew has said that was just perfect. Sure.
+
Dan
+Well, maybe I'll just like more summarize what he said. So, yeah, the way that I look at Horcruxes, there's like three parts to it. So the first thing is that it is a remote signer, so it decouples your signing process from your block indexing process, which is really nice. And what that allows you to do is it allows you to, like, treat your nodes almost as throwaway-able because Horcrux itself will take care of keeping track of all the signing state.
+
Dan
+So you never have to worry about backing up like your validator state dot JSON, none of that. You can just if there's a problem with your node, you can just delete the nodes, spin up a new one from Snapshot, tell it to connect to your Horcrux cluster and it's up and running and there's no risk at all. That's the first advantage is that it's a remote signer.
+
Dan
+There's other remote signers out there to like TMKMS. The second advantage to Horcrux is that it adds high availability. So it allows you to split your signer into multiple locations so that you could put like one on the East Coast, one on the West Coast, one out in Europe or something. And if there's ever an outage in one of those locations, the other two are still able to create the key material needed to sign. thats second advantage.
+
Dan
+And then the third advantage is the security aspect of it. So the key is never located in one location. It's spread through multiple machines. So if you wanted to get access to that key material, you would have to compromise multiple nodes in order to recreate that key. And that's the the third advantage.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And I never even thought about the third advantage until you said it's now. I'm going to ask questions, which are two you guys probably going to seem, I mean Dan and Andrew, like really obvious, but this is what I have gathered about when over the last six or seven months when I've started to mention Horcrux on my podcast, our are on on our Odyssey streams, and I know this is what I've been getting, so I'm going to be asking you those for some I think I understand more or less.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+But again, this is not for me. Hopefully this is going to help people to demystify this. And so the first question, will this increase my... my cost of infrastructure and how much will this increase my cost of infrastructure by?
+
Dan
+There really depends where you're coming from. Go ahead, Andrew.
+
Andrew
+Yeah, So, you know, luckily these these Horcrux cosigner nodes are they're a very lightweight process. And so Horcrux additionally offers a single signer or mode, which is a single node that will hold your validator key, not sharded, but we don't really recommend that for Main Nets. But yeah, you know, that means you have a single additional node that uses very minimal resources.
+
Andrew
+You know, we're talking a single CPU and a gigabyte of ram is all that that the war machine would require. And the Horcrux cosigners are really the same way. So yeah, if you do shard your key now you, you know you need a minimum of three cosigners and that really is our recommended configuration is that you would have three Horcrux Cosigners so you'd have your key sharded into three pieces and with a threshold of two.
+
Andrew
+So that's, that's the configuration that we use on all of our validators and that we recommend that others use as well. And so what that, yeah, that requires three nodes and kind of same resource requirements. There means one CPU, one gigabyte of RAM for each of those machines. That's if you're signing a single chain which up until Horcrux V3 three was all that was supported.
+
Andrew
+So that meant, you know, that you needed a, a Horcrux cluster per chain that you wanted to sign within. Then you would have three nodes each requiring one CPU, one gigabyte of RAM. But now with Horcrux V3, we introduced the ability to sign multiple chains from a single cluster. So what this means is you can load in the Shard for multiple chains and you can point the Horcrux cosigners to the centuries out of those multiple chains and it can sign sign blocks for all of the chains that it's connected to.
+
Andrew
+Yeah. So I mean, a huge improvement because yeah, I mean, right now we're in the middle of the migration as well. We have Horcrux V3 hooked up for a number of our validators, but we're still working to reduce our number of Horcrux clusters because now we really can use a single Horcrux cluster for all of the chains that we signed.
+
Andrew
+So that means that, yes, the resource requirements do go up a little bit on the per cosigner basis, but but it is very minimal. So, you know, if you have a four CPU 16 gigabyte of RAM machine, you can handle, you know, ten, ten or 20 chains.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Now, you mentioned all the time three signers. No, you didn't say thats the architecture we use. Theoretically, could I shard my key to five pieces. Will I be safer of doing that? More secure or not.
+
Dan
+You should kind of think.
+
Andrew
+Tradeoffs go ahead Dan.
+
Dan
+Oh, yeah. I think I was going the same pace as you like in general. Like if you do like a three or five kind of thing, then you're going to have to have five, Horcrux nodes running, right? So there's a scale out in both complexity from the the infrastructure management and the cost based on like how you're doing it.
+
Dan
+So that'll be that. The biggest thing I'd say it also kind of comes down to like how many people are involved in your business too, because we'll get to this a little bit later. But there's this new mode called DKG where you say that you're in a partnership with like seven people, right? Kind of like I think Noble has like a partnership with like seven people for their ...
+
Dan
+You could and they do like a three of seven or something like that. I might be wrong in the numbers, but yeah, you could do the same thing with a Horcrux so that there's like five partners that you have and you want to run a validator together using DKG. You never share the key. Each of you guys have part of the key material and that'd be like a time you might want to scale up to more than two of three.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Okay, okay. Now. But what the questions might sometimes seem a little bit like like I said, this is more like, at least in my head that I remember of the things. I honestly didn't write them down and then put them in place. So that might seem like I'm asking them a little bit, but I'll try. I'm going to try and keep it in logical order as you guys answer, of course.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+So the next thing. Right. And I think.
+
Andrew
+That's a great question. I did just want to add one thing to that, which is that, you know, with your total and your threshold configuration, it is a balancing act because it's, you know, what level of availability do you want compared to what level of security do you want? So if you have a threshold of two with a total of three, that means that you can have one cosigner down and continue signing blocks.
+
Andrew
+It also means that you need two of the shards in order to produce a valid signature. If you go up to, you know, like a five total and a threshold of three, that means that you can have two cosigners down. But it does mean that you need, you know, three of the five. So it is a lower percentage than that of the two of three.
+
Andrew
+So you are sacrificing a little bit of the security availability. If you do a four or five. On the other hand, that is more secure than the two of three, but it has the same availability two of three.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Okay, that makes sense. And relating to that, um, Will Sorry, I had two questions at the same time. Im gonna ask them one by one could theoretically, let's say there is a validator who is, you know, strictly bare metal and you know, they're against having cloud machines and they're part of infrastructure it for Horcrux, it doesn't matter where it runs right?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I mean, you could run them on a home based computer, right. Any of the signers.
+
Andrew
+Right. Okay. Yeah. The main thing they're trying to think about is the latency between signers. And you have to balance that against, you know, what is the window with which you can submit evidence for signing a block. So if the letancy is too high so you have too many cosigners that are needed to sign a signature and it's a lower block time, you do risk missing blocks.
+
Andrew
+So so you do also need to balance the latency between the machines. Of course, if you're are in a cloud or an environment that has very low latencies, you could have any number of cosigners. And with with no latency, you're going to be able to sign the blocks. No problem now. Yeah, we're we're actually in the middle of our on-premise migration ourselves to cut some of our cloud spend.
+
Andrew
+So yeah, we will be moving our our Horcrux cluster, our Horcrux cosigners to decentralized locations throughout the US.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Nice. And by the way, this was my next question. So we maybe we can talk a little bit more in detail if you want about that. This was something I think again was Crypto Crew, was it Jacob, I don't remember, to be honest. Sorry, not that I don't, was just really I'm trying to remember all the questions here and the whole block missing thing.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Now, a lot of validators are terrified of missing blocks. Now, it's a bit silly because, you know, if you have 1% missed blocks or five or whatever the chain is, it can survive without you. But of course not 100%. Right. So. So and then, of course, added Horcrux to your infrastructure will lower the latency so you will miss more blocks now can you reflect on that a little bit say what what's what your thoughts about this.
+
Andrew
+Yeah I mean with our deployments, you know, with the slashing window uptime percentage, we never see it go below 99.9%. And it's typically much higher in the in where, you know, 99.97%, where that means, you know, over the last 16 hours we've missed three blocks potentially. So that's like where we sit that that's in our cloud environment. We do expect that to maybe drop a little bit once we're, you know, Bare Metal and we're using different ISPs for the different locations.
+
Andrew
+But yeah, you know, I would say that when we back back when we had single Node validators, we would see similar percentages of, you know, not always getting 100% in the in a slashing period window. So I think, yeah, you know, it definitely does add latency to the signing process but typically not enough to to miss blocks. And there are there are tuning parameters that you can use time outs that you can tune for the raft consensus and the gRPC timeout so that you know, if a blocksign request between two cosigners is taking too long, it can give up and try again within a shorter time period.
+
Andrew
+So so you come on with it and you know, other validators, we have a telegram channel that happy to invite any other validators that are interested in trying it out, but we can help you, you know, fine tune the operations and minimize latencies too, to make sure that all the blocks are being signed right.
+
Dan
+I want to echo that. That tradeoff that is happening there has a really cool like pro side, too. So even though we're missing three blocks in 16 hours, the pro side is that we have high availability, which means we can have a node go offline so we can like go patch a node with Huckleberry or Burberry or whatever, and we keep signing where if you are running a single sentry without as far as I know, the only high available solution is doing something like Horcrux.
+
Dan
+So if you're just go after 100% uptime with a single sentry and you have to do a patch for some reason without a chain hault, you're going to have a lot of miss locks during that time.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Make make sense. Make sense. I and what do you by the way but in general sense since you guys are quite big on not missing blocks and I'm sorry that was like sounded like a funny phrase. But what's what's what's what's your opinion on general will on this topic? Sorry to kind of sway aside, but it's not really about missing like one or 2% of blocks.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Is that acceptable? Is that unacceptable? Is that should validators be afraid of having, you know, a 0.1 to 1% means blocks are what's what's they've been what's your opinion here?
+
Dan
+I've talked to a lot of people about this and a lot of people think that you actually get penalized if you have less than 100% uptime, which is not true at all. You only get penalized if you violate the slashing window. So I think it's kind of dangerous in general to try to pursue 100%. It can lead to mistakes that can involve like Tombstoning your node.
+
Dan
+I think it's much safer every time that I personally do an upgrade. I am on my scan. I'm watching that I'm missing blocks before I bring up the next node, just to make sure that I don't ever risk double signing.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+It's actually smart. And by the way, I think it was also somebody from crypto crew who said an interesting point. If you're if you're seeing a validator with a constant hundred percent performance, probably they're using very lame infrastructure. And because more complex...
+
Andrew
+That may not be the case for it for a well-tuned. Horcrux Yeah, we do have many that do 100% block signs day to day. And yeah you know you'll see a missed block here and there over the course of days. But yeah, that may not be the case. But I will say, you know, if you're seeing in the realm of 1 to 2% missed blocks, there's probably a problem really, even more than half of a percent probably indicates that there's some kind of a problem.
+
Andrew
+But yeah, anything less than that, I don't think there should be anything to worry about There. But even if you have to do a maintenance upgrade on the Horcrux cluster, that means you can't do the rolling upgrade. It's still means You're still missing a, you know, maybe 20 blocks if you're taking all that the signers down, patching the binary and bringing them all back up.
+
Dan
+Yeah. One final thing to say on this too, is like so that slashing parameter that all the different chains like provide like my opinion that's really there for like the smaller validators, the ones that can only afford to run like one century. Like it would kind of suck if they got penalized for like having to reboot the node to apply security patches and not be allowed to have any downtime at all.
+
Dan
+But that slashing parameter allows on almost every single chain any single validator to be down for probably 8 to 10 hours at any point, which allows validators to sleep through the night, when like emergencies happen, which is very nice, and allows them to have time to like, test that their upgrades went smoothly and not have to worry about keeping 100% uptime.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Okay, that makes sense. And by the way, guys, for the listeners, I mean, but Andrew, I think mentioned the Telegram chat. It's Horcrux have a hangout telegram channel. So I believe this is the chat we're talking about and if you can't find it, go to the Strange Love Telegram chat. And I'm sure from there you will can ask for help and find it.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+So yeah, no stupid question time. Yeah. So one thing about what's going on.
+
Andrew
+We do have a link to the Horcrux Hangout Telegram channel at the end of the V3 blogpost.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Okay. Nice. Nice. And also, again, if you listen to the recording, you will probably see together with the transcript of the link. But regardless, this is more for the for, for, for the people who are live if you if you having trouble to find it either follow his advice or the lost Telegram chats and you will find it.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+So now stupid Question time guys. Prepare yourself now I warned you. And so and this is again a question that I've been gathering over time. So does that mean and here's the question does this mean and by this I mean somebody using Horcrux that you don't need sentry nodes anymore?
+
Dan
+Yeah, go ahead.
+
Andrew
+Yeah, I was going to let you answer a couple. you go for it.
+
Dan
+Okay. Yeah. So it really comes down to like how you define what a century mode is. So you still need a node that is thinking blocks, right? So the way that it kind of technically works behind the scene is that there's this one setting in conflict called Prove validator and by default is commented out, meaning that you're not using an external remote signer.
+
Dan
+So you still need to have a block that has a genesis file that has like persistent peers, that's connecting to all the other validators and creating blocks, and then you're just connecting that to Horcruxe to that one customization in your config. So you definitely need to still have that part, but you can eliminate the term called Sentry, which I think I don't know who it is coined by, but I know Jack wrote an article about it a few years on a Cosmos blog where he called it a sentry where it was basically a node that sits in front of your other node and through the use of private peering, your node that has the key
+
Dan
+material is never exposed to the public. Only the sensory nodes are exposed to the public and they relay the private information to the private node.
+
Andrew
+So you literally.
+
Andrew
+Cluster that. That is the purpose that they're serving. So it's not that you have like a separate chain binary running that has a print out to you and you have another node in front if that you have the, you know, the Horcrux nodes and another noded product and that other node in front typically is referred to as the sentry node.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Okay. But then would you again, I'm going to continue on with my line of thought, but would that mean that you would only need one? I mean, I'm going to call it still sentry just for the sake of conversation, but okay, I understand that it's not the best term, but would you still only need one sentry node in front of your Horcrux node or would you add the cluster of them or it doesn't make any sense in this case already.
+
Andrew
+Yeah. So we do clusters of sentrys in front of our Horcrux Cosigners. We typically do end to end. So if we have three Horcrux Cosigners, we'll run three sentrys and we'll connect all of the cosigners to all of the sentrys for more distributed setups. It might make sense to have the cosigners connecting to the nearest sentry, but again, this goes back to the availability tradeoffs like yes, you can function with a single sentry, but then you have a single point of failure.
+
Andrew
+So if that sentry goes down now you have nothing that can sink the chain and send blocksign requests to the Horcrux cluster. So you won't be able to sign as soon as you introduce a second century, then yes, now you have high availability where if one goes down it can continue signing blocks. But yeah, we typically do three centuries that way.
+
Andrew
+You know, we can have as many as two entries go down and this lets us do like rolling updates. This lets us take down a century to do snapshots and then we'll still have two centuries up. So we still have HA during the time that snapshots are taken and those kinds of things too to further solidify the deployment.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Okay. And now a little bit about the the bad side of Horcrux, what is the bad side? Is there a bad side to Horcrux? But we talked about, you know, the the latency. We talked about the the cost increase especially. Well, it doesn't sound like a lot to me, especially with V3 you guys rolling out. It sounds like pennies, but still, you know.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Okay, let's take that at the bedside. Are there any other technical or non-technical or economical or any other risks that we are not yet mentioned here today?
+
Andrew
+I mean, it does add complexity to your deployments. And I will say in Horcrux V two like that meant you need a different config file for each cosigner. So there were, you know, a couple of bullet guns in there where like a misconfiguration could mean that like Horcrux was signing blocks, but one of them was misconfigured, so you didn't actually have the high availability.
+
Andrew
+So you know, we've taken a lot of those things into account and like tried to resolve many of those for the V3 release. And so now you can use a single config file for all of the COSIGNERS. So you know, you assembled a config file that will have the definition for all of them and they can all use that same config file.
+
Andrew
+They can identify which cosigner they are from the config and use that. So trying to remove the complexity from the deployment, from the configuration to make it more streamlined and easier to use. And you know, I would say that I don't think there are any make any major reasons not to use Horcrux. I think as soon as you kind of wrap your head around it, as soon as you've tried it, really you'll realize that there's probably no better way yet.
+
Dan
+I can say a great way to just like, try Horcrux out to just jump on a testnet where there's no penalty for double signing. Like it's a that's how I learned Horcrux. I go in there. I tried doing different clusters. Sure, I got double signed in playing around because I forgot to also delete my validator key and I was running two signing machines at one time.
+
Dan
+Yeah, that's how you learn. You got it. That's what test nets are for, is to learn and see how things behave, see how things break and then grow from there.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Just to clarify, guys, the V3 is out already. Or it's been rolled out.
+
Andrew
+It's out? Yeah, it's been out for two weeks. We just put out a blog post announcement yesterday.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Because I did it. Sorry, I didn't understand that part. I was still under the impression the blog post is out, but it's going to be rolled out. Okay, so my apologies there. It's out. So, guys, again, I want another easy way to find, by the way, is go to GitHub and find the release, which is also easy.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And guys, I'm going to ask a more of a philosophical, I guess, question, the philosophical, but social philosophical. Now, for a perspective of Horcrux, why are people I mean, from what you guys are explained to me today, it sounds well, it's probably even simpler than running a node in a lot of sense because there was a lot of things you don't need to take care of about within a node you would theoretically care about.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And what is the reason then you think at least this from your perspective of the creators of this thing, of the writters of the code, whatever you want to describe yourself in relation to Horcrux, why are people terrified of this so much? What is the reason?
+
Dan
+I think one factor is that almost all validator documentation out there that exists isn't focused on like Horcrux deployments right through like, Hey, here's how you create your consensus key, here's how you keep track of the state, make sure you protect it, that kind of stuff. So by default, everyone who's like participating in these validator networks, they're just following the official guidance, which does not mention Horcrux, Horcrux is more kind of like a afterthought, or it's like, Oh, I didn't even know there was another way to do it.
+
Dan
+Same thing with TMKMS.
+
Andrew
+Right?
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And by the way, I started going and.
+
Andrew
+Yeah, I'll just say, you know, I think another thing is, you know, maybe you see Horcruxes, you're like, Oh, this, this means that I have, you know, additional nodes I need to manage configuration. And now I need to worry about the networking between those nodes that, that that can seem daunting before you've tried it out. And so I think it's just the port of entry.
+
Andrew
+You know, once you've gotten past that initial understanding and you've tried it out, then I imagine there's there's not a lot of reluctance after that.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And again, worth saying, I think if you're a little bit familiar with Horcrux or joining in the middle of the conversation, that in the new version, the V3, it's narrowed down now to one cluster of Horcrux nodes. So the networking again goes minimizes the amount of networking you will have to do. It's not like the cluster for each of the, let's say, ten networks, you are validating.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And so, yeah, I was going to ask about the comparison to. Dan, you mentioned the ... a couple of times, Um, do you have any presence or any pros and cons if you put them against each other or something?
+
Dan
+So it's been a little while since I've used TMKMS, but I'll go based off of my memory, my personal experience with it. So I started off with a soft sign like default thing, and then I learned about TMKMS as a remote signer, so I switched to that. They support a couple different methods. They support a soft sign as well, which is basically no additional security as far as I can tell.
+
Dan
+It's just it decouples your signer from the the block producer or the block indexer. The second thing that they have is they have a HSM integration. So you can buy a device called the Cube HCM. And if you have a physical server that you can stick a device into, which is hard when you're doing like cloud computing, but if you're running bare metal, it's very easy, then you have a very, very secure signing solution.
+
Dan
+The key is on that device just almost like a ledger. The key doesn't come off. Maybe that's a bad comparison, But, you know, I mean, it's a hardware security module, so they're made to prevent the key material from being extracted. And that's one advantage that TMKMS has that I don't know of any others that currently support that.
+
Dan
+But what they don't have is that as far as I know, it's a high availability solution. If you're using TMKMS, you're only having one signer machine. So if you're a signer goes down for whatever reason, you're going to stop signing blocks.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Can I ask you something here? You said one sign our machine, as far as I'm aware with yubikeys you can double them as in like, you can repeat them so you could replicate the same yubikey. Like, for example, you know, when you can use it, when you log into a computer and when you do it, you should really put not one but two.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+So in this case, would I still have one signer machine if you describe it, or I would have two, because I'm like...
+
Dan
+That's a good point and I don't know the exact answer, but if you did have the same key on two different signers, you need to make sure that a double sign doesn't happen. So I don't know if TMKMS, supports that, but that's one of the things that Horcrux supports is it keeps track of. It is a node sign if it did absolutely prevent any other node from signing.
+
Dan
+So you'd have to have some sort of tracking mechanism for that.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Okay. Just a note to to everybody listening. And if you do use a yubikey now from personal pain guys, if you're using it for your personal computer or your transaction or personal computer, whatever, get two you will save yourself a lot of a lot of crying. I mean, there are solutions, but it's better to get through. This is about personal computing.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Your guys, whoever is listening to this note, nothing to do with Horcrux. So yeah, sorry. But back to back to Horcrux. Now, you mentioned at the beginning, I don't remember if it was Dan you I think it was about talking a little bit down the line about something in particular with regards to what you guys have been either developing or the workshop you guys wanted to talk about.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Do you want to mention it?
+
Dan
+Sure. There's no set date yet, but we're we have a relationship with Dora Hacks and they host a hackathons for all different types of blockchains. One of them is Cosmos, and they are kind of approached us and thought, Hey, it's kind of cool if you guys did a workshop on some of the technology that you guys have built.
+
Dan
+So we kind of threw out Horcrux as the first idea. So once we have our details on that, I'll definitely tweet out some information and probably it'll be from the Strangelove account. So if you want to sign up and do Horcrux workshop, feel free to attend.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I think you should, guys. Everybody was listening to this. My advice, it sounds like it sounds like it solves a lot of a lot a lot of issues, psychological issues for the operator. Let's put it like this. It's at least at the very least it does. There's a lot more from what it sounds like. Okay, I'm now again back to Horcrux.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+What else? I didn't ask you, which is from the obvious things, because like I said, I did admit the questions were coming from the top of my head and trying to remember what people have asked me on on different occasions and what I had in my own head. Now, is there something that I didn't ask in relation to like a higher overview of Horcrux?
+
Andrew
+I think we covered a good chunk of it, you touched on what is next, like what's what's coming. So, you know, to talk about the roadmap a little bit, Dan mentioned one of the things that we're excited to to release, which is DKG key creation. So like he like you alluded to, this means that rather than bringing your ... JSON and sharding it into multiple pieces, you actually have multiple parties come together and declare, you know, what is my cosigner ID want and, and participate in this ceremony that creates a public key from the shards.
+
Andrew
+So then after that ceremony is completed, you have your private key shard. But during that ceremony, there was no secret material exchanged. So you end up with multiple parties that were able to create a public key that can be registered for the validator without requiring any of the parties to to share their secrets. So that's something that we're very excited to roll out, you know, daos and other things where you where you have multiple parties that want to participate in a validator.
+
Andrew
+This will be huge for those applications. Another thing is, so Rafael, who's on the call here, he actually did a great refactor for us to abstracts the local cosigner to open us up to NHSM integration. So similar to the TMKMS, how they offer like a yubikey HSM integration. We would like to do the same thing with Horcrux where rather than having your full key, your full ID 205.9 private key on the YUBIKEY, you would actually just have your key shard and you'd be able to use the Yubikey or other integrations such as, you know, Google Cloud or AWS as their HCM cloud solutions to plug those in to, you know, further add to the
+
Andrew
+security of Horcrux you know, this is especially applicable to us now as we're moving to an on premise deployment where we will have our our Horcrux Cosigners put down in a physical location that that we want. You know, we're looking at co-location setups. So very important to us to keep our shards secure with the hardware that's deployed in a location where we're renting Rackspace potentially.
+
Andrew
+So yeah, that's something that I'm very excited about to further secure Horcrux. So that way you have the the added benefit of a private security module where your key never leaves the device. All the signing happens on that device and also the high availability that Horcrux offers.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And now I'm going to be devil's advocate here, but let's just follow follow with me. It's good intentions and now it sounds when you talk about the roadmap, like the security is getting more and more complex and is that not going to scare the people away? I said I'm going to be devil's advocate. I did warn you. So please, what do you say?
+
Andrew
+And that's where I think, you know, it won't be a required configuration. It won't mean that you're required to use an HSM to use Horcrux, but it will be an additional option that's available to you if you do have those needs. And so, yeah, you may not have those needs. If you if you have the servers in your own locations that you own, where you know that the key shards are are under lock and key physical lock and key as well as by Horcrux.
+
Andrew
+But, you know, there might be other deployments that would benefit from this strategy. Yeah, we definitely don't want to add complexity that's forced on Horcrux operators. But, you know, in the name of additional security, additional availability and those kinds of things, we definitely would like to add those those features to improve the operator experience for advanced for the power users of Horcrux.
+
Dan
+And I'll say that most of the users out there are it's suffice for them to use like the default kind of like best practice config that most people use and that's literally only like 20 lines of YAML. It's just one file that has configuration where you say, Hey, these are my keys, these are the the nodes that run the different blockchains and that's it.
+
Dan
+And Horcrux, does the rest.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+This is my keys and this is my beer and Horcrux does the rest of it. Now, one more devil's advocate question, guys. Now, Horcrux is a product like, you know, I mean, let's separate this for a second from strange love and from everything else. Just just to make my little question now, does that mean that in the future and of course, now you guys are talking about a roadmap already, which probably means that, you know, when you mentioned Rafael, which means that there are probably other engines.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Anyway, long story short, will we get to a point where Horcrux will start charging for additional features or it will always stay for now at least an open source product, which is available to anybody to use?
+
Andrew
+Oh, absolutely. Horcrux will always be open source, you know, with that Apache two license on there. We wouldn't do anything like that, like make it make it closed source and charge people to use it like a licensing fee or anything like that. We do productize most of our open source software at strange love. So, you know, we do have a validated product where you know, white label validator product where we can run the validator for you and you can manage the account key, we'll manage the consensus key so that you know, the customer then can, can manage the funds, the claiming, the staking rewards and all of the custody operations.
+
Andrew
+And we'll just run the the Horcrux validator infrastructure. But yeah, we, you know, that's typically our play with our open source software. So we're not we definitely do not want to make it any more code closed source. We want it to be available for anyone to use because, you know, then we get the benefit of having external contributors point out places where we can improve our code.
+
Andrew
+So we definitely to keep that. Yeah, that's the track where the Strange Lives motto there.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Okay. And Dan, did you want to add something?
+
Dan
+I no I mean Andrew is really the best one to speak on this as the, the director of engineering. He's got a lot of influence on how the products are mature but yeah like he said, it's open source so it's always going to out there and available. Even if whatever reason the repo went away, someone could always fork it and continue the project.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Right. And and just, just to add to what kind of to add a little bit of a side note for anybody listening and you know if you for a second wondered I mean probably didn't but if there is a non validators presence which I actually see some and you're just curious you know about how can about the keys management so yeah so Tendermint offers what's called permissions and grants and you can actually hierarchies accounts and you can get permissions for withdrawal commissions for for un-jailing for, for voting and so on and so forth.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+So that's actually great. It's another, by the way, layer of security, I guess, in a way. So yeah, that's what's Andrew what it was referring to. And guys, do you want to add anything else? It feels like, like, you know, like, like it was I had this expectation of like, oh my God, okay, this is a complicated everybody's going to get confused.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Like, but it's not. It just really simple. So like, well, I'm sorry to simplify, oversimplify it, but, but it is in a sense, and I don't really like I had some other questions, but you kind of already answered them. So if one first of all, by the way, of course, if anybody listening right now wants to ask the question like once again, if you are to shy DM it to me, I'm in front of a screen, I should see it or you can raise your voice and I will just let you speak or raise your hand so much as your voice and you can try.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+And that probably won't work. But yeah, I either. And then, sorry, I'm going to get back to Andrew. And do you want to add anything? I didn't know. Not even about high overview. Let let's maybe, you know, anything else to add for somebody who wants to know, try it out. Apart from trying it out on this Testnet.
+
Andrew
+Yeah. I'm not sure if there's much more I could add other than just say, you know, I'm really excited about this to be V3 release. Great for anyone to go. Go try it out, you know, give us feedback. We love all of the feedback we get from the community. It helps us improve the project. And yeah, it's great to work with with all of you and help help improve the Cosmos ecosystem overall.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Awesome. Dan. Any last last words. Sorry.
+
Dan
+Yeah, just kind of echoing. Andrew said. I just want to say come join the workshop if you want to get some hands on with it or join our telegram group. We're very active in there on helping people to understand how Horcrux can help secure the validator guys.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+So thank you very much. Just again, and a couple of resonance for me from what the guys said. There is the new version, which has a lot of improvements, especially in terms of what it will add to your costs and the complexity. What it will not add to your complexity or other is out. So go check it out.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+There's an article that Andrew mentioned that describes it, and as Dan said, the best way to do it is just to start using it on a testnet. and them go and double sign or whatever. Well, you probably should actually, on a test, do it on purpose, in my opinion, so you understand how it works if you're a lot of data and don't be afraid of of playing around with it.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Yeah. And definitely I personally look a lot forward. I know one of my DevOps team is on this call right now listening and I'm looking forward to slowly starting implementing that as well. And especially now with that I did know about the cluster thing in the V3 that's changes in my opinion, a lot of things. So especially for smaller validators like ourselves, you know.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+So yeah, yeah, that's it from my side I guess. Guys, if anybody else has questions, you still have time to ask them, but I'm not so enhance. So. Yeah. Okay guys, then watch out for the news from Strange love about the workshop. It will be, as I mentioned, I think it was done right on the Twitter of stranger love. And Dan and Andrew, thank you very much, guys.
+
Dan
+Thanks for having us.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Thank you all game. Okay. Thanks, you guys. Thank you for listening, people. Thanks. And start using Horcrux. Okay. Bye, everyone.
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:
Staking is the process of locking up a digital asset to provide economic security for a public blockchain. We have prepared a step-by-step guide on how to stake ATOM
+using Keplr (you might be using any other wallet. It doesn't really matter. The staking option works more or less the same. The idea is that you need to find the
+'reward' or the 'validator' tab and then delegate the desired amount to a desired validator).
+
How to stake ATOM using Keplr Dashboard
+
To delegate the Сitizen Сosmos validator, you can follow this link
+or find the Citizen Cosmos validator manually, to do this open Keplr Dashboard(make sure you have some ATOM balance).
+
+
This will open a new browser window, in which you will see the list of the current, active validators. Make sure that in the menu 'Cosmos Hub' is selected:
+
+
You can find the Citizen Cosmos validator by scrolling down the page, or by searching for "Citizen Cosmos":
+
+
Click on the selected validator:
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+
Another new window will appear. Next, click on Delegate:
+
+
Choose an amount to delegate and click on Delegate:
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+
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Done. Your available and staked balance will be displayed on the home page, as well as in your Keplr:
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+using Keplr (you might be using any other wallet. It doesn't really matter. The staking option works more or less the same. The idea is that you need to find the
+'reward' or the 'validator' tab and then delegate the desired amount to a desired validator).
+
How to stake BCNA using Keplr
+
First go to the BitCanna Wallet and click on Keplr Browser Extension:
+
+
+
And connect the Keplr:
+
+
Next, click on Validators to see all the validators:
+
+
You can find the Citizen Cosmos validator by scrolling down the page, or by searching for "Citizen Cosmos":
+
+
Click on the selected validator:
+
+
Press the Delegate button and enter the amount you wish to delegate and click on Next:
+
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+using Keplr Dashboard and cyb.ai.
+
1. How to stake BOOT using Keplr Dashboard
+
To delegate the Сitizen Сosmos validator, you can follow this link
+or find the Citizen Cosmos validator manually, to do this open Keplr Dashboard(make sure you have some BOOT balance).
+
+
The Keplr Dashboard website will open, and by scrolling down the page below we will see a list of validators:
+
+
+
You can find the Citizen Cosmos validator by scrolling down the page, or by searching for "Citizen Cosmos":
+
+
If you want to support us, please stake with Citizen Cosmos. However, please do not forget to delegate to smaller validators and decentralzie your stake.
+
Click on the selected validator:
+
+
Another new window will appear. Next, click on Delegate:
+
+
Click on Continue to Delegate:
+
+
Choose an amount to delegate and click on Delegate:
+
+
And confirm the transaction in Keplr:
+
+
Done. Your available and staked balance will be displayed on the home page, as well as in your Keplr:
Let's go to cyb.ai and connect Keplr(If you have not yet registered and received your citizenship, then use our
+guide):
+
+
+
Our wallet is connected. Next click on Sphere:
+
+
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+
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If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:
Staking is the process of locking up a digital asset to provide economic security for a public blockchain. We have prepared a step-by-step guide on how to stake EVMOS
+using Keplr (you might be using any other wallet. It doesn't really matter. The staking option works more or less the same. The idea is that you need to find the
+'reward' or the 'validator' tab and then delegate the desired amount to a desired validator).
+
How to stake EVMOS using Keplr Dashboard
+
To delegate the Сitizen Сosmos validator, you can follow this link
+or find the Citizen Cosmos validator manually, to do this open Keplr Dashboard(make sure you have some EVMOS balance).
+
+
The Keplr Dashboard website will open, and by scrolling down the page below we will see a list of validators:
+
+
+
You can find the Citizen Cosmos validator by scrolling down the page, or by searching for "Citizen Cosmos":
+
+
Click on the selected validator:
+
+
Another new window will appear. Next, click on Delegate:
+
+
Choose an amount to delegate and click on Delegate:
+
+
And confirm the transaction in Keplr:
+
+
Done. Your available and staked balance will be displayed on the home page, as well as in your Keplr:
+
+
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:
Staking is the process of locking up a digital asset to provide economic security for a public blockchain. We have prepared a step-by-step guide on how to stake FLIX using Keplr Dashboard and Omniflix dApp.
+If you don't have FLIX, you can obtain them at Osmosis.
+
1. How to stake FLIX using Keplr Dashboard
+
To delegate the Сitizen Сosmos validator, you can follow this link
+or find the Citizen Cosmos validator manually, to do this open Keplr Dashboard(make sure you have some FLIX balance).
+
The Keplr Dashboard website will open, and by scrolling down the page below we will see a list of validators.
+You can find the Citizen Cosmos validator by scrolling down the page, or by searching for "Citizen Cosmos":
+
+
If the search returns no results, try switching the search to an inactive set:
+
+
Click on the selected validator:
+
+
Another new window will appear. Next, click on Delegate:
+
+
Choose an amount to delegate and click on Delegate:
+
+
And confirm the transaction in Keplr:
+
+
Done. Your available and staked balance will be displayed on the home page, as well as in your Keplr:
+
+
+
2. How to stake FLIX using Omniflix dApp
+
First, go to the Omniflix dApp and connect the Keplr or Cosmostation wallet:
+
+
+
+
You can find the Citizen Cosmos validator by scrolling down the page:
+
+
If you cannot find citizen cosmos in the active set, try switching to the inactive set:
+
+
Click on Delegate:
+
+
Choose an amount to delegate and click on Delegate:
+
+
And confirm the transaction in Keplr:
+
+
Congratulations, you have successfully staked your FLIX:
+
+
You can view the statistics in the Dashboard tab:
+
+
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:
Staking is the process of locking up a digital asset to provide economic security for a public blockchain. We have prepared a step-by-step guide on how to stake LIKE
+using Keplr (you might be using any other wallet. It doesn't really matter. The staking option works more or less the same. The idea is that you need to find the
+'reward' or the 'validator' tab and then delegate the desired amount to a desired validator).
+
How to stake LIKE using Keplr
+
First go to the dao.like.co and click on Keplr Browser Extension:
+
+
+
And connect the Keplr:
+
+
Next, click on Validators to see all the validators:
+
+
You can find the Citizen Cosmos validator by scrolling down the page, or by searching for "Citizen Cosmos":
+
+
Click on the selected validator:
+
+
Press the Stake button and enter the amount you wish to delegate and click on Next:
+
+
+
Next, click on Send and approve the transaction:
+
+
+
Congratulations, you have successfully staked your LIKE:
+
+
You can view the statistics in the Portfolio tab:
+
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:
One of the most significant values of blockchain technology is network security and transactions. In POW (Proof-Of-Work) networks, the blockchain is protected by miners, which provide high computational speed. Therefore, the higher the hash rate, the more difficult it is to carry out an attack and the more secure the network.
+A similar principle is used in POS (Proof-Of-Stake) blockchains. Only validators provide security by checking new blocks. The more validators have contributed to the network, the more blocks they can study and the more rewards they can receive, thus making the network safer.
+But what about new projects that have a small number of validators and staked coins? The security of such blockchain networks may be at risk. Using relatively small resources, attackers can hack the network, steal all they can, and make it vulnerable.
+Cosmos network is planning to implement Interchain Security technology in January 2023, designed to resolve such issues. It will allow large networks to share their security with start-up projects. In addition, more extensive networks will be able to share security by providing cryptocurrency capital to validate blocks on a smaller chain. On the Cosmos network, this general security is known as Interchain Security.
+
How will Interchain Security Work?
+
Other terms are sometimes used when describing Interchain Security, such as Shared Security, Cross Chain Validation, Shared Staking, and Interchain Staking. The blockchain provider may be responsible for creating the blockchain of the consumer network. Validators must run two nodes on the primary grid, thread the consumer network, and receive commissions and rewards.
+If a validator does a poor job of creating blocks on any chain, he risks destroying its tokens through a mechanism called "slashing." The consumer network uses IBC to communicate with the supply chain to track which validators participate in Interchain Security using Cross Chain validation. Thus, the security gained from the value of the share locked in the provider chain is shared with the consumer chain.
+Interchain Security technology will allow large ecosystem projects like Cosmos to share their security with start-up projects, making the creation of new decentralized projects and services more accessible to creators and developers, lowering the entry threshold, and making them safe for the end user.
+
The Importance of ICS
+
Although the Cosmos ecosystem has been around for quite some time,the launch of Interchain Security may become its most significant update. Interchain Security's value to Cosmos is much broader than just improving network security. For example, it unites various user groups and reduces their conflict of interest. Interchain Security will make possible the practical minimalism and the strategic philosophy leading to the Cosmos Hub without compromising the platform's effectiveness. It will eliminate security vulnerabilities and reduce the likelihood of a conflict of interest between user groups, which can lead to a hard fork. Since Cosmos Hub constantly adds new features, many users are concerned that the network's security will be compromised. Interchain Security will be able to satisfy these "hub minimalists" by allowing each of these functions to become a separate chain. These individual chains could then be programmed to have their management tokens and fees, which would encourage the participation of validators. The more networks join the Cosmos ecosystem, the more expensive it becomes for hackers to manipulate the web. Since the cost of its attack often measures the security of a network, the more value is invested in Cosmos, the more secure it becomes.
+
When will ICS be available?
+
In the Cosmos roadmap, the official launch of ICS is scheduled for January 2023. This means that many new projects will be added to the Cosmos ecosystem shortly, which will positively affect the cost of ATOM. So don't miss the opportunity to buy ATOM now and stake it with us.
+We are looking forward to taking off!
+
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here
Episode name: Idena, proof of person, AI & democracy
+
+
+
Transcript of the Episode:
+
[00:01:32] Citizen Cosmos: Good space time you all! Welcome to a new episode of Citizen Cosmos, I have with me today two guests LTraveler and TravCrypto, community members of Idena. It's a Cosmos based project, they will tell us all about it, it's a very interesting project. Hey
+guys! Whoever wants to introduce themselves first, welcome!
+
[00:01:58] LTraveler: Community knows me as LTraveler, I'm in the project for about two years. At the beginning why Idena catched me was getting into the crypto world without any penny in your pocket. It was pretty cool when someone asks me if I want to solve some puzzles and then get paid. I got joined into the community then I started to discover and when I went deeply I realized it's not just about to solving tests, it's actually something new that I have never seen
+before. I have developed this script that helped people to run Idena on Linux server and then I have made my YouTube channel, I'm making some video tutorials that are explaining how Idena works and how it could help people to developed the fair democracy. Then I started to help with the translation of Idena chronicles and other materials from English to Russian and more and I felt like we are building something that can make a revolution in the future.
+
[00:03:47] TravCrypto: Hey guys! My name is TravCrypto, I've been involved in crypto since 2016 and I started a little bit skeptical of crypto and what all it could really offer, and basically over time after reading the Bitcoin white paper and other white papers like the Ethereum white paper I got really interested in blockchain technology and basically came across Idena because I wanted to participate in validation but other blockchains can be very plutocratic and can require you to have large amount of wealth in order to participate in validation so I wanted to find a layer one blockchain that anyone could participate in no matter how much wealth they had. That's how I came across Idena and I've been actively involved probably at least for the past couple of years and like LTraveler said the ethos is really really cool within the community because it's accessible to anyone and everyone, and that kind of brings us where we are today.
+
[00:04:57] Citizen Cosmos: I have several questions straight away. Which one of you guys wants to give a brief overview of what exactly it is and what is you guys doing? What is the
+idea behind Idena?
+
[00:05:44] TravCrypto: Idena basically is a layer one blockchain but any human can participate in the validation. So the consensus mechanism is proof of person and unlike Bitcoin which is proof of work where you need ever growing amount of machines to participate or unlike what is soon to be Ethereum 2.0 hopefully if it ever happens proof of stake where you need an evergrowing amount of the actual cryptocurrency in order to stake and participate in validation,
+you just need to be a human being and you need to participate in what's called a validation ceremony which currently happens approximately every three weeks and that validation ceremony is basically puzzles or flips proving that you're human. So you solve these puzzles over relatively short period of time and you prove that you're in fact a human, and once you do that you can participate in validation on the blockchain where you can earn mining rewards for validation. So that's the very basic overview and I think now LTraveler can probably dive into a little bit more of the technicality.
+
[00:07:05] LTraveler: So as TravCrypto said, we're developing the network that is going to be part of web3 and if we look on the process of participation to the network we can see that as a game. First, when you're just joining to the network, you’re just candidate and to protect our blockchain from bots we have created a system to invite new members only through the invitation codes so you cannot just come a candidate and join into the ceremony without invitation. First of all you are taking the invitation code then the person who invited you, he is getting rewards for the invitation so he's motivated to explain you everything clear and to control that you participate on time you know exactly what to do. So it's like your manager who's going to control you, going to check everything, who's gonna explain you the next step after the first validation. Then you're becoming from candidate to newbie and then you can have some new skills that you can do, so you can start mining if you want but the rewards that you are getting are going to the stake so you cannot just take money, you have to keep going. Then you're going for one more validation, you're getting a newbie 2 level but you still new so the money still
+goes to your stake and only after third validation you are becoming identified member which gives you opportunity to invest your money into the stake, and why we are making that as I said because we are developing human blockchain like a blockchain for human being so we have to make the system that accepts humans but does not accept an AI or bots. I would like to tell you more about the process that is a part of solving - flips. The flip is a filter for intelligent people which means that when you're solving flips you can solve it because you are a human but the machine cannot solve it because the way how they made it which is a story with four images that has beginning and the end. we have four images in one colum and four images in another column and only one colum could be the order of image so the images are the same but the order only in one column can be represented as the story that had beginning at the top and the end of the bottom. So since you becoming a newbie, then you have one more responsibility. You have to create flips also and this is very important. It's like people are creating flips and people are solving flips and if we are talking about the validation ceremony, there are two parts. First part is a short session, it is one minute and forty five seconds why we have short session because the short session could guarantee that only one identity and one uman can be connected. It's like the period of the time is very short so you cannot pass validation from many identities which very important. Then we have the second stage and the second stage it's qualification session. The purpose of the long session is to check flips that have been created by other people, checking that all of the keywords are connected to the images and also that there are no marks or hints that help you to solve the flips. So we are moderators and also we are the people who are examinated by other identities. So we are like whole ecosystem that are
+using our brain to support that blockchain, and this is more or less a general explanation.
+
[00:11:51] Citizen Cosmos: I like that. It's a very decent explanation easy to understand. I have more questions, some of them devil's advocate, of course. So let's play a little bit with some of the things that you said. The first question which comes out to me is obvious: why human-only chain? Why Idena doesn’t recognize bots, machines, AIs as full-on intelligent beings capable of participating in life of the chain in an equal way to human?
+
[00:12:30] TravCrypto: That's a great question! My understanding is Bitcoin’s consensus mechanism originally was one machine, one one vote or one node, so anyone could basically participate with their computer and they could validate on the proof of work blockchain which is known as Bitcoin and over time that's become more and more inherently difficult. I actually live in Texas, here in the United States and here are Bitcoin mining farms but hey're located all over the world and you can see how difficult that barrier to entry is for validating on this blockchain. To answer your question in terms of Idena being a proof of person chain or one person one vote as far as the consensus mechanism I think the whole idea is to have a more equal and egalitarian system that anyone in the world can participate in, and that's currently in place with Idena which is really cool to see because you can see people participating in the community. They’re participating in validation as well which is somewhat rare in other blockchains. Also to answer your question in regards to why can't AI participate, I think technically speaking they could participate if they were smart enough to complete the validation ceremonies which we haven't seen to be the case so far but I think technically speaking if AIs were as smart as a human being, smart enough to complete these flips as LTraveler was explaining previously, I think they very well in fact could participate butmthere's no AI that's currently at that technical level.
+
[00:14:27] Citizen Cosmos: So if I could summarize, it's not about disliking robots, you just think that at the current stage of the implementation that's a test for them. If they can solve it they can participate, that means they're smart enough. Is that basically what you're trying to get at? right
+
[00:14:42] TravCrypto: Right.The goal is to not have AI participate, that’s the ideal. We've been successful so far but obviously we hope that this validation ceremony can prevent AIs from participating in the future which allows humans to have the power in the in the consensus mechanism. There obviously have been a lot of attempts so far but they haven't been successful.
+
[00:15:09] LTraveler: There is one thing I would like to add is that there is a price for people who're going to develop that kind of system. So the developers going to pay amount of money for someone who's gonna hack the system.The second thing that we're always trying to predict that since the blockchain was released, it was already two or three additional protection have been implemented and we have to mention that first of all we call it antagonistic noise which is kind of noise that every image has and that protects when, for example, Google vision trying to check that kind of images with this antagonistic noise the percentage of correctly recognized images are very low. Also we have a mechanism when we are putting another image or another background with the low level of opacity, it could be noticed but it didn't break the general sense of the image. Also there is one more thing that sometimes the system when you are loading your flips it makes horizontal mirroring of the image just in case so all of that mechanism
+are making for vision system very hard to ecognize images and to solve plays because
+actually if that system going to exist then the whole blockchain’s going to be in trouble because it's just destroyed the whole system.
+
[00:16:55] Citizen Cosmos: I think it's a good cat and mouse game to see the improvement. It's like with bank security when the hackers hack the bank security, the bank security improves and so on and so forth. I think it’s beneficial for the whole industry what you guys are trying to do.
+
[00:17:10] LTraveler: I'm sorry that I'm interrupting but for us that kind of asystem that's going to solve flips automatically, it's like a person who can ray the money and the money are the same as the real money. That's why we are always aware of what's going on.
+
[00:17:27] Citizen Cosmos: Second question. It's going to be a bit unrelated to that but something I want to make clear. The proof of work and the proof of stake. Can you guys clarify how exactly does it mix everything together? Where do the mining and the validation meet each other? I would love to hear it from you guys and to hear a proper clarification of where I'm wrong and where I'm not wrong.
+
[00:17:59] LTraveler: First of all, when you are joining to the network, your first validation ceremony is to pass the test. and since you pass the test then you can join to the mining but there is one very important thing of the mining that you don't need a powerful machine. You can use whatever computer or a virtual private server regardless of which operation system it is. We have a node client for Linux system, Windows and Mac OS. So, you can join and since you start to mine very important thing that the mining rewards are the same. There was recently a voting for the new hard fork and after accepting it, the new mechanism is going to connect the rewards for your mining and the amount of coins that you have in the stake. So basically what we are trying to do is not connect the mining process to the power off your machine. The only thing which is important if you're joining to the network, you're helping the network be decentralized as much as possible. But the main part is your brain, that you're a human and that you can solve and create good flips. Maybe TravCrypt wants to add something.
+
[00:19:32] TravCrypto: That was actually a great summary, I was pretty much going to say all of that same stuff myself. I just wanted to touch on a question that a lot of people typically ask as
+well and it's all related to this. The question is why wouldn't I just complete the flips on 10 different computers, complete the validation ceremony with 10 different invitations and then I could get 10 times the amount of rewards or mining? Well, the answer to that question is this validation ceremony actually takes place at the same time all around the world so no matter where you live on planet Earth. This validation ceremony takes place all in sync all around the world. So obviously it's impossible to be in two places at once. Each person actually has to complete this validation ceremony on their own personal device. You could do it on a mobile device, you could do it on a laptop but you complete this validation ceremony as LTraveller said in 1 minute and 45 seconds which is a relatively short amount of time, complete 6 different flips which are these puzzles. So it would be difficult to do that at the same time across 10 different machines. So that's how the network prevents people from having multiple identities for the consensus. It really sticks to one person one node.
+
[00:21:17] Citizen Cosmos: You mentioned plutocracy and at the beginning you said that the in Idena it almost doesn't exist and that's really cool to hear because in a lot of the times you come to a community and unfortunately what we see is centralization of stake and using that power to push opinions but a lot of the time it's not even that. It's really cool to see that it's the community members who are coming on to the recording to onto the podcast to talk about the project and to explain it other people rather than actually finding members. So the first question is why? How come it was community members that reacted? Why is it in your opinion like that?
+
[00:22:30] TravCrypto: Just from my perspective as a community member over the past couple of years first and foremost I think the developers of Idena are just very focused on the development of the blockchain and so they're the ones technically implementing these new bug fixes in these new editions that some other community members wouldn't be able to contribute and I think it's also this ethos of a community driven project. The community is now representing itself which I think is very unique to other blockchain projects. It's really cool to see because there's this ethos not only at the consensus level of one person one vote and participating in these different Idena improvement proposals like the most recent one IIP-5 where we're going to make a hard fork but also at this level right on podcasts. The community really is organized and representing itself which is pretty rare to see in the space.
+
[00:23:43] Citizen Cosmos: I have been in this industry for a long long time and I've seen projects fail and rise and one of the biggest reason proof projects fail is the lack of the community involvement, the lack of the community remembering that this is a decentralized space where that's what we're supposed to do.
+
[00:24:19] LTraveler: I think any project going to get success when you are always in touch with the community. The reason I like Idena because the developer is actually listening what the
+community thinks, they are also in touch with us, they are checking discussions and so on and most of the improvements that we have made it was because of the community feedback. For example we have had a hard time when we have had many really bad flips, we start to tell to the developers we have to do something with that because it's just the garbage and it couldn't be like that, and then there were lots of improvements. For example now we have a qualification part of the flip. It's like if you really like the flip you could put the star and then if that specific flip is going to get the majority. We have a filtration mechanism so you can approve flip, you can decline flip or if you do not have more reports, you can leave the flip as it is without any mark so that means that someone else from the committee where that flip goes to be examinated from other identities, if the flip is bad it's going to be marked as bad flip from someone else and
+step by step people learning how to make good flips and how to report bad flips. So we're always in touch of course. We do not know each other in face but we're always talking, we're
+always getting a feedback, there is always brainstorming. For example about IIP-5 there were a lot of discussions and then finally everything was integrated into the perfect wonderful solution. how to make solo miners, how to make them run independent. We have a huge pool and we want to be a network more decentralized so we have created a system how make people around their independent node to start mining by themselves and this is something unique that is happening in our community and I really love that.
+
[00:27:25] TravCrypto: Just to touch on that real quick, I think in other blockchains the like if you take the total community, the percentage of those community members actually participating in the validation is relatively small whereas Idena it's actually a very large proportion of the community so they have more incentive to participate in these proposals, in these changes and and it's actually affect the rewards that they get so I think that incentivizes a lot of involvement within the community and it creates this environment where these proposals. There's really a lot of activity and it's cool to see all of the community proposals that people make.
+
[00:28:07] Citizen Cosmos: By the way proposals and IIP-5, it's about quadratic voting right? Does any of you want to explain what exactly it is and why you guys think it will help?
+
[00:28:39] LTraveler: Let's go back to the IIP-4 where we introducing the quadratic staking. So in the proof of stake systems we always have a problem: if you have a huge stake you're actually getting way more benefits comparing to people who have a small stake. The solution which we integrated in Idena blockchain is to make quadratic coefficient which is going to make the process of getting rewards for the staking in the way that if your stake is small you are getting more rewards the percentage of rewards out of your stake then more your stake than less the percentage out of stake you are getting. So that's how we making new members with a small stake for example earn rewards and also how we are making people with a huge stake also earn but with not a huge gap between people with a small stake. With IIP-5 we are getting a new idea about how to connect the stake and the mining rewards so the more coins you are putting into the stake the more rewards that you are getting from the mining process. Before we have had a huge cake of all rewards for mining and then we just spread all of that pie proportionally to each of the mining member so it was like each of the mining member get the same part of the reward. We have had a connection to the age of the identity so if your identity have had more ages when you are in the blockchain then you're getting more. So the newbies were getting less but it wasn't fair because someone came to the community two years ago and someone just now. So the people with more epochs in the block chain they're going to earn always more than the newbie members. The older the blockchain the more this gap is going to be so we completely changed the rule and now nevermind how old you are, the most important thing how much coins you have in the stake. So you have more coins your rewards are going to be bigger and also it is very good for the economy of the Idena because people are not going to exchange the coin after each validation. So the coin is going to be inside the blockchain.
+
[00:32:36] Citizen Cosmos: It's quite interesting that you use the same quadratic voting model because I've seen it implemented in airdrops a lot especially where you don't want the wells too big of an airdrop so the idea is the less you have the more you get. I don't think I've seen a blockchain before implement it on staking, I think the first time that I've seen this being implemented was only when I was preparing for the podcasts I saw on one of your Twitter accounts a print screen or a pole about what do you guys think and then I started to research and it was quite interesting, I've never seen this implement in before. Another cool thing I've seen across Idena was DeFi demo. I have noticedsome posts and some explanations on how it can play a big role and make an advertisement decentralized. Do you guys want to talk a little bit about that as well?
+
[00:33:49] TravCrypto: This is actually if you're referring to the concept of decentralized on-chain ads, this is something I actually was most excited about for Idena a while back. I think the concept of advertising on-chain in a decentralized way is really applying blockchain technology
+in a way that can can really revolutionize an entire space like the centralized marketing. So how it works is essentially there's this concept of oracles on-chain and you can create an oracle, like an add and when you create this add it goes to the oracles or people to decide whether they're going to approve it. So it needs to be approved by the community first and once it is approved, then it is actually displayed on-chain so after the implementation it will be once year doing the validation ceremony you’ll actually see these adds displayed and the money spent on these adds is burned in the form of Idena’s native crypto currency. That's actually burned on-chain
+in order to display these adds to people around the world. So i think that concept of decentralized marketing is really really cool and I think it adds a lot of value to the blockchain because obviously there's a lower supply and we all know the concepts of supply and demand over time.
+
[00:28:39] LTraveler: One more thing that I would like to add is that you can advertise whatever you want. We don't have rules. The only rule that we have is that the community must approve your ad. So you're sending an advertisement to be examined by comity of people that's going to be randomly selected from the whole network and then if you are getting the approval of majority you can run your advertisement company and this is very important because nobody can tell you nothing.So people will take a decision what is good and what is bad. This is the main point of the future because we always know about discrimination, about censorship, and all of that thing but for example why someone is going to choose what is good and what is bad because you have to ask like at least randomly of some members and if it is good why not? And this is the main principle of our advertisement platform and also you can run whatever oracle you want. For example you can ask whatever thing, you can make a poll. Then you can get a feedback from the community. Of course you have to pay for that but the feedback that you're getting from the real people it is very hard to manipulate that vote system and that's how we are implementing our Idena improvement proposals. First, the person who wants to propose that idea has to describe that idea pretty clear and then we have delegates and that delegates we are choosing every three epochs and then if the delegates approve the program then the program goes to the oracle vote part where everyone from the community is supposed to vote. Everyone can propose something even now we have a community wallet community foundation so if you're a developer you want to develop something new you have to prepare the paper, you have to get the majority from the majority of votes from five delegates that we are selecting every three epochs and then you're going to get that majority then that paper going to be put it into the oracle voting and then if people say yes then you're going to get the foundation for your project or for your implementation. Recently we implemented community foundation to translate Idena chronicles into three languages and it was implemented in that new mechanism.
+
[00:39:18] Citizen Cosmos: what has been the most controversial decision that the community made?
+
[00:39:31] TravCrypto: I'll touch on two things real quick. One, oracles can be as controversial as you want them to be. In terms of oracles you could ask any question that you possibly want e whether it's politically whether it's opinion. One oracle off the top of my and this doesn't affect the blockchain in any way or the community is should abortion be a legal or illegal? Here you have this democratic system with community members literally all over the world in all different political environments from all backgrounds and they can just vote legal or illegal and there you get a true perspective into what people's true thoughts are on any given matter. So I thought that was really cool, I think that like a concept of true democracy but then another example are these improvement proposals like IIP-5 that was controversial within the community because there are certain people that think these mechanisms should be a certain way and then there's certain people that think they should be a different way but it's the coolest part about this is you always have differing opinions. That’s the basis of human nature to see when these proposals are brought up. It's not always just bi-partisan, it could be three or four different thought paths and everyone breaks down their own explanation of why they think it should be this way or the other way. Once you get those explanations then the community can put in their thoughts and when it's all said and done and you have this very broad overview of this IIP-5, that's when community members can take action and actually participate in voting and depending on the results of the vote that will create a hard fork of the blockchain which you could arguable say doesn't happen in most other blockchain communities.
+
[00:42:14] LTraveler: I want to add one more thing that because everything is private. You can ask whatever questions you want, nobody going to judge you.
+
[00:42:29] Citizen Cosmos: I have a wrap up traditional question for you. What keeps you motivated to do what you guys : are doing today? Whether it's for Idena or whether it's for the whole of blockchain industry.
+
[00:43:07] LTraveler: I would like to start because it reminds me the story of how that community proposals came out about the translation. I was so attracted by the idea and I just wrote to the developers and said I want to translate your chronicle and they even agreed to pay me. Then, I started creating videos and the result was also good. What I feel is that apart from your job where you're just earning money there should be something that you're really happy to do. You do something that people really can use because they really need that. The key point of changing our society is to transform it from what we must do to something what we choose to do. For me me this is the key point and Idena really represented the ideas of fair democracies, it is the representation of that kind of style of society. We are small but at least you can feel that and this is wonderful.
+
[00:45:11] TravCrypto: For me it’s very similar to LTraveler. In the time that I've been in web3 professionally over the past three years and as a community member over the past six years I've seen a lot of different blockchains, a lot of different projects all promising different things. The thing that makes me most passionate about Idena is this concept of a truly decentralized democracy and what I mean by that is a global democracy where every humans can participate in this system and their vote can be heard which is really spectacular to me. I think it's a novel concept that hasn't been done at scale and I think Idena is the technology that can allow truly decentralized democracy to happen at scale.
+
[00:46:12] Citizen Cosmos: Guys, this has been a huge pleasure! Thank you very much for your time!
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here)
Citizen Cosmos:
+After I already realized that it goes live, but this is going to happen. And I think we are already live. Let me just check that it's all working. Let me just see our beautiful faces. There we go. There's our beautiful faces. So hi everybody. It's citizen cosmos with our Odyssey and Isaac today. Hi Isaac. Sorry to interrupt your hello there.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+Hello, how are you?
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Good, good, Isaac. So yeah, for everyone who is watching this stream or recording, as you probably usually would with us. This is of course, exploring validators. And today we have Simply Staking and Isaac is the co founder and the CTO of Simply Staking. And let's do like a traditional typical thing, you know, before we go off into our questions, Isaac, I would like to ask yourself what is Simply Staking for you personally in your own words and why on earth did you one day woke up and decide to be part of this business or endeavor or adventure or whatever. So what is Simply Staking and how did you get here? That is the first question.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+To me, it's a lot of stress and lack of sleep, I would say. And I guess...
Episode name:
+Bridging Digital Nations: A Discussion on the Corruption of Centralized Bridges, Academia vs field work & The Importance of Community in Decentralization with Alexei Zamyatin.
+
In this episode, Alexei Zamyatin Co-Founder of Interlay is interviewed. He discusses merge mining, the first cross chain protocol and how it contributed to domain squatting. Alexei gives his thoughts on the dangers of projects using their own token as collateral, the future of trustless bridges and the power of academia. There is also interesting discussion regarding the innate corruption of man over time and how trust in software increases with use over time.
+
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Hi everybody, welcome to a new episode of the Citizen Cosmos Podcast. And again, I love doing those intros and I love messing them up. But nevertheless, I have with me today Alexei. Alexei is the CEO and founder of Interlay. We will find out from him about Interlay and about himself in a second. But Alexei, hi, welcome to the show.
+
Alexei
+Hi, thanks for having me.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I'm very glad to be having you. We are slowly, in Citizen Cosmos, have been trying to interview people outside of just Cosmos ecosystem. And in my opinion, you happen to be such kind of a person who's not just focused on the Cosmos ecosystem, but focused on the whole of Interchain. And this has been our object and goal all along. So first, I mean, I already said CEO and founder of Interlay, but please, if you could make your own intro with you know, whatever you are working on, whatever you fancy telling about yourself, please.
[00:00:19] Citizen Cosmos: Hi everyone! Welcome to a new episode of Citizen Cosmos podcast! We have today two guests with us from Kadena, and it's Will Martino, the founder and president of Kadena and Randy Daal, the head of developer experience at Kadena. They will hopefully tell us all about Kadena, all about themselves, and everything else we want to know. Welcome to the show!
+
[00:00:39] Will Martino: Thanks so much for having us, Serge.
+
[00:00:42] Citizen Cosmos: So, there are two of you so we'll do a turn by turn. I usually present the guests, but I think it's much cooler when the guests present themselves and say whatever they want people to know about them. So please, Will, I'll let you go first. Present yourself, tell us all what
+you do.
+
[00:00:57] Will Martino: I'm the president and co-founder of Kadena. I met my co-founder Stuart Popejoy at JP Morgan. He had opened up a research desk working at high school there, It was in
+Brooklyn and I was living in Brooklyn at the time, and one of my friends from college was working there so I got a gig working there because it was a couple stops away from my apartment. We ended up starting to work on crypto because it was back before Etherium
+had launched and everyone under the sun was coming through JP Morgan trying to sell them on enterprise blockchain, and we needed to do diligence on behalf of the bank in this research group on blockchain. We ended up building JP Morgan coin version zero and open source to publish hyper ledger. The process like that informs a lot of how and why we built Kadena because we were doing this work on behalf of the bank and we knew that we would need certain answers to certain questions that we wouldn't be able to get industrial adoption without. That turned into us leaving and starting Kadena. Back before that I was at an Securities and Exchange Commission back before they had a crypto group because I was there when bellary formed it. I was the tech, I was back doing high frequency data analytics, building their super computing close to things, and then got tired of the government, went to hacker school for three months and to go learn Haskell and after that went to JP Morgan, and the rest of the history been doing Kadena for I think six and a half years now.
+
[00:02:24] Citizen Cosmos: That is the story! I would drop the mic at this point but to be honest I know your story of course, I just wanted you to share it. I have a lot a lot of questions about your story to you, we will get back to them for sure. Please, Randy, introduce yourself.
+
[00:02:38] Randy Daal: I'm leader of developer experience at Kadena, I started in April so I don’t have a long history that Will has. I started out as a job for developer at the airline company. I’m based in Netherlands. After that I soon made the transition after four years to front-end because that was really my passion and I always have a saying that you want to work on something where you find passion. I started switching my career towards front-end development work there
+for my in the fifteen years created all kinds of front-end application for large companies in the Netherlands. At one point in my career I founded my own company where I started out my own front-end company and basically from there on I started doing a lot with the community. I started a foundation called Frontmania where we created all kinds of fun stuff with friend community, educating people with conferences and meetups. I think somewhere in November I got into contact with Will and he told me all about Kadena, it wasn’t the first time I heard the name but I didn't know that it was that awesome. We got into a conversation and I could really help Kadena to grow on the front-end side. Will got me really enthusiastic basically and that's why I started in April working on the developer experience and until now it's a nice experience for me to talk to the community, see what they need. We got so many ideas and I will tell you about that later but it's going to be a real fun road for me and the community.
+
[00:04:23] Citizen Cosmos: Before I'm going to move back to Will, I have a question for you. Were you not terrified of starting working for Kadena? It’s a big project. Was it not terrifying to start at something that big?
+
[00:04:53] Randy Daal: I'm not really terrified of challenges. Challenges are something I like. It was something I would like to do. Also my background is I'm a big sports fan. I play sports on high level, so challenges is a way of life for me and that's what I like here as well. Starting your own company it's big challenge as well, the only difference which you have now is there's everything is exposed, everything is open source but everything you do should be spot on and I'm a perfectionist. It is fun for me working with a lot of smart people and Kadena is filled with amazing talents and a lot of smart people to learn a lot from. So no not really scared, more enthusiastic
+to work with such bright minds.
+
[00:05:41] Citizen Cosmos: Will, let's get back to you. I follow Kadena for a while and for everybody who's listening out there I'm also a token holder, so I'm going to put my cards on the table straight away just in case people do ask. But let's talk about JP Morgan first. I remember when JP Morgan coin came around, it was 2016 or 2017. How did you end up working for them and how did you suddenly realize that you wanted to go into something your own?
+
[00:06:13] Will Martino: That's a long story. There's this tradition inside of banks in New York and I believe London and Paris, where sometimes you'll get new CTOs, new management at the very high levels of these investment banks and they'll put together kind of like a pet RnD group to do some critical RnD they we’ve been wanting to do for long period of time. That group got forked and the way that you normally formed these is you go and you grab some very experienced higher level manager and then some extremely experienced engineers to run the various desks that you're going to fork. So I think this one had three desks. So, Stuart Popejoy, my co-founder was rewrote their agency equity trading platform which actually is a really important part of a Kadena story. So the business case for this thing was that in the agency desk they had these
+institutional clients and they would call up their clients and say “Hey, how do you want to trade?” and the clients would describe to them basically an algorithm of how they would want to execute their portfolios and balance things. They used to call them up and then they spend and then the traders would spend two months with the engineers getting these things implemented, getting them rolled in a production. So Stuart rewrote the trading engine and a bunch of other stuff but the main thing that's relevant for the Kadena story is that he wrote a domain specific language that traders could actually code on the phone. Basically it is like taking notes except that you
+could execute these notes while they're talking with their clients. This took the turn around time from call to production from two months to about two days. It would be like one day to get it into queue and the one day to get it actually shipped. So these are technical non-programmers who are now writing this domain specific language for algorithmic trade and the experience of that how to write a safe like domain specific language for technical non-programmers informs a lot of how we design PACT or smart contract language because we see them as very similar things. Blockchains are the databases with store procedures decentralized with coins. It has the notion of money built into it but at their core they're these databases and smart contracts with the store procedures on top and you can do tons of stuff with that so when we started working on Kadena, Stuart headed the RnD for PACT and all of that experience of years writing a language for technical programmers informed how we wrote PACT. That's why we kept PACT simple and that ended up having a lot of benefits later on being able to do formal verification and that is as easy to code in as the actual language itself being able to show contracts to lawyers who are domain experts but aren't programmers. So he finished that up and then he didn't retire out of JP morgan but took some time off and they came back to him six months later and asked if he wanted to run this RnD desk down the street from your apartment and how does he feel. He agreed and his first hire was one of my good friends out of Yele University. He was a big haskell guy, Stuart wanted to do the desk in haskell just kind of to try to see how this would go. We all like the language and so Carter pulled me in. I went and interviewed and everyone was expecting me. Then I joined up and within about a year we started enterprise blockchain. Our desk ended up capturing that as like the thing that we could focus on first before any of the other desks was that in doing some of the background research. Back in the school I had written the scheme implementation, like a little domain specific language that looks like PACT and when we were doing some research at JP we found this hardened BFT raft variant from Stanford research project that was written in haskell. So over the course of a weekend I had a fully functioning private blockchain that was executing around five hundred transactions a second and was able to run EVM and scheme side by side. That was how we just we kic dropped that.
+
[00:10:45] Citizen Cosmos: That's impressive! I have my first controversial question. You come from the world of enterprise blockchain and not just enterprise blockchain, you come from the enterprise world. Let's talk stigmas here a little bit, most people who use blockchain they automatically tie up blockchain technology and decentralization philosophy together and when people from the
+enterprise world come they say that enterprise blockchain will destroy them. What would you
+say to those things? Are those just crazy talks or does that have anything to it?
+
[00:11:23] Will Martino: It’s a good question. I think that enterprise adoption of blockchain technology will matter in the long term. I don't think you can have full adoption of crypto currency and blockchain technology without that happening but as we’ve seen, it's going to take a long time.
+This isn't like the internet which has started quickly taking over a bunch of different domains, this is much more like advent and money which maybe even like up to a generation that actually convert over. Those aren't the chains that I'm worried about. I'm more worried about the VC chains and the the more exchange focus chains because enterprise really doesn't understand blockchain and I would be surprised if we see any major industrial adoption enterprises before 2030. Since we started Kadena that was our target. We asked ourselves, what do we need to build so that by 2030 when enterprise catches up, we're ready to go and that's why we built Kadena the way we did. It's the VC chains that I worry about more because you just end up with these, you end with the proof of stake networks or you have a few whales who are these major VC funds that do not have a good track record in doing things for the common good and they have this massively outside voting control but it's also basically hidden because it's anonymous enough and everyone knows about these chains and knows who controls it but you can't really
+track it. It's one of things that I've always loved about Cosmos from the beginning, was they burnt one of these chains, they did a very decentralized launch, they have a great community and they stuck to their guns on that since the beginning and didn't try to take the short cut as some other chains have. So those are the ones that I worry about the most because those ones do not have their community's interests at heart and they're really just kind of waiting to mature and get people stuck. They're waiting for people to not be able to migrate off because so many things get integrated and then I suspect that you're going to see a mate voting changes that are of course decentralized and they're going to change things like the gas model to do some rent extraction. I’m not going to name names that's not our style but it's like general themes like those are the ones that i worry about the most. IBM poisoned that well so hard from 2018 to 2019. We were still focused on enterprise back then, we were doing enterprise alongside public and IBM’s ability to force all of their clients to try to do an enterprise change when their technology wasn't even a blockchain and couldn't even run. We sent people to some of their workshops and in the workshops the IBM guy couldn't even get people's computers to run their blockchain. The well is so poisoned that it's going to take at least five more years. You need
+almost like a cycling of the upper management in companies before you're going to be able to really do enterprise blockchain again.
+
[00:14:31] Citizen Cosmos: Yeah it makes sense. There are a lot of VCs out there, some of them could
+own up to like certain percent and I'm not talking about just a network, I’m talking about the whole market cup. I think they do some good things especially with RnD, they do have a lot of Rnd that they bring forward and hopefully that RnD can be used to get better and to improve what we are doing in general. Last question about your your history. You worked at SEC and you worked for the committee. What was it?
+
[00:15:16] Will Martino: It was the crypto currency working group back then, now it's the digital ledger technology group. It was back when it was Valery who formed the group. She still runs that now.
+It was me and one person that were basically brought on by her to be the first people in it and then we grew it from there. It all started because they just had some cases. They needed to look at someone who was in the ASSC who didn't own any coin and who understood the tech. Bitcoin was at sixty and I decided between buying Bitcoin at sixty and going into this. Based on how Kadena started and my career since then, I maintained that was the right decision but it's been close for years. It was fun, I can't talk too much about it because I am still a domain expert at the intersection of regulation and technology in the space so there's just not a ton of details I can go into. We should all be happy that the ASSC didn't go the path that New York did with the bitcoin license because that would have messed up a lot more stuff. At least they've been slow and diligent about it as opposed to coming in and just crashing on the grade.
+
[00:16:26] Citizen Cosmos: Did that experience give you more understanding of how to go with Kadena?
+
[00:16:36] Will Martino: I think it's intuition because this stuff isn't set down in case law. The way that Kadena structure will be by twenty thirty be kind of set in stone or at least the guidance that we provided. But until that guidance comes out you can't be sure so that we all have to be super careful. Now we've been essentialized for years, we've been in production for years, we're in a very good place now, it's always the launching period that's hard but based in the way that we did it we're pretty confident that if we're not good then most of the entire industry has major
+problems. We'll see where it goes. I'm hopeful that we get some clear guidance. I'm very thankful that they didn't come and really screw things up.
+
[00:17:20] Citizen Cosmos: First question about Kadena. It's going to sound silly to both of you but i
+like to break things down. So a multichain network, let's talk about this. You have proof of work, proof of stake, multichain network. What on earth does it mean for the regular user out there who is just browsing the Cosmos ecosystem or Coingecko looking for gems or for anything else but from gems you know he's looking for l1s. Can you guys whoever wants to answer this explain how it works and what does it mean?
+
[00:17:51] Will Martino: It is technical to describe. It's difficult for me to even coverwith people who aren't you know like serious consensus researchers just in like a two minute thing. In Cosmos you have the Cosmos Hub, then you have folks off of it those folks may have their own coins you can lock up coins and put them on the other chains through IBC but at the end of the day they aren't one network. It's a series of networks that can interoperate and talk to each other. So that's like the hub model. People are also familiar with dags, they directed a cycle graph which basically means that you have a ledger that you can run transactions and parallel in that is another approach to scaling, Solon's famous for this one. What we do that is different as
+we have like real horizontal scaling so we have one coin that you can transfer from one chain to another chain. All of these chains are peers with each other and they are all in the same network and it's proof of work that actually allows us to do this so if you've heard of webt2 scaling with companies like Google where they do horizontal scaling, where you can just throw more servers at something to scale it up, we do something very similar but with us it's more chains now you can't just throw more chains at our network. We launched with ten chains we hard for up to twenty chains. Theoretically, you can hard work up to a billion chains. I don't think we ever going get there. I think a hundred thousand chains which would represent fifteen million transactions a second or something like that is the highest that we would ever see and I suspect
+that would take two decades to get to because ours is much more demand driven as our network grows and we need more scale than we hard work to bigger and bigger networks and of course things all decentralized, we do a lot of the core RnD but we take APRs from outside the community and if we misbehave as a foundation then we fully expect people to do what they've done with the proof of work network. So the way that works is that you you have each of these chains running, just a single chain like Ethereum or Bitcoin but they're all in the same network so you can run transactions on gen 1 or gen 19, and you can also do cross-chain messaging through simple payment verification and that's pretty much it. The secret sauce is proof of work is this weird thing where you can actually split up the work that's being done in
+every chain and make the overall system more efficient because right now we have twenty chains. When we go up to say forty chains, what we do is we drop the difficulty of each chains the new block in half keep the overall rate throughput. From an energy used point of view we increase our overall energy used by maybe one percent and in return get double the proof. It’s because proof of work is weird and because the amount of mining that goes into a network isn't related to the overall transaction throughput and you can just split it up and things actually
+getting more secure as your scale which is this weird kind of shunk probability theory that proof of work captures but it works and it's really simple. So, proof of work works, it's just not efficient and we set out to solve that and then of course we threw on PACT or smart contract language and that just allows you to now have this a multithreaded list machine in the sky that you can really do whatever you want with.
