How Bitcoin Will Secure The AppChain Future | Rollkit, Babylon, Stride

Transcript

before we jump into this episode a quick reminder that everything set on bell curve is a meme and nothing set on bell curve is financial advice enjoy the app [Music] all right partner uh this one's gonna be a fun one um here today we're going to be this is the last uh interview episode of this season of bell curve we're going to be talking about Bitcoin coming to Cosmos uh the collab that we didn't know that we needed but now that we know it's a possibility we're all super excited about um you want to talk a little bit about who we've got on the show today yeah absolutely so um you know today we'll be speaking to uh developers of of roll kit um and the Babylon team and and an application developer and Aiden stride

um and so you know I think we have we have a wide range of perspectives on on how Bitcoin plays into this app chain conversation um then we also have the perspective of a builder who is you know thinking about these different stacks and and you know thinking about how to make the best possible version of of their product you know and by leveraging different parts of the stack and security models um so I think yeah it'll be I'm really excited for this one and I think it'll be a great way to kind of tie together a lot of these themes so we've been talking about through the whole season same partner and just to give listeners a guide because in the beginning this is a little bit of a technical episode so the the first probably half or so of the episode we're really digging into what

does it mean to this kind of uh alliance between budding Alliance or potential lines between Cosmos and Bitcoin so we talk about what does it mean for a chain to inherit the security of another chain what are some of the different approaches right both in Babylon and kind of that the nascent roll kit that just sort of got rolled out um and like what are kind of some of the trade-offs in between those Solutions and then we sort of end uh with Aid and kind of talking about things from the perspective of a uh an app chain developer in the cosmos ecosystem so I think we covered a lot of really interesting ground and I think that's about all the audience needs to hear from us so without any further Ado let's just uh Dive Right In I didn't do it sounds great cool all right everyone welcome back to

another episode bell curve this is the final interview of this season so super super excited to do this uh miles and I today are joined by uh Javed David and Aiden we're going to be getting into backgrounds there in a second but welcome fellas thanks for joining us yeah thanks for coming on awesome uh today we're gonna be kind of broadly exploring this idea of the um you know in the last episode miles and I were kind of exploring this idea of the cosmos app chain thesis playing out on ethereum and more recently uh we've kind of shown we've kind of seen signs that uh there might be an intersection a very interesting intersection to explore between Bitcoin and Cosmos and kind of the app chain basis as well but before we start to dig into that I think it might be helpful

just to do a super quick round of intros uh for those on the call so maybe Aiden can I pick on you to go first and then and we'll just do 30 seconds on who you are and the project that you're working on yeah definitely um so I'm Aiden I am working on stride stride is an app chain that provides liquid staking for Cosmos uh so what that means is today we support St Adam SC osmo esteemos Este Luna SD junors and SC stars um but we're going to be adding about 20 more lsts this year so the way the stride works is we provide lsts or liquid staking tokens trustlessly through IBC so it's a cross-chain liquid seeking protocol in in Cosmos awesome thanks thanks in uh javiter

David all things well yeah I was um hey hey everyone I'm Javi um I was working at optimism earlier on the Bedrock release um before that I was part of uh a lot of uh blockchain projects like handshake and beat drag um I also published this paper along with my colleague at first called uh inventory dos like intros we found um a lot of Dos factors in a lot of cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin uh multiple versions of Bitcoin in fact um and now I'm working at the execution environments team here at Celestia um

and recently um uh I made it possible for roorkee to use Bitcoin as a dealer which we'll be getting into today so that's me go ahead David okay great um good morning everybody so I'm David so uh I started this project I belong about a year ago our goal is to bring Bitcoin security to the app chain world um so I focused so far has been on Cosmos which is very natural being the one of the predominant app chain world and uh right now we've built a test net we launched it a few weeks ago in fact we just had a share security

Summit we organized one with eigen layer last week so right now there are eight cosplay chains on a test net integrated with Babylon bringing Bitcoin security including osmosis Juno secret and other changes I'm also professor at Stanford and uh This research for Babylon comes out from our research lab at Stanford excellent well thank you very much David Stanford is definitely one of the good ones that many folks here will have heard of um I actually think that the mission of Babylon is probably a really good sort of jumping off point and maybe before we get into the weeds maybe we could just do kind of like a high level sort of

definition definition of terms so I think uh it might be very good to kind of just Define when we talk about app chains being able to borrow or leverage the security of Bitcoin can you just get a little bit more granular about defining what does security mean what are the properties of security yeah so uh you want me to start right Michael sure okay cool yeah so [Music] um security is basically uh robustness of a blockchain against attacks uh so one can think of security as a multiple Dimension object so for example one can think that there are maybe roughly four types of attacks that one can attack a blockchain uh one

is uh double spend attack short range double Spin Attack number two is a long range double spec attack this is happening when unbonding has happened the third attack is the invalid execution attack where you create money from from Nothing by having an invalid State transition and the fourth is a liveness attack and liveness like techno for the broken down into censorship resistance or just the whole chain got stalled because you know some bad leaders did not update the software properly so those are the four attack vectors that I can think over here at the high level uh maybe Aiden and Jeff mod can add if they think that I'm missing something

yeah maybe if there's uh another attack Vector because of um an invalid State transition the network partitions and that is the most um uh I think uh like on the attack there is like um when you have a network partition it's very hard to uh like bring consensus back and um we saw this happen with for example when we disclosed uh INF dos which was like a Dos Vector uh This falls into the category of liveness uh attack that David just mentioned um because of the disclosure process which takes a long time um because we we did a responsible disclosure so we disclosed to the

Bitcoin developers first and um the risk of not doing this properly was that in case you have uh a role uh or release patched out for for fixing this uh uh bug uh and it's not evenly passed on the network all at once you would have a network partition because some nodes would upgrade uh in sub wouldn't and if for example um because of some malicious actor if this bug was exploited then you would have uh a part of the network going down and a part of network keeping going uh on a different like on a different path and because of this uh it would cause a network partition bill so this was a

this was the warrior for most of the developers that are working on distributed systems because in contrast to traditional infosec practices um the chances of patching a bug are going horribly long or much higher because um there's just so much more complicated uh than uh centralized entity like apple for example uh patching a buck so uh they are definitely uh a lot of uh complexities involved in fixing bugs or and um generally approaching security uh when it comes to distributed systems especially like Bitcoin that's that's great that's really

helpful and I think we'll we'd love to get into you know a little bit later how you know Babylon is helping uh proof of stake chains inherit some of these properties from Bitcoin versus how you know Sovereign Bitcoin roll-up would um but yeah I think that's probably a good time to transition over it so so Javid You released you know a post this week that describes what uh a Bitcoin Sovereign roll-up would look like using roll kit um so maybe just just take it take a stop back could you could you give a high level overview of what role kit is um you know how how is roll kit different or similar like aligned with Celestia um and then exactly what what it's you know what are you describing here when

you say a Bitcoin Sovereign role okay sure yeah uh yeah those are great questions let's dive into those so first of all uh roadkit is a modular framework for building roll ups uh what do you mean by modular um you can have um or like on the components of a roll up uh which are typically the execution environment so this is like for example get like evm um or for example uh like uh custom Watson or like um maybe uh you know maybe like Fuel and all this so uh these are the execution environments uh these are like one layer of the stack

um and um the other stat the other pieces so the components of the stack are like for example data availability um like how would you do sequencing um the sequencer how would you submit like intermediate State routes so block it includes all of these modules um just as cosmos SDK uh allows developers to create new uh blockchains using the whole uh Cosmos tab um rolekit allows developers to create new rollups and with the same level of modularity uh because each component is uh is its own package and nicely uh um like it has abstractions uh defined

so that they can be switched independent of each other so uh our goal with showing uh Bitcoin uh as a data availability layer was to uh highlight that rolekit is easy to integrate with uh a third uh with with any uh data availability layer um and this is what we did in the last week um coming to your second question um how is role can related to Celestia well Note 8 is a neutral project it does not uh related to any single uh entity um but um you can use rolekit for um for having uh use you can use

