Future of DAOs with Jake Hartnell

Transcript

we're live my guest today is Jake Hartnell he's the founder of Juno Dao Dao and stargaze today we're talking about Juno Dao's cosmoasm my only fear is that we have too many things to talk about in an hour I'm very interested in Juno and its place in The Interchange ecosystem as a playground for experimentation with dows I also want to talk about Dow Dao Dow politics and building on doubts and of course cosmoasm open source Juno roadmap and everything in between so strap in because this one's gonna be deep I'm also dying to find out if he thinks Juno is dead so before we get started make sure to hit the like button hit the notification Bell And subscribe to get notified when

I go live every week and remember that none of what we discussed here on the interop is investment advice and if you enjoy this content please consider sticking with us we're live on evmos and on Quicksilver and on the occasion of JP Young on a podcast we set up a Juno validator we've got some tokens there delegated we're not in the active set but why don't you help us get to the active set by sticking with interrupt my guest Jake Hartnell is coming up next right here on the internet [Music]

Jake Hartnell thanks for joining on the podcast you're welcome um it's great um it's really early I'm just you know drinking my coffee getting fired up you know all we need to do is just say the magic word and then I'm gonna get fired up is that is well before we get into all that you know I was I I looked your name up on Google and I scrolled to like Pages two and three and four and I found some really interesting stuff yeah and so um yeah so you you went to Berkeley and you were focusing on like digital

publishing and web annotation is that right yeah my thesis was on like uh on digital publishing in particular and decentralized content publishing and it was 2014 but I was still talking about using like cryptocurrency to disintegrate iterate intermediate the I just woke up uh to disintermediate like the middlemen and like you know allow authors and content creators to sell directly to their end and consumers and enable like a bunch of cool new business models so yeah I've been thinking about it because this is really early I guess so I mean what like what kind of crypto Technologies were you looking at back

then and if these weren't even a concept back then um and uh like ethereum wasn't even like you know publicly announced back then so like I was part of Bitcoin Club at Berkeley and uh yeah it was really all that we had to go with um at that time though it was cheap enough to use Bitcoin for payments and uh and uh yeah we were kind of exploring some really interesting ideas there around like affiliate marketing and stuff like that like imagine if you could like resell digital items was like one of the things that we were really interested in like if you had if you like bought like an ebook for example if you could like resell it to your friends and then like get some percentage of like like a refer fee for like reselling

um yeah were you guys looking at counterparty and some of that stuff like some of those early examples of building you know more theoretical and experimental um and we were looking at like a lot of like another thing that we were just really annoyed about was how much like Amazon had captured the ebook market and how they were like screwing over like years and authors um like authors still to this day paid like like 30 to 60 percent of their sales to like big [ __ ] evil Amazon and uh that's just still insane to me like it's such a bad deal for like the authors and Publishers and like these people don't make a ton of money to

begin with so and it's ultimately just to ship a file over the Internet which is you know I'm I I would actually be one of the projects that I'd be really interested to see as like you know Dows and like nfts is like nfts that get away from like jpegs towards like actual like content distribution whether it's like albums like for music or for like ebooks or things like that that I think that there's like those are actually really great use cases for nfts um and I hope maybe like this year maybe there might be some secret projects going on you never know um I hope that there's a cool like doubt focused publishing tools yeah it does seem like there's a an exorbitant tax on on

publishing digital media and sometimes you'll even see books on Amazon the the digital version is more expensive than the print version and you're like what the [ __ ] how is this possible this is supposed to be the cheapest all the cheapest way to distribute content like ever created by man and yeah you know understand why the economic story don't work out did you also write a novel it did I wrote a Sci-Fi novel um it was a it's kind of like an underground kind of thing got a decent amount of readers oh yeah and it's got good reviews on Amazon you know I think it's I think it's ironically a lot more timely now though

I hate talking about it because I hate it um okay we'll skip to the next question and be like you know go into Google history you can you can hear about it yeah it was ahead of time and you also ran a record label is that right yeah um in undergrad I had like a started in like indie record label with it with a with a friend um and yeah that was quite the experience it kind of was one of the things that really got me into like all these questions of like content it kind of actually got me into programming in a weird way to like wanting to be able to like make websites for bands and stuff and uh

you know that was uh the start of like my programming web 3 decentralized content kind of Journey but yeah cool so tell me like this this early this early work that you did on like open source and open web standards around this digital publishing and digital annotation work I think you also had a startup that was doing digital annotation that what like how did that inform what you're doing now and what what lessons did you learn from that sort of period of your career that informs the kind of work you're doing now and also maybe the

um the the thing like aspects around um content uh uh payment and like you know open source remuneration and things like that um yeah that's a good question you know I think my first like this first startup I worked for I was one of the really early like employees like and we kind of just took it from zero to one um it was called hypothesis and it was like a web annotation startup it's still around today and it's actually used by like uh like over a million students uh use hypothesis today to annotate our documents and articles and uh some Publishers are using it and a lot of

scientific people use it to like annotate documents and have like scholarly discussions so it's pretty cool to have a startup that is not dead um can't be said for all my startups but um that that one was like really important in terms of like in terms of like me learning how to like you know build a product and ship it and get people using it and be being okay with imperfection like you know just like the important it's just taught me the importance of shipping and getting something out there and then you know seeing what people wanted and like building the next thing and yeah I don't know

um yeah and then I you know through that experience I got to learn a lot about like open source uh kind of culture and um I was even had the privilege of like being on a w3c uh working group for which is like a standards body um yeah which one uh w3c they make a bunch of which standards which which group were you I was working on the web web annotation standard so um okay which was actually finalized it actually made it to a huge working group but um it's not been the most successful standard of all time which happens to like actually a lot of standards as well like just because the standard is written doesn't mean it's like widely adopt um yeah that actually kind of like

sort of shapes my thoughts on how standards should be developed like sometimes committees is not the best you just gotta like go out and ship things like if we wanted to make a standard for Dao tooling we could like have like a big committee and get all the cosmosop people together and you know try to agree on some standard but it's better to just like ship it and then eventually the standard kind of like emerges organically um so you think that like some standards uh can emerge in a more organic way by people using it and implementing it but do you know examples of that where standards have emerged without I mean I'm sure there's other many but what do

