DeFi By Design EP#50: What is Cosmos?

Transcript

[Music] d5 slate team [Music] what's up y'all real quick if you like the d5 state content on twitter and youtube and sub stack please please give us a like and a subscribe on this video on youtube and join our channel join the community we'd really appreciate it we're pumping this stuff out for you all as much as we can and we really enjoy the support and the community that we've built thank you very much and enjoy hey guys what's going on this is episode 50 of the d5 by design podcast today we're talking about talking to peng zhang um and we are going to dive into the cosmos ecosystem so

cosmos is another one of those layer one block chains um i'm not going to explain too much about i'm gonna save that for one of the ogs of the cosmos uh blockchain and one of the one of the day one builders over there um of course andy is here with us andy what is going on mate yo what's up guys yeah we are uh we are live right now with the uh cosmos ecosystem in mind a lot of these layer ones are coming out very very prominent and yeah i mean there's there's been some interesting incentives created for a lot of these layer one protocols so looking to dive into kind of what is happening in cosmos for you to to learn about kind of the history of what's happening with tendermint how you

can get into cosmos earn some yield and participate in that kind of world um and what this looks like for bringing d5 you know to more people so excited to hear more from peng and i will turn it over him for an intro um to himself and the cosmos ecosystem hey everyone great to be here thank you to robbie and andy for for bringing me on so i'm ceo at tendermint give you a brief recap of where i come from i have a background in ui design and front-end development i used to make websites and i got involved into crypto in in early 2014 there was the bitcoin wiki back then and

i decided to post my services for sale as a website designer right and uh turns out no one wanted a website designer that wanted to get paid in bitcoin right so um nothing really happened around then but uh in in late 2015 i was reached out by the by the founder of tendermint jae kwan and his very small team at the time it was just jaquan ethan buckman and that was about it so i joined as the very first employee after the uh the initial founders in late 2015 and we've been building you know proof of stake technology since then the idea of cosmos didn't come into

being until late 2016 and in 2017 the interchange foundation was created and launched the fundraiser for the cosmos hub blockchain they raised about 17 million dollars in 30 minutes and uh really the rest is history um so what is it now like four years later now in 2021 cosmos have blockchain is somewhere within the top 30 blockchains in market value today but that's only one part of the ecosystem right it's like the visible part of the iceberg cosmos the ecosystem is really big uh far larger than most people um realize

because while cosmos is a blockchain it also is the infrastructure that powers over 250 different projects um and of the the projects are live today you know over 100 billion usd value is built on top of cosmos core tech yeah and i mean there's a bunch of projects that are are out there on on cosmos a lot of people aren't even aware of it when you look at one of those ecosystem maps um you know it's kind of shocking that there are so many um projects built on there so what's kind of the alert to build on top of cosmos versus other chains you know how what's the attractive lever uh of of of building the top cosmos

yeah that's a great question andy so you mentioned you know some of the some of the bigger chains built on cosmos tech i could name some of them right now you would recognize them they include binance chain uh terra crypto.com thor chain and many others like likava fetch ai injective protocol persistence akash regen and many more so those use the entire cosmos stack and uh are able to you know use cosmos to its full potential which i'll explain in a little bit later but there are also other projects that use just the proof of stake protocol the tendermint consensus protocol and these include projects like polygon

formerly known as medic and also tezos uses a variant of tendermint consensus called tender bake as well because i'm moving on to so our technology has been hugely influential in industry uh so why would people use this tech right um [Music] in one word it's because it's good tech it's saves you you know lots of time from having to build your own blockchain framework um and it's blockchain framework designed for public blockchains right so it's not it's not like hyperledger ledger it's not meant for you know private permissioned uh blockchains it's meant for public blockchains it's meant

to rival you know ethereum and bitcoin and other public blockchains that are that are fully decentralized so you know with this free tech you can build anything you want you can build you know multi-billion dollar networks you can also build you know weekend projects and it's all under your control right you don't have to buy a token to use cosmos tech so that's you know really why it's so appealing for many builders so what's the relationship here between tendermint and cosmos are they on top of each other kind of what does that look like that is actually like a great way to think about it so blockchains built on cosmos tech uh are comprised of two layers right with