Celestia as data availability for using toolkit so it is possible because toolkit is modular um but we wanted to highlight that it's easy to switch away to bitcoin and uh you can have uh just as easily any other data availability layer implemented so this is what we did it's great so it's basically it's a demonstration that you know this framework is so modular and flexible that you could use really any L1 for for data availability whether it's Bitcoin whether it's Celestia or ethereum um and in in the case of the Bitcoin Sovereign roll-up is you know it is basically completely relying on on bitcoin for data availability and

consensus um whereas I think maybe with Babylon and we can we can kind of transition over to to David I think um with Babylon you're really supplementing I think security with with bitcoining so I would love love to just kind of uh David if you wouldn't mind giving an overview of what of what Babylon is is working on and you know specifically maybe I saw the osmosis Babylon proposal um was approved you know on Jane recently and I would love to give you know viewers an overview of what that proposal um is uh describing yeah great so yeah maybe in a high level let me explain a little bit about the um

the the overall goal of the project Babylon so if you look at um the world of share security they're basically true Social Security main Social Security in the blockchain world there is like Bitcoin on one side ethereum on the other side so if you think about the development of vegetarian ecosystem it starts with utilities the chain and then there's a fundamental problem which scalability is building scale so Roll-Ups is what appears as the scaling solution scaling solution right now so robs get scalability and by using Technologies like ZK and fraud proofs it shares as much as the security of the

ethereum as possible now what we see the next step is that now if you have many Roll-Ups then there's a problem of interoperability how do these robes talk to each other and that's what we see the research I guess you had a previous uh episode on super J so you can see the direction here from security to scalability to interrupt virtually interoperative is still very much a work in progress now if you look however outside ethereum then in fact we already have an ecosystem which is very strong in interrupt budget which is Cosmos so Cosmos already have Sovereign chains which have interoperability and because their app chain it implicitly have scalability because all

these app chains are running in parallel what is missing though is security so sometimes you think about it we're now working backwards right we're starting from Cosmos in architecture an ecosystem already have interoperative scalability but now we want to bring back uh security so it is the opposite direction but now there's a very natural source of secure for that which is Bitcoin and uh so that's sort of what we are uh the goal of the project is to take the cosmos ecosystem or any other ecosystems which will have interoperability for example IBC is now going Beyond Cosmos how to add the Bitcoin security to that to make it secure so that's the goal of the project um now going into a little bit detail as

to what kind of security and whether it's a sub as a supplement uh one can think of it in two ways so basically the core technology is to offer a time stamp a Bitcoin timestamp stamp on every single block of every app chain so that's the goal okay every app chain every block has a BTC timestamp and Babylon is a technology that enables us to do that so this is a very scalable technology uh and it allows many many chains to simultaneously get the Bitcoin timestamp now once you get the timestamp there are two uh types of defense that Babylon can

provide through because security one as I mentioned is long range attack so long range attack is when you have unbonding and then the attacker creates an alternative Fork it's a special type of double spare attack but it's very serious because you cannot protect it through slashing so right now the solution is ad hoc in the app chain world is like a 21 day or 28 day bonding basically using Bitcoin you can first make it safe really provably safe and also reduce the important to less than one day so essentially however long time you think that the block is secure in the big clock change one day it's like 100 block deep so it's very very secure and and one is very important so we make

it super secure so that's one second is that you can think of bit core security as also a additional layer of security Beyond The Economic Security of the app chain so the app chain has their own validators like a cosmos SDK chain like stride for example will have their own validated set they would be responsible for confirming transactions right block by block so very fast confirmation this is possibility okay now however in some applications which we talked to different app chains there may be some important high value transactions that you want an extra

level of security extrolium security then you can achieve by waiting for the Bitcoin timestamp of the block to become say two block peep in the Bitcoin chain two blocked it basically means as coinbase can control a Bitcoin transaction so that's Corn based level of security so let's call it Bitcoin security so that's the second type of use case of uh the timestamp through Babylon so it's essentially trying to combine The Best of Both Worlds right with the uh Mass finality of proof of stake but with the basically the long long range attack security of of Bitcoin um yeah good so basically short range by proof of stick right long race by

Bitcoin and medium range also for Bitcoin for important transactions so that's the one way I think about it uh no it's really interesting and I mean I think it's it's leveraging the same properties that that make Bitcoin a great collateral asset um and and you know finding a second basically problem to solve um it's a much more crypto native problem but in terms of you know supplementing the security of proof of stake chains um and and from a practical standpoint this basically is it you know it's fair to say this will eventually mean the unbonding periods compressed to a matter of of you know hours instead of 21 days yeah so just one point going a little bit into the technology and the contrast

with say the rope that Jehovah talked about right just to provide some contrast here is that we actually our design goal was to minimize the footprint onto the Bitcoin check so basically we put a hundred so each timestamp on the Bitcoin chain is 150 bytes so two so-called op return transactions so it's a very very small footprint so that was the um our design goal is to uh use as little for Bitcoin as possible but yet still extract uh quite a lot of security no it didn't make sense and I think is it fair to say Javit that you know that with the Sovereign roll up you you that

is a challenge right um in terms of the amount of data that you would need needing to post the Bitcoin and I mean is there is it is it fair to say that that it's hard to see like practical use cases for it right now but um you know potentially in the future you could see something interesting come out of it or is it at the very least a demonstration of the you know modular stack oh yeah absolutely um this is this was uh like the integration of roll kit with uh Bitcoin was absolutely meant like a research project to uh understand the viability of uh like uh to check the feasibility of uh um doing it actually

um uh I think if uh a lot of data was being posted to bitcoin uh it would bloat up the chain a lot and definitely that is not like um the ideal way to do uh Roll-Ups um uh generally you want to your data availability layer to be able to handle a lot of data without adding a lot of overhead so um this is where the flexibility of using a modular framework like rule kit comes in because you as a as a application developer can choose which data availability layer you want so for example if you're using a role kit to write data to ethereum for example and ethereum is getting too

congested uh you might want to switch over to a different datability layer and that might not be easily possible if you are using a very tightly coupled code base or or like for example a code base which is like very dependent on ethereum like maybe it's parsing ethereum transactions to read the data and you want to replace that with like Bitcoin and typically these transaction formats and almost everything about them is different so you would spend a lot of time rewriting your code base to switch over from one data available to different one and this is where rolekit really shines because it has a modular framework so all the components are