+
[00:21:04] Citizen Cosmos: Randy, quick question to you from a perspective of developer experience. Working with both proof of work and proof of stake, how does it work for you?
+
[00:21:26] Randy Daal: So, all our chains are based on proof of work. We can maybe in the future go through a
+hybrid state but that's not necessary because our chain solves all the problems with proof of work. The only thing we need to improve at Kadena, I mean our primary focus for the last few years has been the greatest state of the first layer blockchain development solution and in my opinion, Kadena completely revolutionized the blockchain world in that part but one thing it doesn't matter how good your technology might be, nothing can replace a good user experience that really is essential. So that's why Will basically came up to me and asked me to help them out on that part and currently we're busy creating a whole new developer experience that would be truly game changing. At the moment building an application or a platform can be tough, you have a pretty high learning curve as well as the documentation written in a more traditional manner. So that's why we're focusing on creating new documentation side, we're also engaging a lot more with the community of what they need from us. We're going to build it developer academy where people can have certifications and badges so when a developer comes into Kadena and gets certified so people will know who get trained in how to do things properly and with that we also kind of developed user friendly tooling, creating robust APIs and SDKS. So it really doesn't matter if you use proof of work, it's the layer on top of that brings developer experience. That should be transparent for developers and users.
+
[00:23:20] Citizen Cosmos: What's your number one thing to go out and attract developers? Today the competition in l1s is enormous and obviously without developers it's a bit hard to build an open source chain.
+
[00:23:39] Randy Daal: So the main thing where we need to focus on it should be easy to develop something on Kadena. So if you look at our APIs at the moment, they're very low level, so if you want to to mint an NFT, you have to do a lot of stuf. The thing is, we should focus on instead of explaining developers of how to built something. The main thing I always go back to is when a couple of years ago you had that battle between Internet Explorer and FireFox, and they were battling each other who has is the best browser, and then very lately Chrome came into play and if you look nowadays, they are the main browsers people are using and it's not because they were better browsers, they focused on technology, they focused on the good developer experience because it was really easy to build applications by using Chrome and that's what we need to focus on as well. It should be easy for developers to build something on Kadena and that's where you’ll get a better and greater adoption,and for that we also need the community to help us out on what they're missing, and that's why you need to interact with community as well.
+
[00:24:57] Citizen Cosmos: Will, do you want to add something?
+
[00:24:59] Will Martino: I do actually, I want to amplify some parts. Some other parts that we have are a very large grant program that we do for going to helping people to be able to kick start helping be able to kick start actually going out and building. It was very easy to apply for and I think we're gonna have our first major announcement some time in July. On top of that there's some other parts that I think are more at the infrastructure level because Randy has more actual development experience and part of the experience is not attracting developers but being able to keep them. If you want to go and have your own NFT platform, you need to roll out your own network and then run it, and that's a bigger lift to do. In Cosmos they built their core community and by moving on to their own spot makes sense but for DID launch itself on Cosmos as the first step I feel I would have a lot of adoption problems so it's one of the reasons that we wanted to scale layer one itself so that you don't have to run your own infrastructure, just deploy your application just like you could with Etherium which then gets to the second problem that we avoid by being able to scale and actually having a scalable platform is low gas fees. That said, it's really the core focus of what gas is for, it limits the amount of computation so you don't solve a network and really that it means we don't want people to do it outside of that, we want the
+piece to be as low as possible for everyone. So if all of a sudden you know you don't run into the Etherium problem where launching a new project is now super expensive, so this is one of the other reasons that we get scaling is so important as it applies to developer experience because you just don't have to worry about that with Kadena because the gas fees are just so much lower. So the part that Randy focuses on is how do you integrate, how do you build, how you get the front-end working there. These other parts that we found have been very attractive to developers because we have this story of launching crypto kitties on our platform and let’s say our platform is going to have massive massive adoption and you've just deployed it to chain zero. You can now deploy to change one through ten in addition to that, and now you have ten times the through put for your application and it takes a little bit of tooling but you deploy it out, there's no one that can stop you and now you have ten times a through put and it costs basically the same if you will be able to scale up your app. Then, we get to the point where you're on every chain and you're saturating all the chains. That's what we talk about when we say adoption drives the scale of the layer one itself because as the time approaches we're going to notice it. The community is going to notice and all of us are going to start to get ready for hard work to changes so that network always grows to meet the capacity of the demand. This is one of my core theses for crypto in general. Now we have straight decentralized work and we don't have the problem that all the other l1s have.
+
[00:29:07] Citizen Cosmos: This is a really great answer because a lot of founders unfortunately don't pay attention to attracting developers from the beginning to the scelability of the net and what we get
+is somebody building a cool application which breaks the network and then you have problems. I’m going to ask a question that's going to sound really stupid to you both of you but I need to ask it because Kadena is always listed as a Cosmos ecosystem project everywhere. What's the reason for this?
+
[00:29:45] Will Martino: I think it's because we've known them forever. I think they first presented Tenderment when we were presenting our private blockchain. We were presenting PACT formal verification of our smart contract language, it was still in development in that time. That was a really funny conference because you had a bunch of the people who now have a bunch of top projects. So I think it's because we've known them for so long we don't see ourselves as being competitive to Cosmos. It serves different needs, we don't have vast finality, because proof of work, our finality, is still in the order of like thirty seconds to a minute. There are certain apps that really do need that and there're certain apps that you want to run of your system on a proof of work network and then you want to run other networks that are more running on a proof of stake because you if want to do settlement on a proof of work network because you want that decentralization but you want the fast finality of a proof of stake system. So we've always seen it as complimentary and because of that we've just been working with Cosmos for a long time, before we working on IBC for a while, we were working with Terra before. The next place that will be looking at with Cosmos is definitely IBC but I’ve been recently getting a lot into zero now proofs and certain knowledge bridges from the point of view bridging and I suspect that will probably be the first time that we have true bridging between our two networks is getting an IBC system that has some knowledge component so that we can solve who owns the key for the bridges problem.
+
[00:31:29] Citizen Cosmos: Because right now I think if I go into the ecosystem part of the Kadena website and if I go click on the bridges section, IBC does come up but it doesn't have a link to it so I guess it's all kind of planted.
+
[00:31:44] Will Martino: Yeah, something has been worked on for a fair bit of time but definitely Terra’s implosion got in the way of us focusing on rolling it out this summer so we're still figuring out the business case for it, figuring out what we're going to do with it because bridges are important for Kadena. We had some bridges that were sort of ready to go this time last year that i didn't pull the plug on. But I basically stalled them because I was looking at them and they were so unsafe, they're going to get hacked. This approach in general is just not okay and over the preceding year I feel very vindicated in that decision because we've seen so many bridge hacks that I don't really feel bad about it. Wormhole for example, they hadn't gotten saved by FTX I don't know what would have happened to that ecosystem but they managed to dodge.
+
[00:32:49] Citizen Cosmos: And to be honest, Wormhole was using bloc chain back in 2015. I'm not saying that's a bad thing necessarily but in 2015 using Wormhole wasn't a great user experience at all. So we talked about easiness of onboarding developers. You have PACT which is the smart count language you guys developed and I think in 2017 or 2018 I read and was quite impressed with the things I saw. There was a lot of concepts there about atomic execution, there were a lot of things which are not new to anything but against the language feels more like a blockchain developer friendly. Randy would you correct me here about that? Does Pact really make onboard developers easier or is it a stone you have to overcome?
+
[00:33:44] Randy Daal: I think nowadays for every smart contract you always have to learn a new language and Pact is a very easy language to learn. It's a list based language so that the only thing people have to overcome is all the parenthesis but it’s a very easy language to learn and that's what you see in the community as well once it clicks, it clicks and that's what feedback we're getting. A lot of people working but the only thing is if you're working with a cripting language you really are focused on a certain way of developing. It can be a bit harder to get acquainted with Pact, but it’s very intuitive and that's what I think Stuart wanted to accomplish as well, to create a language that is very easy to learn and very quick to create smart contract with. In my opinion he succeeded in that.
+
[00:34:40] Will Martino: The thing with Pact is that we could have gotten a different route and had something that looked and felt like Javascript which is the path that some other projects have taken which makes it easier to onboard the developers. First because you have a bunch of people who aren't very good at Javascript and you can go and grab them and then make be
+not very good at your smart contract language. But here's the problem. On the Internet you can evolve your website you can evolve it so it can be better. For smart contracts, when you deploy them, they are themselves a bug bounty and we intentionally decided not to go that route because safety matters more than everything else when it comes to smart contracts. So instead we have a safe language that is intuitive but is a little bit different in the beginning to get your head around. It's closer to the way I described, it is much closer to learning sequel for a data based for queries than it is to learning a Javascript because you can get up and run it quickly but as time goes on, you need to learn more and it's hard to do it safely. It is hard to do it at scale, in a way that you don't end up shooting your own foot off. Whereas in sequel you need to wrap your head around the idea of a table and this relational algebra that the language is expressing. After that everything clicks and it's very easy. Writing Uber in Pact would be very difficult if not impossible but then again, Uber would never run on top of a blockchain. It was that mantra that really draw us to do Pact the way that it is and then students’ experience with writing this language for non-programmers who were technical informed a lot of how we design
+things so that it would be very easy to learn. So yes there's a little bit of initial onboarding that's more difficult because but then it's usually about two or three days and I usually just help people look at the coin contracts, download it and get it running.
+
[00:37:18] Randy Daal: I also want to add something. I think the adoption of Pact will also help when we bring out the academy. I think that will help a lot. It’ll help onborning of new developers way more than what it is nowadays because now if people want to learn Pact, they really have to dive in and there's a lot of content on the Internet to find but it's not centralized and if we centralize all the content, give them a learning part we'll be adopted way more.
+
[00:37:41] Citizen Cosmos: i don't know if you guys heard about Urbit and Hoon. They have their own language which a runic language. I’m just talking about like easiness of onboarding developers because that language is completely made up from scratch and it's got different concept to most things and I don't think that especially you developed language that is concentrated on security. It’s the opposite, it should be easier to adopt and that's that's a great thing. One more thing that I did notice. Considering we think of ourselves as ecosystem developers we go out and help networks. It's hard not to notice how much attention Kadena is paying to ecosystem development. You have the accelerator programs, you have the academy you mentioned, you have a big ecosystem, the community is growing all the time, you have a lot of channels. Is that intentional, the focus ecosystem development on the community or that happened because you have the experience and you understand what you're doing and you understand that that's important or was that a natural evolvemental thing?
+
[00:39:08] Will Martino: It's a generic yes. I think the first trunk of Kadena's time was designing how we
+scale and figuring out what the protocol is like and then I was building a protocol, and then we launched Rnd and it became much more focused on adoption. We know it's stable, we demonstrate that. At the same time we have this community that was clamoring for support and hiring a bunch of people. But Kadena itself is a longer play and it's a longer project. Our entire tokeneconomic system is designed around a hundred and twenty year mission which is just weird for crypto. No one plans at that span of time. We figured out so much and also that means that crypto is now fully adopted in the global standard, so we'll cross that bridge when we come to it, it will be fine. We don't move super fast because it’s not web2, it’s web3, you can't move fast and break things because when you do you get hacked and that’s a huge problem. We have a different approach and it's a slower one where we just keep building and building. I think we hit that stage where it made sense for us to build the foundation for the ecosystems, build the academy. Also, we found Randy. I have been literally looking for someone who fits Randy's position for three years.
+
[00:41:33]
+Citizen Cosmos: I've been professionally working blocking for seven years now and the amount of chains I've seen come and go because of the lack of attention to system and developer experience. People just close their eyes to it as if it doesn't exist and it's great that you
+pay attention to it! I'm going to take into the last block of questions. Will, what was the goal and the motivation in deciding to build an l1 blockchain? I mean nobody just wakes up and thinks “I'm going to go and build the most scalable product!” There must have been something that led you here internally to this point. What was it?
+
[00:42:27] Will Martino: I mean part of it is the context and the timing at JP Morgan, just like having that experience having that in our background, having Stuart as a co-founder without whom I’d never would have done it. That was definitely part of it and part of it was that doing that due diligence at JP Morgan, we ended up with this one page of core questions we now needed to get answered if there was ever going to be industrial adoption blockchain and we knew that no one like we knew. We looked at every single project that was either coming up or that was being launched or had already launched and we knew that nothing answered even a quarter of these things very basic things. We had this core belief that crypto is going to be a thing and that it's going to have widespread global adoption within our lifetimes and we desisded someone needs to do it. So I left and did it. I don’t think without JP Morgan we would have had the motivation because we wouldn't have seen both the potentia, the shortcomings that we saw because
+there were so few projects that were coming out of anyone who had major financial experts even if most of the projects don't even have founders who have major industrial experts usually they're coming out of either other startups or the coming out of open source or coming out of research and cryptography. We came at it from a very different angle. We had an industrial background and leverage that because we knew what's going to be needed if this thing is ever going to be industrial adoption and no one else is going to do this and no one has those backgrounds.
+
[00:44:12] Citizen Cosmos: Randy i didn't ask you for your blockchain story but what motivated you? What led you to decide to go into blockchain in the first place?
+
[00:44:25] Randy Daal: I was always interested in crypto, I think since 2017. But I think the talk I had
+with Will in November really got me enthusiastic and really drove into my blockchain technology and that's what basically got me into Kadena.
+
[00:44:45] Citizen Cosmos: What did he tell you?
+
[00:44:51] Randy Daal: Basically, the people work in blockchain, especially at Kadena are extremely smart and I like to work with the best of the best because if you work with great people you will get a great product and that's what they have done at Kadena and that's currently what I'm doing at the moment as well for the developer experience. I'm trying to create a dream team and so we're basiclly building the best team out there and we focus on building, for us not good enough is not great on the strife of perfection.
+
[00:45:31] Citizen Cosmos: My last question to both of you. What motivates both of you to get out of bed every day and to keep on doing whatever it is you're doing? What would you like to advise to others?
+
[00:46:13] Randy Daal: For me it's like being an entrepreneur within the company itself so Kadena motivates me by telling me “do what you think is best.” I can create my own team do, what I think is best
+for the community, creating a whole new developer experience and even if it means throwing away old stuff in creating new stuff that gives me the motivation to build awesome things and that's why I want to get out of the bed every morning and start working.
+
[00:46:54] Citizen Cosmos: Will?
+
[00:46:55] Will Martino: I think it starts with the team and I've been doing this forever so it definitely starts with the team. We have is amazing the people we get to work with are brilliant. I don't know what else to say. We are strategically tied together, we’re going in : the right direction and we all find that it's meaningful. We all believe that crypto is going to be a thing and that solving the efficiency problems and the scaling problems do matter in the long term. At the same time we get to work on this really cool thing that we've built. It's just a really well built organization.
+
[00:48:14] Citizen Cosmos: Guys it's been a huge huge pleasure! Thank you for finding the time, I know it wasn't easy. Looking forwards to IBC working with Kadena! Join the Kadena social networks!
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here)
The rapid development of the DeFi sector in crypto finance has brought great opportunities for users to manage their assets. But along with this, new risks arose. One such risk was MEV. This arbitrage strategy allows miners to change the order of transactions in the generated blocks and earn on user transactions. This entails higher fees and network congestion and generally destabilizes the blockchain. And although almost all blockchains are subject to MEV, Ethereum bears the main risks, as it is the most common DeFi protocols using smart contracts.
+
What is MEV
+
The architectural features of Ethereum and other blockchains using smart contracts allow you to receive additional income using these same smart contracts and DeFi protocols.
+Previously, MEV was deciphered as a Miner Extractable Value. Still, after the start of using arbitrage strategies, the decoding of Maximum Extractable Value has been more common recently.
+MEV is the profit that a miner or validator can make by intentionally changing the order of transactions in a block that is added to the blockchain.
+
How MEV works
+
Technically, all transactions of users and traders fall into the mempool. Miners take trades from the mempool, form blocks, and add them to the blockchain. Transactions in the league are not arranged in chronological order but in the order in which the miner added them.
+Here there are conditions under which the miner, having determined the high-margin transaction of the user or trader, can copy it and paste it into the block so that it is executed first.
+If the miner did not take advantage of this opportunity, trading bots would come into play. They track a highly profitable transaction, copy, and offer the miner a higher commission for executing the trade in the first place. Since there are a lot of trading bots, an auction begins where the transaction fee rises rapidly.
+
What are the risks of MEV?
+
For users, the risk is a possible exchange at a deliberately unfavorable rate and an unreasonable increase in gas fees. MEV is also one of Ethereum's biggest issues, with more than $689 million extracted from users of the network year-to-date. By leveraging their discretionary power to sequence transactions within blocks, miners can extract value from decentralized application users on Ethereum, greatly diminishing the user experience and threatening the stability of the network. Moreover, MEV can have deleterious effects between blocks. If the MEV available in a block significantly exceeds the standard block reward, miners may be incentivized to remine blocks and capture the MEV for themselves, causing blockchain re-organization and consensus instability.
+
How to fight MEV
+
Unfortunately, a complete solution does not yet exist. However, the developers see the MEV problem and are working on a solution. At the moment, there are two main approaches to solving the problem.
+The first one is to create tools that increase the transparency of transactions and provide access to MEV to all users. Theoretically, this should increase competition and minimize the negative impact of MEVs.
+The second approach assumes that the MEV problem is solvable - it is only necessary to update the rules of the Ethereum network consensus algorithm, release protocols that minimize the opportunities for MEV, and, most importantly, increase the motivation of miners to abandon these strategies.
+
So far, the crypto community cannot eliminate the opportunities for MEV strategies. But their negative consequences can be significantly minimized.
+The main thing is that the developers and users of the Ethereum network see the problem and are already taking measures to solve it.
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:
[00:00:00] Citizen Cosmos: Hi, everyone! Welcome to another episode of Citizen Cosmos. We have Mark with us today, the founder of Microtick. Hi, welcome to the show.
+
[00:00:29] Mark: Hi, thank you for having me!
+
[00:00:32] Citizen Cosmos: Yes, thank you for coming. It wasn't that easy to find you from what I heard from my team, they said you weren't very public, but maybe we can talk about that as well if you want. First, I'll let you introduce yourself in your own words. Tell us who you are, what you do, and anything else you want.
+
[00:00:48] Mark: Sure. My name is Mark Jackson. I founded Microtick back in 2003. It was originally a for-profit company. This was before Bitcoin, blockchain technology, and after a series of events. We were trying to figure out ways of bringing forth a new type of financial product at the time: a short-term option contract. These option contracts have fixed explorations and fixed strikes, and that's the way they are standardized. And the challenge is to bring liquidity to all the various issues. And as you deal with shorter and shorter timeframes, your choices for standardizations multiply because, with shorter timeframes, you might have expirations of 5 minutes, 10 minutes, or 15 minutes. I'm exaggerating, of course, but you can see that providing liquidity for all of the different issues can become a challenge. And so what Microtick was involved with at the time was pioneering a new way to standardize options using relative strikes and explorations. In other words, as the option contract triggers, the expiration is set at a fixed duration from when the option starts at all times. And the challenge you receive or come across when you're trying to standardize in that manner is what is the correct price at a given time. And so the second challenge that we had to solve was how do you get the right price? And so, I figured out a way to use the option contract prices to derive the current price so that we didn't have to import it from a different exchange and, therefore, create a self-contained market. We thought it was pretty innovative. It may not have been, we don't know, but we did talk to several exchanges in the United States and the 2003 to 2005 timeframe. We got feedback: “Hey, that sounds pretty cool.” But at the time, we were not interested in partnering with a small company like that. There were many discussions when you were talking about a massive entity as a small business. There are a lot of challenges there. And so the project got tabled for a while. We then moved on, and during that timeframe, Bitcoin came along.
+I was very interested in technology back in those days. I was at the Miami Bitcoin conference, where Ethereum was introduced, and Vitalic introduced that in Miami in 2014. And I got very interested in Ethereum. And so we started working with Ethereum. I had a set of smart contracts that we developed back then, and it had to work operationally on Testnet. I realized with crypto that we were going to do the same thing because with short-term options, you're, you're, you're talking about a lot of transactions. The network just couldn't handle it. There was no layer to use at the time. So it was a challenging set of problems you're facing when technology evolves as fast as your development.
[00:03:55] Mark: Potentially. I mean, we looked at various options, and we didn't have a team that could fully investigate all our different options. So what we did was a high-level overview of what the challenges were. This was back in 2017, probably that time, and we arrived at Cosmos because it was fairly advanced technology compared to some of the other solutions we saw. We did a pivot and a second pivot and developed a set of smart contract rules. We developed a blockchain node that has the rules embedded into the code. And we did that, which brought forth the Microtick chain in its current form. I made a short question into a long answer, but I hope that gives you some background and let you know where we stand.
+
[00:04:48] Citizen Cosmos: It does, that's for sure. I have a lot of questions, but I'm going to try and go easy before I ask some questions about you, your history, how you got here yourself, and how you got to start that company. When we go into the Microtick website, it says it's cooperative price discovery. Now let's break that down. Imagine that somebody doesn't understand a word in that. I guess, for a lot of people, sometimes myself, it could confuse me. What is the essence of your own comments about the cooperative price discovery?
+
[00:05:26] Mark: It's a good question. It's something that is not bantered around in the financial markets typically. I mean, usually, you have a marketplace. That's a bid-ask order book or something like an automated market. And people take different positions, either going higher or lower, based on what they see as their outlooks for the market. That's a form of price discovery. It's a competitive price discovery because someone else has an opposing interest in the opposite direction in every position you take. And the price goes up and down based on. If market participants share the same outlook, the price will sometimes go up rapidly in the form of a pump or a dump. If it goes in the opposite direction and price discovery, price results in an unstable market over short timeframes. You get these trendy transforming either pumps or dumps in various directions. And then they correct. And so it leads to a lot of volatility.
+In terms of cooperative price discovery, we see a different way to solve the problem of participants agreeing on a price. What I mean by that is blockchain is decentralized. It allows multiple people to participate from all various jurisdictions and wherever they happen to be. And we know one of the problems in blockchain technology is importing prices onto the chain. One thing we wanted to do with Microtick is because we were able to take these price assertions and import them onto the marketplace, then leverage them out in the ways that a lot of these Oracles that you see have been developed work. We're doing the same thing. But the difference with Microtick is that you can hedge that price. You can take a position because they're making assertions that get traded out as market options over a short time frame. And so, you end up with a form of price discovery that is cooperative because you have that averaging effect. It allows participants to jump onto a market and gives a voice in the market to people who don't necessarily want to take a position in either going up or down. It's a voice in the market for people asserting that the price is what it currently is. And so we think that the two markets, side by side if you have a competitive model that can be hedged against a cooperative averaging market, might tend to average out some of the volatility over short timeframes, which benefits everybody. I think because these pumps well, except for the people profiting off of pumping and dumping, maybe some of the high-frequency tradings would tend to in a little bit less opportunity. Still, for the most part, it's just a different form of importing prices that we think will result in a much less volatile process.
+
[00:08:16] Citizen Cosmos: Of course, this is less space for price manipulation, as far as I understand. But let's break it down even more. We hear the words, price manipulation, and if you're a trader, you more or less understand if you're technical, but how would you explain it in your words? I had this question before somebody asked me. What is price manipulation? Sometimes, especially on the blockchain and it's hard a little bit to answer sometimes. How would you, in your own words, explain how it physically works on a stock market that Microtick can prevent?
+
[00:08:46] Mark: Obviously, there are probably lots of forms of price manipulation. I may not be familiar with all of them but typically, what you'll see is market-makers flashing large buys or sells just outside of the competitive market and kind of signaling that they have a high volume of interest in a specific direction, which then causes other participants to see that large wall set up and think that the price is going to soon move in a particular order. Therefore they take a position, and the market goes in the other direction. Surprise. That's what I think of when I think of price manipulation on a traditional order book. The way that my critique would be in that type of situation. It is working with price assertions that can be, traded in either direction. So it forces the market maker to take a position in the center of the price, and the orders that can get sold first are on the outside of that kind of bell curve of charges that we set up. You can't flash an order outside the market without being the most competitive order on the market. So you will get traded first as opposed to a traditional order, but those orders that get flashed on the outside bids and ask never get sold and taken off before the market reaches them. So that's what we mean by helping out with price manipulation. And that's explicitly referring to order books.
+
[00:10:13] Citizen Cosmos: I will return to my critique. I will. And I want to come back as well to some of the economics. But before that, I do want to understand a little bit more about you. There isn't much information on the Internet about you. You had quite an extensive career in quite different companies. lt was ShapeShift, HP, Thunderbird gaming. And you also had many patterns in gaming and trading systematics. I would love to hear about that. How did you get from what looks like quite a successful career in the everyday world to starting in Microtick, Ethereum, and Cosmos?
+
[00:10:50] Mark: Yeah, you've done your research. I try to keep my public profile low. I'm not a personality type that participates much in social media or things like that. Career-wise I've been in a variety of positions. I have an extensive coding background. My education was in electrical engineering. So I've got some electrical background engineering and antenna design background, but I never used that in the real world. It was all software. I've done quite as you said. I've got a few patents. I've done some innovative work in a variety of fields. What led me to this particular opportunity was just my interest in trading. I've always been interested in how markets work and how you can improve them. And that was even before blockchain technology came along.
+
[00:11:46] Citizen Cosmos: What led you to it? Was it just curiosity or something else?
+
[00:12:03] Mark: Well, specifically, electrical engineering has described a field of study called signals and systems with linear time and variant systems. High, And then you start diving into how you can make these systems work in the analog and digital time domains. And my interest was always in the computing side of things, precisely in discreet, linear time and variant systems. And that are things like digital filters and stuff you might build using computer technology. So I was working with that kind of stuff. And as a grad student, I never completed grad school, but that's what I was working on. And then, some of the things I worked on with my career was also in the same area and was just a natural evolution as you get into markets. And then, with blockchain technology, blocks come at infrequent intervals, sometimes because they're probabilistic in their finality. So it leads to a specific set of problems that you can imagine. It kind of attracted my interest, given my background. So that's what led me down that path. And that's where I'm at right now.
+
[00:13:12] Citizen Cosmos: When did you start? When did you start working with the software? I imagine 25, 30 years ago?
+
[00:13:18] Mark: Oh yeah. A little bit of background. I'm in my early fifties. So I'm an older guy. I'm not your typical age group for a lot of this technology. I've noticed that when I was at ShapeShift, I was probably one of the older guys there, but that's a good thing.
+
[00:13:31] Citizen Cosmos: I had Willy on a while ago. When you asked how his day was, was he telling people he was having the best day ever?
+
[00:13:36] Mark: Famous quote!
+
[00:13:37] Citizen Cosmos: He's fantastic. I liked him a lot. He surprised me with this “I'm having the greatest day ever.” And I was like, what? Then he said he’s been saying that for five years. Sorry to cut you out there. By the way, I've been in blockchain for a while, and I've seen quite a few guys about your age.
+
[00:14:30] Mark: Yeah, I'm exaggerating. Of course, older guys can be interested in blockchain technology. To answer your question about when I started coding, my first program was written using punch cards on a mainframe. My mother was enrolled in a class in college, and I was a young kid. I was probably eight or nine years old, and she taught me how to do it in Fortran. I made a program that calculated the number of inches from the Earth to the Sun.
+
[00:14:44] Citizen Cosmos: I would love to use punch cards. I never did.
+
[00:14:50] Mark: That was the only one I ever did. We're at the tail end of that era, but I did a punch card program at one point and then moved on to Apple, to programming. When the Apple 2 was famous, I did some assembly language programming. I taught myself assembly language when I was 12.
+
[00:15:04] Citizen Cosmos: Wow.
+
[00:15:05] Mark: that kind of gives you some background. I'm a self-learner, and all the stuff I did was concerning code.
+
[00:15:12] Citizen Cosmos: Excluding the punch cards, what was the first machine you started to code on then. Do you remember?
+
[00:15:17] Mark: That was the main frame we used at the university at the time. But the first computer we ever owned was an Apple 2 clone. It was a Franklin. And that's where I started programming using those floppy disks. I have to boot up every time and have the OSTP load, then drop down into the monitor and begin again. We would hand-compile our assembly language programs into bites. And then, I would sit there and type these programs in hexadecimal. Tracking down the bugs was super tricky. But at the same time, it was educational because you really start to understand what is underneath the hood and on this, and translating that directly into what we're doing with smart contracts. The EVM is kind of at that same level. So understanding and knowing how virtual machines operate in the way byte code works and things like that is directly relevant to many things that people still work on in today's technology. So I think I'm happy that I had to go through all that trouble at a young age.
+
[00:16:29] Citizen Cosmos: It makes a lot of sense, in my opinion. I don't remember what book it was, but the author explained the coding starting from mathematics. He said we use the decimal system because we have ten fingers. If it were a dolphin, he would use 2. And if you teach a kid any other method, apart from the decimal, they will immediately know them as adults. They will learn to count on all of them. So I can imagine that knowing what's under the hood makes you understand much better what's on the application level and what's not at the application level.
+
[00:17:10] Mark: I agree with that.
+
[00:17:13] Citizen Cosmos: When did you first encounter blockchain technology?
+
[00:17:18] Mark: I think I encountered it in 2012 but didn't bend on it. I got interested when it started to become programmable at the time when Bitcoin was just starting to get its capabilities. I was also looking at some other technology. I forget what it was even called.
+
[00:17:50] Citizen Cosmos: Did you buy into the tokens, or did you not participate in the trading?
+
[00:18:06] Mark: I participated in the Ethereum crowd sale. So that was a good thing? On the other hand, if Microtick was implemented on a theory, it might need to have some coins to pay for gas. So I wanted to have some for sure.
+
[00:18:24] Citizen Cosmos: And talking about implementations and Ethereum, I did have more questions. Now that you mentioned the project, I understand it’s moving from Tendermint to Ethereum, right?
+
[00:18:40] Mark: Well, we have not decided on a layer for the chain as it moves forward. What we're trying to do is to move away from the chain. The project lacks the resources to run and maintain Tendermint and Cosmos SDK for a week. The SDK is excellent. It makes it easy to develop your rules. You must ensure that your chain is always on the reasonably recent tip of the development chain because incompatibilities and things like that could be introduced. There are many requirements for maintenance and chain maintenance. That we just don't have. The project has not evolved to that point yet. So we felt it would be the best and most beneficial to the project to pivot it away from having to maintain our chain and move towards something that might be a little bit more self-contained while we're still trying to get adoption. And at the same time, we have token holders, and we realized that. So many people have invested in the project, and we want to be fair to them. And so we came up with a way to hopefully do that still but adequately allow us to allocate some tokens for fundraising. That's the one thing Microtick has never done: raise funds for the project. It's been bootstrapped from day one and then volunteer up to this point. And at some point, maybe it would make sense to move on and create something a bit more formal to support the development. A lot of that depends on proving out the concept, proving out the code. I think we've done that with the current chain, and although it never got a lot of adoption, I think I'm pretty comfortable that the idea can work, whereas before, I wasn't. I think we've accomplished something, but it is time for a pivot because we need to make sure that we are realistic about the resources we can invest in maintaining.
+
[00:20:39] Citizen Cosmos: This is an honest answer and makes a lot of sense, in my opinion. I have been launching projects before, so I know how much money they eat. Does Microtick have a community pool currently, or does it not?
+
[00:20:54] Mark: It does. Yeah, there's a community pool. Unfortunately, the token, along with every other token, seems to through quite a bit of selling pressure over the last 6 to 12 months.
+
[00:21:06] Citizen Cosmos: Percentage-wise, what's the amount of the funds in the community pool? That could be used as a bonding curve and raise fines. Why on Ethereum?
+
[00:21:20] Mark: Microtick is going away. The project will become DiscoveryDEX. The communities voted on that. And so we've got a logo set up and a website starting to be set up. We've got a Discord channel that's going to be public soon. There have been many people helping out with that, which I greatly appreciate. Thanks, guys. What we're going to do is one of the things that we want to do since you brought up automated market-making Microtick. We learned how it currently works that market makers must come up with their price assertions. They also have to come up with some sort of an idea of what is a fair price for volatility in that is what the option premium is because when you specify a premium, you're saying, “I am pricing the current market volatility at this price over this time duration.” And that's how you come up with your price assertion. And the problem with that is nobody understands that, or at least very few people understand it. It makes it much harder to bring people into the market when they have to understand these esoteric concepts. So we're trying to do Microtick version two to move the premium pricing part away from market-makers competing into a liquidity pool approach. That's more of an automated market maker type approach where the premium moves up or down based on whether people are buying or selling tip on the market. Market makers will no longer have to come up with their tips. They just contribute liquidity into a pool and then contribute their assertions. Everything else would work the same when trades get moved from the liquidity pool into the collateral pool. The current protocol works like this: when the transaction happens, the individual market maker that's backing the business has all the risk of price movement over that timeframe. Instead of creating the automated market maker, we're going to make a collateral pool where that risk is democratized among everybody involved in the trade. You no longer have a chance against a specific trade over a specific time duration. Still, you're involved in a collateral pool where if a bad trade happens, it's shared among everybody, but at the same time, profit is also shared between parties. And so it's just a way of creating a way to offset some of that risk encountered with my particulars.
+
[00:23:57] Citizen Cosmos: So as Microtick moves to whichever layer, it will become more like a service, like a content oracle. Or will it be an application as well of its own?
+
[00:24:18] Mark: Initially, it will be just the price discovery. One of the interesting things about Microtick is we decouple the price discovery part of markets from the trading part of markets. And to my knowledge, I've not seen that done anywhere else. And it's so it's fairly unique, but I think we've got that kind of a concept working on the current year. It's documented on the website how it will work as we move to the DiscoveryDEX version two. If you can get your price discovery based on option pricing, you can then trade your actual tokens or whatever your asset is using futures. And the two can be hedged against each other in a natural way that allows you to create market prices that can be discovered in an independent set of smart contracts. And then, we can do the futures trading as a separate set of smart contracts that use the Oracle price generated from the first set of smart contracts for the futures price. And what happens when you do that is you come up with a stable price discovery mechanism based on Oracles and averaging that can be hedged against your AMMS that are sitting out there. Suppose we're trading futures on a set of tokens, and then your AMM calls it a unit swap, and you're trading the same tokens. Now you've got offsetting positions that you can do. You can arbitrage between those two markets, but at the same time, you can hedge against your Oracle price. So it's a different way of arriving at the same result, but we think it will be a more stable price discovery process. Having the two markets side by side will benefit both because it's a liquidity engine for both because of the potential for arbitrage. Suppose you have a pump over a short timeframe, and the price DiscoveryDEX price is lagging because it's an average. That will tend to happen naturally just because you have market makers that don't all update their quotes simultaneously. Therefore, your price on the Microtick market is lagging price on the AMM has pumped because all of a sudden, you've had the alignment of everybody buying at the same time, driving the price up. Now there's an arbitrage opportunity between the Microtick price and the AMM price, which will tend to bring selling into that market. It'll bring buying into the Microtick market, bringing the two prices naturally together without the market makers having to quickly jump on it. Update their prices like you would have to with a typical Oracle. And so the fact that you can hedge the price on the Microtick market is an advantage over a traditional Oracle.
+
[00:27:06] Citizen Cosmos: As far as I understand the plans of Ethereum, technically, Microtick can still have its chain in the future.
+
[00:27:20] Mark: If we have a standard backing token, and that's the idea of the discovery token, that token can be used as the same backing across multiple chains. Because it's just an average, you can combine the liquidity from multiple chains simply because it's just math. It's not like an order book; combining an order book might be very complicated because you've got to take all the orders. It becomes intractable quickly because all the orders on one chain would have to be combined with all the orders on the other chain. And as you do that, you might get markets or whatever else. So it's a complicated process. But when you're just working with an average, it's two calculations. You can combine the average on one chain with the average on the other to arrive at a combined price.
+
[00:28:15] Citizen Cosmos: And I imagine by the time the development will come to the point of production, l imagine there will be some proper bridge, and it will allow executing contracts from Ethereum to Cosmos? How long do we have to wait for that?
+
[00:28:38] Mark: It's hard to say. That would be exciting. I think that's probably the next challenge facing blockchain technology in general because chains will not go away. How do you combine and make it work, no matter which chain you use? How do you offer services that are compatible and interoperable?
+
[00:28:57] Citizen Cosmos: I have some more questions about Microtick. A lot of the time, we have founders and CEOs, and we ask them questions about the projects about the history. You've said where you started, why, and how you ended up in Cosmos. But you also mentioned the lack of funds and like quite a humble way of doing the basic work in a volunteer way and never having to raise funds. What would you advise or not advisable to do or not do?
+
[00:29:39] Mark: Well, it is what it is. It came together the way it did because of the people involved. Every project will be distinct because you have different people involved in different projects. But in our case, I can't necessarily advise other projects because I don't know what their situations are, but I can say I'm comfortable with where the project is headed. Evolving has been slower because we didn't take the funding approach. I didn't want to take that approach because I didn't necessarily want to approach it as a centralized entity. Initially, we had a for-profit company, and we tried that approach, talking to exchanges, but it didn't work so well. But then you get to blockchain technology. And what happens if you open something like that up? And if you can attract developers and things in a decentralized manner, it's kind of an experiment. Will this result in something that is viable, or will it just fall flat on its face? Due to a lack of resources, the current chain has done well. We'll pick it up and pivot while being fair to the token holders. We've got some ideas to move it, eliminate a lot of the complexity, and see where it goes. I've always said that it's a riskier technology because it wasn't proven when the Microtick chain was first started. We had no idea whether it would be a stable, viable process or whether people would want to use it. And we did some experiments internally, and we got feedback that once people understood it, they thought it was enjoyable. So I think it has potential, but we must figure out how to present it better.
+
[00:31:40] Citizen Cosmos: I was going to say that even though I'm a token holder, and that's a simple thing to say, I think what you're saying is quite important because I would rather see a project with value. And it's coming in a decentralized way. And sometimes I can see a lot of projects, which started as one, changing towards the worst as they go. So I would instead take the loss. I didn't mean to develop but stay true to its values and cores that initially attracted me to this idea rather than make profits. But in a way that makes you think if it is a fair way to make a profit, the advice I hear from you is to stay true to your ideas.
+
[00:32:49] Mark: Interestingly, you say that. If we were to go out and try to get all this funding and become a centralized entity with my values, there would be a disconnect, and I think that's a direction I'm interested in. I mean, I've opened up this project. The company Microtick LLC was disbanded at the end of last year, and the patents we had have been abandoned formerly, and we're not paying for any maintenance on those or anything. So this project has opened up, and someone else's wants to come in and may be motivated to lead up a centralized entity like that that would do development. I would love that that would be something that I would contribute. But that's not my personality type. It's not something I'm particularly interested in. At this point, I've done startups before and didn't have much fun with them. So I think you must be true to your values and understand your objectives. And in this case, Microtick has been an experiment from day one, and there have been no guarantees. I've put tons of time into it in resources, but it is what it is. If it succeeds, it will not be just me doing it. It's got to have other people involved. And so I've opened it up, and let's see what happens, I guess.
+
[00:34:05] Citizen Cosmos: I think that's the right way. This is my personality type as well. I guess we kind of meet each other's values here, but it's unfortunate to see, I know that maybe some people aren't like what I'm saying. Over the years, I've not seen many people in blockchain stay true to their values. I'm not saying that blockchain has to follow the centralization philosophy. Those are two separate things, but it's nice to see that there are still projects and people who stay true to those ideas. And I think it's very important because if we didn't have that, there would be no balance between how the technology is developing. Mark, one last question. What keeps you motivated?
+
[00:35:26] Mark: I think it's a little bit just like with Microtick, the idea of spending so much time thinking about it. It's hard to put it down. And so I just naturally start thinking the ways of how can we improve that? How can we make the markets better? And since then, it's evolved in how we can improve blockchain technology? And how can we take the lessons we've learned and apply them in slightly different ways to solve problems that maybe other people haven't thought about. So problem-solving is number one, with maybe just a touch of competition and saying it can't be done.
+
[00:36:02] Citizen Cosmos: That's a great answer! I love it. Thank you for coming. I'm looking forward to seeing how it's going to develop.
+
[00:36:15] Mark: Sounds good. I hope it was helpful for everybody that's listening!
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here)
Microtick: a guide to move from Cosmos to Ethereum
+
Dear Cosmonauts, while recording a new episode of the podcast with Mark Jackson (the founder of Microtick), we have found out that, unfortunately,
+the Microtick network will be halted on the 1st of August. After this, the project will be named DiscoveryDEX and will be moved to L2 Blockchain (probably ETH).
+Therefore, all TICK holders are to claim their tokens for the future DiscoveryDEX token. We have prepared a simple guide for you, both in video and text versions.
+More detailed information you can find out in our episode.
+
Please find here the original guide from the DAO team.
+
Video guide
+
+
Text guide
+
+
Step 1
+
+
Please go to frontier. Open Assets and find the TICK token.
+
+
+
Step 2
+
+
Push - Withdraw and approve connection
+
+
+
Step 3
+
+
Then please enter the amount (in our case, press MAX) and approve the transaction.
+
+
+
Step 4
+
+
Go to Microtick app and push “Keplr Browser Extension”
+
+
+
Step 5
+
+
Approve connection.
+
+
+
Step 6
+
+
You should see your balance.
+
+
+
Step 7
+
+
Push “Validators” in the left menu and find - the DiscoveryDEX validator. The owner of this Validator is the DAO team.
+
+
+
Step 8
+
+
Push on the Validator, and you must stake your tokens to this validator. If you previously staked with Bro n Bro or any other validator, you must redelegate your tokens.
+
+
+
Step 9
+
+
Enter all amounts by clicking “Max” (but leave a minimal amount for commission)
+
+
+
Step 10
+
+
Push send.
+
+
+
Step 11
+
+
The most crucial part is that in the Keplr window, you need to approve the transaction, but YOU NEED TO WRITE IN MEMO FIELD YOUR ETH ADDRESS.
In explorer, please check the amount, validator, and memo.
+
+
+
Step 14
+
+
Suppose you have forgotten to write an ETH address in the MEMO field. Don’t worry. You can do it again.
+To do this, you need to send the 0.000001 amount of the TICK to the following address:
+micro1ee05vm4kw8yp2avx8gpxegynpytl5g5hfrexhm (autodelegation for DiscoveryDEX val) with the MEMO : TX of the delegation operation transaction - (same ETH address) .
+
+
Step 14.1
+
+
Open KEPLR and make transactions.
+
+
+
+
Step 14.2
+
+
Please check your transaction in explorer.
+
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:
On July 18th, the ecosystem dwellers witnessed the start of the Evmos Momentum Hackathon that will last till August 31st. It is the first Evmos event with this number of participants, prize budget, and partners. Web3Scholarship is leading the hackathon to build the Evmos Ecosystem. We at Citizen Cosmos, being Evmos validators, naturally follow each step of the hackathon and decided to share helpful information with you!
+
The purpose of the Hackathon is to seed and support the development of the Evmos ecosystem. The total prize pool is $500,000, split between the grand prize, track prizes, and EVM migration awards. Additional funding opportunities are available from Huobi Incubators and partners.
+
The Hackathon includes five prize categories:
+
Infrastructure. The prize subject for this category can be anything that contributes to developing tools and frameworks for cross-compatibility chains and provides a base and supports for applications to evolve. The winner will have to show the world which way the ecosystem should go!
+
DeFi. In this category, the participant should try and answer: What if a smart contract can eliminate loopholes and attacks by removing security vulnerabilities from its design? What has been introduced to the financial world that can leverage the Evmos blockchain? How can we put tokens and NFTs into the world of open, transparent, and decentralized transaction platforms? The desired winning project is a financial vehicle or service that is asynchronous and capable of expanding the reach of decentralized finance.
+
Metaverse, NFT & GameFi. The submission must incorporate a system or code framework that can lead to or support the construction of a metaverse. It can be the base of a metaverse or a story in the form of NFT, GameFi, etc. The metaverse should obtain a purpose and be expandable!
+
Web 3. This category aims for decentralized projects like DAO or SocialFi, which incorporate a form of split ownership within the community.
+
For the categories mentioned above, the prizes are as follows:
+1st Prize — $50,000 + Demo Day Opportunity + Funding Opportunity
+2nd Prize — $30,000 + Demo Day Opportunity + Funding Opportunity
+3rd Prize — $20,000 + Demo Day Opportunity + Funding Opportunity
+
EVM Migration Award. This prize category is for the projects that will take the initiative to bring solid solutions to the Evmos ecosystem. The two winning projects will gain $10,000 each.
+
There is also the Grand Champion award for the submission, which the judging panel will deem to be the strongest of all submissions. The project should solve a real problem in the Evmos ecosystem, and the solution should be able to be utilized in a short amount of time and scaled up. The award recipient will receive $80,000!
+The Momentum Hackathon also includes a series of educational workshops on building and launching projects on Evmos. Moreover, each week there is AMA for Q&A sessions.
+The team of judges for the contest is also pretty impressive! Among the jury members of the Hackathon are Praneeth Srikanti, the investment partner of Ethereal Ventures; Rain&Coffee, the research analyst from Maven11 Capital; Jim Parillo, the general partner of Figment Capital; Liam, the business development manager from Evmos, and many more!
+
We highly encourage you to follow the Evmos Momentum Hackathon because it’s a grand event for both Evmos and the entire ecosystem that will contribute to the significant and ongoing process of building the decentralized community!
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:
Episode name:
+Spaydh, sustainability, value & Interchain security
+
+
+
Transcript of the Episode:
+
[00:01:40] Citizen Cosmos: Hi, everybody! Welcome to a new episode of Citizen Cosmos, today I have Spaydh with me from Neutron. I don't know if you guys heard about it or not, but if you haven't, it means you're going to hear all about it today, and if you have - even better because you're going to find out more stuff about it. Spaydh, man, hi, and welcome to the show!
+
[00:02:00] Spaydh: Hey! Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.
+
[00:02:03] Citizen Cosmos: I am thrilled actually because Neutron is on the tip of the tongue of a lot of people, so I would like to talk about that, of course, but also I would like to talk a little bit more about you and about what you do, and what you're planning. So the first thing is first to introduce yourself in your own words. What do you do, and what is Neutron?
+
[00:02:26] Spaydh: Sure. So I am deputy general manager at Neutron, which means I get to do everything that is not development related. The way our team works is that we have 11 devs right now, plus me, so I do everything else. In a few words, Neutron is a small contract platform that is interchain secured by the Cosmos Hub, which means it shares its benefits from the security of the Cosmos Hub in exchange for which it provides revenue to the Cosmos Hub. That small contract platform has a few features which allow you to easily create cross-chain protocols that act as if they were just one protocol. In a unit matter, essentially through interesting accounts, through interesting queries which allow you to control accounts on other blockchains, execute transactions, track execution stages, and also receive data about that blockchain in a trust-minimized manner over IBC.
+
[00:03:20] Citizen Cosmos: That's cool, man! You guys have incorporated all the rewards to do with interest, and we’ll talk about all those things in a little bit. I know you guys are incubated by P2P, and I have a lot of connections to that, Constantine particularly, of course, was a guest on our podcast, and we've worked together for years and years before. So what's your story, man? How did you get Neutron? How did you get into blockchain?
+
[00:04:10] Spaydh: I guess what got me into crypto was that since 2013 with Snowden’s revelations about various government programs that were doing a large-scale collection of data across the world, not just in the US but in various countries with my conviction that computers and code would take a more and more important place in our lives, I’ve been very interested in computing systems but also privacy as a question of how do you know what balance do you need. I was interested in all of this, and during my long nights on the internet, I found out about Bitcoin. It was 2016 or 2017. I was pretty young at the time. Then I ended up finding out about Etherium, and then I realized I can make a wall computer and put tons of stuff on it. I was sold on the idea, but I had just 30$ in my pocket per month, so I didn’t become a millionaire in the next bull market. But that’s what’s got me hooked. I like the idea of Bitcoin removing the intermediaries between financial transactions. I'm not a big fan of the banks like a lot of people here in this system, so to me, the idea that you could make a shared computer that was fully decentralized across the world was also really cool. All of these things got me into crypto, but then I was still doing my studies, I was traveling, I was working as a journalist across the world, and I was following from a distance what was going on until DeFi summer and twenty 2021, mostly when I started hearing about it a bit more, so that piqued my interest. I came back and found my old wallet in which there was 200$ of Ethereum, and I had a reason to go back hard on this, and then suddenly, Ethereum had completely changed. There were dozens of apps on top of Ethereum that you could use to do various DeFi stuff, and so suddenly, you could have a full-time job just researching what was going on. So that's basically what I did. At the time, I was living in Thailand already but working as a teacher, so I would teach English during the day and then research crypto basically as a full-time job at night, so I became a very involved community member in Ethereum and also in Terra at the time and ripped my portfolio. But the whole thing about that is that because Terra was much smaller in terms of how many people were interacting, there any people who have established it allowed me to very quickly meet a lot of the people who were actively engaged in the ecosystem. I started participating, helping produce the briefs of what was said, giving them to the community so that people who had missed the calls could still have that information, and participating on the forums. So the way I got professionally into crypto was that one day there was this proposal on the anchor for about updating SD Luna with a new version of the liquid staking derivative to SD Luna and at the end of this post, there was this small mention that of you think you have skills that we could use, just send us a message and let's chat. And so I thought perhaps there's something that could be done, so I did message them, and we chatted for a while, and that's how I started as a community manager later at Terra. The confusing thing here is that actually, my employer has been PGP from the start because the way it works is that Lido as a DAO is a pretty big organization that coordinates everything that happens across all of Lido. Still, in terms of development and active management, it's mostly focused on Ethereum Ecosystem, including l1s and l2s as well and so to be able to expand to have that bandwidth with a limited amount of devs. What Lido does is often enter contractual relationships with other teams through governance, and so teams like this include P2P and Chorus 1 but also others who have done the deployment on Polkadot polygon, Salona, Terra, and so the way it works is that we'll give you some Lido tokens to create imitation and then if you can reach some degree of market cap you will get a bonus to motivate you to maintain and grow the protocol. P2P had this kind of agreement with Lido for later on Terra, and so that's why I joined PHP as a community team manager. So the rest is history, but basically, the team that was making Lido on Terra was also researching how to make proper liquid staking in Cosmos, and in the course of their research, they found a lot of ideas. Their thesis was that we would like to do it as a smart contract, and we need some technical prerequisites for this to be possible and so which platform allows us to do this? There are many platforms in Cosmos, but none of them allows you to meet these requirements right now and so we shared a lot within P2P, and so all of these criteria and these things that were blocking Lido spread through the org and the realization. If one protocol like Lido is blocked on this lack of security, lack of ability to interact with the blockchains via inquiries and retrieve data from other blockchains. It’s very likely there are other protocols that could deploy on Cosmos that can't because they don't have access to these premises that they would be interested in having to deploy in Cosmos. And so from there, we can't have started thinking if we could technically build a blockchain that does this for one protocol. We could build. This was just the light of the team, but how about we take this and we make it a product that everybody can deploy? so that's how the idea of a Neutron was born, and then we started working on it for months until prop 72 hit the forums, and it aligned with what we wanted for a Neutron. We wanted to be intersecured because we saw it as one way of having much higher security from the get-go but also as a way to have a very close alignment with the rest of the ecosystem. We’re aligned by default. That means if the Neutron goes rogue or becomes hurtful to the rest of the ecosystem, it's very easy for the hub to pull the plug at the same time. The Hub should not be incentivized to pull the plug off the Neutron because if the Neutron is successful it should be driving a ton of revenue to add to Atom takers and you have this very nice property here that is that we have to cooperate. It's all about corporation essentially, so that's my story and Neutron’s in a nutshell.
+
[00:10:48] Citizen Cosmos: That's pretty cool that the role of Neutron is cooperation because blockchains are a lot about reaching consensus. Whether it's a cooperation of
+nodes, a cooperation of governance, or the cooperation of actors in whatever ecosystem is in question. Another question. You said that you were quite young when you got into the whole Bitcoin topic, and the question is: was that still school-age or after? The reason I’m asking is that I’ve been going through this topic with a lot of guests about how the adoption level of crypto turns around the world. I think one cool measurement for that is to see whether people got into it in school already or when they already had jobs.
+
[00:12:08] Spaydh: I remember buying my first Bitcoin on Coinbase in the queue to my high school cafeteria.
+
[00:12:16] Citizen Cosmos: That to me means that adoption is happening and happening, especially among the generation that, in my opinion, can do something with it. I'm sorry to everybody and including my generation here, but I think it’s more important that this happens like that and not only by your employer or something like that. Let's go back to the topic, but that was a very curious kind of thing to see how it evolved.
+
[00:12:41] Spaydh: I agree. The age of people when they discover crypto is an interesting metric.
+
[00:12:46] Citizen Cosmos: It’s for developers as well. The first time I saw this was in Cyber house. It was a place in Minsk, Belarussia, in 2015 or 2016 where Constantine and other
+people used to meet. I remember there was a developer, a kid essentially. He was 14 and was already into smart contracts. And that’s when I thought: “Yeah, it’s working!”
+
[00:13:24] Spaydh: What do you think about 12 y/o kid from the USA, I think, who made millions selling NFTs? I think his name is Pixel Whales.
+
[00:13:46] Citizen Cosmos: Yeah, it was cool. I also recently saw on Twitter it was Josh Lee’s post about a 12 y/o kid called Badkidsart who draws Cosmos now, as far as I know. Back to cooperation. You're welcome to talk about Lido and Neutron in this case. What are your thoughts in general on the decentralization of stake? There is a lot of talk about Lido and a lot of talk about Ethereum. What are your thoughts in general? Because you guys have been somehow involved in all those stories. What can be done about that?
+
[00:15:40] Spaydh: That's a million-dollar question! First, before we talk about it, I want to clarify that the Neutron itself does not deal with stage validators. It’s interchain secured. The Cosmos Hub does that. Neutron doesn’t separate products, it’s a smart contract platform. Lido is a liquid staking protocol. There’s a smart contract that will most likely launch on top of Neutron. What I'm going to say now is my personal belief. I've been in touch with validators and Lido’s node operator group. My take on this is that the way the staking mechanisms work and most blockchains do tend to centralize take, and that's for multiple reasons. Some of
+them are fairly trivial. But there are more profound centralizing forces when it comes to state distribution, and that's the fact that not all validators have access to the same communication channels, PR, but also not all of them have access to the same order flow, and I think that's
+the most significant point here is that if you're Coinbase, Binance, or Kraken, you already have a user base and that user base is pretty huge. If they're going to be holding those tokens because they're speculating on them or they're taking a long position on them they're going to be holding these tokens in your platform, they might as well just yield on them, and so you can make this very easy for them and even make it more comfortable than delegating directly at the blockchain’s level because what you can do is you can have a one-click process, or you choose your token you stake amount that you want, and then if you want to withdraw you can do it instantly because instead of staking everything though their validator they can keep a small part of it as a soothing pool kind of so that you can withdraw at any time. So you don't even have to care about the bonding period unless everybody is leaving on drugs and so the house streamlined the process is how comfortable it is for you as a staker: you don't have to care about the morning period, you don't have to care about government, you don't have to care about anything really. You can just be speculating and earning a yield on stuff that gives a tremendous advantage to this kind of entity who is able to have a vertically integrated business model when it comes to staking. And so what we see is that centralizing changes have grown pretty fat on most of the blockchains they operate on, and that's even without liquid staking. So you stake and get the yield, but you don't actually even get a token that you can use in other platforms. Coinbase was the first one to recently enable this for Coinbase Eth, and the success of it now is pretty tremendous. It's the fastest-growing liquid-taking derivative in Ethereum, and so obviously some of it is probably just people who were already staking with Coinbase but now are also getting the derivative, but some of it is most likely new growth as well. So the idea is that you need decentralized alternatives to centralize staking offers, and you need that alternative to be competitive enough to actually meet that demand so that the absolute share of centralized actors represented in state distribution doesn't grow at least is crucial. So how do you make it competitive? Well, I guess there are two things about this. The first one is that it needs to be able to scale with a demand for taking and not be limited by kind its internal way of dealing with a stake. That's mostly relevant to Ethereum, but it's also relevant to Cosmos. You want your product to be able to scale, that might include you being able to onboard new zones quickly although that's probably not where you'll find the most competition from the most centralized actors because they take a while before they list new chains, but anyway you need the protocol to scale, you need to have a perfect token, a good derivative that is well integrated so that people want to have this token, use it, hold it, and you need the validator set underneath to be robust, and that's for multiple reasons. The first one is that if your validator set management is really bad, you're going to hurt the network and so either you are going to destroy the network, you're participating in thereby also destroying your value or the network itself in its community will react before that happens hopefully and will either fork you out or find a way to stop you from hurting the network. So the first thing and the second thing is that your token is only as good as your validator set because if you have a shitty validator set with tons of validators who get jailed and others who get slashed, the APR of your liquid second derivative is not going to be competitive and it might even go negative if you're really bad. So to sustain a good token you need a good validator set and have all of these things that can contribute to improving the concentration of the state. So that's on the liquid staking. In terms of the way we do blockchains in general I think having lower requirements to become a validator is a good thing. We see on Etherium that the 32 Eth requirement has been a tremendous barrier to smaller validators which have been Ethereum. His vision of Ethereum should be evaluated eventually. It should run on your phone. We're going to make it as lightweight as possible. I think this vision has tremendous value though Ethereum is very far from that state right now, and I think in Cosmos we have to deal with the limitations of tendermint which is now as you increase the size of the set you increase latency and it stops working so efficiently. So that's one of the main hiccups there, and so in the meantime, before we figure out a way that we can have no larger sets, which would be nice, there are interesting initiatives like cyborg a couple of months back led this initiative where they were trying to make some ranking of various interfaces so that people would have access to differentiated tools and differentiated lists of validators with different profiles so that people can select validators based on their priorities without having three years of research. I think that's really the key point, you need the information to be available, and you need people to have access to it as easily as possible because the barrier the difference between staking with a liquid it a centralized provider and staking on your own is already massive and so we need to do everything that we can to make it as easy as possible whilst providing as much information as possible but also recognizing that it will most probably never be possible to actually give all of the relevant information publicly because some of the information that is relevant to actually making rational decisions about who to stake with is information that is really critical to the validators business for example which direct jurisdiction are they under, which country are they in, which server they use, what's their set up. That might be the best practice that should be shared, but you also might see it as a competitive advantage. If you have a better setup that is more efficient then you don't really want to share that information necessarily and so for various reasons like their personal safety, the safety of their business or their competitive advantage, or even the security of their infrastructure because for all these reasons validator will most probably not be fully comfortable sharing all of the information that is required to make a dedicated decision. Even if they did, most people would not have the time to actually go that in-depth, make charts about where the validators are distributed in the world, and then aggregate stake based on this. This is not something that is available to just anyone. I guess I'm somewhat deep in the context, I would still not be able to do that, so it's unrealistic to expect people to go that deep.
+
[00:23:40] Citizen Cosmos: It's interesting that we came to that from that question because in Citizen Cosmos one of the targets and goals that we have is to try, and we have the biggest databases. I'm talking about interviews with the top founders of validators and asking about their motivation. Not just what's their setting and setup, because these are private questions that lead to security issues but looking at those blockchains as digital nations and looking at those validators as businesses who build on those nations, then I want to know as the citizen of that nation what is this business building in my nation. I want to know whether this business is building an atomic bomb in there or whether they're putting that money back into work, for example building an IMM Zone which would benefit me more and that's what we try to go into, and especially when we have validators, we have now a separate thing. We do streams with validators where we try to get their profile but you're right that people have no time to listen to an hour-long interview. It's a big balance of weights, it is hard to understand which way it goes.
+Let's get back in a slightly different angle and talk a little bit more about Neutron and a little
+bit more about the major topics out there. I’m going to quote Neutron’s Twitter. It says “permissionless CosmWasm gateway. Could you explain what it is?
+
[00:26:05] Spaydh: That's a good question. So CosmWasm is a virtual machine, it's basically a way that your blockchain can take pieces of code that have been written by other people that are not directly in the blockchain itself and run them to produce products and services or make a pretty pictures or whatever you want. The interesting thing about Cosmos is that it's a module that you can put into your blockchain and so that module you can choose for it to be permissioned or permissionless. If you’re permissioned, that means that for somebody to deploy a piece of code that can get executed in that virtual machine, they have to go through governance first. That is usually seen as a way to either improve the security of the zone by having some people review the code before it's deployed or a way to only select the protocols that complement your zone the best, which makes a lot of sense especially for app chains. Osmosis is doing it and makes perfect sense, it doesn't need to have a very complex DeFi protocol that has nothing to do with their trading engine and so what they want is to have other programs that come and complement very closely and make symbiosis with their main product. Essentially the permissionless version of it is that anyone can come and work on your small contract, you're ready to deploy it while you can deploy it on your own you make a few transactions, and then your contract starts existing on the blockchain. The point here is that we're building a whole ecosystem, not just one product that we want to complement with plugins. We want to give anybody access to the IBC technologies that allow you to interact with other blockchains very closely. So because of it, there is very little sense for us in asking people to go through the loops of governance, presenting the whole thing. They can release a smart
+contract, if they found vulnerabilities in them, they can migrate them to a new version where they patch it. They don't have to wait two weeks or whatever governance delay in between. And so if they improve their product or if they fix issues can just iterate and get better. Essentially, over time and the overhead in terms of the developer experience is much lower. Now, the gateway to IBC part means that there are a few ideas but one of them is that building an app chain today is much easier than ever, but it's still not a trivial amount of work. You need to learn how the Cosmos works and the rest down the line if you want to have small contracts and bootstrap your validator set and the market cap of your token so that your zone is secure, etc. There are a ton of considerations, and if you don't need an app chain or don't have the means to have an app chain, then you can still enter Cosmos by just releasing a smart contract on Neutron. So it's a gateway because it is an easier way to enter a Cosmos than spending up your whole blockchain. However, it's also a gateway because once you're on Neutron, you still get access to all the technologies that app chains enjoy. Also, to all of the other zones that IBC connects, not only can you transfer tokens, you can also execute transactions on every ICA blockchain, but can also retrieve data from any IBC blockchain. So you can come to Cosmos on Neutron and enjoy the full
+ecosystem.
+
[00:29:36] Citizen Cosmos: It's interesting that you mentioned several things while explaining the interesting accounts and queries. I think Neutron is mentioned in the white paper 2.0 of Atom. Was that deliberate? Were you guys waiting to build those things? Were you trying to align the release of the protocol and the tesnet’s active nets with the release of the
+white paper? Or were you just piling the good technologies and putting them all together?
+
[00:26:05] Spaydh: No, actually, we had zero visibility into the progress of Atom 2.0 to point itself just like any other cosmonauts we were looking forward to it because exciting ways that aligned with Cosmos vision to drive value to Atom is kind of an interesting topic, but at the same
+time we weren't actively involved in it, we didn't have an idea of the timeline, so we didn't build our road map with that in mind. The main thing for us was interchain security because we didn't want to launch on our own value set and then fire that validator set and then go to the validator set of the Cosmos Hub we wanted to be intersecured from the start. So if we built our roadmap around anything, it's most probably intersecurity. Now, in terms of Atom 2.0, I think
+that there's a lot of potentials. Obviously, there are a lot of risks as well. That amount of money if it's misappropriated or if the government system is that control it is poorly designed, there are a lot of bad things that could happen. At the same time, if we get it right, implement the right systems, and come to a consensus about how this will work, then I think there's tremendous potential. The allocator, for example, is something that synergizes tremendously well with Neutron because, essentially, you can have the Hub that has an enormous treasury, and that treasury can be deployed to bootstrap the best projects and products or even create different systems that would not be possible in other circumstances because the actors that would benefit from these systems would not have access to that amount of capital. For example, you can allow a money market to re-hypothecate the collateral by liquid staking that collateral. The problem is when the collateral needs to be recalled, then you have a 21 day, you need to unstake and then that takes 21 or you need to sell to the market but you might not get price parity so you might actually take losses on your rehabilitation that's something that you want to avoid, and so what can be done here is that potentially that protocle could take a loan from the allocator for some capita, keep it as not staked tokens into price stability module and
+then when they need to unwind the positions they basically swap through this at price parity and then what the module does is just that it unstakes and then waits to 21 days and then it gets essentially all the tokens back but the protocole is able to generate more revenue without increasing the risk and the price parity is not taking on risk either because it's just unstaking stuff and waiting and the Cosmos Hub itself is getting an interest rate on that capital that has been deployed and so as long as the money market is able to generate more than the interest rate charged by the locator then that's a benefit for everybody, the Hub gets money, the product gets money, Neutron gets transaction fees so everybody is happy basically.
+
[00:33:10] Citizen Cosmos: Do you think the interchange allocator will help make chains more community pools rather than chains more sustainable in the long run? What I mean is that a few years ago, there were a lot of examples where we saw DAOs buying DAOs with one project swapping with another project, tokens inside a community pool and that, in my opinion, makes the community pool a bit more sustainable because it's a bit more diversified then now instead of having just IBC or just Atom in the community pool and be open to the risks of a bear market. Let's say, in five years when the chain is much bigger in terms of decentralization, and the community will only sustain a certain amount of money. That money is only an Atom, and a bear market happens. Of course, we're going to have trouble because the price of Atom is fallen. It's not diversified enough. A good example is what is happening now. If the Atom community was to diversify the community pool during the bull market when Atom was at a higher price, the community pool currently could have a lot more money in it to develop the chain to feed more developers to feed more projects. So the question is: what features like the interchange allocator could it help to achieve with the abilities it has theoretically in an easier manner?
+
[00:34:46] Spaydh: I think it makes sense. It depends on diversifying. Selling some of the tokens of a zone during the peak of the bull market, ideally to stablecoins makes sense because these are not going to decrease in value when the bear market comes but diversifying to other tokens from other projects, I don't think is very efficient in terms of protecting the value of the community pool in terms of a bear market for the simple reasons that most assets in crypto are very correlated. Most assets in Cosmos are even more correlated, so the same tide raises or lowers all ships. It is especially true since Atom is the most liquid, established token, so it might not suffer from the bear market as much as other least established project tokens. So, diversifying can be useful, but you need to do it carefully because you don't want to buy stable coins at the bottom of the bear market. So getting tokens from other projects into your community pool is a great thing to do, but not for protecting the value of your token and rather for establishing diplomatic relationships between projects. What you want to do is you want to have close alignment with the projects that you can energize with, and so one way you can do this is by making sure that they benefit from you, increasing in value, and you benefit from them increasing in value. So that’s the way I see it, not like a portfolio management thing.
+
[00:36:20] Citizen Cosmos: Although it wouldn't be that bad buying Atom or Ethereum at 10 cents. That would be a good purchase if you could do it. The next question is, what would be, in your opinion, a good way to help community pools to cure value in the long run? Neutron is, as you mentioned, all about bringing value to not just its holders but to Atom and the Cosmos. So in your opinion, what could be those ways, or what are you guys planning to do in Neutron to cure that value and attract that value that will benefit everybody else?
+
[00:37:06] Spaydh: So I think right now we're in the phase where we're bootstrapping the ecosystem, and so that's the phase of a project where essentially your network doesn't have that many users and projects yet, and so the appeal of joining the network is fairly low. In traditional start-ups, we refer to this as the cold start problem when you need to start the engine, but you know it's not already running by itself, so it's much more difficult than just keeping it running so in this specific phase of the project most likely what we're going to do is we're going to give grants to projects that we think are promising to incentivize the first adopters, to start and build the foundations of the system. It's likely that you will have some very fundamental primitives. One of the models that makes sense for bootstrapping a zone is choosing a team that you can trust, that has demonstrated their abilities already built interesting products or even preferably built that kind of product, a team that, by doing your due diligence, you have a fairly high confidence that they will deliver something incredible. Then you give them a significant amount of the zone tokens. These tokens would be locked for investing for a long period but they get this incentive. So if you build these cool premises, other people develop and build on top of it. Then, not only am I generating a business that hopefully makes sense and is profitable, but I'm also creating value for the zone. Because I have a large stake in the zone, that will also be profitable. But those strategic protocols should be removable by governments, and that should be something that should be known and well said from the beginning. So the incentive you're creating here is that if you do a great job and build this zone up and build the protocol up, then you’re going to get rich, and if you fuck up or underdeliver, then I'm going to lose all of the things that haven't been paid back to you. So it's not like we're not going to take back what you've already been paid because it's gradually investing. We can demonstrably show that you're not doing what you are supposed to do, which was building an incredible product then we can stop the relationship and then try to find somebody else who will do a better job by using those tokens again or just remove them and take them back to the community pool so that they can be used there. There are four ecosystems. In particular, there are a few fundamental premises that you need. You need a good dex, you need a good money market, you need a stablecoin, you need bridges to other interesting ecosystems, you need an NFT marketplace, and you need some way for DAOs to organize themselves. You probably need liquid staking because they make good collateral for many of these other use cases once you have this. You have a lot of Legos that people can build on top of and create more interesting, complex, or innovative products. So that's the way I see it in a nutshell. The first phases of Neutron will most probably be as a zone, as a project. We will probably need to incentivize a few incredible teams to build these foundations so that other people can come and experiment and make new innovative stuff. The other idea here is that Neutron as a protocol should reward people actively contributing value to it. We do this by proposing an incentives model where you know there are incentives in a pool. They can get distributed by governance to various protocols registered for a gauge. Once they receive these incentives, they have to be distributed in their entirety to the users, so they're not getting paid directly. The developers are only getting paid directly from there. They can get grants and stuff, but they're not getting paid with incentives. What we're doing is that we helping them bootstrap the adoption of their product which generates fees for them because they're monetizing their app. But we're also giving back value to the users, and that value will probably be using the ecosystem. That's what happens with incentives, and it's fine as long as the ecosystem itself is growing and we're building an infrastructure that will make it competitive in the long run. There are very interesting mechanisms here. The gauge system itself is a mind funk, but that's what I'm working on right now, so all that I've said and a lot more that we haven't discussed yet apply to this phase of your bootstrapping zone. That doesn't apply, for example, to the Cosmos Hub and Osmosis because they already have well-established positions in the market. They should be protecting their tokens and only allocating the tokens where they're getting a large return on deployment. So they're not leaking out value everywhere; they should only be focused on growing the parts of the protocol that makes the most sense and that produces a better user experience, more revenue for the state holders, etc.
+
[00:42:21] Citizen Cosmos: It's interesting that you went into bootstrapping zones because one of the next questions I had was specifically about that. It's interesting how
+blockchain projects get launched from a general perspective. From your experience being a community manager and then a cringe manager, as you wrote on your Twitter.
+
[00:43:20] Spaydh: My title is deputy general manager, but my actual title is chief chief LARP officer.
+
[00:43:35] Citizen Cosmos: Yeah, that’s cool. I was a manager looking busy. So, back to the question. How was that experience? What would you suggest to somebody that just getting involved in it? What would you say not to ever do?
+
[00:43:20] Spaydh: This is a trillion-dollar question! The topic is very complex and very unique to every project and the context in which they are built, the type of communities and developers that they appeal to, etc. There is no size fits all recipe. In 2021 we saw that large incentives programs seem to work at bootstrapping, having protocols on the zones. We've also seen now that a lot of the activity on a lot of blockchains that had these programs like Avalanche and Venom, unfortunately for these ecosystems left so I think it's a tremendously tricky question. I think there are multiple approaches to trying to find the solution that is going to work best. I think first you need to have a good understanding of what has been tried before, you need to try and
+identify what worked, what didn't work, and which context these solutions were applied to. For example, the Ethereum story of the whole thing bootstrapping itself is one likely to repeat itself at scale because there is so much competition right now, why would you devote all your time with no expectation of an upside to building something on a completely new ecosystem when there are multiple good ones on the sides with whatever language you want to code in like Cosmos or Solidity? This doesn't seem likely to happen again, so I think you need to learn from what happened before and try to take it into account, and that's why for Neutron we want to have the incentive program to be inside the blockchain itself and managed by the community itself so that it can adjust over time to the circumstances that it's faced with. We're trying our best. We're trying everything possible to make sure that Neutron will be successful at the same time, you can never guarantee that these things will be, and so that’s the same problem that every founder or every person launching a new project will face. You have to evaluate the market honestly to find out if there is a need for what you're building. Usually, you only start building your thesis. Our thesis is that there is a need for smart contracts that exist across multiple blockchains and allow applications to behave cross-blockchains just as if they were one whilst being secure. You can never know, you can just try and learn from the past, try to find, and improve those systems and implement them in a way that makes sense so that perhaps you know you're building the next Ethereum.
+
[00:47:15] Citizen Cosmos: I'll give you a small blitz. Give me three projects outside the top twenty that you're interested in. They don't have to be blockchains.
+
[00:48:24] Spaydh: So I think what the Anoma team has been building is incredible. I also like what Bitcoin is doing with decentralized grants. That's a tremendous inspiration. And I really like
+what DAODAO is doing as well.
+
[00:49:39] Citizen Cosmos: Second question. Name 2 things that motivate you in your daily
+life.
+
[00:49:47] Spaydh: Learning stuff and coffee.
+
[00:50:00] Citizen Cosmos: Last one! Give me one person or a book that you recommend.
+
[00:50:21] Spaydh: Paolo Cohelo’s “The Alchemist” novel.
+
[00:50:28] Citizen Cosmos: Great book, I love it! That’s about it I guess, thanks a lot Spaydh!
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here)
Neutron is permissionless smart contract platform for Interchain DeFi built with Cosmos SDK & Tendermint. Neutron allows to deploy smart contracts to the market in a blaze. Smart contracts can query, transact and manage
+accounts in remote zones directly from Neutron.
+
Airdrop
+
The Neutron Token Airdrop for ATOM stakers is currently live, You can check Your eligibility and claim the Airdrop here. You can find a full guide on how to do this
+here.