tendermint being the base layer and the cosmos being the application layer um i'll use an example that might be familiar to to more people um maybe it's even people outside of crypto uh you know if you use computers you probably know how to use bittorrent right and then the torn protocol um tendermint consensus protocol is in in many ways similar to something like the bittorrent protocol it allows a bunch of machines around the world to reach consensus on you know what is an accurate file or an accurate set of files or an accurate you know zip file things like that um whereas bittorrent just verifies you know um

a binary file like let's say a linux iso right tendermint verifies um a chain of transactions a blockchain essentially so that's what tendermint does it replicates you know one database across many machines and it allows those machines to also listen for transactions that are coming from you know people around the world so tendermint handles that consensus portion and makes sure is that you know we don't have people double signing you know and and other attacks that are possible without blockchain what cosmos is and the cosmos sdk is the

application there so that's what makes your application different from everyone else right the most simplest application being an application that just says hello world you know that does nothing else that's an application you can also build some wildly complicated applications um like a dex for example or you can create an ethereum bridge or you can create a smart contract platform just like ethereum you can in fact one project uh built by a team called tharsis is working on bringing all of the features of the ethereum virtual machine onto cosmos right so you can write solidity smart contracts you can port over your favorite celebrity smart

contracts over to cosmos and run it on top of tendermint proof of stake consensus so that's how it works together there are two layers uh tendermint of the company um we invented the tender consensus protocol we were the original builders of the cosmos sdk and we yeah we built the initial underpinnings but now this technology is being developed on by many companies in concon what is it together sweet yeah that's awesome um thanks for the clarification there it's it's an interesting um kind of system of of checks and balances almost

um you know when it gets to bringing bringing the the chains together to interoperate you know in the best ways possible um so so right now what does the interoperability look like for cosmos based chains with i guess ethereum and kind of these other more uh these other prominent layer one chains that are popping up now um you know kind of how you know is there evm compatibility with cosmos how can users access the cosmos chain to start yield forming so how can our community get in there who is you know all miss right now and listening in how can they participate in you know basically reward yield mining um all sorts of stuff you know in cosmos how do they get there how compatible is it yeah what's that

process gonna look like yeah so first of all i'm really excited this year i think 2021 has been the year of cross chain and and multi-chain and that has really entered everyone's minds as being necessary right um i think all of crypto is united towards getting as much capital and assets off of centralized exchanges and onto decentralized exchanges but once you do that right how do you bridge you know solana to ethereum and solana to cosmos and things like that well that's one area that cosmos has been thinking about since 2017 we were really the original cross chain project uh it's taken us quite a long time to to make sure the protocol works

but as of early 2021 as of march we've enabled ibc which is called the inter blockchain communication protocol if you're familiar with how the web works is similar to tcp ip it's as a low-level protocol allowing you to exchange data between blockchains uh so i i totally um glazed over it earlier when i mentioned why people wanted to build on cosmos right yes it's great tech saves you months if not years of development time and you have to own everything at the end of it right but at the same time it also allows you to communicate and send tokens between all the chains built with cosmos right now there are

i believe 11 blockchains live today that support ibc uh given that ibc you know really just launched in march i think it's a great sign we have about 30 other blockchains slated to upgrade to the version of the cosmos sdk that supports ibc by the end of the year so we should see you know 40 different chains with communities that are able to freely send tokens back and forth between each other without relying on any centralized entity so so that's super exciting but you know that is still the cosmos corner of the world right so how do we get from there to ethereum and to solana and you know to polygon et cetera that's what we're all working on right now so you know we are in touch with a

lot of these other major ecosystems and figuring out ways to incentivize bridge building um we you know we do believe ibc is the right way forward given that chains built on cosmos right have already surpassed 100 billion dollar usd mark there's a lot of momentum behind ibc right the moment you decide to build a chain that supports ibc you have access you know to all these users you know across you know hundreds of chains right now so there's a lot of incentive to do so already um but at the same time right there are very big ecosystems that have not