are there any that stand up to you as particularly interesting uh you know I think uh a lot of the ethereum Improvement proposals um like they you know they're kind of this interesting Crux between like a standard and like they didn't get together with a bunch of other blockchain people and they were like we want to create a like standard for like NFC metadata or whatever or Open Season another great example of this is like we actually used like the open C standard for nft metadata like at stargaze and you know with like a bunch of like the cosmos nfts um we never got together in a group with

those people to like be like we should all like use this thing it's kind of just became super popular like everyone started using the ERC 721 standard um yeah but it was never like designed in a committee you know they kind of just like they did a really nice write-up about it uh like uh and then they like shipped some working implementations and then everyone just kind of naturally started using those like even cross ecosystem like in cosmopolism we don't use the ebm but we still use that same standard so all the functions we have designed like behave basically exactly the same way um and we never had to have like a you know sort of big committee about it I think the same thing with like the

metadata standards for nfts so like openc uh and you can read about this just like Google like nft openc metadata standard and you'll find it um you know what why reinvent the wheel if someone like ships something and they have like an open spec for it that works um that's a great way to set a standard because like everyone you know that's like integrating with these things like it makes integration a lot easier we use the open C standard versus if we try to like make our own um yeah yeah no and I think that with with this sort of thing being early also helps right so like with something like the open C standard they are you know you gotta be early you got to ship something

that works and then right if like a lot of people integrate with it then then it's got a lot of momentum as a standard um yeah yeah standards is something that has momentum and and where you know w3c actually helps I hope we get this way with like ICS standards as well like inner chain um yeah standards because they they're moving a little bit slowly at the moment and IBC could just move so much faster like the kinds of standards that we could build on top of it um but there's two a little bit too much Central planning and not enough team shipping which is you know one of the things I hope that we're going to start doing with you know even more is just like

shipping these new interchange standards and protocols so yeah do you think that IBC has a chance of of becoming a standard outside of like quote-unquote Cosmos like erc20 yeah no if you're following like the developments of IBC it's like the probably most popular uh interoperability framework um polka dots joining um near has plans to join IBC I've talked with like the near team a lot uh Avalanche is joining IBC those are three major ecosystems and if you add that to like all everything that's like happening in Cosmos like wow holy [ __ ] that's really great

momentum and if imagine all those chains joined you got Avalanche you got polka dot you got all of Cosmos you got near like other ecosystems are going to be like God damn like we can't miss out on the whole interchange thing because it's like you know it's pretty great and it's a seamless experience and I think by the end of this year we have all those chains that kind of join successfully and getting some successful adoption like I wouldn't be surprised if others like Solana or like you know who knows maybe even polygon like like I think others will definitely consider joining like all you know all these standards kind of rely on network effects and um the bigger the network grows the more

cost there is to not being in the network you know um yeah more opportunity there is to join so um that'll be really exciting yeah it always felt to me like IBC was I think to a lot of people you know in the cosmos ecosystem like IBC was this this sort of gem right it's just like this gem that the cosmos ecosystem created and it was just waiting to to to proliferate outside of of the of the interchange or you know of like the IBC uh or like the cosmos SDK ecosystem and it feels like it's happening now like it feels like we're right at the beginning it's great it's super cool yeah all right well let's let's talk

about Juno a little bit um you know I I I said in the beginning you know I want to ask you a few things Juno is dead um is Juno dead uh okay I mean Long Live Juno yeah it's like uh I think uh if you look on map of zones they have this amazing tab in terms of it's called daily active users over the past seven days Juno is [ __ ] number one my friend we are the most used chain in the cosmos ecosystem in fact our stats have been pretty good for a while everyone floods us and yet the people like futting us are like way less actively used so you

uh you know we fought ourselves to be honest like uh but I think that's one of the great things about Juno culture is that you know what our chain has made mistakes in the past but at least we've like [ __ ] dealt with them and we're like finding ways to like move forward as a community and that's what I really pay attention to because I think that there's a lot of chains out there with a lot of problems a lot of you know like shady stuff happening or you know I don't want to like get into like talking [ __ ] about other chants but like you know it's out there uh there's a lot of like inefficiencies in governance there's a lot of just like basically clear like not lack of Direction lack of like clear Direction lack of usage even

um and I think that as a as a community like the Juno Community has been much more honest about like dealing with all our faults and our problems and has been more constructive like moving forward like if you look at like Juno sub-dials like they're they're not perfect but they're like actually moving the needle and like doing important experiments um and frankly like allow for a lot more accountability than anything else I've seen in the ecosystem you know yeah it feels to me like Juno is you know looking at the entire ecosystem and you know like I try to have a broad view of the ecosystem like I don't dive sort of like really deep into any one

Community but from from looking at it as an as an overview it feels like the Juno ecosystem is because I'm like on this move fast and break things uh sort of mentality right where like you know there's there's been a lot of issues as you mentioned and there's like there's been some drama right but then but I think the thing that's the most consistent is is the honesty right like people are honest about and the community is honest about what it is and what it's doing and sort of where it's at in its Journey towards building something larger and I think that's interesting and if you know that going in like if you know that going into the ecosystem at least you know what you're dealing with compared to

something else right it's not going to be super polished yeah it's a radical Community chain you know I mean like it's like completely Community owned and operated which it makes it like probably in a weird way one of the most decentralized projects in crypto like we like we just passed a crop like we the core team is fully like under the control of the community they can elect and remove members if they like if they displease them the like Dev funds which is our equivalent of a foundation we don't have a foundation we're like the only crypto project that doesn't have some like secret thing like the ICF or all embarrassed like controlling a very large percentage of the chain and like we actually have that like just completely under community control which

is like that's that's that's what we want like it you know I actually wonder how different things would be in in Cosmos if we had like similar like decentralization um of you know core Community funds effectively um yeah I mean it's really great if the core Foundation is doing its job but if they're not then you know that's great um yeah I know I know you're you have you have conflicting views about that uh on the ICF uh but maybe we won't get into that here uh yeah let's keep it constructive talking about you know like other things um but yeah well I mean so that's that's

an interesting point because like I I've been thinking a lot about this community governance um topic over the last few months and and observing communities and how they've dealt with some of their issues and uh it feels to me like there's problems with scaling that right what when you when you have a small-ish community of people who are fairly aligned on their values you can arrive at some form of clean consensus around things but then when the community starts getting larger and you have different interests coming in and that's that will naturally happen as our community gets larger it gets harder to to have smoother