+
Staking
+
As such, the concept of staking in the usual sense (PoS) in Neutron is not provided (reward for staking in Neutron is not provided), but with the help of locked NTRN we can get the voting power and participate
+in the governance of the Neutron DAO.
+
Neutron does not use standard Cosmos SDK governance module. Neutron governance is based on DAO DAO contracts. Neutron DAO core contract interacts with the Voting Power Registry contract that keeps
+track of multiple Voting Vaults:
+
+
Real vaults - is the Neutron Vault, which allows its users to directly bond and unbond NTRN tokens.
+
Virtual vaults - not directly storing user funds in the vault:
+
+
+
Credits Vault - airdropped NTRN tokens in vesting.
+
Lockdrop Vault - LP tokens from axlrUSDC/NTRN and ATOM/NTRN pools.
+
LP Vesting Vault - LP tokens from axlrUSDC/NTRN and ATOM/NTRN pools that are being vested during TGE.
+
Investors Vault - NTRN tokens that are being vested according to investors agreements.
+The overall voting power of a given address is a sum of the voting powers that the address has in real and virtual vaults, 1 NTRN = 1 vote. Real value will always hold voting rights whereas the virtual valuts can be added or removed as per the governance.
+
+
Currently governance is not live on Neutron.
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:
Neutron is permissionless smart contract platform for Interchain DeFi built with Cosmos SDK & Tendermint. Neutron allows to deploy smart
+contracts to the market in a blaze. Smart contracts can query, transact and manage accounts in remote zones directly from Neutron.
+
+
Neutron is the most secure CosmWasm platform because it uses Interchain Security technology. Interchain Security allows Neutron to have the same security as Cosmos hub
+(which is 200M+ ATOM tokens). This means that Cosmos hub validators will also secure Neutron, for which they will be rewarded with native tokens distributed from
+consumer fees.
+
Neutron is incubated by P2P Validator who also were founders of Lido Protocol.
+
Interchain Accounts(ICA)
+
Interchain accounts allow modules and smart contracts to execute and track transactions on foreign zones via IBC, instead private keys,
+and without deploying additional code. Also ICAs allow transactions to be written and transported in a way that can be executed on the host chain.
+
Neutron will be both a “host” and a “controller” and will launch with a custom implementation that makes Interchain Accounts available to smart contracts.
+It means, smart contracts on Neutron will be able to interact with modules and zones from other ICA-enabled Cosmos chains and vice versa.
A query is a way to retrieve data from a blockchain’s storage. For example, in order to find out about the balance of a certain token or tokens in a wallet,
+you need to send a query and get a reply with proof. Queries are widespread in the DeFi sphere and without them its existence is impossible. The problem is that
+queries often only work within a single blockchain, but with IBC and ICQ you can solve this problem and send queries between different blockchains connected by IBC.
+
How this would work:
+
+
On the querying zone, the ICQ module collects query requests and makes them available to relayers;
+
Relayers go to the queried zones, find a "value" for each "key" and package them with cryptographic proofs;
+
Relayers bring the packaged results back to the ICQ module, which verifies them;
+
Specific smart-contracts get the verified results from the module;
+
They process the raw results into a neat data structure for the author of the query.
+
+
+
Why Neutron makes sense
+
The main advantages of Neutron are security and interoperability.
+Neutron will allow you to create applications that run on Neutron, but they will also run on all blockchains that are connected to Neutron via IBC, while having the
+same security as the Cosmos hub.
+
This will lead to significant development of DeFI in the Cosmos ecosystem, and will also make life easier for users, because they won't have to think about which
+network they are on now Juno, Cosmos hub or Evmos. Neutron will allow you to use the services you want to use from wherever you are in Cosmos. And then get the
+assets you want on whatever chain you want to get them on.
+
Roadmap
+
Neutron mainnet is scheduled for launch in the first quarter of 2023, currently undergoing Baryon Testnet.
+
+
See also our episode with guests from Neutron, where they talk more about the project, validator and user incentives, and $NTRN token:
+
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:
Interchain Security is probably one of the most interesting narratives in crypto now. We have researched Neutron, a project that will use Interchain Security in no small way. In this article we will break down
+
+
Quark Testnet
+
What is Neutron
+
Interchain Security
+
Interchain Accounts
+
Interchain Queries
+
+
Quark Testnet
+
Neutron will launch Quark testnet to find bugs and fix them. This testnet will not be incentivized and will not use Interchain Security. This testnet is more for advanced users and developers.
+
Quark will run for 3 weeks. Testnet participants will test the network and report their results and feedback in late November.
+
Technical сases are broken down in categories (Performance, Interchain Accounts, Interchain Queries, etc.) and their completion is expected.
+
Kindly note that Quark and the ICS Incentivized testnet are different test networks. The Neutron ICS feature will be tested on the ICS incentivize testnet first.
+
What is Neutron?
+
Neutron is a secure platform for Interchain DeFi powered by Tendermint and built with Cosmos SDK. Neutron’s tech helps developers to launch smart contracts and gives tools to interoperate with other protocols and appchains. Neutron is incubated by P2P Validator who also were founders of Lido Protocol. Moreover, they received 50k ATOM funding in Prop72.
+
Interchain Security
+
Interchain Security provides the level of security for Neutron as the Cosmos Hub by enabling validators to produce blocks from a Provider-Chain to a Consumer Chain. In addition, all node operators are rewarded with native tokens distributed from consumer fees.
+
Interchain Accounts
+
Interchain Accounts (ICA) let Cosmos blockchains control accounts on remote zones via IBC, instead of local private keys, and write transactions that can be executed on the remote chain.
+
Neutron will be both a “host” and a “controller” and will launch with a custom implementation that makes Interchain Accounts available to smart contracts.
+
It means, smart contracts on Neutron will be able to interact with modules and zones from other ICA-enabled Cosmos chains and vice versa.
+
Interchain Queries
+
Interchain Queries (aka ICQs) are an essential building block enabling devs to securely retrieve data from remote zones. Queries are fundamental to DeFi protocols: They are used by DEXs to calculate swap prices, by Money Market to determine a user’s loan-to-value ratio, etc.
+Here’s how Neutron makes Interchain Queries work:
+On the querying zone, the ICQ module collects query requests and makes them available to relayers.
+The relayers go to the queried zones, find a “value” for each “key” and package them with cryptographic proofs.
+
+
If you have an interest in learning more about Neutron’s ideas and hearing their team's plans firsthand, you might want to listen to Citizen Cosmos episode 73 with Spaydh from Neutron:
+Here you will find both an audio and a text version of the interview.
During our latest episode of the Citizen Odyssey, we spoke with Neutron's team. Our guests were Soi - Neutorn's community manager, Spaydh - the project manager and Mike - Go/Rust Dev. We discussed Interchain Security, interoperability, CosmWasm, dApps and much more.
+
This is a short recap of the conversations and might not do justice to everything that was said and mentioned by Neutron's team. The purpose, as stated above, was to ELI5 what is Neutron, who for and why. We strongly suggest watching the whole conversation in order to get a better picture of what is Neutron. However, we did highlight the main points in this recap.
+
Q: How is Neutron different? What is Neutrons value proposition?
+
There are two: security and interoperability. There are others, but the focus is on these two. Interchain security allows Neutron to have the same security at launch as Cosmos Hub, one of the top 10 most secure proof-of-stake blockchains. The second thing is interoperability. On most smart contract platforms (as of today), the app you release on that blockchain only works on that blockchain. Neutron will allow you to create applications that work on Neutron, but they will also work on all the blockchains that are connected to Neutron by IBC. Every chain has different dApps, and you need to adapt to this.
+
+
"Perhaps, we can make a version of Cosmos where you have one front end for every application and you don't need to care about which blockchain you're on. You can just use the services you want to use from wherever you are in Cosmos. And then get the assets you want to get on whatever chain you want to get them. Essentially, we're trying to remove all the complexity of having multiple blockchains in the same ecosystem and just make it way easier to navigate." say the guys fron Neutron.
+
+
Q: Who will be using Neutron?
+
According to the team, Neutron is for ordinary users, developers and people building businesses on top of Neutron. One of the goals is to create a home in The Interchain. A chain that you can use to access everything else in The Interchain. For example, you want to do a swap on Osmosis? You can do it from Neutron, because there's an Outpost — a proxy / a contract. Quote from the team:
+
+
"You don't need to bridge back and forth the smart contracts. You just go to the interface, you click the button, you sign one transaction. Everything happens in the background, and you get what you want. Don't have to care about the fact that these are multiple blockchains connected by IBC. For users it's going to be a home in The Interchain and for developers it's going to be a command center."
+
+
Q: Were there any things with the Neutron testing that came as a surprise in a bad way or in a good way?
+
+
Mike: "I'm pretty familiar with Cosmos ecosystem, the technical side of things, so there were no surprises."
+
+
Q: Maybe there were surprises for validators?
+
+
Spaydh: "Interchain security changes Neutron and the others. We are secured by Atom, but we can't mint Atom. So when we launch we're not going to create a whole bunch of Atoms. Also this means that we can't do foundation delegations. Unfortunately. We appreciate tremendously the fact that a lot of validators have been very interested in committing and stuff but every time we get asked like “Hey, can we get a delegation in exchange for it?”, but unfortunately we don't have the Atom that it takes to make a delegation."
+
+
Q: Will there be a token on Neutron, its own token?
+
+
Spaydh: "Yeah, most likely. The idea is how do we make an incentives game that allows people to create value to bring new stuff to experiment, to create new protocols, new applications to make cool community events, all that kind of stuff. And how do we ensure that people participate in this are rewarded when they contribute? People are punished when they try to destroy things or to do things that hurt the blockchain. For example, trying to spam transactions. The token kind of serves that purpose. It also provides a tool to make decisions together, governance."
+
+
Q: What is the future for Neutron?
+
+
Soi: "Cosmos is frankly a little bit behind the times in terms of DeFi. There's a lot of stuff that you can do on Ethereum that you can't do on Cosmos yet. And we like to think that Neutron is going to open the door to the the future of Defi in Cosmos. In five years, what we're going to see on the platform? We're going to see lending protocols, money markets, taxes and really sort of open the door to the future of DeFi in Cosmos."
+
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here)
The hype around NFT is already subsiding, and sales of NFT images have come to naught. But is the technology of non-fungible tokens as useless as they say lately?
+
The most familiar tokens to us are subway cards. We buy a subway token to ride the subway. If earlier only states and large corporations could issue their tokens, now everyone can issue them within 15 minutes.
+
There are a lot of different tokens. Management tokens, tokens for purchasing services and goods, music, works of art, and tokens for buying services and goods. In China, reputation is tokenized in the form of a social rating). Soon, all citizens will be tokenized with the introduction of state digital money (CBDC).
+
All tokens can be divided into fungible and non-fungible, better known as NFTs.
+
Fungible tokens are issued for identical goods or services that do not differ from each other. For example, there is a certain amount of tokens for taking the subway, and it makes no difference which token you use for this trip.
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Another thing is non-fungible NFT tokens. They are usually released for something unique. It is generally viewed that NFTs are pixelated pictures people buy for crazy money. In fact, they are not. For example, we have a cottage village of 10 buildings. All houses were built using the same materials and a standard layout. But one home is located at the entrance to the town, and the other on the outskirts. One house faces the forest, and the other one the lake. In this case, for each house, it will be necessary to issue a separate non-fungible NFT token.
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The most exciting thing is that you can measure a person's reputation with the help of the NFT token. The reputation tokenization is inextricably linked with personality tokenization.
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How does it work?
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For example, Rachel decided to become a programmer. For now she is not a programmer yet and needs funds for subsistence and training. Rachel can issue 10,000 tokens for her programs. At the presale, Rachel can sell her tokens for $10-$20. But after some time, when Rachel becomes a high-class programmer, her services will increase in price and be estimated at $100-200, depending on how well she masters programming languages.
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If Rachel fulfills the obligations on the tokens, her reputation will grow. And in case of failure to fulfill the obligations, it will accumulate a vast negative reputation. This will make it clear to others whether to have business with Rachel or not.
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NFTs are tightly integrated into our lives, and most likely, the world around us will soon be tokenized. Driver's licenses, real estate rights, art, and even pets.
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Which tokens would you buy at the presale?
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If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:
Episode name: Jacob Gadikian, sand, relaying & the interchain
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Transcript of the Episode:
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[00:01:41] Citizen Cosmos: Hey, everyone, welcome to a new episode of the Citizen Cosmos podcast! We have Jacob Gadikian, founder of Notional, a disciplined software development validator.
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[00:02:07] Jacob Gadikian: Hi! It’s good to be here. So Notional was a uniswap airdrop and a computer. Our team now is 20 people. It's pretty incredible, actually.
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[00:02:13] Citizen Cosmos: 20? Wow! I have to be honest before the listeners, I prepared zero questions for Jacob because he’s a great guy, and I thought the conversation is going to be free flow so this is why the conversation might seem a little bit lost it's not. We are on track. Please carry on with the introduction Jacob.
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[00:02:53] Jacob Gadikian: So basically, in February of 2021, several things happened. One, I left Tendermint and began to research dexes for a very real-world physical commodities trading product, and since that's still in play, I'm gonna go into detail on that; that’s something I'm still consulting on. Initially, I looked at applying the tools and techniques in the GravityDex. Somebody along the way said: “Jacob you really need to talk to Sunny, he's building something, and he had invited me to a conference in 2019, but my son had just been born, so I wasn’t able to attend. It was the last time I had spoken to him except for once at Tendermint. I sent him a Twitter DM, and he told me we need to talk. So he and I had about an hour-and-a-half-long call where he introduced Osmosis to me, and honestly, my comprehension was very low. I never got into Ethereum DeFi except, of course, enough to deploy something very amateurish onto Ethereum, which was enough to get me a very significant uniswap airdrop. I had spoken to Sunny, and then one day, I saw that Osmosis was about to launch, and I threw in a Genesis transaction. Our uptime was initially terrible, I was validating from my family's old apartment, and we were getting 80% uptime. Initially, I created just some new documentation around seeds and peers and work down our network a bit and got that up, and made it very stable. That was when I first built an open MPTCP router and linked that up to another IASP in Vietnam. After that, I explored relaying. I had my Osmosis validator, and we started to get requests to back up on relaying. So I did the majority of relaying that summer and this actually got me down. It's now a 14-month-long rabbit hole in Cosmos performance, so my computer has a ridiculously fast hard drive; it's an Intel p5800x. Anyhow, U quickly learned from observing that rate actually slowed things down, and because of the stripe size on it, the chain would keep trying to write all these small files smaller than the 32 kbs but the striped size of the rate was 32 kbs. I was relaying against our validator node, you should not do this if you want to learn how to relay. Please do not follow these directions it was not safe. I had the relayer running I had three or four validators on that computer. I noticed that when IBC packets would build up, the validators would miss blocks, and I was relaying a fairly significant portion of the whole IBC network packets. I was also trying to figure out why our packets would come in faster than Cephalopods packets, they were trying to figure that out too. Also, that was not consistent, but there was just
+this tendency, turns out that Cosmos chains would just show up disusage and it's only in the past month that we put this issue to bed. There are still a lot more performance things to fix in Cosmos, but at least on the database layer, with three Notional team members, we refactored heavily the database that the Cosmos SDK uses tore almost everything out; it’s 75% lighter, and introduced a new data bates called Pebble DB. Now, sometime around September 2021, I stopped doing things dangerously and began to formalize operations. I separated validation and relaying. Validation was strictly on-site, and relaying was strictly at Hetzer. I think this is about the time that we really began to grow. In May of 2021, I met an amazing young individual, and he built Notional’s engineering team. They are technology students, and so they began to help with the process of formalizing operations and making things safer. To do that, we had to write code. The infrastructure operations weren't enough, we could get the fastest disk in the world and not get much of a speed boost from it. We knew that we were really dependent on speed, particularly for relaying and then on faster chains. Because that thing is so fast, there's an additional operational burden there. Evmos is fairly similar, it's just a very fast blockchain, and we began to specialize in that. Then, along the way, in about January 2020, I had been working on Juno I was told that there’s a chain they're going to build with StarPort, and it could be launched on the StarPort network. That part didn't play out, but what I would do for 10 months, I'd go between Juno and the StarPort template, and I'd update the template every time that I saw that Juno had sort of fallen behind the latest versions of the Cosmos core libraries. So by the fall of 2021, we were doing more and more with Osmosis, and we were collaborating with some teams although I'm going to give credit where credit is due, even though it's as controversial, we never really got paid by Terra but a lot of the database stuff that we worked on definitely came from a long string of interactions that included Do Kwon because we had just launched Chihuahua chain, I was working on the database yet again. I thought it would be a good idea to record a video barking like a Chihuahua about the speed of the chain, and I did and shared it.
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[00:11:47] Citizen Cosmos: Just to point out, nobody got paid by Do Kwon; everybody got misused by him. Even if you got paid by Do Kwon, you probably put it back in a way.
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[00:12:04] Jacob Gadikian: Yeah, there was a certain recycling effect. Luckily, we weren’t directly exposed. Of course, the indirect exposure was still horrific. A lot of Cosmos went down by 80-90%, and during that week, I was watching the chain. I still suspect that the chain was attacked at the same time the chain's economy was attacked. Really weird things happened across their validator set.
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[00:12:38] Citizen Cosmos: I must say that it’s great to hear your side of things after different conversations with guys from Cephalopods.
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[00:13:04] Jacob Gadikian: so look, I'll take a second here to praise Cephalopod and what informal did for IBC in the beginning. IBC is very huge and complex and probably needs
+to be. The key base level of IBC is 2 tendermint chains exchanging light clients. After that, the protocol pretty much mirrors TCP/IP and it’s a good analogy for anybody who is technically looking into it. At the time, it was Hermes that worked well. Since then, Strangelove has done a very deep refactor on the go relayer. Go relayer version 2.0 was very reliable and very performant. In the summer of 2021 though, it was just Hermes and a lot of things broke. Things broke constantly. You would see channels get backed up. Nobody knew why; we just had our guesses.
+I think the thing that I was right about was the influence of hardware. One of the things that we figured out or added evidence to was that there were situations where Hermes would work well, but I don't think that we know to this day what caused some of those issues because we decoupled IBC from the SDK in version 43. Version 43 was pulled back, and then 44 was released. Osmosis ran 44 for a bit. I helped to upgrade Osmosis to 45, and I think that's when IBC 2 was released. I mean that in the original Osmosis, which kicked off the big explosion in IBC, many issues, I believe, are still undiagnosed. We had a bunch of guesses I’m sure that those guesses fed into both the IBC spec and then the IBC code, and now I would say that the big deal presently is that we’re integrating CosmWasm and IBC to a much greater degree, so that if a chain is a computer and another chain is a computer, then you have applications on each computer. Those contracts can talk to each other, and that's the stage where we are now. So how did we get to 20 people? Along the way, our focus shifted. Initially, we were mainly an operator. We learned how to run relayers and run them well, we also helped to teach people how to run relayers. We then began writing code that led to different engineering contracts throughout the ecosystem. Presently we support Osmosis, Juno, Pylon’s craft economy. We’re pushing out SDK-46 across the ecosystem and working on performance, so that's how we ended up at 20 people, and we will likely move to a new office this or next month, and that's the story.
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[00:17:56] Citizen Cosmos: There is one thing here I would like to ask you. I would love to talk about what makes you tick and keeps you motivated in governance, in trying to make things fair for everybody, etc. What is the push forward?
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[00:19:40] Jacob Gadikian: Frankly, some of the things I've seen around Cosmos self-development are not up to the Osmosis standard, but I hate for anybody to think I'm just baselessly protecting Osmosis. The Hub has kicked off Cosmos, and many people probably don't know this, but I was a validator, and I noticed that the Hub had a much smaller-sized environment. If we’re talking about delegations, this is getting taken care of. There was a validator doing some nasty things to Gaia and ICF, and they withdrew their delegation, which was the right thing to do. So I noticed that the allegations were off and that builders were not being supported like they were on Osmosis. Furthermore, if we go to something I've spoken about many times on Twitter, there's just one random string, no name, no contact, 20% commission, no governance participation, and frequent downtime. Everything is bad about a validator. But it still had a very effective ICF delegation, and I questioned that, unfortunately, along the way of questioning, which seems to have harmed relationships. I hope that that can be amended. I'm going to defend myself and say that those things need to be taken care of, and they were not addressed in a serious manner when I first approached them. I first approached them in a minimal semi-private context, and I was told to let the professionals handle it - they didn't.
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[00:21:28] Citizen Cosmos: I love that sentence: let the professional handle it.
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[00:21:39] Jacob Gadikian: Yeah. Well, that's more or less how I felt about it, and I think that in a healthier environment, things like that would not harm relationships. I found and eventually resolved only through working with the code reviewers; one of them accused me of code of conduct violations for tweeting too much during proposal 69. I don't want to name names and am not interested in further damaging relationships. I'm interested in building relationships where we can say that there was a pretty serious problem with the Hub where it would always pass. I want to give credit where it's due, so the Cosmos SDK team, and IBC team, really did an incredible job helping me get code that touched on the usability of SDK-46 because Notional invested a tremendous amount of energy and money time in building out chains on SDK-46 and one of the byproducts of that so we've put up the only chain on 46 that's Pylon’s and that will soon be going from testnet to mainnet, it's a chain that allows cards to be accepted. We have been building a craft economy on SDK-46 since the fall of last year, and more recently, there was some highly inaccurate information spread about governance. I want to have fact-driven conversations about all this stuff. I feel that politics have been taken over, and I'm not trying to hurt anyone's feelings. I genuinely care about the Cosmos Hub and Cosmos overall, and I think that because I raised these issues, Notional has been treated wrong and at a very disappointing scale. We rewrote tmdb, but there has been no recognition of that. We have created tooling to automatically find unclosed iterators in chains which turned out to be a relatively common issue that was affecting database performance all across Cosmos, and at the end of the day, if we're kind of cast aside, will just go and work out on Osmosis and Juno. In my opinion, this has just been a misuse of our time, and I do not feel that it is disrespectful to point out that during all the debates around CosmWasm. When you enable the CosmWasm chain, you double its system resource consumption. This is just that's just how it is. We love Cosmos at Notional. In terms of features and functions against CosmWasm on the Hub, my views don't match Jay's views there, and one of the things that were repeatedly tossed out during the debate was that I was some kind of a proxy for him. He's the guy who taught me all of this. I've had many teachers, and that's how you learn. In Cosmos, there is a very non-formal mentorship. It was Jay, it was Alessio. Other members of the Tendermint team, including Dennis - head of StarFort, was Jack. Jack noticed I was doing a lot of IBC traffic. He called me one day out of the blue and said: “How are you doing this? I don't think you know how it works.” Then he spent about two weeks making sure I knew how IBC worked. That's a huge deal; he invested a lot of time. After that, it was Dave from Osmosis. When I began to work on the chain, he spent tons of time making sure that I knew what the hell was going on under the hood because I came in fairly green. I’m a former history teacher and Bitcoin miner. I've learned a lot of technical stuff.
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[00:26:30] Citizen Cosmos: This is interesting. I want to know your story, man. I'm putting you a little bit off the track, but I would love to hear how you began loving hardware and where the love was born. So what’s the story? Where did it start?
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[00:27:21] Jacob Gadikian: It's a little longer, but I'll go right into it. I was teaching history in China. It was a private high school program where the students would eventually go to school in the United States, and it was cool, I got to do the curriculum design. But during that time, Xi Jinping became president of China, and stuff changed quite a bit. I don't know much about Chinese politics, but two notable things changed. If you work in a school in China, you have contact with the government by necessity. This school was considered a pilot program, and there were just mixed opinions. Secondly, the curriculum teaching style was affected, and the politics courses became mandatory from my perspective, I wanted to learn about all that stuff, but that's not my point of view. I found it very interesting because one thing that did happen in China was rapid human advancement at scale. That's notable and probably shouldn't be ignored. Any time you're looking at what China is today, you should be thinking about mega cities, you should think about the advancement in human development, and you should probably also be thinking about the double-edged sword. The negative part about this for me is that for a time, I got separated from my family by the great firewall. This is probably how you and I met online, by the way. So it's also how I started to use Bitcoin. China made the great firewall far more strict, and my interest in hardware and electronics, I’ve been doing that all my life. So in China, I was testing and collecting all kinds of weird, interesting Chinese electronics because it's all made there, so you can get some neat stuff there I met with several companies based in Shenzhen whose products I like. So in the middle of my first year of teaching, Xi Jinping took power. For a brief time, I could not easily contact my family; there were ways to do it, of course, but it became difficult, and we certainly couldn't have a call like we’re having now. So I learned to build VPNs because the commercial one was not reliable. I wasn't concerned with privacy either, I was more about connectivity. This is what led me to Bitcoin. I learned about MadeSafe, I participated in the ICO, and somehow it led to bit shares of Fuzzy. I came on the Fuzzy show in 2013 or 2014. By the end of my second year of teaching, I had invested in Bitcoin, rolled in all the coins, and lost a great deal of that play money, of course. Then, I decided to quit teaching, moved to Shenzhen, and made open-source hardware because these wallets and private keys are the hardware we run. The keys are always vulnerable, and there we got about a six-month crash course in why hardware isn't open source or, more accurately, why open-source software hardware is crazy hard. If you look at the arm CPU market, people license the arm design those drivers are proprietary. Intel is relatively similar they protect things at different levels in the stack until drivers are all open, but Intel’s PCB reference designs are all closed, and then certainly, the semiconductor material in both cases is closed. All of that failed, and I entered weird political stuff again; my visa ran out during the umbrella revolution, so I went from Shenzhen to Hong Kong. I was down there for a week or two, you could taste the pepper spray in the air just about everywhere, and it looked like it was going to turn violent, and in many ways, it did turn violent, of course. But I felt it could easily get more violent than it already was. Additionally, there were counter-protesters. They were doing things like juggling knives in menacing ways on street corners. Eventually, I realized this wasn't going to stop. The government offices are closed, and I can't renew my Chinese visa. If I'd stayed another week, I probably could have had it, but I eventually decided this was not going to work because I was just there to renew my visa; it was going to be a very straightforward thing, and I flew down to Saigon where I failed again and ended up in Hanoi for two and a half years, and that's how I ended up coming here again, this time I got stuck here for Covid, and then in the middle part I visited Cambodia for Steemet South East Asia meet up. It was just a small meet-up that another Steemet user made but me, and my colleagues were writing on Steemer and making great money with it, decided to go to Cambodia. If you check my Steemet post, you'll find that I found some bugs, and what it turned out to be is Steemet using the JavaScript 256k1 implementation. I changed my view, I thought it was insecure, it's non-canonical. So there's a way that you're supposed to use that library, Steemet doesn't use it that way, and they're very prescriptive about how to use that library, and that's how I found Jae Kwon. I was researching proof of stake consensus mechanisms so that I could try to make a replacement for Steemet, it was called down, and I was having mental health trouble, but I didn't know it, and that's the scariest thing about going crazy. You will not know if you're going off the deep end. I was, but I didn't know it. I probably had undiagnosed bipolar for 15 years. Long story short, it all culminates in that crazy thing with me stealing a giant truck full of sand in Phnom Penh. I was delusional, I don't precisely how or why I felt that I needed to steal transportation, then drive that transportation to China. These were my overriding priorities in life, greater than food, greater than anything I attempted to do for about a week, and I was eventually successful. That's probably not a very good thing. I nearly drove into a parade, but luckily I had no murderous intent, and I stopped the truck. Then I got my ass kicked by a giant mob of people and went to jail. One of the most interesting and heartwarming parts of this story is that the truck’s owner came to see me in jail, took one look at my crazy ass, and within a day, the U.S. embassy picked me up and took me to a psychiatric hospital. There they tried everything except for actually what helped me. To this day, I religiously take lithium but there they put me on every downer type of drug that you can imagine, and it didn’t work, but then they got me into an airplane after about two weeks, and so I flew from Phnom Penh to Buffalo with a doctor who was feeding me pills the entire time, and so he got me to the Buffalo psychiatric center, and this stuff genuinely helped me, I wouldn't be here today if it if things hadn't gone in this way.
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[00:40:06] Citizen Cosmos: I can relate very much to the story. The first time I was diagnosed with bipolar was 18 years ago when I was about 17-18. I think I decided when I was 18 that will be my prerogative and battle, and I refused to take the pills that I was prescribed, all the downers. I never did, and I think that helped me keep it. But again, with bipolar, it's a very loud sentence to say because you have very different levels of bipolar disorder and how it develops from the first to the fourth stage. I'm trying to connect here everything, your history teaching, the Chinese government changes, the love for the hardware, and what I see and hear there have been misjudgments which you saw with the Chinese government and how they started to treat the inability to contact you family and that to me calls as if the governance goes wrong, if nobody says anything in the right time and doesn't try to do something, that's what's going to happen.
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[00:41:55] Jacob Gadikian: I should expand on that. So I was in an Iraq war protest. It was the dumbest, most futile thing I've ever done. Technically speaking, that's the first time I was arrested, but they didn't book it. I was in Chicago, put in plastic handcuffs, taken to the other side of the city, and jumped out, which was pointless. What I mean is what I was doing at the time, carrying around and talking about war, was pointless because there
+was a giant apparatus of lies backing up that conflict. I am sensitive to governance issues and the accuracy of the information that affects governance, and maybe just give you another dot to connect. Going back to the whole mental health situation, I made it miraculously and, in my mind, statistically unlikely recovery. Most of the people that I met in the mental hospital I don't think that they recovered, and they got the same treatment but did not recover. But I did. I Had a lot of help from my family, but here's a deal. I began to take lithium in the summer of 2017, and by the fall of 2017, I was figuring out how to raise venture capital when you have just stolen a giant truck full of sand. We were successful. Drone energy raised a million dollars from all kinds of investors, and I believe has raised another round now. The business worked, and that's one of the reasons why I'm so comfortable speaking openly about that experience because, for good reasons, investors will look into your background and will ask you questions about it. It's a substantial amount of money, they want to know that you're not going to invest in sand trucks instead of Bitcoin mines. So I learned to tell the facts on that. It's a very relationship-based business; you're seeking capital to purchase equipment and sourcing the business's energy contracts. I ended up doing a lot of that, I learned to be very direct about things even if they're uncomfortable, and it's not especially the first 75 times because when you raise venture capital, don't talk to one investor. You don't do this once you do that many times and find the ones you click with, so the first 75 times were hard, but after that, not really. It's just another piece of my history that just has to be incredibly fact-driven. Otherwise, why would anybody trust me? Frankly, if I were to try to hide that, they shouldn't trust me.
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[00:45:38] Citizen Cosmos: I’d like to say that all you just said come as battling bipolar
+and succeeding because, to me, those swings that are uncontrollable are something I want to control. I don't trust those swings, and I don’t want to trust them. And that's why I would rather be direct and say this is what I am. These are my minuses, these are my pluses. This is how I’ve been living my life for over 20 years, and it immediately calls back the things I see in the world and how I interact with the planet, and I understand it very well.
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[00:46:55] Jacob Gadikian: That's interesting that we both share that. I failed over and over until I started taking lithium. I still experience bipolar sometimes, sleep is very hard. I don't have the world's most regular or normal sleep schedule, but I sleep every day, and I wouldn't need to I'm not sure that most people can relate to that but I could just keep going, but they said that's dangerous. I look after the whole sleep thing. My wife checks in on it. That's important, I give her a lot of credit for my being alive. She chased me around Cambodia for about 6 months, getting me out all kinds of messed up, crazy ridiculous shit. So I got back up on my feet in the States and started to make plans to marry her. So we’re now married and live in Hanoi. We have a kid and trying to have another kid. So to answer your question, though, I have seen that since I was young. I was 18 in that Iraq war protest, which left a big impression on me.
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[00:48:54] Citizen Cosmos: You're gonna laugh, but the first protest I went to was in 2003 against the war in Iraq. That’s very ironic.
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[00:49:22] Jacob Gadikian: So now, just about being rigorously fact-driven, and then in the blockchain space, you only talk about this issue because it's solved. This was also true of the Cosmos SDK, with several CI jobs that hadn't been fired in years. It was a program to check the code, one of them is called a Linter. The result was that no matter what you did, various things that were supposed to check and test the code would always tell you everything
+was all good. We fixed the SDK and then moved on to Gaia, and I didn't want to be a pariah because I was insistent that the delegations were screwed up and were harming governance. It affected Quorum quite a bit because of the lack of governance participation among recipients of ICF delegations. If I found it I can't leave it to the professionals, I must be the professional because it wasn't being addressed. We need to focus on the code, we need to focus on transparency, and go public.
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[00:54:12] Citizen Cosmos: I think it’s important to hear an unbiased opinion. But regardless of that, we haven't opened up a lot of things, but I would love to ask you about your motivation. What keeps you from wanting to get off bed? With all you mentioned, it’s not easy for anyone with a struggle like yours.
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[00:59:27] Jacob Gadikian: I guess it goes back to the Iraq war protest. I do think that governments worldwide are fairly fundamentally flawed and that transparency would solve a lot. I recently voted for a 5% minimum commission on the Hub and am a big supporter of markets. One thing I've found frustrating throughout my career as an entrepreneur is the incorporation and capital formation processes. I think most start-ups fail and lose 100% of their investment capital. It's only a moral issue when there isn't a genuine effort; in that case, that's like fraud or a scam, and chains are not companies. There’s also Dig. Dig is a project based on readme files: we’re going to put physical plots on the chain, we're going to sell those physical plots of land, and we're going to excel because of transparency. That project suffered tremendously because of the conflict in Ukraine. We overinvested in that market, but there is a particular reason. Probably if I was faced with the same set of decisions again, I’d probably make the same decisions because they had the legal structures that they had put in place just before the war for martial law was put into place and made the Dig project o100% legal so we would have been able to do everything, the whole nine yards without question. So at present, we've upgraded Dig SDK-46, we have added CosmWasm to Dig, and we’ll be upgrading it in the next couple of weeks as soon as IBC is finalized.
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[01:02:22] Citizen Cosmos: Back to the original question. What does keep you from getting out of bed?
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[01:02:29] Jacob Gadikian: It's just the creation of transparent systems. I'm a true believer in the style of governance that we have in Cosmos chains even though it's messy and imperfect, I
+think the current setup can be extended a great deal. One of the reasons I love SDK-46 is because it did extend governance. We can do that more in 47.
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[01:03:47] Citizen Cosmos: On that note, I would like to wrap this episode up because you had an important point that somehow concludes what we’ve been talking about. Thanks very much, and hopefully, we can speak again!
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here)
Citizen Cosmos:
+After I already realized that it goes live, but this is going to happen. And I think we are already live. Let me just check that it's all working. Let me just see our beautiful faces. There we go. There's our beautiful faces. So hi everybody. It's citizen cosmos with our Odyssey and Isaac today. Hi Isaac. Sorry to interrupt your hello there.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+Hello, how are you?
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Good, good, Isaac. So yeah, for everyone who is watching this stream or recording, as you probably usually would with us. This is of course, exploring validators. And today we have Simply Staking and Isaac is the co founder and the CTO of Simply Staking. And let's do like a traditional typical thing, you know, before we go off into our questions, Isaac, I would like to ask yourself what is Simply Staking for you personally in your own words and why on earth did you one day woke up and decide to be part of this business or endeavor or adventure or whatever. So what is Simply Staking and how did you get here? That is the first question.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+To me, it's a lot of stress and lack of sleep, I would say. And I guess...
+
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+I understand.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+And we decided to get into this because we're crazy, probably. So, simply speaking, well, as a company, it's been founded for quite some time. Back in the day, our original investor and founder was doing some mining, some Bitcoin mining and Ethereum. and he had the idea to build a data center. So this is how we inherited the data center in Malta. So he started off doing like Bitcoin mining, some proof of work mining. And after some years, electricity costs were no longer, it was no longer lucrative to mine in Malta. So he kind of abandoned the project. And then we got introduced to this guy about five years ago. and he gave us a remit like figure out how to make money. Like here you have a data center, figure out how to make money in blockchain. So we started at the time he had a lot of tokens around master nodes. So we started running the first version of proof of stake, which was master nodes. That very quickly became unprofitable and we started looking into how to make money. We got into Cosmos, we were one of the Genesis validators for the Cosmos Hub, and back then there were very little validators, not like today where everybody's a validator. So after starting validating on Cosmos, we had a lot of new chains coming up asking us to validate on their chains, At that time there were a lot of test nets and it was like the thing to do for validators to go into the test nets and go over the challenges. So we did a lot of that and we made a good name for ourselves. Back then I think we were like four people or five people. It was me, myself, Matthew, Francesco, I think, and Daniel back then and maybe Miguel. So then we were Chainlink reached out to us to start working with them. and we did that. And we started adding networks, you know, slowly, slowly. Fast forward five years, we're running like nearly close to 10,000 validators now, like running on about 20-something main nets, pretty much run all the RPC nodes, lots of hardware. So I think the... One of the biggest issues we had was scaling the hardware. Back in the day, a lot of the nodes were running on local disk, but we realized that if we want to be reliable, you cannot have a server fail and you lose all the data on the server, especially when chains started growing, like 30 terabyte chains to sink a new blockchain would take forever. So we started playing around with shared storages and talking to a lot of vendors. And we finally figured out how to run SANS with blockchain nodes. It was very expensive, but today it gives us peace of mind that when we need to do maintenance, we don't need to take a node down and just migrate it to another host, shut down the host to the maintenance. Yesterday. There was that Intel CPU vulnerability, the downfall. So we've been restarting hosts, updating firmware on hosts on these last two days. But the hard work gives us the flexibility to do maintenance without causing any downtime. So very happy and proud of my team for getting us here.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+How big is the team now? You said you started four people, how big is the team now?
+
Isaac Zarb:
+Okay, so now we're like 38th in the company.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Almost 40 people. 40 people.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+It's not all the staking. So we have multiple teams. So the staking team is around 15 people, if I'm not mistaken. Then we have a blockchain team. We're soon going to test that on our ETF blockchain, index vault blockchain. It's called Entry Point. We've got a data team. who help us figure out all our transactions for our accounts. And who knows in the future. And then we have some HR and the, you know, a finance and the typical management. Pretty much nearly 40.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+So basically you're concentrating only on hardware and software, right? In that case, you're not concentrating on any other services, is that correct?
+
Isaac Zarb:
+uh as myself or as the company you mean
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+No, I mean, of course, of course, Simply Staking and I'm referring just to Simply Staking. What I mean is, for example, you see some validators choosing to go down the route of we're going to provide an additional service for the blockchain, whether it's media, whether it's blockchain development, whether it's, I don't know, community work, whether it's something else. And there is, let's say the hardware validators, what I like to call them as the validators, who primarily they are concentrating on providing a stable permanent uptime. hardware, whether it's, I don't know, archive nodes, any other nodes or whatever else, you know, the build up as you describe a big, big. So I guess this is what you're mainly concentrated on, right?
+
Isaac Zarb:
+Well, we do some tooling as well. We've built some tooling
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Okay.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+for Ethereum, some tooling for... We have
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Okay.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+a monitoring system called Panic for Cosmos and Substrate validators. We're building our own blockchain. We've helped like Agoric build their Oracle network. We do quite
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Okay.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+a lot of development. We've built some modules for the Cosmos Hub again, back in the day.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Nice.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+We helped... blockchain launch. So yeah, quite a lot of development work as well.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+nice
+
Isaac Zarb:
+And we're building our Staking Dashboard now. Still working on the name. Sorry.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+which is going to be like a dashboard for delegators or a dashboard for anyone else.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+Mostly for the initial use case where it is for RPC. So
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Okay, RPC.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+to enable clients to get RPC nodes from us.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Okay,
+
Isaac Zarb:
+But
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+nice.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+we'll expand it as it goes along to have like the delegators and the validators of service business from it. And we'll expand as need be.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+There has been a lot of talk in the past. I think the talk kind of stopped with the bear market hitting, but I think before it hit, there was a lot of talk from the larger projects such as yourself, what I mean with the resources by saying larger, of developing validator tools, not so much delegator tools, but validator specifically tools. I'm curious because you did mention that you're developing like a dashboard for clients to take RPC. And what I mean by that was, I think me and Notional, we're talking about the fact that a lot of validators starting out would like to see statistics that they would have helped them to manage their funding and funds, what money comes in, what money goes out, what they earn and so forth. What I'm interested in is what do you think about... is currently like as a big validator who's running, well, helping to maintain almost 50 networks, as you say, and I see we can see this on your website, you have like a huge, huge list of all over, it's not just Cosmos, you know, so we're talking somebody, a big player, in terms of infrastructure, do you think that the space needs such thing as validator tools that will help?
+
Isaac Zarb:
+Definitely.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Okay.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+So we've kind of built most of that in-house. Maybe we can actually talk about open sourcing it. So we wanted to figure out like what we're making from each blockchain that we're validating on. And sometimes you'd see like the rewards at the end of the month, but you don't know if they're coming from your own delegations, if they're coming from other delegators. So we've built this tool ourselves that goes through the wallets and tries to figure out if it's commission or
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Nice.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+rewards. Definitely there is a use for that tooling. There's also the issue with finances and taxes, like this is something that all the validators go through. I think in every jurisdiction you need to file some accounting. I think in Dubai you don't, but everywhere else you have to. Unfortunately, in Malta, we have to file a lot of accounting. So we're building the data system that goes over all our transactions, so all the chains, outputs, the data, and then we hand over this to the finance teams to verify. It's a lot of work. We've been working on the system for a number of years. I think finally we have a good... system that allows us to get out the data which we need, extract data and gives us soon meaningful reports. So yeah,
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Yeah.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+we keep ourselves very busy, we're working on a lot of things.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+It's cool. It would be cool to see if you guys decide in the future to open source part of it or some of it. I know there have been other big teams working like Notional in the background on similar tools. And there's been a few smaller teams as well, I know, working on similar things. So everybody's in agreement that those tools are definitely needed, not necessarily so much just taxing tools, but... tools that will allow the validators to understand what's happening with their money. Where is this revenue streams? Where do we lose? Where did we gain? So yeah, but let's go back to your initial setup, your data center. I love the story you said, your original founder, sounds a bit like Satoshi left you lots of tokens and left. Out of curiosity, before we go, and of course, this is a kind of private question, you said, the original investor or founder, are they still I'm curious, does that imply that there was a founder who left? Or does that imply that there was just somebody originally an investor who helped to invest and now there is a team running it? And it's a private question. I understand you don't have to answer that.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+It's public knowledge I can answer. So there was the previous investor who sold his shares to another investor. So that's the story. So there's some of us who are co-founders as well. And there's the UBO, which is the larger.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+The one and only.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+Yeah. Hahaha.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+The big guy, yes. I understand totally what you mean though. I totally understand what you're getting with it. A lot of teams especially, I remember I launched my first, I think, node in 2016 on a pitchers type network. It wasn't a master node, it was a depost node. And a lot of the time back then, you would see slowly teams like you described start to arise. But in 2017, you would always see like one person go into the background, who would be the original investor. And then you would have a lot of co-founders and we can see that. So it's definitely something that I can relate to. Um, but you said about the original setup. So it was Bitcoin mining. And then one thing led to another, you end up with, um, electricity costs going up, you end up with some equipment and okay, here you are. How did it develop into what it is today? Like what were the steps sort of to build it, that plays the data center, the third tier data center as you call it.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+Okay, so the data center was pretty equipped, like there were the generators, EPSs, all the electrical circuits. We had to get out all the mining grigs because they were ASIC miners and DANT miners and stuff, like we had to dump all that crap. We bought some servers, back in the day, it wasn't as hard to run blockchains as it is today, so we bought some Dell servers. and started running some master nodes, like some Linux VMs and some, and the initial Cosmos validator. I think initially we went crazy because we didn't know how difficult it is going to be to run the Cosmos. So we had, I think, like six sentries and like the main validator hidden behind the sentries. And then we even panicked and we were like, maybe let's
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+It's not enough.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+runsentries all over the cloud as well. And then we quickly realized that, okay, we don't need all this. You know, so we, we removed all the cloud data centers and we just had our one data center in Malta. And then we started, as I mentioned, moving into other networks. So we started adding hardware as we went along. I think the first thing we did was we bought some really good firewalls, put those in, then like started setting up the segmentation, the networks and then. put the hardware, put the servers in and started increasing our bandwidth slowly. Bandwidth in Malta, unfortunately, is extremely expensive, but it's part of
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+It's an island life, I imagine.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+being island. Yeah, so bandwidth is a premium. And then, like when we were running at a good capacity in our data center in Malta, we realized that we need more data centers just to be resilient. So we got a co-located data center in Netherlands and we bought all the hardware, shipped it there, shipped the people there, set everything up. And then we had two data centers. So we were operating out of two. And then like, I think two years ago, we decided to expand into another data center. We got a data center in Canada. We thought the regulation there might be a bit friendlier than the US. We got a couple of cabinets in the data center there, shipped the hardware, and I didn't realize what a nightmare it's gonna be to get hardware in Canada. In Europe, it's much easier to get hardware. Especially all our suppliers were in Europe, so we had to find new suppliers in Canada, and it was quite a nightmare, especially... flying there, it was minus 25. It was really cold when we got there.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+And I can imagine for you it was a shock
+
Isaac Zarb:
+Yes, it was really cold. It was in COVID time, so we were wearing masks and doing tests at the airport. And after like 20 hours not sleeping, it was like, are you going to poke me now?
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Ha ha ha.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+But yeah, we got that data up and running. So now we're running out of three data center. We own all the hardware and the stack from the firewall to the servers, to the storage. The only thing we get from the data centers is bandwidth and power and remote hands sometimes if we need them. I think it's, having our own data centers and our own hardware allows us to be very flexible. Like there were times where For example, running a BSC node was nearly impossible. And at some point, we were running it on commodity hardware because the servers weren't tuned well enough. And we tried actually running it on some clouds, got really big VMs on Azure and AWS, and still syncing this node was nearly impossible. Then we started looking at the stack, we optimized the VMware. VMs that we're using that played around with some settings and we finally got these VMs to sync So we didn't need to buy gaming PCs anymore just to sync this So having our own Obviously, we always never we never want to use gaming PCs or anything like that. We want the enterprise hardware. So We had a need because we needed to run these chains So we did whatever we could to get them running but our goal was to get them on to onto the servers as quickly as possible. That was like interesting. I got to play with a lot of hardware at the time. The newer generation CPUs I think are really great. Like there was a time where AMD was much faster than the Intel, but Intel CPUs have finally caught up. And I think now we can run any chain without any problems on the latest generation CPUs.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+actually a lot of questions regarding bare metal as you speak, you're kind of writing some of them, jotting some of them down. And some of them might seem plain, simple, plain silly. But I think it's things that are interesting to a lot of people, especially a lot of people either starting out. So I'm going to ask some questions. And of course, some of them you might find very short. For example, you know, you describe like what to use, obviously your story, and it's kind of like, That's what happened. But a lot of people are like, wow, this guy built his own data centers. These guys are crazy. So there's a lot of questions coming up to mind. For example, if would you say that using... And this is a big discussion I had with a lot of other validators. For example, what about secondhand hardware? Do you guys use secondhand hardware? Do you think it's a good practice to use secondhand hardware? Does that help or no? Or only top of the notch or whatever? What's your opinion on that, for example?
+
Isaac Zarb:
+We do get some refurbished hardware. I always make sure to get the manufacturer refurbished, not buy them off eBay or something like that. If we do get refurb hardware, it has to be like latest gen. So it would be some company who just bought the hardware and like closed down or something, never buy old servers because they're useless. Like I would say our servers are like... one or two generations old. I think
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Okay.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+we have some older generations, but those are just used to run our monitoring systems and internal stuff. The blockchains really need the latest CPUs. Generally, we tend to go for refurb when we cannot get our hands on new hardware. This happens like what's gonna happen right now after this Intel downfall vulnerability. a lot of companies are going to need new CPUs because the latest Gen 13 CPUs are not vulnerable to the exploit.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Oh,
+
Isaac Zarb:
+So there's gonna be
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+and
+
Isaac Zarb:
+a lot of demand
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+I
+
Isaac Zarb:
+for hardware
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+think
+
Isaac Zarb:
+and
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+our
+
Isaac Zarb:
+you
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+guests
+
Isaac Zarb:
+won't be able
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+lost
+
Isaac Zarb:
+to.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+connection, but they will come back. So if you guys watching it stick with me. There we go. Hello, Isaac.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+I lost you for a second there.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+It
+
Isaac Zarb:
+Yeah,
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+happens.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+I'm back.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+No worries. No worries. It happens. You were saying about the new about we're talking about secondhand and new hardware and you're talking about the generations of CPUs. So if you just want to carry on or.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+Yeah. So generally you'd always want to stick to the latest generation of CPUs. Like within one generation old is usually fine, but anything older than that, you're going to start having problems, especially with new blockchains. Like say, where you have sub one second block times, you really need the latest CPUs to keep up. We generally tend to go for refurb hardware when we need to buy new hardware and there's a chip shortage, which will probably happen now given the Intel vulnerability that came out a couple of days ago.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Mm-hmm.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+So everybody will want a lot of new hardware, so there'll be a shortage. So your only option would be if you need hardware today to try and find some refurbished hardware.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+What about...
+
Isaac Zarb:
+Never buy refurbished disks, obviously. Hard disks should always be new. because they degrade.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+That was actually a question about the disc. Sorry, carry on, carry on, please. It was about
+
Isaac Zarb:
+Yeah.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+the discs.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+So disks, I would always go for new, like definitely new, especially for our SANs, because those are the hearts of the system. I think the lessons that we learned are switches and stuff like that can be refurb, like Cisco switches never die, but anything else you probably want to get as recent as possible.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+What about, I mean, initial, sorry, initial or general costs? I mean, there was, for example, I recently spoke to, it's amazing how many opinions you can get from speaking to so many validators. And of course, the bigger validators and smaller validators have different opinions because they have different goals. And of course, sometimes our opinions... Like, you know, you get, you talk to one person and they're like, oh, you don't need all that. And then you understand, okay, but their goal is different. But what about the initial cost that you, that you, and talk about architecture here, that, um, and okay, let's talk of course, Europe, American kind of, um, realism, because that's where we allocated me and you at least, and it's easier for us to understand it. So it's not that we want to ignore everything else. What is the reality? Let's say there is a team. sitting in a basement and they have hands-on some equipment, but what is the real cost currently that they would need to, if they want to run a couple of top validators and a couple of top networks? I'm not talking about the dockings they need to get into the set, but what would be the cost of running those kind of operations if between something...
+
Isaac Zarb:
+Okay. So if you're starting out, obviously,
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Yeah.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+I don't think building your data center, it's a huge cost. So had we not had the initial data center, it would have been very hard to say, okay, I'm going to get into this business. Let's spend 300 grand to build a data center. I would say like the setup is like, for example, from our setup, I think the biggest cost would be like the bandwidth. Because we have like, we use multiple ISPs and then we use BGP to bond the links together. So if one, so our, something that is rooted over multiple ISPs, so if one ISP is down, we can continue routing traffic and never change our IP addresses. So you're kind of paying twice for the bandwidth because you get two links from different ISPs. But all these things allow you to be more resilient and up, you know, like increase your uptime. I think if I were starting new until you boost revenue, I would probably use some co-located hardware in a data center. And then once it scales up, maybe get my own data center or maybe use providers where you can rent hardware until you have a steady revenue stream.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+It's definitely an interesting case because for a lot of, of course, validators who have started their operations a long time ago, you know, the case can be easier. Like you say, okay, we'll have the data center. Somebody says, well, I had the team, I had the whatever. And that's why I think also the reason why when I speak to a lot of smaller validators, another topic. comes up at hand and actually doesn't come just with smaller validators, it comes up also with big validators, but more rarely. And the top is X is one network one server. And at the beginning, especially like during 2017-18, I think it was kind of like the law was like, hey, you cannot put more than one network on one server. Of course, the market was going up. Everybody was happy. The market changed, the conditions changed. We learned a lot of things in the process of what's harmful, what's not to the networks. And today, what I can see is that we have validators already bragging about putting five, six, seven networks on one server in order to get the costs back. And even then they say, well, I'm running those five, six. I don't want to be... use a bad word here, but you know, low cost, sorry, low cap, low cap, excuse me, networks, and even they don't pay for the servers. What are your opinions on that? What's your opinion on how this should be or shouldn't be or how you guys do it or what you suggest? Any reflection?
+
Isaac Zarb:
+So the way I see it is that most of the requirements are. I wouldn't say wrong, but you see like most blockchains, they would tell you, you need a terabyte of RAM or you need five, one, two gigs of RAM. That's true for Solana, by the way. You need a server for Solana. Trash is that kind of it. But besides Solana, I would say like, you can like, one thing we figured we did a lot of research on was what kind of storage do you need to... to run these blockchain nodes, because everybody tells you need local NVMe disks, SSDs are, SAS or SATA SSDs are not fast enough, you need NVMe. But the chip on the NVMe and the SSD is the same chip, it's just the interface that's different. So, Andy said you need a million IOPS. It's not about the IOPS, like you can run it with much less IOPS. The problem is latency. So... because you have a lot of reads and writes at the same time. So you have like blockchain reading a whole epoch from disk while writing at the same time. So basically you need a lot of interface bandwidth to talk to the silicon. One thing we were doing wrong in the beginning was we were using iSCSI, which is software based LANS on the storage. So what happens is when you're using a protocol like iSCSI, from the hypervisor or from the server, you're hitting the CPU of the server and then going to the SAN and hitting the CPU of the SAN. So it's not like you have like a middleman, which is the CPU in the way. Then we move to fiber channel. So same hardware, just we went from iSCSI to fiber channel. And that made like, it's like we... changed everything, like it's like
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Wow.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+we had new disks. So the latency went from one millisecond to like 0.01 milliseconds.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Wow.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+Whereas with Fiber Channel, you're not using the CPU and the hypervisor. So whenever you need to go to storage, you go to the Fiber Channel card and direct to the storage. So over there, we removed a big bottleneck. using NVMe disks in the storage helps because again when you're using SATA or SAS you're passing through the CPU and the controller has like a 12 gigabit bandwidth where you need much more bandwidth so with NVMe you have like the whole PCI express bandwidth. Yeah but like we don't see much difference from our shared story from our SANs to the local NVMe disks. It's pretty much, pretty much the same. It's just getting the right infrastructure deployed and knowing how to maintain it.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Do you still use NVMe disks or do you use all sorts of, or there is a mixture of types of disks that you use across the servers? Considering...
+
Isaac Zarb:
+We don't run much anything local on the servers because we want the service to be disposable if the server dies, we just run
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Mm-hmm.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+the workload on another server. All the SANs have NVMe disks because
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Mm-hmm.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+they offer better performance. But it's not because the disk is better, it's because their interface offers better performance.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Yeah.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+We do use some local NVMe disks on some servers where if we have... emergency and we need a little bit extra power we would run something locally something huge like a Solana node or something like that
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Let's talk a little bit about, I mean, there's a million questions I can really ask and a couple of questions. I see someone posted one here. And actually let me ask that because I'm going to, it's a good direction to take it in. How do you guys choose the network? I mean, how do you today, especially considering your size and I mean, you know, blockchain, decentralization, but we all understand the power of. every given, any given entity or any given player. So when a player with a lot of force comes in, how do you make your choices? I mean, do networks come to you completely all the time or do you go out and look for networks? That's I guess the first step. And second, regardless, what's the criteria that would make you validate a network today?
+
Isaac Zarb:
+Okay, so I think we made the mistake in the past where we joined all the networks. Like any network that came up, we were joining, but then you start realizing that you're losing a lot of money from most of the chains you're running and like the bigger chains are subsidizing everything. So now we join chains, which we either invest in, or we would have a good relationship with where we help out in the test net and we know that we're going to get
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Okay.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+a good delegation. Either we have a good delegation, like we know like there's this chain coming up and we have a delegator who has a good position in that. There are some chains which we still join because they're common good chains. So we want to contribute. So we do run these common good chains. Mostly...
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+What do you call a common good chain? Sorry. What's a common good chain? Example. Can you?
+
Isaac Zarb:
+For example, like a liquid staking protocol, like
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Okay.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+Stride, for example. And
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+I understand what you mean.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+the Cosmos Hub, for example, like you need to run the Cosmos. I think, am I still here? Yeah, my
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Yes,
+
Isaac Zarb:
+video.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+yes,
+
Isaac Zarb:
+Yeah.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+sorry, too. No, no, the connection is good. Sorry, I wanted to understand what you mean by public good chain. But you were talking about choosing a criteria of choosing a chain. Sorry. Yeah.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+Okay, so now when we join chains, like we want to make sure that we'll not be at the bottom of the set and we have to keep worrying about staying in the set. And so we try to work with the team before to understand what we can offer them, what we can bring to the table to help them out. And we think of it as a partnership, like a win-win for both of us. We validate on
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Yes.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+the chain. We help them bring decentralization by not being on the cloud because it is a problem. cloud providers, like we've seen like on Solana, for example, a lot of people were running on Hetzner because it was quite cheap to run on Hetzner. And then one fine day, Hetzner decided to kick out like 20% of the Solana validators. So I think we offer a peace of mind that we're running out of our own data centers and we'll make sure that the data centers we're in have no cloud presence. So the... the co-located data centers we have do not offer cloud services. So if there is a cloud outage, we'll still be producing blocks. I
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+What about?
+
Isaac Zarb:
+think that's it.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+No, that makes sense. Makes perfect sense. Well, what about the goal? And when I say the goal, this is kind of sometimes confusing for, for not confusing, but it's interpreted very differently. And what I mean by that is I'm going to give you personal example of what, for example, we don't do. And I think that would help you to answer as. precisely is possible to the question that I'm trying to direct you to. So for example, today Citizen Cosmos as a validator, we've been offered, we have been stopped on these offers because we refuse them constantly. But a lot of the times we've been offered to validate certain networks. And a lot of them are not something that aligns with the values of the projects. and doesn't correlate. So for example, when somebody comes to me and says, Hey, we're launching a new Dex, for example, I don't know. So nothing comes to mind right now. Sorry. Let's say Astral port or whatever. I'm making this up. And somebody brings this to me, somebody from the team. And I'm like, well, no, because this doesn't go with the way we want to build, you know, decentralization or blockchain or whatever it is we believe in. So what about your goal? Where is like, especially validating so many networks, do you, does Simply Staking have something like that? Or Simply Staking just wants to be the best and the most reliable staking provider and that's it. Which is also a goal, of course.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+Well,
+
Isaac Zarb:
+yeah, so best and most reliable, definitely that's a goal.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Okay.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+And there's a lot of good validators out there. So I wouldn't say we're the best, but we're, we, at least we aim to be among the best. Um, uh, but like there's a lot of good people out there. So I'm, you know, happy to be in this ecosystem. So, so early, um, we do have values. Um, we, uh, How do I say this? So we definitely would not want to run anything that is considered as like not a value project or like we don't want to contribute to it definitely a scam. So if there's something like offering us higher rewards, but we don't believe in their vision or we think that it's a scam, we'll definitely not put our name on that and not contribute to
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Mm-hmm.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+that. I can't say like there's something. pinpoint like there is this thing that definitely we will not run. It's like we have a committee where we discuss the new changes that are coming up and we all vote if we think we should vote, join. But quality of the team is one thing that we look at. If they have any history with launching projects and then abandoning them. There's a lot of criteria which we look at and the chances of success of the project.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+What about, you know, more... more, I don't know what word to pick here to describe it, but I guess validators can be divided according to whoever describes validators into different separate groups. Somebody says validator is purely technical entity. Somebody says it's a social entity, a business entity, a mixture of all those entities. And I guess governance is one of those topics, which is very Well, it has been going shaky from, you know, especially if you've been like yourself, you know, you've been a masternodes, you know, you've seen depots, you've seen witnesses, you've probably been involved in places like EOS, you know, at least maybe not as a validator, but probably, I don't know if you are, but at least you've definitely seen that scene and the difference of all of those things. I'm curious, what's the opinion of yourself, of Isaac and Simply Staking when it comes to what do validators or what should validators do? when it comes to governance, should they participate? Should they stay, I don't know, abstained or whatever? What's your opinion here?
+
Isaac Zarb:
+Okay. So this is my personal opinion. I think
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Please.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+that especially on big chains, validators should be KYC'd because, or at least like top, there should be a process to KYC or validator. And people have the option to be anon or not. But if these validators are providing security for so much value, you
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Mm-hmm.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+want to know who's running these,
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Mm-hmm.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+you know, these services. Now if. If people want to delegate to a non-validator, they're free to do so. But I think
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Mm-hmm.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+there should be some way of KYCing a validator and having the top validators known. That's one thing. Around governance, I think we've lacked on that in the past. We were very busy focusing on the tech and we did not do a lot of community outreach. We don't... have a good marketing yet. However, I'm very proud of the work Damian and the rest of the team are doing with governance. We've actually put up some proposals lately. And I think that all validators should vote for that's something that we always try to do. And I think validators should be active in governance, especially on things that relate to the network and security of the network. Obviously, maybe not all validators can contribute to tokenomics or the future of a project, because maybe the validator's remit is providing security and running the network. However, they definitely should be involved. I don't like the fact that the exchanges don't vote on governance. However, their excuse is that there's regulators that they might be held liable if they... if they vote. So it's all clear there. So I can understand that nobody wants the SCC knocking down their door. So I understand why they don't vote, but it would be nice to see more participation from validators.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Yet they're okay with taking the risks and running the validator and earning the commission rates.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+Yeah.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+That's true.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+They're already taking the risks. No, but okay, without sticking to going into my own opinions, though I have to ask a question from what you reflected on before. I'm going to say story and then you tell me what's your opinion on that. So I think it was back in 2000, wasn't that far away ago it was 2019 or maybe 2020, I believe maybe. And I don't remember what was the context. But the story was that somebody sent me some story from I don't forget, I don't remember where it was, whether it was European or American story, where a provider who was collecting KYC data for, well, they were not doing the KYC. They were just collecting, storing some data, then sending it. There was some cycle of events that led basically to the loss of all the data. And that provider, it was nothing to do with blockchain. It was to do with quite a big bank. And basically, they lost the amount of hundreds of thousands of people of data.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+or something.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+During the same time, we had a conversation of what, imagine something that happens in blockchain where whoever is doing the KYC, let's say for the validators, and there is only about 100 or 150 validators on a given network, they lose all the data. And basically with it, all the private information of where these people live. Who is their daughter's name? What is the dog's name? I don't know, whatever else that KYC information might have. Of course, that's if in open format and considering that if banks lose it, damn it, their security is like, you know, a bit different from at least, so does one hope, to the security of this guy. So do you not think that could potentially, KYC invalidators could potentially create actually a big security risk in terms of... knowing where they are and who they are.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+I mean,
+
Isaac Zarb:
+most validators would all have blockchain account, exchange accounts. So I've done so many KYCs.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Of course.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+Like I mean, for every project, if you're going to get tokens, you have to do KYC. So wouldn't it be better if there was like a blockchain where you could do one KYC and then have zero knowledge proofs across anybody who needs your data just has to... Is this guy valid? Is this guy a PEP? Is this guy a criminal? Is this... and you don't get the data, but you get a yes, like, you know, using ZKs. I think
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Mm-hmm.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+that's the system that we have to go for. It's not that we shouldn't use the system because the way the system currently is, it's much worse because I have to do the same KYC over and over again with the same provider most of the time. Like all the exchanges probably use one or two providers. and you're sending them the same data over and over again. It would be much easier if there was a central place where you could do this. And once you update your data, everybody gets the updated data. This, like I recently moved house and I had to go to all the banks and update my data and then go to the transport, you know, to the DMV and update my license there, update my ID card. So I really think like blockchain could... solve this pain point for a lot of human beings. Having an NFT as your ID card or your passport would probably solve most of these things.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+I don't think adding verification, because you're still doing, all the validators are still doing the KYC across multiple providers, so I don't think it would weaken security.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+I think I think it's a lot of the time that the thought crosses the mind when you're in an office of a lawyer, especially or an accountant. Would have been useful if that was done when I was five and not
+
Isaac Zarb:
+Yeah.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+every now and again. What about the topic of, you know, I want to understand again, as somebody who has such a wide not range of networks, but I guess that Having to validate such a wide range of networks, I know personally, you kind of have to understand what's going on there, which means it gives you a better perspective of the whole space in general. Well, at least so I can, I understand it like that. I envision it that you would. So my question is, what's your vision on, you know, on tribalism? And I mean, to me, it's a very dear topic. tribalism in a bad way, not in a good way. I don't like it. But I'm curious, what's your opinion considering you validate so many networks and you're definitely probably aware of something that's going on in Ethereum, something in Cosmos, something in Polkadot, something in Solana, something there. How do you see that all of those things coming together or never coming together, stay in separate silos? What's your opinion?
+
Isaac Zarb:
+So... Yeah, like most chains are like separate ecosystems and there's very little interconnectivity between them and there are like these tribal like, no I'm building on Polkadot, I'm better or I'm building on Cosmos or I'm building on ETH. So I think most chains have their pros and cons like building on ETH, you have high gas fees so then you'd end up running on a layer 2. Building on Cosmos, maybe you have the IBC protocol which allows you to connect to many chains. However, I still think the shared security there is not done right. Building on Polkadot, then the blockchain community is still not at the level of the IBC. So I see them as multiple programming languages pretty much like you have Java, you have NET, you have PHP, you have Python, you have Ruby. And they all have something Great. But they all have their own cumbersome things to learn. Yeah, I think the most value right now is on Ethereum. I think it's the heart of blockchain at the moment.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+for sure, for sure,
+
Isaac Zarb:
+I mean, DeFi
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+it is,
+
Isaac Zarb:
+definitely
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+it is, it is,
+
Isaac Zarb:
+is on Ethereum.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+it is definitely, I agree.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+I don't know how much space for different ecosystems there is, like at some point, how many programming languages can you have? But if we look at the world, like we have Windows, we have Mac OS, we have Linux, and they all survive and they all thrive. So there is space for more than one blockchain, like you have Bitcoin that now has Ordinals and it's like a good store of value and like this legacy thing but everybody trusts it because it's existed for so long. You have Ethereum, which has proven some use cases. But I would like to see more use cases rather than just finance and DeFi. NFTs were a good idea, but they were used as art. Maybe they can be used as tickets or, you know, there's probably a better use case to get them into the hands of everyone. I think we still haven't figured out the thing that's going to get mass adoption. Like with the internet back in the day, everybody, you know, the techies were playing on the internet, like messaging and stuff. But it's not until we gave the public the ability to shop online that we, you know, the internet became widespread. You know, email helped that. So I don't think there is... We went to finance immediately now on the internet finance came later when people trusted the internet and on blockchain we went we skipped the Validity and the onboarding of people and we just said okay, let's get your money here So people obviously are scared like it's very difficult to use blockchain Like I I've you know interacted with all the wallets and sometimes when I need to swap between the layer to It's like confusing sometimes you have to use Metamask and then you get another network in. What the hell am I doing? Am I sending the money to the wrong... And then like I have to use... Now I have to use Kepler and then I have to use Cosmos Station and then I have to jump in and... Oh my God, like why do I need so many wallets and so many ledgers and so many... So that's one thing that makes the user experience really hard. I think like having... universal currency and a wallet where you don't need, if I need to do a transaction on 10 chains, I don't need 10 tokens. So if I can have a USDT or USDC and then the wallet can trade it to whatever it needs rather than I have to trade it, that might make life much easier. Because imagine like on the internet or like on your phone, you want to call the US. You don't need to have like US currency in your phone to be able to make the call in the US. You have a connection with one provider and then they deal with passing through all the countries. Imagine if to route a call you need to have Italian currency in this wallet and then a UK currency in this wallet to pass through all the channels. So I think that's one of the limiting factors we have right now. the infrastructure is still a bit cumbersome to use.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+I think it's a good example you gave, especially with when you think about telephone code numbers, you know, and we all still put in, you know, the plus zero one or plus four or four or so when we ring. And it's not that long ago that the currency thing actually stopped because I mean, it's not, it wasn't that long ago when I remember buying, well, okay, not yesterday, of course, but I'm a bit older probably than I look, but I do remember buying, you know, phone cards and then and ringing. top up the phone card and going to ring another country. And I still remember that it wasn't that long ago. So
+
Isaac Zarb:
+Yeah. That was the VOIP to get cheaper
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+yes,
+
Isaac Zarb:
+calls.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+foips
+
Isaac Zarb:
+Yeah.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+voips. Yeah, it was a big, big jump, big jump, I think in progress from
+
Isaac Zarb:
+Yeah, it
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+how
+
Isaac Zarb:
+made
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+we
+
Isaac Zarb:
+it affordable to call outside of the country because back then it was so expensive. But it was, even though it was expensive, you only had to have one contract with your local provider. And then
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Yes.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+they took care of everything with blockchain. If you need to move from Cosmos to Ethereum, you need to have multiple tokens, multiple wallets. You know, we have to bridge the, yes, it's much harder. So I think that's what we lack. The it's like with the internet. If you want to browse. bbc.co.uk, you don't need a subscription with the British provider where the website is running. It's, you know, your internet provider takes care of routing the traffic.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+So I think that will unite the tribes. Like, so like having better connectivity will unite the tribes as you were talking. And then it would be easier for the tribes to do business with one another or to trade.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+hopefully, hopefully. I think that's a very, not big vision, but sort of hopeful vision in a sense sometimes. But I definitely, I think that like you described, you know, you described the internet epoch, and there was a lot of similarities between that. And I think we're slowly kind of, you know, uh moving into the same on the same paths in terms of development and um yeah so hopefully we will also uh get to the point of like you described you know where people don't think any more of okay maybe I need to think of what code I need to put in whether plus 44 is Solana and plus 45 is uh is tender mint but uh okay apart from that let's go Isaac, in terms of simply staking, is there anything else you would like to share that I didn't ask you?
+
Isaac Zarb:
+As I mentioned before, we're launching our own blockchain called Entry Point.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Okay.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+We're going to test that pretty soon, like in September.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Is there any info anyone can find on that?
+
Isaac Zarb:
+Yeah,
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Anywhere?
+
Isaac Zarb:
+the URL is entrypoint.zone.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Okay?
+
Isaac Zarb:
+And you could, there's the website, there's the white paper, there's a bunch of documentation. And soon we'll be having a testnet. We'll probably be looking for validators to help us validate. We have a discussion on the Cosmos Forum ongoing to see if we're joining ICS and... we had some controversy because we asked for some funding from the hub and not everybody was keen on that. But it seems like sentiment has changed and like people understand what we're trying to do. We're trying to change the way blockchains are funded and the way that traditionally most blockchains would start off with dishing out a lot of their token to help pay for validation. And then you end up with a lot of validators dumping your token and that causes a problem for your token. So we were trying to find different ways on how to do this. It's an interesting discussion. I look forward to finalizing it and see where we get to that.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+So yeah, definitely guys, check out the Cosmos forum. There is a big thread on that there. And of course, there's gonna be a couple of links through the description, because most likely you're watching the recording of this. Do join the discussion. And of course, follow entrypoint.zone, right? And for all other information. And I'm sure you can find the Simply Staking validator on most networks if you cannot. You have to type in Simply Staking. There we go. And you'll find the guys. Isaac, I thank you very, very much for your time and your answers.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+Thank
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+And
+
Isaac Zarb:
+you.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+hopefully we get to chat again in the future.
+
Isaac Zarb:
+I'd love that. Thank you very much.
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Thank you. Please don't hang up just a second. I'm just going to stop the stream and thank you everybody for listening.
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:
[00:00:00] Citizen Cosmos: Hi everyone! Welcome to our new episode of the Citizen Cosmos podcast! Today we have with us CO, the Community Overlord from Orbital Apes. Hey! Welcome to the show!
+
[00:01:42] CO Orbital Apes: Thank you for having me here, excited about it!
+
[00:01:45] Citizen Cosmos: Glad have you. You guys have probably the current biggest NFT project in the Cosmos ecosystem. I would love to talk all about it. Do you want to introduce yourself and maybe talk a little bit about Orbital Apes and what you guys do?
+
[00:01:57] CO Orbital Apes: For sure! So me, I run the social media marketing and part of the business side of the of the collection. So Orbital Apes started as NFT collection, it's relatively simple to just create the art and push an NFT collection so we decided to take it one step further and pack it like with as much utility we could give it. So that's where our idea for the market place started and we decided to create a validator in the Evmos chain and we're currently building a game for Evmos as well, so we're tying all of these different aspects to the NFT collection so as a holder of the main collection you get a piece of everything we’ll build in the future, so all the Orbital Apes NFT holders get 50% of our validator management fees. They get 20% of the marketplace fees and they're going to get a free airdrop for them to maintain the new collection for the PvP game. So with all of this we're trying to tie up the different aspects and everything we develop in the future into the main collection so holder from now we'll get access to everything we build.
+
[00:03:08] Citizen Cosmos: You just answered one of my next questions but it's good! So you have a lot plans, we'll talk a little bit about them later as well. I'm going to start with obvious questions. Why did you guys decide to go anonymous?
+
[00:03:24] CO Orbital Apes: For us this is just a matter of privacy, we don’t have any problems with sharing our identity, but if we don’t need it, we want to have apes as the core image of our brand. We’re dogs with the Evmos team because we have to go through full KYC for one of the projects we're running on Evmos, so they've seen our faces, we're in constant communication
+with them but for the public itself maybe in the future we would have plans of not being anonymous but for now it's just a matter of privacy. People can reach out directly to us on social networks but for now we don't feel identity is the most important thing.
+
[00:04:08] Citizen Cosmos: i absolutely agree with. It's just interesting that you actually had to go through a full KYC the team and here you still decide to stay anonymous but in my opinion it might be a little bit better for the team to be anonymous because that way you strip down the persona behind the person who creates the project and you concentrate on the project. What do you think about having to go through the full KYC? Were you okay with it?
+
[00:04:37] CO Orbital Apes: It's just a part of the process with one of the projects we're working on, so not a big issue for us.
+
[00:04:45] Citizen Cosmos: What's with the nicknames? Share the story!
+man i love the nicknames community overlord
+
[00:04:52] CO Orbital Apes: It's just pretty much fun names we came up with as we were looking for our nicknames. I'm using my actual nickname, people called me CO in real life so I went with that.Then, Mr. Sir is something we say a lot,we often refer to each other like that. So that's how that came up. People just chose whatever they felt was cool.