worked on ibc so working on them to enable that the first one of which we're working on is with ethereum right so ethereum 1.0 cannot use ibc because it's not a fast finality blockchain by fast finality i mean you know with ethereum you need to wait right several blocks before you can you can sort of be sure that you're on the right chain that you know the blocks are not going to do a re-org um it's similar to bitcoin right with bitcoin you have to wait even longer before you guarantee a transaction it is valid so those types of chains proof of work chains generally can't support ibc so with ethereum there's a team called

althea that has worked on a bridge between ethereum and cosmos the product is called gravity bridge and it's planned on launching i think in the upcoming upcoming weeks or months uh sometime in q3 lake q3 or early q4 so that will allow ethereum liquidity to come into cosmos immediately and will allow you know i think everyone listening to the podcast probably has you know some erc 20 or each tokens to participate without having to do you know much else other than have metamask ready um for other ecosystems other bridges are being developed as well in collaboration with those teams yeah so as far as takeaways and

actionables that someone some can have um you know the this is kind of what we saw with avalanche where people um that were on that chain early on um you know reaped a lot of rewards the early lp benefits from being on those chains um so it you know the only way to get there now is natively um the a bridge from kind of an external ecosystem is still weeks to months away um but there's still you know kind of that early adopter incentive to be over there now um yeah go ahead yeah so we we have a product for early adopters um it just launched three weeks ago it's called

amaris it's meant to be a cross-chain d5 portal um like i said the beginning of this interview um i have a background design in ui development and i'm really passionate about getting crypto into the hands of more people um so what what mrs is is meant to be the most user-friendly you know cross-chain d5 portal in the world uh we started by supporting like like robbie said just the cosmos ecosystem right so just these initial you know 10 chains that are ibc supported but as the youth bridge goes live right we're going to support more protocols more applications you know things like unit swap will be natively supported to allow you to you know

swap assets in each but also be able to transfer them to the cosmos ecosystem uh and why would you want to transfer assets of cosmos ecosystem well that there are yield farming opportunities now we're talking there are three live dexes already uh in the cosmos ecosystem and what makes them really unique is that these are all cross chain dexes um in fact the most recent one that launched called sift chain already has a life live east bridge so sift chain is a project that i don't have a lot of knowledge into but you have used the cosmos sdk they use a fork version of the the

ethereum bridge that has been developed for the for the cosmos hub and uh they've launched i think last week actually so you know if you're a very early adopter you can try using sift chain today to start transferring ethereum to cosmos so once you get through the path right now like the the path of weeks the path of least resistance right now is to use that bridge you'd say like so say if if somebody's just a defy user they don't use centralized exchanges yeah so here's the caveat right so i haven't used this chain before um [Music] it may be the path that requires you know minimal kyc and uh the last you know you don't need fiat right but you

can definitely do so um yeah you can definitely get into 15 and from 16 going to the other dexes and cosmos through the ibc protocol which is really crazy but i haven't done it myself yet and the other way to access would be to purchase um cosmos so atom token on a centralized exchange and then transferred over to a wallet that is compatible with that is the other way right so the traditional way is you know logging onto binance or or coinbase and getting some cosmos tokens and then sending them over to a cosmos um wallet or cosmos portal like amorous but actually within mrs itself you can there's a fiat on-ramp in there so you're able to to purchase

cosmos tokens directly numerous you can buy you can bypass centralized exchange step if you want can you fill out your vision of the multi-chain world a little bit more kind of how you see these different chains now that solana's in the mix um focus on these layer ones more so than polygon and other layer twos how do you see them all fitting together yeah so how i see them fitting together is i see a future where where all major ecosystems will bridge to each other there's no way that's not happening because there's just so much value to be gained by allowing users from other ecosystems to come over right like if you imagine