and more consensual governance and you know like look at Democratic Society as you know an example of this at scale you arrive at a point where there's just so many different opinions and and stakeholders and so do you do you think that full Dow governance can scale or do you think that at some point things needs to stratify and um in order for for things to work oh yeah I think fold out governance can scale I mean look at how much quicker like Juno is moving than Cosmos up it's because the key the key that the key thing that's needed is the right tooling for it and if you have the right tooling then you can scale so like for example like the subdial system

is great because the sub-dials are fully accountable to the larger Community which is important you don't want to just like hand people like a blank check of like oh here's 10 million dollars like go you know do whatever you want with it and there's no way we can remove you and there's no way we can get the money back and there's no way we can you know you there needs to be checks and balances in the system I totally get the point that like and I you know I'm I'd be one of the first people to say like we shouldn't have to [ __ ] vote on everything all the time no one has the mental bandwidth for that but we do need to make sure like that like systems are in place to like keep people accountable so this is what you know we try to do

with subdials it makes you know obviously they use data so you can see everything you know a A subdial or a group of people is doing what they're voting on how they're spending money uh the checks and balances are also in place so if the community is displeased with a subdial for for any reason like they can you know remove members they can add new members they can uh recall funds they can put limitations on spending so for example we have this new vesting contract which I'm so excited about it's about to come out and it's really going to unlock I think a lot of really cool things for for not just Juno but for like a lot of other communities as well um it basically allows for like you know

let's say you're you're starting like a marketing subdo and it's like your your budget is going to be like 250k for the year but like we don't want to like maybe we don't you know trust you and there's a couple other people in the subdial so we're going to like limit your ability to spend that all at once so you're budgeted for 250k for the year but that unlocks over the whole year so like the first month you can only spend like uh like 25k or something like that yeah and then the next month another 25k unlocks and and on and on and on and that prevents like sub subdives from being able to like rug you know community and also make sure that they like don't like overspend as well you know

um yeah so we have uh and they could always you know go back to the community and request hey like there's this really big effort there's this big event we want to sponsor we need to unlock more funds and then the community can have a discussion about that but what's really great is then the subdial can go off and be like oh we need to pay this event and we need to pay this poster designer and we need to pay this journalist and we need to pay this content creator they don't need like the community doesn't need to vote about that like I think one of the bad things in Cosmos governance right now is it's like so flat it's so direct democracy that you have all these people that are like please sponsor my podcast or like you know help out this like charity effort or like

whatever it's it's too much no one can pay attention to all that stuff um and so it's better to like you want to divide things up so that people don't have to like so that like the big decisions the community has like are basically like are we happy with like the performance of this group that's supposed to do a tip certain task or hey here's this new sub-dial they want this amount of budget this is who's on it this is how they think they're going to provide value to the network is that something that's worth doing and then that that group or that team or that Council or that subdial choose whatever name you want they go off and they like go and do the task and hopefully like do it well and create value for the community and if they don't do it well then there's

mechanisms for the community to get their funds back or to kick people out or to add new people that they feel like better represent them um that's like I think that's a really nice like kind of balance and like sort of how we can get you know Dows that like kind of scale but it all to me it all comes down to like the tooling and like being able to have things like vesting contracts vesting contracts are really useful for like funding projects as well like I really don't like this idea and we learned the hard way as well by doing this because we're just we just go out and do it um I feel like Cosmos Hub some of the others have been a little bit slower might like wind up learning a lot of the same lessons and like might wind up structuring their sub-dials or consoles

or whatever they call them in in the same kind of way that we do um but like you shouldn't just like if you make a commitment to like fund a project there has to be milestones and then there has to be a community out at some point you can't just like commit to a project of like you know we're gonna like fund you like a million dollars you know with these Milestones or whatever because you know what's inevitably gonna happen is that there's gonna be a project that like quote unquote hits the Milestones but the community is like really upset with for some reason and then who is the arbitrator in that in that case these things need to like in terms of like dab proposals we need to be very very explicit and have as much on chain as possible about the like relationship of that

Dynamic of like in the event of there there's a dispute like let's say we're working together and I like I pay you and we have some Milestones but now we have disagreement about whether or not you actually hit those Milestones who resolves that that needs to be like explicitly in the smart contract um and we have to have like explicitly like you know like a clause that says like you might have a clause like in the event of a dispute you know the Juno Community is the final Arbiter over you know like the decision or whatever and then that that puts the project in Hot Seat they just can't take the money and run they have to actually [ __ ] deliver and they're they should deliver

they're kind of they're getting these Community funds and they should be accountable um and if they don't want to like sign that Clause like well then don't [ __ ] request Community funds like um I think we can like do a lot to like normalize this stuff and um so we have uh you know we've been working with the Juno growth funds um we got this new investing contract and we're going to be using this with like a lot of our projects kind of going forward of like no you don't just get a blank check you know like the there's got to be a clause that like if the community is upset I mean also part of your job receiving funding is to keep the community [ __ ] happy and if you can't do that I'm sorry like I mean there's a lot to unpack there but

I think this this vesting contract seems pretty cool and also very use useful right and and needed um and you're right I think we need to stratify the funding mechanisms a lot more so doing uh you know on-chain proposals in a single community pool that essentially you know needs to be vetted by the entire Community doesn't work at scale you know we had a lot of these conversations around afterm 2.0 and the allocator and yeah I think specialization is ultimately required once you grow at a scale that is you know larger a couple thousand people because they're you know you can't ask a community of like token holders hey what do you think about like this thing or

that thing most people have no idea what things cost and and so you know when you look at when you look at okay like hey I'm like well here's here's a a very uh a very pertinent example so I I just like a few minutes ago posted a proposal up on the Juno Commonwealth for the junior Community to consider sponsoring nebula Summit which is a con this conference we're organizing in Paris this summer um and you know we're asking we're asking for like a decent sum of money right because well we want to make sure that like Junior can be fully present there that it can have it could be part of the hackathon that like Cosmos a big part of it and everything and we put it up there for Community feedback and one of the

first things that people said to us was like okay what's the budget and and so we're okay well let's let's let's we'll we'll provide some budget we'll provide some more information about what the budget is and so this is useful feedback for us because okay well this is what the community wants to know but I've had this up I've had this experience before also where you know last year we did the same thing where we asked we asked evmos um Community for money and and it you know it went really well um they were present there the community was happy but a lot of folks were like this is like you know you don't need this much money to organize a conference well I mean what do you know about organizing a conference in Paris you know like what do you know about you know the price of venues or the price of