+
[00:05:36] Citizen Cosmos: Before we go more into Orbital Apes I was going to ask why and i've seen this a lot, 10.000 NFTs? I guess 10.000 is a kind of nice round number which makes sense psychologically I guess. But still, why?
+
[00:05:52] CO Orbital Apes: So 10.000 has become pretty much a standard in NFT collections. We know it's a big number and in the current market conditions it's been a hard push to reach the full mint but right now we're 8000 minted, so it's already 80% and we plan on pushing even more so I think it's a realistic number for what we're trying to achieve. Also in the scope of our project it was better for us to split, to have a lot more NFTs because this would allow more people to get into the ecosystem because for example the game in the future we're going
+to want a lot of users so if we have more holders we are already preparing a large user base for for the game. Also for the market place and a validators’ fees that are going to be distributed are significant and are going to continue growing in the future so it we felt it was better to split it between a lot of people instead of going the smaller collection.
+
[00:06:47] Citizen Cosmos: Makes sense! I do have one more intro question. Why Evmos? We also validate Evmos so we also on the same side but I would love to hear your opinion.
+
[00:07:10] CO Orbital Apes: We've always been big fans of the Cosmos ecosystem, we think it's amazing how everything is connected, how easy it is to move from one place to another but
+our experience is in solidity and then EVM, so as soon as we saw Evmos, this massive project coming to IBC we felt like that was the right way for us to go because it combines everything, like all of our experience in the EVM side with the interopperability of Cosmos. So it was perfect
+match, so everything we've done in the past because our team has experience in solidity could be translated directly into Evmos so it was perfect for us.
+
[00:07:54] Citizen Cosmos: You mentioned twice having experience in solidity. Do you want to expand on that? Did you do any projects already in Ethereum that we can talk about?
+
[00:08:02] CO Orbital Apes: Sure. So our teams is half devs, half designers and the devs they all worked in Silicon Valley companies like Google and Slack, and part of their coding experience comes from there. The team also worked in worked as freelancers for several EVM based projects, so that's how all of us got acquainted to EVM and all of this but this is the first time this team gets together to a solo project like not working for anybody else but this is actually something we own and we're running ourselves so it's pretty much our debut as a team.
+
[00:08:38] Citizen Cosmos: It's a big debut you made! A good entrance for sure and now you're saying that you guys have quite a lot of experience in big companies. Why did all those people gather together and decide to make a game? what was the idea? Why not anything else but a game?
+
[00:08:56] CO Orbital Apes: We've all been into blockchain and cryptocurrency for a long time so we've been looking at the type of projects that are successful, the type of projects we wanted to work in and first of all the NFT collection was like an entry point, it was a way to create a brand, to create community so this is why we chose that as a centerpiece of everything we wanted to build. And then we're all gamers, we’re super passionate about it so it was fun to see how much we could experiment because you can see other games like Infinity, for example, that started in Ethereum but that's not viable, they have their own subchain but with gas feeds it becomes impossible to do. Then we've seen several other games and other chains that as they grow like gas feeds can become expansive or the network becomes clogged so they also slow down and fade away, but we saw Evmos and the way it interacts with IBC and everything like
+much more solid place to develop. Everything matched perfectly, so what we decided to go for it and games are a super fun way to interact with a community and to grow a brand, so this is
+our path.
+
[00:10:08] Citizen Cosmos: I agree about gaming and interacting but let's talk a little bit more about all the things you mentioned in the beginning. You guys have a validator, let's start talking about the validator. So the idea from what you said is that the people who are community members and owners of the NFT get part of the commission that the validator earns. Is that correct?
+
[00:10:30] CO Orbital Apes: Yeah exactly. Through marketing and through community engagement we managed to get our validator to the top one spot in Evmos which was a massive surprise for us. It also required a lot of effort so we're happy with a result we got. So from that validator there our users stake with us because they trust the brand, they know how we operate and the reward system we've created for them, so all of the holders are getting the 50% of the management fees sent to them daily. So at the current rate I think the Apes are getting around 1.3k Evmos daily split into all of them, so every day the collection is getting some rewards. So right now if you go to mint on Orbital Apes instead you still pay the 60 Evmos mint price but as soon as you mint, you can go claim the rewards that have been staking since release. Right now they hold around three most inside so the real price you're going to pay is 57. So this is a cool system because in the future if enough time goes where Apes are not minted they're going to become free at some point or if people mint now, they're going to recover the full price of their mint. So it's sort of self-balancing system. If people invest early they're going to get their rewards and if it's going to be paid off so they can just continue getting rewards or selling it in the future or when the game releases, so it's pretty cool. Apes are always going to be generating rewards and validator right now is the main source of it but also we run
+the largest just NFT marketplace in Evmos and the holders are also collecting rewards from that so right now since we launched our collection, the traded volume for the apes is about 90.000 Evmos so it's significant right now and we expected to continue growing as more and if the collections come to the market place. Now have some excellent NFTs approaching Evmos so it's pretty cool, we’re excited to see how much the volume increases in the marketplace and all of this is going to benefit Ape holders in long term as volume increases, their fees increase.
+
[00:12:49] Citizen Cosmos: So basically what other parts are there to the economics? So you have the marketplace which generates a certain revenue and are there other parts to economics apart from being an NFT collection and being scarse which is I can guess can also be part of the economics. Are there any more things that week can say that's part of that?
+
[00:13:10] CO Orbital Apes: So for now things with actual monetary value are just these like this is where we're assigning value but we also have like a reward sort of reward points for people who delegate to us. We created this token OAV so people that stake with us get a monthly airdrop of the OAV token which is not something that has value in itself but it's something that people can use in the OAV store that we created. So the whole purpose of this store is to give some incentives for people and rewards for people that delegate to us and that have been loyal to us and we give something back that they can use to further engage with the brand so the OAV store contains some exclusive NFT designs they're all erc 1155 so it's shared ownership but people can use the tokens they got from staking to mint these new Apes. All of these are limited edition Apes so they're going to be there for one month and then they're going to disappear forever so you can use the OAV tokens you've got from staking with us. To mint these Apes you can use it as a profile picture, you can trade in the marketplace, and we're creating a system of scarcity by making them time limited so early stakers who minted one of the current Apes are going to have them but in the future these are going to be impossible to get unless you buy them of secondary. So its this scarcity system we created to reward holders, early holders especially because they're the only ones with access to the early releases of OAV.
+
[00:14:45] Citizen Cosmos: Could you kind of summarize that the NFTs in this case are a gateway point into the system that you're creating?
+
[00:14:54] CO Orbital Apes: Yeah, exactly. So if you own an Ape you can be sure that you're
+going to be part of every single project, and you're going a get rewards from every single project we build.
+
[00:15:03] Citizen Cosmos: If you don't mind talking about what other projects do you want to talk about? The other plans that you guys have?
+
[00:14:54] CO Orbital Apes: Right now the game is something where dedicating our full time right now because it's pretty complex task to achieve we've seen games, we've seen how successful they are on bull run especially once the game is new it continues to the tokens associated with the game continue to go up like crazy but this is from history we see that this is not sustainable. Pretty much every play to earn game that has released eventually collapses
+so this is something we're really trying to avoid. Of course like teams that release a play to earn game can get a lot of capital quick from the increase of the value of the token but then in the end you're still responsible for your community, for what you promise to the people. Having a token falling in price is not something we want to give to our customers, so we're taking our time we're trying to build a more sustainable play to earn tokanomic system so this is why we're going to continue taking our time for the game, make sure to release it once it's perfect and also one of the important things is to release it under a better market condition because even if you have the best game in the world you really do have to wait for for a good market condition for it
+to be truly successful if not lunching something that's not going to take off immediately is going to make it way harder to push it in the future, so we're trying to wait for every factor to align itself. Everything has done until now for collection so that's when we're going to release that's also going to be part of the reward system for the holders.
+
[00:16:50] Citizen Cosmos: You mentioned two things: market conditions and games failing. Let's talk a little about the games failing. First, why in your opinion, most of the other games fail?
+We’re talking blockchain games of course.
+
[00:17:04] CO Orbital Apes: The thing with blockchain is that most games have been pretty much just another way to invest. We've seen idle games where you just click send your players to do some activity but you're not really engaging with the game. So this lack of entertainment in the game is what will determine its lifespan. So as long as the tokenomics inside the game continue increasing and people are making money then it's going to make sense to play but if it's not entertaining and the rewards start decreasing that's where a game fails. Right now the key thing we're focusing on is making a game that someone would play on its own even without a reward system because we believe this is the key. This is the only thing that's going to make any game sustainable because if you purely rely on tokenomics, it's just like releasing a new DeFi protocol, not an actual game. So we're not going to go that route, we're going to make something actually fun for people to play.
+
[00:18:04] Citizen Cosmos: This is an interesting point. I would love to expand on that. Let's talk psychology a little bit. You say that you want to make a game which will attract people to play without having a monetary reward. I can understand that you probably have a lot of things that you're trying to avoid because of the like the things that you haven't released yet but can you talk a little bit more like in general psychology wise, what in your opinion makes people play a
+game in the first place if it's not receiving a reward?
+
[00:18:35] CO Orbital Apes: For anything you're going to need a reward. So in games for example xp systems are a pretty good expand levels are a pretty good incentive so people have leaderboards, you get to level a hundred and you're in the top. So you're competing against other people, people can see your name, people know who you are, and your NFTs are linked to you. So you're online your block chain identity goes with you into the game and you get some recognition if you do well with the game but this is one sort of reward this is purely on an entertainment and recognition level we're also going to do a full tokenomic system but by combining these two and making sure they interact properly with each other we're going to make it sustainable in the long run. Because only when you achieve a true balance in this the game can succeed. So it's going to be both like a social factor, a rewards factor and something that will keep people engaged.
+
[00:19:29] Citizen Cosmos: What would you say from the outside of the blockchain world, which successful games can be an example to what you're building?
+
[00:19:40] CO Orbital Apes: I mean we can see probably that the biggest game right now by user base is probably Fortnite or World of Warcraft and all of these games where you create an online persona and your avatar becomes an extension of you. So, for example, in Fortnite you buy some skins, WoW you can buy different cosmetics and all of this is important because you create online persona and you pretty much decorated so you get new items for people to see who you are online, what new thing you have and all this so this is important thing like the social factor combined with cosmetics you can apply. This is what creates a successful game so if a lot of people are playing and then you have the new most exclusive skin then people are going to give you some recognition for that so this is sort of the system we are going to strive towards. We're testing out with the OAV Apes because all of these are limited, they're only going to be there for one month so people are actually rushing to buy the Apes because they know if they buy this now, they're going to be the only one to have it and this is something people actually cherish.
+
[00:20:52] Citizen Cosmos: You mentioned market conditions before a couple of times. Would love to hear your thoughts in general. So are we in a depth of a bear market, in terrible market conditions to relate things? if you can talk more about it, I would love to hear your opinion.
+
[00:21:08] CO Orbital Apes: So right now everybody can see it's not the full green candles every
+day as we experienced in past years, but in Evmos I feel like we're in a secluded place because Evmos keeps growing. More people get interested in the coin, they're coming to the ecosystem, they're seeing their reward, all the useful features you can have when you combine EVM with IBC. So right now Evmos is in a pretty good spot, it's getting a lot of attention as the chain keeps growing. It keeps proving people what the possibilities for it are so right now like we're waiting also for the use surveys in Evmos to increase as well because it's getting a lot of attention but it's still very small compared to the potential it could have in the future. I think that after some months we're going to have a lot of people really invested into the entire ecosystem and that's when it makes sense to do something truly big. Even in these market conditions we managed to sell 80% of our collection until now in a couple of weeks from launch and it looks like we're going to fully mint out in a couple of weeks as well. So it's not terrible but if you have a solid product it will do well even in not the optimal conditions.
+
[00:22:28] Citizen Cosmos: For your team and for you personally, what would be the 1 market event that would trigger you?
+
[00:22:40] CO Orbital Apes: I don't know if it's going to be only one event. We have to see continuous growth throughout decent enough period of time because that's the only signal you can have of improving market conditions because big green candle for the month is not an indication of anything. You have to see how people are engaging with Evmos, for example. How
+many more wallets are created in the chain? How many more DeFi protocols exist? What kind of brands it's attracting? Right now this is not directly related to Cosmos but dYdX is building their own Cosmos chain, so this is something huge for the cosmos ecosystem and this is the sort of thing we like to see when when we're dealing with Evmos that's fully integrated into Cosmos and having these massive protocols migrating into Cosmos seeing the value. That's very good signal of what's to come in the future. So as we see more protocols migrating into Cosmos, and more people discovering the potential of these chains, that's where we can find great signa,l not one specific market event but a series of them for a sustained period of time.
+
[00:23:48] Citizen Cosmos: So I guess we're talking more fundamentals than technical analysis. I have a couple of questions which I'm going to look at because they were from our various chats from community members and then I also have some more questions but a little bit different. So one question was on Twitter. What are the current difficulties in the cryptoworld and the business in terms of like launching your own project in general, and maybe both the market conditions being not in the best situation?
+
[00:24:53] CO Orbital Apes: We've been in in crypto for a long time so we have seen projects become successful and fail and we determined what makes a project be successful. So I remember there was a point in time where any NFT collection you just had to release it and the floor price went crazy and everybody made money on that. So it was a period where people
+just continue to buy mint every collection and the demand for them was crazy. But right now I think the market is more mature so people know where to find value, how to determine a successful project from one that's going to fail, so right now it's not enough to just release a profile picture collection but you actually have to give the user something that they will recognize value in. Now every user is marked, people know how to do their research, they know what works and what doesn't so if you just try to launch very simple project, it's not likely to be
+successful so that's why the Orbital Apes a are full ecosystem. So we have different aspects
+that hedge the performance of the NFT collection so the validator as long as we remain in a good position is going to continue generating for our our project. The NFT marketplace we’re fully into this industry so if the NFT industry within Evmos continues to do well as our NFT then we're going to continue getting benefits from that by combining this having multiple sources of rewards and incentives. It's much more complete package for collection so I would say right now if you’re going to launch a project, make sure something unique and that has true value in itself regardless of market conditions. Something that can endure a bear market, something that can help you push through that and then of course in a bull market it's going to be amazing but you really need something that can withstand any conditions. So that's how we built the Apes, and that's why they made such a loud noise right now even with the current conditions.
+
[00:26:59] Citizen Cosmos: What was the most difficult thing though for your team to overcome and apart from the market conditions obviously? What was the one thing may be drawing the Apes thinking of the collection or maybe launching the validator?
+
[00:27:23] CO Orbital Apes: I don't know if it was just one thing. We had multiple roadblocks like the validator, for example. We started it as soon as the chain restarted so for that we had to make a pretty expensive investment into Evmos when the price was 6 to get into the active set and that was of course a completely different price than right now. So right the start our cost was massive, and then we saw all of that investment go down quickly because we wanted to be there from the start, then we had to run the valley data for OAV, a month without any rewards
+active because inflation was not active in Evmos so that was also an additional cost, and all of the costs of development like the artists, software engineers, and all of these. It was a long period of time where nobody was collecting any profits from anywhere, so it was all our effort waiting for the time to release, and we also ran the NFT marketplace at 0 profit for a long time because we wanted to have everything enabled for the chain to grow, and then for releasing we had to adjust to the timeline of Evmos, not necessarily our own because Evmos was still in the middle of doing upgrades for the Keplr claim issues, so there were multiple factors that had to come through for us to be able to launch. So one of the main things that was preventing us from announcing minting date or a price was the fact the IBC transactions were not enabled to pretty much the largest part of the ecosystem which is Cosmos. It was hard for them to access Evmos directly, so we had to wait for all of these, endure the cost and all the time we spent, just being patient until all the factors aligned and then we could release and it was the right choice to wait even though it was hard and even though we hit many roadblocks, it was the right choice.
+
[00:29:21] Citizen Cosmos: So huddling works, right? I have one more question here which was sent privately. Why did you only self-bond 0.008% of the stake? Is this okay for network security?
+
[00:29:40] CO Orbital Apes: That was the initial self-bond that we had to buy when Evmos was at 6 and after that instead of self-bonding more we just staked 10% of the Orbital Apes mint into the validator so this s a bit more secure for us, gives us more flexibility. Pretty much every validator keeps a really low self-bonded amount because of this. It gives you more security, flexibility but it it's just like that. We want to keep the fund safe so from anything in this way by just staking to the validator, we can do that and all of our wallets are public so people can see that we're not only staking 10% of the main funds to our valudator as we promised but right now we have around 300.000 Evmos stake to smaller validators in this page so people can go to the addresses that are connected to the validator there and they can see how it spreads. I think we're currently staking to 15 other validators, maybe the list has grown but this is pretty much our way to support the ecosystem because we did realize our validator grew to a pretty large size. So initially our plan was to stake with Evmos to continue growing but right now we don't feel like that's the most responsible thing to do, so everything we earn from all the rewards are staked with other people. We choose to stake with validators that are providing something to the Evmoschain, to the Cosmos ecosystem. So for example, a big part of our stake is with ecostate that created the restake tool that a lot of people use, then we deliver it to several other validators. This is something pretty cool for us because we get to engage with a lot of teams so whenever they've come to us sometimes people need a little bit of help to remain in the active set so we discussed the project, and then we know what they're going to be adding to the Evmos chain and it's amazing to be in this position where we can help others and we know what they're doing to help the chain so it's perfect. We love supporting other people because we really get to see inside of everything that's being built for Evmos.
+
[00:32:12] Citizen Cosmos: I love the answer, thank you! I think you guys are doing a very cool job to decentralize the stake. I have a couple of questions, it's going to be harder to ask you since your team is anonymous but I'm still going to try. You did mention that your team has worked with Google and Slack, but how did you resonally get into crypto?
+
[00:32:47] CO Orbital Apes: I think all of us got into crypto in a different period. Me personally, I started in 2018. I started with Bitcoin, that was my first purchase and then as soon as you're invested into something that you keep track of it and you keep looking for more about it so I think that was my entry and then I started looking into other protocols like getting a load to DeFi into NFTs. So by investing in them you get to engage in a much deeper level than people just read the news because you have something and you have a stake so it's important to you and this is pretty much how all of the team got involved. Some have been in crypto from like 2015 so
+they're much more experienced. We're all pretty confident in the crypto space, we know what's going to be the key success factor so it's pretty cool to also have a full team of people that you can talk to about different strategies, about different events because everybody has experience. Combining all of this experience into one project has been massively useful for us.
+
[00:34:06] Citizen Cosmos: What's your personal worst buy so far since 2018?
+
[00:34:10] CO Orbital Apes: I'm not sure what was the worst buy. Right now everything is pretty toughbut I don't think there's been one complete fail. You can always pull out. We had some UST, luckily we were able to to sell it quickly as soon as it broke back. We were also actually huge fans of Luna before but luckily we didn't hold it at the time of the crash.
+
[00:34:54] Citizen Cosmos: I guess UST was one of the worst hits for everybody. Personally, it was a big hit for our project, we had five years worth of money in UST and then it was a big hit, so I totally understand. What was the internal motivation behind creating Orbital Apes?
+
[00:34:06] CO Orbital Apes: So a lot of the team worked as freelancers for other people and we saw how their projects were becoming super successful and they grew into actual companies in
+the cryptospace and all of this, so we wanted to be able to work on what we really wanted. So the Orbital Apes is a company like every other business where we're using our skills what we have to provide value to people and we’re running a company around this. We're going to continue pushing our skills to anything we can do, maybe we get into the maybe we get into DeFi, maybe validating other chains. I wouldn't say it's something novel, something that will change the lives of people but at least right now we're doing our responsibility of keeping the network, secure in helping decentralized although we do take a big chunk of the chain, we’re doing efforts to decentralize, we're supporting other teams and just yesterday on the upgrade it was completely smooth, the V6 of Evmos happened and our validator there was up and running
+perfectly on time, we didn't miss a single block in there so it's perfect. It makes us feel better to see that we can prove to people that their funds are in a safe place, that we're going to have one of the best up times in the network and that's part of what we're doing for the people. This is a business, this is our baby and we're going to continue running it as a business and growing it as much as we can.
+
[00:37:45] Citizen Cosmos: I think it's a very great and fair answer! I'm going to ask one last question to you. What keeps you personally motivated?
+
[00:34:06] CO Orbital Apes: I would say running an NFT collection is pretty tough. At some point you have to be constantly engaged with community, constantly developing new things, you’re pretty much in the hands of how the market is behaving, how market psychology works so it's tough but once you have success in a collection that's more than enough to keep you going because if you know you were successful in this than you know what else to do in the future. And it's also pretty fun. I run the community so getting to interact with a lot of people in Discord is super fun. I know a lot of the people that are in the day score and there's some that are pretty much there 24/7 so talking to them, getting their feedback about the project, listening to suggestions is also super helpful because even though we are a big team it's super useful to hear the the ideas of the people that are actually using our product and are invested on it because first of all, they give us a lot of different ideas of what to do in the future. We've taken a lot of their suggestions and we actually implemented them for the whole ecosystem and you also see when when people react positively towards a new update that you did to the market place or towards a new Ape design that you're released in the OAV store. All of this is super rewarding and fun, it's super fun to see the reactions of people when you release a new snique peek or something like that. Working in crypto you have all the freedom and flexibility you want.
+
[00:40:37] Citizen Cosmos: To be honest with you I don't get many guests who are so business driven and I love that because it's a motivation in itself to succeed. I think success is a very good motivation. Thanks for the conversation, it’s been a huge pleasure!
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here)
In this episode of Citizen Cosmos podcast, the host interviews Jae Kwon, the founder of Cosmos and author of the Tendermint white paper. Kwon discusses various topics, including censorship, resistance systems, truth, misleading narratives, and division in society. They also delve into the importance of discourse, fiction, semantics, the power of history and languages, and smart contract systems.
+
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Good Space time yall. In this episode of The Citizen Cosmos podcast, I talk with Jae Kwon, founder of Cosmos and the author of the Tendermint Whitepaper. Along with Jae, we talk about censorship resistant systems, truth in instincts, misleading narratives and division in the society. We also discuss humanity, the importance of discourse, fiction, semantics, the power of history and languages and smart contract systems
+
Jae Kwon
+We have to create alternative financial systems because the system we're living under seems captured. It feels more like the wormhole between our physical world and the completely different kind of world. What makes a smart contract system good is going to be the language itself. It's really an ongoing battle of getting the truth out so that the things that were hidden become known and compellingly known in a way that is digestible to people so that they can say, Oh, that's crazy. That's actually a real.
In this episode, Citizen Cosmos talks to Jaya Klara Brekke, head of strategy at Nym. They discuss the nature of man and if we can overcome our innate greed and embrace the more altruistic aspects of human nature to build a better tomorrow. Jaya discusses privacy and decentralisation and how she distinguishes between the different iterations of each. Jaya also gives a lot of detail regarding Nym and Nyx. And as always, Citizen Cosmos plays the devil’s advocate at key times.
+
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Good space time yall In this episode of The Citizen Cosmos podcast, I speak to Jaya Klara Brekke, Chief Strategy Officer at NYM Project Privacy Platform, working on infrastructure at the network and application layers. Along with Jaya, we discuss decentralization and its origins, trust networking. Privacy is a fundamental right and who needs saving. We also talked about some anticorruption, criminal activity, pain as a catalyst for change and drone strikes.
+
Jaya
+Was super curious about the totally crazy mix of people that was in this hall. It was everything from dreadlocked anarchists to people in the financial sector all the way through to kind of devs and hackers.
Episode name:
+Chris Castig, Bots, Startups, & The new web.
+
In this episode, Citizen Cosmos
+talks to Chris Castig, co-founder of Console.xyz. Chris and Citizen Cosmos
+discuss education and its importance. They delve into a possible future where bots
+may be recognized as people and look at the now where people are already behaving
+like bots. Chris gives a wealth of information on Console.xyz and I for one
+will be making an account, just to see if it is as beautiful as described.
+
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Good spacetime y'all. In this episode of The Citizen Cosmos podcast, I speak to Chris Castig, founder and console, X, Y, Z, a Web3 chat for Decentralized Communities. Along with Chris, we talk about digital identities, good and bad. Robots and Humans, personal rights, startups, education and product market fit. We also discuss the dangers of wrong funding the Golden Billion onbourding users and the original vision of the Internet.
+
Chris Castig
+I think if we could understand the original vision for the web and then understand how it failed or the challenges with it, which I would say are the powers of centralization that came in the early 2000, then I think you can start to understand what a better future might be. There has never been a more exciting time since maybe the nineties with the web.
Staking is the process of locking up a digital asset to provide economic security for a public blockchain. We have prepared a step-by-step guide on how to stake BOOT
+using Keplr Dashboard and cyb.ai.
+
1. How to stake BOOT using Keplr Dashboard
+
To delegate the Сitizen Сosmos validator, you can follow this link
+or find the Citizen Cosmos validator manually, to do this open Keplr Dashboard(make sure you have some BOOT balance).
Episode name:
+Valerie Tetu, empathy, market strategy & public good.
+
In this episode, Citizen Cosmos talks to Valerie Tetu, GTM at Lido. This episode is fast paced and is packed full of information. Valerie’s enthusiasm and detailed explanations make this a great interview. It has excellent technical information on Lido and liquid staking as well as discussions on ethics and Philosophy, and as always Citizen Cosmos asks the tough questions and plays devil’s advocate.
+
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Good space time, y'all. In this episode of The Citizen Cosmos podcast, I speak with Valerie Tetu GTM Strategy at Lido Finance liquidity staking provider across multiple networks, including Cosmos and Ethereum We discuss startups, Defi public goods, data storage, onboarding new users with empathy and the semantics around pegged assets. We also make a deeper dive into liquid staking how it works, the associated risks and pros and voting rights
+
Valerie Tetu
+Immutable storage that is under my custody that can't go away. They're valuable records. I can transact them anywhere is very, very powerful.
Episode name:
+Eric Waisanen, game theory, inflation & token value.
+
In this episode, Citizen Cosmos talks to Eric Waisanen, tokenomics lead at Phi Labs. In this episode, they delve into the nature of inflation, how it is dealt with in different systems and how it can eventually lead to the death of economies if managed poorly. Â Eric explains at length how the rewards are structured at Astrovault and how they plan on building a sustainable rewards system. Citizen Cosmos and Eric have a heated discussion on how content creators should be compensated and Citizen Cosmos gives a beautiful bit of history on how one used to have to apply for funds in the good old days.
+
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Good space time yall. In this episode of the Citizen Cosmos podcast, I speak to Eric Waisanen, tokenomics lead at Phi Labs Global, helping to facilitate economic innovations and Archway the Cosmos L one, designed to reward developers, along with Eric we discuss counting cards, token utility, monetization, innovation versus Ponzi schemes, economic philosophy, game theory, rewards and liquidity.
+
Eric Waisanen
+Just trying to find a nice niche in a place with great tech and terrible economics.
+
We were having developers build economies and that is not their forte.
+
What they were doing to print money was not different to what the US government does.
+
I don’t think everyone is going to make it, but what does make it out of this dot com bubble, will be the next Amazon or the next Google.
Staking is the process of locking up a digital asset to provide economic security for a public blockchain. We have prepared a step-by-step guide on how to stake ATOM
+using Keplr (you might be using any other wallet. It doesn't really matter. The staking option works more or less the same. The idea is that you need to find the
+'reward' or the 'validator' tab and then delegate the desired amount to a desired validator).
+
How to stake ATOM using Keplr Dashboard
+
To delegate the Сitizen Сosmos validator, you can follow this link
+or find the Citizen Cosmos validator manually, to do this open Keplr Dashboard(make sure you have some ATOM balance).
Staking is the process of locking up a digital asset to provide economic security for a public blockchain. We have prepared a step-by-step guide on how to stake EVMOS
+using Keplr (you might be using any other wallet. It doesn't really matter. The staking option works more or less the same. The idea is that you need to find the
+'reward' or the 'validator' tab and then delegate the desired amount to a desired validator).
+
How to stake EVMOS using Keplr Dashboard
+
To delegate the Сitizen Сosmos validator, you can follow this link
+or find the Citizen Cosmos validator manually, to do this open Keplr Dashboard(make sure you have some EVMOS balance).
A common misconception about how cryptocurrencies are stored in digital wallets is that they are "stored" within the wallet itself, similar to how money is kept in a
+physical wallet. However, this is not the case in the realm of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. In reality, digital wallets do not "store" cryptocurrencies or
+money in the traditional sense. Instead, digital wallets are access points that allow users to interact with the blockchain and manage their digital assets. The actual
+ownership and transfer of cryptocurrencies are recorded on the blockchain, which is a decentralized and distributed ledger. Digital wallets simply store private keys.
+
In a recent podcast episode, we talk with Pedro Gomes co-founder of Wallet Connect about this pressing topic and much more.
In this episode, Citizen Cosmos talks to Zarko Milosevic, CTO of Informal Systems. In this episode, they explore how an organization that expands can manage to stick to their core founding values and have it drive growth. This episode is also packed full of Alpha and hints at more to come. Zarko is passionate about all the new potential developments and unpacks details of Informal becoming the stewards of consensus engine, Tendermint Core.
+
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Good Spacetime yall. In this episode of the Citizen Cosmos Podcast, I speak to Zarco Milosevic, CTO at Informal Systems, core developer of everything Cosmos. Zarco makes two big announcements, revealing Quint, a TLA+ inspired specification language for blockchain protocols and he updates the news on Informal’s work on the Tendermint code base. We will also discuss Informal’s vision, governance in Cosmos, Verification tools and their importance, advanced indexing and scalability issues.
+
Zarko
+It’s like the programming language but with some nice superpowers.
In this episode, Citizen Cosmos talks to Jonathan Caras, dragon rider, proffessional magician and computer science prodigy. In this episode they cover a range of topics, including dragons on Mars, the Hostory of the Sheckle and the collapse of empires. Jonothan has some insights into stablecoins and why it is essential we wrest control of currency away from government.
+They also explore what could be the catalyst for broader user adoption and give some great reasons to buy NFT's.
+
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Good space-time, y'all. In this episode of The Citizen Cosmos podcast, I speak with Jonathan Caras, currently working on Levana, collateralized trading platform. We discuss inflation, stablecoins, NFT’s in gaming, collapse of empires and the history of the Shekel. We also talk about dragons on Mars, the life cycle of living organisms and trust in money.
+
Jonathan
+I’ve worked for a company that built a fashion app called Screenshop for the Kardashians.
+It’s verifiable, you can store it in your head, it’s not sizeable by the government, it allows for arbitrage of electricity, it crosses borders.
+Do thought of it, like a year before me.
In this episode, Citizen Cosmos speaks to Carter Woetzel, co-founder of Shade Protocol, built on the Secret Network.
+Carter delves into his book, Building Confidence in Blockchain, what inspired him to write it and why he feels we should read it.
+They discuss the concept of trust in Blockchain and how we can solve the trust dilemma.
+Citizen Cosmos and Carter debate whether regulators are actually needed and whether what they actually do that is worthwhile.
+Carter discusses some of the projects being built on Shade Protocol, like Silk, a privacy protecting stable coin for Cosmos. As always, Citizen Cosmos ends off with the Blitz and gets Carter to speak to his motivations and projects that he has great respect for.
+
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Good space-time, y'all. In this episode of The Citizen Cosmos podcast, I speak with Carter Woetzel, the chief researcher of Shade Protocol, a privacy focused Defi project built with Cosmos SDK on top of the Secret network. Along with Carter, we discuss privacy on blockchains and smart contracts, Homomorphic encryption, auditability, and trust. We also talked about simplifying gas, non-traditional stablecoins, futuristic tokens and our perception of time in blockchains.
+
Carter
+Crypto’s at the crossroads of all those things. So many times, in this space we lose track of why the technology is valuable. And so why is decentralization so important? What is the problem that blockchain is ultimately solving?
In this episode, Citizen Cosmos speaks to Phoebe Poon, co-founder of LikeCoin, a decentralized publishing protocol, built on Cosmos SDK.
+Phoebe discusses how the changing social context in our ever-changing world is making Web 3, especially decentralized publishing ever more relevant.
+Phoebe sheds light on broader and lesser publicized use cases for NFT’s as well as giving key advice on how to succeed with a start-up during Crypto Winters.
+She addresses historic preservation in many different forms, potential avenues for monetization and the barriers to user adoption, as well as many other topics.
+
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Good space-time y'all. In this episode of The Citizen Cosmos Podcast, I speak with Phoebe Poon. Founder of Likecoin, an open sourced, decentralized, publishing protocol, built on Cosmos SDK. We discuss storage, publishing, history, social media and Web 3. We also talked about the importance of preservation, the role of the community and surviving Crypto Winters.
+
Phoebe
+Sometimes we need to wait for certain social context to happen, to let the layman or majority of the mass understand why this matter. The mindset of running a start-up is very important.
Episode name:
+Boris Mann, storage, web applications & decentralization of web3.
+
In this episode, Citizen Cosmos speaks to Boris Mann, co-founder at Fission nodes, building protocols for the future of the Internet and web3.
+Boris shares his passion for the use of content addressing as a potential solution to storage on web3. If you do not know what content addressing is, I would suggest
+listening to the podcast for the concise and elegant manner in which it is explained.
+Boris also delves into what he believes the future of the internet is and how we can get there.
+During the Blitz, Boris reveals his motivations for crusading for user privacy and social responsibility.
+
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Good space-time y'all. In this episode of The Citizen Cosmos podcast, I speak with Boris Mann from Fission Codes. Powering hub decentralized web applications. We discuss the future of Web 3 marketing, the steps needed to get away from Web 2 and where we are on our Web 3 journey. We also talked about interoperability, DID's, decentralized storage and the pros and cons of IPFS.
+
Boris
+IPFS is awesome, works everywhere in many ways. Content addressing has won and continues to win, in really interesting ways. It's a commons network. It's best effort. People say, "That's terrible. What if it goes away?" And I say the flipside, "Literally any piece of content that any human on the planet cares about, they can keep it online themselves effectively for free, effectively forever."
The way we store data has come a long way since the days of physical storage devices like floppy disks and CDs. In today's digital age, data storage has evolved to become much more accessible and efficient. However, the methods we use to store data are still vulnerable to hacking attacks, censorship, and data loss. This is where the concept of permanent storage comes into play.
+
The Concept of Permanent Storage
+
The concept of permanent storage refers to a type of data storage that allows data to be stored permanently and retrieved instantly. It provides a decentralized way of storing data, eliminating the need for centralized entities that can be vulnerable to censorship and hacking attacks.
+
Censorship resistance is another critical aspect of permanent storage. In centralized systems, there is always a risk that data can be censored, deleted, or modified. However, with permanent storage, the data is stored in a tamper-proof manner, ensuring that it is resistant to censorship.
+
Permanent storage is essential for storing valuable data, such as academic research, art, and personal records. It ensures that the data is accessible to everyone, forever. This type of storage is particularly important for data that needs to be preserved for future generations.
+
Scalability and Cost-Effectiveness
+
Permanent storage can also provide scalability and cost-effectiveness, making it an ideal choice for organizations that need to store large amounts of data. Unlike traditional cloud storage systems, permanent storage typically involves a one-time fee, making it more affordable in the long run.
+
The concept of permanent storage has been the subject of exploration and development in various ways, one of which is through blockchain technology. In a recent episode of our podcast, we had the pleasure of hosting Benjamin from Arweave.News (Now Permaweb.News) and Decent.Land, who is working on projects involving blockchain-based storage solutions. Permaweb.news calls itself the go-to source for community-driven news and updates about the Arweave ecosystem (a permanent storage infrastructure protocol). And Decent.Land is a set of web3 social protocols for identity, DAO governance and social networking built on Arweave.
+
We encourage you to tune in to our podcast episode to learn more about the concept of permanent storage through blockchain technology.
+
Final Thoughts
+
In conclusion, the concept of permanent storage is crucial in today's digital age, where data storage has become a vital aspect of our lives. It provides a decentralized way of storing data, ensuring that it is resistant to censorship and hacking attacks, and is accessible to everyone, forever. With the development of technologies like blockchain, permanent storage is becoming more accessible and cost-effective, making it an increasingly more practical choice for organizations that need to store large amounts of data.
+
+
Become a Citizen of the Cosmos. If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here
Benefits of decentralization and a comparison between decentralized and centralized systems
+
One of the key benefits of decentralization we discussed is that it eliminates the need for intermediaries, which can reduce costs and increase efficiency.
+
Decentralized systems are also more secure and resilient, as there is no central point of failure. In contrast, centralized systems are vulnerable to hacking, censorship, and other forms of manipulation.
+
Challenges of implementing decentralized systems
+
Implementing decentralized systems can be challenging. For example, there may be technical barriers to adoption, such as scalability and
+interoperability issues. There may also be regulatory hurdles, as decentralized systems may be perceived as a threat to bureaucratic systems.
+
When it comes to decentralized social media, the challenges are even greater. Social media platforms are inherently centralized, as they rely on a
+centralized database and black-box algorithms to manage content, not to mention the data ownership.
+
Decentralized social media platforms must therefore find a way to replicate these functions in a decentralized manner, ensure that users have
+control over their data and privacy, while also thinking of hwo to incentivise users.
+
+
Permacast, Decent.Land and Benjamin
+
Permacast is a decentralized podcasting platform that allows creators to publish their content without intermediaries and keep then stored on the permaweb.
+Decent.Land, on the other hand, is a decentralized virtual world that enables users to own and control their own identity across multiple blockchains.
+
Benjamin has a background in marketing, development and journalism, and utilizes his skills to create decentralized systems that empower people and
+promote freedom with the help of the Arweave infrastructure and ecosystem.
+
+
Conclusion
+
While there are challenges to overcome, the benefits of decentralization for the social space are clear. By eliminating intermediaries and promoting
+freedom and autonomy, decentralized systems have the potential to transform the way we live, work, and interact with each other.
+
If you want to hear more from Benjamin, make sure to check out our podcast where he shares his experiences and perspectives on the future of technology and
+society.
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here)
Neutron is permissionless smart contract platform for Interchain DeFi built with Cosmos SDK & Tendermint. Neutron allows to deploy smart
+contracts to the market in a blaze. Smart contracts can query, transact and manage accounts in remote zones directly from Neutron.
Celestia is the first modular blockchain network. By decoupling consensus from execution, Celestia enables anyone to easily deploy their own
+blockchain, without the overhead of bootstrapping a new consensus network. Blockchains on Celestia are simultaneously scalable, sovereign and secure.
Stablecoins - a cryptocurrency with a fixed and stable rate, pegged to the price of fiat currency and with different collateral and reserves
+(whether cryptocurrency or fiat money). It is a popular and liquid medium as it is a convenient way to trade, store and protect your portfolio from volatility.
+After the collapse of UST, there was a debate about what a stablecoin really should be. We spoke with Youssef Amrani
+representing $IST, Chad Barraford representing Thorchain, Siddarth Patil representing $CMST,
+Carter Woetzel representing $SILK, Dove representing $USK, about what stablecoins are for,
+the different designs of stablecoins, what their purpose is, and the dangers of centralization.
Evmos is a scalable, high-throughput Proof-of-Stake blockchain that is fully compatible and interoperable with Ethereum. It's built using the Cosmos SDK which runs on top of Tendermint Core consensus engine.
+Evmos allows developers to make any smart contracts in the native language of Ethereum understandable to the Cosmos with almost no changes to the program code. This allows developers to have all the desired features of Ethereum, while at the same time, benefit from Tendermint’s PoS implementation. Also, because it is built on top of the Cosmos SDK, it will be able to exchange value with the rest of the Cosmos Ecosystem through the Inter Blockchain Communication Protocol (IBC), which is Cosmos's novel solution to the issue of cross chain communication.
Episode name:
+Discussing Interfacing with nation states, UX as utility for people and Inherent risks of validating with Tyler Schmidt.
+
In this episode, Tyler Schmidt Co-Founder and business lead at Strangelove is interviewed.
+The secret's to good decision making and how to achieve true personal freedom are discussed. Tyler gives his philosophy on building and how his values have guided him. He tells us some of the projects that Strangelove is working on. The podcast also touches on the complexities of operating in regulatory frameworks in different nation states.
+
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Hi everybody and welcome to a new episode of the Citizen Cosmos podcast. Today I have Tyler Schmidt with me today, twice today. I don't know why he's only once today, but he's here with me. And he is the co-founder of Strangelove. Tyler, hi.
+
tyler_schmidt:
+Hey, Serj. Nice to meet you, man. It's wonderful to be here.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+How are you man today? How's your day going so far?
+
tyler_schmidt:
+So dude, I'm doing fantastic. And top line item that I have to discuss with you, there is a new cosmonaut on the way.
Episode name:
+The Best Day Ever: Discussing The sustainability of Open Source, Product Market Fit and Dank Meme's with Willy Ogorzaly.
+
In this episode, Willy Ogorzaly from ShapeShift and the Fox foundation is interviewed. He gives the details of his startup journeys and the secret to his success. He gives his definition of dank memes and their power in community building. There is information given on the Arkeo airdrop, as well as thoughts on the ultimate interface for a decentralized universe.
+
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Welcome everyone to a new episode of the Citizen Cosmos Podcasstas. Sometimes I forget what I'm doing where I am, but we are here. the Citizen Cosmos podcast Willy hi. Welcome to the show again. Welcome back to the show. Shall I say?
+
willy:
+GM Serj, happy to be back. Thanks for inviting me.
+
citizen_cosmos:
+Yea, So just for the listeners out there, we have willy with us from shape shift. Well, I don't know if I should introduce it like that any more. Shall I, shall I still say shape shift, or shall I now use the name of the upcoming chain? Or what shall I do? Man? How shall I introduce you?
+
willy:
+It's a good question. I'm a community member of shapeshift. I'm a community member of Arcio. Technically, I'm the head of decentralization for the Fox Foundation. But a lot of people aren't familiar with the Fox Foundation. So shapeshift is probably the most recognized brand. And Arcio
Particles are bits of Information (text, image, audio, video files or any other information, such as - map coordinates) that are registered on the Bostrom blockchain. Each particle is stored using IPFS, hence is immutable.
+
A cyberlink is a link between two particles registered in Bostrom blockchain by a particular neuron. In the case of Cyber and Bostrom a neuron is just another word for a user. Each user represents a neuron, and together - they represent a global formation of the superintelligence. To create a cyberlink in Bostrom, neurons need to have any number of Ampere and 1 or more Volt tokens on their balance.
You can buy BOOT tokens at Osmosis Frontier. We will be able to exchange ATOM/OSMO/JUNO and many other tokens for BOOT tokens. I'll show You an example using ATOM.
During our latest episode of the Citizen Odyssey, we spoke with Neutron's team. Our guests were Soi - Neutorn's community manager, Spaydh - the project manager and Mike - Go/Rust Dev. We discussed Interchain Security, interoperability, CosmWasm, dApps and much more.
+
This is a short recap of the conversations and might not do justice to everything that was said and mentioned by Neutron's team. The purpose, as stated above, was to ELI5 what is Neutron, who for and why. We strongly suggest watching the whole conversation in order to get a better picture of what is Neutron. However, we did highlight the main points in this recap.
+
Q: How is Neutron different? What is Neutrons value proposition?
+
There are two: security and interoperability. There are others, but the focus is on these two. Interchain security allows Neutron to have the same security at launch as Cosmos Hub, one of the top 10 most secure proof-of-stake blockchains. The second thing is interoperability. On most smart contract platforms (as of today), the app you release on that blockchain only works on that blockchain. Neutron will allow you to create applications that work on Neutron, but they will also work on all the blockchains that are connected to Neutron by IBC. Every chain has different dApps, and you need to adapt to this.
+
+
"Perhaps, we can make a version of Cosmos where you have one front end for every application and you don't need to care about which blockchain you're on. You can just use the services you want to use from wherever you are in Cosmos. And then get the assets you want to get on whatever chain you want to get them. Essentially, we're trying to remove all the complexity of having multiple blockchains in the same ecosystem and just make it way easier to navigate." say the guys fron Neutron.
+
+
Q: Who will be using Neutron?
+
According to the team, Neutron is for ordinary users, developers and people building businesses on top of Neutron. One of the goals is to create a home in The Interchain. A chain that you can use to access everything else in The Interchain. For example, you want to do a swap on Osmosis? You can do it from Neutron, because there's an Outpost — a proxy / a contract. Quote from the team:
+
+
"You don't need to bridge back and forth the smart contracts. You just go to the interface, you click the button, you sign one transaction. Everything happens in the background, and you get what you want. Don't have to care about the fact that these are multiple blockchains connected by IBC. For users it's going to be a home in The Interchain and for developers it's going to be a command center."
+
+
Q: Were there any things with the Neutron testing that came as a surprise in a bad way or in a good way?
+
+
Mike: "I'm pretty familiar with Cosmos ecosystem, the technical side of things, so there were no surprises."
+
+
Q: Maybe there were surprises for validators?
+
+
Spaydh: "Interchain security changes Neutron and the others. We are secured by Atom, but we can't mint Atom. So when we launch we're not going to create a whole bunch of Atoms. Also this means that we can't do foundation delegations. Unfortunately. We appreciate tremendously the fact that a lot of validators have been very interested in committing and stuff but every time we get asked like “Hey, can we get a delegation in exchange for it?”, but unfortunately we don't have the Atom that it takes to make a delegation."
+
+
Q: Will there be a token on Neutron, its own token?
+
+
Spaydh: "Yeah, most likely. The idea is how do we make an incentives game that allows people to create value to bring new stuff to experiment, to create new protocols, new applications to make cool community events, all that kind of stuff. And how do we ensure that people participate in this are rewarded when they contribute? People are punished when they try to destroy things or to do things that hurt the blockchain. For example, trying to spam transactions. The token kind of serves that purpose. It also provides a tool to make decisions together, governance."
+
+
Q: What is the future for Neutron?
+
+
Soi: "Cosmos is frankly a little bit behind the times in terms of DeFi. There's a lot of stuff that you can do on Ethereum that you can't do on Cosmos yet. And we like to think that Neutron is going to open the door to the the future of Defi in Cosmos. In five years, what we're going to see on the platform? We're going to see lending protocols, money markets, taxes and really sort of open the door to the future of DeFi in Cosmos."
+
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here)
Bostrom is a superintelligence, with a permissionless knowledge graph at its core built on a blockchain (cosmos-SDK) and content addressing mechanism (with the current implementation of IPFS protocol).Bostrom allows adding knowledge (creating cyberlinks between particles) to the knowledge graph verifiably. By "verifiably" we mean that it is guaranteed by blockchain design that the holder of a particular private key added specific content into the blockchain at the known time.
The Interchain Security protocol (ICS) is planned to launch on Cosmos in January 2023. To test it, an incentivized testnet program called Game of Chains (GoC) was launched.
+It’s the third public incentivized testnet in the history of Cosmos, after Game of Stakes and Game of Zones.
Q: What is the difference between this game and the previous ones?
+
As part of a brief historical overview, Udit explained what GoC is and how this game differs from the previous two Cosmos games.
+Game of Stakes was based on testing proof-of-stake mechanism, its goal was to understand all possible attack vectors.
+Game of Zones came for the launch of IBC, and people were testing how IBC packets were being relayed between the different zones, which provided an
+opportunity to actually prove that this IBC ecosystem of sovereign interoperability where we had independent zones working together was something that could come to fruition.
+
What is GoC?
+
The goal of ongoing Game of Chains is to test Interchain Security. The idea of ICS is that one blockchain (The Cosmos Hub) can share security with another chain.
+This feature was developed by Informal Systems. The format of incentivezed testnet basically means that validators come and help run this network completing
+certain milestones to surface attack vectors, bugs and other issues. There are rewards for this because it’s a lot of work.
+Also, rewards make this process a lot of fun by providing an environment where participants both compete and still help each other.
+All of this ultimately helps a lot to polish that really complex piece of technology which is ICS.
+
+
Preparation for the testnet
+
Of course, it was necessary to prepare thoroughly for the testnet launch. Jehan shared how preliminary testing within the repository was going and about the automated
+tests that ran on every pull request. One of the types of tests is setting up a virtual network with several different chains: provider chain, which provides the
+security, and consumer chains which draw security from provider chain. Another type of test is a model based test which uses a reference implementation to generate
+many different scenarios in the form of actions that different actors in the network take. But no matter how sophisticated those tests get, testnets are more thorough
+method of testing, because people are unpredictable and they do all kinds of weird crap instead of normal things.
+Udit added up that another form of preparation is social planning. What are the tasks? How people are going to hit all the criteria? What are the phases of the game?
+So significant work was done in that area of planning. Udit also touched on infrastrucure that has to be used by participating validators, since they have to run
+both on proveder chain and consumer chains, they need to be relayers. For that, GoC has to have quite a few supporting tools. And last but not least, it all requires
+communicating. Sometimes things break during a testnet running, and people should know what’s going on and how the plan is being adapted in new conditions.
+
Mitigating risks
+
Q: How do we make sure that binaries we are being given are not malicious software?
+
According to Jehan, this is one of the key things. At least for the first few consumer chains there will be a process of due diligence that Jehan’s team will go through to look at their code. There are a few ways in which consumer chains can harm either The Cosmos Hub or the validators:
+
+
A Cosmos chain is just a binary that runs on the computer, so it could delete your hard drive or use your computer to send spam out or anything a computer program would do. Jehan and the team are not expecting to have that situation for the first few consumer chains. Everyone would know who they are and who’s building them. As things become more decentralized and there’s a higher volume consumer chains running, you’ve got to run it in its own virtual environment, but validators do that anyway when they are running a new chain. So that’s not a huge concern.
+
Consumer chain could potentially steal the private key given by a validator or sign malicious messages. This potential harm is limited by the process when validators inform The Cosmos Hub saying they want to use this key for this consumer chain and they can do that before the consumer chain even goes live. If you’re a validator and you see a consumer chain proposal is going to pass, you can provision a new box to run it and you’ll go to GitHub, look at the code and try to get the full node running on that virtual server. At the same time you initialize a new private key and then send a message on The Cosmos Hub saying this is the key to be using for this particular consumer chain.
+
The largest vector is that some malicious consumer chain could have hidden the code that would send a ton of downtime slashing packs at once slashing every validator on the Hub and jailing them. Then they could register a bunch of fake validators and that malicious validator set would come in and control all the IBC bridges and be able to steal a lot of money. How to mitigate that? (1) The last form of defence is a circuit breaker which only allows a small percent of the validation power to be jailed per hour and make obvious to everybody that the attack is happening. Then we maybe halt the Hub if it’s really bad and take down the consumer chain. (2) There is a pretty robust capability system within Cosmos SDK as to what modules have the ability to send packets claiming to different other modules. When consumer chains are submitted we can make sure that there’s no possibility of the consumer chain’s own code being able to send packets claiming to be ICS module. This can be automated in the future.
+
+
As a conclusion for this part of the discussion, Jehan noted that there are some other risks too, but they are really not as much concern as those three, because they are more based on mistakes than a deliberate attack.
“There’s something called iterators, which are kind of functions in the code, which go over a collection of items and you basically have to return from the function, you have to return true or false depending on whether you want to keep going to the next item and look at the next item in the list or whether you want to stop looking at the list. And so we had a situation in our code where we had some iterators you had to return true to keep looking at the rest of the list, so it was either return true to continue or return true to stop. And so some of the iterators are written that you would return true to stop, and some of the iterators were written that you would return true to continue. And so what actually with the bug happened was basically that there was an iterator over the consumer chains running on the provider chain, so when it’s doing operations involving the consumer chains iterate over the consumer chains, and it was that function was returning the wrong thing, like was returning true when it should have returned false to continue. And what happened is that that iterator would stop after looking at the first consumer chain. Basically, the provider chain was only ever really interacting with the first consumer chain, the second one was being left out. So that was basically the bug, and so we fixed that, and we also went in and we refactored everything so we’re consistent about the stuff, and we got the upgrade.”
+
There were also some issues in relaying. These have been resolved now.
+
Phases of GoC
+
Udit gave a quick review on the Game of Chains phased approach.
+There are three phases:
+I. Testing dummy chains (Apollo and Sputnik), very basic, the most simple chains, to make sure that we can run the provider chain.
+II. Testing actual chains. Expecting to see some of the consumer chains that are going to be launching next year (e.g. Neutron).
+III. Asking anybody in the public or validators to submit consumer chains of their own.
+
In conclusion, a quick Q&A session was held, during which some advantages of Cosmos SDK were pointed out.
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:
The 72nd episode of the Citizen Cosmos podcast was dedicated to the Stride Labs project that provides liquidity for staked assets. Serj talked to the co-founder of the project, Riley Edmund, about ledger compatibility, the process of choosing a validator, DeFi economics, Riley’s path toward blockchain, and much more. Find out the recap of the discussion below.
Interchain Security is one of the main features being added to the Cosmos Hub as the platform transitions to the next phase of development. Interchain Security (ICS) is a complex technology that needs to be tested.
+
Game of Chains is a public, incentivized, Interchain Security testnet, which has been launched on November 8.
+
Interchain Security allows for a provider chain, such as the Cosmos Hub, to share security and have its validators produce blocks for a consumer chain. Interchain Security will allow blockchains to leverage the high security of the Cosmos Hub.
+
If the Cosmos Hub has a large market cap, smaller projects may rent its security. Consumer chains (chains that will use Hub's security) will be required to go through governance to get their chain admitted by the validator set.
+
The benefits of ICS for the Cosmos ecosystem:
+
+
Chains can spend less time on thinking about where to hire reputable and concetrate more on building
+
Validators will benefit as they can attract delegators from new chains and get a part of their tokens (delegators will also receive the extra rewards)
+
+
Game of Chains will help validators to understand ICS and help to find any bugs. It is designed to fulfill two purposes: (1) testing Interchain Security in mainnet-like conditions (2) providing Cosmos Hub validators the opportunity to build confidence around running the ICS protocol.
Game of Chains will end in the end of November. In each phase, points will be awarded to validators who complete certain tasks. In the end of campaign, the best validators will be eligible for rewards, which are funded by Prop77, with 20000 ATOMs.
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:
Interchain Security is probably one of the most interesting narratives in crypto now. We have researched Neutron, a project that will use Interchain Security in no small way. In this article we will break down
+
+
Quark Testnet
+
What is Neutron
+
Interchain Security
+
Interchain Accounts
+
Interchain Queries
+
+
Quark Testnet
+
Neutron will launch Quark testnet to find bugs and fix them. This testnet will not be incentivized and will not use Interchain Security. This testnet is more for advanced users and developers.
+
Quark will run for 3 weeks. Testnet participants will test the network and report their results and feedback in late November.
+
Technical сases are broken down in categories (Performance, Interchain Accounts, Interchain Queries, etc.) and their completion is expected.
+
Kindly note that Quark and the ICS Incentivized testnet are different test networks. The Neutron ICS feature will be tested on the ICS incentivize testnet first.
+
What is Neutron?
+
Neutron is a secure platform for Interchain DeFi powered by Tendermint and built with Cosmos SDK. Neutron’s tech helps developers to launch smart contracts and gives tools to interoperate with other protocols and appchains. Neutron is incubated by P2P Validator who also were founders of Lido Protocol. Moreover, they received 50k ATOM funding in Prop72.
+
Interchain Security
+
Interchain Security provides the level of security for Neutron as the Cosmos Hub by enabling validators to produce blocks from a Provider-Chain to a Consumer Chain. In addition, all node operators are rewarded with native tokens distributed from consumer fees.
+
Interchain Accounts
+
Interchain Accounts (ICA) let Cosmos blockchains control accounts on remote zones via IBC, instead of local private keys, and write transactions that can be executed on the remote chain.
+
Neutron will be both a “host” and a “controller” and will launch with a custom implementation that makes Interchain Accounts available to smart contracts.
+
It means, smart contracts on Neutron will be able to interact with modules and zones from other ICA-enabled Cosmos chains and vice versa.
+
Interchain Queries
+
Interchain Queries (aka ICQs) are an essential building block enabling devs to securely retrieve data from remote zones. Queries are fundamental to DeFi protocols: They are used by DEXs to calculate swap prices, by Money Market to determine a user’s loan-to-value ratio, etc.
+Here’s how Neutron makes Interchain Queries work:
+On the querying zone, the ICQ module collects query requests and makes them available to relayers.
+The relayers go to the queried zones, find a “value” for each “key” and package them with cryptographic proofs.
+
+
If you have an interest in learning more about Neutron’s ideas and hearing their team's plans firsthand, you might want to listen to Citizen Cosmos episode 73 with Spaydh from Neutron:
+Here you will find both an audio and a text version of the interview.
Sometimes you need to send your tokens from one chain to another using Keplr. But many people really struggle with this. We made this guide for newbies to show how you can do this. We will show it on Osmosis to Evmos transfer. So, let’s go.
+
First, you need to turn Advanced IBC transfers on
+
+
Then, you need to copy your Evmos address
+
+
Then, you need to add New IBC Transfer Channel
+
+
And add EVMOS channel
+
+
And now you can transfer your tokens
+
+
Now, after you sent your tokens from Osmosis to Evmos you can stake them.
+
Click stake
+
+
You find a validator and click Manage
+
+
You enter the amount you want to delegate, and click Delegate. As a good practice you should leave some tokens for future fees
+
+
Then, you need to approve the transaction with Keplr
+
That’s it. You have transferred tokens from Osmosis to Evmos and staked them.
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:
The universe of Proof of Stake and validating is growing by the block. The 15th of September 2022 saw ETH complete its merge and move to POS. This adds the largest crypto ecosystem to the total market cap of POS, which according to staking rewards was already at > 10% of
+the total MC prior to the merge itself. That's over 6 million users (stakers) before the merge and a lot more now. That's over 250 known providers (operators) before the merge and a lot more today. In fact, this is difficult to measure, but we are certain that the Cosmos ecosystem, alone, contains more than 250 providers.
[00:00:00] Anna: Hey, it's Citizen Cosmos, we are Serge and Anna, and we discover Cosmos by chatting with awesome people from various teams within the Cosmos ecosystem and the community. Join us if you are curious about how dreams and ambitions become code!
+
[00:01:03] Citizen Cosmos: Welcome to the new episode of Citizen Cosmos, everybody! Today we have Federico Kunze Kullmer with us, the co-founder of Evmos. We’re excited to have you!
+
[00:01:15] Federico: Hi, everyone! Thanks for having me today. I’m excited to talk with you about Evmos and the rest of the Cosmos ecosystem.
+
[00:01:30] Citizen Cosmos: There recently was a Cosmoverse in Lisbon. How was it? Did you guys get the attention at those conferences and hackathons? I mean development and user attention.
+
[00:01:52] Federico: Yeah. Many people were excited about the project, especially with the recent announcement of the recent partnership we've been publishing weekly with different infrastructure providers. So people realize the potential of the project. During the hackathon and the Cosmoverse conference, we got a lot of interest from developers. We got a few outstanding projects, the two winners. First was a wallet that directly integrates AVM smart contract and metamask so you can see your erc20s and also Cosmos on IBC tokens. In the second place was a balancer fork, it's going to be one of the first natively built AMM directly built up on Evmos. So we’re excited about all the support from the entire community and developers.
+
[00:02:42] Anna: Let's start with the very basics. Could you explain a bit from scratch what Evmos is because it’s not super easy to understand? What’s it all about?
+
[00:03:08] Federico: Evmos is an application-specific blockchain that allows you to run smart contracts the same way as Ethereum. It supports AVM. You can use your erc20s directly
+on Evmos. Still, on top of that, it runs on Cosmos, which allows you to have interoperability functionalities, especially in building interoperability between the more minor contracts on other blockchains. The main goal is to make intelligent contracts scalable and scale the entire
+ecosystem by connecting chains that might not run innovative contract platforms directly interrupted with smart contracts. This brings a lot of different use cases and the whole ecosystem. For example, Somalia or another region could interact directly with the smart contracts deployed on top of Evmos through the composability functionalities we’re enabling. It’s all about smart contract interoperability, our main selling point. We will be working with developers, infrastructure providers, and the entire community to make the economics of Evmos appealing for developers to start migrating and deploying their projects into Evmos.
+
[00:04:25] Citizen Cosmos: What would you classify Evmos - as a smart contract interoperability platform? Layer 1 is Cosmos and Ethereum. Is it infrastructure or a bridge?
+
[00:04:42] Federico: I'll consider Evmos as layer 1. It has its own validator security set. It doesn’t depend on Ethereum, so we don’t need to roll up to Ethereum or any other EVM-based chain like Cosmos Hub. It’s a fully sovereign chain and a platform because it allows you to
+support and deploy the smart contract and interact with contracts directly deployed to the Evmos AVM. We also build the bridge on top of Evmos. For example, all the AVM bridges connecting Ethereum with EVM chains like Mpolygon, Moon Beam, Moon River, etc., and the other l2s can also be deployed using our EVM. That also comes with the IBC components that allow developers to interact with all these different other blockchains and thus get more access to liquidity from various sources like Osmosis or the Cosmos Hub. It's genuinely like a fully interoperable sovereign smart contract platform with its own
+validator set, and the stakeholder of the platform entirely governs it.
+
[00:06:00] Citizen Cosmos: At the time, it was like a protocol for other bridges, which makes
+it a bit different. It’s interesting to see how it's going to develop. I would love to hear how many
+layers we can handle inside of the blockchain. For example, let’s say Evmos is AVM on top of Cosmos but you can build something on Evmos, which will be another layer. Can you make another layer? Or is there a limit?
+
[00:06:45] Federico: Well, that's not the project's scope. It's more like enabling full smart contract functionality with fast finality as well, so all the smart contacts for all the transactions that are involved in smart contacts are executed after the block is committed so it's faster than Etherium in terms of finality because it's running BFD also the securities guarantees are different from Etherium - one third versus 51% to perform an attack so that's
+more like the trade-off between BFD and consensus. The topic of building on top of different layers is something that we are going to work with Celestia to support an optimized EVM for roll-ups as well. That's something that will be working closely with the Celestia team next year and we recently announced something on our blog post. It's going to end up being the most team-working project where we’re going to do what we’re best at which is EVM and smart contract interoperability components and the Celestia team is working on the data availability solution which is what they were building before - an optimistic tendermint fro consensus.
+
[00:08:07] Citizen Cosmos: It's good that you mentioned it because I had a question about it, and it sounds like what you guys are basically doing - a collaboration with them, it sounds like the Web3 OSI model and equivalent to that where you have a data availability layer, smart contract layer, and communication layer. So is it an OSI kind of thing?
+
[00:08:32] Federico: I think in the future, once Celestia is out, we won't see many other l1s. Celestia will effectively be the last layer one solution, providing data availability for all these blockchains and the data availability layers. So instead
+of the blockchains checking if the blocks are valid, it will result in the bltheming if the blocks are available or not on the Celestia data availability. The chains themselves, instead of being l1, will be the settlement layer. So that's how I see the ecosystem evolving. What needs to be figured out as well is a migration path for the existing blockchains.
+
[00:09:35] Citizen Cosmos: Do you think this will cause problems? We see now some Web3 projects that are trying to move data from Web2 to Web3 and a lot of ipfs or crawlers, and you know there are many different ways to take data from web2 and upload it to web3, but we're seeing that people are not incentivized to do that. Is it still a problem to transfer all the data from the existing blockchains and get developers to share existing blockchains to Celestia?
+
[00:10:15] Federico: That's a great question. I think, in general, the migration path is still not clear. I’m not an expert in terms of data availability, so this is a topic the Celestia team is working on the migration pass for existing blockchains but what we're building with them is sort of like this collaboration for optimized EVM that access layer in terms of cost this new chain that will act as a settlement layer and will be connected directly connected with Evmos and use Evmos for security as well. I think that’s the first step in terms of using the same token for a potential migration but we’ll have to see how the technology evolves. Celestia just announced their initial developer net which is earlier than just a public net, so once we see that technology
+publicly available will be able to see how other projects are reacting or how the challenges of migrating the existing solutions to Celestia would be.
+
[00:11:15] Citizen Cosmos: Obviously the goal of l1 is to get developers to build projects and users
+to use those projects but do you have any specific targets at Evmos in terms of numbers? If you want ten developers and $100 market projects in 1 month, who are you going to attract?
+
[00:11:50] Federico: We’re trying to track projects and we want to leverage the interoperability functionality from Evmos and also the token economics and get a new user base. The Cosmos ecosystem, even though it has IVC interoperability between different blockchains in the ecosystem, has generally been very isolated from the rest of the Ethereum in general EVM ecosystem. So we wanted different projects trying to get a new user base from the Cosmos community. Terra has a few bridges: third chain and a few others, and now with the gravity bridge as well, but we want to be the point of entry for all these different projects that want to expand and have a different cover and access to the entire ecosystem. So our token economy is being built with the thought of how can we create the right incentives for developers to migrate on to the smart contracts on Evmos and thus expand their user base onto the entire ecosystem.
+
[00:12:58] Citizen Cosmos: Talking about tokenomics, do you want to share about direct airdrops?
+
[00:13:15] Federico: When trying to design the urge the first thing that we were discussing was how do we get up a broad token distribution and how we incentivize Ethereum users to start working on deploying their contracts to Evmos and for retail users in the Evmos ecosystem to interact with contracts directly? We decided to have different categories. The first is the Cosmos ecosystem which involves Cosmos Hub and Osmosis. We're going to reward and stake a few different pools on Osmosis. We want to bring and incentivize all these different uses to start migrating but we didn't want to take the token holders and have a not fair distribution, but we want to make sure that users that we care about from Ethereum are the ones that are actually using Ethereum and that's why we roll up with the concept of the gas drop. The gas drop is when you filter some of the most used applications. We created a list of the applications with high TDL or a high volume. Then, we’re rewarding users based on the amount of gas they spent. The whole narrative behind the direct drop is that all these users are getting wrecked in terms of like how much fees are they expending. So, the more gas you spend based on the number of tokens, the more gas you spend because the gas price for Ethereum is really high right now if you're getting some tokens back because of all the gas you spent on Ethereum. That's kind of like the concept of the drag-drop for the users and also because we wanted to follow this narrative and create a lot of discussion in the ecosystem we wanted to reward victims for different projects that have been hacked in the ecosystem, so we collected the addresses from several hacks on vulnerabilities in the Ethereum ecosystem. We were rewarding the victims of those projects. If you’ve been a victim of an attack of the product that we mentioned in the direct drop announcement, you will be eligible for tokens as well. So that's kind of the whole concept of the narrative behind the direct drop. The token price has decreased significantly over there past few months as well.
+
[00:16:17] Citizen Cosmos: Could you share any more details about the economics apart from the drop?
+
[00:16:28] Federico: We thought about Evmos being a two-way marketplace where users and developers meet together. For example, developers deploy their decentralized applications and users interact with these apps. For token economics in general we're discussing different ways of incentivizing both sides of the marketplace so that users and developers are incentivized to use the applications. The other thing that I could mention is we’re another column of the token economics. We’re adding fee rebates for IBC relayers and transferring all these packets between two connecting chains, in this case, Evmos and Cosmos Hub. Once a new fee model for IBC transfers will be out, they’ll also be gaining fees and rebates for the transactions.
+
[00:18:07] Citizen Cosmos: That’s really great that you guys are thinking about relayers because there’s been a lot of problems and people who started to talk about it, say it costs a lot of money. It’s not incentivized at all, and it’s strange how people expect it to hold on to that infrastructure. As an infrastructure provider, we’re not a relayer but we’d like to be. Is there any project out there in the blockchain space where the tokenomics design is something you think is a good example?
+
[00:19:02] Federico: I think one of those tokenomics designs is definitely Osmosis. We took this a basis for our airdrop but we wanted to expand it. We didn't really like the quadratic boating mechanism that they had because it wasn’t fairly distributed. We went instead for a pro-rata approach in which you have different things that you need to comply with. Some of them give you points that have different weights. For example, if you stake versus if you lp one pool, they might have different weights and those points assigned to each of these tasks will be pro-rata to the number of tokens that each category will have. For example, the more points you gain, the pro-rata to the total number of points of all the users. In that way, you're basically incentivizing for usage and not for large token holders or large aflp providers and that's the main difference, it's fairer for users that may be not have a large number of shares or tokens, so we’re distributing everything pro-rata based on these options.
+
[00:20:25] Citizen Cosmos: I have another strange tokenomics question. I don't know if you've followed the bribery war with Terra and Etherium and bridges giving incentivized and stablecoins. Is Evmos going to be a place where DeFi is going to enter Cosmos?
+
[00:21:20] Federico: I have two thoughts about this. One is that these different bridges have different layers of various degrees of security. Hence, it's not the same as talking about a single multi-secured bridge, and another bridge also has an optimistic mechanism that you can like clean back in case things happen. The user can choose the different bridges based on their security and risk profile. Incentivizing other users will come out come down to the end-user to preferences that they have. The bridges need some liquidity to be operational. I don't think that's necessarily bad because otherwise, if you don't
+have the liquidity, there’s not enough bridging mechanism. If on one side of the bridge there is not enough liquidity, then you want to be able to transfer. In terms of the incentives, I would
+say it's not necessarily bad for the ecosystem, and in the end, it will be resolved. There are a lot of attack scenarios that also can happen through incentives. If you’re incentivizing enough one bridge with a security vulnerability, you can get a lot of tokens through bridge farming. All the exchanges should be aware before incentivizing the different bridges, so that's my thought in terms of user security and risk profiles on incentive being another attack surface for the smart contract platforms and, in general, for the bridges.
+
[00:23:42] Anna: I’m excited about how Evmos was born as a project. How did you get to the idea of creating it?
+
[00:24:02] Federico: Evmos was born from the concept of this old project called Ethermint. The RnD project started in late 2016, even before Cosmos SDK was built.
+The whole concept was proving that you can build the EVM on top of tendermint you can run
+smart contracts using fast finality and then this project was migrated to Cosmos and there were a few teams working on it but no one even gave it new resources or support from a community point. Once these multiple parties have decided to de-prioritize the project, we saw the opportunity of not only having just an EVM on Cosmos but also expanding the scope of the project to be a fully interoperable smart contract platform in which you can build all these interesting economic models for smart contracts to be deployed. The initial scope of Ethermint was expanded in a way that wasn't there before, and that's ultimately what we want to do - to create a platform in which we support interoperability and interchange composability so that other smart contract platforms can also interact with smart contract deployed on Evmos. It doesn't have a smart contract environment. You can still interact with the smart concept that is deployed on Evmos. It’s all about interchange composability and scalability for smart contracts. The product initially started when I stopped my consulting for Chainsafe after they decided not to continue with a project. I reached out to my two co-founders Akash and Nick with whom I was friends since Blockchain Berkley. It was a blockchain community student organization from Berkley where a lot of projects in the Cosmos ecosystem were founded. Sunny was also part of Blockchain Berkley as well as co-founders of Osmosis and the whole IBC team. My co-founders were active in the Cosmos ecosystem and in the blockchain system. They were really excited to start this journey together.
+
[00:26:40] Citizen Cosmos: We had an episode with Chainsafe in 2020. Is it involved in Evmos?
+
[00:27:15] [federico_kunze_k_llmer]: No they're not involved they have other priorities with different ecosystems. They started working on other projects so they haven't supported the project since they left in early 2021. After Aragon chain pulled the plug on the project and they decided to rely on other solutions like xDai. They didn’t have enough resources to continue with Aragon chain.
+
[00:27:52]
+Citizen Cosmos: Now it’s Osmosis chain, right? They just rebranded.
+
[00:27:56] Federico: Yeah.
+
[00:28:00] Anna: I'm really interested in the Berkeley alumni group. Could you tell us a little bit about it? I guess it wasn’t that mainstream back then, why did you decide to join the group?
+
[00:28:24] Federico: I was in Berkeley for only use a semester, I was an exchange student. I studied computer science and industrial engineering in Chile. So when I went to
+Berkley, I was working on different machine learning projects and I realized like everyone was working on machine learning and AI. There was a lot of demand and a lot of general offers from computer scientists and engineers. I wanted to join and learn a new technology that wasn’t so mainstream. I chose blockchain Berkeley because they had a consulting arm. You could work with real companies that were interested in doing projects with blockchain, so I was involved early on with Qualcom that they wanted to build a network of a private blocking solution with different providers and suppliers. The other thing I found really interesting about Blockchain Berkeley is they also have RnD research and also an education arm which is really useful to get started with all blockchain lingo and everything technical about blockchain, so I started my career by learning everything about blockchain with Blockchain Berkeley. My co-founder Akash was actually the one who taught me to write smart contracts early on. It was nice to reunite and create this project. I think Blockchain Berkeley has been foundational for Cosmos ecosystem. Essential projects like Tendermint had offices in Berkeley, and Berkeley alumni created a lot more.
+
[00:30:44] Citizen Cosmos: I have a slightly controversial question. Do you think it's an issue for decentralization when a large group of people near the foundation of the projects know each other and could potentially communicate with each other or found the vector of attack?
+
[00:31:40] Federico: When we were just students, I think none of us participated in the ICO that was involved in the ecosystem. I joined as an intern so I didn't have access to any of the token sales or any of the projects. I remember while still with Blockchain Berkeley, I used to read the IBC on Cosmos as well. On the whole governance procedures, we used to have different white paper sessions and really what motivated us was building these technologies in terms of decentralization. I guess not many developers were available for other projects so I think for Cosmos and tendermint having this pool of young motivated students that we're able to also contribute a lot back to the project was really beneficial for the early stage of the project because literally, all us knew what blockchain meant on both at
+a high level and also from a technical perspective. We were doing all these white paper circles every week where we would read a new paper that came and also analyze it from a technical perspective. Back in 2017, there were a lot of white papers coming out and most of them were
+not really relevant but I guess it was very beneficial in terms of having this pool of two engineers early on for the ecosystem.
+
[00:33:05] Citizen Cosmos: I guess it is a great thing. I think it was AZ16 who was the first to talk publicly about the specter of centralization/decentralization and that it's a really good thing where the project evolves and decentralizes. It is a perfect example of how this is evolved.
+
[00:33:35] Anna: I want to ask, do you still spend some time on RnD? Or you’re so involved in the project building and development that you don't have time for that?
+
[00:33:45] Federico: I would definitely need more time to do more RnD. I’m usually up to date with everything that's going on in the Cosmos ecosystem, but it's tough to catch up with all these different blockchains that are being developed right now. I don't have much context about what's going on. I try to focus my attention mainly on the Ethereum/EVM ecosystem. It is where we can provide value. My co-founders have been involved in different blockchains and different communities so they know a lot about all these other blockchains as long each can provide value from different perspectives. I think that's relevant for the project in terms of RnD.