independently abstracted away the uh the component which handles uh for example this is something I uh appreciated when I was implementing this was when I had to implement Bitcoin data availability layer all I had to write it was like two functions one function is to submit data to bitcoin like um it's literally called Summit block and another called retrieve blocks so it was really simple to implement because of the abstractions that roadkit provides um this is where application developers can make use of the modularity to uh innovate and find uh whatever suits the needs best uh and Implement that uh using the modular shape

yeah go ahead go ahead Mike oh I I've just got a question for for the two of you both David and Java can you comment a little bit on you know what you know if both your Solutions are implemented what is the impact on kind of the Bitcoin side of things so David you mentioned that uh part of your design philosophy was to sort of minimize the imprint or the footprint on bitcoin block space we know that ordinals uh right you know kind of Taproot so it have led to this uh revolution in Bitcoin block space and there's a lot of lively discussion coming from that side of the world in terms of what should Bitcoin block space be used for I'd be very curious to understand uh because we're not actually my understanding is that we're not actually you know exporting you know physical Bitcoins to

be used as collateral into these app chain sort of systems instead it's exporting the properties of Bitcoin block space and the ability to actually read and write onto Bitcoin block space so can you just talk a little bit about kind of the reception from the Bitcoin side of things and then what if any sort of benefits are there to bitcoin foreign yeah it's a very interesting question because the time stamps that we put in is very succinct so it's a very small footprint and so in terms of transaction fees it's a very small transaction piece for Bitcoin uh so that's a double-edged sword I guess right from a course point of view

uh we're minimizing our cost but from the Bitcoin point of view the benefit they get is rather Limited so I think uh we have thought about this so there are several different ways of thinking about this one is uh the following question which is if you want to use Bitcoin as a data with a bit layer like which I bought mentioned about rocket then you have to put the full data put the full data on to bitcoin our solution is still extreme where you put no data on bitcoin except for basically commitments of each block which is very small

do you get any benefit in in the middle is there any intermediate benefit in the middle I think that's a really interesting question but at this point it's more a research question because we don't really know so given sort of the current security framework uh an assets we've done an answer this problem which basically says that well is item one or nothing either you put the whole thing there or you don't put anything there you don't seem to get any benefit in the middle but however I think that's a very interesting question precisely given the recent uh excitement around order notes before notes the understanding was that bitcoiners really hate people to put

stuff onto the Bitcoin chain so after ordinance however this seems to have changed so I think this question so this situation revived interest on that problem so I would say one thing two is uh in terms of getting more engagement from the Bitcoin Community more benefit uh so we had a discussion with sunny Algoa at the share security Summit and there are some ideas on whether or not one can bring some say BTC real quick you see into the cosmos ecosystem to help with BTC staking as a way of getting another form of security another form of security but this is kind of an early discussion with

uh sunny oh going back to that question though I forgot to ask answer early questions since I mentioned study was the integration with osmosis so maybe very briefly talk about that um yeah so we have eight chains on a test and right now going to 10 actually and uh hopefully stride will join us soon um so we have basically these chains on test net but we decide to integrate with osmosis uh on the mainnet so that was the governance proposal on the mainnet so it's multiple phases the first phase is basically opening IBC to get the Bluetooth timestamp and the latter phase is about fast and bonding so they're fast as bonding requires us to feed the BTC timestamp information back onto the

osmosis chain and control the unsticking module so that requires some software changes and that will be later phases of the integration but right now we have a acceptance of the governor's proposal about 99 I guess so we're very happy for the support and um and uh the general support is for the full integration but the specifics we have we're going to pass more governance proposal for specific software changes right just just out of curiosity David what is the cost structure of the economics look like there with that relationship you know I assume Babylon incurs a cost to post data to bitcoin um and then you know did you just add a

margin on top of that cost and is that coming from you know the community pool or or some Dow treasury of the app chains um just just yeah I've sort of one sec yeah so it'd be that's right so we paid the transaction fees to bitcoin and we decided to increase find a new use case of increasing amount of data that transaction fees will go up now uh they changed the consumer chains like osmosis using Babylon assuming split console Security will be paying in terms of um these because they have two time stamps and technology is that osmosis and any chance will be time stamping onto Babylon Babylon will be timestamping on

the Bitcoin too sort of aggregate all the times them together so the natural place that they can pay is at the timestamp uh when they when they commit the timestamp through IBC so that would be a natural way to pay in terms of exactly how much to pay uh we're still exploring the tokenomics because we're trying to quantify uh the value that Babylon should be called security that gives to the app change so one value is the fast and bond bank so that we're doing some analysis actually with aided we're doing some analysis on that impact on liquid sticking protocols um another one is you can ask the question well now that you have Bitcoin security as sort of a backup or a slow uh for high value transaction how much

does that reduce the cost of the Native sticking because everyone knows every founder knows that to maintain a POS app chain you have to spend a lot of tokens in basically enticing people to stick on your chain by having Bitcoin security that cost should be reduced because now that you have Bitcoin security how much is it reduced uh because the reduction is quite important because then you can use the tokens to actually focus on the applications they try to build to provide incentives for people who build the application so that is a very important question and that we are discussing with multiple projects including like Akash was very interested in this question

and to quantify this and yep that's really really interesting and there's powerful implications there I think um and maybe just to kick it over to Aiden uh you you did you tweeted the other day that you you saw there's basically like Bitcoin plus Cosmos you know ethereum and Roll-Ups this makes sense um and I'd love to just start unpacking this idea app from the perspective of the Builder why do you see Cosmos as you know potentially aligned with Bitcoin um and ethereum and Roll-Ups on the other side of the equation makes a lot of sense um I think we're starting to hear a little bit about it but curious uh just to unpack this idea a little bit yeah definitely

um maybe I'll start with a comment that David just made about how fast and bonding actually can improve the health of the ecosystem uh and then I'll jump over to this so if you think about liquids taking protocols there's sort of a few layers of the stack the bottom layer you have the liquid-saking protocol itself so for example in Cosmos this is stride we provide liquid shaking tokens for all of these different l1s on top of that you have the pools so these are the l-pupils that have for example SC atom atom SC osmo osmo so they pair the liquid staking token with the native token and on top of that you have Integrations such as lending

markets you could buy nfts with for example SD Stars this is something that's not out yet but it could come out so there's all kinds of applications and they're all they all kind of rely on the health of these pools now if you think about like how to measure the health of these pools one metric is how healthy is the peg so for example if you want to sell an SD atom for atom how much atom do you get in return do you actually get the same amount of atom that you should or is it d-pegged and do you get less than uh then you could redeem with tribe um and the way that fasts on bonding actually increases the health of the peg is the health of the peg is a function of how easy it is to run the r between

for example St Adam and atom so if St atom is cheap one way that you could run the ARB is you buy the cheapest atom you go back to stride and you redeem it for uh for atom and in this way you actually get the full amounts of atom redeemable for SC atom so for example if St atom is draining at 95 cents in the pool you could go back to stride and redeem it for a dollar the problem is you have to wait for three weeks um or maybe not the problem but this is the reason why why uh liquid staking tokens Can debug I mean we saw this on ethereum where Steve had an infinite unbonding period and therefore there were these massive defects because no one actually knew whether they could or when they could redeem SES for