catering and this sort of thing yeah you know I think that was an interesting experience people just need to like grow a bit of thicker skin around I hear a lot of people like bitching about this all the time like oh the community oh the community or the community the community is a hive Minds you can't be you can't be offended by like yeah there's going to be people that don't understand [ __ ] that's fine it's your job to like communicate to those people anyway like you're requesting Community funds and like there's some extra leg work that comes with it but I think it comes like down to like it creates better results at the end of the day and you know what there's there's also a lot of smart people in the community so there's flip side we have like the dumbest dumb people but there's also

some smart people as well and so like Collective yeah actively is a hive mind the community is giving you like a lot of signal you know um and I think obviously projects requesting funding they're always like in the mentality of like my thing is super important and deserves to be funded and um they just need to like engage with the community a lot more and some some people I'm not going to name names they get really frustrated about like oh we have to engage with the community or whatever it's just like yeah you do and if you can't yeah I don't have an issue with engaging with Community I mean that's that's part of the game I think that I I think that at

a certain scale it becomes difficult to to achieve anything without layers of abstraction and and the subtitles are solving this like sub-dials are actually solving this by giving people responsibility getting those those people to be accountable but not requiring them to get vote on everything and I think that's an important that's that's important if you're just going to get work done right yeah you know the really important thing there is the chain of accountability it's like how do you make sure that like you have to like put put people's feet to the fire a little bit um like you have to like make sure that the people on the subdials are like properly incentivized to do a good job

like oh [ __ ] if you do a bad job and we like fund like something like a little too heavily that the community doesn't find Value in that could like mean I get removed from the subdial that could mean I don't get like paid that could mean I don't like our sub-dot funding gets revoked that could be in like xx and x and now that whoever's reviewing those events or those like you know Dev funding or like Open Source Grants or whatever they're like thinking a lot more aligned with the community um yeah and yeah it's interesting because like this is the kind of accountability we want with our politicians right I I wish I could yeah so many politicians yes but like I think we are like actually

creating we're going through this process of like recreating like governance systems and institutions from the ground up and a lot many times we're like kind of Reinventing like similar looking things but that process that we're going through is super important and yeah I think yeah and the tools like you know I think that um you know you could build like a really awesome local government that would function like um better than any other local government with like Dada today basically um yeah and like where things are going to be at in like a year or two years from now is like I think other organizations that are even not not even just blockchains are going to be looking at this tooling to be like in the way we

structure ourselves and be like holy [ __ ] like this is like way more efficient this is like really great there's still there's like direct democracy and yet accountability at the same time um I think this is one of the big you know in terms of like the vision of Juno I think that in The Interchange the most effective Dao like Takes the Cake or gets like you know a large large market share um like how do you build the like this like self-governing self-running Community um and how do you like get it like as much Capital as possible that it can like reinvest and like grow and grow and grow um

the inner chain is like you know like each each Paradigm of crypto and I've been through enough like has like different kind of meta and we were previously You could argue we're still in the multi-chain Paradigm but we're heading to this inner chain world where block space is cheap as [ __ ] like there's just so much box base but like it's really all about like the applications and the people and like uh interoperability and I think in that kind of world they're like successful projects are going to look very different a successful project for example will not run on just one blockchain they're going to run on as many blockchains as they can because they it's it's all

about Network effects it's about getting the most users for your protocol absolutely uh yeah well um just to wrap up on that note if if people are interested in looking at this this uh proposal it's up on Commonwealth I'll put a link in the show notes and uh we're open to the community's feedback on this and looking looking for feedback on the proposal um yeah and then on the um are what are your thoughts on like quadratic voting and and this sort of Novel voting mechanisms foreign contract that's coming soon which I think will be really great uh really useful we have multiple choice that's

going to be like shipped really really soon so like um very very excited for those those kind of use cases uh quadratic voting in particular very much interests me um but uh there's a big challenge with quadratic voting is it doesn't work in every context you need to protect against civil accounts so civil accounts is like you know how with blockchain we can have like hundreds and hundreds of accounts um which is great I think that's a great thing um that kind of fundamentally you know bricks something like quadratic voting for quadratic voting you kind of need like one person that's like a unique person you can't if one person has a cleared accounts like you can really kind of like break in

game quadratic systems uh the uh get coin folks have thought like really deeply about this and published a lot of stuff and they have this product called like get coin passport that like really attempts to like make sure that like an account that is voting like belongs to like One Singular person and that One Singular person person cannot vote more than once um and if you can sort of gear that guarantee that through like whatever sort of like identity systems that you want to build then quadratic voting is like really really cool but I'm excited about some other things like ranked Choice voting um like we are looking at using like ranked Choice voting or like potentially you know multiple choice voting for like election Styles uh like so you you could

have it like an election of you know people running for like a particular sub now or people running sort of place someone on a particular sub-dial um we have I have friends who are really into orbit I don't know if you're if you're familiar with that yeah it's uh it's it's it's cool so there there's there there's a group of people that I that I hang out with who are really into orbit and think that orbit is an effective tool for um well a few things one displacing Discord as the central place where people chat uh for Dao so that Dows could actually own their data because essentially everybody would have their

data in their own you know orbit um environment and then the other thing is because Urban identities are so sticky and people really get attached to their orbit uh names right even though they're pseudonymous effectively it's harder or it's it's more complex it's it's more work to um to create more identity so perhaps this could be like a civil uh like a mechanism against civil attacks but have you given any thought to like orbits role as a way to manage identities and Dows like is this something that you think is I mean it's something that could be like you know play along nicely with a bunch of other stuff you know um I don't know exactly what's I'm very

open-minded to like potential solutions for that um and that could be one uh you know I think it really just depends on like adoption Luke yeah like how widely adopted Urban becomes it's definitely something we could you know integrate at some point if it if it gets to like the right amount of adoption um but you know there's there's other ways to do things like have decentralized like chat or whatever so for example like you could use Matrix Matrix is like an open source encrypted version of Discord um and like dials can like effectively run their own like Federated servers um which could be like really appealing for a lot of people uh I don't know they're you know more and more people