+
[00:34:33] Citizen Cosmos: Do you think you guys will connect to other l1s to build the connection between the two most significant ecosystems in blockchain?
+
[00:34:45] Federico: In the future, we'll see the two leading smart contract platforms - EVM and WASM. I would expect every primary l1 to have a blockchain or a run time that supports
+Most l1s widely support EVM and WASM. We'll be indirectly connecting to these ecosystems through the EVM bridges. Evmos will be the point of entry to the different EVM bridges. Next year we’ll focus on shared security and make Evmos on the EVM chain.
+
[00:36:05] Citizen Cosmos: Nice description! The last question. What motivates you in your daily life? Books, activities, music, whatever.
+
[00:36:42] Federico: What motivates me is building the base infrastructure layer for all these different products to be built. Right now, blockchain is mainly focusing on finance, and we're seeing a recent NFT ecosystem. In the future, NFT will be huge in adopting and connecting the real world with the blockchain. My motivation, in general, is to build this infrastructure layer. No one has yet built any fully interoperable smart contract, so that was my central core when I decided to make Evmos. Use cases that we don't even know
+that will exist right now will be possible through this infrastructure that will be set
+in place through Evmos and the entire blockchain ecosystem.
+
[00:37:48]Citizen Cosmos: But what helps you in your daily life not to set off your goal?
+
[00:38:14] Federico: I try to set some time for myself in the morning. I try to meditate or do sports. I like balancing my life especially when I’m in a high-stress job. If you're not
+taking care of yourself, then you're not taking care of your company, employees, and the entire community. So it's essential to be humble, aware, and mindful of the things you're doing. at times like being present.
+
[00:39:05] Citizen Cosmos: Nice. Isn't that the essence of blockchain?
+
[00:39:09] Federico: Blockchain is a perfect technology for making money in the ecosystem because it’s technology + finance. At the same time, we're building foundational infrastructure. The base layer infrastructure is usually what I care the most about and what it would enable to create all these exciting applications for users that need it the most.
+
[00:39:48] Citizen Cosmos: You're right. I was invited to a round table to speak about some things, and there were people there: a couple of guys from YouTube, Holochain, etc. Unfortunately, after forty-five minutes, I had to log off because the conversation was about price and NFTs. It was kind of boring. People only talk about money rather than data availability layers, IBC, and the future foundation for infrastructure. So I agree with you.
+
[00:40:40] Federico: A lot of investors in general, when they join your community channels, are usually asking when the token is going to be available or how they can buy the token instead of learning more about the project or asking the right questions, but I think it's okay. We will be slowly transitioning and it's our job to both educate and give more resources to people. There are different products and all these other exciting applications being built and they are not money-making applications, they are benefiting and serving coordination problems or giving access to finance to people they didn’t have before.
+
[00:41:25] Citizen Cosmos: I think this is a great note to finish up! Thank you very much! Bye!
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here)
[00:00:19] Citizen Cosmos: Hi everyone! Welcome to a new episode of Citizen Cosmos podcast! We have today two guests with us from Kadena, and it's Will Martino, the founder and president of Kadena and Randy Daal, the head of developer experience at Kadena. They will hopefully tell us all about Kadena, all about themselves, and everything else we want to know. Welcome to the show!
+
[00:00:39] Will Martino: Thanks so much for having us, Serge.
+
[00:00:42] Citizen Cosmos: So, there are two of you so we'll do a turn by turn. I usually present the guests, but I think it's much cooler when the guests present themselves and say whatever they want people to know about them. So please, Will, I'll let you go first. Present yourself, tell us all what
+you do.
+
[00:00:57] Will Martino: I'm the president and co-founder of Kadena. I met my co-founder Stuart Popejoy at JP Morgan. He had opened up a research desk working at high school there, It was in
+Brooklyn and I was living in Brooklyn at the time, and one of my friends from college was working there so I got a gig working there because it was a couple stops away from my apartment. We ended up starting to work on crypto because it was back before Etherium
+had launched and everyone under the sun was coming through JP Morgan trying to sell them on enterprise blockchain, and we needed to do diligence on behalf of the bank in this research group on blockchain. We ended up building JP Morgan coin version zero and open source to publish hyper ledger. The process like that informs a lot of how and why we built Kadena because we were doing this work on behalf of the bank and we knew that we would need certain answers to certain questions that we wouldn't be able to get industrial adoption without. That turned into us leaving and starting Kadena. Back before that I was at an Securities and Exchange Commission back before they had a crypto group because I was there when bellary formed it. I was the tech, I was back doing high frequency data analytics, building their super computing close to things, and then got tired of the government, went to hacker school for three months and to go learn Haskell and after that went to JP Morgan, and the rest of the history been doing Kadena for I think six and a half years now.
+
[00:02:24] Citizen Cosmos: That is the story! I would drop the mic at this point but to be honest I know your story of course, I just wanted you to share it. I have a lot a lot of questions about your story to you, we will get back to them for sure. Please, Randy, introduce yourself.
+
[00:02:38] Randy Daal: I'm leader of developer experience at Kadena, I started in April so I don’t have a long history that Will has. I started out as a job for developer at the airline company. I’m based in Netherlands. After that I soon made the transition after four years to front-end because that was really my passion and I always have a saying that you want to work on something where you find passion. I started switching my career towards front-end development work there
+for my in the fifteen years created all kinds of front-end application for large companies in the Netherlands. At one point in my career I founded my own company where I started out my own front-end company and basically from there on I started doing a lot with the community. I started a foundation called Frontmania where we created all kinds of fun stuff with friend community, educating people with conferences and meetups. I think somewhere in November I got into contact with Will and he told me all about Kadena, it wasn’t the first time I heard the name but I didn't know that it was that awesome. We got into a conversation and I could really help Kadena to grow on the front-end side. Will got me really enthusiastic basically and that's why I started in April working on the developer experience and until now it's a nice experience for me to talk to the community, see what they need. We got so many ideas and I will tell you about that later but it's going to be a real fun road for me and the community.
+
[00:04:23] Citizen Cosmos: Before I'm going to move back to Will, I have a question for you. Were you not terrified of starting working for Kadena? It’s a big project. Was it not terrifying to start at something that big?
+
[00:04:53] Randy Daal: I'm not really terrified of challenges. Challenges are something I like. It was something I would like to do. Also my background is I'm a big sports fan. I play sports on high level, so challenges is a way of life for me and that's what I like here as well. Starting your own company it's big challenge as well, the only difference which you have now is there's everything is exposed, everything is open source but everything you do should be spot on and I'm a perfectionist. It is fun for me working with a lot of smart people and Kadena is filled with amazing talents and a lot of smart people to learn a lot from. So no not really scared, more enthusiastic
+to work with such bright minds.
+
[00:05:41] Citizen Cosmos: Will, let's get back to you. I follow Kadena for a while and for everybody who's listening out there I'm also a token holder, so I'm going to put my cards on the table straight away just in case people do ask. But let's talk about JP Morgan first. I remember when JP Morgan coin came around, it was 2016 or 2017. How did you end up working for them and how did you suddenly realize that you wanted to go into something your own?
+
[00:06:13] Will Martino: That's a long story. There's this tradition inside of banks in New York and I believe London and Paris, where sometimes you'll get new CTOs, new management at the very high levels of these investment banks and they'll put together kind of like a pet RnD group to do some critical RnD they we’ve been wanting to do for long period of time. That group got forked and the way that you normally formed these is you go and you grab some very experienced higher level manager and then some extremely experienced engineers to run the various desks that you're going to fork. So I think this one had three desks. So, Stuart Popejoy, my co-founder was rewrote their agency equity trading platform which actually is a really important part of a Kadena story. So the business case for this thing was that in the agency desk they had these
+institutional clients and they would call up their clients and say “Hey, how do you want to trade?” and the clients would describe to them basically an algorithm of how they would want to execute their portfolios and balance things. They used to call them up and then they spend and then the traders would spend two months with the engineers getting these things implemented, getting them rolled in a production. So Stuart rewrote the trading engine and a bunch of other stuff but the main thing that's relevant for the Kadena story is that he wrote a domain specific language that traders could actually code on the phone. Basically it is like taking notes except that you
+could execute these notes while they're talking with their clients. This took the turn around time from call to production from two months to about two days. It would be like one day to get it into queue and the one day to get it actually shipped. So these are technical non-programmers who are now writing this domain specific language for algorithmic trade and the experience of that how to write a safe like domain specific language for technical non-programmers informs a lot of how we design PACT or smart contract language because we see them as very similar things. Blockchains are the databases with store procedures decentralized with coins. It has the notion of money built into it but at their core they're these databases and smart contracts with the store procedures on top and you can do tons of stuff with that so when we started working on Kadena, Stuart headed the RnD for PACT and all of that experience of years writing a language for technical programmers informed how we wrote PACT. That's why we kept PACT simple and that ended up having a lot of benefits later on being able to do formal verification and that is as easy to code in as the actual language itself being able to show contracts to lawyers who are domain experts but aren't programmers. So he finished that up and then he didn't retire out of JP morgan but took some time off and they came back to him six months later and asked if he wanted to run this RnD desk down the street from your apartment and how does he feel. He agreed and his first hire was one of my good friends out of Yele University. He was a big haskell guy, Stuart wanted to do the desk in haskell just kind of to try to see how this would go. We all like the language and so Carter pulled me in. I went and interviewed and everyone was expecting me. Then I joined up and within about a year we started enterprise blockchain. Our desk ended up capturing that as like the thing that we could focus on first before any of the other desks was that in doing some of the background research. Back in the school I had written the scheme implementation, like a little domain specific language that looks like PACT and when we were doing some research at JP we found this hardened BFT raft variant from Stanford research project that was written in haskell. So over the course of a weekend I had a fully functioning private blockchain that was executing around five hundred transactions a second and was able to run EVM and scheme side by side. That was how we just we kic dropped that.
+
[00:10:45] Citizen Cosmos: That's impressive! I have my first controversial question. You come from the world of enterprise blockchain and not just enterprise blockchain, you come from the enterprise world. Let's talk stigmas here a little bit, most people who use blockchain they automatically tie up blockchain technology and decentralization philosophy together and when people from the
+enterprise world come they say that enterprise blockchain will destroy them. What would you
+say to those things? Are those just crazy talks or does that have anything to it?
+
[00:11:23] Will Martino: It’s a good question. I think that enterprise adoption of blockchain technology will matter in the long term. I don't think you can have full adoption of crypto currency and blockchain technology without that happening but as we’ve seen, it's going to take a long time.
+This isn't like the internet which has started quickly taking over a bunch of different domains, this is much more like advent and money which maybe even like up to a generation that actually convert over. Those aren't the chains that I'm worried about. I'm more worried about the VC chains and the the more exchange focus chains because enterprise really doesn't understand blockchain and I would be surprised if we see any major industrial adoption enterprises before 2030. Since we started Kadena that was our target. We asked ourselves, what do we need to build so that by 2030 when enterprise catches up, we're ready to go and that's why we built Kadena the way we did. It's the VC chains that I worry about more because you just end up with these, you end with the proof of stake networks or you have a few whales who are these major VC funds that do not have a good track record in doing things for the common good and they have this massively outside voting control but it's also basically hidden because it's anonymous enough and everyone knows about these chains and knows who controls it but you can't really
+track it. It's one of things that I've always loved about Cosmos from the beginning, was they burnt one of these chains, they did a very decentralized launch, they have a great community and they stuck to their guns on that since the beginning and didn't try to take the short cut as some other chains have. So those are the ones that I worry about the most because those ones do not have their community's interests at heart and they're really just kind of waiting to mature and get people stuck. They're waiting for people to not be able to migrate off because so many things get integrated and then I suspect that you're going to see a mate voting changes that are of course decentralized and they're going to change things like the gas model to do some rent extraction. I’m not going to name names that's not our style but it's like general themes like those are the ones that i worry about the most. IBM poisoned that well so hard from 2018 to 2019. We were still focused on enterprise back then, we were doing enterprise alongside public and IBM’s ability to force all of their clients to try to do an enterprise change when their technology wasn't even a blockchain and couldn't even run. We sent people to some of their workshops and in the workshops the IBM guy couldn't even get people's computers to run their blockchain. The well is so poisoned that it's going to take at least five more years. You need
+almost like a cycling of the upper management in companies before you're going to be able to really do enterprise blockchain again.
+
[00:14:31] Citizen Cosmos: Yeah it makes sense. There are a lot of VCs out there, some of them could
+own up to like certain percent and I'm not talking about just a network, I’m talking about the whole market cup. I think they do some good things especially with RnD, they do have a lot of Rnd that they bring forward and hopefully that RnD can be used to get better and to improve what we are doing in general. Last question about your your history. You worked at SEC and you worked for the committee. What was it?
+
[00:15:16] Will Martino: It was the crypto currency working group back then, now it's the digital ledger technology group. It was back when it was Valery who formed the group. She still runs that now.
+It was me and one person that were basically brought on by her to be the first people in it and then we grew it from there. It all started because they just had some cases. They needed to look at someone who was in the ASSC who didn't own any coin and who understood the tech. Bitcoin was at sixty and I decided between buying Bitcoin at sixty and going into this. Based on how Kadena started and my career since then, I maintained that was the right decision but it's been close for years. It was fun, I can't talk too much about it because I am still a domain expert at the intersection of regulation and technology in the space so there's just not a ton of details I can go into. We should all be happy that the ASSC didn't go the path that New York did with the bitcoin license because that would have messed up a lot more stuff. At least they've been slow and diligent about it as opposed to coming in and just crashing on the grade.
+
[00:16:26] Citizen Cosmos: Did that experience give you more understanding of how to go with Kadena?
+
[00:16:36] Will Martino: I think it's intuition because this stuff isn't set down in case law. The way that Kadena structure will be by twenty thirty be kind of set in stone or at least the guidance that we provided. But until that guidance comes out you can't be sure so that we all have to be super careful. Now we've been essentialized for years, we've been in production for years, we're in a very good place now, it's always the launching period that's hard but based in the way that we did it we're pretty confident that if we're not good then most of the entire industry has major
+problems. We'll see where it goes. I'm hopeful that we get some clear guidance. I'm very thankful that they didn't come and really screw things up.
+
[00:17:20] Citizen Cosmos: First question about Kadena. It's going to sound silly to both of you but i
+like to break things down. So a multichain network, let's talk about this. You have proof of work, proof of stake, multichain network. What on earth does it mean for the regular user out there who is just browsing the Cosmos ecosystem or Coingecko looking for gems or for anything else but from gems you know he's looking for l1s. Can you guys whoever wants to answer this explain how it works and what does it mean?
+
[00:17:51] Will Martino: It is technical to describe. It's difficult for me to even coverwith people who aren't you know like serious consensus researchers just in like a two minute thing. In Cosmos you have the Cosmos Hub, then you have folks off of it those folks may have their own coins you can lock up coins and put them on the other chains through IBC but at the end of the day they aren't one network. It's a series of networks that can interoperate and talk to each other. So that's like the hub model. People are also familiar with dags, they directed a cycle graph which basically means that you have a ledger that you can run transactions and parallel in that is another approach to scaling, Solon's famous for this one. What we do that is different as
+we have like real horizontal scaling so we have one coin that you can transfer from one chain to another chain. All of these chains are peers with each other and they are all in the same network and it's proof of work that actually allows us to do this so if you've heard of webt2 scaling with companies like Google where they do horizontal scaling, where you can just throw more servers at something to scale it up, we do something very similar but with us it's more chains now you can't just throw more chains at our network. We launched with ten chains we hard for up to twenty chains. Theoretically, you can hard work up to a billion chains. I don't think we ever going get there. I think a hundred thousand chains which would represent fifteen million transactions a second or something like that is the highest that we would ever see and I suspect
+that would take two decades to get to because ours is much more demand driven as our network grows and we need more scale than we hard work to bigger and bigger networks and of course things all decentralized, we do a lot of the core RnD but we take APRs from outside the community and if we misbehave as a foundation then we fully expect people to do what they've done with the proof of work network. So the way that works is that you you have each of these chains running, just a single chain like Ethereum or Bitcoin but they're all in the same network so you can run transactions on gen 1 or gen 19, and you can also do cross-chain messaging through simple payment verification and that's pretty much it. The secret sauce is proof of work is this weird thing where you can actually split up the work that's being done in
+every chain and make the overall system more efficient because right now we have twenty chains. When we go up to say forty chains, what we do is we drop the difficulty of each chains the new block in half keep the overall rate throughput. From an energy used point of view we increase our overall energy used by maybe one percent and in return get double the proof. It’s because proof of work is weird and because the amount of mining that goes into a network isn't related to the overall transaction throughput and you can just split it up and things actually
+getting more secure as your scale which is this weird kind of shunk probability theory that proof of work captures but it works and it's really simple. So, proof of work works, it's just not efficient and we set out to solve that and then of course we threw on PACT or smart contract language and that just allows you to now have this a multithreaded list machine in the sky that you can really do whatever you want with.
+
[00:21:04] Citizen Cosmos: Randy, quick question to you from a perspective of developer experience. Working with both proof of work and proof of stake, how does it work for you?
+
[00:21:26] Randy Daal: So, all our chains are based on proof of work. We can maybe in the future go through a
+hybrid state but that's not necessary because our chain solves all the problems with proof of work. The only thing we need to improve at Kadena, I mean our primary focus for the last few years has been the greatest state of the first layer blockchain development solution and in my opinion, Kadena completely revolutionized the blockchain world in that part but one thing it doesn't matter how good your technology might be, nothing can replace a good user experience that really is essential. So that's why Will basically came up to me and asked me to help them out on that part and currently we're busy creating a whole new developer experience that would be truly game changing. At the moment building an application or a platform can be tough, you have a pretty high learning curve as well as the documentation written in a more traditional manner. So that's why we're focusing on creating new documentation side, we're also engaging a lot more with the community of what they need from us. We're going to build it developer academy where people can have certifications and badges so when a developer comes into Kadena and gets certified so people will know who get trained in how to do things properly and with that we also kind of developed user friendly tooling, creating robust APIs and SDKS. So it really doesn't matter if you use proof of work, it's the layer on top of that brings developer experience. That should be transparent for developers and users.
+
[00:23:20] Citizen Cosmos: What's your number one thing to go out and attract developers? Today the competition in l1s is enormous and obviously without developers it's a bit hard to build an open source chain.
+
[00:23:39] Randy Daal: So the main thing where we need to focus on it should be easy to develop something on Kadena. So if you look at our APIs at the moment, they're very low level, so if you want to to mint an NFT, you have to do a lot of stuf. The thing is, we should focus on instead of explaining developers of how to built something. The main thing I always go back to is when a couple of years ago you had that battle between Internet Explorer and FireFox, and they were battling each other who has is the best browser, and then very lately Chrome came into play and if you look nowadays, they are the main browsers people are using and it's not because they were better browsers, they focused on technology, they focused on the good developer experience because it was really easy to build applications by using Chrome and that's what we need to focus on as well. It should be easy for developers to build something on Kadena and that's where you’ll get a better and greater adoption,and for that we also need the community to help us out on what they're missing, and that's why you need to interact with community as well.
+
[00:24:57] Citizen Cosmos: Will, do you want to add something?
+
[00:24:59] Will Martino: I do actually, I want to amplify some parts. Some other parts that we have are a very large grant program that we do for going to helping people to be able to kick start helping be able to kick start actually going out and building. It was very easy to apply for and I think we're gonna have our first major announcement some time in July. On top of that there's some other parts that I think are more at the infrastructure level because Randy has more actual development experience and part of the experience is not attracting developers but being able to keep them. If you want to go and have your own NFT platform, you need to roll out your own network and then run it, and that's a bigger lift to do. In Cosmos they built their core community and by moving on to their own spot makes sense but for DID launch itself on Cosmos as the first step I feel I would have a lot of adoption problems so it's one of the reasons that we wanted to scale layer one itself so that you don't have to run your own infrastructure, just deploy your application just like you could with Etherium which then gets to the second problem that we avoid by being able to scale and actually having a scalable platform is low gas fees. That said, it's really the core focus of what gas is for, it limits the amount of computation so you don't solve a network and really that it means we don't want people to do it outside of that, we want the
+piece to be as low as possible for everyone. So if all of a sudden you know you don't run into the Etherium problem where launching a new project is now super expensive, so this is one of the other reasons that we get scaling is so important as it applies to developer experience because you just don't have to worry about that with Kadena because the gas fees are just so much lower. So the part that Randy focuses on is how do you integrate, how do you build, how you get the front-end working there. These other parts that we found have been very attractive to developers because we have this story of launching crypto kitties on our platform and let’s say our platform is going to have massive massive adoption and you've just deployed it to chain zero. You can now deploy to change one through ten in addition to that, and now you have ten times the through put for your application and it takes a little bit of tooling but you deploy it out, there's no one that can stop you and now you have ten times a through put and it costs basically the same if you will be able to scale up your app. Then, we get to the point where you're on every chain and you're saturating all the chains. That's what we talk about when we say adoption drives the scale of the layer one itself because as the time approaches we're going to notice it. The community is going to notice and all of us are going to start to get ready for hard work to changes so that network always grows to meet the capacity of the demand. This is one of my core theses for crypto in general. Now we have straight decentralized work and we don't have the problem that all the other l1s have.
+
[00:29:07] Citizen Cosmos: This is a really great answer because a lot of founders unfortunately don't pay attention to attracting developers from the beginning to the scelability of the net and what we get
+is somebody building a cool application which breaks the network and then you have problems. I’m going to ask a question that's going to sound really stupid to you both of you but I need to ask it because Kadena is always listed as a Cosmos ecosystem project everywhere. What's the reason for this?
+
[00:29:45] Will Martino: I think it's because we've known them forever. I think they first presented Tenderment when we were presenting our private blockchain. We were presenting PACT formal verification of our smart contract language, it was still in development in that time. That was a really funny conference because you had a bunch of the people who now have a bunch of top projects. So I think it's because we've known them for so long we don't see ourselves as being competitive to Cosmos. It serves different needs, we don't have vast finality, because proof of work, our finality, is still in the order of like thirty seconds to a minute. There are certain apps that really do need that and there're certain apps that you want to run of your system on a proof of work network and then you want to run other networks that are more running on a proof of stake because you if want to do settlement on a proof of work network because you want that decentralization but you want the fast finality of a proof of stake system. So we've always seen it as complimentary and because of that we've just been working with Cosmos for a long time, before we working on IBC for a while, we were working with Terra before. The next place that will be looking at with Cosmos is definitely IBC but I’ve been recently getting a lot into zero now proofs and certain knowledge bridges from the point of view bridging and I suspect that will probably be the first time that we have true bridging between our two networks is getting an IBC system that has some knowledge component so that we can solve who owns the key for the bridges problem.
+
[00:31:29] Citizen Cosmos: Because right now I think if I go into the ecosystem part of the Kadena website and if I go click on the bridges section, IBC does come up but it doesn't have a link to it so I guess it's all kind of planted.
+
[00:31:44] Will Martino: Yeah, something has been worked on for a fair bit of time but definitely Terra’s implosion got in the way of us focusing on rolling it out this summer so we're still figuring out the business case for it, figuring out what we're going to do with it because bridges are important for Kadena. We had some bridges that were sort of ready to go this time last year that i didn't pull the plug on. But I basically stalled them because I was looking at them and they were so unsafe, they're going to get hacked. This approach in general is just not okay and over the preceding year I feel very vindicated in that decision because we've seen so many bridge hacks that I don't really feel bad about it. Wormhole for example, they hadn't gotten saved by FTX I don't know what would have happened to that ecosystem but they managed to dodge.
+
[00:32:49] Citizen Cosmos: And to be honest, Wormhole was using bloc chain back in 2015. I'm not saying that's a bad thing necessarily but in 2015 using Wormhole wasn't a great user experience at all. So we talked about easiness of onboarding developers. You have PACT which is the smart count language you guys developed and I think in 2017 or 2018 I read and was quite impressed with the things I saw. There was a lot of concepts there about atomic execution, there were a lot of things which are not new to anything but against the language feels more like a blockchain developer friendly. Randy would you correct me here about that? Does Pact really make onboard developers easier or is it a stone you have to overcome?
+
[00:33:44] Randy Daal: I think nowadays for every smart contract you always have to learn a new language and Pact is a very easy language to learn. It's a list based language so that the only thing people have to overcome is all the parenthesis but it’s a very easy language to learn and that's what you see in the community as well once it clicks, it clicks and that's what feedback we're getting. A lot of people working but the only thing is if you're working with a cripting language you really are focused on a certain way of developing. It can be a bit harder to get acquainted with Pact, but it’s very intuitive and that's what I think Stuart wanted to accomplish as well, to create a language that is very easy to learn and very quick to create smart contract with. In my opinion he succeeded in that.
+
[00:34:40] Will Martino: The thing with Pact is that we could have gotten a different route and had something that looked and felt like Javascript which is the path that some other projects have taken which makes it easier to onboard the developers. First because you have a bunch of people who aren't very good at Javascript and you can go and grab them and then make be
+not very good at your smart contract language. But here's the problem. On the Internet you can evolve your website you can evolve it so it can be better. For smart contracts, when you deploy them, they are themselves a bug bounty and we intentionally decided not to go that route because safety matters more than everything else when it comes to smart contracts. So instead we have a safe language that is intuitive but is a little bit different in the beginning to get your head around. It's closer to the way I described, it is much closer to learning sequel for a data based for queries than it is to learning a Javascript because you can get up and run it quickly but as time goes on, you need to learn more and it's hard to do it safely. It is hard to do it at scale, in a way that you don't end up shooting your own foot off. Whereas in sequel you need to wrap your head around the idea of a table and this relational algebra that the language is expressing. After that everything clicks and it's very easy. Writing Uber in Pact would be very difficult if not impossible but then again, Uber would never run on top of a blockchain. It was that mantra that really draw us to do Pact the way that it is and then students’ experience with writing this language for non-programmers who were technical informed a lot of how we design
+things so that it would be very easy to learn. So yes there's a little bit of initial onboarding that's more difficult because but then it's usually about two or three days and I usually just help people look at the coin contracts, download it and get it running.
+
[00:37:18] Randy Daal: I also want to add something. I think the adoption of Pact will also help when we bring out the academy. I think that will help a lot. It’ll help onborning of new developers way more than what it is nowadays because now if people want to learn Pact, they really have to dive in and there's a lot of content on the Internet to find but it's not centralized and if we centralize all the content, give them a learning part we'll be adopted way more.
+
[00:37:41] Citizen Cosmos: i don't know if you guys heard about Urbit and Hoon. They have their own language which a runic language. I’m just talking about like easiness of onboarding developers because that language is completely made up from scratch and it's got different concept to most things and I don't think that especially you developed language that is concentrated on security. It’s the opposite, it should be easier to adopt and that's that's a great thing. One more thing that I did notice. Considering we think of ourselves as ecosystem developers we go out and help networks. It's hard not to notice how much attention Kadena is paying to ecosystem development. You have the accelerator programs, you have the academy you mentioned, you have a big ecosystem, the community is growing all the time, you have a lot of channels. Is that intentional, the focus ecosystem development on the community or that happened because you have the experience and you understand what you're doing and you understand that that's important or was that a natural evolvemental thing?
+
[00:39:08] Will Martino: It's a generic yes. I think the first trunk of Kadena's time was designing how we
+scale and figuring out what the protocol is like and then I was building a protocol, and then we launched Rnd and it became much more focused on adoption. We know it's stable, we demonstrate that. At the same time we have this community that was clamoring for support and hiring a bunch of people. But Kadena itself is a longer play and it's a longer project. Our entire tokeneconomic system is designed around a hundred and twenty year mission which is just weird for crypto. No one plans at that span of time. We figured out so much and also that means that crypto is now fully adopted in the global standard, so we'll cross that bridge when we come to it, it will be fine. We don't move super fast because it’s not web2, it’s web3, you can't move fast and break things because when you do you get hacked and that’s a huge problem. We have a different approach and it's a slower one where we just keep building and building. I think we hit that stage where it made sense for us to build the foundation for the ecosystems, build the academy. Also, we found Randy. I have been literally looking for someone who fits Randy's position for three years.
+
[00:41:33]
+Citizen Cosmos: I've been professionally working blocking for seven years now and the amount of chains I've seen come and go because of the lack of attention to system and developer experience. People just close their eyes to it as if it doesn't exist and it's great that you
+pay attention to it! I'm going to take into the last block of questions. Will, what was the goal and the motivation in deciding to build an l1 blockchain? I mean nobody just wakes up and thinks “I'm going to go and build the most scalable product!” There must have been something that led you here internally to this point. What was it?
+
[00:42:27] Will Martino: I mean part of it is the context and the timing at JP Morgan, just like having that experience having that in our background, having Stuart as a co-founder without whom I’d never would have done it. That was definitely part of it and part of it was that doing that due diligence at JP Morgan, we ended up with this one page of core questions we now needed to get answered if there was ever going to be industrial adoption blockchain and we knew that no one like we knew. We looked at every single project that was either coming up or that was being launched or had already launched and we knew that nothing answered even a quarter of these things very basic things. We had this core belief that crypto is going to be a thing and that it's going to have widespread global adoption within our lifetimes and we desisded someone needs to do it. So I left and did it. I don’t think without JP Morgan we would have had the motivation because we wouldn't have seen both the potentia, the shortcomings that we saw because
+there were so few projects that were coming out of anyone who had major financial experts even if most of the projects don't even have founders who have major industrial experts usually they're coming out of either other startups or the coming out of open source or coming out of research and cryptography. We came at it from a very different angle. We had an industrial background and leverage that because we knew what's going to be needed if this thing is ever going to be industrial adoption and no one else is going to do this and no one has those backgrounds.
+
[00:44:12] Citizen Cosmos: Randy i didn't ask you for your blockchain story but what motivated you? What led you to decide to go into blockchain in the first place?
+
[00:44:25] Randy Daal: I was always interested in crypto, I think since 2017. But I think the talk I had
+with Will in November really got me enthusiastic and really drove into my blockchain technology and that's what basically got me into Kadena.
+
[00:44:45] Citizen Cosmos: What did he tell you?
+
[00:44:51] Randy Daal: Basically, the people work in blockchain, especially at Kadena are extremely smart and I like to work with the best of the best because if you work with great people you will get a great product and that's what they have done at Kadena and that's currently what I'm doing at the moment as well for the developer experience. I'm trying to create a dream team and so we're basiclly building the best team out there and we focus on building, for us not good enough is not great on the strife of perfection.
+
[00:45:31] Citizen Cosmos: My last question to both of you. What motivates both of you to get out of bed every day and to keep on doing whatever it is you're doing? What would you like to advise to others?
+
[00:46:13] Randy Daal: For me it's like being an entrepreneur within the company itself so Kadena motivates me by telling me “do what you think is best.” I can create my own team do, what I think is best
+for the community, creating a whole new developer experience and even if it means throwing away old stuff in creating new stuff that gives me the motivation to build awesome things and that's why I want to get out of the bed every morning and start working.
+
[00:46:54] Citizen Cosmos: Will?
+
[00:46:55] Will Martino: I think it starts with the team and I've been doing this forever so it definitely starts with the team. We have is amazing the people we get to work with are brilliant. I don't know what else to say. We are strategically tied together, we’re going in : the right direction and we all find that it's meaningful. We all believe that crypto is going to be a thing and that solving the efficiency problems and the scaling problems do matter in the long term. At the same time we get to work on this really cool thing that we've built. It's just a really well built organization.
+
[00:48:14] Citizen Cosmos: Guys it's been a huge huge pleasure! Thank you for finding the time, I know it wasn't easy. Looking forwards to IBC working with Kadena! Join the Kadena social networks!
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here)
Episode name:
+Spaydh, sustainability, value & Interchain security
+
+
+
Transcript of the Episode:
+
[00:01:40] Citizen Cosmos: Hi, everybody! Welcome to a new episode of Citizen Cosmos, today I have Spaydh with me from Neutron. I don't know if you guys heard about it or not, but if you haven't, it means you're going to hear all about it today, and if you have - even better because you're going to find out more stuff about it. Spaydh, man, hi, and welcome to the show!
+
[00:02:00] Spaydh: Hey! Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.
+
[00:02:03] Citizen Cosmos: I am thrilled actually because Neutron is on the tip of the tongue of a lot of people, so I would like to talk about that, of course, but also I would like to talk a little bit more about you and about what you do, and what you're planning. So the first thing is first to introduce yourself in your own words. What do you do, and what is Neutron?
+
[00:02:26] Spaydh: Sure. So I am deputy general manager at Neutron, which means I get to do everything that is not development related. The way our team works is that we have 11 devs right now, plus me, so I do everything else. In a few words, Neutron is a small contract platform that is interchain secured by the Cosmos Hub, which means it shares its benefits from the security of the Cosmos Hub in exchange for which it provides revenue to the Cosmos Hub. That small contract platform has a few features which allow you to easily create cross-chain protocols that act as if they were just one protocol. In a unit matter, essentially through interesting accounts, through interesting queries which allow you to control accounts on other blockchains, execute transactions, track execution stages, and also receive data about that blockchain in a trust-minimized manner over IBC.
+
[00:03:20] Citizen Cosmos: That's cool, man! You guys have incorporated all the rewards to do with interest, and we’ll talk about all those things in a little bit. I know you guys are incubated by P2P, and I have a lot of connections to that, Constantine particularly, of course, was a guest on our podcast, and we've worked together for years and years before. So what's your story, man? How did you get Neutron? How did you get into blockchain?
+
[00:04:10] Spaydh: I guess what got me into crypto was that since 2013 with Snowden’s revelations about various government programs that were doing a large-scale collection of data across the world, not just in the US but in various countries with my conviction that computers and code would take a more and more important place in our lives, I’ve been very interested in computing systems but also privacy as a question of how do you know what balance do you need. I was interested in all of this, and during my long nights on the internet, I found out about Bitcoin. It was 2016 or 2017. I was pretty young at the time. Then I ended up finding out about Etherium, and then I realized I can make a wall computer and put tons of stuff on it. I was sold on the idea, but I had just 30$ in my pocket per month, so I didn’t become a millionaire in the next bull market. But that’s what’s got me hooked. I like the idea of Bitcoin removing the intermediaries between financial transactions. I'm not a big fan of the banks like a lot of people here in this system, so to me, the idea that you could make a shared computer that was fully decentralized across the world was also really cool. All of these things got me into crypto, but then I was still doing my studies, I was traveling, I was working as a journalist across the world, and I was following from a distance what was going on until DeFi summer and twenty 2021, mostly when I started hearing about it a bit more, so that piqued my interest. I came back and found my old wallet in which there was 200$ of Ethereum, and I had a reason to go back hard on this, and then suddenly, Ethereum had completely changed. There were dozens of apps on top of Ethereum that you could use to do various DeFi stuff, and so suddenly, you could have a full-time job just researching what was going on. So that's basically what I did. At the time, I was living in Thailand already but working as a teacher, so I would teach English during the day and then research crypto basically as a full-time job at night, so I became a very involved community member in Ethereum and also in Terra at the time and ripped my portfolio. But the whole thing about that is that because Terra was much smaller in terms of how many people were interacting, there any people who have established it allowed me to very quickly meet a lot of the people who were actively engaged in the ecosystem. I started participating, helping produce the briefs of what was said, giving them to the community so that people who had missed the calls could still have that information, and participating on the forums. So the way I got professionally into crypto was that one day there was this proposal on the anchor for about updating SD Luna with a new version of the liquid staking derivative to SD Luna and at the end of this post, there was this small mention that of you think you have skills that we could use, just send us a message and let's chat. And so I thought perhaps there's something that could be done, so I did message them, and we chatted for a while, and that's how I started as a community manager later at Terra. The confusing thing here is that actually, my employer has been PGP from the start because the way it works is that Lido as a DAO is a pretty big organization that coordinates everything that happens across all of Lido. Still, in terms of development and active management, it's mostly focused on Ethereum Ecosystem, including l1s and l2s as well and so to be able to expand to have that bandwidth with a limited amount of devs. What Lido does is often enter contractual relationships with other teams through governance, and so teams like this include P2P and Chorus 1 but also others who have done the deployment on Polkadot polygon, Salona, Terra, and so the way it works is that we'll give you some Lido tokens to create imitation and then if you can reach some degree of market cap you will get a bonus to motivate you to maintain and grow the protocol. P2P had this kind of agreement with Lido for later on Terra, and so that's why I joined PHP as a community team manager. So the rest is history, but basically, the team that was making Lido on Terra was also researching how to make proper liquid staking in Cosmos, and in the course of their research, they found a lot of ideas. Their thesis was that we would like to do it as a smart contract, and we need some technical prerequisites for this to be possible and so which platform allows us to do this? There are many platforms in Cosmos, but none of them allows you to meet these requirements right now and so we shared a lot within P2P, and so all of these criteria and these things that were blocking Lido spread through the org and the realization. If one protocol like Lido is blocked on this lack of security, lack of ability to interact with the blockchains via inquiries and retrieve data from other blockchains. It’s very likely there are other protocols that could deploy on Cosmos that can't because they don't have access to these premises that they would be interested in having to deploy in Cosmos. And so from there, we can't have started thinking if we could technically build a blockchain that does this for one protocol. We could build. This was just the light of the team, but how about we take this and we make it a product that everybody can deploy? so that's how the idea of a Neutron was born, and then we started working on it for months until prop 72 hit the forums, and it aligned with what we wanted for a Neutron. We wanted to be intersecured because we saw it as one way of having much higher security from the get-go but also as a way to have a very close alignment with the rest of the ecosystem. We’re aligned by default. That means if the Neutron goes rogue or becomes hurtful to the rest of the ecosystem, it's very easy for the hub to pull the plug at the same time. The Hub should not be incentivized to pull the plug off the Neutron because if the Neutron is successful it should be driving a ton of revenue to add to Atom takers and you have this very nice property here that is that we have to cooperate. It's all about corporation essentially, so that's my story and Neutron’s in a nutshell.
+
[00:10:48] Citizen Cosmos: That's pretty cool that the role of Neutron is cooperation because blockchains are a lot about reaching consensus. Whether it's a cooperation of
+nodes, a cooperation of governance, or the cooperation of actors in whatever ecosystem is in question. Another question. You said that you were quite young when you got into the whole Bitcoin topic, and the question is: was that still school-age or after? The reason I’m asking is that I’ve been going through this topic with a lot of guests about how the adoption level of crypto turns around the world. I think one cool measurement for that is to see whether people got into it in school already or when they already had jobs.
+
[00:12:08] Spaydh: I remember buying my first Bitcoin on Coinbase in the queue to my high school cafeteria.
+
[00:12:16] Citizen Cosmos: That to me means that adoption is happening and happening, especially among the generation that, in my opinion, can do something with it. I'm sorry to everybody and including my generation here, but I think it’s more important that this happens like that and not only by your employer or something like that. Let's go back to the topic, but that was a very curious kind of thing to see how it evolved.
+
[00:12:41] Spaydh: I agree. The age of people when they discover crypto is an interesting metric.
+
[00:12:46] Citizen Cosmos: It’s for developers as well. The first time I saw this was in Cyber house. It was a place in Minsk, Belarussia, in 2015 or 2016 where Constantine and other
+people used to meet. I remember there was a developer, a kid essentially. He was 14 and was already into smart contracts. And that’s when I thought: “Yeah, it’s working!”
+
[00:13:24] Spaydh: What do you think about 12 y/o kid from the USA, I think, who made millions selling NFTs? I think his name is Pixel Whales.
+
[00:13:46] Citizen Cosmos: Yeah, it was cool. I also recently saw on Twitter it was Josh Lee’s post about a 12 y/o kid called Badkidsart who draws Cosmos now, as far as I know. Back to cooperation. You're welcome to talk about Lido and Neutron in this case. What are your thoughts in general on the decentralization of stake? There is a lot of talk about Lido and a lot of talk about Ethereum. What are your thoughts in general? Because you guys have been somehow involved in all those stories. What can be done about that?
+
[00:15:40] Spaydh: That's a million-dollar question! First, before we talk about it, I want to clarify that the Neutron itself does not deal with stage validators. It’s interchain secured. The Cosmos Hub does that. Neutron doesn’t separate products, it’s a smart contract platform. Lido is a liquid staking protocol. There’s a smart contract that will most likely launch on top of Neutron. What I'm going to say now is my personal belief. I've been in touch with validators and Lido’s node operator group. My take on this is that the way the staking mechanisms work and most blockchains do tend to centralize take, and that's for multiple reasons. Some of
+them are fairly trivial. But there are more profound centralizing forces when it comes to state distribution, and that's the fact that not all validators have access to the same communication channels, PR, but also not all of them have access to the same order flow, and I think that's
+the most significant point here is that if you're Coinbase, Binance, or Kraken, you already have a user base and that user base is pretty huge. If they're going to be holding those tokens because they're speculating on them or they're taking a long position on them they're going to be holding these tokens in your platform, they might as well just yield on them, and so you can make this very easy for them and even make it more comfortable than delegating directly at the blockchain’s level because what you can do is you can have a one-click process, or you choose your token you stake amount that you want, and then if you want to withdraw you can do it instantly because instead of staking everything though their validator they can keep a small part of it as a soothing pool kind of so that you can withdraw at any time. So you don't even have to care about the bonding period unless everybody is leaving on drugs and so the house streamlined the process is how comfortable it is for you as a staker: you don't have to care about the morning period, you don't have to care about government, you don't have to care about anything really. You can just be speculating and earning a yield on stuff that gives a tremendous advantage to this kind of entity who is able to have a vertically integrated business model when it comes to staking. And so what we see is that centralizing changes have grown pretty fat on most of the blockchains they operate on, and that's even without liquid staking. So you stake and get the yield, but you don't actually even get a token that you can use in other platforms. Coinbase was the first one to recently enable this for Coinbase Eth, and the success of it now is pretty tremendous. It's the fastest-growing liquid-taking derivative in Ethereum, and so obviously some of it is probably just people who were already staking with Coinbase but now are also getting the derivative, but some of it is most likely new growth as well. So the idea is that you need decentralized alternatives to centralize staking offers, and you need that alternative to be competitive enough to actually meet that demand so that the absolute share of centralized actors represented in state distribution doesn't grow at least is crucial. So how do you make it competitive? Well, I guess there are two things about this. The first one is that it needs to be able to scale with a demand for taking and not be limited by kind its internal way of dealing with a stake. That's mostly relevant to Ethereum, but it's also relevant to Cosmos. You want your product to be able to scale, that might include you being able to onboard new zones quickly although that's probably not where you'll find the most competition from the most centralized actors because they take a while before they list new chains, but anyway you need the protocol to scale, you need to have a perfect token, a good derivative that is well integrated so that people want to have this token, use it, hold it, and you need the validator set underneath to be robust, and that's for multiple reasons. The first one is that if your validator set management is really bad, you're going to hurt the network and so either you are going to destroy the network, you're participating in thereby also destroying your value or the network itself in its community will react before that happens hopefully and will either fork you out or find a way to stop you from hurting the network. So the first thing and the second thing is that your token is only as good as your validator set because if you have a shitty validator set with tons of validators who get jailed and others who get slashed, the APR of your liquid second derivative is not going to be competitive and it might even go negative if you're really bad. So to sustain a good token you need a good validator set and have all of these things that can contribute to improving the concentration of the state. So that's on the liquid staking. In terms of the way we do blockchains in general I think having lower requirements to become a validator is a good thing. We see on Etherium that the 32 Eth requirement has been a tremendous barrier to smaller validators which have been Ethereum. His vision of Ethereum should be evaluated eventually. It should run on your phone. We're going to make it as lightweight as possible. I think this vision has tremendous value though Ethereum is very far from that state right now, and I think in Cosmos we have to deal with the limitations of tendermint which is now as you increase the size of the set you increase latency and it stops working so efficiently. So that's one of the main hiccups there, and so in the meantime, before we figure out a way that we can have no larger sets, which would be nice, there are interesting initiatives like cyborg a couple of months back led this initiative where they were trying to make some ranking of various interfaces so that people would have access to differentiated tools and differentiated lists of validators with different profiles so that people can select validators based on their priorities without having three years of research. I think that's really the key point, you need the information to be available, and you need people to have access to it as easily as possible because the barrier the difference between staking with a liquid it a centralized provider and staking on your own is already massive and so we need to do everything that we can to make it as easy as possible whilst providing as much information as possible but also recognizing that it will most probably never be possible to actually give all of the relevant information publicly because some of the information that is relevant to actually making rational decisions about who to stake with is information that is really critical to the validators business for example which direct jurisdiction are they under, which country are they in, which server they use, what's their set up. That might be the best practice that should be shared, but you also might see it as a competitive advantage. If you have a better setup that is more efficient then you don't really want to share that information necessarily and so for various reasons like their personal safety, the safety of their business or their competitive advantage, or even the security of their infrastructure because for all these reasons validator will most probably not be fully comfortable sharing all of the information that is required to make a dedicated decision. Even if they did, most people would not have the time to actually go that in-depth, make charts about where the validators are distributed in the world, and then aggregate stake based on this. This is not something that is available to just anyone. I guess I'm somewhat deep in the context, I would still not be able to do that, so it's unrealistic to expect people to go that deep.
+
[00:23:40] Citizen Cosmos: It's interesting that we came to that from that question because in Citizen Cosmos one of the targets and goals that we have is to try, and we have the biggest databases. I'm talking about interviews with the top founders of validators and asking about their motivation. Not just what's their setting and setup, because these are private questions that lead to security issues but looking at those blockchains as digital nations and looking at those validators as businesses who build on those nations, then I want to know as the citizen of that nation what is this business building in my nation. I want to know whether this business is building an atomic bomb in there or whether they're putting that money back into work, for example building an IMM Zone which would benefit me more and that's what we try to go into, and especially when we have validators, we have now a separate thing. We do streams with validators where we try to get their profile but you're right that people have no time to listen to an hour-long interview. It's a big balance of weights, it is hard to understand which way it goes.
+Let's get back in a slightly different angle and talk a little bit more about Neutron and a little
+bit more about the major topics out there. I’m going to quote Neutron’s Twitter. It says “permissionless CosmWasm gateway. Could you explain what it is?
+
[00:26:05] Spaydh: That's a good question. So CosmWasm is a virtual machine, it's basically a way that your blockchain can take pieces of code that have been written by other people that are not directly in the blockchain itself and run them to produce products and services or make a pretty pictures or whatever you want. The interesting thing about Cosmos is that it's a module that you can put into your blockchain and so that module you can choose for it to be permissioned or permissionless. If you’re permissioned, that means that for somebody to deploy a piece of code that can get executed in that virtual machine, they have to go through governance first. That is usually seen as a way to either improve the security of the zone by having some people review the code before it's deployed or a way to only select the protocols that complement your zone the best, which makes a lot of sense especially for app chains. Osmosis is doing it and makes perfect sense, it doesn't need to have a very complex DeFi protocol that has nothing to do with their trading engine and so what they want is to have other programs that come and complement very closely and make symbiosis with their main product. Essentially the permissionless version of it is that anyone can come and work on your small contract, you're ready to deploy it while you can deploy it on your own you make a few transactions, and then your contract starts existing on the blockchain. The point here is that we're building a whole ecosystem, not just one product that we want to complement with plugins. We want to give anybody access to the IBC technologies that allow you to interact with other blockchains very closely. So because of it, there is very little sense for us in asking people to go through the loops of governance, presenting the whole thing. They can release a smart
+contract, if they found vulnerabilities in them, they can migrate them to a new version where they patch it. They don't have to wait two weeks or whatever governance delay in between. And so if they improve their product or if they fix issues can just iterate and get better. Essentially, over time and the overhead in terms of the developer experience is much lower. Now, the gateway to IBC part means that there are a few ideas but one of them is that building an app chain today is much easier than ever, but it's still not a trivial amount of work. You need to learn how the Cosmos works and the rest down the line if you want to have small contracts and bootstrap your validator set and the market cap of your token so that your zone is secure, etc. There are a ton of considerations, and if you don't need an app chain or don't have the means to have an app chain, then you can still enter Cosmos by just releasing a smart contract on Neutron. So it's a gateway because it is an easier way to enter a Cosmos than spending up your whole blockchain. However, it's also a gateway because once you're on Neutron, you still get access to all the technologies that app chains enjoy. Also, to all of the other zones that IBC connects, not only can you transfer tokens, you can also execute transactions on every ICA blockchain, but can also retrieve data from any IBC blockchain. So you can come to Cosmos on Neutron and enjoy the full
+ecosystem.
+
[00:29:36] Citizen Cosmos: It's interesting that you mentioned several things while explaining the interesting accounts and queries. I think Neutron is mentioned in the white paper 2.0 of Atom. Was that deliberate? Were you guys waiting to build those things? Were you trying to align the release of the protocol and the tesnet’s active nets with the release of the
+white paper? Or were you just piling the good technologies and putting them all together?
+
[00:26:05] Spaydh: No, actually, we had zero visibility into the progress of Atom 2.0 to point itself just like any other cosmonauts we were looking forward to it because exciting ways that aligned with Cosmos vision to drive value to Atom is kind of an interesting topic, but at the same
+time we weren't actively involved in it, we didn't have an idea of the timeline, so we didn't build our road map with that in mind. The main thing for us was interchain security because we didn't want to launch on our own value set and then fire that validator set and then go to the validator set of the Cosmos Hub we wanted to be intersecured from the start. So if we built our roadmap around anything, it's most probably intersecurity. Now, in terms of Atom 2.0, I think
+that there's a lot of potentials. Obviously, there are a lot of risks as well. That amount of money if it's misappropriated or if the government system is that control it is poorly designed, there are a lot of bad things that could happen. At the same time, if we get it right, implement the right systems, and come to a consensus about how this will work, then I think there's tremendous potential. The allocator, for example, is something that synergizes tremendously well with Neutron because, essentially, you can have the Hub that has an enormous treasury, and that treasury can be deployed to bootstrap the best projects and products or even create different systems that would not be possible in other circumstances because the actors that would benefit from these systems would not have access to that amount of capital. For example, you can allow a money market to re-hypothecate the collateral by liquid staking that collateral. The problem is when the collateral needs to be recalled, then you have a 21 day, you need to unstake and then that takes 21 or you need to sell to the market but you might not get price parity so you might actually take losses on your rehabilitation that's something that you want to avoid, and so what can be done here is that potentially that protocle could take a loan from the allocator for some capita, keep it as not staked tokens into price stability module and
+then when they need to unwind the positions they basically swap through this at price parity and then what the module does is just that it unstakes and then waits to 21 days and then it gets essentially all the tokens back but the protocole is able to generate more revenue without increasing the risk and the price parity is not taking on risk either because it's just unstaking stuff and waiting and the Cosmos Hub itself is getting an interest rate on that capital that has been deployed and so as long as the money market is able to generate more than the interest rate charged by the locator then that's a benefit for everybody, the Hub gets money, the product gets money, Neutron gets transaction fees so everybody is happy basically.
+
[00:33:10] Citizen Cosmos: Do you think the interchange allocator will help make chains more community pools rather than chains more sustainable in the long run? What I mean is that a few years ago, there were a lot of examples where we saw DAOs buying DAOs with one project swapping with another project, tokens inside a community pool and that, in my opinion, makes the community pool a bit more sustainable because it's a bit more diversified then now instead of having just IBC or just Atom in the community pool and be open to the risks of a bear market. Let's say, in five years when the chain is much bigger in terms of decentralization, and the community will only sustain a certain amount of money. That money is only an Atom, and a bear market happens. Of course, we're going to have trouble because the price of Atom is fallen. It's not diversified enough. A good example is what is happening now. If the Atom community was to diversify the community pool during the bull market when Atom was at a higher price, the community pool currently could have a lot more money in it to develop the chain to feed more developers to feed more projects. So the question is: what features like the interchange allocator could it help to achieve with the abilities it has theoretically in an easier manner?
+
[00:34:46] Spaydh: I think it makes sense. It depends on diversifying. Selling some of the tokens of a zone during the peak of the bull market, ideally to stablecoins makes sense because these are not going to decrease in value when the bear market comes but diversifying to other tokens from other projects, I don't think is very efficient in terms of protecting the value of the community pool in terms of a bear market for the simple reasons that most assets in crypto are very correlated. Most assets in Cosmos are even more correlated, so the same tide raises or lowers all ships. It is especially true since Atom is the most liquid, established token, so it might not suffer from the bear market as much as other least established project tokens. So, diversifying can be useful, but you need to do it carefully because you don't want to buy stable coins at the bottom of the bear market. So getting tokens from other projects into your community pool is a great thing to do, but not for protecting the value of your token and rather for establishing diplomatic relationships between projects. What you want to do is you want to have close alignment with the projects that you can energize with, and so one way you can do this is by making sure that they benefit from you, increasing in value, and you benefit from them increasing in value. So that’s the way I see it, not like a portfolio management thing.
+
[00:36:20] Citizen Cosmos: Although it wouldn't be that bad buying Atom or Ethereum at 10 cents. That would be a good purchase if you could do it. The next question is, what would be, in your opinion, a good way to help community pools to cure value in the long run? Neutron is, as you mentioned, all about bringing value to not just its holders but to Atom and the Cosmos. So in your opinion, what could be those ways, or what are you guys planning to do in Neutron to cure that value and attract that value that will benefit everybody else?
+
[00:37:06] Spaydh: So I think right now we're in the phase where we're bootstrapping the ecosystem, and so that's the phase of a project where essentially your network doesn't have that many users and projects yet, and so the appeal of joining the network is fairly low. In traditional start-ups, we refer to this as the cold start problem when you need to start the engine, but you know it's not already running by itself, so it's much more difficult than just keeping it running so in this specific phase of the project most likely what we're going to do is we're going to give grants to projects that we think are promising to incentivize the first adopters, to start and build the foundations of the system. It's likely that you will have some very fundamental primitives. One of the models that makes sense for bootstrapping a zone is choosing a team that you can trust, that has demonstrated their abilities already built interesting products or even preferably built that kind of product, a team that, by doing your due diligence, you have a fairly high confidence that they will deliver something incredible. Then you give them a significant amount of the zone tokens. These tokens would be locked for investing for a long period but they get this incentive. So if you build these cool premises, other people develop and build on top of it. Then, not only am I generating a business that hopefully makes sense and is profitable, but I'm also creating value for the zone. Because I have a large stake in the zone, that will also be profitable. But those strategic protocols should be removable by governments, and that should be something that should be known and well said from the beginning. So the incentive you're creating here is that if you do a great job and build this zone up and build the protocol up, then you’re going to get rich, and if you fuck up or underdeliver, then I'm going to lose all of the things that haven't been paid back to you. So it's not like we're not going to take back what you've already been paid because it's gradually investing. We can demonstrably show that you're not doing what you are supposed to do, which was building an incredible product then we can stop the relationship and then try to find somebody else who will do a better job by using those tokens again or just remove them and take them back to the community pool so that they can be used there. There are four ecosystems. In particular, there are a few fundamental premises that you need. You need a good dex, you need a good money market, you need a stablecoin, you need bridges to other interesting ecosystems, you need an NFT marketplace, and you need some way for DAOs to organize themselves. You probably need liquid staking because they make good collateral for many of these other use cases once you have this. You have a lot of Legos that people can build on top of and create more interesting, complex, or innovative products. So that's the way I see it in a nutshell. The first phases of Neutron will most probably be as a zone, as a project. We will probably need to incentivize a few incredible teams to build these foundations so that other people can come and experiment and make new innovative stuff. The other idea here is that Neutron as a protocol should reward people actively contributing value to it. We do this by proposing an incentives model where you know there are incentives in a pool. They can get distributed by governance to various protocols registered for a gauge. Once they receive these incentives, they have to be distributed in their entirety to the users, so they're not getting paid directly. The developers are only getting paid directly from there. They can get grants and stuff, but they're not getting paid with incentives. What we're doing is that we helping them bootstrap the adoption of their product which generates fees for them because they're monetizing their app. But we're also giving back value to the users, and that value will probably be using the ecosystem. That's what happens with incentives, and it's fine as long as the ecosystem itself is growing and we're building an infrastructure that will make it competitive in the long run. There are very interesting mechanisms here. The gauge system itself is a mind funk, but that's what I'm working on right now, so all that I've said and a lot more that we haven't discussed yet apply to this phase of your bootstrapping zone. That doesn't apply, for example, to the Cosmos Hub and Osmosis because they already have well-established positions in the market. They should be protecting their tokens and only allocating the tokens where they're getting a large return on deployment. So they're not leaking out value everywhere; they should only be focused on growing the parts of the protocol that makes the most sense and that produces a better user experience, more revenue for the state holders, etc.
+
[00:42:21] Citizen Cosmos: It's interesting that you went into bootstrapping zones because one of the next questions I had was specifically about that. It's interesting how
+blockchain projects get launched from a general perspective. From your experience being a community manager and then a cringe manager, as you wrote on your Twitter.
+
[00:43:20] Spaydh: My title is deputy general manager, but my actual title is chief chief LARP officer.
+
[00:43:35] Citizen Cosmos: Yeah, that’s cool. I was a manager looking busy. So, back to the question. How was that experience? What would you suggest to somebody that just getting involved in it? What would you say not to ever do?
+
[00:43:20] Spaydh: This is a trillion-dollar question! The topic is very complex and very unique to every project and the context in which they are built, the type of communities and developers that they appeal to, etc. There is no size fits all recipe. In 2021 we saw that large incentives programs seem to work at bootstrapping, having protocols on the zones. We've also seen now that a lot of the activity on a lot of blockchains that had these programs like Avalanche and Venom, unfortunately for these ecosystems left so I think it's a tremendously tricky question. I think there are multiple approaches to trying to find the solution that is going to work best. I think first you need to have a good understanding of what has been tried before, you need to try and
+identify what worked, what didn't work, and which context these solutions were applied to. For example, the Ethereum story of the whole thing bootstrapping itself is one likely to repeat itself at scale because there is so much competition right now, why would you devote all your time with no expectation of an upside to building something on a completely new ecosystem when there are multiple good ones on the sides with whatever language you want to code in like Cosmos or Solidity? This doesn't seem likely to happen again, so I think you need to learn from what happened before and try to take it into account, and that's why for Neutron we want to have the incentive program to be inside the blockchain itself and managed by the community itself so that it can adjust over time to the circumstances that it's faced with. We're trying our best. We're trying everything possible to make sure that Neutron will be successful at the same time, you can never guarantee that these things will be, and so that’s the same problem that every founder or every person launching a new project will face. You have to evaluate the market honestly to find out if there is a need for what you're building. Usually, you only start building your thesis. Our thesis is that there is a need for smart contracts that exist across multiple blockchains and allow applications to behave cross-blockchains just as if they were one whilst being secure. You can never know, you can just try and learn from the past, try to find, and improve those systems and implement them in a way that makes sense so that perhaps you know you're building the next Ethereum.
+
[00:47:15] Citizen Cosmos: I'll give you a small blitz. Give me three projects outside the top twenty that you're interested in. They don't have to be blockchains.
+
[00:48:24] Spaydh: So I think what the Anoma team has been building is incredible. I also like what Bitcoin is doing with decentralized grants. That's a tremendous inspiration. And I really like
+what DAODAO is doing as well.
+
[00:49:39] Citizen Cosmos: Second question. Name 2 things that motivate you in your daily
+life.
+
[00:49:47] Spaydh: Learning stuff and coffee.
+
[00:50:00] Citizen Cosmos: Last one! Give me one person or a book that you recommend.
+
[00:50:21] Spaydh: Paolo Cohelo’s “The Alchemist” novel.
+
[00:50:28] Citizen Cosmos: Great book, I love it! That’s about it I guess, thanks a lot Spaydh!
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here)
Episode name: Willy Ogorzaly, values, DAO's & the best day ever
+
+
+
Transcript of the Episode:
+
[00:00:00] Citizen Cosmos: Good space-time ya’ll! Welcome to the new Citizen Cosmos episode, and today we have Willy Ogorzaly with us, the head of the decentralization at the ShapeShift DAO. Hi!
+
[00:01:33] Willy: What’s up, everyone? How are you?
+
[00:01:37] Citizen Cosmos: Great! How are you? How is the sunny state of Colorado?
+
[00:01:39] Willy: It's a sunny day out here, I'm having the best day ever so far. What about you?
+
[00:01:44] Citizen Cosmos: Good, also sunny. So, ShapeShift. So much noise, so many years, such a big project. Do you want to maybe introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what you, what does it mean to be the head of decentralization?
+
[00:01:59] Willy: I've been part of ShapeShift for almost four years now, and I had the pleasure of being a part of it when it was a centralized corporation then, last year in July, we announced that we're becoming a DAO, and over the next six months we worked on transitioning from a centralized corporation to a DAO. Employees were let go in three waves, and meanwhile, we were building up the DAO deploying work streams. Things have been going well, we’re about nine months into this DAO journey. The Shape has pivoted a bit so when we first started in 2014, we were the first non-custodial exchange where you could trade crypto across chains from your own wallet rather than depositing it onto a centralized exchange. It started right after the Mount Gox fiasco. It was built as a solution to having to deposit funds onto a centralizing exchange and give up trust, so we were doing cross-chain trading before d5, before DeX, and before Ethereum. So when we saw the advent of these decentralized exchanges, we were impressed and realized that these decentralized exchanges were doing a better job at ShapeShift’s original vision and that way to do this was to decentralize protocol so that you could list any new token as soon as it came up and be permissionless so that people could come to list their own tokens. We embraced these decentralized exchanges, integrated the DeX and Etherium, we integrated Thor chain the day that they launched mainnet. The day that we integrated Thor chain, we sunset our own trading desk, so now you can think about ShapeShift as a free open source community-owned and soon decentralized interface between users private keys and
+decentralized protocols. We support multiple wallets, we support multiple chains, and we support multiple protocols on those chains. Now, you can come and buy, sell, receive, trade, and the yield on cryptos on 11 different blockchains.
+
[00:03:42] Citizen Cosmos: And it's all non-custodial, right?
+
[00:03:45] Willy: Yeah. Non-custodial is our core value. We’re all about financial sovereignty, and another one of our core values is the multi-chain future we've always believed in Shape. We love Etherium, we love Bitcoin, we love Cosmos, and Shape is the interface where you can do things on all these different chains and even across chains.
+
[00:04:03] Citizen Cosmos: Tell me about the journey. In crypto, a project that has worked for 8 years now, that’s like history. How was this journey for you personally?
+
[00:04:18] Willy: For me personally, it's been an awesome journey, and we've been through several market cycles. We've seen a lot of ups and downs. My first experience with ShapeShift was in 2017 when my friend showed me an easy way to trade, and I just thought it was so cool I've always liked altcoins and cool visions, so I'm always looking for the next hot thing, and so at the end of 2017 I started a company called Bitfract, and it was the first tool where you could trade Bitcoin for multiple cryptocurrencies in a single transaction. It was built on top of ShapeShift, you could buy any of the tokens or coins that ShapeShift had supported, and you could choose what percentage you wanted of each coin, send in Bitcoin, and then we’d use ShapeShift to execute trades and then send all the crypto to you whatever addresses you had put. That was a pretty awesome experience and six months after we started that, ShapeShift acquired Bitfract and we were brought on to a team to build a new version of ShapeShift. This is the time when ShapeShift was realizing that the original exchange model had regulatory issues with it and we came to the conclusion that we needed to implement KYC to continue offering trading functionality. Before KYC ShapeShift was the leading way to trade crypto non-custodial and after we implemented KYC we lost a lot of our users and our volume and our revenues. A lot of our existing users started in even wallets that had integrated ShapeShift to power their trades and didn’t want to start requiring KYC so they implemented a lot of the copycat projects that had kind of done the same thing that ShapeShift had done but without requiring KYC. That was a tough couple of years. We had
+to spend months building this KYC functionality and not only into our products but into our organization bringing on compliance teams. So that was a lot of effort that really ended up hurting us more in the long run and I wish we could go back in time and just realize that we should just stop the trading thing now, we shouldn't go down this centralized route, we should instead start embracing these decentralized protocols even though the centralized exchanges weren't quite feasible yet. That was one of the challenges. We didn't have the option at the time to just plug into these centralized exchanges because they hadn't been built yet. So retrospectively that was probably not the right decision but at the time there were reasons that it made sense for us to make that switch at the time. Once we saw the decentralized exchanges actually working and able to handle the liquidity and the volume that we had with our users, we immediately integrated them. Since then things have been going great, we were able to remove KYC which made our product better. Now, as a DAO, things are going better than ever. Some of the differences before ShapeShift got decentralized, we were closed source so we could only build however much as we had internal bandwidth to build and there's so much to build in the cryptocurrency world. We wanted to integrate all these protocols, all these chains we were always limited in how much we could prioritize. Also, things were pretty secret at ShapeShift. We had a big separation between the internal employees and team and our actual users in the broader community and I always hate it. We'd be working on cool stuff but I couldn't talk about it at conferences, I couldn't tell anybody about it until it was live. Now everything is open, we have public meetings every day in the discord and anyone can just come in and hang out which is really awesome. I like being able to be just fully transparent and it's powerful because now we have the support of the community in ShapeShift. we have such an awesome community because we have been around for so long. We’re a recognizable brand and we recently deployed an airdrop after a million users joined us. One of my favorite parts about the DAO is just the awesome power of the community builders all around the world coordinating every day and coming up with cool ideas, sharing their unique perspectives to achieve this vision and we are now moving faster towards this vision. We're spending less than we did at a centralized company, we're earning more revenues and this is nine months into it so we're just getting started.
+
[00:08:17] Citizen Cosmos: This is fantastic! We’re all here to see how products progress from centralization to decentralization. In your opinion, how should the applications be launched in Web3? In decentralized manner or start centralized and move towards decentralization?
+
[00:08:55] Willy: It's a really interesting question! I'm a big fan of decentralization. I think the sooner you can get to that the better. When ShapeShift started it wasn't possible to be a decentralized organization. We had no choice. But if I were starting a new project today I would absolutely push to start it as a DAO because once you do start it as a centralized organization, then it's more difficult to transition to a DAO. With a Shift, it was pretty interesting though. Huge props to Eric and John for getting our shareholders on board with the idea of transitioning to a DAO. There were some advantages. The fact that ShapeShift had been around for a while, we weren't just starting from scratch we had a community, not just our internal employees who all knew each other and worked together well but also our users, so I think that was pretty advantageous and we were able to do a lot of work as a team internally to then launch the DAO successfully. We were able to build the DAO stack, build the governance process and gift it to the community. I talked to a lot of people now who are working on new projects and I encourage them to go the DAO route because it will pay off in the end. I also think progressive decentralization is important. You don't have to start day one being fully decentralized - it is difficult, right now there aren’t many tools where you can do everything you need to do as an organization in a decentralized way. But as long as you're progressively getting more decentralized and as long as you're transparent with your community about where points of centralization are, then I think that's fine and you can work together as a community to address each of those points.
+
[00:11:02] Citizen Cosmos: As somebody who has already been through the whole journey of going from a centralized to a centralized company, what would be your number one advice to those who have already started doing their projects but not in a decentralized way?
+
[00:11:24] Willy: I think it's a challenge when you want to launch your DAO but you want to make sure that you're ready to launch the MVP and ideally an MLP. You don't need to have everything figured out as long as you have that core framework where people can come in and pass proposals and start contributing and coordinating. That's a great place to start and once you have that, you need to some dank memes. You need to make it really clear what your DAO is about, and why anybody who hears about your DAO should be interested and get involved. How can you distill that into a really clear and like Bitcoin. ShapeShift is like the one-stop shop for cross-chain DeFI. I think we still need to work on that mem so it's catchy.
+From that you know you can have all the actual cartoons and pictures and funny stuff that go
+viral and capture people's attention but that's so valuable because the DAO is all about the community and so you need to start building that community. I also had experience working with Giveth. That was amazing to see unfold in real life when people all around the world just
+come join the community and say they believe and share the same vision. It's so powerful and you need to make it really clear to somebody why they would want to get involved with your community and then make it easier for them to onboard. Think about the user experience of like somebody who actually then lands in your Discord, they land on your form, how can you make it really easier for them to get engaged start contributing and then reward them with your governance tokens? You can figure out that cycle where people can hear about your DAO, get involved, become owners, and contribute and add value. Then you're off to a great start and the rest can just be built by the community.
+
[00:13:14] Citizen Cosmos: In your opinion, is a DAO suitable for any type of product? Let’s say podcast? What would DAO do in a podcast?
+
[00:13:25] Willy: I like to think that DAO really can apply to just about any business. First of all, DAOs can be designed really however you want. They can be flat, they can have a hierarchy. When you can have a podcast company with shareholders or a podcast DAO and bring each of your guests, you can give some tokens so that they have an owner in your DAO. You can create just about any kind of business, any organization, you can either do it with a bank account and with a legal entity or you can do it with a treasury on a chain. It now makes the most sense for these digital communities or technology software companies or protocols, but I don't see any reason why it's in the future it's not going to be easier to start a DAO. With a DAO, you’ll be able to do all the things you can do as a centralized corporation except for having bank accounts and can't sign contracts but everything else you can do. There’re multiple things you can do with DAO. Why would you start an LLC if you could just go online?
+
[00:14:30] Citizen Cosmos: I really don’t understand why anybody wants to start LLC. That’s crazy. You have a good point. The idea of minting NFTs and giving the to guests and then listeners has been on my mind for a while. I have a slightly different question. What is the future of DAOs? Where are we headed? What’s it going to be in 5 years?
+
[00:15:12] Willy: I think we have barely begun to scratch the surface of like what's possible with DAOs and you can just see where DAOs are today and where they were a year ago or two years ago. It comes so far, and they're continuing to innovate, and now the pace of innovation is accelerated because there are all these real doubts that need solutions. There's a huge opportunity for entrepreneurs to build these solutions. I think we're just getting started, and what we’re making at ShapeShift we’re solving most of the relevant problems. Our goal is to dissolve ourselves, and we will do that once ShapeShift is completely decentralized, and there's no need for the illegal entity, no central points of failure. Our mission is to remove all the central points of failure, and replace them with decentralized alternatives so that we can dissolve ourselves and pass complete control over to the community.
+
[00:16:30] Citizen Cosmos: It's interesting you mentioned values goals. What was the original motivation for ShapeShift to be created? And what is the big goal of the DAO right now?
+
[00:17:20] Willy: I would say we stayed true to our values from day one and the core values that were founded on financial sovereignty enabling financial sovereignty for billions of individuals across the world borderless, unstoppably, trustlessly. I think we've done a great job sticking to that, and people also always believe in this multi-chain future where there's value beyond Bitcoin, beyond Ethereum, and that if this feature is going to exist, then there should be a way where any individual can access this feature in a way where they're not giving up custody or trust or they can't be censored or stopped. So I think that’s cool because the industry has evolved around us and so the way that we've tried to tackle that vision has evolved absolutely. Now, we are embracing just all of these decentralized protocols that new ones were getting built every single day, and I just think that's so cool. It’s hard for me to imagine a more important mission. If we can enable that and bring that to the masses, that is going to have more of an impact on society than anything else that I can think of. You can have all these cool decentralized protocols but if the actual interfaces themselves or if they back in the blockchain data the user needs to be able to access this itself decentralized and we can't really enjoy this decentralized future. So ShapeShift is in a great position to solve that because we've been running nodes interacting with these chains since 2014. We have a ton of experience doing this and doing it in a noncustodial way. Not only do we have this amazing team that's been working at ShapeShift for eight years but we've got this awesome community. Now that we’re open-source, we’ve been putting bounties on GitCoin, and ShapeShift is now a top project on GitCoin for putting bounties out.
+
[00:19:30] Citizen Cosmos: This is so cool, man! I didn't know that ShapeShift was the number one project offering tasks on GitCoin. What is now the main goal of the DAO except for financial sovereignty?
+
[00:19:59] Willy: If you go to app.shapeshift.com, you could see the new Cosmos functionality. It's beautiful, it's super easy to use, and they're no fees added ever so you can think of us as an aggregator. We build really great UI/UX, and you can come to apps.js.com, buy, sell and receive and yield in crypto all for free and across chains. So our trade page it looks a lot like uni spot where you can trade one asset for another and put the amounts
+but it's also got a Thor chain in that same interface. Not only can you trade all the Ethereum assets but you can also trade Ethereum for Bitcoin. The way we're building all this, too is with abstraction layers so that we build one UI/UX. We're constantly optimizing that and then any protocol that shares that same UI/UX, which is like a lot of the trading protocols like an exact lot of lending protocols, the same a lot of the single asset staking yield protocols. You approve the token, you choose the amount you deposit, and you see numbers go up, so the way we are building things is so that once we build this UI/UX, it's very easy for other protocols to integrate themselves. For example, the first yield generating protocol we integrated was yearned, and right now we're working on the abstraction layer, and we have idle finance ready to come to integrate them or put a bounty up to get integrated, and we're actually going to partner with them on this bounty. They're going to put up half the funds from their treasury, we're going to put half the funds from our treasury, and then anyone in the community who wants to come to integrate idle can just come to plug it into our existing UX/UI. Now that we have Cosmos support, it’s very easy for us to support all the Cosmos zones. There's a bounty also up from Osmosis, this is another joint bounty from the Osmosis
+community to get integrated into ShapeShift, and this is in progress. and now that our Cosmos support is much easier for us. Soon, Osmosis will be sending, receiving, staking, trading and liquidity providing, and bonding. Then we want to support all the Cosmos zones. If you're Cosmos dev listening to this, come integrate yourself into ShapeShift or come put a bounty you have to get integrated. The other reason I'm excited about is bridging. Enabling bridging between Etherium between Cosmos so that in one place, you can connect your Keplr, your metamask, or you can connect the ShapeShift wallet, and it supports both. All free, open source, and soon - fully decentralized.
+
[00:22:32] Citizen Cosmos: This is my next question. When are we going to see foxchain on Cosmos?
+
[00:22:39] Willy: If you guys haven't heard about fox chain it is the new Cosmos zone that's under development and collaboration with ShapeShift, and we're also working with coinbase cloud on building this out, and they've been awesome. Shout out to coinbase cloud team. It's in the early stages of development; we're in like the research phase right now so we're kind of designing all the protocol, we're doing models, and stuff with tokenomics. Basically, what a fox chain is, it's a network to incentivize node operators to provide blockchain data to end users. We need this for ShapeShift to be decentralized. We've always operated the nodes ourselves, but we need in order to fully decentralize and for the foundation to dissolve we need to have another source of blockchain data, ideally a decentralized source. That doesn't exist yet so what fox chain does is incentivize node operators to run nodes for any blockchain they want to run notes for it and then get rewarded in fox tokens. We need it for ourselves, but any DAO that actually wants to be decentralized and not just run their own nodes can plug into fox chain to get the blockchain data they need for their users. We’re expecting in to launch in early 2023.