underlying youth so by reducing the Unbound include you make it much easier to run this arm so the way that it works is if SC Adam is trading at 95 cents someone can go in and they can buy that SD atom for 95 cents they can redeem it with stride and if the unbonding period is only three days that's actually a less expensive ARB to run than if the embonding period is three weeks um so so by decreasing the unbonding period you increase the health of all the equals and uh if you go one layer up the stack you increase the health of all the Integrations that rely on these pools um so I guess to summarize that that point if if you sort of believe in a future where liquid taking tokens are widespread

um reducing the unbonding period is actually very desirable and it can increase the health of the entire ecosystem that makes total sense and it didn't you know it basically you know reduces the liquidity premium um from from the perspective of these the native staking tokens which you know should drive down inflation rates uh to a more reasonable level in the long term but also you know as you mentioned makes kind of the usage of the liquid staking tokens even more safe which I think is great so I you know I can see now why you know starting to make sense yeah a little bit more your Tweet because it also you know improves improves The Stride product

um a little bit more but you know is it is it fair to say that you know basically Bitcoin um the cosmo stack allows you to make incredible applications um and Bitcoin you know as as a very basically the opposite set of properties um and so you know by combining them you can get something that is as close to I guess what's replicated on the ethereum side as possible um is that kind of the general idea with the with your Tweet yeah I think I think that's fair um and to to uh kind of unpack the Tweet um I don't have it in front of me but it was something along the lines of uh like Cosmos and Bitcoin is a match made in heaven and you have

ethereum and Roll-Ups on the other side um and you kind of have this strategy where you have a base layer that's very secure and you push the flexibility to the edges of the system um so maybe I'll talk talk about that for a moment um I think you sort of need to start with why shared security so David touched on this a little bit earlier but I think Upstream of shared security you actually have scalability um so when I think of blockchains I sort of think of them as press markets so you want to maximize trust and the problem today is that there's way too much demand for Block space then there is block space available or highly trusted blogspace and this kind of leads to

things like the alt L1 season in 2021 we have all of these different um alt l1's springing up and people kind of go to new blockchains they don't really know what the trust properties of those are and some of them actually have quite bad trust properties um and I I guess there's sort of two ways to think about scaling blockchain so one way is vertical scaling and this is just making your chain faster increasing the block size things like that and the other way to think about scaling is horizontal scaling so this is where you get into ideas like the interchain and Cosmos where you have lots of blockchains running in parallel that can communicate on optimism it's it's called the super chin I believe I

just started reading about this the other day very interesting and then I guess you have the more General version of this which is just the multi-chain and that's where you sort of have all these different chains and they're connected with various bridging standards and I I think for the most part uh I mean it's sort of the thesis of of this entire podcast most blockchains have come around to the horizontal scaling Vision I would say Solana is like the one notable exception or holdout um where they're they're still trying to scale things vertically and just get bigger blocks and faster blocktimes um but but most most ecosystems I think have come around to this horizontal scaling vision um and I would frame the problem here as new chains when you scale horizontally

have low Economic Security so if you think about the cost of goods securing chains uh for a pow chain it's like the hash power for a POS stand uh chain it's it's the the um cost to buy up two-thirds stake uh or one-third if it's a live nose attack um and for for many nutrients the the market cap of the staking token is actually quite low um and this can actually lead to very bad outcomes if you have thousands of chains so right now there aren't very many chains even in Cosmos Cosmos has like 50. but if you imagine a future where there are literally thousands of chains you have uh strong interdependence between all those chains so for example if you bridge a token through 10

different chains you actually care about what the weakest link in that path is and if you have thousands of Chains It's very plausible that you're like bridging between tens or hundreds of chance even so if if one chain along that path fails it can lead to very bad outcomes um so I think this is sort of uh that's sort of the scalability side of things and the solution that's been introduced is uh the idea that these high security chains such as Bitcoin and ethereum should scale their trust to lower security chains and there are tons of implementations of this but I think they all reduce the same thing which is how to scale trusts um maybe I can talk briefly about the the

shared security landscape and what some of those Solutions look like and then I guess why I think Bitcoin and Cosmos are ideologically aligned but I'll pause there so that that would be great unless uh somebody else wants to jump in cool um so looking at the Shared security landscape today uh the ecosystems that I'm most interested in personally are ethereum posmus and Bitcoin um if you look at ethereum there are sort of two solutions that I'm aware of so there are there's this roll-up Centric roadmap uh the idea that you can scale ethereum through optimism uh and arbitrum so optimistic Roll-Ups or ZK Roll-Ups um and then you also have eigenlayer

which you know as as David mentions I just had a big conference it's very exciting to learn more about them um and the idea here is that you can rehypothecate steak so you can take your either ethereum LST or you can even run a node yourself and on top of that you can run another node and introduce new slashing conditions um so it's a little bit different than the role of central group map but another way to scale ethereum um on Cosmos there are at least four uh shared Security Solutions that I'm aware of so there's interchange security there's opt-in security uh there is Alliance from the Terra ecosystem and then there's mesh from osmosis they all have some similarities and differences um happy to talk about these but the I think the high level is in Cosmos people

are sort of just starting to experiment with this idea of shared security and on the interoperability side Cosmos is way ahead but on the shared security side I think Cosmos is sort of catching up to ethereum um and then on bitcoin of course you have Babylon and roll Kid um and I say Bitcoin sort of has a lot going for it it's extremely decentralized it's probably the most decentralized chin and it's the least volatile crypto asset and if you're thinking about uh as a chain like uh looking for shared security what you actually want that's basically it you want a chain that's extremely decentralized and you want a chain that has a low

volatility crypto asset with a very high marking up um so that is very hard to manipulate and oh sorry no go ahead go ahead um yeah and I I would actually make a claim that there is alignment between bitcoiners and Cosmos and they just don't know it yet actually some people do know it such as uh you know David and um I think Sunny has also tweeted about this and Java of course you're building uh Cosmos Roll-Ups on on bitcoin so some people definitely do know this but I think it's it's underappreciated um so maybe I'll talk about what bitcoiners want and then what Cosmos Builders want and how I sort of see these lining up

so I tweeted out a while ago and I don't think I was the first to tweet this that Bitcoin is an app chain where the application is digital gold so there's already sort of an ideological alignment between Bitcoin and Cosmos you know Cosmos I think the heart of Cosmos is app chains and IBC and Bitcoin is an app chain it doesn't have IVC but it has sort of half of the cosmos ideology um it's it's already a provider of trust you know bitcoiners talk about like immutable money um and uh I think that relies on strong trust assumptions and bitcoiners really don't want anyone to to mess with that so the change

should just be minimal and secure I guess is what bitcoiners said um and it provides sort of digital goals or maybe you would generalize it a little bit and just say trust um I think the problem that Bitcoin has is how do you generate demand for Bitcoin block space and generate transaction fees um so this is sort of the open question now on the cosmo side what do Cosmos Builders want I speaking from my perspective uh and building stride I think most app chains want sovereignty interoperability and security now the first two sovereignty and interoperability Cosmos has this um you can build your own option you can customize the execution environment uh

