Cosmos Design Philosophy with Jack Zampolin: Rollchains & Strangelove Insights

Transcript

what are you excited about these days I mean other than other than Ro chains obviously like what uh kind of tickles your interest in the cosmos space and and Beyond of course yeah you know I think that what I am excited about is this growth in mod this modularity narrative and I think that this has always been the design philosophy that Cosmos has preached you know the Unix design philosophy is simple single-use components that expose an easy to use API and can be endless remixed and composed together to form higher level systems and I think that in the original software ABCI sort of embodies this as far as a an interface that allows for

new things and what we've seen is folks breaking apart the stack in new and novel ways with data availability and shared sequencing and things like that and um building these modular tools and you know part of that for me who's been building modules in the cosmos SDK and thinking about black Jades from a modular perspective for a very long time it's exciting to see interest around this and I think when you think about the two major paths to scale one is vertical scalability which is sort of embodied by uh salana and one is horizontal scalability which is embodied by Cosmos you know more and more folks jumping into that world I think is

really exciting and role chains the the initial product that we're working with is sort of an effort to offer a different set of trade-offs in the modular ecosystem one where you still have a validator set you have that ability to decentralize and potentially scale out to a full POS set different sorts of Poa different forms of security whether it's adding Celestia to existing chains or using celesti to add additional security to POA chains using things like ethos and stake e um I think that there's a lot of options there and with ro chains we wanted to add another option to that and I think the other thing that we're trying to do

with ro chains is make it as easy as possible for folks who are coming into the ecosystem to be able to launch a new chain whether it's on Roll kit or shared security with the Hub or Celestia or one of the many excellent options but I think right now there's no easy way for beginners to approach the stack there's you know you look there's many different Forks at the SDK there's Forks of tender it's very confusing when folks want to come in and try to build and if you want to integrate all of the latest features you end up spending a lot of time learning about go dependency hell and um how where all these different repos are and there's a ton of them so we're trying to make that as easy as possible

for developers and help build a way to sell services and software through that stack and that's kind of what we're working with ro chains yeah I want to unpack that but I just want to say like this Linux analogy I think is really on point and you I I use this analogy a lot to describe um how uh Cosmos like is uh is building this stack that enables modularity and um that you know but but I I think for people that look at Cosmos from the outside like there's there's a few things that are confusing one is the this this kind of dependency on the cosmos Hub or at this perceived dependency on the cosmos Hub which you know for people inside Cosmos I think we

understand that that's not the case but for people outside of Cosmos I think they they associate Cosmos with the Hub and that somehow like the Hub manages all of this or somehow like orchestrating all the cosmos chains and then the other thing is the the app chain thesis that Cosmos pushed like pretty aggressively for uh for a long time that was kind of a precursor to to to modularity and was necessary in order to achieve modularity but I think people still associate Cosmos to sort of you know these highly vertically integrated app chains with a validator set and like the cosmos SDK and perhaps cosmism and like IBC and so breaking apart those misconceptions outside of the space right when talking with you know

typically when we talk to investors or when we talk to people in ethereum that are not familiar with Cosmos is a challenge how do you how do you uh navigate that when speaking with people outside the space that might say like oh yeah well Adam's not doing very well so then like you know Adam hasn't pumped recently so maybe like Cosmos is not doing very well yeah you know it's I think that now with the launch of Celestia and DTX and many of the other exciting projects coming this year also with the rise and Sayan objective within the ecosystem I think it's now much more of a multi-polar ecosystem than in the past and the cosmos thesis has never been about the cosmos Hub as a single

instantiation of this idea and that was going to be the end of History it it's always been about this world in which there's hundreds if not thousands if not tens of thousands if not millions of chains and I think you know we saw Pang talk about millions of chains back in 2019 so like this idea has been around like I see Nick white talking about millions of rollups and I tend to agree you know I think that there's going to be many of these verified State machines that have all kinds of different properties and the key there is the interoperability and I think you know there's an increasing realization throughout the crypto ecosystem broadly that IBC has effectively solved this bridging problem and that there's you

know the a lot of the things that people would knock about the protocol like the call and response nature or some of the things that people think are overly complex has actually led to something that is very strong and extensible and able to provide first class user experience and cross-chain composability in a way that other protocols have just been unable to bring and you know we see this over and over again and you know I think that when I think about the cosmos I think about the broader IBC ecosystem and in that broader IBC ecosystem there's many things that have pumped that are pumping there's active communities there and there's a lot of excitement especially from the Builder community and you know that that is what

has me excited [Music] [Music]