are kind of working on this sort of like the Discord problem um and it'll be really exciting to see like what comes up and what you know people are people are looking at a lot of people are also working on the identity problem as well I mean so you know everybody could be like a definitely a potential solution um so yeah I don't know that much about it I just have like these two friends who are really really into it and uh and think it's the future so um yeah yeah I'd like to talk a little bit about Dows a little bit a little bit more and like that you know I I wrote this thesis a couple of uh two weeks ago and and talked about about Dow Dow and yeah thanks for providing your your comments

there as well um yeah sure and one of the use cases I thought was really interesting is leveraging Dao Dao for uh Dao governed validators and um I I think this is such an interesting use case uh can you explain that how that works practically speaking um and what part of that stack is decentralized uh so the way a dial around validator works is you have like a smart contract um like on Juno for example and it's running it's it's just the normal Dow contracts people can vote to execute any Cosmos message um and that could you know be like calling another smart contract that

could be minting an nft that could be trading some of the Dallas treasury on a wind or like Alpine some of the Dallas treasury on wind or um then the Dow can you know vote on any Cosmos message and so one of the cosmos messages we support is create validator um or edit validator or claim validator commission so we have all the messages the cosmos messages that um that are used to run a validator uh and the Dow is capable of just voting on on all those different messages so we actually have the Dowda validator I think we're like number seven in Juno which is people people got pretty excited about it which is which is great

um it's run entirely by by our Dow so we actually have a whole sub-dial dedicated to the Dow validator and that subdial is you know in charge of like like claiming the commissions sending it back to the Dow treasury uh like uh you know voting on governance proposals is another one um so we have all the tools in the data UI to just like manage your your validator collectively as a dow now you're probably wondering like but who runs the node so these these These are this these have always been separate in in Cosmos so like uh there's the concept of like the validator but then

there's also the concept of the node operator and the node operator has its own special public key which it uses for signing and so when you run the create validator transaction you actually include the public key of the node operator um now if you're on the same machine these are the same like you got the same public key for the node operator and like a different or the same public key that's like signing the create validator transaction but in the context of the Dao you know obviously as a dow we can't you know run a node but we can work with someone else to run a node or one of the dial members could run a node or you could use something like horcrux that allows a bunch of validators to come

together each run a node and each have like a partial fragment of the key like a a four of seven if you will um and like so there's a couple different options here but the the basic idea is that like the node operator has its own public key that's separates so um for example with Dowda we have a bunch of the data folks and their uh they're running the validator which we need anyway for like one of the indexers that we built um and uh yeah so they run the validator uh but the Dow calls the create validator transaction and all the money flows to the Dow and not to like uh you know the people running the validators pockets

but you know they do request like a certain budget of like hey you know I've got this much server cost you know so we have like a we have like a deal with them to like cover their server costs at least and then get like 10 on top for like the labor um each dial needs to kind of figure out that situation like you could have down members run it uh you could uh we've actually talked about um a dial that's launching the scene which is kind of like a public a public benefit Dao and uh we were thinking about having a validator to like get some income for it and uh we're gonna have a bunch of existing validators each run a node for this like public charity kind of stuff um so they're kind of like donating like

the compute resources of like one node and then we would use horcrux to like allow them to like that way it's not like a it's not like we're just working with like one validator we're actually working with like seven validators and they each run a node but that they're all running one node for like the Dao I think these are so they're each signing transactions with like horcrux is allowing each of them to to do signing and so they're Distributing the load of that validator that's interesting yeah yeah and I guess you could also could you could you use something like Akash to run the notes yeah you could that's really okay so you could effectively do like a fully decentralized validator yeah I mean there's like a lot of uh I think there's a lot of exciting things to explore here

but you know another great thing about the tower and validators is then it gives it gives a lot more people like a say in the direction of of the validator like people can vote how the validator will do yeah which is like yeah which is pretty cool like imagine like a representative democracy where if you cared enough you could like vote on how you're Senator you should vote like yeah yeah it puts like well I mean I I ideally you'd you'd want all the delegators to be voting independently I mean like this this this already kind of exists only like delegators don't don't all vote but if you had some rep some kind of foreign

I think a lot of the people that really care are going to vote directly but if you could also vote and have your validator votes like that's extra because one of the problems and I think we could debate whether or not this is a bad thing but when validators vote in Cosmos if the delegators don't vote the like the validator votes for them so there's a lot of people like that especially on certain chains like on Juno we have like a pretty great voter turnout like it's pretty awesome but there's other chants that are a lot less good on that that voter turnout and so that means that validators are voting with all this extra power um so it does matter I think you know it'll be really exciting to

explore these ideas like a lot more in like the coming years um but I think it's I think it's really good for the decentralization of networks and I actually think it's a really great way to bootstrap validators like imagine if like instead of like just going to launch a validator right away and like get it or be like everybody delegate to us on Juno like imagine if you created a dow first like a dow around the interop and then now you've got like that whole business model and then you get money in the treasury like say you like like you just like get the money for like the conferences or whatever or you get I don't know how I don't know how the interop business model works but you know you get money in the treasury business model um yeah

this is me it's just me doing content dude there's no business model right right figure out figure out a busy model started yeah journalism now or something like that that sounds cool um and then like or just like use use the Dow to like help fundraise like getting into the active set basically I think this is like a whole interesting Dynamic that we could like potentially see like this year um but it gives you like another tool to like help people get in the active set so yeah that's cool what What's um what's the most interesting stuff on the Dowda roadmap oh we got so much like so much great stuff

um we have like some real [ __ ] entertain accounts features they're gonna be shipping you've heard of energy and accounts right um have I used interchange accounts sorry yeah all right so you got liquid sticky and that's it but like can you have an account on the cosmo sub for example and just do anything across the inner chain well not yet because it sucks like yeah they like cosmosup is great at like over marketing and things and then under delivering

um but like we're gonna like actually make really [ __ ] great interchange account experience so as a doubt you are going to be able to swap tokens on osmosis LP or Treasury and get like rewards you're going to be able to sell list like create nfts mint them on Juno and sell them on stargaze you're going to be able to like hold accounts Across The Interchange and see balances for them and stuff and uh so yeah that's like really we really want to live up to The Interchange down tooling and we think you know it's like strategically also very important for for making Juno a hub you know like the Hub of the doubt um yeah and being some of the first people it's like actually ship like