chains or protocols can even extract nav and IBC is sort of the Cornerstone of Cosmos and in my opinion it's the best interoperability standard so Cosmos has interoperability and security sorry sovereignty and interoperability it does not have security um you have like all of these Cosmos chains and some of them have very low market caps um and it's it's uh sort of obvious like why you'd want to hire a market cap on your chain if say a massive validator or someone with a lot of money came in they could buy up one-third of your tokens and stop your chain or two-thirds of your tokens and actually change the logic and steal the money

um so it's it's not good that that possible chains are are not secure um but there's a lot of interest around Cosmic chance so there's lots of users and lots of economic activity so on the one hand you have Bitcoin which provides trust and it needs more demand for Bitcoin block space and transaction fees and on the other hand you have Cosmos chains which have lots of activity great sovereignty great interoperability but less security um so this is sort of uh like the opportunity that I see and with ethereum this already sort of exists like ethereum has come around to this vision and they're just going to use Roll-Ups so there's already a match um so I think

it's going to be pretty hard for Cosmos to insert themselves into that Vision definitely possible and there's people working on for example connecting IBC to ethereum like the polymer team but I think it's going to be harder um so this is sort of the opportunity that I see for Cosmos and Bitcoin to align yeah I think that framing of sovereignty interoperability and security is is great and I think it goes to something what David was saying earlier and that you know Cosmos is now working backwards to solve the the security piece um whereas you know I think applications on ethereum are now coming around to this idea of sovereignty um and wanting their own application specific you know environments um and also you know from a maybe a less of an application perspective with more

more of a you know infrastructure perspective thinking about interoperability and how to recreate the benefits of IPC um you know or or Port over IBC itself um so yeah I think that makes a lot of sense and yeah let David or Java does anything you you'd want to react to there um yeah I think um I would just say that um like with roll kit um you were able to uh like choose the best of the uh you can have like best of all the worlds so along all these access like uh sovereignty in interoperability security um you choose uh like as an application developer uh what level of each of these

you want like what suits your needs best and you can plug this in for your specific app because uh not apps not app not all apps might need like um to have sovereignty like they might choose to be settled on some uh chain and uh this is on the road back so um even though uh like you have we have uh software and roll ups already working what role kit uh in the future we're going to have the ability to have settled UPS um and then um on the roadmap we also have shade sequences decentralized sequences so um we are going to provide the maximum flexibility for uh app developers to choose uh what their requirements are

and um they choose what what suits their requirements best um so yeah I would just say that uh I think modularity allows the most flexibility for the developers to choose and um via just providing this framework for uh for developers to innovate around and um have uh best of all those okay so I think one of the big differences that I'd like to to kind of tease apart here is you know when I kind of think about one of the advantages of the way ethereum has sort of constructed their their roadmap is it's very easy to sort of export ethereum outside of the natural ecosystem right there's kind of a trusted solution there to get ethereum onto let's say optimism and even I think

it's pretty notable That Bass is in lieu of a token they're going to be using ethereum as kind of their gas in their currency and one of the um at the Tilt to get your your perspective here from the Bitcoin side of things and that one of the challenges that I see here is there's a little bit of I think there's a lot of alignment in between the sort of communities and Ethos and philosophies but I think one of the the challenges is going to be there's already a lot of internal debate about within Bitcoin about hey what should we really be using our block space for and certainly some of the kind of ogs on the Bitcoin side of things are extremely protective of Bitcoin block space and without that ability to export Bitcoin and create a little bit more buying

pressure for Bitcoin the asset like you're kind of losing a big uh quiver right in your in Your Arsenal for what makes this appealing from the Bitcoin side of things so maybe just any any commentary there about um you know some of the challenges or frictions that you either see from the lack of ability to actually take Bitcoin out of the Bitcoin ecosystem or any sort of communal uh bump UPS you know in between Cosmos and and Bitcoin or maybe there's not an you think it's gonna be very smooth yeah I can maybe jump in with uh with with two two protocols I'm aware of that might that might helps with this I'm I'm less sure about the ideological challenges but I sort of agree I think

if Bitcoin were exported and uh maybe Cosmos platforms um or D5 protocols start importing Bitcoin I do think there there might be a little bit more uh alignment behind that because there's demand for Bitcoin that is happening off of the Bitcoin chain um so uh the two protocols that I would mention are I think there is actually a trustless Bitcoin bridge in Cosmos called nomic um I haven't used it personally but I I believe uh it's it's um fully trustless and you can actually already export Bitcoin into Cosmos um the the other protocol that might drive demand for Bitcoin is actually Tara's Alliance module

um so I'll give a quick overview of what this says um and I know there's like uh different connotations with Tara Luna at this point but I think the the alliance module in and of itself is actually pretty interesting so the idea behind Alliance is you have Alliance chance and all it means to be an alliance chain is you can stake exogenous assets on an alliance chain so this is actually built for staking derivatives but technically it could be any asset and the way that it works on Luna is you have the Luna blockchain and you have a lions chains around them and to drive economic activity for the the chain the alliance chance in the lunar

Alliance you would take SC Luna so the staking derivative of Luna and you would stake it on the alliance chain in return you get staking yields from that new chain so if there's like I don't know maybe kujira which is like some D5 protocol and it has a very high yield if you say S2 Luna on that chain you get kuji rewards and the kujiro stickers get ACI Luna so there's this sort of like economic alignment or the the futures of these chains become interwoven as the tokens are distributed between bus communities um and I think using I think chains outside of the tarot ecosystem are going to use Alliance it's just one of many Cosmos shared Security Solutions but you can

imagine a future where if you're a bitcoiner and you want a little bit of exposure not much but maybe a little bit of exposure to a new chain say it's a lending platform you could actually stake your Bitcoin on that chain and receive staking rewards from that chain in return so you maybe you give up a little bit of Bitcoin um or maybe you don't give up any Bitcoin and the service that you're providing is just the additional security of staking your asset on this chain and in return you get paid a little bit for it so the sort of one plausible way that Bitcoin could be uh exported from the Bitcoin chain and also used to secure chains in Cosmos yeah I kind of think about it as like a almost like Capital efficiency for your