blockchain ecosystems are like cities right there's so many advantages to building roads between cities that they'll they'll just be built right you see international trade today you know as much as you know people try to put sanctions into place you know free trade is ruling the world right now there's just so much you know arbitrages can be done um by moving from ecosystem to ecosystem and i think you know the you know people in d5 right now should really be looking into this area because there's just so few people doing it right now of course you know there are the caveats this is all experimental technology you know bridging tech um

and sending tokens away from their native chain can always be a good way for you to permanently lose those assets forever right so please be careful with how much assets you're sending over these bridges but we believe that you know in the cosmos ecosystem the ibc bridge in particular is the safest implementation of a bridge that has ever existed we've been building this stuff for the longest time uh it's never been exploited and so the biggest decks and cosmos osmosis i believe launched about three months ago or so i could be wrong here but there's already over 300 million usd in tvl and uh you know when it launched those months ago you know

yield was i think over like 6 000 the first few days and even today yield is over 200 percent on um on the incentivized pairs great yeah yeah that's awesome um in you speak to some of those strateg arbitrage strategies um yeah especially when when some of these gains are compounded but i i can even see strategies where uh it's faster to bridge between chains to make a swap rather than say waiting for a transaction on l1 um so

yeah oh that's definitely true i'm looking forward to seeing that happening i think this is a matter of time before the user experience of that like you said you know like uh swaps using bridged sf you know on proof of stake networks is just so much better than than doing a swap or an exchange on on ethereum yeah and that that bridge um connection just helps capital efficiency because the infrastructure builds and then and then the network effect uh kind of compounds from there um and i see it as almost like a push and a pull like we're continuously building these new chains and then having to build these bridges to support the new chains um

to kind of go in a different direction not not so much in the in the d5 realm but more so on on some other business applications you see uh or just general applications of cosmos uh chain um you know how can some of these other chains that are building with the sdk integrate and what are some of the what i guess with the general theses and then kind of from there what what do you anticipate as some of the major impact applications yeah yeah so cosmos is built not just for d5 right i think d5 is the hottest thing right now well maybe it's overshadowed by nfts these days but in

either case whether it's nfts or d5 that's only like a small portion of what blockchain can be used for because cosmos is all about building sovereign chains right and it's all about building applications specific chains it allows you to you know fulfill some very niche or esoteric use cases um that don't make sense uh to be done on on a more public shared network and i'm going to use ethereum as an example here again because you don't need you know the whole world to know these transactions are happening right let's say you're an industry like you're shipping lumber right and uh you keep track of

where where lumber is going or where it's coming from um and there are you know several companies you know around the world that care about this right they can easily set up a cosmos blockchain you know make use of this technology that we've all poured you know tens of millions of dollars into building and build something custom to suit their exact needs right for for verifying the transport and marketplaces for lumber but at the same time because it's built on cosmos before because it uses ibc you know you can transport some of this data onto the greater network that's down to the cosmos hub which is an open you know open blockchain that's meant to to route transactions across the

internet of blockchains so you can do that let's say once a month pay very minimal transaction fees um you know during your everyday transactions but once a month you know settle your balances with the greater internet of blockchains that's what we see as sort of the scalable future for football teams in general uh you know when you buy an nft let's say you buy a crypto punk i can't afford a crypto punk but let's say you buy one and you want to send it to somebody you know does the whole world need to know that you sent it um probably not let's say you want to send it from one of your wallets to another one of your wallets right why does it cost you 50 to do that transaction

you know it shouldn't be done on an nfc chain right and when you want to transfer to someone else so when you want to announce you know a sale to a different organization then you could do it on on one of the one of the bigger higher throughput chains so it's really all about efficiency right it's about not having the entire world you know share one highway but instead branch out across the entire world because the world is big yeah most definitely and there's a lot of people that are there's a lot of people in quote and businesses corporations industries that you know are ready to take on and and use blockchain which kind of haven't really been presented with the right opportunities yet and it's just a matter