working ux and good ux around this like uh I think we can like make a big difference um so I'm pretty pretty excited for for interchange Account Support uh we have fundraising tools that are on the way so what did every group like say you're a non-profit what do you want to do we usually have to fundraise somehow maybe you have to fundraise to get your ballot if you're in the active set or like um so these are are incredibly important for many different types of dials and projects basically every every group whether you're like a non-profit or a club or a startup you know at some point you want to do some sort of fundraising right like this is something we do with like entities so

um we want we're building something really really awesome like next level kind of fundraising tools for doubts uh we have a lot better like nft support on the way we already have like nft Dows um we're going to be like supporting like stargaze Outpost so you're going to be able to like mint like your nft for your Dow or whatever and then like seamlessly list it on like you know the stargaze marketplace if you're looking to sell it um we're gonna have like Dow publishing tools which are you know kind of alluded to but I'm particularly really excited about giving given my background um we have we're gonna have better like kind of Fiat sports we actually have Fiat on-ramps now but like we want to get like little payment widgets so that

like Dows can like like include a little snippet on their website and then people can just swipe their credit card and it shows up as usdc and the data's balance um we are also working a really big Initiative for us this year is privacy privacy is great I think one of the best things about Dao's is transparency but it's like our it's like our logo it's like the yin yang sometimes you want transparency transparency is really good but sometimes you want privacy and we want both um so we've been actually working with risk zero um risk zero is like working on this amazing like zero knowledge like virtual machine um and so we're working with them to like Implement a private voting

private Dow treasuries and private dot membership so like that is this a cosmos VM or is it something different oh well it plays great with Cosmos because cosmosm is awesome and cosmosm is just written in Rust and risk zero is also written in Rust so you know that's great um so in fact I already have a working smart contract example for for verifying azk proof in uh in using risks here so um would be able to verify proofs yeah so we well we'd have Smart contracts that like would like allow for like private voting and private Dow

treasuries and private membership so okay yeah I think the private membership thing is really huge the price I mean I feel like without the way this probably needs to be designed is in a way where like accountability for you know I I like people who are needed to need to be accountable and like privacy for voters or I mean at least that would be like the ideal thing right if you think about it yeah yeah I think I think it'll just be another option when you're creating your doubt of like do you want like public or private like do you want like is this like you know obviously for like something like a Community Fund you want that stuff to be public these

people are spending Community money we want to see how they're voting we want to see what they're doing we want to make sure that they're like doing their jobs correctly so that we can hold them accountable um I think that's also true for like projects that are like you know kind of like raising money you know it's like we don't want like like a startup for example to raise money and then just like no they have to be accountable to like you know the people the people that invested uh there's a lot of times where you want transparency but then there's also times where you want you want privacy you want people to be able to like like imagine you're in a class and you're voting on like how you should rate your professor you don't want to like rate your professor badly because then he's going

to see it and so you need like kind of actually private voting so the professor gets the final score but can't see how everyone in the class voted you know um yeah I'm I'm really excited about the internet account stuff and I think you know when you were talking earlier about Juno becoming a hub for dows this is the way that I've been kind of talking to people about it I I see Juno becoming a a like gnosis chain-like thing for the cosmos ecosystem where it has all of the best Dow tooling all the best Dows are there um and then with this entertaining counts integration

I I think like it could also become in a way that the account abstraction chain where anytime you're creating an account on any of the chain while you're actually creating an account on Juno because that chain has all of the tooling to be able to do really complex stuff Across The Interchange like all these things you've been describing um is that is that the vision for Juno I mean to become this this Dow tooling hub I mean I think I think Dows are like a crucial part of the strategy of Juno like yeah because I think that Dallas are how business activity happens I want investment dies on Juno we're going to have like tools for investing investment

doubts like things like the vesting contract we have a token swap contract like all this you can use without having to know any [ __ ] code it's all right there in the UI like and I think by being like early adopters in this like you know we're probably like the most underrated like chain in the cosmos right now like if you look at in terms of like our metrics like our daily active users if you look in terms of like actual development activity and it's not just data like look at everything wind is doing it's like it's incredible they're building in like interchange D5 protocols like like real interchange D5 protocols like um I think it would just add a little bit more to it because I don't think

that like the goal is to be like just like a gnosis chain I think though I think that that's like I kind of agree with that and that it's like a really important part of the strategy but the way I think about it like the tagline I've been using is like I want Juno to be The Interchange incubator where we're like yes we have all this Dow tooling but we really want to be like incubating like the best like interchange protocols like um it's like I think people go about launching projects in Cosmos all around they immediately jumped to launching a whole L1 and then they have like basically hardly any like usage um and then they have all this overhead too of like running a whole L1 like

I think what I've been advising a lot of projects to do and what a lot of projects on Juno have have already done is like you launch on a chain like Juno take advantage of the really like insanely passionate community and like the awesome Dow tooling which you can use for like fundraising and deploying your smart contracts and maybe even integrate into your protocol uh take advantage of all that stuff and then launch your product on Juno get some product Market fit and then once you get some traction once you get some actual users uh well then you can like think about like launching your own like L1 and you can secure it with mesh security um yeah so that's another big thing for like the Juno roadmap this year is is

mesh security um so uh I think it's going to be a real game changer and I think it's going to scale a lot better than ICS scales ICS is like like I've already been hearing a lot of complaints about you know from validators like there's only going to be so many ICS chains there's not going to be thousands and I think that this is like a big misconception that a lot of the lay people think is they think that like ICS is going to endlessly scale and there's going to be thousands of consumer chains and that's just not the case um validators Every Chain that's added the validators have to run an instance of and they will get slashed if there's downtime um and so it's going to be important to actually

like ship like real like shared Security Solutions that scale and I think that's going to be mesh security at least that's what we've like you know and and I've been helping like develop that you know we have some of our best developers like helping helping develop that um but to me like that's more aligned with like the Juno kind of vision of like the home of interchange Dows or The Interchange incubator is we want to be able to incubate projects get them get them the funding they need get them to like launch on Juno and get that early like traction and then we want to be able to like support them and still like have a beneficial economic relationship with them after they launch their own L1 because we don't want them on Juno

forever I think that this is yeah in the inner chain Paradigm what really matters is like that value is accruing to the stakers that this Juno stickers are getting good Roi for for what's who cares if it's happening on the Juno blockchain [ __ ] if a protocol is like really taking off and doing like thousands of transactions per like you know per minute or whatever I don't want it on the Juno blockchain it's going to drive up gas fees for everybody else you know it's like right at that point they they deserve their own you know Cosmos L1 and the great thing about security is it allows just have like an advantageous economic relationship and still like benefit from like we can effectively like secure each other