Bitcoin especially if you know we're recording and who knows right we're recording this on uh you know March 7 of 23 maybe in a couple of years this whole operation choke point will be a uh not super fond memory but you know it's like a very real example right when you're like let's say if you're applying for a mortgage right or something like that in traditional Finance um up until very recently like usually what they do is they'll do a survey of all of your assets up until recently Bitcoin was not only or crypto is not only neutral is actually a negative uh for you when you're applying for a mortgage right now they've basically upgraded it to neutral so if you think about it from the perspective of a Bitcoin or someone who owns a lot of Bitcoin I that you know call it

exporting call it additional ways to leverage your your sort of assets um you know you can kind of get it from two different Financial systems one could be traditional Finance which is increasingly hostile to all sources of crypto Bitcoin included or there could be these new very interesting uh sort of crypto native Avenues at least that's how I sort of bucket it in my head Cosmos could be you know a really interesting Avenue to consider so I just want to add a thought on that it was okay so I if you think about Cosmos right it's like competitive Bitcoin Bitcoin is 400 billion osmosis of the order of tens of billions right so if you look at like 50 costs will change they're like startups both bitcoiners so you can now stick on any

of these chains just like investing in startup you can pick and choose the ones you want to kill help secure so I think that could really potential claim yeah that's really interesting I love that idea and I see a lot of parallels there to jog and layers restaking um and can understand why you guys are so aligned there um then yes maybe just to wrap up I mean something we've been talking about a lot this season is just the life cycle of of app chains um starting from you know basically just finding pmf and and iterating on product and then determining okay how much more scalability do I need or customization do I need should I move to my own full

stack app chain or should I move to maybe an app specific roll-up um and you know there there are still we're still very early here so there aren't a lot of a ton of examples to point to of of Builders who have have really thought about this strategically um and and I think stride is is one of the very few examples that that is live and is at least begun this journey um and so you know I would love to love to just pick your brain Aiden on the Strategic rationale uh but but behind each stage of your roadmap right so you started as and what you are right now is a sovereign you know full stack app chain with an independent validator Set uh you'll be soon transitioning to a you

know Cosmos Hub consumer chain um and then I know you have you have long-term plans around you know different ways to secure your chain in a way that reflects I guess the usage of your product um The Stride like good staking tokens um so I'd just love to kind of hear your thoughts on what was the Strategic rationale behind you know launching as a sovereign app chain what is what was the rationale behind you know your transition to ICS um and then you know your your plans for the future beyond that yeah um so I think uh when you if you look at

Cosmos uh I think the best manifestation of the cosmos vision is Sovereign options and IBC um and I know you guys have already talked a lot about options and IVC so maybe I won't get too much into that but when we launched stride as a sovereign option part of our vision is to have stride be very minimal very secure and have a great ux and I'll just briefly touch on each of these so uh I think the app chains that are more minimal closer to True options rather than General l1s you're going to have uh they're going to reap the most rewards of being an option such as extracting Mev such as Fork

ability so the ability to to change the logic if something goes wrong or if there's a big hack um and then there's additional benefits that that you get as well in terms of security because we're a liquid syncing platform you can actually look at tbls across different D5 protocols and liquid staking platforms typically have some of the highest tvls of all D5 protocols and they're also very Central to proof of stake ecosystems they touch staping which is sort of the heart of proof of stake so it's it's very important in our view that liquids taking Protocols are highly really secure um and on the ux side I think the people that talk about like

the ls LST Wars or something where there's all these different liquid sinking protocols and they're all battling for market share I think the real battle is between centralized exchanges and decentralized liquid-saking protocols if you go and buy say atom on coinbase you're going to get a little bit of yield it's it's very similar to holding a liquid-saking token but coinbase takes a bunch of it and it centralizes the network so this is not great um so that's just a little bit of background on stride now when we initially launched uh we were in competition we still are with lots of liquid sinking protocols so we wanted to move very fast uh we were also building something that was fairly complex so

stride is really an interchained D5 protocol there's logic that executes on stride stride owns accounts which do staking and unstaking on other chains and we have to send packets to these other chains to say hey stake these tokens there's a new deposit or unstake them because someone wants to redeem and when you introduce this asynchronous Logic the complexity space just kind of balloons uh so I I think as people start building more interchange uh D5 this is they're going to realize this and it's actually very challenging to to build interest nd5 um so we wanted to move fast and be minimally complex um and also like we're a startup so you can think about it we're like pouring

water into a leaky bucket we don't have very much time um so we we opted to launch with a sovereign validator set now as we've talked about bootstrapping high Economic Security is hard so our Economic Security is actually not where we'd like it to be today but launching with a sovereign validator set allowed us to move very fast and in my opinion uh bootstrapping a validator set is actually not hard in Cosmos today at least uh when we did our test net for example there were like a thousand validators on our intestine and uh we only have 100 on mainnet so there's really an abundance of very high quality validators distributed throughout the world um so this is sort of like phase one for stride which is moving fast and that's

why we chose to launch with a sovereign validator set now as I mentioned liquid saving protocols touch something that's uh close to the heart of proof of sake ecosystems and they can have very high TBL so you actually want liquid saving protocols to have very high security and specifically with Adam there are people that are um uh I think uncomfortable with the idea of stride holding lots of Adam's stake because it moves power from atom stakers over to the stride chain so if the stride chain becomes a large Staker of atom for example it might make some atom stakers uncomfortable

so we started looking into interchange security which is also known as replicated security it's one of the many Cosmos forms of shared security that I talked about and the way that it works is stride is going to onboard to Interchange security and our validator set will be the cosmos Hub validator set so the cosmos have validators will validate blocks for this dry chain now the the governance process will still happen through stride's current validator set they'll transition to something more like we've been calling them governators so they do votes but they don't validate blocks so stride will inherit the economic security of the cosmos hub and it will have the sovereignty of a standard option so it's

sort of the the best of uh The Best of Both Worlds so we retain sovereignty we retain interoperability and um our net security expenditure might actually go down so today uh stride does something like 10 inflation it might actually be that we have to pay the cosmos Hub less than we pay our current validator set to secure the stride chain and in return we get much higher Economic Security um so this is sort of V2 uh and I I know there's like many iterations of interchange security or replicated security there's versions where only a subset of the entire validator set validates the chain uh there's versions where you have two validator sets so you

have the stride validator set and the cosmosaw validator set and they both have some power maybe each has 50 and then there's of course mesh security which is which is also coming but the fact is interchange security is the only shared security model that is live or soon to be live in a week um in Cosmos today so at Stride we're looking to make stride as secure as possible while retaining sovereignty full sovereignty and full interoperability and interchange security allows us to to do that um now uh miles you were touching on um sort of a Future Vision which I think is or personally this is the most

interesting to me which is sort of like what Sunny talks about where you have this NATO alliance of many chains and all of their economic features are interwoven and if one validated risk behaves on one chain they get slashed on another chain um and this is this idea of mesh security and the idea with mesh security is as a sovereign out chain you can inherit different amounts of security from many different chains and this is actually really useful for stride because as I mentioned earlier you know if stride is providing a liquid saving token for a chain that chain is actually moving some of its staking power to a different validator set so that chain probably wants um their validator set represented on

stride and you can actually do this with with mesh security sort of an early idea but what we've been thinking is uh you can look at the the tvl of each token on stride and consume security proportional to tvl across these different chains so say uh if if stride has 50 St atom by tvl 25 SC osmo 25 SC Juno stride would inherit half of its security from the cosmos Hub and then one quarter from osmosis and one quarter from Juno and uh it's it's sort of a more fair way for for stride to secure itself now I love that and and I think what what really comes through to me there is that you know at each stage here you're

you're thinking about okay what security model and what infrastructure would make the best possible product right yet each each stage you're you're really improving the product um and I think that that's you know kind of a big theme of what we've been trying to get into this season um and I can totally see it you know free and mesh at the end to kind of it's almost like you're matching assets with liabilities um and some and you know in that perspective um so yeah I really really appreciate you giving that an overview there um and uh you know turn it back over to Mike yeah I think guys uh that that's all the time we have but we really dug into uh you know some super interesting