of time i'm curious kind of if if the cosmos uh ethos as far as marketing and establishment goes is it you know would you say more focus towards these crypto native type of d5 you know yield farming nft art applications right now or more perhaps focused on this on these more enterprise business level kind of higher um let's call it higher level applications of of finance and business and um and data and you know identity things like this you know kind of where is the main focus um is it more crypto native or these larger you know scale block chains i suppose yeah so

we chose the word cosmos right for the brand because it means absolutely everything so all of those people are customers from enterprise to weekend projects you know to nfg collectors to d5d gens it's a matter of what level of cosmos we're talking about so it's a base layer which we started with you know tendermint core cosmos sdk it's technology that's that's very scalable so there are small teams like very small teams building blockchains let's say social media platforms and the name services and uh and things of that nature that take less effort but then there's also you know projects like finance chain there are projects like terra

that are that are worth you know in the tens of billions of dollars that use the same technology um so i don't want to limit ourselves to calling ourselves like a platform for enterprise um because it's not that right i'm i don't come from enterprise background myself you know i'm sort of more of a weekend thinker uh before working at tendermint right i did freelance web development work so i really want to make sure that all of our tools are usable by by solo engineers you know doing things in their spare time and i want them to be very successful you know i want them to be able to build and raise funding for a million dollar and ideally a billion dollar projects um yeah so we really try to cover the spectrum

uh and it's really flexible so maybe you can think of it over time right we want to make it as easy to use as something like air table or google sheets you know or excel right that's really what a blockchain is at the end of the day it's a way to to record things into a centralized database or a decentralized database right with a with a set of owners and a set of users and ibc and cosmos is a way for you to exchange values across spreadsheets so if we nail the user experience correctly you know we'll have a million blockchains in the world both on cosmos tech and you know it's not going to be

technology that takes over every other tech in blockchain but it will bridge for every other blockchain in the world right yeah i mean that's a that's a that's pretty solid um introduction into into getting you know these new people on board to cosmos um know getting new people as far as people who are not even uh you know into the space of crypto yet even really um you know that's gonna be that's a major push that i feel like cosmos might have an edge on compared to some of these other other other blockchains um you know let's talk about the process of projects building on top of cosmos so how does that work like for example you you you name some pretty prominent projects

towards the beginning of the show and kind of what does that look like as far as them deciding to build on cosmos and then the implementation and you know what does the user see and you know versus what's kind of happening in the back end yep so we realized early on that you know this technology that we're building the cosmos sdk is very flexible and uh very stable and you know now in mid-2021 we see that people are building incredible amounts of value with it but we want to make sure more people can do so right so there is a huge lack of cosmos developers in the world today we're trying to figure out

ways to to educate more people about how to use this tech but uh you know people building projects on cosmos like terra for example that is a great example because actually as of today september 9th they announced a 150 million dollar initiative to fund cosmos core development so they clearly see the value of these of these tools and they want to you know make the infrastructure better have more people understand how it works uh and on the similar vein uh we started building a usability layer on top of the cosmos sdk called starport uh about a year and a half ago so what starport is

is it lets you use the cosmos sdk to build a blockchain right a blockchain that can that can secure billions of dollars but at the same time it saves you a lot of steps in launching a new chain so launching a new chain is difficult in the proof-of-stake world because unlike proof-of-work um where in the past you you maybe you can post on you know the bitcoin talk forums uh maybe i'm really dating myself here and say hey i have a new chain you know it's a fork of bitcoin isn't new you know jpeg is the icon please go mine it right and then really it's sort of fair because the first people who start mining it get get the initial tokens and uh the founder never really has to worry about token allocation but in proof-of-stake um you need to set an initial token

allocation that's one of the biggest problems in blockchain today like how do you solve initial token distribution um you can do fundraisers right fundraisers are very clear and uh and well-tested way to do it but at the same time you know the um the legal clarity around doing crypto fundraisers is very unclear around many parts of the world um and so another option people have been doing before you know are air drops right maybe you can airdrop tokens to a set of people that that would believe in your project and use it uh so we've been working on this tool called start where it uh it's meant to solve fundraising for blockchain projects it's also meant to solve the um