um and so like the vision is that like we're going to incubate all these protocols all these amazing like interchange things that are even going to transcend the cosmos ecosystem as we like typically think about it of just the cosmos SDK Chains No we want to go into the polka dot and we want to go into Avalanche and we want to go beyond like that's that's how we get the most valuable protocols and then the great thing about mesh as well is it works with non-cosmos SDK chains as well or it can and that is a big game changer going forward um and so we'll be able to spawn these protocols and then like Forge like mutually beneficial economic

relationships with them as they spin off into their own l1s or they like spread out throughout the inner chain yeah I think that's a really sane vision of product scaling in blockchains uh the way I've been thinking about it is you know smart contracts are launching on a smart contract chain is like building your website on WordPress it's yeah you know you have very little sovereignty but you're building an application that's going to work and it's going to allow you to you know grow and build build a user base and then you can you can kind of move up from that and I don't think app chain is maybe like the the next logical step because I think app Chains Are Gonna are going to end up costing quite a bit to to secure maybe mesh Security will offset some of that

cost a little bit but I feel app chains are really you know the the fangs of crypto right like these are big chains that that are that need vertical vertical integration you know things like dydx things like osmosis and in between I feel like there's there's a space for uh I think Roll-Ups make a lot of sense in between there uh depending on the level of sovereignty you need you want you might need a settlement roll up or a solvent roll up but but it's more of a linear growth thing than like uh you know these things are in opposition to each other you know I do I do think that Economic Security like one of the things that I really them sort of upset about in this whole like discussion of shared security and interchange security and there's many

aspects to security like and economic security is just one aspect and there's been all this like talk of like oh like they talk about it as if it's the only thing that if you're secured by a high market cap chain that you're secured and the truth could not be further from reality first of all like there's not been a lot of successful like economic attacks against chains like a lot of chains don't even even have that much liquidity out there like let's just say for for sake of example there's like a hundred billion dollars of assets on Juno and we only have a market cap of 100 million well guess what given the current state most Juno is not listed on exchanges

like there's like you can't buy enough like Juno to like actually take over the network because like yeah um and then whatever it is like okay that all gets bought up and now like now the market cap of the Juno chain has gone up and it's gonna cost more and more to like continue like buying up buying up the chain what's more concerning to me is actually another risk that's not been addressed which is validator concentration like how many validators has to be compromised in order to Halt the chain or take over the chain um another thing that I think is extremely important that we need to solve as an ecosystem is software security because there have been you know I can't talk about them but there's like real bugs

and guess what just because you're secured by high market cap chain does [ __ ] off for that like hmm it it does nothing with when it comes to like software security um so I'm really excited to be launching a security dial a security sub dial finally and we're like you know building some powerful defense and offensive like tools like in-house and you know I think it's going to be like really important we need to think about security though like really holistically it's not like even Mass security I think mesh security is great but you're really only talking about Economic Security um in many ways I think the main benefit

of of mesh security is just like forging like Mutual economic incentives between chains you know I mean um so yes we can secure each other but we can also sort of form this like mutually beneficial kind of relationship yeah that's that's great and the security Dao is is going to be funding security research or yeah research running things like bug Bounty programs things like that um I think with that we want to also try to get as many of like the best devs as best abs as possible like you know we got we got Rhys we got myself we got like a few others and we were like gonna

try to get just honestly like a really good group of people that it's like really focused on Cosmo security there's just so many different don't don't get me wrong I think I think our funds are safe but like there is there's a lot of issues like oftentimes like you know there's a lot of things that might not result in like theft of funds but could result in like downtime for a chain for sure I think that there's a large amount of those kind of issues um and I think we need and I think this is actually something that we need to like dedicate resources to Across The Cosmos I think a lot of us are so focused on like building features and like bringing value to our token and making like great products you know we need to like have this like cross you

know ecosystem like better collaboration on how do we make this software stack as robust as possible even to downtime okay it's like downtime is like not that big of a deal if you think about it like great the chance down for like you know a day or eight hours or whatever it is but that's when we're talking about like like running like actual [ __ ] economies like actual financial markets and stuff like that's absolutely huge uh yeah and so we like if you think about like especially as we go into like you know maybe a like a bull market again or at least get away from like the worst of the bear market like if you think about the amount of dollars that is like of economic activity that

is lost because of downtime it's like we need to do everything that's possible to prevent those kinds of incidences in the future um and yeah it's as important as economic security is and it is important and I think there are some like good things about the other ICS design not that many but there's a few um like we really do need to be taking like a more holistic look at security as an industry and um yeah that's that Ryan cool well looking forward to seeing uh seeing the security Dow and the research that comes out of that um so what is the uh yeah two questions who do you think I should have on next

uh who would you love to uh to see getting more uh more air time um I had Shane on a couple weeks ago it was super it was a great conversation yeah all right uh looking best you should get Zeke from data I don't know if you want to have like two data people on in a row but you know it's great yeah no so he's been suggest he's been suggested to me as well and I was actually thinking of doing like another episode that's about Dow Dow but a little bit more technical like getting into the contracts and actually like a perfect person to do it um because like yeah so um and um what's the contracts and

stuff and he's he's really a lot of the like the Giga Brands behind it but it's pretty cool okay well I'll try to get him on and uh yeah before we wrap up like what is the thing that uh people can do to contribute to Juno but but more importantly what are some areas that are severely lacking in terms of resources in terms of people building where there's like some low hanging fruit that people can get into and start contributing in meaningful ways yeah that's a great question um you know I think that we actually have like a really strong like development community in in Juno like uh which is which is great uh other chains I'm not

gonna name names they have to like do like a huge marketing budget I've literally seen ads in their in their their feed and they get like zero zero engagement they're like please call some awesome devs we need you so much like you know we're just a big VC chain and we've got developer incentives oh we also have developer incentives too um the next version of Juno like half the transaction fees can go to like smart contract developers which I'm really excited about um but uh yeah so we're we're actually doing really great on developers and I have actually a fundamental kind of almost contrarian belief is that it's all quality over quantity like give me give me five of the best like Cosmos and deaths give me a Zeke give me Noah give

me like Ethan fry and like the wins team and it's like that's all you need to like really change the change the world and make like the next Paradigm like if you have like a hundred like mediocre cosmosum devs like good luck with that I'll take I'll take five of the best people like those are gonna make like the the game changing interchange verticals um in terms of what we need though like you know I think that Juno is a decentralized community really needs a lot more help on like kind of just marketing and storytelling and like uh you know maybe it comes down to like content creators of like we have a communication subdial but you know there's there's just so much work to do

on like sort of the marketing and storytelling side of like you know we actually have like some really great numbers in terms of like daily active users but like who's like spinning that into a narrative like how are we like working with the journalists and like telling our story like what you know like unfortunately like all the press that we've gotten is like for like mildly negative events and then we did all these actions to like fix those things you know but like you know we need to like get people that are like kind of more focused on like those kind of aspects uh and that's not me yet you know I'm not like a marketer or anything like that but um that'd be like you know kind of something that I would look for is just like