+
[00:24:40] Citizen Cosmos: When are you planning to launch the first test net for validators to come in already? Is there going to be an incentivized test net before it goes live in 2023?
+
[00:24:46] Willy: I'm sure there will be a test net, and I think hopefully, once we complete this research phase will have a better timeline for when that could be available.
+
[00:25:00] Citizen Cosmos: So the most important question - when airdrops of the new fox chain?
+
[00:25:02] Willy: That's what we're figuring out right now
+
[00:25:08] Citizen Cosmos: I see. So basically, is there any alfa? Should people go and buy more fox tokens now on Ethereum to get more airdrops in the future or not?
+
[00:25:18] Willy: I think I'm not supposed to say anything about that.
+
[00:25:20] Citizen Cosmos: I know, but still, I’m looking forward to that because. I have a controversial question. It’s a made-up story. You said that you know the first day you started working in ShapeShift there was the whole thing with the introduction of the KYC. Obviously, now things have changed, and things have progressed again. Who is to say that the foundation is still there or some of the company is still there, and something bad happens like the authorities would come and ask for the valuable data? Is there a possibility of it, considering there was such an incident already?
+
[00:26:22] Willy: As a foundation, we don't have that data so we specifically made sure that we receive the data necessary to continue operating ShapeShift legacy infrastructure until we could send, edit and migrate all of our users to the new open source which doesn't require KYC, doesn't have any tracking. The KYC laws require you to keep the data for five years after collecting it. But ShapeShift is required to keep that data but right now is pretty much operating in a skeleton mode. Almost all the employees have moved on and there's just a small skeleton group that's keeping ShapeShift alive basically for tax purposes this year and maybe just to like to be the custody of that data which is all encrypted, stored offline in cold storage. The data that we didn't want to collect but had to. We followed the rules. Fortunately, there was no reason for the foundation to receive this data because we don't need that to continue operating ShapeShift, so we specifically made sure that we didn't
+have access to the data, so if the regulators come to ask us for it, we can’t give it to them which feels pretty good.
+
[00:27:28] Citizen Cosmos: I understand what you mean - the less you know, the better you sleep. What is, in your opinion, the future of KYC and web3?
+
[00:27:48] Willy: I am excited for civil tools like the ability to know that an individual address is a real person. As long as users are in control of the data, they can choose whether or not to share their data. I think it's a much better status quo than we have right now and especially if there's options to do the thing that you want to do in finance without being required to share that data. Then I think that's a better world. I personally think that KYC is kind of ridiculous: requiring people to give up all their private information when normally it's like innocent until proven guilty, but here were assuming people are bad actors, and then it's a bad risk it's like we're just a honey pot. All this data that time and time again is going to get hacked, so I'm excited about the potential for web3 to enable users to at least have control over their data. I do think that there probably will be on-chain KYC types of things that do get built, and I probably won't myself use them. Maybe there are some benefits, maybe
+there's no potential for benefits, maybe it's possible that the people can come up with reasons. I don't think it needs to exist, and I believe in free sovereign finance, and we don't need KYC for that, so it will be interesting to see how it all plays out. These KYC protocols will get built, and some projects will choose to implement them and require them, and whether or not those projects can compete with the decentralized alternatives that don't require that, it's hard for me to imagine we'll see what they can come up with.
+
[00:29:10] Citizen Cosmos: I have a slightly different question. When I go on your Twitter account, you have a .eth nickname and laser eyes. How does that work? You have to explain this one.
+
[00:29:45] Willy: Ethereum was what got me into the space for sure. It was the first crypto that I bought, but very quickly, I became a fan of Bitcoin and I have a lot of appreciation for Bitcoin I personally think that Ethereum will flip into Bitcoin but who knows what's going to happen I definitely believe in a multi-chain world. I think that's a good way to just show that. I love Ethereum, but I also like Bitcoin and am open to other chains. I reject tribalism, and ultimately I think the real enemies are the banks, the legacy centralized infrastructure, and the regulators but not each other. We're on the same team, and it hurts me to see that the
+The bitcoin community is becoming so toxic and so maximalist. If the Bitcoin community continues going in that direction and Ethereum continues going in the same direction that is going, maybe I will get rid of the laser eyes.
+
[00:31:02] Citizen Cosmos: What is the value in your opinion of Bitcoin today?
+
[00:31:37] Willy: Before crypto, I used to like gold, so I really believe that fiat is the biggest evil, the biggest scam in history, and so I'm a big fan of hard money. I think Bitcoin is doing a great job at solving that. However, it's possible that Ethereum is going to do an even better job. There's not a lot you can do with your Bitcoin right now, and I see the transact fees that Bitcoin is generating right now. I see how much it costs to secure the network, and the block reward is going down, and right now, it's not clear if Bitcoins' actual model is going to be sustainable. On Ethereum not only can you do anything and have all these decentralized finance protocols that add a lot of value and that people are paying a lot to use because it's worth it, but Ethereum can also be money. If you can have hard money that has a utility that people are willing to pay for and have a monetary model where it’s deflationary but
+still sustainable, then that could be better than being sound money than Bitcoin, so I'm open to that. But right now, Bitcoin has a lot of liquidity, and it can still enable people to have financial sovereignty and to hold their own money and to send it to anyone across the world unstoppably, and so that's still very valuable I still think that's super freaking cool, and I appreciate everything that Bitcoin has done to enable what Ethereum and other blockchains are doing now.
+
[00:33:00] Citizen Cosmos: Yeah, I agree on most parts, though I’m not as enthusiastic about Bitcoin as you are, especially with all this toxicity.
+
[00:33:25] Willy: Actually, I got rid of my laser eyes a couple of days ago. I put a new picture. I did it because I didn't want my credibility to be hurt. However, I think Bitcoin needs to be worried because if Etherium can be better at being the sound money that right now they're, Bitcoin can’t compete. But Bitcoin has a strong community, they got a lot of supporters, and we'll see if they're able to survive I would be happy to live in a world where we have Bitcoin and Ethereum and they both co-exist.
+
[00:34:37] Citizen Cosmos: I have two more questions. The first one is more like a story about ShapeShift decentralization. How did somebody suddenly bring it on board? Can you deeper into the story?
+
[00:35:33] Willy: Shapeshift in early 2021 started going down this path. We could see a lot of the projects that were best achieving similar visions were structured as DAOs. A lot of the top DeFi projects were DAOs. I also had first-hand experience with the project for the hackathon, which was the DAO to save the world. We got first place and immediately afterward started building it, and we ended up joining forces with Giveth and building out the new version of Giveth. We built a DAO, we launched a token and built a community, and it was amazing to experience because I was able to do that in my free time. This was actually during the pandemic, so quarantine, lockdown, it's a perfect way for me to stay busy, so every week we're just having these community calls, and more people are joining the community. We built a beautiful product from scratch without any fundraising, just off of donations. That was pretty amazing to see when we were figuring out what is the best path forward for ShapeShift, and what's the best way we could achieve their dream. It was a heavy advocate for decentralization. We need to structure ourselves as a DAO, we need to drop fox tokens for all of our users and open source everything, and work with the community to build a community-owned interface to these decentralized protocols. At the
+time, I was excited about this whole DAO movement. I think it's so freaking cool that you can have these community-owned products and ecosystems and not have to have a centralized corporation with a CEO.
+
[00:38:41] Citizen Cosmos: The last question is a traditional question. You are so alive, so energetic! What on Earth motivates you to keep on staying, apart from the decentralization and the value of the building? Is there something in your daily life that you could share?
+
[00:39:15] Willy: For five years now, I've been saying it's the best day ever, every single day, so I kind of became known for that somewhat, and I love it. I think it's the right attitude to have. I love my job and the people that I work with. I'm passionate about what we’re working on, and it's fun. My values are to always, first of all, work on something you love, work with people that you love and stick to your values, and have fun!
+
[00:40:00] Citizen Cosmos: I like the number 1 rule; this is my biggest value.
+Thank you so much. It’s been a huge pleasure!
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here)
Episode name: Idena, proof of person, AI & democracy
+
+
+
Transcript of the Episode:
+
[00:01:32] Citizen Cosmos: Good space time you all! Welcome to a new episode of Citizen Cosmos, I have with me today two guests LTraveler and TravCrypto, community members of Idena. It's a Cosmos based project, they will tell us all about it, it's a very interesting project. Hey
+guys! Whoever wants to introduce themselves first, welcome!
+
[00:01:58] LTraveler: Community knows me as LTraveler, I'm in the project for about two years. At the beginning why Idena catched me was getting into the crypto world without any penny in your pocket. It was pretty cool when someone asks me if I want to solve some puzzles and then get paid. I got joined into the community then I started to discover and when I went deeply I realized it's not just about to solving tests, it's actually something new that I have never seen
+before. I have developed this script that helped people to run Idena on Linux server and then I have made my YouTube channel, I'm making some video tutorials that are explaining how Idena works and how it could help people to developed the fair democracy. Then I started to help with the translation of Idena chronicles and other materials from English to Russian and more and I felt like we are building something that can make a revolution in the future.
+
[00:03:47] TravCrypto: Hey guys! My name is TravCrypto, I've been involved in crypto since 2016 and I started a little bit skeptical of crypto and what all it could really offer, and basically over time after reading the Bitcoin white paper and other white papers like the Ethereum white paper I got really interested in blockchain technology and basically came across Idena because I wanted to participate in validation but other blockchains can be very plutocratic and can require you to have large amount of wealth in order to participate in validation so I wanted to find a layer one blockchain that anyone could participate in no matter how much wealth they had. That's how I came across Idena and I've been actively involved probably at least for the past couple of years and like LTraveler said the ethos is really really cool within the community because it's accessible to anyone and everyone, and that kind of brings us where we are today.
+
[00:04:57] Citizen Cosmos: I have several questions straight away. Which one of you guys wants to give a brief overview of what exactly it is and what is you guys doing? What is the
+idea behind Idena?
+
[00:05:44] TravCrypto: Idena basically is a layer one blockchain but any human can participate in the validation. So the consensus mechanism is proof of person and unlike Bitcoin which is proof of work where you need ever growing amount of machines to participate or unlike what is soon to be Ethereum 2.0 hopefully if it ever happens proof of stake where you need an evergrowing amount of the actual cryptocurrency in order to stake and participate in validation,
+you just need to be a human being and you need to participate in what's called a validation ceremony which currently happens approximately every three weeks and that validation ceremony is basically puzzles or flips proving that you're human. So you solve these puzzles over relatively short period of time and you prove that you're in fact a human, and once you do that you can participate in validation on the blockchain where you can earn mining rewards for validation. So that's the very basic overview and I think now LTraveler can probably dive into a little bit more of the technicality.
+
[00:07:05] LTraveler: So as TravCrypto said, we're developing the network that is going to be part of web3 and if we look on the process of participation to the network we can see that as a game. First, when you're just joining to the network, you’re just candidate and to protect our blockchain from bots we have created a system to invite new members only through the invitation codes so you cannot just come a candidate and join into the ceremony without invitation. First of all you are taking the invitation code then the person who invited you, he is getting rewards for the invitation so he's motivated to explain you everything clear and to control that you participate on time you know exactly what to do. So it's like your manager who's going to control you, going to check everything, who's gonna explain you the next step after the first validation. Then you're becoming from candidate to newbie and then you can have some new skills that you can do, so you can start mining if you want but the rewards that you are getting are going to the stake so you cannot just take money, you have to keep going. Then you're going for one more validation, you're getting a newbie 2 level but you still new so the money still
+goes to your stake and only after third validation you are becoming identified member which gives you opportunity to invest your money into the stake, and why we are making that as I said because we are developing human blockchain like a blockchain for human being so we have to make the system that accepts humans but does not accept an AI or bots. I would like to tell you more about the process that is a part of solving - flips. The flip is a filter for intelligent people which means that when you're solving flips you can solve it because you are a human but the machine cannot solve it because the way how they made it which is a story with four images that has beginning and the end. we have four images in one colum and four images in another column and only one colum could be the order of image so the images are the same but the order only in one column can be represented as the story that had beginning at the top and the end of the bottom. So since you becoming a newbie, then you have one more responsibility. You have to create flips also and this is very important. It's like people are creating flips and people are solving flips and if we are talking about the validation ceremony, there are two parts. First part is a short session, it is one minute and forty five seconds why we have short session because the short session could guarantee that only one identity and one uman can be connected. It's like the period of the time is very short so you cannot pass validation from many identities which very important. Then we have the second stage and the second stage it's qualification session. The purpose of the long session is to check flips that have been created by other people, checking that all of the keywords are connected to the images and also that there are no marks or hints that help you to solve the flips. So we are moderators and also we are the people who are examinated by other identities. So we are like whole ecosystem that are
+using our brain to support that blockchain, and this is more or less a general explanation.
+
[00:11:51] Citizen Cosmos: I like that. It's a very decent explanation easy to understand. I have more questions, some of them devil's advocate, of course. So let's play a little bit with some of the things that you said. The first question which comes out to me is obvious: why human-only chain? Why Idena doesn’t recognize bots, machines, AIs as full-on intelligent beings capable of participating in life of the chain in an equal way to human?
+
[00:12:30] TravCrypto: That's a great question! My understanding is Bitcoin’s consensus mechanism originally was one machine, one one vote or one node, so anyone could basically participate with their computer and they could validate on the proof of work blockchain which is known as Bitcoin and over time that's become more and more inherently difficult. I actually live in Texas, here in the United States and here are Bitcoin mining farms but hey're located all over the world and you can see how difficult that barrier to entry is for validating on this blockchain. To answer your question in terms of Idena being a proof of person chain or one person one vote as far as the consensus mechanism I think the whole idea is to have a more equal and egalitarian system that anyone in the world can participate in, and that's currently in place with Idena which is really cool to see because you can see people participating in the community. They’re participating in validation as well which is somewhat rare in other blockchains. Also to answer your question in regards to why can't AI participate, I think technically speaking they could participate if they were smart enough to complete the validation ceremonies which we haven't seen to be the case so far but I think technically speaking if AIs were as smart as a human being, smart enough to complete these flips as LTraveler was explaining previously, I think they very well in fact could participate butmthere's no AI that's currently at that technical level.
+
[00:14:27] Citizen Cosmos: So if I could summarize, it's not about disliking robots, you just think that at the current stage of the implementation that's a test for them. If they can solve it they can participate, that means they're smart enough. Is that basically what you're trying to get at? right
+
[00:14:42] TravCrypto: Right.The goal is to not have AI participate, that’s the ideal. We've been successful so far but obviously we hope that this validation ceremony can prevent AIs from participating in the future which allows humans to have the power in the in the consensus mechanism. There obviously have been a lot of attempts so far but they haven't been successful.
+
[00:15:09] LTraveler: There is one thing I would like to add is that there is a price for people who're going to develop that kind of system. So the developers going to pay amount of money for someone who's gonna hack the system.The second thing that we're always trying to predict that since the blockchain was released, it was already two or three additional protection have been implemented and we have to mention that first of all we call it antagonistic noise which is kind of noise that every image has and that protects when, for example, Google vision trying to check that kind of images with this antagonistic noise the percentage of correctly recognized images are very low. Also we have a mechanism when we are putting another image or another background with the low level of opacity, it could be noticed but it didn't break the general sense of the image. Also there is one more thing that sometimes the system when you are loading your flips it makes horizontal mirroring of the image just in case so all of that mechanism
+are making for vision system very hard to ecognize images and to solve plays because
+actually if that system going to exist then the whole blockchain’s going to be in trouble because it's just destroyed the whole system.
+
[00:16:55] Citizen Cosmos: I think it's a good cat and mouse game to see the improvement. It's like with bank security when the hackers hack the bank security, the bank security improves and so on and so forth. I think it’s beneficial for the whole industry what you guys are trying to do.
+
[00:17:10] LTraveler: I'm sorry that I'm interrupting but for us that kind of asystem that's going to solve flips automatically, it's like a person who can ray the money and the money are the same as the real money. That's why we are always aware of what's going on.
+
[00:17:27] Citizen Cosmos: Second question. It's going to be a bit unrelated to that but something I want to make clear. The proof of work and the proof of stake. Can you guys clarify how exactly does it mix everything together? Where do the mining and the validation meet each other? I would love to hear it from you guys and to hear a proper clarification of where I'm wrong and where I'm not wrong.
+
[00:17:59] LTraveler: First of all, when you are joining to the network, your first validation ceremony is to pass the test. and since you pass the test then you can join to the mining but there is one very important thing of the mining that you don't need a powerful machine. You can use whatever computer or a virtual private server regardless of which operation system it is. We have a node client for Linux system, Windows and Mac OS. So, you can join and since you start to mine very important thing that the mining rewards are the same. There was recently a voting for the new hard fork and after accepting it, the new mechanism is going to connect the rewards for your mining and the amount of coins that you have in the stake. So basically what we are trying to do is not connect the mining process to the power off your machine. The only thing which is important if you're joining to the network, you're helping the network be decentralized as much as possible. But the main part is your brain, that you're a human and that you can solve and create good flips. Maybe TravCrypt wants to add something.
+
[00:19:32] TravCrypto: That was actually a great summary, I was pretty much going to say all of that same stuff myself. I just wanted to touch on a question that a lot of people typically ask as
+well and it's all related to this. The question is why wouldn't I just complete the flips on 10 different computers, complete the validation ceremony with 10 different invitations and then I could get 10 times the amount of rewards or mining? Well, the answer to that question is this validation ceremony actually takes place at the same time all around the world so no matter where you live on planet Earth. This validation ceremony takes place all in sync all around the world. So obviously it's impossible to be in two places at once. Each person actually has to complete this validation ceremony on their own personal device. You could do it on a mobile device, you could do it on a laptop but you complete this validation ceremony as LTraveller said in 1 minute and 45 seconds which is a relatively short amount of time, complete 6 different flips which are these puzzles. So it would be difficult to do that at the same time across 10 different machines. So that's how the network prevents people from having multiple identities for the consensus. It really sticks to one person one node.
+
[00:21:17] Citizen Cosmos: You mentioned plutocracy and at the beginning you said that the in Idena it almost doesn't exist and that's really cool to hear because in a lot of the times you come to a community and unfortunately what we see is centralization of stake and using that power to push opinions but a lot of the time it's not even that. It's really cool to see that it's the community members who are coming on to the recording to onto the podcast to talk about the project and to explain it other people rather than actually finding members. So the first question is why? How come it was community members that reacted? Why is it in your opinion like that?
+
[00:22:30] TravCrypto: Just from my perspective as a community member over the past couple of years first and foremost I think the developers of Idena are just very focused on the development of the blockchain and so they're the ones technically implementing these new bug fixes in these new editions that some other community members wouldn't be able to contribute and I think it's also this ethos of a community driven project. The community is now representing itself which I think is very unique to other blockchain projects. It's really cool to see because there's this ethos not only at the consensus level of one person one vote and participating in these different Idena improvement proposals like the most recent one IIP-5 where we're going to make a hard fork but also at this level right on podcasts. The community really is organized and representing itself which is pretty rare to see in the space.
+
[00:23:43] Citizen Cosmos: I have been in this industry for a long long time and I've seen projects fail and rise and one of the biggest reason proof projects fail is the lack of the community involvement, the lack of the community remembering that this is a decentralized space where that's what we're supposed to do.
+
[00:24:19] LTraveler: I think any project going to get success when you are always in touch with the community. The reason I like Idena because the developer is actually listening what the
+community thinks, they are also in touch with us, they are checking discussions and so on and most of the improvements that we have made it was because of the community feedback. For example we have had a hard time when we have had many really bad flips, we start to tell to the developers we have to do something with that because it's just the garbage and it couldn't be like that, and then there were lots of improvements. For example now we have a qualification part of the flip. It's like if you really like the flip you could put the star and then if that specific flip is going to get the majority. We have a filtration mechanism so you can approve flip, you can decline flip or if you do not have more reports, you can leave the flip as it is without any mark so that means that someone else from the committee where that flip goes to be examinated from other identities, if the flip is bad it's going to be marked as bad flip from someone else and
+step by step people learning how to make good flips and how to report bad flips. So we're always in touch of course. We do not know each other in face but we're always talking, we're
+always getting a feedback, there is always brainstorming. For example about IIP-5 there were a lot of discussions and then finally everything was integrated into the perfect wonderful solution. how to make solo miners, how to make them run independent. We have a huge pool and we want to be a network more decentralized so we have created a system how make people around their independent node to start mining by themselves and this is something unique that is happening in our community and I really love that.
+
[00:27:25] TravCrypto: Just to touch on that real quick, I think in other blockchains the like if you take the total community, the percentage of those community members actually participating in the validation is relatively small whereas Idena it's actually a very large proportion of the community so they have more incentive to participate in these proposals, in these changes and and it's actually affect the rewards that they get so I think that incentivizes a lot of involvement within the community and it creates this environment where these proposals. There's really a lot of activity and it's cool to see all of the community proposals that people make.
+
[00:28:07] Citizen Cosmos: By the way proposals and IIP-5, it's about quadratic voting right? Does any of you want to explain what exactly it is and why you guys think it will help?
+
[00:28:39] LTraveler: Let's go back to the IIP-4 where we introducing the quadratic staking. So in the proof of stake systems we always have a problem: if you have a huge stake you're actually getting way more benefits comparing to people who have a small stake. The solution which we integrated in Idena blockchain is to make quadratic coefficient which is going to make the process of getting rewards for the staking in the way that if your stake is small you are getting more rewards the percentage of rewards out of your stake then more your stake than less the percentage out of stake you are getting. So that's how we making new members with a small stake for example earn rewards and also how we are making people with a huge stake also earn but with not a huge gap between people with a small stake. With IIP-5 we are getting a new idea about how to connect the stake and the mining rewards so the more coins you are putting into the stake the more rewards that you are getting from the mining process. Before we have had a huge cake of all rewards for mining and then we just spread all of that pie proportionally to each of the mining member so it was like each of the mining member get the same part of the reward. We have had a connection to the age of the identity so if your identity have had more ages when you are in the blockchain then you're getting more. So the newbies were getting less but it wasn't fair because someone came to the community two years ago and someone just now. So the people with more epochs in the block chain they're going to earn always more than the newbie members. The older the blockchain the more this gap is going to be so we completely changed the rule and now nevermind how old you are, the most important thing how much coins you have in the stake. So you have more coins your rewards are going to be bigger and also it is very good for the economy of the Idena because people are not going to exchange the coin after each validation. So the coin is going to be inside the blockchain.
+
[00:32:36] Citizen Cosmos: It's quite interesting that you use the same quadratic voting model because I've seen it implemented in airdrops a lot especially where you don't want the wells too big of an airdrop so the idea is the less you have the more you get. I don't think I've seen a blockchain before implement it on staking, I think the first time that I've seen this being implemented was only when I was preparing for the podcasts I saw on one of your Twitter accounts a print screen or a pole about what do you guys think and then I started to research and it was quite interesting, I've never seen this implement in before. Another cool thing I've seen across Idena was DeFi demo. I have noticedsome posts and some explanations on how it can play a big role and make an advertisement decentralized. Do you guys want to talk a little bit about that as well?
+
[00:33:49] TravCrypto: This is actually if you're referring to the concept of decentralized on-chain ads, this is something I actually was most excited about for Idena a while back. I think the concept of advertising on-chain in a decentralized way is really applying blockchain technology
+in a way that can can really revolutionize an entire space like the centralized marketing. So how it works is essentially there's this concept of oracles on-chain and you can create an oracle, like an add and when you create this add it goes to the oracles or people to decide whether they're going to approve it. So it needs to be approved by the community first and once it is approved, then it is actually displayed on-chain so after the implementation it will be once year doing the validation ceremony you’ll actually see these adds displayed and the money spent on these adds is burned in the form of Idena’s native crypto currency. That's actually burned on-chain
+in order to display these adds to people around the world. So i think that concept of decentralized marketing is really really cool and I think it adds a lot of value to the blockchain because obviously there's a lower supply and we all know the concepts of supply and demand over time.
+
[00:28:39] LTraveler: One more thing that I would like to add is that you can advertise whatever you want. We don't have rules. The only rule that we have is that the community must approve your ad. So you're sending an advertisement to be examined by comity of people that's going to be randomly selected from the whole network and then if you are getting the approval of majority you can run your advertisement company and this is very important because nobody can tell you nothing.So people will take a decision what is good and what is bad. This is the main point of the future because we always know about discrimination, about censorship, and all of that thing but for example why someone is going to choose what is good and what is bad because you have to ask like at least randomly of some members and if it is good why not? And this is the main principle of our advertisement platform and also you can run whatever oracle you want. For example you can ask whatever thing, you can make a poll. Then you can get a feedback from the community. Of course you have to pay for that but the feedback that you're getting from the real people it is very hard to manipulate that vote system and that's how we are implementing our Idena improvement proposals. First, the person who wants to propose that idea has to describe that idea pretty clear and then we have delegates and that delegates we are choosing every three epochs and then if the delegates approve the program then the program goes to the oracle vote part where everyone from the community is supposed to vote. Everyone can propose something even now we have a community wallet community foundation so if you're a developer you want to develop something new you have to prepare the paper, you have to get the majority from the majority of votes from five delegates that we are selecting every three epochs and then you're going to get that majority then that paper going to be put it into the oracle voting and then if people say yes then you're going to get the foundation for your project or for your implementation. Recently we implemented community foundation to translate Idena chronicles into three languages and it was implemented in that new mechanism.
+
[00:39:18] Citizen Cosmos: what has been the most controversial decision that the community made?
+
[00:39:31] TravCrypto: I'll touch on two things real quick. One, oracles can be as controversial as you want them to be. In terms of oracles you could ask any question that you possibly want e whether it's politically whether it's opinion. One oracle off the top of my and this doesn't affect the blockchain in any way or the community is should abortion be a legal or illegal? Here you have this democratic system with community members literally all over the world in all different political environments from all backgrounds and they can just vote legal or illegal and there you get a true perspective into what people's true thoughts are on any given matter. So I thought that was really cool, I think that like a concept of true democracy but then another example are these improvement proposals like IIP-5 that was controversial within the community because there are certain people that think these mechanisms should be a certain way and then there's certain people that think they should be a different way but it's the coolest part about this is you always have differing opinions. That’s the basis of human nature to see when these proposals are brought up. It's not always just bi-partisan, it could be three or four different thought paths and everyone breaks down their own explanation of why they think it should be this way or the other way. Once you get those explanations then the community can put in their thoughts and when it's all said and done and you have this very broad overview of this IIP-5, that's when community members can take action and actually participate in voting and depending on the results of the vote that will create a hard fork of the blockchain which you could arguable say doesn't happen in most other blockchain communities.
+
[00:42:14] LTraveler: I want to add one more thing that because everything is private. You can ask whatever questions you want, nobody going to judge you.
+
[00:42:29] Citizen Cosmos: I have a wrap up traditional question for you. What keeps you motivated to do what you guys : are doing today? Whether it's for Idena or whether it's for the whole of blockchain industry.
+
[00:43:07] LTraveler: I would like to start because it reminds me the story of how that community proposals came out about the translation. I was so attracted by the idea and I just wrote to the developers and said I want to translate your chronicle and they even agreed to pay me. Then, I started creating videos and the result was also good. What I feel is that apart from your job where you're just earning money there should be something that you're really happy to do. You do something that people really can use because they really need that. The key point of changing our society is to transform it from what we must do to something what we choose to do. For me me this is the key point and Idena really represented the ideas of fair democracies, it is the representation of that kind of style of society. We are small but at least you can feel that and this is wonderful.
+
[00:45:11] TravCrypto: For me it’s very similar to LTraveler. In the time that I've been in web3 professionally over the past three years and as a community member over the past six years I've seen a lot of different blockchains, a lot of different projects all promising different things. The thing that makes me most passionate about Idena is this concept of a truly decentralized democracy and what I mean by that is a global democracy where every humans can participate in this system and their vote can be heard which is really spectacular to me. I think it's a novel concept that hasn't been done at scale and I think Idena is the technology that can allow truly decentralized democracy to happen at scale.
+
[00:46:12] Citizen Cosmos: Guys, this has been a huge pleasure! Thank you very much for your time!
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here)
[00:00:00] Citizen Cosmos: Hi everyone! Welcome to our new episode of the Citizen Cosmos podcast! Today we have with us CO, the Community Overlord from Orbital Apes. Hey! Welcome to the show!
+
[00:01:42] CO Orbital Apes: Thank you for having me here, excited about it!
+
[00:01:45] Citizen Cosmos: Glad have you. You guys have probably the current biggest NFT project in the Cosmos ecosystem. I would love to talk all about it. Do you want to introduce yourself and maybe talk a little bit about Orbital Apes and what you guys do?
+
[00:01:57] CO Orbital Apes: For sure! So me, I run the social media marketing and part of the business side of the of the collection. So Orbital Apes started as NFT collection, it's relatively simple to just create the art and push an NFT collection so we decided to take it one step further and pack it like with as much utility we could give it. So that's where our idea for the market place started and we decided to create a validator in the Evmos chain and we're currently building a game for Evmos as well, so we're tying all of these different aspects to the NFT collection so as a holder of the main collection you get a piece of everything we’ll build in the future, so all the Orbital Apes NFT holders get 50% of our validator management fees. They get 20% of the marketplace fees and they're going to get a free airdrop for them to maintain the new collection for the PvP game. So with all of this we're trying to tie up the different aspects and everything we develop in the future into the main collection so holder from now we'll get access to everything we build.
+
[00:03:08] Citizen Cosmos: You just answered one of my next questions but it's good! So you have a lot plans, we'll talk a little bit about them later as well. I'm going to start with obvious questions. Why did you guys decide to go anonymous?
+
[00:03:24] CO Orbital Apes: For us this is just a matter of privacy, we don’t have any problems with sharing our identity, but if we don’t need it, we want to have apes as the core image of our brand. We’re dogs with the Evmos team because we have to go through full KYC for one of the projects we're running on Evmos, so they've seen our faces, we're in constant communication
+with them but for the public itself maybe in the future we would have plans of not being anonymous but for now it's just a matter of privacy. People can reach out directly to us on social networks but for now we don't feel identity is the most important thing.
+
[00:04:08] Citizen Cosmos: i absolutely agree with. It's just interesting that you actually had to go through a full KYC the team and here you still decide to stay anonymous but in my opinion it might be a little bit better for the team to be anonymous because that way you strip down the persona behind the person who creates the project and you concentrate on the project. What do you think about having to go through the full KYC? Were you okay with it?
+
[00:04:37] CO Orbital Apes: It's just a part of the process with one of the projects we're working on, so not a big issue for us.
+
[00:04:45] Citizen Cosmos: What's with the nicknames? Share the story!
+man i love the nicknames community overlord
+
[00:04:52] CO Orbital Apes: It's just pretty much fun names we came up with as we were looking for our nicknames. I'm using my actual nickname, people called me CO in real life so I went with that.Then, Mr. Sir is something we say a lot,we often refer to each other like that. So that's how that came up. People just chose whatever they felt was cool.
+
[00:05:36] Citizen Cosmos: Before we go more into Orbital Apes I was going to ask why and i've seen this a lot, 10.000 NFTs? I guess 10.000 is a kind of nice round number which makes sense psychologically I guess. But still, why?
+
[00:05:52] CO Orbital Apes: So 10.000 has become pretty much a standard in NFT collections. We know it's a big number and in the current market conditions it's been a hard push to reach the full mint but right now we're 8000 minted, so it's already 80% and we plan on pushing even more so I think it's a realistic number for what we're trying to achieve. Also in the scope of our project it was better for us to split, to have a lot more NFTs because this would allow more people to get into the ecosystem because for example the game in the future we're going
+to want a lot of users so if we have more holders we are already preparing a large user base for for the game. Also for the market place and a validators’ fees that are going to be distributed are significant and are going to continue growing in the future so it we felt it was better to split it between a lot of people instead of going the smaller collection.
+
[00:06:47] Citizen Cosmos: Makes sense! I do have one more intro question. Why Evmos? We also validate Evmos so we also on the same side but I would love to hear your opinion.
+
[00:07:10] CO Orbital Apes: We've always been big fans of the Cosmos ecosystem, we think it's amazing how everything is connected, how easy it is to move from one place to another but
+our experience is in solidity and then EVM, so as soon as we saw Evmos, this massive project coming to IBC we felt like that was the right way for us to go because it combines everything, like all of our experience in the EVM side with the interopperability of Cosmos. So it was perfect
+match, so everything we've done in the past because our team has experience in solidity could be translated directly into Evmos so it was perfect for us.
+
[00:07:54] Citizen Cosmos: You mentioned twice having experience in solidity. Do you want to expand on that? Did you do any projects already in Ethereum that we can talk about?
+
[00:08:02] CO Orbital Apes: Sure. So our teams is half devs, half designers and the devs they all worked in Silicon Valley companies like Google and Slack, and part of their coding experience comes from there. The team also worked in worked as freelancers for several EVM based projects, so that's how all of us got acquainted to EVM and all of this but this is the first time this team gets together to a solo project like not working for anybody else but this is actually something we own and we're running ourselves so it's pretty much our debut as a team.
+
[00:08:38] Citizen Cosmos: It's a big debut you made! A good entrance for sure and now you're saying that you guys have quite a lot of experience in big companies. Why did all those people gather together and decide to make a game? what was the idea? Why not anything else but a game?
+
[00:08:56] CO Orbital Apes: We've all been into blockchain and cryptocurrency for a long time so we've been looking at the type of projects that are successful, the type of projects we wanted to work in and first of all the NFT collection was like an entry point, it was a way to create a brand, to create community so this is why we chose that as a centerpiece of everything we wanted to build. And then we're all gamers, we’re super passionate about it so it was fun to see how much we could experiment because you can see other games like Infinity, for example, that started in Ethereum but that's not viable, they have their own subchain but with gas feeds it becomes impossible to do. Then we've seen several other games and other chains that as they grow like gas feeds can become expansive or the network becomes clogged so they also slow down and fade away, but we saw Evmos and the way it interacts with IBC and everything like
+much more solid place to develop. Everything matched perfectly, so what we decided to go for it and games are a super fun way to interact with a community and to grow a brand, so this is
+our path.
+
[00:10:08] Citizen Cosmos: I agree about gaming and interacting but let's talk a little bit more about all the things you mentioned in the beginning. You guys have a validator, let's start talking about the validator. So the idea from what you said is that the people who are community members and owners of the NFT get part of the commission that the validator earns. Is that correct?
+
[00:10:30] CO Orbital Apes: Yeah exactly. Through marketing and through community engagement we managed to get our validator to the top one spot in Evmos which was a massive surprise for us. It also required a lot of effort so we're happy with a result we got. So from that validator there our users stake with us because they trust the brand, they know how we operate and the reward system we've created for them, so all of the holders are getting the 50% of the management fees sent to them daily. So at the current rate I think the Apes are getting around 1.3k Evmos daily split into all of them, so every day the collection is getting some rewards. So right now if you go to mint on Orbital Apes instead you still pay the 60 Evmos mint price but as soon as you mint, you can go claim the rewards that have been staking since release. Right now they hold around three most inside so the real price you're going to pay is 57. So this is a cool system because in the future if enough time goes where Apes are not minted they're going to become free at some point or if people mint now, they're going to recover the full price of their mint. So it's sort of self-balancing system. If people invest early they're going to get their rewards and if it's going to be paid off so they can just continue getting rewards or selling it in the future or when the game releases, so it's pretty cool. Apes are always going to be generating rewards and validator right now is the main source of it but also we run
+the largest just NFT marketplace in Evmos and the holders are also collecting rewards from that so right now since we launched our collection, the traded volume for the apes is about 90.000 Evmos so it's significant right now and we expected to continue growing as more and if the collections come to the market place. Now have some excellent NFTs approaching Evmos so it's pretty cool, we’re excited to see how much the volume increases in the marketplace and all of this is going to benefit Ape holders in long term as volume increases, their fees increase.
+
[00:12:49] Citizen Cosmos: So basically what other parts are there to the economics? So you have the marketplace which generates a certain revenue and are there other parts to economics apart from being an NFT collection and being scarse which is I can guess can also be part of the economics. Are there any more things that week can say that's part of that?
+
[00:13:10] CO Orbital Apes: So for now things with actual monetary value are just these like this is where we're assigning value but we also have like a reward sort of reward points for people who delegate to us. We created this token OAV so people that stake with us get a monthly airdrop of the OAV token which is not something that has value in itself but it's something that people can use in the OAV store that we created. So the whole purpose of this store is to give some incentives for people and rewards for people that delegate to us and that have been loyal to us and we give something back that they can use to further engage with the brand so the OAV store contains some exclusive NFT designs they're all erc 1155 so it's shared ownership but people can use the tokens they got from staking to mint these new Apes. All of these are limited edition Apes so they're going to be there for one month and then they're going to disappear forever so you can use the OAV tokens you've got from staking with us. To mint these Apes you can use it as a profile picture, you can trade in the marketplace, and we're creating a system of scarcity by making them time limited so early stakers who minted one of the current Apes are going to have them but in the future these are going to be impossible to get unless you buy them of secondary. So its this scarcity system we created to reward holders, early holders especially because they're the only ones with access to the early releases of OAV.
+
[00:14:45] Citizen Cosmos: Could you kind of summarize that the NFTs in this case are a gateway point into the system that you're creating?
+
[00:14:54] CO Orbital Apes: Yeah, exactly. So if you own an Ape you can be sure that you're
+going to be part of every single project, and you're going a get rewards from every single project we build.
+
[00:15:03] Citizen Cosmos: If you don't mind talking about what other projects do you want to talk about? The other plans that you guys have?
+
[00:14:54] CO Orbital Apes: Right now the game is something where dedicating our full time right now because it's pretty complex task to achieve we've seen games, we've seen how successful they are on bull run especially once the game is new it continues to the tokens associated with the game continue to go up like crazy but this is from history we see that this is not sustainable. Pretty much every play to earn game that has released eventually collapses
+so this is something we're really trying to avoid. Of course like teams that release a play to earn game can get a lot of capital quick from the increase of the value of the token but then in the end you're still responsible for your community, for what you promise to the people. Having a token falling in price is not something we want to give to our customers, so we're taking our time we're trying to build a more sustainable play to earn tokanomic system so this is why we're going to continue taking our time for the game, make sure to release it once it's perfect and also one of the important things is to release it under a better market condition because even if you have the best game in the world you really do have to wait for for a good market condition for it
+to be truly successful if not lunching something that's not going to take off immediately is going to make it way harder to push it in the future, so we're trying to wait for every factor to align itself. Everything has done until now for collection so that's when we're going to release that's also going to be part of the reward system for the holders.
+
[00:16:50] Citizen Cosmos: You mentioned two things: market conditions and games failing. Let's talk a little about the games failing. First, why in your opinion, most of the other games fail?
+We’re talking blockchain games of course.
+
[00:17:04] CO Orbital Apes: The thing with blockchain is that most games have been pretty much just another way to invest. We've seen idle games where you just click send your players to do some activity but you're not really engaging with the game. So this lack of entertainment in the game is what will determine its lifespan. So as long as the tokenomics inside the game continue increasing and people are making money then it's going to make sense to play but if it's not entertaining and the rewards start decreasing that's where a game fails. Right now the key thing we're focusing on is making a game that someone would play on its own even without a reward system because we believe this is the key. This is the only thing that's going to make any game sustainable because if you purely rely on tokenomics, it's just like releasing a new DeFi protocol, not an actual game. So we're not going to go that route, we're going to make something actually fun for people to play.
+
[00:18:04] Citizen Cosmos: This is an interesting point. I would love to expand on that. Let's talk psychology a little bit. You say that you want to make a game which will attract people to play without having a monetary reward. I can understand that you probably have a lot of things that you're trying to avoid because of the like the things that you haven't released yet but can you talk a little bit more like in general psychology wise, what in your opinion makes people play a
+game in the first place if it's not receiving a reward?
+
[00:18:35] CO Orbital Apes: For anything you're going to need a reward. So in games for example xp systems are a pretty good expand levels are a pretty good incentive so people have leaderboards, you get to level a hundred and you're in the top. So you're competing against other people, people can see your name, people know who you are, and your NFTs are linked to you. So you're online your block chain identity goes with you into the game and you get some recognition if you do well with the game but this is one sort of reward this is purely on an entertainment and recognition level we're also going to do a full tokenomic system but by combining these two and making sure they interact properly with each other we're going to make it sustainable in the long run. Because only when you achieve a true balance in this the game can succeed. So it's going to be both like a social factor, a rewards factor and something that will keep people engaged.
+
[00:19:29] Citizen Cosmos: What would you say from the outside of the blockchain world, which successful games can be an example to what you're building?
+
[00:19:40] CO Orbital Apes: I mean we can see probably that the biggest game right now by user base is probably Fortnite or World of Warcraft and all of these games where you create an online persona and your avatar becomes an extension of you. So, for example, in Fortnite you buy some skins, WoW you can buy different cosmetics and all of this is important because you create online persona and you pretty much decorated so you get new items for people to see who you are online, what new thing you have and all this so this is important thing like the social factor combined with cosmetics you can apply. This is what creates a successful game so if a lot of people are playing and then you have the new most exclusive skin then people are going to give you some recognition for that so this is sort of the system we are going to strive towards. We're testing out with the OAV Apes because all of these are limited, they're only going to be there for one month so people are actually rushing to buy the Apes because they know if they buy this now, they're going to be the only one to have it and this is something people actually cherish.
+
[00:20:52] Citizen Cosmos: You mentioned market conditions before a couple of times. Would love to hear your thoughts in general. So are we in a depth of a bear market, in terrible market conditions to relate things? if you can talk more about it, I would love to hear your opinion.
+
[00:21:08] CO Orbital Apes: So right now everybody can see it's not the full green candles every
+day as we experienced in past years, but in Evmos I feel like we're in a secluded place because Evmos keeps growing. More people get interested in the coin, they're coming to the ecosystem, they're seeing their reward, all the useful features you can have when you combine EVM with IBC. So right now Evmos is in a pretty good spot, it's getting a lot of attention as the chain keeps growing. It keeps proving people what the possibilities for it are so right now like we're waiting also for the use surveys in Evmos to increase as well because it's getting a lot of attention but it's still very small compared to the potential it could have in the future. I think that after some months we're going to have a lot of people really invested into the entire ecosystem and that's when it makes sense to do something truly big. Even in these market conditions we managed to sell 80% of our collection until now in a couple of weeks from launch and it looks like we're going to fully mint out in a couple of weeks as well. So it's not terrible but if you have a solid product it will do well even in not the optimal conditions.
+
[00:22:28] Citizen Cosmos: For your team and for you personally, what would be the 1 market event that would trigger you?
+
[00:22:40] CO Orbital Apes: I don't know if it's going to be only one event. We have to see continuous growth throughout decent enough period of time because that's the only signal you can have of improving market conditions because big green candle for the month is not an indication of anything. You have to see how people are engaging with Evmos, for example. How
+many more wallets are created in the chain? How many more DeFi protocols exist? What kind of brands it's attracting? Right now this is not directly related to Cosmos but dYdX is building their own Cosmos chain, so this is something huge for the cosmos ecosystem and this is the sort of thing we like to see when when we're dealing with Evmos that's fully integrated into Cosmos and having these massive protocols migrating into Cosmos seeing the value. That's very good signal of what's to come in the future. So as we see more protocols migrating into Cosmos, and more people discovering the potential of these chains, that's where we can find great signa,l not one specific market event but a series of them for a sustained period of time.
+
[00:23:48] Citizen Cosmos: So I guess we're talking more fundamentals than technical analysis. I have a couple of questions which I'm going to look at because they were from our various chats from community members and then I also have some more questions but a little bit different. So one question was on Twitter. What are the current difficulties in the cryptoworld and the business in terms of like launching your own project in general, and maybe both the market conditions being not in the best situation?
+
[00:24:53] CO Orbital Apes: We've been in in crypto for a long time so we have seen projects become successful and fail and we determined what makes a project be successful. So I remember there was a point in time where any NFT collection you just had to release it and the floor price went crazy and everybody made money on that. So it was a period where people
+just continue to buy mint every collection and the demand for them was crazy. But right now I think the market is more mature so people know where to find value, how to determine a successful project from one that's going to fail, so right now it's not enough to just release a profile picture collection but you actually have to give the user something that they will recognize value in. Now every user is marked, people know how to do their research, they know what works and what doesn't so if you just try to launch very simple project, it's not likely to be
+successful so that's why the Orbital Apes a are full ecosystem. So we have different aspects
+that hedge the performance of the NFT collection so the validator as long as we remain in a good position is going to continue generating for our our project. The NFT marketplace we’re fully into this industry so if the NFT industry within Evmos continues to do well as our NFT then we're going to continue getting benefits from that by combining this having multiple sources of rewards and incentives. It's much more complete package for collection so I would say right now if you’re going to launch a project, make sure something unique and that has true value in itself regardless of market conditions. Something that can endure a bear market, something that can help you push through that and then of course in a bull market it's going to be amazing but you really need something that can withstand any conditions. So that's how we built the Apes, and that's why they made such a loud noise right now even with the current conditions.
+
[00:26:59] Citizen Cosmos: What was the most difficult thing though for your team to overcome and apart from the market conditions obviously? What was the one thing may be drawing the Apes thinking of the collection or maybe launching the validator?
+
[00:27:23] CO Orbital Apes: I don't know if it was just one thing. We had multiple roadblocks like the validator, for example. We started it as soon as the chain restarted so for that we had to make a pretty expensive investment into Evmos when the price was 6 to get into the active set and that was of course a completely different price than right now. So right the start our cost was massive, and then we saw all of that investment go down quickly because we wanted to be there from the start, then we had to run the valley data for OAV, a month without any rewards
+active because inflation was not active in Evmos so that was also an additional cost, and all of the costs of development like the artists, software engineers, and all of these. It was a long period of time where nobody was collecting any profits from anywhere, so it was all our effort waiting for the time to release, and we also ran the NFT marketplace at 0 profit for a long time because we wanted to have everything enabled for the chain to grow, and then for releasing we had to adjust to the timeline of Evmos, not necessarily our own because Evmos was still in the middle of doing upgrades for the Keplr claim issues, so there were multiple factors that had to come through for us to be able to launch. So one of the main things that was preventing us from announcing minting date or a price was the fact the IBC transactions were not enabled to pretty much the largest part of the ecosystem which is Cosmos. It was hard for them to access Evmos directly, so we had to wait for all of these, endure the cost and all the time we spent, just being patient until all the factors aligned and then we could release and it was the right choice to wait even though it was hard and even though we hit many roadblocks, it was the right choice.
+
[00:29:21] Citizen Cosmos: So huddling works, right? I have one more question here which was sent privately. Why did you only self-bond 0.008% of the stake? Is this okay for network security?
+
[00:29:40] CO Orbital Apes: That was the initial self-bond that we had to buy when Evmos was at 6 and after that instead of self-bonding more we just staked 10% of the Orbital Apes mint into the validator so this s a bit more secure for us, gives us more flexibility. Pretty much every validator keeps a really low self-bonded amount because of this. It gives you more security, flexibility but it it's just like that. We want to keep the fund safe so from anything in this way by just staking to the validator, we can do that and all of our wallets are public so people can see that we're not only staking 10% of the main funds to our valudator as we promised but right now we have around 300.000 Evmos stake to smaller validators in this page so people can go to the addresses that are connected to the validator there and they can see how it spreads. I think we're currently staking to 15 other validators, maybe the list has grown but this is pretty much our way to support the ecosystem because we did realize our validator grew to a pretty large size. So initially our plan was to stake with Evmos to continue growing but right now we don't feel like that's the most responsible thing to do, so everything we earn from all the rewards are staked with other people. We choose to stake with validators that are providing something to the Evmoschain, to the Cosmos ecosystem. So for example, a big part of our stake is with ecostate that created the restake tool that a lot of people use, then we deliver it to several other validators. This is something pretty cool for us because we get to engage with a lot of teams so whenever they've come to us sometimes people need a little bit of help to remain in the active set so we discussed the project, and then we know what they're going to be adding to the Evmos chain and it's amazing to be in this position where we can help others and we know what they're doing to help the chain so it's perfect. We love supporting other people because we really get to see inside of everything that's being built for Evmos.
+
[00:32:12] Citizen Cosmos: I love the answer, thank you! I think you guys are doing a very cool job to decentralize the stake. I have a couple of questions, it's going to be harder to ask you since your team is anonymous but I'm still going to try. You did mention that your team has worked with Google and Slack, but how did you resonally get into crypto?
+
[00:32:47] CO Orbital Apes: I think all of us got into crypto in a different period. Me personally, I started in 2018. I started with Bitcoin, that was my first purchase and then as soon as you're invested into something that you keep track of it and you keep looking for more about it so I think that was my entry and then I started looking into other protocols like getting a load to DeFi into NFTs. So by investing in them you get to engage in a much deeper level than people just read the news because you have something and you have a stake so it's important to you and this is pretty much how all of the team got involved. Some have been in crypto from like 2015 so
+they're much more experienced. We're all pretty confident in the crypto space, we know what's going to be the key success factor so it's pretty cool to also have a full team of people that you can talk to about different strategies, about different events because everybody has experience. Combining all of this experience into one project has been massively useful for us.
+
[00:34:06] Citizen Cosmos: What's your personal worst buy so far since 2018?
+
[00:34:10] CO Orbital Apes: I'm not sure what was the worst buy. Right now everything is pretty toughbut I don't think there's been one complete fail. You can always pull out. We had some UST, luckily we were able to to sell it quickly as soon as it broke back. We were also actually huge fans of Luna before but luckily we didn't hold it at the time of the crash.
+
[00:34:54] Citizen Cosmos: I guess UST was one of the worst hits for everybody. Personally, it was a big hit for our project, we had five years worth of money in UST and then it was a big hit, so I totally understand. What was the internal motivation behind creating Orbital Apes?
+
[00:34:06] CO Orbital Apes: So a lot of the team worked as freelancers for other people and we saw how their projects were becoming super successful and they grew into actual companies in
+the cryptospace and all of this, so we wanted to be able to work on what we really wanted. So the Orbital Apes is a company like every other business where we're using our skills what we have to provide value to people and we’re running a company around this. We're going to continue pushing our skills to anything we can do, maybe we get into the maybe we get into DeFi, maybe validating other chains. I wouldn't say it's something novel, something that will change the lives of people but at least right now we're doing our responsibility of keeping the network, secure in helping decentralized although we do take a big chunk of the chain, we’re doing efforts to decentralize, we're supporting other teams and just yesterday on the upgrade it was completely smooth, the V6 of Evmos happened and our validator there was up and running
+perfectly on time, we didn't miss a single block in there so it's perfect. It makes us feel better to see that we can prove to people that their funds are in a safe place, that we're going to have one of the best up times in the network and that's part of what we're doing for the people. This is a business, this is our baby and we're going to continue running it as a business and growing it as much as we can.
+
[00:37:45] Citizen Cosmos: I think it's a very great and fair answer! I'm going to ask one last question to you. What keeps you personally motivated?
+
[00:34:06] CO Orbital Apes: I would say running an NFT collection is pretty tough. At some point you have to be constantly engaged with community, constantly developing new things, you’re pretty much in the hands of how the market is behaving, how market psychology works so it's tough but once you have success in a collection that's more than enough to keep you going because if you know you were successful in this than you know what else to do in the future. And it's also pretty fun. I run the community so getting to interact with a lot of people in Discord is super fun. I know a lot of the people that are in the day score and there's some that are pretty much there 24/7 so talking to them, getting their feedback about the project, listening to suggestions is also super helpful because even though we are a big team it's super useful to hear the the ideas of the people that are actually using our product and are invested on it because first of all, they give us a lot of different ideas of what to do in the future. We've taken a lot of their suggestions and we actually implemented them for the whole ecosystem and you also see when when people react positively towards a new update that you did to the market place or towards a new Ape design that you're released in the OAV store. All of this is super rewarding and fun, it's super fun to see the reactions of people when you release a new snique peek or something like that. Working in crypto you have all the freedom and flexibility you want.
+
[00:40:37] Citizen Cosmos: To be honest with you I don't get many guests who are so business driven and I love that because it's a motivation in itself to succeed. I think success is a very good motivation. Thanks for the conversation, it’s been a huge pleasure!
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here)
Corporations, large Internet sites, electronic services, applications on your smartphone, and God knows who else... Everyone collects and analyzes your data: geolocation, behavioral responses, and personal correspondence.
+
There are several data types about a person, and not all of them are created by him. Here is a far from a complete list of data that are of great interest and are in high demand:
+
+
+
Automatically generated location data
+This is information about the location of a cell phone or device from which you go online or keep it in your pocket.
+
+
+
Service Data
+This is information that a site or service needs to provide you with a service—typically your first name, last name, phone number, shipping address, and credit card information.
+
+
+
Voluntary public-controlled data
+This is the type of information you leave on the Web voluntarily, consciously, and proactively and want to be available to the public. At the same time, as a data producer, you have complete control over their availability.
+
+
+
Voluntary public but uncontrolled data
+There are specific platforms where your comments on other people's posts are out of your control, and you can't delete or edit them.
+
+
+
Biometric data
+The market for wearable devices is growing (fitness bracelets that measure heart rate, fingerprint and voice control sensors, etc.). This is because our body has several activity indicators and unique identifiers.
+
+
+
Attributed data
+There is information about you on the Internet that others possess, and you may not even know about it. For example, if your friend wrote a post about you and did not tell you, there is a piece of information about you that you have nothing to do with.
+
+
+
Behavioral Data
+The information about your activity on the website is collected, analyzed, and converted into a portrait of your preferences and hobbies.
+
+
+
Medical Data
+Medical level readings of heart rate monitors, blood glucose meters, body thermometers, smart inhalers for asthmatics that analyze the composition of residual air in the lungs, data on visits to doctors, medical history, test results, prescribed medications, whether you have allergies, phobias, and mental deviations - all this information in most developed countries has long been computerized and stored exclusively in digital form.
+
+
+
Collateral data
+The essence of this data perfectly captures the ancient folk wisdom, "Tell me who your friend is, and I will tell you who you are." For example, if you have 70% of your followers on Facebook that is gay, then it's highly likely that you are too. If 80% of your searches are related to musical instruments, studios and music, you are probably a musician. The conclusions that can be drawn from complex data are astounding. For example, Facebook can predict with a high degree of certainty which candidate a user in their country will vote for. And your cellular operator, if desired, can find out if you are cheating on your wife/husband because it knows who, when, and where you are calling and with which contact persons you intersect in space (if they use the services of the same operator).
+
+
+
Secretly collected data
+We will not dwell too much on the data collected by the special services and their methods. Edward Snowden told everyone about this in detail. However, remember that intelligence agencies and highly skilled hackers always have the theoretical ability to remotely connect to your computer and turn on your camera or microphone without your knowledge, record everything you type, or secretly take a screenshot of a working window.
+
+
+
Heroes of viral memes
+
In addition, there is a tremendous amount of information about you posted by other users on the network: photos from parties, funny short videos, screenshots of private correspondence, and much more. The scandalous pictures and videos of famous people pop up here and there like mushrooms after the rain is above mentioning.
+
We are talking about people who find themselves in a funny or ridiculous situation and burn with shame. There are quite a few cases of bullying individuals for this or information that got into the network. Some of them were in danger and forced to change residence. The story of Edgar Maddison Welch of Salisbury, who burst into a pizzeria armed with an automatic rifle after reading materials related to Pizzagate, is indicative.
+
They say that "the Internet remembers everything." Since then, laws have been passed that sometimes allow information to be removed from the public domain. Yet another aspect arises.
+
The right to be forgotten vs. freedom of speech
+
The right to be forgotten is closely linked to the right to freedom of speech, press, and information. At the same time, several experts believe that the right to be forgotten is a severe legal regression since it accompanies the emergence of problems of censorship and manipulation of information, infringing on freedom of speech and the right to free access to information - fundamental human rights enshrined at the national (including at the level constitutions) and the international legal level (art. 19 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights)
+
On the other hand, the right to be forgotten accompanies the right to inviolability of private and personal life since the result is the removal of information for socially valuable purposes from the general information field, to which an indefinite circle of persons has access, based on the principle of treating information as a thing, owned by a person on the right of ownership with all the ensuing consequences. Thus, the right to be forgotten becomes a bridge between freedom of information and privacy. In contrast, the right to disseminate/publicize information becomes the antipode of the right to be forgotten.
+
How is the right to be forgotten implemented today?
+
At the moment, a person who wants to remove information about himself from public access can legally apply to the Internet site with a request to remove materials related to him. You can go to court if the Internet resource refuses to comply with this requirement. In reality, however, it’s not as simple as most sites, and court rulings ignore these requirements.
+
However, Google has a dedicated support section detailing the possibilities for exercising the right to be forgotten due to the high volume of hits.
+https://support.google.com/legal/answer/10769224?hl=en
+
Our favorite blockchain
+
Now let's move on to the critical question. Blockchain. If "the Internet remembers everything," but there are specific levers for removing information from the public domain, what about the blockchain?
+
Everything can be written into the blockchain. Removing this information from the blockchain network will no longer be possible. It will stay there FOREVER! Anyone can access this information.
+
If we are talking about funny videos, we can Laugh and forget about it. But there are things more severe and tragic. So how to deal with it?
+
Summary
+
We'd like to see how the state budget moves to the blockchain: transparent transactions, controlled costs, and no closed areas. Blockchain is also instrumental in general voting. However, if an open public poll on the blockchain regarding setting wages for civil servants from the budget, it would be a combo! )))
+
But what to do with personal information that you would like to get rid of? We are all human, and we tend to make mistakes. Sometimes these errors become the subject of public attention. Living with the constant thought that an unsightly piece of your life can forever remain a record in the blockchain is not the best idea. By the way, the guys from the Black Mirror series foresaw this dilemma. Something similar describes the event from the series "All About You."
+
What to do with the new technological opportunities that come into our lives? How do we adapt to the new social conditions these technologies give rise to?
+
The question is earnest. I invite you to a public discussion. Please write in the comments what you think about it!
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:
The 66th episode of Citizen Cosmos was dedicated to the CUDOS project - the decentralized cloud computing network. Among the topics discussed with Matt Hawkins, the CEO of CUDOS, were crypto, mining, diversity of cloud computing projects, gaming, education, and many more. However, above all these topics stands the primary goal of CUDOS is sustainability and eco-friendliness. Therefore, we will discuss the data centers, their harmful impact on the ecology, and the ways of dealing with them.
+
Data centers, facilities that centralize an organization's shared IT operations and equipment to store, process, and disseminate data and applications, consume 3-7% of the world's electricity. In addition, data centers require 24/7 to keep their equipment running. As a result, the operation of the data center provokes greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. CO2 emissions are also results of data centers usage of computing power making it one of the most disturbing factors. Moreover, this does not even consider the impact of construction of the data center, which is also the sourse of various harmful emissions. To learn more about the carbon footprint the data centers and cloud computing leave, we recommend reading Hessam Lavi's article from Climatiq.
+
PUE
+
As the problem of data centers’ harmful emissions is becoming more and more disturbing, many big and smaller companies are considering the PUE. PUE or Power Utilization Efficiency is a metric for evaluating the energy efficiency of a data center. PUE reflects the electrical energy consumed by the data center to the point consumed directly by the data center equipment. For example, if the data center receives 10 MW of power from the network and all equipment keeps at 5 MW, the PUE indicator will be 2. If the reading gap decreases, the coefficient will be 1, which is perfect. The PUE is globally used to understand which regions are affected mainly by the data centers' emissions. However, although the indicator may help some areas to start working on problem-solving, it might sometimes be unjust. For example, some data centers simply have worse climatic conditions than others. So, to cool a conditional data center in South Africa, you need much more electricity than a data center in Iceland. The most energy inefficient data centers are in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and parts of the Asia-Pacific region. Europe and the area uniting the USA and Canada are among the leaders in terms of PUE. So how can the PUE be lowered, especially for the regions with a hot climate?
+
Free cooling
+
One of the ways to lower the PUE is free cooling. A significant percentage of energy consumed by data centers goes to operating artificial cooling systems. The implementation of free cooling is one of the ways to reduce the cost of this energy. The outside air is filtered, heated, cooled, and supplied into the server room. Exhaust hot air is thrown out or partially mixed with the incoming flow. The more outdoor air temperature is suitable for the data center hall, the less energy is needed to bring it to the desired condition.
+
Proper use of the capacity available in the data center can also contribute to energy efficiency. For example, the purchased servers should either work for the clients' tasks or consume minimal energy during downtime. One way to control the situation is to use infrastructure management software. For example, a data center infrastructure management system. This software automatically redistributes the server load, disables idle devices, and recommends the cooling fans' rotation speed. In addition, timely updating of equipment is an integral part of improving the data center's energy efficiency. For example, an outdated server is often inferior in performance and resource intensity to a new generation server. Therefore, to reduce PUE, it is recommended to update the equipment as often as possible.
+
Finally, the optimal way to lower PUE is to use virtual servers. They consume 80% less energy. It happens because putting more virtual servers on fewer physical machines incurs hardware maintenance, cooling, and power costs. In addition, virtualization allows reallocating virtual resources from processors to storage. Therefore, electricity is only used to ensure operation, and alternative energy sources improve energy efficiency.
+
Particular actions
+
Talking about CUDOS and their dedication to sustainability and reduction of carbon footprint, it is important to talk about their particular actions. Cudos offers scalable computing solutions that address two apparent possibilities. Firstly, the Cudos network is an l1 blockchain in the Cosmos ecosystem. It uses a consensus system with delegated share confirmation (DPoS). At its core, PoS is also more careful about the environment. Therefore, it does not require energy for crypto mining, like the Proof of Work protocol. By communicating with other networks and providing data and computing oracles, the Cudos network can also effectively act as an l2 solution for other blockchains and solve scalability and throughput problems. Secondly, Cudo Ventures is working on creating a platform for automating the process of managing and trading unused computing power. Finally, it improves existing cloud service offerings regarding supply and demand for computing power. Thus, the Cudo solution will provide sustainability, economic rewards, and improved and personalized services. Ultimately, Cudo aims to connect them by giving them the first ever new Level 3. Furthermore, it will allow blockchain networks to seamlessly perform any computing work, integrating cloud and blockchain solutions into one.
+
Today, data centers are one of the most worrying sources of ecological problems. However, more and more companies are striving to make the data-keeping process as eco-friendly as possible regarding the PUE index. As we see even smaller companies like CUDOS getting involved in sustainability awareness, we can be sure that sooner or later, most data centers will be energy efficient.
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:
Episode name:
+The Power of Community: Exploring possibilities, Building Communities & Introspection with Sistla Abhishek.
+
In this episode, Sistla V Abhishek, the founder of OmniFlix is interviewed. He discusses the culture around education in India and how this contributed to his success and India's dominance in the area of computer science . He gives his perspective on the importance of community building and content creation in web3. Sistla gives his vision for the future of Omniflix and what they are trying to build.
+
+
Citizen Cosmos:
+Hi everyone, welcome to a new episode of the Citizen Cosmos Podcast. And today I have an OG content creator with me, Sistla, the man, the one and only man from Omniflix. Sistla Mann, hi, welcome to the show. How are you?
+
Sistla:
+I'm doing great. Glad to be here on the Citizen Cosmos Podcast. Been hearing it, been following it, know all the builders that are coming down week after week and glad to see you continue even after all these years. So I'm pretty excited to be here
The transition from centralization to decentralization
+
Until recently, our world was primarily centralized. The priority form of government was, in most cases, a pyramidal structure. Decisions and orders descend from top to bottom. From bosses to subordinates, from corporate managers to branch directors, from the central bank to banks, from the president to ministers, and on to the people. And although it is believed that democracy prevails in society, and all decisions are made based on a social contract, we all see perfectly well that critical decisions are made in a single center of concentration of power.
+
However, blockchain has changed everything...
+
Everything changed with the invention of blockchain technology (although some conspiracy theorists believe that this technology was given to us from above =)). Blockchain gradually entered our lives and changed our paradigm of thinking from centralized representations to decentralized ones. Blockchain has shown that it is possible to negotiate, make decisions and monitor their implementation without involving a single center of power. In the blockchain, all processes and management are open and belong directly to the community without intermediaries. Therefore, it is quite attractive, which is why the number of decentralized services proliferates.
+
Decentralization in the wild
+
A decentralized service is a distributed organism where each user is a part of one whole. As an example consider the forest as an example of a decentralized system of blockchains and interchains.
+
The tree blockchain interacts with the grass blockchain and the squirrel blockchain. Many decentralized ecosystems in the forest are interconnected by bridges and send transactions to each other. The kingdom of mushrooms alone is worth something.
+
The forest does not have a single control center. Instead, each part of it acts in its interests. Yet, all its elements are combined into a giant ecosystem and are naturally synchronized with each other.
+
The idea
+
In the same way, a group of people united by a common idea or having the same values can join a community where there will be no chairperson, deputy, secretary, etc. The meaning in these positions disappears, and corruption opportunities are associated with them. Such communities can interact with other groups and communities as well as individuals. And the rules of these interactions and communications are equal. A smart contract monitors the fulfillment of the conditions of exchange and transactions. Regulators, notaries, and brokers are no longer needed. They are extra in this chain of interaction.
+
The idea of decentralization is increasingly capturing the minds of people. The absence of a central governing body is so attractive that the number of new blockchains has recently been overgrowing. And the number of services built on these blockchains is growing even faster. Already today, we see such services as decentralized exchanges, decentralized finance and loans, decentralized data storage services, decentralized video hosting (https://bastyon.org), instant messengers (https://usedust.com), and even social networks (http://twister.net.co). And in the future, entire states based on the blockchain may appear.
+
Which decentralized services are you lacking?
+
+
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The hype around NFT is already subsiding, and sales of NFT images have come to naught. But is the technology of non-fungible tokens as useless as they say lately?
+
The most familiar tokens to us are subway cards. We buy a subway token to ride the subway. If earlier only states and large corporations could issue their tokens, now everyone can issue them within 15 minutes.
+
There are a lot of different tokens. Management tokens, tokens for purchasing services and goods, music, works of art, and tokens for buying services and goods. In China, reputation is tokenized in the form of a social rating). Soon, all citizens will be tokenized with the introduction of state digital money (CBDC).
+
All tokens can be divided into fungible and non-fungible, better known as NFTs.
+
Fungible tokens are issued for identical goods or services that do not differ from each other. For example, there is a certain amount of tokens for taking the subway, and it makes no difference which token you use for this trip.
+
Another thing is non-fungible NFT tokens. They are usually released for something unique. It is generally viewed that NFTs are pixelated pictures people buy for crazy money. In fact, they are not. For example, we have a cottage village of 10 buildings. All houses were built using the same materials and a standard layout. But one home is located at the entrance to the town, and the other on the outskirts. One house faces the forest, and the other one the lake. In this case, for each house, it will be necessary to issue a separate non-fungible NFT token.
+
The most exciting thing is that you can measure a person's reputation with the help of the NFT token. The reputation tokenization is inextricably linked with personality tokenization.
+
How does it work?
+
For example, Rachel decided to become a programmer. For now she is not a programmer yet and needs funds for subsistence and training. Rachel can issue 10,000 tokens for her programs. At the presale, Rachel can sell her tokens for $10-$20. But after some time, when Rachel becomes a high-class programmer, her services will increase in price and be estimated at $100-200, depending on how well she masters programming languages.
+
If Rachel fulfills the obligations on the tokens, her reputation will grow. And in case of failure to fulfill the obligations, it will accumulate a vast negative reputation. This will make it clear to others whether to have business with Rachel or not.
+
NFTs are tightly integrated into our lives, and most likely, the world around us will soon be tokenized. Driver's licenses, real estate rights, art, and even pets.
+
Which tokens would you buy at the presale?
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:
What is a smart contract? Let's first see how a regular contract works. Two parties, A and B, want to conclude a contract. They need the services of a third party they can trust to keep up with the contract. Smart contracts eliminate dependency and enable the automatic execution of contracts. A smart contract is nothing more than a programmable behavior of the chain or even simpler, its a programmable behavior.
+
If we compare ordinary and smart contracts, smart contracts have apparent advantages.
+
Regular contracts require:
+
• A third party you can trust.
+Usually, lawyers, notaries, and the government enforces the contract.
+
• Time.
+Manually executing a contract can take a lot of time.
+
• Money transaction
+In conventional contracts, the transfer of funds is carried out manually, which adds more time to the final execution of the contract.
+
• Transparency
+Ordinary contracts cannot provide 100% transparency, because their clarity largely depends on the contract's third parties, intermediaries, and institutions involved.
+
• Storage
+The storage of contracts is usually a large and complex problem since most transactions are recorded on paper, and all records are stored in physical form.
+
• Expenses
+Traditional contracts require more expenses to pay for the services of intermediaries.
+
When using a smart contract:
+
• There is no third party to trust.
+A smart contract is executed automatically and does not require the involvement of intermediaries.
+
• Time
+A smart contract is executed quickly, in minutes, when the specified conditions occur.
+
• Money transaction
+In smart contracts, all conditions are predetermined and set in advance. As soon as the condition is met, the transfer of funds is carried out automatically.
+
• Transparency
+100% transparency around the clock. Any party can view the terms and transactions of the smart contract.
+
• Storage
+Smart contracts do not require paper storage and allow you to instantly track the entire history of the fulfillment of the terms of the contract and transactions.
+
• Expenses
+Smart contracts offer low commissions because they do not require intermediaries to execute them. Only the commission of the leading blockchain network in which the smart contract is implemented is charged.
+
What is a smart contract?
+
Let's take an example from real life. You want to buy chocolate from a vending machine. You put a bill into the machine, press the button with the number of the chocolate you want to buy, and the machine gives you that particular chocolate. A smart contract is very similar to a vending machine. It eliminates the need for intermediaries and replaces the vendor.
+A smart contract is a self-executing contract that contains all the terms and conditions between the parties and participants of the agreement. The terms and conditions of the agreement are written in code that runs on a decentralized blockchain platform. Such agreements govern digital assets, shares, property, currencies, etc.
+
Let's take another example.
+
Rachel arrived at the airport, but her flight was delayed. However, this inconvenience can benefit Rachel, as according to the smart contract with the insurance company, she will instantly receive compensation for the delayed flight. Imagine that there is already a smart running contract with an insurance company. This contract tracks delayed flights, and as soon as the delay is more than 2 hours, all insured persons, including our Rachel, automatically receive compensation in their account.
+Let's see how it works.
+An insurance company issues its clients a smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain. This smart contract is connected to airport databases and keeps track of flight delays. If any flight is delayed by more than X hours, automatic compensation occurs, and Rachel gets the money into her account.
+
What are the bottom-line benefits of smart contracts?
+
• No intermediaries
+The advantages of smart contracts include the absence of the need for intermediaries and a third party.
+
• Automation
+The smart contract is executed automatically. All terms of the contract are written in the code. So you don't need to do anything manually.
+
• High speed
+The absence of intermediaries and the high speed of calculations make it possible to execute a smart contract quickly.
+
• Safety
+The contract data is stored in a decentralized system and cannot be changed.
+
• Accuracy
+Depending on the terms and conditions of the contract, the requirements for its implementation are prescribed with high accuracy. All transactions are recorded in the blockchain ledger and become immutable. No one can edit or make changes to these entries.
+
In what areas do you think using smart contracts will be helpful?
+
+
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One of the most significant values of blockchain technology is network security and transactions. In POW (Proof-Of-Work) networks, the blockchain is protected by miners, which provide high computational speed. Therefore, the higher the hash rate, the more difficult it is to carry out an attack and the more secure the network.
+A similar principle is used in POS (Proof-Of-Stake) blockchains. Only validators provide security by checking new blocks. The more validators have contributed to the network, the more blocks they can study and the more rewards they can receive, thus making the network safer.
+But what about new projects that have a small number of validators and staked coins? The security of such blockchain networks may be at risk. Using relatively small resources, attackers can hack the network, steal all they can, and make it vulnerable.
+Cosmos network is planning to implement Interchain Security technology in January 2023, designed to resolve such issues. It will allow large networks to share their security with start-up projects. In addition, more extensive networks will be able to share security by providing cryptocurrency capital to validate blocks on a smaller chain. On the Cosmos network, this general security is known as Interchain Security.
+
How will Interchain Security Work?
+
Other terms are sometimes used when describing Interchain Security, such as Shared Security, Cross Chain Validation, Shared Staking, and Interchain Staking. The blockchain provider may be responsible for creating the blockchain of the consumer network. Validators must run two nodes on the primary grid, thread the consumer network, and receive commissions and rewards.
+If a validator does a poor job of creating blocks on any chain, he risks destroying its tokens through a mechanism called "slashing." The consumer network uses IBC to communicate with the supply chain to track which validators participate in Interchain Security using Cross Chain validation. Thus, the security gained from the value of the share locked in the provider chain is shared with the consumer chain.
+Interchain Security technology will allow large ecosystem projects like Cosmos to share their security with start-up projects, making the creation of new decentralized projects and services more accessible to creators and developers, lowering the entry threshold, and making them safe for the end user.
+
The Importance of ICS
+
Although the Cosmos ecosystem has been around for quite some time,the launch of Interchain Security may become its most significant update. Interchain Security's value to Cosmos is much broader than just improving network security. For example, it unites various user groups and reduces their conflict of interest. Interchain Security will make possible the practical minimalism and the strategic philosophy leading to the Cosmos Hub without compromising the platform's effectiveness. It will eliminate security vulnerabilities and reduce the likelihood of a conflict of interest between user groups, which can lead to a hard fork. Since Cosmos Hub constantly adds new features, many users are concerned that the network's security will be compromised. Interchain Security will be able to satisfy these "hub minimalists" by allowing each of these functions to become a separate chain. These individual chains could then be programmed to have their management tokens and fees, which would encourage the participation of validators. The more networks join the Cosmos ecosystem, the more expensive it becomes for hackers to manipulate the web. Since the cost of its attack often measures the security of a network, the more value is invested in Cosmos, the more secure it becomes.
+
When will ICS be available?
+
In the Cosmos roadmap, the official launch of ICS is scheduled for January 2023. This means that many new projects will be added to the Cosmos ecosystem shortly, which will positively affect the cost of ATOM. So don't miss the opportunity to buy ATOM now and stake it with us.