interesting Concepts today and um thank you all so much I know this is uh you know frankly like a very new area and a lot of these uh a lot of the topics that we touch on today are still developing but really appreciate all of you coming on and and sharing your thoughts and thank you for helping miles and I bookend what's been a really fun season uh where I think both of us learned a whole lot so really appreciate all your time and guys highly recommend that you go check out uh everyone's project here um so Aiden Java David thank you so much really appreciate it thanks guys thanks Mike thanks Bob joining us all right buddy that was a that was a really fun episode just a great way to to book end the season what'd you think yeah

couldn't agree more um in one of my favorite episodes I thought we covered a ton of ground um and also tied a lot of these themes together um really nicely and brought in a new angle that we haven't talked about in Bitcoin um and how this you know plays into every uh into the opt-in thesis so really enjoyed that yeah there was a bit of sort of poetic symmetry in that you know Aiden pointed this out but Bitcoin is sort of the original app chain and it is it's very apt on kind of a whole bunch of levels that we ended up this season talking about the original app chain and some novel use cases for that for that app chain all right and just to dig into that a little bit I mean Bitcoin has been very in the

community has been very very you know um I'd say intentional about being an app chain um you know this this ordinals nft uh you know uh development is is pretty much the first deviation from from Bitcoin as a map chain with its product being right this this digital goal and I think all the properties that make you know Bitcoin a great collateral asset um you know can be can be exported um in you know but like what we're seeing with Babylon to solve other use cases um so it's not changing any properties of Bitcoin itself Bitcoin can still be you know an app chain but it it's it's

creating I guess more more value right um and so yeah I thought I thought it was a really interesting way to kind of bring everything back um yeah you know what this made me this made me think of two things so one this made me think of one of the ideas that Sunny brought up in a in a much earlier episode of the Season which was he was talking about the idea of permissioning when it comes to app chains very difficult to you know if you have a permissionless app chain there's a natural tension there because you want to be very specific about the design of that app space your your block space what the uses are on the other hand you want it to be open and permissionless and it's very funny like the original location where that played out was in the Bitcoin block space and we're seeing

that reignited with we didn't really get into this but all this was made possible by Tap Root and then we saw Casey rodemore create ordinals and now there's this kind of Renaissance and it's reigniting the debate around this but it was problem or or just an issue or something to think about that Sunny flagged and this new especially the like Babylon I think I think again people are going to stop start talking about the difference between Bitcoin with a small B and Bitcoin with a capital B in that a Bitcoin with a large B being the the network itself and then there's the small B which is Bitcoin the asset and I think it's an important distinction to draw that we kind of got into here because what we're talking about exporting is Bitcoin the large B right we're talking about the ability to read

and write on bitcoin's block space and that's different from exporting Bitcoin the small B the asset that's that's an important distinction to dig into I think oh no it 100 is um and you know I think we the Aiden Aiden framed it really well um you know every every app developer is looking for sovereignty interoperability and security um and you know Cosmos has started with the interoperability and the sovereignty um and now they're looking for ways to to augment the security piece right um and Cosmo says a lot of as something like to say undercover Bitcoin Maxes um and so you know it it makes a lot of

sense like is that they would look to bitcoin to potentially be one of the main Solutions there along with like you know all these other uh security models that are developing like mesh security um like replicated security these are all very very complementary um and yeah I think there's it could be a budding relationship between between Bitcoin um community and and this Cosmos ecosystem yeah I agree with you I think uh one of the I'm very interested to see in in a lot of ways they're going to be two ways that this might play or two components that determine how this eventually ends up playing out there is from the perspective of the app chain Builder kind of the Aiden perspective right

which is what exactly can Bitcoin security do to improve the product that I'm building here and we kind of talk and I want to get your opinion specifically on what he mentioned about um shortening the unbonding period for proof of stake James or Tender based uh proof State chains and then there the other component that's going to play out here and frankly there's not a lot of control here I think we all just have to watch and see what happens but this is kind of like the op Wars right and Bitcoin has to decide what the model that it wants for its own block space right and do we want to broaden the definition of what can uh settle to or write or be written with the in the Bitcoin block space because the two different solutions that we talked to here had very different design

principles in mind there was Babylon which was set to specifically minimize the footprint right because the thought being hey bitcoiners don't like it when you when you bloat their state right on the other hand you don't have this you don't get the security the transaction fees from that either and then you've got the roll kit which is kind of the opposite of that and you can actually write all of that data right to the Bitcoin blockchain the issues there being you very quickly run into performance issues and the bitcoiners might not like it so two very interesting components there yeah exactly it you know it it definitely drives more demand for Bitcoin block space the rollcat approach um but leaves you know it presents a lot of challenges in terms of the

performance of the actual application and as you know to your point you may not actually be all that aligned with the Bitcoin Community um but on the Babylon side you know you are basically posting as little did uh data as possible um I thought it was you know really interesting from David I asked him kind of about what what do the economics look like here and and what what would Babylon you know basically charge chains that it helping augment their security um and you know one way to think about it is okay what does it just cost to post this data to bitcoin you slap a margin on top of that and that's what you charge you know the proof of stake chain that that's leveraging Babylon for

this um but that's not the way that he's thinking about this right he says what is the value that Babylon is providing to proof of stake chains well that is really determined by how much is the does the inflation come like could come down right now it's the stakers when you change the unbounding period from 21 days to say five days or three days um so for example osmosis has uh I believe staking rate right now of 22 percent um which is the equivalent of you know millions and millions of dollars uh per year in value coming out of the admission schedule and going to sneakers

uh and that is really determined by okay what does the staking rate need to be in order to incentivize enough delegators to stake their osmo and have it you know be locked up for 21 days um well if that's 22 maybe that's maybe it only comes stick maybe it comes all the way down to 10 if the unbonding period was say a three days or five hours um that you know in in terms of the actual cost is the value that that Babylon is providing um and you know that also leads me to think like people on the Bitcoin side are eventually going to be like okay well

babylon's leveraging Bitcoin to provide this service Babylon is you know providing millions and millions of dollars of value to proof of stake chains um by reducing the unbonding periods you know Babylon might see a lot of those economics obviously the proof of stake chains get um all the benefits of increased security and protocol Health um how does the value or does it at some point flow back to to the actual Bitcoin Community um I think that that's you know what we kind of touched on it uh but but this idea of being able to stake your Bitcoin is is really interesting and seems very similar to you know eigenlayers but uh

what they're coming out with uh ethereum restaking yeah that was Aiden sort of brought that up when we talked about exporting the small B Bitcoin and that that I think you know if you if I really thought about it I think that is going to be something that has to get solved here because I do think just to be totally honest this is a little bit my read write my own opinion here but I think it'll be a lot easier to to get bitcoiners on your side if there's a way to uh to buy some more Bitcoin that being said I actually you know the more I think about that I'm actually not even sure it's super relevant what that to the true credit of Bitcoin it is so decentralized that you know you have kind of the high priest of Bitcoin that