I would encourage people like come engage with the community like there's Discord there's telegram there's a really great like Juno community that happens of your Twitter spaces and on Twitter um so you know follow me uh there's about a few of those retweet a lot of those people um and like yeah get get involved in the community by like Twitter Twitter spaces and then I think you know after you've been hanging out for a while and feel how things work like there's a lot of work I think just on that whole like kind of media side of like how what what kind of content are we making how are we telling like the Juno story and the Juno narrative because I think I think it's gotten lost in in the context of like a lot of the other like heavy marketing that's like

kind of going out that's why like the Juno is Dad joke is kind of a joke we're actually you know as like this week if you look over the past seven days we're the most active the most used Cosmos chain and yet like everyone is out like there's so much fun yeah I need to connect you guys with uh with story Guild um uh they they're like a a PR Dao and they have like actual PR experts in it and you know they work yeah I think that's actually something that's like really needed is like a PR kind of subbed out on Juno and like I'm not the person to lead that

I've never never done PR or anything like that bit like you know those those kind of aspects are really important and I think it's I think it's the biggest thing we're lacking at the moment of like we've made a lot of stride uh in terms of like uh investment subdowns so like the Juno growth fund I think is doing a really good like very thorough job of like reviewing projects and investing in them and there's a lot of really great checks and balances that I think could Inspire like other projects in the ecosystem I actually wish that prop 95 like borrowed a little bit more heavily from the general growth Bond um but uh like we you know and that core one is now a subdial which is I'm so [ __ ] excited for like that's that's amazing

uh we have uh you know all our like software developments uh but I think that and we do have the communications debt but the communications dab is different from like you know there's so many different aspects to like Communications and marketing you know there's PR there's content production um oh there is one more thing uh that if you're listening we really need help with uh documentation is is a huge yeah huge Challenge and I've actually been talking with uh some folks and uh I've been talking with some folks from uh like osmosis we need to do a better job of Cosmos and documentation because right right now it's all like very like

fragmented and the reason this is a problem is because like it's pretty technical right and the most technical people that are best most capable to work on the documentation guess what they're too busy like actually like building the protocols you know like yeah because like documentation does not pay as well as like building like a really lucrative like interchange D5 protocol you know it's like um so we're kind of in this Catch-22 with cause and walls and documentation I would say actually Tara has like the best cosmosom documentation at the moment but like it still has like a huge amount of room to improve and then I think one of the problems which I

really hope we can get over as as an ecosystem is like everyone's kind of Reinventing the wheel and everyone has their own Silo for documentation and it's all low quality and I really want to move past this like can we all just collaborate on like one canonical cosmopolism documentation resources like and all just contribute like resources toward it so that we can make it like really awesome but yeah um if you're listening and we really do need people to like help kind of spearhead that effort and um it's also a great way if like you're a Dev it's a great way to actually learn cosmosm is to like just go through and like be forced to explain it to other people and I guarantee by the time you're done with that you're gonna have a really good understanding of it you're gonna be able to uh you know write some

very valuable smart contracts and everyone's gonna love you for like having helped like solve the documentation crisis um well that's great um uh yeah I think documentation is like really uh one thing that a lot of teams don't spend enough time on and so they certainly tell a lot of teams I advise yeah spend time writing dog early I will say that it's like oftentimes not as valuable as like people want like uh yeah I have a contrarian view again like to me it's all about getting like you know the five best devs or the 10 best devs because like they don't need the documentation we just we just read the we just read the code like um yeah but if you want but if you want

like you know the next wave of people to get on and start using it like you need good documentation for that yeah yeah documentation is good uh we just really we really need help and I I'm very very focused at the moment on but you know the great thing about Juno is it's not just like it's not top down like I actually don't run it it runs itself it's great um so I think those are the biggest areas of opportunity like marketing storytelling um and just content and then just documentation is like those are like the biggest needs of Juno so if if you're listening or maybe you can help us out that would be awesome um yeah I can try to make some intros and connect you some people who might be

able to help there um yeah there's so many more things that I wish uh we could talk about like I've only covered about half of what I had in my uh list of topics here like fraction of the data road map and you know we didn't talk about like you know but we'll do oh my gosh the next Juno release I'm gonna just tease it we're gonna like you know get down to like much faster block times so like you yeah like uh like evmo style like block time so like two to three seconds this is very possible that's gonna be like I think that's perfect oh we're gonna like also this is the last thing but we're also going to be working on improving the Nakamoto coefficient with

real economic incentive like because I think it's huge chains could be a lot more decentralized and like everyone's talking about security Economic Security I'm worried about validator concentrations because if you only have to get six validators to collude to Halt the chain or if they get regulated against because they all have like you know they all live in the same jurisdiction like that's that's a huge amount of like existential risk um and so we are going to be working to make it so that if you um delegate to the number one validator in in the set versus the last validator in the set you make slightly more if you delegate to the last validator but you're also taking on slightly more risk so we need to like incentivize people to

take on that extra risk to decentralize the chain um that's massive and it's so needed it happened to be the craziest you know people out there that are actually going to do this before you know other communities do great well thanks so much for coming on this has been really fascinating I really enjoyed this conversation learned a lot and uh yeah looking forward to doing more more Juno and Dow Dow content because I I've been kind of get going into this Dada rabbit hole and also Cosmos I feel like there's just like so many strings to to pull on and so um we'll definitely do do more of that here on the on the podcast and hopefully I hope to see you at the at the conference and at the hackathon

and uh we'd love to have a junior presence there great Jake thanks thanks again for coming on yeah no worries thanks cheers peace