+We are looking forward to taking off!
+
+
+
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On July 18th, the ecosystem dwellers witnessed the start of the Evmos Momentum Hackathon that will last till August 31st. It is the first Evmos event with this number of participants, prize budget, and partners. Web3Scholarship is leading the hackathon to build the Evmos Ecosystem. We at Citizen Cosmos, being Evmos validators, naturally follow each step of the hackathon and decided to share helpful information with you!
+
The purpose of the Hackathon is to seed and support the development of the Evmos ecosystem. The total prize pool is $500,000, split between the grand prize, track prizes, and EVM migration awards. Additional funding opportunities are available from Huobi Incubators and partners.
+
The Hackathon includes five prize categories:
+
Infrastructure. The prize subject for this category can be anything that contributes to developing tools and frameworks for cross-compatibility chains and provides a base and supports for applications to evolve. The winner will have to show the world which way the ecosystem should go!
+
DeFi. In this category, the participant should try and answer: What if a smart contract can eliminate loopholes and attacks by removing security vulnerabilities from its design? What has been introduced to the financial world that can leverage the Evmos blockchain? How can we put tokens and NFTs into the world of open, transparent, and decentralized transaction platforms? The desired winning project is a financial vehicle or service that is asynchronous and capable of expanding the reach of decentralized finance.
+
Metaverse, NFT & GameFi. The submission must incorporate a system or code framework that can lead to or support the construction of a metaverse. It can be the base of a metaverse or a story in the form of NFT, GameFi, etc. The metaverse should obtain a purpose and be expandable!
+
Web 3. This category aims for decentralized projects like DAO or SocialFi, which incorporate a form of split ownership within the community.
+
For the categories mentioned above, the prizes are as follows:
+1st Prize — $50,000 + Demo Day Opportunity + Funding Opportunity
+2nd Prize — $30,000 + Demo Day Opportunity + Funding Opportunity
+3rd Prize — $20,000 + Demo Day Opportunity + Funding Opportunity
+
EVM Migration Award. This prize category is for the projects that will take the initiative to bring solid solutions to the Evmos ecosystem. The two winning projects will gain $10,000 each.
+
There is also the Grand Champion award for the submission, which the judging panel will deem to be the strongest of all submissions. The project should solve a real problem in the Evmos ecosystem, and the solution should be able to be utilized in a short amount of time and scaled up. The award recipient will receive $80,000!
+The Momentum Hackathon also includes a series of educational workshops on building and launching projects on Evmos. Moreover, each week there is AMA for Q&A sessions.
+The team of judges for the contest is also pretty impressive! Among the jury members of the Hackathon are Praneeth Srikanti, the investment partner of Ethereal Ventures; Rain&Coffee, the research analyst from Maven11 Capital; Jim Parillo, the general partner of Figment Capital; Liam, the business development manager from Evmos, and many more!
+
We highly encourage you to follow the Evmos Momentum Hackathon because it’s a grand event for both Evmos and the entire ecosystem that will contribute to the significant and ongoing process of building the decentralized community!
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:
What's happening in the cryptocurrency market? We're in a deep bear market. Crypto is gradually decreasing. Some investors lose their patience, causing intense panic. Selling at the bottom of the market means fixing prices. Buying at the top of the market when the crypto is at its peak is by far not the most intelligent move.
+
The best strategy, in this case, is to buy more coins from fundamental projects such as Cosmos while the price is moderate. But what to do if you have already entered the crypto with all available funds? Learn more below.
+
Insider information.
+
Let's take a closer look at a couple of recent news:
+
+
According to Sam Bankman-Fried, exchanges do not have the liquidity they claim.
+
+
Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, said that some interactions are already secretly insolvent.
+
Some small crypto exchanges are “quasi-insolvent.” So it was stated in an interview with Forbes by FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, although he did not specify which deals he was talking about. However, he noted that some companies have "gone too far."
+
“There are companies that have gone too far. It's impractical to support them because of a significant breach in the corporate account, regulatory issues, and because there isn't much business left to save."
+
+
Coinbase announced plans for expansion in the crypto market. They already have offices in Germany and the UK, and soon there will be offices in the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, and France.
“During market downturns, it can be tempting to shy away from international expansion. However, we first launched in the UK and EU during the bear market in 2015, and the move paid off when the recovery began a few years later. We will continue to expand globally and make everything possible to develop cryptoeconomics."
+
This news informs us that a stock market collapse is possible soon. As a result, many scam projects will close and disappear, as well as several crypto exchanges with fake liquidity.
+
But at the same time, the big players are planning to continue their expansion, hoping to capture market share as long as conditions are favorable.
+
The decline of the crypto markets may continue. Some players and market participants will not survive this fall.
+
At the same time, after such a substantial fall, there will be a reversal and rapid growth. The major players are preparing for this growth by opening additional European offices.
+
Conclusions
+
We have already mentioned that you should not store your coins in custodial wallets. Considering everything described above, keeping cash on exchanges is not reasonable. A collapse may happen in the crypto market, and it would be better if you found a haven for your coins. After that, only real projects will remain afloat, and all the scam projects will cease to exist.
+
Strategy
+
You may ask, where is this quiet and safe harbor to save the coins? Of course, cold non-custodial wallets are the obvious way out. However, there is a simpler and more efficient way - staking!
+
Staking using non-custodial wallets is the most reasonable strategy. Your coins will remain stored in your non-custodial wallet. When staking, your funds are not dead weight.
+
As usual, the bear market turns into a bull market rather quickly. Not everyone has time to jump into a rocket taking off. At this moment, it is essential to already be on board!
+
The results are simple:
+
+
Do not sell coins at the bottom of the market. It will only bring you losses
+
Get ready for a storm that will sink the scammers and keep your coins safe
+
Securely stake coins using non-custodial staking and increase your funds
+
Prepare for a sudden high-speed take-off, and don't leave the spaceship, so the rocket doesn't take off without you
+
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:
[00:01:29] Сitizen Сosmos: Welcome everybody to a new episode of Citizen Cosmos, and today we have a very special guest, his name is Sebastien, he's the host of two podcasts:
+Epicenter.tv and Interop. It’s remarkable to me because I’m a fan, and I started Citizen Cosmos because I was listening to Epicenter. Hi! Let’s start with Epicenter.tv. When it began, it was a huge event. I still love and enjoy
+it and listen to most of the episodes, but in my opinion, it has become smaller. Do you want to comment on that?
+
[00:03:25] Sébastien Couture: Hi! It’s nice to be on here, and I'm not often on this side of the river. Considering your question, this is something that I've come to terms with, and I think a lot of us, hosts, have come to terms with it. I co-founded Epicenter with Brian Crane in late 2013, and back then, there weren't a lot of crypto podcasts. There was Let’s talk Bitcoin, which is why we started Epicenter because we were in their contest. So, there weren't a lot of podcasts back then, and certainly, there weren't a lot of podcasts that covered a wide range of cryptal projects.
+There were a lot of Bitcoin podcasts, and many of those don't exist anymore, but we've been through several cycles, and I think Epicenter grew to its peak around 2017-2018. Then, things have flattened out, and I think every cycle also
+has its new entrance to the space, including podcasters. So there's been a ton of new podcasters coming into the space that perhaps feels more native to the people who enter a specific point in the space. So you have guys like Bankless
+and Peter McCormick, who are great media people. They've built massive media empires. Epicenter is unique because there have always been many hosts, and we've tried to bring a lot of different viewpoints to the show, so none of us
+have full-time on the show anymore. It’s not our main gig anymore. Epicenter remains an institution for many people, and we will keep it that way.
+
[00:05:33] Сitizen Сosmos: Now, when you’re answering the question, I realized I got a little bit excited with you being on, and I didn't ask you to introduce yourself, and I was
+starting the conversation as everybody knows you. Maybe you can talk a little bit more about what you do?
+
[00:05:55] Sébastien Couture: My name is Sebastien, I've been in crypto for about ten years. I found this podcast called Epicenter, I’m sure you are familiar with it because of our
+proximity to Cosmos. I've done a couple of other things. In 2015 I founded a company in France, it was one of the first companies here to raise funds for building blockchain projects. Since then, I've also been on the
+policy side of things here in Europe, co-founding an organization called Adan, which advises and helps promote good sound blockchain and crypto policy in France and the broader European space. I've been working on a new Interop
+ventures project for a couple of months. It's a fund that will help back teams in the Cosmos ecosystem that are building protocols and projects that adhere to the interchange vision of interoperable modular sovereign proof of the state of
+blockchains. In that same way, I’ve started a new podcast called Interop which isn't its eighth episode now. It is more focused on the Cosmos ecosystem. I'm organizing a conference next month which we could also talk about.
+
[00:07:09] Сitizen Сosmos: Thank you for the introduction! Before we move from Epicenter, I still have another couple of questions about it. Was it on purpose that you
+have Brian, Sunny? It seems that half of the Cosmos OGs were started from Epicenter. How did it happen?
+
[00:07:37] Sébastien Couture: I think it's just a confluence of people with like-minded individuals meeting. So Brian and I met in a Skype call which was a very chance meeting, and we met
+on this skype call organized by Adam Levine, former host of Let’s Talk Bitcoin, he's now at Coindesk. So we started Epicenter together, and the space used to be
+small. You could fit all the blockchain and crypto people in Europe into a big conference room. We had been closely following this guy named Roy, who had at
+that time written a paper called “The Internet of money,” and we had done a podcast episode about this guy and later brought him on as a host. So for a
+while, it was the three of us, and then after some time, Brian worked at Tendermint for some time in Berlin and helped co-found Full Node. Then, Sunny
+was also at Tendermint, and we hung out at events. At some point, we thought, why not invite him. The same thing was with Friederike. You’ll notice that most hosts are in Europe, and that’s not an
+accident. We move around fast and thus meet often.
+
[00:09:15] Сitizen Сosmos: I have to claim that the first episode of Citizen Cosmos was recorded in Full Node with Sebastien in the studio. So, the last question about Epicenter. I
+guess, considering you just mentioned all the hosts have their projects, what is the future for an Epicenter? Are you still planning to run it, or is it a sidekick?
+
[00:10:33] Sébastien Couture: We all sort of run it together. In the last, Friederike has taken a more critical role in the operating inside of things, but we still produce episodes, and as long as we all want to do it and there's
+enough of us that want to do it, we're going to keep doing it.
+
[00:10:52] Сitizen Сosmos: That's good to hear because it provides a lot of insights, and we cross a lot of guests, which I like because I like to hand-pick the guests, but I’ve
+noticed we have a lot of expected guests. You mentioned France and that you’re on a policy side now. I read about France's policy regulations and wanted to
+discuss them. In your opinion, how is it developing in France?
+
[00:11:30] Sébastien Couture: I'm not so involved in that world anymore, but for about a year and a half, I was customer director of a non-profit called Adan that helps promote sound
+crypto policy and represents the industry towards policy makers in France, and it has taken a vital role also advising a lot of the EU policymakers in the
+drafting of Mika. So this European market and crypto assets regulation is coming. Much of the work in terms of regulation and how to adapt that Adan made
+regulation in proportionality to the risks. I was there for the beginning, and we overgrew that team to five or six people, and Adan is now an organization with about 150 members.
+
[00:12:37] Сitizen Сosmos: What's your take on regulations in crypto in general? Do you think it's something that should be regulated?
+
[00:12:46] Sébastien Couture: My view here is a little bit nuanced. I think some regulation in the space would be beneficial, but the amount of regulation and the speed at which they
+come is frustrating. Mika was passed faster than some of the other financial regulations we know in Europe. There's a feeling that European regulators want
+this to go quickly. Things like this are not conducive to creating positive narratives around this technology, so I think a certain amount of things need
+to be regulated. Still, the amount of regulation and scrutiny being put on crypto is just out of this world compared to other financial services. In
+France, for instance, the amount of KYC and AML is far beyond what is required for any bank account. It's just making things harder for a lot of people, and I
+think what the regulation misses as well is that a lot of regulation in the existing financial space is meant to create protections and systems in place to
+protect people and to create transparency around a certain number of things like where transactions go and so on. A lot of that stuff is built-in into
+crypto, so if you have self-custody, you don't need to have a custodian. Some of the regulations miss what the inherent properties of crypto provide as a
+base layer and add these unnecessary rules that make users’ lives harder and service providers and all the companies being regulated.
+
[00:14:31] Сitizen Сosmos: My biggest question here is, in a way, exactly what you said - transactions. So all of us remember the origins of crypto, and one of the main
+things you always hear is that every transaction should be routed with regulation that puts a big nail into it. We always hear that financial freedom
+is one of the most important things and that every transaction should be routed no matter the purpose. So if somebody sends a transaction from point A to B, it
+should go from point A to B and not be stopped at point C. It doesn't matter what the purpose of the transaction is, but if you put regulation, we’re getting the question of should it arrive at point B or should we first regulate the transaction?
+
[00:16:05] Sébastien Couture: TCP IP doesn't care what goes through the packets. Those considerations are held at higher levels in the stack. With crypto, I don't know if regulators are
+trying to control what transactions are going through the chain. A lot of the regulation is happening at the edges. There's a risk regarding exchanges, on-off ramps, and things like that. It becomes harder for people to move in and
+out of off-ramps, so regulation would create barriers where certain types of assets wouldn't be welcome at a centralized or regulated exchange. Things like
+traceability of funds would make it prohibitive for people to send transactions because they would have to tag each transaction with providence, including
+their information. There are also privacy concerns that the regulation brings to light. In a traditional world, if you want privacy for whatever reason, you
+always have cash, and you can always go back to that means of payment. But as we've moved to more digital forms of payment, what ends up happening is that all of the means of transacting are now, by definition, not private. Crypto allows you a form of payment that is anonymous. It’s this globally coordinated
+attempt by the financial sector to have KYC on every transaction.
+
[00:18:03] Сitizen Сosmos: I agree. By the way, I'm sorry to go into a different topic here, but how did you end up in France? I don't know if you were born in France. Can you tell
+your story?
+
[00:18:15] Sébastien Couture: No, I wasn't. I was born in Canada, I grew up in the province of New Brunswick, it’s on the East Coast. When I was 21, I decided to study abroad for six
+months, then came to France, and 16 years later, I'm still here.
+
[00:18:33] Сitizen Сosmos: Where did crypto happen in these 16 years?
+
[00:18:37] Sébastien Couture: I worked as a web development project manager after my studies in the North of France, doing responsive email design and stuff like that. I was always a bit
+technical, although I didn't study computer science. I’ve been coding for as long as I can remember, so I did HTML, CSS, and some PHP web development. Then,
+I stumbled upon bitcoin and started looking into that. Here's one thing I will say about crypto origin stories. I've interviewed enough people and have asked
+this question so many times, and the one thing you rarely hear is, “I got it in the crypto because I wanted to make money.” Most people will tell you they got
+in the crypto because it resonated with them, etc. On the contrary, I thought I wanted to make some money, and then later, all these philosophical and ideological things that people were talking about started to resonate with
+me.
+
[00:19:50] Сitizen Сosmos: By the way, talking about making money. You mentioned that you have a company that does some funding for Cosmos. So let's talk about that.
+
[00:20:32] Sébastien Couture: Yeah. I think a lot of folks that have entered the space in the last couple of years. We’re investing in some projects in France because of my proximity to the ecosystem
+here. There's a vast Etherium community here in France and many high-quality engineers and people working on exciting projects. I invested in a few of
+those, and I made a few investments also in Cosmos space. At the moment, I am in the process of raising a fund that will invest in pre-seed and seed rounds
+in the Cosmos and entertain ecosystem, and that fund is called Interop ventures so at the moment I haven't talked about this publicly because I think people
+know about it. I’m getting a structure, talking to investors speaking with teams, and aligning up all the decks here to start making my first investments
+in a couple of months. It's my first time creating a fund. Maybe it’s a little late to enter the game, but I feel it's a good time for the Cosmos ecosystem.
+My goal is to back teams building excellent protocols, products, and primitives as provided. The value that I bring is the network that I have and my media
+expertise. Then we will also have several advisors who can provide expertise on other things like tokenomics, operations, and some technical things.
+
[00:22:23] Сitizen Сosmos: For anyone listening out there, what's your focus at the beginning going to be? What type of project specifically?
+
[00:22:28] Sébastien Couture: The focus is quite broad within interchain. I know interchain is also becoming a bit nebulous because as the interchain starts to connect with another system
+through bridging or through interoperability protocols, that kind of grows. Still, I think my focus stems from the interchain vision. The focus right from
+the get-go you will be investing in protocols and some d5 primitives that are coming up in the space right now. Our main driver is that this project embraces
+the interchain vision of sovereign interoperable modular proof of state blockchains. The team aligns with that philosophy over the long term and how much value they can bring to the ecosystem.
+
[00:23:14] Сitizen Сosmos: So if dock one comes around in a year and says, “I have an idea for a project idea for luna 3.0.” Yes or no?
+
[00:23:25] Sébastien Couture: My opinion is not yet formed but let's just put it that way.
+
[00:23:33] Сitizen Сosmos: That was a joke, of course. What's the worst investment that you can think about? Considering you’ve been in crypto for a long time.
+
[00:23:46] Sébastien Couture: Here's the thing. For a long time, I wasn't actively investing in crypto. I held a handful of layer1 tokens for a long time and wasn't investing too much.
+During the ICO craze, I did Adan and Tazos. I didn't do all the ICO and fell into this craze. And also, maybe to my demise, I was focused on building a company. At the time, I was building a company called Stratum. We had
+investors, and I was also running a media company. I felt that I needed to hold a certain amount of integrity to continue doing the podcast and do it well.
+That meant not being all-in on all the projects we had on the show. I should have a spreadsheet with all the episodes we've had on all the l1s we had tokens. I think I've taken a step back and have a little more maturity about
+all that and realize that it's possible to invest but also have intelligent conversations, and that’s where I’m focusing my time now.
+
[00:25:11] Сitizen Сosmos: It's funny what you said. We did one of the project managers I had worked on before the war in Eastern Europe started. He did that a couple of times, took
+all the projects he mentioned, deposited about $1000, and even though there was a market fall in the summer, he had like x50, x60, or something. So it’s nice
+to hear that the focus is not on that rather intelligent conversations because one of the scariest things crypto has created is terrible journalism I’m happy
+to hear there are more people out there who are focused on creating good media intellectual based good media rather than go and sell this token and that’s really bad home journalism and I'm happy to hear that there are more people out there who are focused on creating good media rather than go buy and sell this token and that's I think what Epicenter has done at the beginning, and I'm sure that's what draws a lot of other people. As I said, I don't have a financial background, so investing for me came sometime. This passion I've cultivated on a personal level is now meeting this business I'm starting, Interop Ventures. So hopefully, if L1s will give me money, we’ll enter a new level.
+
[00:26:44] Сitizen Сosmos: Let’s talk a bit about Interop.
+
[00:28:02] Sébastien Couture: The Interop podcast started a couple of months ago, and it's all about understanding the decentralized economic networks that make up the inner chain.
+My goal here is to have deep and technical conversations with folks in the interchange ecosystem. We've interviewed a couple of folks by now. The website
+is https://theinterop.show/. You can also find it on YouTube and SoundCloud. We also have live streams on YouTube. Usually, I upload the video first and later post it as
+a podcast, which is the opposite of Epicenter. We did an episode last week with Ishmael Kofi of Celestia. We've done Christopher Goes. We had Joe Bowman, Jack
+Sampling, and other representatives of creme de la creme of the Cosmos ecosystem. Hopefully, we'll keep doing these at a rate of twice a month or something.
+
[00:29:30] Сitizen Сosmos: I'm sorry if I'm wrong here but is Interop also a validator?
+
[00:29:35] Sébastien Couture: It’s not a validator, but there's probably going to be a validator, so this is something I've been struggling with, and if there's anybody out there who wants
+to help me set up some validators, I'd love to get some help.
+
[00:30:00] Сitizen Сosmos: I would take credit for this, but I will a little bit. Many people who came on the podcast, including, for example, Cryptocito, and many others, did go
+through here. And I was always telling them to start their validators because they’re ecosystem developers and building the whole community. So I would love
+to see if in a month's time you also start some validators. I wouldn’t say we were the first to do that, but the way that Citizen Cosmos has built is
+ecosystem development. If there are networks that we can support, we give them the instruments. And then say we also run validators, we don’t want to work with contracts, and that’s our model.
+
[00:30:52] Sébastien Couture: That’s cool. I talked to a lawyer who also had a similar model, so instead of bolling you for counsel, he would ask you to delegate to his validator, which I
+thought was cool. By the way, do you run it yourself, or do you have people who help you run the validation?
+
[00:31:13] Сitizen Сosmos: I have a guy who helps me on the technical side of the course. I’m like you technical, but I can start up a validator. I would prefer somebody who's
+professional would help me. There is a couple of more people who helped me with project management. I hope to grow.
+
[00:31:48] Sébastien Couture: I think I'm sort of similar to you. I can spin up a validator like I've done it before, and that's not the issue it's more like running it in production is
+another thing.
+
[00:32:50] Сitizen Сosmos: Let's talk about the Nebular event you're doing, which is a Cosmos-based event.
+
[00:32:59] Sébastien Couture: I’m so excited about this event. So it's called Nebular summit, and the website is https://nebular.paris/. This is a conference that is about celebrating the Cosmos
+ecosystem. So we're going to be having talks and panels and even technical workshops, so there could be a ton of developers and researchers and entrepreneurs there. They'll be discussing all the challenges facing the
+interchain and also thinking about the future and where the ecosystem is going. Before we started this, I was getting ready to push the schedule online, so I’m
+sure the plan will be online by the time you release this. Anyway, the list of speakers is there, so we've got about 40 speakers. I'm not going to list them all, but,
+for example, Sunny Agarwal and Julian Butler and many others. Tickets are $35. The venue is an old fire station. It is a beautiful building with a massive
+courtyard, and there's a rooftop terrace like this fashion incubator, but they've got some rooms for events, so the venue is super cool. So if you’re in
+Paris or in Europe, get yourself a ticket and join us!
+
[00:34:33] Сitizen Сosmos: While you were saying that, I just thought I would love to see the first conference that starts to accept the ticket in the old USD. That would be fantastic.
+
[00:34:50] Sébastien Couture: Yeah, that would be great, but we only accept euros for now.
+
[00:36:07] Сitizen Сosmos: Are you going to Cosmoverse this year? What’s your plan? Are you going as Sebastien or as Interop?
+
[00:36:12] Sébastien Couture: Yeah, I think so. I always go as Sebastien. I’m unsure if I will go for Cosmoverse plus Devcon because that means staying in Colombia for three weeks.
+Are you going to BuildAsia?
+
[00:36:41] Сitizen Сosmos: I can’t because I’m stuck in Madeira for bureaucratic stuff for now.
+
[00:37:28] Sébastien Couture: I’ll also have to skip.
+
[00:37:28] Сitizen Сosmos: It will be lovely. There are so many big conferences now; I think that’s great because most of them were terrible several years ago. Another question,
+Sebastien. You’ve been in crypto for 10 years and recorded so many episodes. What keeps you motivated? What would you suggest to our listeners? It could be reading or meditating, dog walking, whatever.
+
[00:38:41] Sébastien Couture: When you've been through so many ups and downs in the space, that's it's a good sign I think that the space is super resilient, and the people who are
+dedicated to building meaningful value of this technology are like in it for the right reasons, and I was talking about this with someone this morning. The correction we've seen recently has brought a lot of sanity to the space. It's
+brought valuations for everything down to sane levels. A lot of people left in 2017-2018, people who are passionate about building meaningful products and creating value. To me, what's been motivating all this time was creating
+amazing content with Epicenter and the other podcast I'm doing. The next chapter for me is creating value by helping teams with capital, marketing support, operational support, and security, hopefully by having a validator. I
+think it’s also helpful to take some time off and disconnect for several weeks. That's what I did a couple of weeks ago when I was in Bali, and it felt great, and I feel recharged.
+
[00:40:12] Сitizen Сosmos: That’s a good answer. I'm planning something like this next month. Is there anything else you would like to mention that I haven't asked you?
+
[00:40:29] Sébastien Couture: Anybody interested in building some cool stuff, please reach out, whether that's you having a chat on the podcast or having an investment from Interop,
+or setting up a validator. I’m looking for cool and interesting people to collaborate with. And please don’t forget about the Nebular conference and come check it out!
+
[00:41:25] Сitizen Сosmos: Sebastien, thank you very much for coming. It’s been a great pleasure!
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here)
Episode name: Jacob Gadikian, sand, relaying & the interchain
+
+
+
Transcript of the Episode:
+
[00:01:41] Citizen Cosmos: Hey, everyone, welcome to a new episode of the Citizen Cosmos podcast! We have Jacob Gadikian, founder of Notional, a disciplined software development validator.
+
[00:02:07] Jacob Gadikian: Hi! It’s good to be here. So Notional was a uniswap airdrop and a computer. Our team now is 20 people. It's pretty incredible, actually.
+
[00:02:13] Citizen Cosmos: 20? Wow! I have to be honest before the listeners, I prepared zero questions for Jacob because he’s a great guy, and I thought the conversation is going to be free flow so this is why the conversation might seem a little bit lost it's not. We are on track. Please carry on with the introduction Jacob.
+
[00:02:53] Jacob Gadikian: So basically, in February of 2021, several things happened. One, I left Tendermint and began to research dexes for a very real-world physical commodities trading product, and since that's still in play, I'm gonna go into detail on that; that’s something I'm still consulting on. Initially, I looked at applying the tools and techniques in the GravityDex. Somebody along the way said: “Jacob you really need to talk to Sunny, he's building something, and he had invited me to a conference in 2019, but my son had just been born, so I wasn’t able to attend. It was the last time I had spoken to him except for once at Tendermint. I sent him a Twitter DM, and he told me we need to talk. So he and I had about an hour-and-a-half-long call where he introduced Osmosis to me, and honestly, my comprehension was very low. I never got into Ethereum DeFi except, of course, enough to deploy something very amateurish onto Ethereum, which was enough to get me a very significant uniswap airdrop. I had spoken to Sunny, and then one day, I saw that Osmosis was about to launch, and I threw in a Genesis transaction. Our uptime was initially terrible, I was validating from my family's old apartment, and we were getting 80% uptime. Initially, I created just some new documentation around seeds and peers and work down our network a bit and got that up, and made it very stable. That was when I first built an open MPTCP router and linked that up to another IASP in Vietnam. After that, I explored relaying. I had my Osmosis validator, and we started to get requests to back up on relaying. So I did the majority of relaying that summer and this actually got me down. It's now a 14-month-long rabbit hole in Cosmos performance, so my computer has a ridiculously fast hard drive; it's an Intel p5800x. Anyhow, U quickly learned from observing that rate actually slowed things down, and because of the stripe size on it, the chain would keep trying to write all these small files smaller than the 32 kbs but the striped size of the rate was 32 kbs. I was relaying against our validator node, you should not do this if you want to learn how to relay. Please do not follow these directions it was not safe. I had the relayer running I had three or four validators on that computer. I noticed that when IBC packets would build up, the validators would miss blocks, and I was relaying a fairly significant portion of the whole IBC network packets. I was also trying to figure out why our packets would come in faster than Cephalopods packets, they were trying to figure that out too. Also, that was not consistent, but there was just
+this tendency, turns out that Cosmos chains would just show up disusage and it's only in the past month that we put this issue to bed. There are still a lot more performance things to fix in Cosmos, but at least on the database layer, with three Notional team members, we refactored heavily the database that the Cosmos SDK uses tore almost everything out; it’s 75% lighter, and introduced a new data bates called Pebble DB. Now, sometime around September 2021, I stopped doing things dangerously and began to formalize operations. I separated validation and relaying. Validation was strictly on-site, and relaying was strictly at Hetzer. I think this is about the time that we really began to grow. In May of 2021, I met an amazing young individual, and he built Notional’s engineering team. They are technology students, and so they began to help with the process of formalizing operations and making things safer. To do that, we had to write code. The infrastructure operations weren't enough, we could get the fastest disk in the world and not get much of a speed boost from it. We knew that we were really dependent on speed, particularly for relaying and then on faster chains. Because that thing is so fast, there's an additional operational burden there. Evmos is fairly similar, it's just a very fast blockchain, and we began to specialize in that. Then, along the way, in about January 2020, I had been working on Juno I was told that there’s a chain they're going to build with StarPort, and it could be launched on the StarPort network. That part didn't play out, but what I would do for 10 months, I'd go between Juno and the StarPort template, and I'd update the template every time that I saw that Juno had sort of fallen behind the latest versions of the Cosmos core libraries. So by the fall of 2021, we were doing more and more with Osmosis, and we were collaborating with some teams although I'm going to give credit where credit is due, even though it's as controversial, we never really got paid by Terra but a lot of the database stuff that we worked on definitely came from a long string of interactions that included Do Kwon because we had just launched Chihuahua chain, I was working on the database yet again. I thought it would be a good idea to record a video barking like a Chihuahua about the speed of the chain, and I did and shared it.
+
[00:11:47] Citizen Cosmos: Just to point out, nobody got paid by Do Kwon; everybody got misused by him. Even if you got paid by Do Kwon, you probably put it back in a way.
+
[00:12:04] Jacob Gadikian: Yeah, there was a certain recycling effect. Luckily, we weren’t directly exposed. Of course, the indirect exposure was still horrific. A lot of Cosmos went down by 80-90%, and during that week, I was watching the chain. I still suspect that the chain was attacked at the same time the chain's economy was attacked. Really weird things happened across their validator set.
+
[00:12:38] Citizen Cosmos: I must say that it’s great to hear your side of things after different conversations with guys from Cephalopods.
+
[00:13:04] Jacob Gadikian: so look, I'll take a second here to praise Cephalopod and what informal did for IBC in the beginning. IBC is very huge and complex and probably needs
+to be. The key base level of IBC is 2 tendermint chains exchanging light clients. After that, the protocol pretty much mirrors TCP/IP and it’s a good analogy for anybody who is technically looking into it. At the time, it was Hermes that worked well. Since then, Strangelove has done a very deep refactor on the go relayer. Go relayer version 2.0 was very reliable and very performant. In the summer of 2021 though, it was just Hermes and a lot of things broke. Things broke constantly. You would see channels get backed up. Nobody knew why; we just had our guesses.
+I think the thing that I was right about was the influence of hardware. One of the things that we figured out or added evidence to was that there were situations where Hermes would work well, but I don't think that we know to this day what caused some of those issues because we decoupled IBC from the SDK in version 43. Version 43 was pulled back, and then 44 was released. Osmosis ran 44 for a bit. I helped to upgrade Osmosis to 45, and I think that's when IBC 2 was released. I mean that in the original Osmosis, which kicked off the big explosion in IBC, many issues, I believe, are still undiagnosed. We had a bunch of guesses I’m sure that those guesses fed into both the IBC spec and then the IBC code, and now I would say that the big deal presently is that we’re integrating CosmWasm and IBC to a much greater degree, so that if a chain is a computer and another chain is a computer, then you have applications on each computer. Those contracts can talk to each other, and that's the stage where we are now. So how did we get to 20 people? Along the way, our focus shifted. Initially, we were mainly an operator. We learned how to run relayers and run them well, we also helped to teach people how to run relayers. We then began writing code that led to different engineering contracts throughout the ecosystem. Presently we support Osmosis, Juno, Pylon’s craft economy. We’re pushing out SDK-46 across the ecosystem and working on performance, so that's how we ended up at 20 people, and we will likely move to a new office this or next month, and that's the story.
+
[00:17:56] Citizen Cosmos: There is one thing here I would like to ask you. I would love to talk about what makes you tick and keeps you motivated in governance, in trying to make things fair for everybody, etc. What is the push forward?
+
[00:19:40] Jacob Gadikian: Frankly, some of the things I've seen around Cosmos self-development are not up to the Osmosis standard, but I hate for anybody to think I'm just baselessly protecting Osmosis. The Hub has kicked off Cosmos, and many people probably don't know this, but I was a validator, and I noticed that the Hub had a much smaller-sized environment. If we’re talking about delegations, this is getting taken care of. There was a validator doing some nasty things to Gaia and ICF, and they withdrew their delegation, which was the right thing to do. So I noticed that the allegations were off and that builders were not being supported like they were on Osmosis. Furthermore, if we go to something I've spoken about many times on Twitter, there's just one random string, no name, no contact, 20% commission, no governance participation, and frequent downtime. Everything is bad about a validator. But it still had a very effective ICF delegation, and I questioned that, unfortunately, along the way of questioning, which seems to have harmed relationships. I hope that that can be amended. I'm going to defend myself and say that those things need to be taken care of, and they were not addressed in a serious manner when I first approached them. I first approached them in a minimal semi-private context, and I was told to let the professionals handle it - they didn't.
+
[00:21:28] Citizen Cosmos: I love that sentence: let the professional handle it.
+
[00:21:39] Jacob Gadikian: Yeah. Well, that's more or less how I felt about it, and I think that in a healthier environment, things like that would not harm relationships. I found and eventually resolved only through working with the code reviewers; one of them accused me of code of conduct violations for tweeting too much during proposal 69. I don't want to name names and am not interested in further damaging relationships. I'm interested in building relationships where we can say that there was a pretty serious problem with the Hub where it would always pass. I want to give credit where it's due, so the Cosmos SDK team, and IBC team, really did an incredible job helping me get code that touched on the usability of SDK-46 because Notional invested a tremendous amount of energy and money time in building out chains on SDK-46 and one of the byproducts of that so we've put up the only chain on 46 that's Pylon’s and that will soon be going from testnet to mainnet, it's a chain that allows cards to be accepted. We have been building a craft economy on SDK-46 since the fall of last year, and more recently, there was some highly inaccurate information spread about governance. I want to have fact-driven conversations about all this stuff. I feel that politics have been taken over, and I'm not trying to hurt anyone's feelings. I genuinely care about the Cosmos Hub and Cosmos overall, and I think that because I raised these issues, Notional has been treated wrong and at a very disappointing scale. We rewrote tmdb, but there has been no recognition of that. We have created tooling to automatically find unclosed iterators in chains which turned out to be a relatively common issue that was affecting database performance all across Cosmos, and at the end of the day, if we're kind of cast aside, will just go and work out on Osmosis and Juno. In my opinion, this has just been a misuse of our time, and I do not feel that it is disrespectful to point out that during all the debates around CosmWasm. When you enable the CosmWasm chain, you double its system resource consumption. This is just that's just how it is. We love Cosmos at Notional. In terms of features and functions against CosmWasm on the Hub, my views don't match Jay's views there, and one of the things that were repeatedly tossed out during the debate was that I was some kind of a proxy for him. He's the guy who taught me all of this. I've had many teachers, and that's how you learn. In Cosmos, there is a very non-formal mentorship. It was Jay, it was Alessio. Other members of the Tendermint team, including Dennis - head of StarFort, was Jack. Jack noticed I was doing a lot of IBC traffic. He called me one day out of the blue and said: “How are you doing this? I don't think you know how it works.” Then he spent about two weeks making sure I knew how IBC worked. That's a huge deal; he invested a lot of time. After that, it was Dave from Osmosis. When I began to work on the chain, he spent tons of time making sure that I knew what the hell was going on under the hood because I came in fairly green. I’m a former history teacher and Bitcoin miner. I've learned a lot of technical stuff.
+
[00:26:30] Citizen Cosmos: This is interesting. I want to know your story, man. I'm putting you a little bit off the track, but I would love to hear how you began loving hardware and where the love was born. So what’s the story? Where did it start?
+
[00:27:21] Jacob Gadikian: It's a little longer, but I'll go right into it. I was teaching history in China. It was a private high school program where the students would eventually go to school in the United States, and it was cool, I got to do the curriculum design. But during that time, Xi Jinping became president of China, and stuff changed quite a bit. I don't know much about Chinese politics, but two notable things changed. If you work in a school in China, you have contact with the government by necessity. This school was considered a pilot program, and there were just mixed opinions. Secondly, the curriculum teaching style was affected, and the politics courses became mandatory from my perspective, I wanted to learn about all that stuff, but that's not my point of view. I found it very interesting because one thing that did happen in China was rapid human advancement at scale. That's notable and probably shouldn't be ignored. Any time you're looking at what China is today, you should be thinking about mega cities, you should think about the advancement in human development, and you should probably also be thinking about the double-edged sword. The negative part about this for me is that for a time, I got separated from my family by the great firewall. This is probably how you and I met online, by the way. So it's also how I started to use Bitcoin. China made the great firewall far more strict, and my interest in hardware and electronics, I’ve been doing that all my life. So in China, I was testing and collecting all kinds of weird, interesting Chinese electronics because it's all made there, so you can get some neat stuff there I met with several companies based in Shenzhen whose products I like. So in the middle of my first year of teaching, Xi Jinping took power. For a brief time, I could not easily contact my family; there were ways to do it, of course, but it became difficult, and we certainly couldn't have a call like we’re having now. So I learned to build VPNs because the commercial one was not reliable. I wasn't concerned with privacy either, I was more about connectivity. This is what led me to Bitcoin. I learned about MadeSafe, I participated in the ICO, and somehow it led to bit shares of Fuzzy. I came on the Fuzzy show in 2013 or 2014. By the end of my second year of teaching, I had invested in Bitcoin, rolled in all the coins, and lost a great deal of that play money, of course. Then, I decided to quit teaching, moved to Shenzhen, and made open-source hardware because these wallets and private keys are the hardware we run. The keys are always vulnerable, and there we got about a six-month crash course in why hardware isn't open source or, more accurately, why open-source software hardware is crazy hard. If you look at the arm CPU market, people license the arm design those drivers are proprietary. Intel is relatively similar they protect things at different levels in the stack until drivers are all open, but Intel’s PCB reference designs are all closed, and then certainly, the semiconductor material in both cases is closed. All of that failed, and I entered weird political stuff again; my visa ran out during the umbrella revolution, so I went from Shenzhen to Hong Kong. I was down there for a week or two, you could taste the pepper spray in the air just about everywhere, and it looked like it was going to turn violent, and in many ways, it did turn violent, of course. But I felt it could easily get more violent than it already was. Additionally, there were counter-protesters. They were doing things like juggling knives in menacing ways on street corners. Eventually, I realized this wasn't going to stop. The government offices are closed, and I can't renew my Chinese visa. If I'd stayed another week, I probably could have had it, but I eventually decided this was not going to work because I was just there to renew my visa; it was going to be a very straightforward thing, and I flew down to Saigon where I failed again and ended up in Hanoi for two and a half years, and that's how I ended up coming here again, this time I got stuck here for Covid, and then in the middle part I visited Cambodia for Steemet South East Asia meet up. It was just a small meet-up that another Steemet user made but me, and my colleagues were writing on Steemer and making great money with it, decided to go to Cambodia. If you check my Steemet post, you'll find that I found some bugs, and what it turned out to be is Steemet using the JavaScript 256k1 implementation. I changed my view, I thought it was insecure, it's non-canonical. So there's a way that you're supposed to use that library, Steemet doesn't use it that way, and they're very prescriptive about how to use that library, and that's how I found Jae Kwon. I was researching proof of stake consensus mechanisms so that I could try to make a replacement for Steemet, it was called down, and I was having mental health trouble, but I didn't know it, and that's the scariest thing about going crazy. You will not know if you're going off the deep end. I was, but I didn't know it. I probably had undiagnosed bipolar for 15 years. Long story short, it all culminates in that crazy thing with me stealing a giant truck full of sand in Phnom Penh. I was delusional, I don't precisely how or why I felt that I needed to steal transportation, then drive that transportation to China. These were my overriding priorities in life, greater than food, greater than anything I attempted to do for about a week, and I was eventually successful. That's probably not a very good thing. I nearly drove into a parade, but luckily I had no murderous intent, and I stopped the truck. Then I got my ass kicked by a giant mob of people and went to jail. One of the most interesting and heartwarming parts of this story is that the truck’s owner came to see me in jail, took one look at my crazy ass, and within a day, the U.S. embassy picked me up and took me to a psychiatric hospital. There they tried everything except for actually what helped me. To this day, I religiously take lithium but there they put me on every downer type of drug that you can imagine, and it didn’t work, but then they got me into an airplane after about two weeks, and so I flew from Phnom Penh to Buffalo with a doctor who was feeding me pills the entire time, and so he got me to the Buffalo psychiatric center, and this stuff genuinely helped me, I wouldn't be here today if it if things hadn't gone in this way.
+
[00:40:06] Citizen Cosmos: I can relate very much to the story. The first time I was diagnosed with bipolar was 18 years ago when I was about 17-18. I think I decided when I was 18 that will be my prerogative and battle, and I refused to take the pills that I was prescribed, all the downers. I never did, and I think that helped me keep it. But again, with bipolar, it's a very loud sentence to say because you have very different levels of bipolar disorder and how it develops from the first to the fourth stage. I'm trying to connect here everything, your history teaching, the Chinese government changes, the love for the hardware, and what I see and hear there have been misjudgments which you saw with the Chinese government and how they started to treat the inability to contact you family and that to me calls as if the governance goes wrong, if nobody says anything in the right time and doesn't try to do something, that's what's going to happen.
+
[00:41:55] Jacob Gadikian: I should expand on that. So I was in an Iraq war protest. It was the dumbest, most futile thing I've ever done. Technically speaking, that's the first time I was arrested, but they didn't book it. I was in Chicago, put in plastic handcuffs, taken to the other side of the city, and jumped out, which was pointless. What I mean is what I was doing at the time, carrying around and talking about war, was pointless because there
+was a giant apparatus of lies backing up that conflict. I am sensitive to governance issues and the accuracy of the information that affects governance, and maybe just give you another dot to connect. Going back to the whole mental health situation, I made it miraculously and, in my mind, statistically unlikely recovery. Most of the people that I met in the mental hospital I don't think that they recovered, and they got the same treatment but did not recover. But I did. I Had a lot of help from my family, but here's a deal. I began to take lithium in the summer of 2017, and by the fall of 2017, I was figuring out how to raise venture capital when you have just stolen a giant truck full of sand. We were successful. Drone energy raised a million dollars from all kinds of investors, and I believe has raised another round now. The business worked, and that's one of the reasons why I'm so comfortable speaking openly about that experience because, for good reasons, investors will look into your background and will ask you questions about it. It's a substantial amount of money, they want to know that you're not going to invest in sand trucks instead of Bitcoin mines. So I learned to tell the facts on that. It's a very relationship-based business; you're seeking capital to purchase equipment and sourcing the business's energy contracts. I ended up doing a lot of that, I learned to be very direct about things even if they're uncomfortable, and it's not especially the first 75 times because when you raise venture capital, don't talk to one investor. You don't do this once you do that many times and find the ones you click with, so the first 75 times were hard, but after that, not really. It's just another piece of my history that just has to be incredibly fact-driven. Otherwise, why would anybody trust me? Frankly, if I were to try to hide that, they shouldn't trust me.
+
[00:45:38] Citizen Cosmos: I’d like to say that all you just said come as battling bipolar
+and succeeding because, to me, those swings that are uncontrollable are something I want to control. I don't trust those swings, and I don’t want to trust them. And that's why I would rather be direct and say this is what I am. These are my minuses, these are my pluses. This is how I’ve been living my life for over 20 years, and it immediately calls back the things I see in the world and how I interact with the planet, and I understand it very well.
+
[00:46:55] Jacob Gadikian: That's interesting that we both share that. I failed over and over until I started taking lithium. I still experience bipolar sometimes, sleep is very hard. I don't have the world's most regular or normal sleep schedule, but I sleep every day, and I wouldn't need to I'm not sure that most people can relate to that but I could just keep going, but they said that's dangerous. I look after the whole sleep thing. My wife checks in on it. That's important, I give her a lot of credit for my being alive. She chased me around Cambodia for about 6 months, getting me out all kinds of messed up, crazy ridiculous shit. So I got back up on my feet in the States and started to make plans to marry her. So we’re now married and live in Hanoi. We have a kid and trying to have another kid. So to answer your question, though, I have seen that since I was young. I was 18 in that Iraq war protest, which left a big impression on me.
+
[00:48:54] Citizen Cosmos: You're gonna laugh, but the first protest I went to was in 2003 against the war in Iraq. That’s very ironic.
+
[00:49:22] Jacob Gadikian: So now, just about being rigorously fact-driven, and then in the blockchain space, you only talk about this issue because it's solved. This was also true of the Cosmos SDK, with several CI jobs that hadn't been fired in years. It was a program to check the code, one of them is called a Linter. The result was that no matter what you did, various things that were supposed to check and test the code would always tell you everything
+was all good. We fixed the SDK and then moved on to Gaia, and I didn't want to be a pariah because I was insistent that the delegations were screwed up and were harming governance. It affected Quorum quite a bit because of the lack of governance participation among recipients of ICF delegations. If I found it I can't leave it to the professionals, I must be the professional because it wasn't being addressed. We need to focus on the code, we need to focus on transparency, and go public.
+
[00:54:12] Citizen Cosmos: I think it’s important to hear an unbiased opinion. But regardless of that, we haven't opened up a lot of things, but I would love to ask you about your motivation. What keeps you from wanting to get off bed? With all you mentioned, it’s not easy for anyone with a struggle like yours.
+
[00:59:27] Jacob Gadikian: I guess it goes back to the Iraq war protest. I do think that governments worldwide are fairly fundamentally flawed and that transparency would solve a lot. I recently voted for a 5% minimum commission on the Hub and am a big supporter of markets. One thing I've found frustrating throughout my career as an entrepreneur is the incorporation and capital formation processes. I think most start-ups fail and lose 100% of their investment capital. It's only a moral issue when there isn't a genuine effort; in that case, that's like fraud or a scam, and chains are not companies. There’s also Dig. Dig is a project based on readme files: we’re going to put physical plots on the chain, we're going to sell those physical plots of land, and we're going to excel because of transparency. That project suffered tremendously because of the conflict in Ukraine. We overinvested in that market, but there is a particular reason. Probably if I was faced with the same set of decisions again, I’d probably make the same decisions because they had the legal structures that they had put in place just before the war for martial law was put into place and made the Dig project o100% legal so we would have been able to do everything, the whole nine yards without question. So at present, we've upgraded Dig SDK-46, we have added CosmWasm to Dig, and we’ll be upgrading it in the next couple of weeks as soon as IBC is finalized.
+
[01:02:22] Citizen Cosmos: Back to the original question. What does keep you from getting out of bed?
+
[01:02:29] Jacob Gadikian: It's just the creation of transparent systems. I'm a true believer in the style of governance that we have in Cosmos chains even though it's messy and imperfect, I
+think the current setup can be extended a great deal. One of the reasons I love SDK-46 is because it did extend governance. We can do that more in 47.
+
[01:03:47] Citizen Cosmos: On that note, I would like to wrap this episode up because you had an important point that somehow concludes what we’ve been talking about. Thanks very much, and hopefully, we can speak again!
+
+
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The latest Citizen Cosmos podcast was dedicated to the Kadena project. Serge and his guests Will Martino and Randy Daal discussed L1, multichain and scaling, and many other topics. However, one topic that stands out among the others is the use of blockchain technology, and especially enterprise blockchain. In this article we are going to see the benefits and the use cases of enterprise blockchain.
+
Blockchain is a technology that competes with the existing way of document management and accepted formats of interaction between counterparties. Only when solving problems, can the blockchain turn into a product. Blockchain is a technology that competes with the existing way of document management. It increases security, efficiency, and transparency across many industries.
+
Many companies looking at blockchain technologies are interested in adopting its three main features: decentralization, immutability, and cost-effectiveness.
+
First, let’s talk about decentralization. Most businesses usually use a centralized server that stores all the data for them, thus allowing anyone who needs the information to go through the database with various permission levels. The one and only central server stores and keeps under control access to all the company’s public and private data. Such a state of affairs may create problems if the server stops working due to malfunctioning or a hacker attack. This is where decentralization comes in. In a decentralized network, there is neither a central server nor an authority. If some peer goes offline, several identical peers can still perform the same functions.
+
The second blockchain benefit is immutability. It basically means that once data or a transaction has entered the blockchain, it can’t be deleted, altered, or destroyed in some other way. In addition, the ledger is transparent, so no one can hide or steal money or use it for unwanted purposes. It is possible due to each grouping of blocks in a blockchain containing a hash of all the data in the preceding blocks. So, with the immutability of blockchain, if anyone tries to sabotage the company’s data, the company would instantly know which data was altered.
+
Cost-effectiveness speaks for itself and probably needs no explanation. Companies spend vast sums of money yearly to keep up with governmental regulations. For example, KYC requires institutions to update and maintain their identities. With government-maintained blockchain, this expense can be offloaded. Customers could keep updated data on the chain and release it to the facility.
+
Today, the enterprise is still developing, and many companies join this technology daily. For example, J.P. Morgan, GoldmanSachs, Santander Bank, and other banks have been developing their private blockchains within the last several years. Let’s look at the implementation of enterprise blockchain in the example of Walmart.
+
The famous American retailer Walmart was one of the first to use blockchain for food products' quality control and traceability. The company first tested the concept by delivering mangoes from Latin America and pork from China. The experience was then transferred to tracking the origin of the greens. The retailer demanded a transition to the blockchain from all greens suppliers after another epidemic of E. coli poisoning in the United States. Walmart used the technology of the IT giant IBM, which launched the IBM Food Trust initiative based on this case. Participation in it provides the following benefits: food safety insurance through traceability of the supply chain and transparency of data on the expiration date, manufacturer, method, and transportation conditions; constant supply chain efficiency improvement through automating processes and collecting big data that helps you find the best logistical paths; increasing consumer trust and loyalty through open access to most of the data in the blockchain, which allows assessing product quality and authenticity; reduction of food waste and spoilage during transport by identifying problem areas that cause the most spoilage; protection against food fraud. Walmart set an example to the global retailing networks, so today, Carrefour, Nestlé, Unilever, and many others either already have their private blockchains or building them right now.
+
In conclusion, enterprise blockchains unlock the potential of blockchain technology and can provide more ingenious solutions not only to individuals but also to big companies and industries.
+
+
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The rapid development of the DeFi sector in crypto finance has brought great opportunities for users to manage their assets. But along with this, new risks arose. One such risk was MEV. This arbitrage strategy allows miners to change the order of transactions in the generated blocks and earn on user transactions. This entails higher fees and network congestion and generally destabilizes the blockchain. And although almost all blockchains are subject to MEV, Ethereum bears the main risks, as it is the most common DeFi protocols using smart contracts.
+
What is MEV
+
The architectural features of Ethereum and other blockchains using smart contracts allow you to receive additional income using these same smart contracts and DeFi protocols.
+Previously, MEV was deciphered as a Miner Extractable Value. Still, after the start of using arbitrage strategies, the decoding of Maximum Extractable Value has been more common recently.
+MEV is the profit that a miner or validator can make by intentionally changing the order of transactions in a block that is added to the blockchain.
+
How MEV works
+
Technically, all transactions of users and traders fall into the mempool. Miners take trades from the mempool, form blocks, and add them to the blockchain. Transactions in the league are not arranged in chronological order but in the order in which the miner added them.
+Here there are conditions under which the miner, having determined the high-margin transaction of the user or trader, can copy it and paste it into the block so that it is executed first.
+If the miner did not take advantage of this opportunity, trading bots would come into play. They track a highly profitable transaction, copy, and offer the miner a higher commission for executing the trade in the first place. Since there are a lot of trading bots, an auction begins where the transaction fee rises rapidly.
+
What are the risks of MEV?
+
For users, the risk is a possible exchange at a deliberately unfavorable rate and an unreasonable increase in gas fees. MEV is also one of Ethereum's biggest issues, with more than $689 million extracted from users of the network year-to-date. By leveraging their discretionary power to sequence transactions within blocks, miners can extract value from decentralized application users on Ethereum, greatly diminishing the user experience and threatening the stability of the network. Moreover, MEV can have deleterious effects between blocks. If the MEV available in a block significantly exceeds the standard block reward, miners may be incentivized to remine blocks and capture the MEV for themselves, causing blockchain re-organization and consensus instability.
+
How to fight MEV
+
Unfortunately, a complete solution does not yet exist. However, the developers see the MEV problem and are working on a solution. At the moment, there are two main approaches to solving the problem.
+The first one is to create tools that increase the transparency of transactions and provide access to MEV to all users. Theoretically, this should increase competition and minimize the negative impact of MEVs.
+The second approach assumes that the MEV problem is solvable - it is only necessary to update the rules of the Ethereum network consensus algorithm, release protocols that minimize the opportunities for MEV, and, most importantly, increase the motivation of miners to abandon these strategies.
+
So far, the crypto community cannot eliminate the opportunities for MEV strategies. But their negative consequences can be significantly minimized.
+The main thing is that the developers and users of the Ethereum network see the problem and are already taking measures to solve it.
+
+
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[00:00:00] Citizen Cosmos: Hi, everyone! Welcome to another episode of Citizen Cosmos. We have Mark with us today, the founder of Microtick. Hi, welcome to the show.
+
[00:00:29] Mark: Hi, thank you for having me!
+
[00:00:32] Citizen Cosmos: Yes, thank you for coming. It wasn't that easy to find you from what I heard from my team, they said you weren't very public, but maybe we can talk about that as well if you want. First, I'll let you introduce yourself in your own words. Tell us who you are, what you do, and anything else you want.
+
[00:00:48] Mark: Sure. My name is Mark Jackson. I founded Microtick back in 2003. It was originally a for-profit company. This was before Bitcoin, blockchain technology, and after a series of events. We were trying to figure out ways of bringing forth a new type of financial product at the time: a short-term option contract. These option contracts have fixed explorations and fixed strikes, and that's the way they are standardized. And the challenge is to bring liquidity to all the various issues. And as you deal with shorter and shorter timeframes, your choices for standardizations multiply because, with shorter timeframes, you might have expirations of 5 minutes, 10 minutes, or 15 minutes. I'm exaggerating, of course, but you can see that providing liquidity for all of the different issues can become a challenge. And so what Microtick was involved with at the time was pioneering a new way to standardize options using relative strikes and explorations. In other words, as the option contract triggers, the expiration is set at a fixed duration from when the option starts at all times. And the challenge you receive or come across when you're trying to standardize in that manner is what is the correct price at a given time. And so the second challenge that we had to solve was how do you get the right price? And so, I figured out a way to use the option contract prices to derive the current price so that we didn't have to import it from a different exchange and, therefore, create a self-contained market. We thought it was pretty innovative. It may not have been, we don't know, but we did talk to several exchanges in the United States and the 2003 to 2005 timeframe. We got feedback: “Hey, that sounds pretty cool.” But at the time, we were not interested in partnering with a small company like that. There were many discussions when you were talking about a massive entity as a small business. There are a lot of challenges there. And so the project got tabled for a while. We then moved on, and during that timeframe, Bitcoin came along.
+I was very interested in technology back in those days. I was at the Miami Bitcoin conference, where Ethereum was introduced, and Vitalic introduced that in Miami in 2014. And I got very interested in Ethereum. And so we started working with Ethereum. I had a set of smart contracts that we developed back then, and it had to work operationally on Testnet. I realized with crypto that we were going to do the same thing because with short-term options, you're, you're, you're talking about a lot of transactions. The network just couldn't handle it. There was no layer to use at the time. So it was a challenging set of problems you're facing when technology evolves as fast as your development.
[00:03:55] Mark: Potentially. I mean, we looked at various options, and we didn't have a team that could fully investigate all our different options. So what we did was a high-level overview of what the challenges were. This was back in 2017, probably that time, and we arrived at Cosmos because it was fairly advanced technology compared to some of the other solutions we saw. We did a pivot and a second pivot and developed a set of smart contract rules. We developed a blockchain node that has the rules embedded into the code. And we did that, which brought forth the Microtick chain in its current form. I made a short question into a long answer, but I hope that gives you some background and let you know where we stand.
+
[00:04:48] Citizen Cosmos: It does, that's for sure. I have a lot of questions, but I'm going to try and go easy before I ask some questions about you, your history, how you got here yourself, and how you got to start that company. When we go into the Microtick website, it says it's cooperative price discovery. Now let's break that down. Imagine that somebody doesn't understand a word in that. I guess, for a lot of people, sometimes myself, it could confuse me. What is the essence of your own comments about the cooperative price discovery?
+
[00:05:26] Mark: It's a good question. It's something that is not bantered around in the financial markets typically. I mean, usually, you have a marketplace. That's a bid-ask order book or something like an automated market. And people take different positions, either going higher or lower, based on what they see as their outlooks for the market. That's a form of price discovery. It's a competitive price discovery because someone else has an opposing interest in the opposite direction in every position you take. And the price goes up and down based on. If market participants share the same outlook, the price will sometimes go up rapidly in the form of a pump or a dump. If it goes in the opposite direction and price discovery, price results in an unstable market over short timeframes. You get these trendy transforming either pumps or dumps in various directions. And then they correct. And so it leads to a lot of volatility.
+In terms of cooperative price discovery, we see a different way to solve the problem of participants agreeing on a price. What I mean by that is blockchain is decentralized. It allows multiple people to participate from all various jurisdictions and wherever they happen to be. And we know one of the problems in blockchain technology is importing prices onto the chain. One thing we wanted to do with Microtick is because we were able to take these price assertions and import them onto the marketplace, then leverage them out in the ways that a lot of these Oracles that you see have been developed work. We're doing the same thing. But the difference with Microtick is that you can hedge that price. You can take a position because they're making assertions that get traded out as market options over a short time frame. And so, you end up with a form of price discovery that is cooperative because you have that averaging effect. It allows participants to jump onto a market and gives a voice in the market to people who don't necessarily want to take a position in either going up or down. It's a voice in the market for people asserting that the price is what it currently is. And so we think that the two markets, side by side if you have a competitive model that can be hedged against a cooperative averaging market, might tend to average out some of the volatility over short timeframes, which benefits everybody. I think because these pumps well, except for the people profiting off of pumping and dumping, maybe some of the high-frequency tradings would tend to in a little bit less opportunity. Still, for the most part, it's just a different form of importing prices that we think will result in a much less volatile process.
+
[00:08:16] Citizen Cosmos: Of course, this is less space for price manipulation, as far as I understand. But let's break it down even more. We hear the words, price manipulation, and if you're a trader, you more or less understand if you're technical, but how would you explain it in your words? I had this question before somebody asked me. What is price manipulation? Sometimes, especially on the blockchain and it's hard a little bit to answer sometimes. How would you, in your own words, explain how it physically works on a stock market that Microtick can prevent?
+
[00:08:46] Mark: Obviously, there are probably lots of forms of price manipulation. I may not be familiar with all of them but typically, what you'll see is market-makers flashing large buys or sells just outside of the competitive market and kind of signaling that they have a high volume of interest in a specific direction, which then causes other participants to see that large wall set up and think that the price is going to soon move in a particular order. Therefore they take a position, and the market goes in the other direction. Surprise. That's what I think of when I think of price manipulation on a traditional order book. The way that my critique would be in that type of situation. It is working with price assertions that can be, traded in either direction. So it forces the market maker to take a position in the center of the price, and the orders that can get sold first are on the outside of that kind of bell curve of charges that we set up. You can't flash an order outside the market without being the most competitive order on the market. So you will get traded first as opposed to a traditional order, but those orders that get flashed on the outside bids and ask never get sold and taken off before the market reaches them. So that's what we mean by helping out with price manipulation. And that's explicitly referring to order books.
+
[00:10:13] Citizen Cosmos: I will return to my critique. I will. And I want to come back as well to some of the economics. But before that, I do want to understand a little bit more about you. There isn't much information on the Internet about you. You had quite an extensive career in quite different companies. lt was ShapeShift, HP, Thunderbird gaming. And you also had many patterns in gaming and trading systematics. I would love to hear about that. How did you get from what looks like quite a successful career in the everyday world to starting in Microtick, Ethereum, and Cosmos?
+
[00:10:50] Mark: Yeah, you've done your research. I try to keep my public profile low. I'm not a personality type that participates much in social media or things like that. Career-wise I've been in a variety of positions. I have an extensive coding background. My education was in electrical engineering. So I've got some electrical background engineering and antenna design background, but I never used that in the real world. It was all software. I've done quite as you said. I've got a few patents. I've done some innovative work in a variety of fields. What led me to this particular opportunity was just my interest in trading. I've always been interested in how markets work and how you can improve them. And that was even before blockchain technology came along.
+
[00:11:46] Citizen Cosmos: What led you to it? Was it just curiosity or something else?
+
[00:12:03] Mark: Well, specifically, electrical engineering has described a field of study called signals and systems with linear time and variant systems. High, And then you start diving into how you can make these systems work in the analog and digital time domains. And my interest was always in the computing side of things, precisely in discreet, linear time and variant systems. And that are things like digital filters and stuff you might build using computer technology. So I was working with that kind of stuff. And as a grad student, I never completed grad school, but that's what I was working on. And then, some of the things I worked on with my career was also in the same area and was just a natural evolution as you get into markets. And then, with blockchain technology, blocks come at infrequent intervals, sometimes because they're probabilistic in their finality. So it leads to a specific set of problems that you can imagine. It kind of attracted my interest, given my background. So that's what led me down that path. And that's where I'm at right now.
+
[00:13:12] Citizen Cosmos: When did you start? When did you start working with the software? I imagine 25, 30 years ago?
+
[00:13:18] Mark: Oh yeah. A little bit of background. I'm in my early fifties. So I'm an older guy. I'm not your typical age group for a lot of this technology. I've noticed that when I was at ShapeShift, I was probably one of the older guys there, but that's a good thing.
+
[00:13:31] Citizen Cosmos: I had Willy on a while ago. When you asked how his day was, was he telling people he was having the best day ever?
+
[00:13:36] Mark: Famous quote!
+
[00:13:37] Citizen Cosmos: He's fantastic. I liked him a lot. He surprised me with this “I'm having the greatest day ever.” And I was like, what? Then he said he’s been saying that for five years. Sorry to cut you out there. By the way, I've been in blockchain for a while, and I've seen quite a few guys about your age.
+
[00:14:30] Mark: Yeah, I'm exaggerating. Of course, older guys can be interested in blockchain technology. To answer your question about when I started coding, my first program was written using punch cards on a mainframe. My mother was enrolled in a class in college, and I was a young kid. I was probably eight or nine years old, and she taught me how to do it in Fortran. I made a program that calculated the number of inches from the Earth to the Sun.
+
[00:14:44] Citizen Cosmos: I would love to use punch cards. I never did.
+
[00:14:50] Mark: That was the only one I ever did. We're at the tail end of that era, but I did a punch card program at one point and then moved on to Apple, to programming. When the Apple 2 was famous, I did some assembly language programming. I taught myself assembly language when I was 12.
+
[00:15:04] Citizen Cosmos: Wow.
+
[00:15:05] Mark: that kind of gives you some background. I'm a self-learner, and all the stuff I did was concerning code.
+
[00:15:12] Citizen Cosmos: Excluding the punch cards, what was the first machine you started to code on then. Do you remember?
+
[00:15:17] Mark: That was the main frame we used at the university at the time. But the first computer we ever owned was an Apple 2 clone. It was a Franklin. And that's where I started programming using those floppy disks. I have to boot up every time and have the OSTP load, then drop down into the monitor and begin again. We would hand-compile our assembly language programs into bites. And then, I would sit there and type these programs in hexadecimal. Tracking down the bugs was super tricky. But at the same time, it was educational because you really start to understand what is underneath the hood and on this, and translating that directly into what we're doing with smart contracts. The EVM is kind of at that same level. So understanding and knowing how virtual machines operate in the way byte code works and things like that is directly relevant to many things that people still work on in today's technology. So I think I'm happy that I had to go through all that trouble at a young age.
+
[00:16:29] Citizen Cosmos: It makes a lot of sense, in my opinion. I don't remember what book it was, but the author explained the coding starting from mathematics. He said we use the decimal system because we have ten fingers. If it were a dolphin, he would use 2. And if you teach a kid any other method, apart from the decimal, they will immediately know them as adults. They will learn to count on all of them. So I can imagine that knowing what's under the hood makes you understand much better what's on the application level and what's not at the application level.
+
[00:17:10] Mark: I agree with that.
+
[00:17:13] Citizen Cosmos: When did you first encounter blockchain technology?
+
[00:17:18] Mark: I think I encountered it in 2012 but didn't bend on it. I got interested when it started to become programmable at the time when Bitcoin was just starting to get its capabilities. I was also looking at some other technology. I forget what it was even called.
+
[00:17:50] Citizen Cosmos: Did you buy into the tokens, or did you not participate in the trading?
+
[00:18:06] Mark: I participated in the Ethereum crowd sale. So that was a good thing? On the other hand, if Microtick was implemented on a theory, it might need to have some coins to pay for gas. So I wanted to have some for sure.
+
[00:18:24] Citizen Cosmos: And talking about implementations and Ethereum, I did have more questions. Now that you mentioned the project, I understand it’s moving from Tendermint to Ethereum, right?
+
[00:18:40] Mark: Well, we have not decided on a layer for the chain as it moves forward. What we're trying to do is to move away from the chain. The project lacks the resources to run and maintain Tendermint and Cosmos SDK for a week. The SDK is excellent. It makes it easy to develop your rules. You must ensure that your chain is always on the reasonably recent tip of the development chain because incompatibilities and things like that could be introduced. There are many requirements for maintenance and chain maintenance. That we just don't have. The project has not evolved to that point yet. So we felt it would be the best and most beneficial to the project to pivot it away from having to maintain our chain and move towards something that might be a little bit more self-contained while we're still trying to get adoption. And at the same time, we have token holders, and we realized that. So many people have invested in the project, and we want to be fair to them. And so we came up with a way to hopefully do that still but adequately allow us to allocate some tokens for fundraising. That's the one thing Microtick has never done: raise funds for the project. It's been bootstrapped from day one and then volunteer up to this point. And at some point, maybe it would make sense to move on and create something a bit more formal to support the development. A lot of that depends on proving out the concept, proving out the code. I think we've done that with the current chain, and although it never got a lot of adoption, I think I'm pretty comfortable that the idea can work, whereas before, I wasn't. I think we've accomplished something, but it is time for a pivot because we need to make sure that we are realistic about the resources we can invest in maintaining.
+
[00:20:39] Citizen Cosmos: This is an honest answer and makes a lot of sense, in my opinion. I have been launching projects before, so I know how much money they eat. Does Microtick have a community pool currently, or does it not?
+
[00:20:54] Mark: It does. Yeah, there's a community pool. Unfortunately, the token, along with every other token, seems to through quite a bit of selling pressure over the last 6 to 12 months.
+
[00:21:06] Citizen Cosmos: Percentage-wise, what's the amount of the funds in the community pool? That could be used as a bonding curve and raise fines. Why on Ethereum?
+
[00:21:20] Mark: Microtick is going away. The project will become DiscoveryDEX. The communities voted on that. And so we've got a logo set up and a website starting to be set up. We've got a Discord channel that's going to be public soon. There have been many people helping out with that, which I greatly appreciate. Thanks, guys. What we're going to do is one of the things that we want to do since you brought up automated market-making Microtick. We learned how it currently works that market makers must come up with their price assertions. They also have to come up with some sort of an idea of what is a fair price for volatility in that is what the option premium is because when you specify a premium, you're saying, “I am pricing the current market volatility at this price over this time duration.” And that's how you come up with your price assertion. And the problem with that is nobody understands that, or at least very few people understand it. It makes it much harder to bring people into the market when they have to understand these esoteric concepts. So we're trying to do Microtick version two to move the premium pricing part away from market-makers competing into a liquidity pool approach. That's more of an automated market maker type approach where the premium moves up or down based on whether people are buying or selling tip on the market. Market makers will no longer have to come up with their tips. They just contribute liquidity into a pool and then contribute their assertions. Everything else would work the same when trades get moved from the liquidity pool into the collateral pool. The current protocol works like this: when the transaction happens, the individual market maker that's backing the business has all the risk of price movement over that timeframe. Instead of creating the automated market maker, we're going to make a collateral pool where that risk is democratized among everybody involved in the trade. You no longer have a chance against a specific trade over a specific time duration. Still, you're involved in a collateral pool where if a bad trade happens, it's shared among everybody, but at the same time, profit is also shared between parties. And so it's just a way of creating a way to offset some of that risk encountered with my particulars.
+
[00:23:57] Citizen Cosmos: So as Microtick moves to whichever layer, it will become more like a service, like a content oracle. Or will it be an application as well of its own?
+
[00:24:18] Mark: Initially, it will be just the price discovery. One of the interesting things about Microtick is we decouple the price discovery part of markets from the trading part of markets. And to my knowledge, I've not seen that done anywhere else. And it's so it's fairly unique, but I think we've got that kind of a concept working on the current year. It's documented on the website how it will work as we move to the DiscoveryDEX version two. If you can get your price discovery based on option pricing, you can then trade your actual tokens or whatever your asset is using futures. And the two can be hedged against each other in a natural way that allows you to create market prices that can be discovered in an independent set of smart contracts. And then, we can do the futures trading as a separate set of smart contracts that use the Oracle price generated from the first set of smart contracts for the futures price. And what happens when you do that is you come up with a stable price discovery mechanism based on Oracles and averaging that can be hedged against your AMMS that are sitting out there. Suppose we're trading futures on a set of tokens, and then your AMM calls it a unit swap, and you're trading the same tokens. Now you've got offsetting positions that you can do. You can arbitrage between those two markets, but at the same time, you can hedge against your Oracle price. So it's a different way of arriving at the same result, but we think it will be a more stable price discovery process. Having the two markets side by side will benefit both because it's a liquidity engine for both because of the potential for arbitrage. Suppose you have a pump over a short timeframe, and the price DiscoveryDEX price is lagging because it's an average. That will tend to happen naturally just because you have market makers that don't all update their quotes simultaneously. Therefore, your price on the Microtick market is lagging price on the AMM has pumped because all of a sudden, you've had the alignment of everybody buying at the same time, driving the price up. Now there's an arbitrage opportunity between the Microtick price and the AMM price, which will tend to bring selling into that market. It'll bring buying into the Microtick market, bringing the two prices naturally together without the market makers having to quickly jump on it. Update their prices like you would have to with a typical Oracle. And so the fact that you can hedge the price on the Microtick market is an advantage over a traditional Oracle.
+
[00:27:06] Citizen Cosmos: As far as I understand the plans of Ethereum, technically, Microtick can still have its chain in the future.
+
[00:27:20] Mark: If we have a standard backing token, and that's the idea of the discovery token, that token can be used as the same backing across multiple chains. Because it's just an average, you can combine the liquidity from multiple chains simply because it's just math. It's not like an order book; combining an order book might be very complicated because you've got to take all the orders. It becomes intractable quickly because all the orders on one chain would have to be combined with all the orders on the other chain. And as you do that, you might get markets or whatever else. So it's a complicated process. But when you're just working with an average, it's two calculations. You can combine the average on one chain with the average on the other to arrive at a combined price.
+
[00:28:15] Citizen Cosmos: And I imagine by the time the development will come to the point of production, l imagine there will be some proper bridge, and it will allow executing contracts from Ethereum to Cosmos? How long do we have to wait for that?
+
[00:28:38] Mark: It's hard to say. That would be exciting. I think that's probably the next challenge facing blockchain technology in general because chains will not go away. How do you combine and make it work, no matter which chain you use? How do you offer services that are compatible and interoperable?
+
[00:28:57] Citizen Cosmos: I have some more questions about Microtick. A lot of the time, we have founders and CEOs, and we ask them questions about the projects about the history. You've said where you started, why, and how you ended up in Cosmos. But you also mentioned the lack of funds and like quite a humble way of doing the basic work in a volunteer way and never having to raise funds. What would you advise or not advisable to do or not do?
+
[00:29:39] Mark: Well, it is what it is. It came together the way it did because of the people involved. Every project will be distinct because you have different people involved in different projects. But in our case, I can't necessarily advise other projects because I don't know what their situations are, but I can say I'm comfortable with where the project is headed. Evolving has been slower because we didn't take the funding approach. I didn't want to take that approach because I didn't necessarily want to approach it as a centralized entity. Initially, we had a for-profit company, and we tried that approach, talking to exchanges, but it didn't work so well. But then you get to blockchain technology. And what happens if you open something like that up? And if you can attract developers and things in a decentralized manner, it's kind of an experiment. Will this result in something that is viable, or will it just fall flat on its face? Due to a lack of resources, the current chain has done well. We'll pick it up and pivot while being fair to the token holders. We've got some ideas to move it, eliminate a lot of the complexity, and see where it goes. I've always said that it's a riskier technology because it wasn't proven when the Microtick chain was first started. We had no idea whether it would be a stable, viable process or whether people would want to use it. And we did some experiments internally, and we got feedback that once people understood it, they thought it was enjoyable. So I think it has potential, but we must figure out how to present it better.
+
[00:31:40] Citizen Cosmos: I was going to say that even though I'm a token holder, and that's a simple thing to say, I think what you're saying is quite important because I would rather see a project with value. And it's coming in a decentralized way. And sometimes I can see a lot of projects, which started as one, changing towards the worst as they go. So I would instead take the loss. I didn't mean to develop but stay true to its values and cores that initially attracted me to this idea rather than make profits. But in a way that makes you think if it is a fair way to make a profit, the advice I hear from you is to stay true to your ideas.
+
[00:32:49] Mark: Interestingly, you say that. If we were to go out and try to get all this funding and become a centralized entity with my values, there would be a disconnect, and I think that's a direction I'm interested in. I mean, I've opened up this project. The company Microtick LLC was disbanded at the end of last year, and the patents we had have been abandoned formerly, and we're not paying for any maintenance on those or anything. So this project has opened up, and someone else's wants to come in and may be motivated to lead up a centralized entity like that that would do development. I would love that that would be something that I would contribute. But that's not my personality type. It's not something I'm particularly interested in. At this point, I've done startups before and didn't have much fun with them. So I think you must be true to your values and understand your objectives. And in this case, Microtick has been an experiment from day one, and there have been no guarantees. I've put tons of time into it in resources, but it is what it is. If it succeeds, it will not be just me doing it. It's got to have other people involved. And so I've opened it up, and let's see what happens, I guess.
+
[00:34:05] Citizen Cosmos: I think that's the right way. This is my personality type as well. I guess we kind of meet each other's values here, but it's unfortunate to see, I know that maybe some people aren't like what I'm saying. Over the years, I've not seen many people in blockchain stay true to their values. I'm not saying that blockchain has to follow the centralization philosophy. Those are two separate things, but it's nice to see that there are still projects and people who stay true to those ideas. And I think it's very important because if we didn't have that, there would be no balance between how the technology is developing. Mark, one last question. What keeps you motivated?