the hosting problem so like we mentioned before in mining right you download an app you start mining tokens and due to the elegance of proof of work you know anyone can set up mining anytime they can stop mining any time no problem but the improvement work you know cosmos based tendermint proof of stake wait sorry i'm talking about proof of stake now but uh generally you need to launch a blockchain with at least two thirds of the tokens that exist for that blockchain let's let's say you're creating a new chain called the banana chain right and there are one million banana tokens right so to launch this banana network you need to have at least you know 67 million banana tokens

staked to some of the initial validators and you need them to all start their their hardware to start their applications at the same time right it becomes a big coordination problem cosmos championed this coordination process um through incentivized contests in the past we're like hey we want to get people to start trying launching cosmos chains right so so we launched these games where we give out you know tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of dollars to validators who help us launch things at the same time but we also realize that for for smaller chains you know weekend projects smaller teams they don't have the capital to fund these experiments they don't have the marketing team to

get the reach because it you know the validators they need to launch a chain so starboard network also solves the validator problem uh i like to think of it as uber for validation right so instead of you know creating a you know a website a social media profile and then slowly collecting community and reaching out to validators individually we have this platform that allows you to you know sort of at on demand say hey i got a blockchain i want to launch it i want to set the token distribution if you want to validate for it i can give you part of it and uh but the idea is validators will just start coming right up to you and negotiating with you how many tokens you want to get in return for launching a

chain so yeah that's my recommendations that are long-winded but use starboard you can launch your own chain um starport has a test net that is uh that's launching q4 we're launching media and q1 uh yeah great yeah that's awesome okay so we have starboard which is basically how how you know how we were able to launch new chains through the cosmos ibc and i mean that's that's kind of like the key factor of being able to launch um you know new protocols and sustain this kind of level of value to the base layer which basically is the cosmos blockchain um you know at

its core is is responsible almost for all the other chains built on top of it which you know derive value from the cosmos blockchain and the blockchain itself cosmos also drives value from you know the kind of application layer on top um so you know we're kind of getting to a point where we have a lot of these protocols in d5 you know the the uni-swaps the abe's the sushi swaps that that are starting to derive their value not necessarily just from ethereum but from all from multiple chains we've seen them port over to phantom you know to avalanche to polygon uh is there a future where we see these kind of og ethereum decentralized applications uh porting porting over to

cosmos and and running on the cosmos blockchain you know what what would that process look like as far as deploying some of these og apps on cosmos yeah that's a great question so going back again to the causal sub blockchain it's not the atom right you can as of today right you can you can vote with it you can stick with it and as uh i think a couple months ago we we launched the decks the community launched the decks on the cosmos hub called the gravity decks and it's a it's a cross chain decks right that allows you to swap tokens that comes through ibc i also mentioned that later this year late q3 early q4 um the the current maintainer of the

cosmos hub plans on adding a ethereum bridge onto the cosmos hub right so you're able to bring ethereum assets over and and swap with it and lp with it on gravity decks now the same thing is possible in reverse right so you're able to take cosmos assets uh like i said earlier there's ten chains ten cosmos assets really that can go into the cosmos up and then from there take the issue bridge back over to eve so you're gonna see things like adam and and terra tokens on ethereum uh so you can already you know access all the great defy apps that you're used to on ethereum with cosmos tokens i think that's really cool as far as answering your question about porting over

uh ethereum smart contracts you know like like ave and uh and sushi swap and such onto the cosmos ecosystem you know we see that happening as well so there's a team called tarsus right building etherman which is evm on cosmos and they plan on launching in the upcoming months so that is one direct way solidity developers can port over their their d5 contracts over to cosmos in the future i would say next year there is also a new feature being added to the cosmos hub called interchange security so what this is is a way for the cosmos hub to secure multiple blockchains with the same