are saying things like miners might censor these Trends if maybe they there's some Merit in censoring these transactions uh or this isn't good you know ordinals were kind of generally shamed in the beginning and these were seen as invalid there's not much they can do there's not much they can do and at the end of the day this might happen whether bitcoiners like it or not and there is a concept that I think Bitcoin kind of has it it got distribution right it got mind share and distribution and people that care about it but I don't see the way that it like scales beyond that and what I see in this budding relationship is I thought the other thing that David mentioned that I was really interested in is this could also be almost on a transaction by

transaction basis right like let's say you have one transaction that you care and enormous about an enormous amount about maybe you add an additional security guarantee right I'm sure this model is still being baked out but that is really interesting so then suddenly you have transactions that are actually originating on totally separate chains being written to the Bitcoin blockchain and depending on this is where I think the bitcoiner's opinion does matter a little bit depending on what happens there it can actually create a meaningful amount of demand for Block space and you know help save their security budget that and that seems to be the big challenge yeah yeah exactly exactly I think um this definitely plays into the security budget uh long the long-term

concerns of Bitcoin basically um yeah but it's always that tension you know and there's always potentially at odds with with you know the the sanctity of their block space right uh right and well it's going to be some trade-offs that they need to make um but I think it's really exciting just bringing it back to the app chain side that you know this is I guess Cosmos working backwards right to to solve the security piece um whereas ethereum is now is now you know the cosmosification of ethereum is is underway um and they are have the security right and now they're seeing the value of sovereignty

um and that is going to you know Drive the creation of a lot of these app specific Roll-Ups um and then it's just about figuring out the interoperability piece um that that you know Cosmos is way ahead of in in terms of IPC so yeah I think it was a great app because it pulled all of this together um and we had some you know very different perspectives but um yeah that that I thought it made a lot of sense to me yeah one one question that I that I wish we had asked a little bit more was I wonder if one of the other things I think Cosmos needs a little bit of an answer for is how is it going to attract users to its products right we

really focus on this from the standpoint of you build the best product what's the security architecture or apparatus that's going to support that product but then there's the pretty obvious question of how do you go out and get the people that want to use that and I you know I'm I'm very curious I think ordinals showed that there is a large contingency of people within Bitcoin that actually like nfts and some of these other use cases that we talk about in crypto I think there are probably a lot of Bitcoin Bitcoin Closet bitcoiners in Cosmos land and I think it actually could you know a partnership right between these two communities Bitcoin is a very large and engaged Community I think it actually

could move the needle on the user side of things as well yeah yeah I agree I think the big question to me is what is the overlap between you know Bitcoin holders uh in the Bitcoin community and users of decentralized applications uh right as you know I would say like a kind of a gross generalization in the last cycle is that a lot a lot of the Bitcoin Community would obviously hold then you know their Bitcoin but they would use you know they would it wasn't didn't seem like there was a huge overlap between Bitcoin holders and say you know defy summer users uh it seemed like they were very very different right um and now that a lot of the centralized

you know applications have gone down um and potentially this Bitcoin are Bitcoin Community you know was using them or um also it warmed up to the idea of using apps on ethereum you know can can you actually get distribution from From cosmos's perspective by tapping into this community um yeah they are they would they be receptive to be you know using these these apps if there's some alignment to bitcoin yeah I would bet that overlap that Venn diagram is bigger than you might think at first I understand what the public perception of that is but I've talked to enough bitcoiners that have crypto punks uh and use you know and like are are actually on-chain users

but there is a big like one thing to to be aware of is that a lot of people sort of get trapped by their Persona right uh you know you talk about Bitcoin for an up years and it's hard to talk about anything else right and it goes It goes both ways right let's just be honest crypto is a super super tribal ecosystem especially on Twitter podcasts or whatever but I think most people are appearing crypto you're at least a relatively curious person you know you you uh so I think the overlap is I bet that it's bigger than than yeah yeah is it compelling enough you know this alignment that it would actually you know uh get get those users to move over to Cosmos I don't know but I agree it's probably a larger lap than we give them

like you know Bitcoin community credit for you know miles just just to wrap this all up one of the the most fun Parts about these last two episodes at least for me is we started talking about the app chain thesis you know bro and I think it belongs in Cosmos generally right uh you know I think that's where the strongest core community of people that believe in that leaving that idea sort of originated by the way I I also know we haven't really talked a whole lot about about polka dot on the season but I know that uh the folks and on polka dot like also sort of believe in this Vision but it's been really cool to see this idea sort of propagate to other ecosystems and that's what was so much fun about the last two episodes like we really saw that tacit almost actually I

would argue explicit Embrace coming from optimism with their super chain and now it was a ton of fun to end with with Bitcoin um you know succeeding you know proving the app chain thesis in more ways than one so yeah I I couldn't I couldn't agree more um you know I think what would be amazing to see is is you know kind of um in all of these communities embracing this alignment and working together on the interoperability standards um because I think that that is like the last piece that connects you know the ethereum super chain to app to app specific chains and Cosmos you know to

you even you know others ecosystems like like polygon Avalanche and and polka dots we've talked about um and then you know you can if if all if if these chains all accept some sort of Standards around interoperability then you can truly let you know the best possible product Define what the infrastructure is like for dydx the infrastructure is a full stack app chain because that's what makes the best possible product that might not be true for you know other other applications and they'll they'll you know stand up their own app specific Roll-Ups on you know op Jane or or on the Celestia stack um and if there was you know it's it's

like a common standard you know interoperability for interoperability then you know it wouldn't have to be as tribal it wouldn't have to be as you know um Zero Sum right it's just everybody would be every every application to be able to talk to each other and kind of let the product Define what the stack looks like and what their security model looks like um so becoming more and more clear to me like this is you know probably the last Missing Link you know what's funny about that is you're just reminding me how sometimes how fast crypto moves but also how how slow it moves as well the very first event that blockworks ever did uh when Jason and I still had our full-time jobs and the name of the event was Crypt talks uh this was February of 2018

one of the one of the panels that we hosted was on the subject of intro interoperability and the fact that we needed interoperability standards so it's just funny how like Anyway this episode's very very full circle for me in in a lot of ways but this is what my way of saying I'm in violent agreement with you there and uh it'll be interesting to see how that plays out yeah there I couldn't agree more um it's been so much fun digging into this and you know I think we've heard like the awesome range of perspectives from you know infrastructure Builders to application Builders um and and really kind of digging into I guess the choices they made in the

different trade-offs um you know along the way and we we heard that from from Maine and at the end there um you know exactly like the Strategic rationale that goes into picking the stack the security model um and and picking you know making those choices with the product you know first like that is that is the the number one goal like you're solving core objectives for the product right um and letting the letting the stack kind of you know be whatever makes the best version of that product agreed agreed all right buddy well I think we can wrap it there and uh listeners miles and I will we'll be back next uh next week just the two of us to kind of dissect uh major learnings and takeaways and we'll just kind of do a a

retrospective on the season even though we kind of bookended a lot of it uh with this discussion here but um hopefully you all enjoyed this one this was I think you could tell from both miles and I this was this little fun one to do so hope you all enjoy it yeah awesome thanks everyone [Music]