+
[00:35:26] Mark: I think it's a little bit just like with Microtick, the idea of spending so much time thinking about it. It's hard to put it down. And so I just naturally start thinking the ways of how can we improve that? How can we make the markets better? And since then, it's evolved in how we can improve blockchain technology? And how can we take the lessons we've learned and apply them in slightly different ways to solve problems that maybe other people haven't thought about. So problem-solving is number one, with maybe just a touch of competition and saying it can't be done.
+
[00:36:02] Citizen Cosmos: That's a great answer! I love it. Thank you for coming. I'm looking forward to seeing how it's going to develop.
+
[00:36:15] Mark: Sounds good. I hope it was helpful for everybody that's listening!
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here)
As HackAtom VII 2022 comes in less than a month in Seoul, we at Citizen Cosmos decided to give you overview of this event. Before the event starts on July 29th, we’ll do occasional reviews related to HackAtom. Today, let’s talk about what we should expect during the event.
+
HackAtom VII precedes the BUIDL ASIA event and will host South Korea's best hackers. Teams will compete for a diverse range of prizes, rewarded to the best teams that build the Interchain vision aside from the hackathon. There will also be a series of free educational workshops throughout the event.
+
There are three main challenges that participants will have to take part in to get the main prize. The first one is called Interchain Prize: Interoperability. The mission is to build anything that would push IBC forward. The event organizers confirm that this could be an application that leverages IBC in a novel way, a new IBC application-level packet type, improvements or modifications to lower levels of IBC, or implementation in new environments. The competitors should demonstrate their skills and talents to show how interoperability unlocks ingenuity.
+
The second challenge is the Hub Prize: Interchain Security. Its mission is to spin a Consumer Chain that showcases the power of the Cross Chain Validation (CCV) protocol and experiment with the application layer. The developers are encouraged to play with Interchain Security and innovate on the application layer. The task is open-ended, and the participants should show their creativity in how Interchain Security will reimagine the Cosmos-SDK chain and how the Cosmos Hub can evolve as a chain for application development and deployment. The main requirement of the challenge is to leverage Interchain security design in the project.
+
The third general challenge is the Application Prize: Cosmos-SDK. The task here is to build either a blockchain with the Cosmos SDK, a rewrite of an existing module, or a tool that improves the user experience of developing with the SDK. The organizers are mainly curious about determining how well contestants work with SDK. The requirement is to use the Cosmos SDK repository or a codebase like Atlas, Lens, or any other tool that provides UX improvements to SDK.
+
Don’t forget to apply for the Hackatom and keep reading our digests. Next time we’ll talk about the event’s sponsors and their challenges!
+
+
Event’s sponsors and challenges (pt.2)
+
The Hackatom VII is coming in just ten days in Seoul, so it’s time to get to know who sponsors this event. Moreover, we shall cover the special challenges for the participants that the sponsors have prepared.
+
There are several sponsorship categories. The main one is the Platinum which includes Juno and Osmosis blockchains. Next is the Bronze, with Celestia, Crescent, Provalidator, Konstellation, Agoric, and Persistence. The Citizen Cosmos podcast is also a sponsor! We provide media coverage for the event and help promote it. You can learn more about sponsors and their contributions on the official website.
+
Let’s look at the challenges the Platinum sponsors Juno and Osmosis have provided for the contestants. The Osmosis challenge is called “Osmosis track: CosmWasm-related challenge. Its mission is to build a CosmWasm application that will interact with Osmosis AMM using its custom bindings. The participants will have to write a contract leveraging this functionality to produce some helpful protocols to enhance the Osmosis ecosystem. Finally, the app should be deployed to the Osmosis testnet and provide a UI. The requirements for winning the challenge are pretty straightforward, but the Osmosis team also shares their ideas for inspiration:
+Maker DAO like stablecoin using Osmosis for TWAP price oracle and liquidation
+Autocompounder for Osmosis LP shares
+Futures or options on a token using the AMM for settlement
+
The Juno challenge is also related to CosmWasm. It has a mission to write a CosmWasm contract that runs on Juno testnet and demonstrates the power of CosmWasm IBC to create a meaningful product-level application (not just R&D). Juno is currently the largest deployment of permissionless CosmWasm in the Cosmos ecosystem. They encourage many projects to build on their chain and focus on governance and composability. In addition, they are looking at IBC to enable more composability of DAOs and other protocols with other Cosmos blockchains. The recommendations Juno gives to the participants are the following:
+Leverage Interchain Accounts for a DAO to stake assets on a remote chain (that doesn’t have CosmWasm)
+Write a custom protocol to move NFTs between Juno and Stargaze testnets (both have CosmWasm)
+Build an “AMM router” that swaps tokens either on JunoSwap (local) or Osmosis (via custom IBC protocol), depending on the best current rate.
+Stay with us and learn more about Hackatom VII in Seoul. Next time we’ll talk about the judges who will decide the winner of the challenges!
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:
Microtick: a guide to move from Cosmos to Ethereum
+
Dear Cosmonauts, while recording a new episode of the podcast with Mark Jackson (the founder of Microtick), we have found out that, unfortunately,
+the Microtick network will be halted on the 1st of August. After this, the project will be named DiscoveryDEX and will be moved to L2 Blockchain (probably ETH).
+Therefore, all TICK holders are to claim their tokens for the future DiscoveryDEX token. We have prepared a simple guide for you, both in video and text versions.
+More detailed information you can find out in our episode.
+
Please find here the original guide from the DAO team.
+
Video guide
+
+
Text guide
+
+
Step 1
+
+
Please go to frontier. Open Assets and find the TICK token.
+
+
+
Step 2
+
+
Push - Withdraw and approve connection
+
+
+
Step 3
+
+
Then please enter the amount (in our case, press MAX) and approve the transaction.
+
+
+
Step 4
+
+
Go to Microtick app and push “Keplr Browser Extension”
+
+
+
Step 5
+
+
Approve connection.
+
+
+
Step 6
+
+
You should see your balance.
+
+
+
Step 7
+
+
Push “Validators” in the left menu and find - the DiscoveryDEX validator. The owner of this Validator is the DAO team.
+
+
+
Step 8
+
+
Push on the Validator, and you must stake your tokens to this validator. If you previously staked with Bro n Bro or any other validator, you must redelegate your tokens.
+
+
+
Step 9
+
+
Enter all amounts by clicking “Max” (but leave a minimal amount for commission)
+
+
+
Step 10
+
+
Push send.
+
+
+
Step 11
+
+
The most crucial part is that in the Keplr window, you need to approve the transaction, but YOU NEED TO WRITE IN MEMO FIELD YOUR ETH ADDRESS.
In explorer, please check the amount, validator, and memo.
+
+
+
Step 14
+
+
Suppose you have forgotten to write an ETH address in the MEMO field. Don’t worry. You can do it again.
+To do this, you need to send the 0.000001 amount of the TICK to the following address:
+micro1ee05vm4kw8yp2avx8gpxegynpytl5g5hfrexhm (autodelegation for DiscoveryDEX val) with the MEMO : TX of the delegation operation transaction - (same ETH address) .
+
+
Step 14.1
+
+
Open KEPLR and make transactions.
+
+
+
+
Step 14.2
+
+
Please check your transaction in explorer.
+
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:
Citizen Cosmos
+Did it did. Can't. Hey, Andrew. Hey, man. Can you hear me? Okay, great. So we have sound. That's good. And lets approved Dan as well. Dan Can you hear me too? Say something. I'm good, Dan. Okay, great. So let's give it, like, some chit chat to the know, because it's going to take some time until people join. Let's hope that we have live ... some people.
Episode name:
+The Web3 Puzzle: Decoding Scammers, Web3 lending, and Scalability with Chad Barraford
+
In this episode, Chad Barraford The Technical Lead from THORchain is interviewed. Chad gives us his story behind the birth and ethos of THORchain, as well as giving details on their unique lending product. Chad explains how he managed to get a super user account at Twitter. There is also a discussion around scalability of chains, as well as what it would take to get THORchain to consider being part of IBC.
+
+
Citizen cosmos:
+Good Space time yall and welcome to a new episode of a Citizen Cosmos podcast. A source for educational insights into the world of Web3. In today's episode, we are speaking with Chad Barraford, the CTO of ThorChain. We delve into a wide range of Thought provoking topics, including the early applications of AI and their potential impact. Explore the concept of a ten hour work week and discuss the shifting landscape of web3 lending, including the dangers of Defi designs.
+We delve into the importance of separating money from the state and address the challenges surrounding scalability. During our discussion. We also touch upon the role of crypto in advancing human rights and the significance of ethical development practices and the need for the crypto community to continuously explore new possibilities.
+
chad_barraford:
+You want the next evolutionary step in your product, ask your customers if you want the next revolutionary step, ask yourself. In nature 97% of all life is extinct, right? Only 3% actually exist in the world today. That's because of, you know, trial and error trying new things. Whoever is a validator or a relayer has to do it in an altruistic fashion because there's no way for that person to make an income.
+Now, that's a scalability issue, because obviously, if you're doing one swap every 30 minutes, it's like, you know, what are you even doing? I was like, Oh, what's this about? I looked into I'm like, Well, that sounds like one of the worst things ever, One of the worst designs I've ever heard of,
Citizen Cosmos
+And while we are waiting to do some general chitchat, A So people who do join Dont think that it's empty. So just for everyone joining, regardless whether you're listening to the recording of this or you are listening to this as you join us and this is Citizen Cosmos Twitter Spaces. Today we're going to be talking with Galactica and it's a Z K related project, and it's much more than that, to be honest.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+There's a lot of a lot a lot of look to it, and we are going to find out everything about them and what they do. Hopefully soon. In a couple of minutes, we'll start. We have some uncomfortable questions prepared as well. So guys, prepare yourself. I mean, talking about the speaker is, of course, nothing unusual. Just some questions.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+I'm sure that none of them are out of the ordinary, but that some people might consider them to be uncomfortable. But that's good. And the more we can find out, the better. So let's wait maybe one more minute, and then slowly we start maybe two or three more minutes. Anybody, by the way, guys, the Galactica team and all, I think all three of you, all previous speakers now.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+So I'm going to be directing most of my questions at Sarvodoya, of course, but this not necessarily like that. So feel free to jump in and answer the questions. And they are mostly about the projects and things that the project. So yeah, whoever feels like the one to answer the question and when it's going to be there, of course, feel free to jump in and answer.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+So let's wait a couple of minutes, guys.
+
Dan
+Just your aware I think Sarv is actually pretty busy right now. So I think I might answer the questions myself and then if we need some input from Sarv, just jump on it, if that's okay.
Staking is the process of locking up a digital asset to provide economic security for a public blockchain. We have prepared a step-by-step guide on how to stake LIKE
+using Keplr (you might be using any other wallet. It doesn't really matter. The staking option works more or less the same. The idea is that you need to find the
+'reward' or the 'validator' tab and then delegate the desired amount to a desired validator).
+
How to stake LIKE using Keplr
+
First go to the dao.like.co and click on Keplr Browser Extension:
Staking is the process of locking up a digital asset to provide economic security for a public blockchain. We have prepared a step-by-step guide on how to stake BCNA
+using Keplr (you might be using any other wallet. It doesn't really matter. The staking option works more or less the same. The idea is that you need to find the
+'reward' or the 'validator' tab and then delegate the desired amount to a desired validator).
+
How to stake BCNA using Keplr
+
First go to the BitCanna Wallet and click on Keplr Browser Extension:
Neutron is permissionless smart contract platform for Interchain DeFi built with Cosmos SDK & Tendermint. Neutron allows to deploy smart contracts to the market in a blaze. Smart contracts can query, transact and manage
+accounts in remote zones directly from Neutron.
Staking is the process of locking up a digital asset to provide economic security for a public blockchain. We have prepared a step-by-step guide on how to stake FLIX using Keplr Dashboard and Omniflix dApp.
+If you don't have FLIX, you can obtain them at Osmosis.
+
1. How to stake FLIX using Keplr Dashboard
+
To delegate the Сitizen Сosmos validator, you can follow this link
+or find the Citizen Cosmos validator manually, to do this open Keplr Dashboard(make sure you have some FLIX balance).
+
The Keplr Dashboard website will open, and by scrolling down the page below we will see a list of validators.
+You can find the Citizen Cosmos validator by scrolling down the page, or by searching for "Citizen Cosmos":
+
+
If the search returns no results, try switching the search to an inactive set:
+
+
Click on the selected validator:
+
+
Another new window will appear. Next, click on Delegate:
+
+
Choose an amount to delegate and click on Delegate:
+
+
And confirm the transaction in Keplr:
+
+
Done. Your available and staked balance will be displayed on the home page, as well as in your Keplr:
+
+
+
2. How to stake FLIX using Omniflix dApp
+
First, go to the Omniflix dApp and connect the Keplr or Cosmostation wallet:
+
+
+
+
You can find the Citizen Cosmos validator by scrolling down the page:
+
+
If you cannot find citizen cosmos in the active set, try switching to the inactive set:
+
+
Click on Delegate:
+
+
Choose an amount to delegate and click on Delegate:
+
+
And confirm the transaction in Keplr:
+
+
Congratulations, you have successfully staked your FLIX:
+
+
You can view the statistics in the Dashboard tab:
+
+
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:
Episode name:
+Governance in the Era of Technology: A Discussion on Syntax and Privacy with Chris Goes.
+
In this episode, we interviews Chris Goes from Anoma. The interview is both technical and philosophical and it covers a wide range of topics, including but not limited to; monetary theory, shortfalls of government, advances in hardware, mass adoption and the needs and wants of the people, to name a few. Chris also shares his initial journey that led him to Anoma and his passion for privacy.
+
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Good space time, y'all. In this episode of The Citizen Cosmos podcast. We had the pleasure of speaking with Chris Goes from Anoma a project dedicated to providing privacy and governance on the blockchain. During our conversation with delved into some thought provoking topics such as the importance of privacy and governance, a polycentric conception of law, and the cultural context in which money operates, we explored how semantics can lead to dystopia and the dangers of gradient descent.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+We tackled the nature of money and what people truly want or don't want out of it. Furthermore, we discussed the solutions to the shortcoming of blockchain governance, democracy, social equilibrium, using technology and the consensus building process.
+
Chris
+Maybe it's like a perfectly coordinated dystopia. There's a lot of what I would call like gradient descent, and Defi could sometimes slip into this. And if we wants to build, you know, products that people, you know, in 100 years are still going to remember as opposed to being consigned to the annals of some Wikipedia page editing debate, We need a theory of what people want financial systems to do when lightspeed delays become real, like a multi-planetary species, and how that changes the dynamics of cultural evolution.
+
Chris
+I Pay American taxes and I am forced to pay that under penalty of guns.
Episode name:
+Bojan Peček, Mass Adoption, Stablecoins & Web3.
+
In this episode, Citizen Cosmos speaks to Bojan Peček, Operations Manager at Liquity. In this interview, they discuss how the current banking crisis and the state of traditional finance is driving adoption of Web3 and how it will hopefully lead to mass adoption. They also follow the journey of a freelancer and ponder as to why more people don't take this route. Bojan goes into detail about Liquity and why it is the best borrowing protocol in his eyes and what the future holds for the project. The age old debate around stablecoins continues in this episode as well. As always Citizen Cosmos poses some tough questions as the devil's advocate around education and the nature of money and it ends with everyone's favourite, The Blitz.
+
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Good space time yall In this episode of The Citizen Cosmos podcast, I spoke with Bojan from Liquity an Ethereum based borrowing protocol managed by Smart Contract. We discussed the value of traditional education of Web 3 freelance and the catalysis for mass adoption and the points of failure on project. We also spoke about people as currency, future of Stablecoin, the security of Multisig and the structure of liquity versus other similar platforms.
+
Bojan
+I think that Defi itself is not sufficiently interesting for the common person for us that financial systems actually help via their incompetence to push non trustless financial systems. Why are you building this? What problem is it solving? Who needs this? And if you can't answer that, then you shouldn't build a web 3 product they are providing defi and wider with reliable price sources, then they have I think a multisig 4 of 9 which can crash and burn all of defi.
In this episode, Citizen Cosmos has a conversation Pedro Gomez, co-founder of Wallet Connect about his journey starting in traditional FinTech and how regulators and a hackathon helped to being him to where he is now. As always, the devil's advocate has some great questions around, safety and privacy that always raises it's head in Web 3 conversations. Pedro has some wonderful insights into what he hopes the future will be. The conversation spans a wide range of topics, including physics, sociology, economics, motivation and Web 3. Pedro also gives a run down of what we can expect at WalletCon, you will not want to miss it.
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+
Citizen Cosmos
+Good space time, y'all. In this episode in the Citizen Cosmos podcast, I spoke to Pedro Gomez, the co-founder of Wallet Connect, a web wallet and a communication protocol. Along with Pedro, we discussed the dark side of fintech connections between physics sociology and Web 3 and what can be considered as a crypto wallet. We also spoke about account abstraction, developers, responsibility decentralization spectrum and adoption of Web3.
+
Citizen Cosmos
+At the end of the day, this is communication tools, and if the communities will not communicate, there will be nothing. I think semantics does definitely play a huge role in understanding to everything.
+
Pedro
+An address on the blockchain is a reference to a blockchain account, and a blockchain account itself is not even a wallet. When you have money in a bank account, you don't technically on it. You have a contract with the bank.
In this #citizencosmos podcast episode, Benjamin, co-founder of ArweaveNews, permacastapp, and decent.land, discusses various web 3 and decentralization topics. They talk about creating web 3 social media with current tools and debate the readiness of web 3 for everyone. The conversation also covers decentralized identities, merging account identities, friction in using web 3 tools, and the possibility of decentralizing everything and everyone. They further debate how to incentivize users to move to web 3 and why users should use Areweave instead of IPFS.
+
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Good space time yall in this episode of The Citizen Cosmos podcast, I'm joined by Benjamin, a.k.a. xylophonezy. He's the founder of Decent Land a Tool for Building Decentralized Communities Arweave news and Permacast podcast Storage Protocol. Along with Benjamin, we discussed storage development Dao tooling, decentralized frontend, the state of web2 and web3, and the adoption of the latter. We also spoke about interoperability and whether or not decentralization should be the end goal of everything.
+
Benjamin
+I kind of felt uncomfortable about the fact that we were like all about decentralization, price is almost like a crutch for, you know, a project that might just be an EVM fork that can't offer anything else. Having your DAO discussions on Web2 puts the transparency at risk. The incentives in Web2 are anti-user Social media is pretty much controlled by five or so companies, all of which use closed source non interoperable protocols.
In this episode of Citizen Cosmos podcast, the host interviews Denis Fadeev, developer of Ignite. They discuss the importance of valuing developer’s time, providing users with a feedback loop, and the necessity of tutorials and documentation in building a blockchain. Fadeev shares his passion for building for developers and the role of the CosmosHub in the ecosystem. They address the issue of tribalism in crypto and how Cosmos is working to fix it. The conversation then shifts to Ignite, a marketplace of sovereign blockchains, and how it helps projects build. They highlight the motivation to keep on building and the flexibility of Cosmos that keeps it interesting.
+
+
Citizen Cosmos
+Good space time, y'all. In this episode of The Citizen Cosmos podcast, I speak to Denis Fadeev ex VP of product at Tendermint and creator of Ignite CLI. Along with Denis, we discussed time and value developers Users and feedback and the passion to build tools working remotely, and the steps in building blockchains. We also talk about the Cosmos Hub, tribalism, marketplaces and sovereign blockchains, motivation and flexibility.
+
Denis
+And this is the crucial thing, I think in the beginning you need to make the developer experience as smooth as possible. Building a blockchain is not everything you also need to build end user applications. If something doesn't work, you are free to create something that is better, that has functionality that he wants, and you don't have to ask anyone. The decisions made through governance actually change the course of events.
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+.pagination{margin-top:50px}.pagination__title{display:flex;text-align:center;position:relative;margin:100px 0 20px}.pagination__title-h{text-align:center;margin:0 auto;padding:5px 10px;background:var(--background);font-size:.8rem;text-transform:uppercase;letter-spacing:.1em;z-index:1}.pagination__title hr{position:absolute;left:0;right:0;width:100%;margin-top:15px;z-index:0}.pagination__buttons{display:flex;align-items:center;justify-content:center}@media (max-width: 683px){.pagination__buttons{flex-direction:column}}.button{position:relative;display:inline-flex;align-items:center;justify-content:center;font-size:1rem;border-radius:8px;max-width:40%;padding:0;cursor:pointer;appearance:none}@media (max-width: 683px){.button{max-width:80%}}.button+.button{margin-left:10px}.button a{display:flex;padding:8px 16px;text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap;overflow:hidden}.button__text{text-overflow:ellipsis;white-space:nowrap;overflow:hidden}
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+.posts{width:100%;margin:0 auto}.post{width:100%;text-align:left;margin:20px auto;padding:20px 0}@media (max-width: 899px){.post{max-width:660px}}.post:not(:last-of-type){border-bottom:1px solid var(--border-color)}.post .post-meta-inline,.post .post-meta{font-size:1rem;margin-bottom:10px;color:var(--accent-alpha-70)}.post-meta-inline{display:inline}.post-title{--border: 2px dashed var(--accent);position:relative;color:var(--accent);margin:0 0 15px;padding-bottom:15px;border-bottom:var(--border);font-weight:normal}.post-title a{text-decoration:none}.post .post-tags-inline,.post .post-tags{margin-bottom:20px;font-size:1rem;opacity:.5}.post-tags{display:block}.post-tags-inline{display:inline}@media (max-width: 683px){.post-tags-inline{display:block}}.post-content{margin-top:30px}.post-cover{border:20px solid var(--accent);background:rgba(0,0,0,0);margin:40px 0;padding:20px}@media (max-width: 683px){.post-cover{padding:10px;border-width:10px}}.post ul{list-style:none}.post ul li:before{content:"►";position:absolute;left:-20px;color:var(--accent)}.post--regulation h1{justify-content:center}.post--regulation h2{justify-content:center;margin-bottom:10px}.post--regulation h2+h2{margin-top:-10px;margin-bottom:20px}.post-list .post-date{color:var(--accent-alpha-70);text-decoration:none}.post-list a{text-decoration:none}.post-list .post-list-title{text-decoration:underline}.post-list .post-tag{text-decoration:underline}
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+File should start from this:
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+title = "EXAMPLE"
+date = 2022-01-01
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+[taxonomies]
+tags = ["example", "example2", "example3"]
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+than paragraph for the short reading and than
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+
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+at the bottom should be following:
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+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us [here](https://www.citizencosmos.space/staking))
+
+- [EVMOS](https://wallet.keplr.app/chains/evmos?modal=validator&chain=evmos_9001-2&validator_address=evmosvaloper1mtwvpdd57gpkyejd566s24afr9zm5ryq8gwpvj)
+- [ATOM](https://wallet.keplr.app/chains/cosmos-hub?modal=validator&chain=cosmoshub-4&validator_address=cosmosvaloper1e859xaue4k2jzqw20cv6l7p3tmc378pc3k8g2u)
+- [BOOT](https://wallet.keplr.app/chains/bostrom?modal=validator&chain=bostrom&validator_address=bostromvaloper1f7nx65pmayfenpfwzwaamwas4ygmvalqj6dz5r)
+
+Join our [community](https://discord.gg/kJaG3EucCX), to build a future where communication is decentralized. May the code be with you!
+
+INSTEAD OF - CURRENTPAGENAME - you should write name of the page that you created. ALso don't use caps.
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+User-agent: *
+Disallow:
+Allow: /
+Sitemap: https://citizenweb3.github.io/manuscripts/sitemap.xml
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+ Citizen Web3 blog
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Episode name: Willy Ogorzaly, values, DAO's & the best day ever
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Transcript of the Episode:
+
[00:00:00] Citizen Cosmos: Good space-time ya’ll! Welcome to the new Citizen Cosmos episode, and today we have Willy Ogorzaly with us, the head of the decentralization at the ShapeShift DAO. Hi!
+
[00:01:33] Willy: What’s up, everyone? How are you?
+
[00:01:37] Citizen Cosmos: Great! How are you? How is the sunny state of Colorado?
+
[00:01:39] Willy: It's a sunny day out here, I'm having the best day ever so far. What about you?
+
[00:01:44] Citizen Cosmos: Good, also sunny. So, ShapeShift. So much noise, so many years, such a big project. Do you want to maybe introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what you, what does it mean to be the head of decentralization?
+
[00:01:59] Willy: I've been part of ShapeShift for almost four years now, and I had the pleasure of being a part of it when it was a centralized corporation then, last year in July, we announced that we're becoming a DAO, and over the next six months we worked on transitioning from a centralized corporation to a DAO. Employees were let go in three waves, and meanwhile, we were building up the DAO deploying work streams. Things have been going well, we’re about nine months into this DAO journey. The Shape has pivoted a bit so when we first started in 2014, we were the first non-custodial exchange where you could trade crypto across chains from your own wallet rather than depositing it onto a centralized exchange. It started right after the Mount Gox fiasco. It was built as a solution to having to deposit funds onto a centralizing exchange and give up trust, so we were doing cross-chain trading before d5, before DeX, and before Ethereum. So when we saw the advent of these decentralized exchanges, we were impressed and realized that these decentralized exchanges were doing a better job at ShapeShift’s original vision and that way to do this was to decentralize protocol so that you could list any new token as soon as it came up and be permissionless so that people could come to list their own tokens. We embraced these decentralized exchanges, integrated the DeX and Etherium, we integrated Thor chain the day that they launched mainnet. The day that we integrated Thor chain, we sunset our own trading desk, so now you can think about ShapeShift as a free open source community-owned and soon decentralized interface between users private keys and
+decentralized protocols. We support multiple wallets, we support multiple chains, and we support multiple protocols on those chains. Now, you can come and buy, sell, receive, trade, and the yield on cryptos on 11 different blockchains.
+
[00:03:42] Citizen Cosmos: And it's all non-custodial, right?
+
[00:03:45] Willy: Yeah. Non-custodial is our core value. We’re all about financial sovereignty, and another one of our core values is the multi-chain future we've always believed in Shape. We love Etherium, we love Bitcoin, we love Cosmos, and Shape is the interface where you can do things on all these different chains and even across chains.
+
[00:04:03] Citizen Cosmos: Tell me about the journey. In crypto, a project that has worked for 8 years now, that’s like history. How was this journey for you personally?
+
[00:04:18] Willy: For me personally, it's been an awesome journey, and we've been through several market cycles. We've seen a lot of ups and downs. My first experience with ShapeShift was in 2017 when my friend showed me an easy way to trade, and I just thought it was so cool I've always liked altcoins and cool visions, so I'm always looking for the next hot thing, and so at the end of 2017 I started a company called Bitfract, and it was the first tool where you could trade Bitcoin for multiple cryptocurrencies in a single transaction. It was built on top of ShapeShift, you could buy any of the tokens or coins that ShapeShift had supported, and you could choose what percentage you wanted of each coin, send in Bitcoin, and then we’d use ShapeShift to execute trades and then send all the crypto to you whatever addresses you had put. That was a pretty awesome experience and six months after we started that, ShapeShift acquired Bitfract and we were brought on to a team to build a new version of ShapeShift. This is the time when ShapeShift was realizing that the original exchange model had regulatory issues with it and we came to the conclusion that we needed to implement KYC to continue offering trading functionality. Before KYC ShapeShift was the leading way to trade crypto non-custodial and after we implemented KYC we lost a lot of our users and our volume and our revenues. A lot of our existing users started in even wallets that had integrated ShapeShift to power their trades and didn’t want to start requiring KYC so they implemented a lot of the copycat projects that had kind of done the same thing that ShapeShift had done but without requiring KYC. That was a tough couple of years. We had
+to spend months building this KYC functionality and not only into our products but into our organization bringing on compliance teams. So that was a lot of effort that really ended up hurting us more in the long run and I wish we could go back in time and just realize that we should just stop the trading thing now, we shouldn't go down this centralized route, we should instead start embracing these decentralized protocols even though the centralized exchanges weren't quite feasible yet. That was one of the challenges. We didn't have the option at the time to just plug into these centralized exchanges because they hadn't been built yet. So retrospectively that was probably not the right decision but at the time there were reasons that it made sense for us to make that switch at the time. Once we saw the decentralized exchanges actually working and able to handle the liquidity and the volume that we had with our users, we immediately integrated them. Since then things have been going great, we were able to remove KYC which made our product better. Now, as a DAO, things are going better than ever. Some of the differences before ShapeShift got decentralized, we were closed source so we could only build however much as we had internal bandwidth to build and there's so much to build in the cryptocurrency world. We wanted to integrate all these protocols, all these chains we were always limited in how much we could prioritize. Also, things were pretty secret at ShapeShift. We had a big separation between the internal employees and team and our actual users in the broader community and I always hate it. We'd be working on cool stuff but I couldn't talk about it at conferences, I couldn't tell anybody about it until it was live. Now everything is open, we have public meetings every day in the discord and anyone can just come in and hang out which is really awesome. I like being able to be just fully transparent and it's powerful because now we have the support of the community in ShapeShift. we have such an awesome community because we have been around for so long. We’re a recognizable brand and we recently deployed an airdrop after a million users joined us. One of my favorite parts about the DAO is just the awesome power of the community builders all around the world coordinating every day and coming up with cool ideas, sharing their unique perspectives to achieve this vision and we are now moving faster towards this vision. We're spending less than we did at a centralized company, we're earning more revenues and this is nine months into it so we're just getting started.
+
[00:08:17] Citizen Cosmos: This is fantastic! We’re all here to see how products progress from centralization to decentralization. In your opinion, how should the applications be launched in Web3? In decentralized manner or start centralized and move towards decentralization?
+
[00:08:55] Willy: It's a really interesting question! I'm a big fan of decentralization. I think the sooner you can get to that the better. When ShapeShift started it wasn't possible to be a decentralized organization. We had no choice. But if I were starting a new project today I would absolutely push to start it as a DAO because once you do start it as a centralized organization, then it's more difficult to transition to a DAO. With a Shift, it was pretty interesting though. Huge props to Eric and John for getting our shareholders on board with the idea of transitioning to a DAO. There were some advantages. The fact that ShapeShift had been around for a while, we weren't just starting from scratch we had a community, not just our internal employees who all knew each other and worked together well but also our users, so I think that was pretty advantageous and we were able to do a lot of work as a team internally to then launch the DAO successfully. We were able to build the DAO stack, build the governance process and gift it to the community. I talked to a lot of people now who are working on new projects and I encourage them to go the DAO route because it will pay off in the end. I also think progressive decentralization is important. You don't have to start day one being fully decentralized - it is difficult, right now there aren’t many tools where you can do everything you need to do as an organization in a decentralized way. But as long as you're progressively getting more decentralized and as long as you're transparent with your community about where points of centralization are, then I think that's fine and you can work together as a community to address each of those points.
+
[00:11:02] Citizen Cosmos: As somebody who has already been through the whole journey of going from a centralized to a centralized company, what would be your number one advice to those who have already started doing their projects but not in a decentralized way?
+
[00:11:24] Willy: I think it's a challenge when you want to launch your DAO but you want to make sure that you're ready to launch the MVP and ideally an MLP. You don't need to have everything figured out as long as you have that core framework where people can come in and pass proposals and start contributing and coordinating. That's a great place to start and once you have that, you need to some dank memes. You need to make it really clear what your DAO is about, and why anybody who hears about your DAO should be interested and get involved. How can you distill that into a really clear and like Bitcoin. ShapeShift is like the one-stop shop for cross-chain DeFI. I think we still need to work on that mem so it's catchy.
+From that you know you can have all the actual cartoons and pictures and funny stuff that go
+viral and capture people's attention but that's so valuable because the DAO is all about the community and so you need to start building that community. I also had experience working with Giveth. That was amazing to see unfold in real life when people all around the world just
+come join the community and say they believe and share the same vision. It's so powerful and you need to make it really clear to somebody why they would want to get involved with your community and then make it easier for them to onboard. Think about the user experience of like somebody who actually then lands in your Discord, they land on your form, how can you make it really easier for them to get engaged start contributing and then reward them with your governance tokens? You can figure out that cycle where people can hear about your DAO, get involved, become owners, and contribute and add value. Then you're off to a great start and the rest can just be built by the community.
+
[00:13:14] Citizen Cosmos: In your opinion, is a DAO suitable for any type of product? Let’s say podcast? What would DAO do in a podcast?
+
[00:13:25] Willy: I like to think that DAO really can apply to just about any business. First of all, DAOs can be designed really however you want. They can be flat, they can have a hierarchy. When you can have a podcast company with shareholders or a podcast DAO and bring each of your guests, you can give some tokens so that they have an owner in your DAO. You can create just about any kind of business, any organization, you can either do it with a bank account and with a legal entity or you can do it with a treasury on a chain. It now makes the most sense for these digital communities or technology software companies or protocols, but I don't see any reason why it's in the future it's not going to be easier to start a DAO. With a DAO, you’ll be able to do all the things you can do as a centralized corporation except for having bank accounts and can't sign contracts but everything else you can do. There’re multiple things you can do with DAO. Why would you start an LLC if you could just go online?
+
[00:14:30] Citizen Cosmos: I really don’t understand why anybody wants to start LLC. That’s crazy. You have a good point. The idea of minting NFTs and giving the to guests and then listeners has been on my mind for a while. I have a slightly different question. What is the future of DAOs? Where are we headed? What’s it going to be in 5 years?
+
[00:15:12] Willy: I think we have barely begun to scratch the surface of like what's possible with DAOs and you can just see where DAOs are today and where they were a year ago or two years ago. It comes so far, and they're continuing to innovate, and now the pace of innovation is accelerated because there are all these real doubts that need solutions. There's a huge opportunity for entrepreneurs to build these solutions. I think we're just getting started, and what we’re making at ShapeShift we’re solving most of the relevant problems. Our goal is to dissolve ourselves, and we will do that once ShapeShift is completely decentralized, and there's no need for the illegal entity, no central points of failure. Our mission is to remove all the central points of failure, and replace them with decentralized alternatives so that we can dissolve ourselves and pass complete control over to the community.
+
[00:16:30] Citizen Cosmos: It's interesting you mentioned values goals. What was the original motivation for ShapeShift to be created? And what is the big goal of the DAO right now?
+
[00:17:20] Willy: I would say we stayed true to our values from day one and the core values that were founded on financial sovereignty enabling financial sovereignty for billions of individuals across the world borderless, unstoppably, trustlessly. I think we've done a great job sticking to that, and people also always believe in this multi-chain future where there's value beyond Bitcoin, beyond Ethereum, and that if this feature is going to exist, then there should be a way where any individual can access this feature in a way where they're not giving up custody or trust or they can't be censored or stopped. So I think that’s cool because the industry has evolved around us and so the way that we've tried to tackle that vision has evolved absolutely. Now, we are embracing just all of these decentralized protocols that new ones were getting built every single day, and I just think that's so cool. It’s hard for me to imagine a more important mission. If we can enable that and bring that to the masses, that is going to have more of an impact on society than anything else that I can think of. You can have all these cool decentralized protocols but if the actual interfaces themselves or if they back in the blockchain data the user needs to be able to access this itself decentralized and we can't really enjoy this decentralized future. So ShapeShift is in a great position to solve that because we've been running nodes interacting with these chains since 2014. We have a ton of experience doing this and doing it in a noncustodial way. Not only do we have this amazing team that's been working at ShapeShift for eight years but we've got this awesome community. Now that we’re open-source, we’ve been putting bounties on GitCoin, and ShapeShift is now a top project on GitCoin for putting bounties out.
+
[00:19:30] Citizen Cosmos: This is so cool, man! I didn't know that ShapeShift was the number one project offering tasks on GitCoin. What is now the main goal of the DAO except for financial sovereignty?
+
[00:19:59] Willy: If you go to app.shapeshift.com, you could see the new Cosmos functionality. It's beautiful, it's super easy to use, and they're no fees added ever so you can think of us as an aggregator. We build really great UI/UX, and you can come to apps.js.com, buy, sell and receive and yield in crypto all for free and across chains. So our trade page it looks a lot like uni spot where you can trade one asset for another and put the amounts
+but it's also got a Thor chain in that same interface. Not only can you trade all the Ethereum assets but you can also trade Ethereum for Bitcoin. The way we're building all this, too is with abstraction layers so that we build one UI/UX. We're constantly optimizing that and then any protocol that shares that same UI/UX, which is like a lot of the trading protocols like an exact lot of lending protocols, the same a lot of the single asset staking yield protocols. You approve the token, you choose the amount you deposit, and you see numbers go up, so the way we are building things is so that once we build this UI/UX, it's very easy for other protocols to integrate themselves. For example, the first yield generating protocol we integrated was yearned, and right now we're working on the abstraction layer, and we have idle finance ready to come to integrate them or put a bounty up to get integrated, and we're actually going to partner with them on this bounty. They're going to put up half the funds from their treasury, we're going to put half the funds from our treasury, and then anyone in the community who wants to come to integrate idle can just come to plug it into our existing UX/UI. Now that we have Cosmos support, it’s very easy for us to support all the Cosmos zones. There's a bounty also up from Osmosis, this is another joint bounty from the Osmosis
+community to get integrated into ShapeShift, and this is in progress. and now that our Cosmos support is much easier for us. Soon, Osmosis will be sending, receiving, staking, trading and liquidity providing, and bonding. Then we want to support all the Cosmos zones. If you're Cosmos dev listening to this, come integrate yourself into ShapeShift or come put a bounty you have to get integrated. The other reason I'm excited about is bridging. Enabling bridging between Etherium between Cosmos so that in one place, you can connect your Keplr, your metamask, or you can connect the ShapeShift wallet, and it supports both. All free, open source, and soon - fully decentralized.
+
[00:22:32] Citizen Cosmos: This is my next question. When are we going to see foxchain on Cosmos?
+
[00:22:39] Willy: If you guys haven't heard about fox chain it is the new Cosmos zone that's under development and collaboration with ShapeShift, and we're also working with coinbase cloud on building this out, and they've been awesome. Shout out to coinbase cloud team. It's in the early stages of development; we're in like the research phase right now so we're kind of designing all the protocol, we're doing models, and stuff with tokenomics. Basically, what a fox chain is, it's a network to incentivize node operators to provide blockchain data to end users. We need this for ShapeShift to be decentralized. We've always operated the nodes ourselves, but we need in order to fully decentralize and for the foundation to dissolve we need to have another source of blockchain data, ideally a decentralized source. That doesn't exist yet so what fox chain does is incentivize node operators to run nodes for any blockchain they want to run notes for it and then get rewarded in fox tokens. We need it for ourselves, but any DAO that actually wants to be decentralized and not just run their own nodes can plug into fox chain to get the blockchain data they need for their users. We’re expecting in to launch in early 2023.
+
[00:24:40] Citizen Cosmos: When are you planning to launch the first test net for validators to come in already? Is there going to be an incentivized test net before it goes live in 2023?
+
[00:24:46] Willy: I'm sure there will be a test net, and I think hopefully, once we complete this research phase will have a better timeline for when that could be available.
+
[00:25:00] Citizen Cosmos: So the most important question - when airdrops of the new fox chain?
+
[00:25:02] Willy: That's what we're figuring out right now
+
[00:25:08] Citizen Cosmos: I see. So basically, is there any alfa? Should people go and buy more fox tokens now on Ethereum to get more airdrops in the future or not?
+
[00:25:18] Willy: I think I'm not supposed to say anything about that.
+
[00:25:20] Citizen Cosmos: I know, but still, I’m looking forward to that because. I have a controversial question. It’s a made-up story. You said that you know the first day you started working in ShapeShift there was the whole thing with the introduction of the KYC. Obviously, now things have changed, and things have progressed again. Who is to say that the foundation is still there or some of the company is still there, and something bad happens like the authorities would come and ask for the valuable data? Is there a possibility of it, considering there was such an incident already?
+
[00:26:22] Willy: As a foundation, we don't have that data so we specifically made sure that we receive the data necessary to continue operating ShapeShift legacy infrastructure until we could send, edit and migrate all of our users to the new open source which doesn't require KYC, doesn't have any tracking. The KYC laws require you to keep the data for five years after collecting it. But ShapeShift is required to keep that data but right now is pretty much operating in a skeleton mode. Almost all the employees have moved on and there's just a small skeleton group that's keeping ShapeShift alive basically for tax purposes this year and maybe just to like to be the custody of that data which is all encrypted, stored offline in cold storage. The data that we didn't want to collect but had to. We followed the rules. Fortunately, there was no reason for the foundation to receive this data because we don't need that to continue operating ShapeShift, so we specifically made sure that we didn't
+have access to the data, so if the regulators come to ask us for it, we can’t give it to them which feels pretty good.
+
[00:27:28] Citizen Cosmos: I understand what you mean - the less you know, the better you sleep. What is, in your opinion, the future of KYC and web3?
+
[00:27:48] Willy: I am excited for civil tools like the ability to know that an individual address is a real person. As long as users are in control of the data, they can choose whether or not to share their data. I think it's a much better status quo than we have right now and especially if there's options to do the thing that you want to do in finance without being required to share that data. Then I think that's a better world. I personally think that KYC is kind of ridiculous: requiring people to give up all their private information when normally it's like innocent until proven guilty, but here were assuming people are bad actors, and then it's a bad risk it's like we're just a honey pot. All this data that time and time again is going to get hacked, so I'm excited about the potential for web3 to enable users to at least have control over their data. I do think that there probably will be on-chain KYC types of things that do get built, and I probably won't myself use them. Maybe there are some benefits, maybe
+there's no potential for benefits, maybe it's possible that the people can come up with reasons. I don't think it needs to exist, and I believe in free sovereign finance, and we don't need KYC for that, so it will be interesting to see how it all plays out. These KYC protocols will get built, and some projects will choose to implement them and require them, and whether or not those projects can compete with the decentralized alternatives that don't require that, it's hard for me to imagine we'll see what they can come up with.
+
[00:29:10] Citizen Cosmos: I have a slightly different question. When I go on your Twitter account, you have a .eth nickname and laser eyes. How does that work? You have to explain this one.
+
[00:29:45] Willy: Ethereum was what got me into the space for sure. It was the first crypto that I bought, but very quickly, I became a fan of Bitcoin and I have a lot of appreciation for Bitcoin I personally think that Ethereum will flip into Bitcoin but who knows what's going to happen I definitely believe in a multi-chain world. I think that's a good way to just show that. I love Ethereum, but I also like Bitcoin and am open to other chains. I reject tribalism, and ultimately I think the real enemies are the banks, the legacy centralized infrastructure, and the regulators but not each other. We're on the same team, and it hurts me to see that the
+The bitcoin community is becoming so toxic and so maximalist. If the Bitcoin community continues going in that direction and Ethereum continues going in the same direction that is going, maybe I will get rid of the laser eyes.
+
[00:31:02] Citizen Cosmos: What is the value in your opinion of Bitcoin today?
+
[00:31:37] Willy: Before crypto, I used to like gold, so I really believe that fiat is the biggest evil, the biggest scam in history, and so I'm a big fan of hard money. I think Bitcoin is doing a great job at solving that. However, it's possible that Ethereum is going to do an even better job. There's not a lot you can do with your Bitcoin right now, and I see the transact fees that Bitcoin is generating right now. I see how much it costs to secure the network, and the block reward is going down, and right now, it's not clear if Bitcoins' actual model is going to be sustainable. On Ethereum not only can you do anything and have all these decentralized finance protocols that add a lot of value and that people are paying a lot to use because it's worth it, but Ethereum can also be money. If you can have hard money that has a utility that people are willing to pay for and have a monetary model where it’s deflationary but
+still sustainable, then that could be better than being sound money than Bitcoin, so I'm open to that. But right now, Bitcoin has a lot of liquidity, and it can still enable people to have financial sovereignty and to hold their own money and to send it to anyone across the world unstoppably, and so that's still very valuable I still think that's super freaking cool, and I appreciate everything that Bitcoin has done to enable what Ethereum and other blockchains are doing now.
+
[00:33:00] Citizen Cosmos: Yeah, I agree on most parts, though I’m not as enthusiastic about Bitcoin as you are, especially with all this toxicity.
+
[00:33:25] Willy: Actually, I got rid of my laser eyes a couple of days ago. I put a new picture. I did it because I didn't want my credibility to be hurt. However, I think Bitcoin needs to be worried because if Etherium can be better at being the sound money that right now they're, Bitcoin can’t compete. But Bitcoin has a strong community, they got a lot of supporters, and we'll see if they're able to survive I would be happy to live in a world where we have Bitcoin and Ethereum and they both co-exist.
+
[00:34:37] Citizen Cosmos: I have two more questions. The first one is more like a story about ShapeShift decentralization. How did somebody suddenly bring it on board? Can you deeper into the story?
+
[00:35:33] Willy: Shapeshift in early 2021 started going down this path. We could see a lot of the projects that were best achieving similar visions were structured as DAOs. A lot of the top DeFi projects were DAOs. I also had first-hand experience with the project for the hackathon, which was the DAO to save the world. We got first place and immediately afterward started building it, and we ended up joining forces with Giveth and building out the new version of Giveth. We built a DAO, we launched a token and built a community, and it was amazing to experience because I was able to do that in my free time. This was actually during the pandemic, so quarantine, lockdown, it's a perfect way for me to stay busy, so every week we're just having these community calls, and more people are joining the community. We built a beautiful product from scratch without any fundraising, just off of donations. That was pretty amazing to see when we were figuring out what is the best path forward for ShapeShift, and what's the best way we could achieve their dream. It was a heavy advocate for decentralization. We need to structure ourselves as a DAO, we need to drop fox tokens for all of our users and open source everything, and work with the community to build a community-owned interface to these decentralized protocols. At the
+time, I was excited about this whole DAO movement. I think it's so freaking cool that you can have these community-owned products and ecosystems and not have to have a centralized corporation with a CEO.
+
[00:38:41] Citizen Cosmos: The last question is a traditional question. You are so alive, so energetic! What on Earth motivates you to keep on staying, apart from the decentralization and the value of the building? Is there something in your daily life that you could share?
+
[00:39:15] Willy: For five years now, I've been saying it's the best day ever, every single day, so I kind of became known for that somewhat, and I love it. I think it's the right attitude to have. I love my job and the people that I work with. I'm passionate about what we’re working on, and it's fun. My values are to always, first of all, work on something you love, work with people that you love and stick to your values, and have fun!
+
[00:40:00] Citizen Cosmos: I like the number 1 rule; this is my biggest value.
+Thank you so much. It’s been a huge pleasure!
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here)
Stablecoins - a cryptocurrency with a fixed and stable rate, pegged to the price of fiat currency and with different collateral and reserves
+(whether cryptocurrency or fiat money). It is a popular and liquid medium as it is a convenient way to trade, store and protect your portfolio from volatility.
+After the collapse of UST, there was a debate about what a stablecoin really should be. We spoke with Youssef Amrani
+representing $IST, Chad Barraford representing Thorchain, Siddarth Patil representing $CMST,
+Carter Woetzel representing $SILK, Dove representing $USK, about what stablecoins are for,
+the different designs of stablecoins, what their purpose is, and the dangers of centralization.
+
+
+
Q: What are stablecoins and what are they for?
+
According to Youseff, stablecoin is a cryptocurrency that serves as a stable reserve asset, like the dollar, as well as a medium of exchange for daily transactions.
+It can also be a means to store value in the short term (because in the long term, stablcoins are often subject to inflation as well, though not as volatile as other
+cryptocurrencies) and a bridge between cryptocurrency and fiat currencies.
+Dove added that capital efficiency is really key, and that trading in a stablecoin pair obviously carries much less risk compared to pairs with two volatile assets.
+
According to Chad, it's also a way to change your risk profile.
+If you expect the markets to go down, you can sell your asset(bitcoin or whatever) and then buy again at the bottom.
+What Carter is saying is that we need decentralized stablecoins, not just stablecoins, because stablecoin with no decentralization is not much different than a regular
+real world dollar. Unlike decentralized stablcoins, which have the advantage of open source, transparency, and no censorship.
+
Q: Is there a risk of repeating the failures of previous algo-stablecoins and how to avoid repeating such scenarios?
+
Youseff agreed that after the algo-stablecoin incidents (mainly the Terra crash and their algo-stablecoin UST) there may be some concern.
+But that doesn't mean that experiments should stop, because such things take time to build something that works perfectly.
+Most likely, the design of the UST stablecoin was not entirely successful, and the new algo stablecoins can learn from that experience.
+In the opinion of Chad, there have been 4 or 5 different stablecoins in the last few years, and they have all failed for various reasons.
+All of the algo-stablecoins have a different structure, a different design, and when a particular stablecoin fails, it informs the rest of the industry about what
+didn't work and why it didn't work. This gives developers of new stablecoins a chance to look at the failed experience and not make the same mistakes, but to move on.
+And the designs of subsequent stablecoins will already protect against such scenarios.
+But if it didn't work 5 times before, that doesn't mean that it won't work the 6th time. So you shouldn't discard algo-stablecoins just because Terra or someone
+else had a problem before.
+
Q: What's the special design of your stablecoins that you represent? And why do you think it should and will work?
+
In our particular project, the stablecoin is in its own chain - said Chad. If you sell a coin that's tied to an asset on the secondary market at a different price
+than the primary market, that's not a problem. But people get scared when they look at coinmarketcap, for example, and they see a different price than the primary
+market, they think it's depeg, but it's not. For example, when I buy an Apple computer, and then sell it for $400 cheaper, it doesn't mean that the Apple computer is
+depegged. It's just that I'm selling the asset on the secondary market at a different price than the primary market. So there was often a problem in the secondary
+market. When the secondary market could squeeze the primary market. The tail was wagging the dog. So the first thing that Thorchain makes is the absence of secondary
+markets, that is, you can only buy and sell in our own Thorchain. In our case, we have no external dependencies, and nothing in Thorchain depends on anything.
+We design the stablecoin in a way that eliminates price manipulation to make it economically unprofitable. So that if someone wanted to profit from Thorchain,
+they would lose more money than they would make. So we have USDC, we have USDT, we have DAI, we have FRAX, maybe others will be added, then the network takes their
+aggregate, Takes the median, not the average, but the median of these things to understand the price of RUNE in dollars. So to make a depeg, you have to manipulate
+the price of 51% of the pools and if you try to do that, the trading volume, the commissions will go up very high, the fees go up like crazy. That makes it
+impractical to manipulate these pools.
+
According to Siddarath, when they first announced their intention to create their own stablecoin, they looked at various models and realized that the most
+reliable model at the time and which had stood the test of time against volatility was the overcollateralized model that MakerDAO created for DAI. It is important
+for them not to try to stray too far from what has already proven to be effective. So broadly because they have a fully functioning dex, they have a fully
+functioning money market on their chain as well. They want to unlock for users different types of leverage strategies that they could create themselves. So one
+example is you start with stAtom, you collateralize, you mint the stablecoin, with the stablecoin you buy more ATOM, which you turn into stAtom and so on. Similarly,
+you could do that with, let's say, you know, providing liquidity to an stAtom-Atom pool on the DEX where you have the LP token. When it comes to $IST, we're not
+trying to reinvent the wheel, and we're also inspired by DAI Stablecoin because it just works. At IST, we are also aiming to have use cases from day one. In our
+case, we're doing something that hasn't launched yet, but will very soon, where all payments will be made on the Agoric blockchain. So we will have a lot of
+applications built on Agoric that will use IST to pay for gas.
+
As for $SILK, the key difference is that Silk is private and tied to a basket of world currencies and commodities, says Carter.
+
We have a queue based approach and then people can bid on those liquidations at the asset values,
+if that capital falls bellow the threshold then the regular liquidate is come in. We've seen it in the most extreme scenario ever. And it's interesting because you
+still get people really wanting to buy that collateral. Obviously, Terra was a pretty extreme example. It's not that often that a project like that just unwinds to
+zero basically. I think it's always good to kind of let you know have a backstop of some kind. And in this case it can just these like heavy hitter liquidators that
+come in. I don't think I'm saying anything new, but I mean the DAI model has been proven and of course you always have to be on your toes - Dove said.
+
Q: And yet, why do we need stablecoins, since no perfectly stablecoin has ever existed in the world?
+
When we say stablecoin, we mean a relatively stable coin. That doesn't mean it can't go up or down in value. Nothing can be 100% stable, as far as I can tell.
+It's a question of how volatile the asset is, high volatility or low volatility, says Chad.
+
Youseff gave the example of fiat currency, where the transfer fees reach 3% or even 10% and this is a very large amount. And stablecoins in this direction can be an
+interesting option to use.
+
I think I've said this before, but it makes a lot of sense. I agree with Youseff, because when you live in South America, in addition to the 10% commission, you also
+get inflation. So like I said, even in the Kujira ecosystem it's an important thing. Why do we need stablecoin? Well, we think it's a more efficient way to use
+capital, but more importantly, it allows people to transact with something that they're familiar with and then move through an ecosystem like Kujira or, you know,
+like Shade, like Comdex, like Thorchain, and be able to use their money effectively, even if it's pegged to the dollar, it's important for people to have something
+with which they can say, "Okay, here's my paycheck, it's worth it". I think having a stable stable fin ecosystem is a big deal. And, as we've all said, there will be
+many iterations of all of our stablecoins. And you know, things like that get a little safer over time, so I think the Terra case was an exception and a lesson - Dove says.
+
So, you have a community gathered around a token, but if you can also have a secondary token on top of that token, which is a stable currency, then you can close the
+loop. So you'll have a community culture, you'll have the token itself that you can make money from because you believe in the community, you believe in the project.
+And you also have a stable currency for transactions between the two. And, on top of that, you can do it locally. We can imagine a world where you have tens of
+thousands of stablecoins, each one meeting a specific need in the local community, say 10,000 or 100,000 people. And then you can connect them with more global
+stablecoins, and all these stablecoins coexist peacefully and are a fulcrum for the community. So even in that respect, I think stablecoins can have an interesting
+purpose - added Youseff.
+
At the end, we asked for tips that relate to stablecoins:
+
Dove's advice is to double check the project. You can find out what the project is set up for, how the oracles work, design issues, and so on. You don't need to know
+too much about technology, just ask "how it should work and how it will protect us".
+
Chad said he wouldn't invest much money in any new stablecoins. In his opinion, the credibility of stablecoins increases over time. So yes, don't invest your savings
+in stablecoins, probably anytime soon. And the older the coin, the more trustworthy it should be. I would say don't get too involved in any stablecoins, including my own too
+early on.
+
Carter also agreed that this is a very young industry and mechanisms will get better and more perfect over time. And it is not worth investing your money in
+stablecoins at such an early stage. Even so, ask questions about the mechanics, learn as much as you can, and realize that you are still an early innovator.
+Enjoy this time in history.
+
Siddarath also agreed with Dove. And he added that we need to ask questions and dig deeper. And if you can't find answers to your questions, it's probably done on
+purpose.
+
I think everything that has been said has been pretty well said by people here, just be careful. The type of collateral backed by stablecoin, as well as the
+minting limits, is an important marker - says Youseff.
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:
What's happening in the cryptocurrency market? We're in a deep bear market. Crypto is gradually decreasing. Some investors lose their patience, causing intense panic. Selling at the bottom of the market means fixing prices. Buying at the top of the market when the crypto is at its peak is by far not the most intelligent move.
+
The best strategy, in this case, is to buy more coins from fundamental projects such as Cosmos while the price is moderate. But what to do if you have already entered the crypto with all available funds? Learn more below.
+
Insider information.
+
Let's take a closer look at a couple of recent news:
+
+
According to Sam Bankman-Fried, exchanges do not have the liquidity they claim.
+
+
Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, said that some interactions are already secretly insolvent.
+
Some small crypto exchanges are “quasi-insolvent.” So it was stated in an interview with Forbes by FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, although he did not specify which deals he was talking about. However, he noted that some companies have "gone too far."
+
“There are companies that have gone too far. It's impractical to support them because of a significant breach in the corporate account, regulatory issues, and because there isn't much business left to save."
+
+
Coinbase announced plans for expansion in the crypto market. They already have offices in Germany and the UK, and soon there will be offices in the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, and France.
“During market downturns, it can be tempting to shy away from international expansion. However, we first launched in the UK and EU during the bear market in 2015, and the move paid off when the recovery began a few years later. We will continue to expand globally and make everything possible to develop cryptoeconomics."
+
This news informs us that a stock market collapse is possible soon. As a result, many scam projects will close and disappear, as well as several crypto exchanges with fake liquidity.
+
But at the same time, the big players are planning to continue their expansion, hoping to capture market share as long as conditions are favorable.
+
The decline of the crypto markets may continue. Some players and market participants will not survive this fall.
+
At the same time, after such a substantial fall, there will be a reversal and rapid growth. The major players are preparing for this growth by opening additional European offices.
+
Conclusions
+
We have already mentioned that you should not store your coins in custodial wallets. Considering everything described above, keeping cash on exchanges is not reasonable. A collapse may happen in the crypto market, and it would be better if you found a haven for your coins. After that, only real projects will remain afloat, and all the scam projects will cease to exist.
+
Strategy
+
You may ask, where is this quiet and safe harbor to save the coins? Of course, cold non-custodial wallets are the obvious way out. However, there is a simpler and more efficient way - staking!
+
Staking using non-custodial wallets is the most reasonable strategy. Your coins will remain stored in your non-custodial wallet. When staking, your funds are not dead weight.
+
As usual, the bear market turns into a bull market rather quickly. Not everyone has time to jump into a rocket taking off. At this moment, it is essential to already be on board!
+
The results are simple:
+
+
Do not sell coins at the bottom of the market. It will only bring you losses
+
Get ready for a storm that will sink the scammers and keep your coins safe
+
Securely stake coins using non-custodial staking and increase your funds
+
Prepare for a sudden high-speed take-off, and don't leave the spaceship, so the rocket doesn't take off without you
+
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:
Sometimes you need to send your tokens from one chain to another using Keplr. But many people really struggle with this. We made this guide for newbies to show how you can do this. We will show it on Osmosis to Evmos transfer. So, let’s go.
+
First, you need to turn Advanced IBC transfers on
+
+
Then, you need to copy your Evmos address
+
+
Then, you need to add New IBC Transfer Channel
+
+
And add EVMOS channel
+
+
And now you can transfer your tokens
+
+
Now, after you sent your tokens from Osmosis to Evmos you can stake them.
+
Click stake
+
+
You find a validator and click Manage
+
+
You enter the amount you want to delegate, and click Delegate. As a good practice you should leave some tokens for future fees
+
+
Then, you need to approve the transaction with Keplr
+
That’s it. You have transferred tokens from Osmosis to Evmos and staked them.
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:
The 72nd episode of the Citizen Cosmos podcast was dedicated to the Stride Labs project that provides liquidity for staked assets. Serj talked to the co-founder of the project, Riley Edmund, about ledger compatibility, the process of choosing a validator, DeFi economics, Riley’s path toward blockchain, and much more. Find out the recap of the discussion below.
+
+
+
Stride Labs and ledger compatibility
+
Riley described his project and goals. He pointed out that Stride Labs is a product app blockchain in the Cosmos ecosystem that allows liquid stake tokens across any IBC-compatible chain. It aims to disrupt the cycle of social and technological inequality and support the non-profit business objectives by providing affordable services for effective technology leveraging. One of the main things introduced as a part of this goal-achieving process is ledger compatibility. It is an ambitious plan to make the ledger compatible with multiple networks and wallets. It already supports Osmosis and Cosmos is already on its way. This will allow us to go to the pool on Osmosis, trade into Atom, and start gaining rewards. That’s the beauty of liquid staking, according to Riley.
+
How to choose a validator the right way?
+
Another lively topic discussed was the validation process and how to choose a validator. Riley mentioned the Nakamoto coefficient, which states that a certain number of validators will control one-third of the stake. Stride aims to increase this coefficient. When choosing the validator, the Stride team follows a simple method of governance: they’ve listed the validators already in Cosmos and allowed the Stride token holders to vote to increase the weight of their preferred validator. The team plans to create voting vaults for particular ecosystems to avoid Stride being held by only a few whales that would keep voting on a specific validator to increase their weight in the liquid staking. This way, the Cosmos community would vote for the Atom validator set, the Juno community on the Juno set, and so on. This attitude to choosing a validator is especially important for smaller underrepresented communities.
+
DeFi and economic sustainability
+
Regarding how DeFi economics is progressing, Riley emphasizes the role of IBC in terms of tokenomics and how DeFi products entered the market. He also mentioned that there had been a ton of inflationary reward-based DeFi apps in the past. Now, it is moving toward sustainable business models where actual yield and revenue are acknowledged and rewarded. There’s also been a shift towards distributed app-specific chains that have control over the full layer of the stack, and tokenomics are starting to shift toward sustainable business models similar to web2. Finally, according to Riley, we’re moving away from trusted intermediaries to trustless and sustainable DeFi.
+
+
Inspiration & challenges
+
Usually, we ask our guests about their way toward crypto and blockchain. This time was no exception. Riley shared his blockchain story and the difficulties he and his team faced when launching Stride. He said his main inspiration to start building was his experience in Bridgewater. He observed how the centralized financial system operates and compared it with the benefits of the decentralized one. Not being able to change the state of affairs completely, he nonetheless saw the opportunities to make minor impacts that would affect the future using DeFi.
+One of the main unexpectedness faced by Riley and his team was that Stride was initially conceived as a side project, yet turned out to be one of the influential blockchain projects. Because of that, they were urged to hire more developers and engineers but didn’t have time. Today, Stride has only four engineers, while the desired amount is at least eight, so there’s still a way to go.
+
Wrapping up
+
Apart from the topics mentioned above, Riley shared his insights and gave excellent advice to blockchain newbies regarding research. Moreover, he shared his motivation, a crucial part of every Citizen Cosmos podcast. Riley is passionate about exploring, and so are we, and we hope we were able to encourage you to keep exploring the ecosystem with us!
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here)
Corporations, large Internet sites, electronic services, applications on your smartphone, and God knows who else... Everyone collects and analyzes your data: geolocation, behavioral responses, and personal correspondence.
+
There are several data types about a person, and not all of them are created by him. Here is a far from a complete list of data that are of great interest and are in high demand:
+
+
+
Automatically generated location data
+This is information about the location of a cell phone or device from which you go online or keep it in your pocket.
+
+
+
Service Data
+This is information that a site or service needs to provide you with a service—typically your first name, last name, phone number, shipping address, and credit card information.
+
+
+
Voluntary public-controlled data
+This is the type of information you leave on the Web voluntarily, consciously, and proactively and want to be available to the public. At the same time, as a data producer, you have complete control over their availability.
+
+
+
Voluntary public but uncontrolled data
+There are specific platforms where your comments on other people's posts are out of your control, and you can't delete or edit them.
+
+
+
Biometric data
+The market for wearable devices is growing (fitness bracelets that measure heart rate, fingerprint and voice control sensors, etc.). This is because our body has several activity indicators and unique identifiers.
+
+
+
Attributed data
+There is information about you on the Internet that others possess, and you may not even know about it. For example, if your friend wrote a post about you and did not tell you, there is a piece of information about you that you have nothing to do with.
+
+
+
Behavioral Data
+The information about your activity on the website is collected, analyzed, and converted into a portrait of your preferences and hobbies.
+
+
+
Medical Data
+Medical level readings of heart rate monitors, blood glucose meters, body thermometers, smart inhalers for asthmatics that analyze the composition of residual air in the lungs, data on visits to doctors, medical history, test results, prescribed medications, whether you have allergies, phobias, and mental deviations - all this information in most developed countries has long been computerized and stored exclusively in digital form.
+
+
+
Collateral data
+The essence of this data perfectly captures the ancient folk wisdom, "Tell me who your friend is, and I will tell you who you are." For example, if you have 70% of your followers on Facebook that is gay, then it's highly likely that you are too. If 80% of your searches are related to musical instruments, studios and music, you are probably a musician. The conclusions that can be drawn from complex data are astounding. For example, Facebook can predict with a high degree of certainty which candidate a user in their country will vote for. And your cellular operator, if desired, can find out if you are cheating on your wife/husband because it knows who, when, and where you are calling and with which contact persons you intersect in space (if they use the services of the same operator).
+
+
+
Secretly collected data
+We will not dwell too much on the data collected by the special services and their methods. Edward Snowden told everyone about this in detail. However, remember that intelligence agencies and highly skilled hackers always have the theoretical ability to remotely connect to your computer and turn on your camera or microphone without your knowledge, record everything you type, or secretly take a screenshot of a working window.
+
+
+
Heroes of viral memes
+
In addition, there is a tremendous amount of information about you posted by other users on the network: photos from parties, funny short videos, screenshots of private correspondence, and much more. The scandalous pictures and videos of famous people pop up here and there like mushrooms after the rain is above mentioning.
+
We are talking about people who find themselves in a funny or ridiculous situation and burn with shame. There are quite a few cases of bullying individuals for this or information that got into the network. Some of them were in danger and forced to change residence. The story of Edgar Maddison Welch of Salisbury, who burst into a pizzeria armed with an automatic rifle after reading materials related to Pizzagate, is indicative.
+
They say that "the Internet remembers everything." Since then, laws have been passed that sometimes allow information to be removed from the public domain. Yet another aspect arises.
+
The right to be forgotten vs. freedom of speech
+
The right to be forgotten is closely linked to the right to freedom of speech, press, and information. At the same time, several experts believe that the right to be forgotten is a severe legal regression since it accompanies the emergence of problems of censorship and manipulation of information, infringing on freedom of speech and the right to free access to information - fundamental human rights enshrined at the national (including at the level constitutions) and the international legal level (art. 19 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights)
+
On the other hand, the right to be forgotten accompanies the right to inviolability of private and personal life since the result is the removal of information for socially valuable purposes from the general information field, to which an indefinite circle of persons has access, based on the principle of treating information as a thing, owned by a person on the right of ownership with all the ensuing consequences. Thus, the right to be forgotten becomes a bridge between freedom of information and privacy. In contrast, the right to disseminate/publicize information becomes the antipode of the right to be forgotten.
+
How is the right to be forgotten implemented today?
+
At the moment, a person who wants to remove information about himself from public access can legally apply to the Internet site with a request to remove materials related to him. You can go to court if the Internet resource refuses to comply with this requirement. In reality, however, it’s not as simple as most sites, and court rulings ignore these requirements.
+
However, Google has a dedicated support section detailing the possibilities for exercising the right to be forgotten due to the high volume of hits.
+https://support.google.com/legal/answer/10769224?hl=en
+
Our favorite blockchain
+
Now let's move on to the critical question. Blockchain. If "the Internet remembers everything," but there are specific levers for removing information from the public domain, what about the blockchain?
+
Everything can be written into the blockchain. Removing this information from the blockchain network will no longer be possible. It will stay there FOREVER! Anyone can access this information.
+
If we are talking about funny videos, we can Laugh and forget about it. But there are things more severe and tragic. So how to deal with it?
+
Summary
+
We'd like to see how the state budget moves to the blockchain: transparent transactions, controlled costs, and no closed areas. Blockchain is also instrumental in general voting. However, if an open public poll on the blockchain regarding setting wages for civil servants from the budget, it would be a combo! )))
+
But what to do with personal information that you would like to get rid of? We are all human, and we tend to make mistakes. Sometimes these errors become the subject of public attention. Living with the constant thought that an unsightly piece of your life can forever remain a record in the blockchain is not the best idea. By the way, the guys from the Black Mirror series foresaw this dilemma. Something similar describes the event from the series "All About You."
+
What to do with the new technological opportunities that come into our lives? How do we adapt to the new social conditions these technologies give rise to?
+
The question is earnest. I invite you to a public discussion. Please write in the comments what you think about it!
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:
What is a smart contract? Let's first see how a regular contract works. Two parties, A and B, want to conclude a contract. They need the services of a third party they can trust to keep up with the contract. Smart contracts eliminate dependency and enable the automatic execution of contracts. A smart contract is nothing more than a programmable behavior of the chain or even simpler, its a programmable behavior.
+
If we compare ordinary and smart contracts, smart contracts have apparent advantages.
+
Regular contracts require:
+
• A third party you can trust.
+Usually, lawyers, notaries, and the government enforces the contract.
+
• Time.
+Manually executing a contract can take a lot of time.
+
• Money transaction
+In conventional contracts, the transfer of funds is carried out manually, which adds more time to the final execution of the contract.
+
• Transparency
+Ordinary contracts cannot provide 100% transparency, because their clarity largely depends on the contract's third parties, intermediaries, and institutions involved.
+
• Storage
+The storage of contracts is usually a large and complex problem since most transactions are recorded on paper, and all records are stored in physical form.
+
• Expenses
+Traditional contracts require more expenses to pay for the services of intermediaries.
+
When using a smart contract:
+
• There is no third party to trust.
+A smart contract is executed automatically and does not require the involvement of intermediaries.
+
• Time
+A smart contract is executed quickly, in minutes, when the specified conditions occur.
+
• Money transaction
+In smart contracts, all conditions are predetermined and set in advance. As soon as the condition is met, the transfer of funds is carried out automatically.
+
• Transparency
+100% transparency around the clock. Any party can view the terms and transactions of the smart contract.
+
• Storage
+Smart contracts do not require paper storage and allow you to instantly track the entire history of the fulfillment of the terms of the contract and transactions.
+
• Expenses
+Smart contracts offer low commissions because they do not require intermediaries to execute them. Only the commission of the leading blockchain network in which the smart contract is implemented is charged.
+
What is a smart contract?
+
Let's take an example from real life. You want to buy chocolate from a vending machine. You put a bill into the machine, press the button with the number of the chocolate you want to buy, and the machine gives you that particular chocolate. A smart contract is very similar to a vending machine. It eliminates the need for intermediaries and replaces the vendor.
+A smart contract is a self-executing contract that contains all the terms and conditions between the parties and participants of the agreement. The terms and conditions of the agreement are written in code that runs on a decentralized blockchain platform. Such agreements govern digital assets, shares, property, currencies, etc.
+
Let's take another example.
+
Rachel arrived at the airport, but her flight was delayed. However, this inconvenience can benefit Rachel, as according to the smart contract with the insurance company, she will instantly receive compensation for the delayed flight. Imagine that there is already a smart running contract with an insurance company. This contract tracks delayed flights, and as soon as the delay is more than 2 hours, all insured persons, including our Rachel, automatically receive compensation in their account.
+Let's see how it works.
+An insurance company issues its clients a smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain. This smart contract is connected to airport databases and keeps track of flight delays. If any flight is delayed by more than X hours, automatic compensation occurs, and Rachel gets the money into her account.
+
What are the bottom-line benefits of smart contracts?
+
• No intermediaries
+The advantages of smart contracts include the absence of the need for intermediaries and a third party.
+
• Automation
+The smart contract is executed automatically. All terms of the contract are written in the code. So you don't need to do anything manually.
+
• High speed
+The absence of intermediaries and the high speed of calculations make it possible to execute a smart contract quickly.
+
• Safety
+The contract data is stored in a decentralized system and cannot be changed.
+
• Accuracy
+Depending on the terms and conditions of the contract, the requirements for its implementation are prescribed with high accuracy. All transactions are recorded in the blockchain ledger and become immutable. No one can edit or make changes to these entries.
+
In what areas do you think using smart contracts will be helpful?
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:
The universe of Proof of Stake and validating is growing by the block. The 15th of September 2022 saw ETH complete its merge and move to POS. This adds the largest crypto ecosystem to the total market cap of POS, which according to staking rewards was already at > 10% of
+the total MC prior to the merge itself. That's over 6 million users (stakers) before the merge and a lot more now. That's over 250 known providers (operators) before the merge and a lot more today. In fact, this is difficult to measure, but we are certain that the Cosmos ecosystem, alone, contains more than 250 providers.
+
The point and the mission
+
We view blockchains as cities. We have been talking about this for years. Finally, it seems that the narrative is catching up. If one was to take the statement that blockchains are developing cities as an assumption, then an obvious question is - where does that place the validators (those who run nodes as
+a service and / or as a business)?
+
At Citizen Cosmos we strongly believe that node runners, along with the infrastructure and the services they provide, can be seen as business startups are to a city. If the blockchain space is a universe of cities and each wallet is a citizen, then this easily makes the validators business owners. Where each business is competing for customers and for attention from the city in various ways. One builds more infra, another provides
+media services, another opens a bank, etc.
+
The irony comes when you think VC for a moment. In this case the VC becomes the delegators! Decentralzaioton and on-chain governance are with us for a while now. Those cities are user-manged. We delegate to the business we think will benefit our city the most. And just like a VC, we expect a return from the share of the business. In fact, in this case, we get a return of the business straight away. Every block. If we don't like the business or not happy with what they do, we redelagete. Sure - VC, isn't the perfect word. The point is the metaphor, and we think that it fits perfectly.
+
But still. What is the point?
+
Great question anon. The point is that if all those operators are the businesses. The delegators (or the citizens) are the VCs, and it is up to us to develop the city (finally... a world where we can really decide where the money goes to), then we believe it is important to understand who the business owner is and
+what they are planning to do with that money.
+
Today, there are several ways to try and understand this. There are various metrics and dashboards. There are foundations (founding fathers city council) that each have their own valuation criteria, various public Excel spreadsheets, etc... But does it truly help to build for decentralization and for a bright future?
+
We believe that the only way to truly recognize what a business owner wants, is to ask them. Yep, as simple as that. This is why the Citizen Cosmos podcast and now the streams have been, and will be dedicated to getting down to the bottom of this question.
+
Our mission is to pick validator minds to understand their motivation, their mission, and their purpose. Not just their role in the building of the city, but of the whole universe. We want to know who we delegate our money to, and what those companies spend their money on. Are they motivated by greed? By
+success? By philosophy? Or maybe they are lunatics building a nuclear bomb in a shelter with the money they earn from delegations. Anything is possible.
+
The cherry
+
Currently, we judge to possess the biggest source of such info. We have 1-1 and team interviews, that go down to the bottom of these questions with a lot of the top validators and node operators from across the Cosmos and POS ecosystems. And we are on a mission to expand that catalogue further.
+
Who are you then?
+
Another great question. We are ecosystem developers. We believe in decentralization maximalism, but we hate chain maximalism. We believe that nothing should be banned, yet we hate censorship. We have been in crypto (almost) since its inception, however we are just starting out. We are a small team of enthusiasts, that believe in education, code, and lack of blackbox opinions. Most of all, we believe in freedom.
+
+
If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here)