validator set and this may include an evm chain so an evm cosmos chain secured by the cosmos hub right secured by the atom which is probably going to be far more secure than than a standalone evm cosmos gene just because i think cosmos hubs is valued at over seven billion right now yeah so there's many sorry there's there's many ways for um celebrity smart contracts come over to cosmos um and development is moving very quickly to make this show that's possible uh by later this year early next year yeah the composability is certainly

there and coming along for cosmos to integrate most of these applications that already building communities and brands across all the chains um there's kind of that battle between the native yield farms and the ones that are you know blue chips as people referred to them and um that that's kind of a balance that i think is playing out on on a k on a chain by chain basis oh yeah i i you know i appreciate and love blue chip d5 protocols um you know i use the ones that are on ethereum because that's the network i trust the most i haven't had a lot of time really to investigate you know layer twos and

other scalability options for example i haven't used phantom you know i haven't used um polygons that much right uh so i appreciate where the blue ships are but i also see that you know it's not cheap to use it's really expensive to use right if you want to actually earn yields and withdraw regularly you need to put in lots of money you know probably tens of thousands maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars into these protocols on these if you're earning you know a small amount of yield then it's not really even worth it to participate in d5 uh but what these these scalability solutions offer and what things like you

know evm cosmos offer it's just much cheaper transaction costs so you know people who are able to earn you know like ten dollars a month and withdraw it and not feel like they're being ripped off and losing everything to your transaction fees so that's something i care about a lot as well solid yeah um cool all right well i as far as transaction fees um could you just give us a quick scope on like how you stack up to some of these other chains yeah so first of all my um my disclaimer is that cosmos doesn't plan on competing on transaction fees or tps that's not how cosmos scales

um how cosmos scales is by launching applicants application specific chains right so if any one point one protocol you know um [Music] congests an entire blockchain let's say someone deploys ave on an evm on cosmos chain and it totally blocks anyone else i'm using it any other sort of d5 protocol if i'm using it well that's when obviously really launch their own ave chain on cosmos and uh and you know have the entire bandwidth of that chain dedicated ave and if that becomes saturated right they should launch multiple avion cosmos genes and it's very easy to do so cosmos is meant to be very horizontally scalable so that's the long-term

solution for scaling right but to answer your question transactions right now the cosmos hub are between one to ten cents per transaction usd cents and uh transaction speed is about seven seconds per per transaction wait what am i saying uh seven seconds per block of transactions gotcha cool yeah that competes with um the scaling solutions out there right now phantoms the avalanches um you know and yeah it provides a pro provides a layer of security as you're saying that with the you know the the seven billion dollar market cap um you know i'm kind of keen what you think about that as a measure of security for some of these you know

alternative layer one chains like should we be looking at them as all right what's the market cap and like user base and like is there a monetary moat like is that a real concept you know kind of talk us through the concept of like a monetary moat by means of market cap and you know just i i guess wealth of holders um you know in terms of validation and stuff like that and if that even exists yeah so i think it exists but i think it's also only one part of a mode i think um in cosmos anyway we we tend to um rank security based on you know the value of the assets being secured but it's also true that there's many other factors at play here right it's about

the age of the network right let's see if everyone apes into a new network and and now you know there's like 1 billion staked and 500 million total value locked on our decks on this new network right um is it as valuable as a billion dollar network that's been around for three years no no it's not because it hasn't gone through due diligence right um people who may want to to look into the inner workings of this chain hasn't haven't had time to look into it right so how long the network is running is also a big contributor right and then of course bitcoin wins that wins that race um but then again with bitcoin right it's it's become so conservative that you can't

really do define on bitcoin so it's a balancing act right um [Music] there are other things as well so the mode also includes the the user base itself right what are the core values of the user base right are they you know particularly um yield oriented right are they just going to hop onto the next best thing the moment they can right and leave everyone else sort of in a lurch um you need to make sure people aren't just chasing short-term yield you really want to build a community of long-term you know long-term holders long-term governance participants that's also part of the mode um you also have to look at the leadership of an ecosystem right are they are they

people you want to hang out with right are they toxic or are they you know looking um looking to do things for the for the sake of the entire community as a whole so yeah it's really about buying into an entire ecosystem buying into an entire community and uh cosmos is not opinionated there that's why we allow the creation of you know hundreds of thousands or a million different communities you really got to pick and choose which one you want to be a part of sweet yeah i i think that's important and there's no uh correct me if i'm wrong but there's no like leader of cosmos that's like active on social media or anything is there um there are lots of leaders of cosmos but there's no one that can actually

speak for the cosmos blockchain right because you know i'm thinking of like aetherium you got metallic and on phantom now you've got andre cronie and even on the other side of things you've got justin sun and tron and kind of um you know charles hoskinson and eamon for avalanche there's a bunch um for these different chains but these are all decentralized protocols i'm curious what your thoughts are as far as having like uh almost like a ringleader for a decentralized protocol where they're obviously very hands-off in terms of how the protocol develops it's more so in the hands of the core developers but they're all they're kind of at the at the at the helm you know what's kind of your thought process on that yeah i think this is sort of the beauty

and also the difficulty of the cosmos ecosystem we have we have so many leaders and some people are building great things but because the the core infrastructure is so good and it makes it so easy to exit and build your own chain right um yeah when when core developers disagree you know they tend to go out and create their own change in cosmos which is really cool for the ecosystem but can be hard to follow if you're an outsider right so yeah cosmos is really huge and uh most people don't know how big it is but it's also hard to invest in cosmos right um yeah like where do you look like okay so

you got the atom token but like what what are like the blue chips of cosmos blue chips of cosmos okay this is gonna be controversial but um [Music] i'm gonna be a little bit neutral and just say go check out the cosmos network website we have a page that shows all cosmos projects by market cap and i would say the top 10 or 15 are the blue chips and cosmos um yeah cool but you should really do your own research for sure the reason why the atom is so central to cosmos is because many of the people in the ecosystem hold atoms and the atom was really the first token in cosmos to exist it's also the token that really has paid

the the salaries of all the developers working in the ecosystem so if you believe in the core tech of cosmos then you should be a part of the ecosystem but there's many many ways you can be a part of the ecosystem it doesn't have to be you know buying one token uh yeah one of the things we're working on is actually like a decentralized etf that lets you buy a basket of all the top cosmos tokens we'll have more to say about that in the future yeah those indexes do well people like those a lot um just kind of makes it easy on them and when you make it easy it's i mean yeah it's easy so yeah that's awesome in the meantime you know i recommend uh checking out amaris amris is one way to check out all the

the tokens that support ibc right now uh 10 change right now 40 years by the end of the year and i would guess maybe over 200 by the end of next year so we you're sort of the you know ground zero of a brand new ecosystem that's going to bridge all ecosystems together i'm really excited to be a part of it sweet awesome man this is uh this is one thing that we kind of ask at the end of each show as you wrap up here you know if you had to if you had to pitch one person on the cosmos ecosystem in an elevator you know who would it be and why yeah so i would pitch builders i think there's so much opportunity here

to build build valuable projects that wasn't the question is there one builder yeah if there is one person one builder that you you would pitch um if you were in this scenario you were stuck in an elevator with this person who would you who would you choose to be in the elevator with yeah well obviously i'd pitch elon musk you know i think obviously he loves space travel and cosmo sits with that team and uh at the same time because of this cross-chain communication protocol right you can do things like use cosmos to build blockchains on mars and blockchains on earth and then sync them up you know every month or so when the planets align or whatever they

do so so it's really cool this tech can be used for that um it wasn't meant for that but i think it's a really neat feature yeah someone needs to connect andy's tesla with uh my ferrari no no no no i'm playing but uh yeah and and they need to communicate with each other on a self uh you know distributed network where self-driving cars can can talk to one another um yeah maybe the cosmos ecosystem is is right for that you can definitely be used for that nice all right where's that where's our business pay our business plan for this cosmos ecosystem grant we're going to build it out pitch elon

all right thanks for coming on man it was a pleasure yeah it was great to talk to you andy and robbie thanks for having me on absolutely thank you ben