Inside the Future of Cosmos and Appchains| Jehan Tremback

Transcript

and we actually have uh this is kind of not fully like announced yet and stuff but there's definitely a lot going on behind the scenes to to integrate rollup technology but like you know like I was saying it fits within that framework of the eased power Spectrum um and so we want there to be rollups for people like if they don't need necessarily everything app chain gives we also want there to be an easy option for them to launch a rollup on on the cosmos Hub um but then also kind of a cosmos flavored you know I mean we want it to be with Cosmos SDK and so that they could pretty easily transition their logic um up to an app chain if they decide they want to add some more power functionality or whatever the polygon Community grants program was launched with 1 billion

tokens all four polygon Builders season 1 is live right now and features 45 million in madic to support the next generation of polygon products builders on polygon these grants are for you join the aggregated future today by applying at polygon.net platform that has a consensus protocol subnet infrastructure and the hyper SDK toolkit which allows web free developers to easily launch custom powerful blockchain Solutions you can start building today by checking out the link nothing set on zerx Research is a recommendation to buy or sell Securities or tokens this podcast is for informational purposes only and any views expressed by anyone on the show

are solely our opinions not Financial advice Pacho Ryan and our guests May hold positions in the company funds or projects discussed what's up guys welcome back to another episode of ZX research today I'm joined by effort Capital the number one Cosmos Fanboy at blockworks research and Jan from Cosmos Hub and informal systems um Jan thank you so much for joining us yeah thanks for having me perfect um just as a precursor to our listeners this SP is going to be a little bit different than how we usually do it I feel like usually I'm bombarding um developers with like very very technical question questions but I want to hear a bit more of the story of Cosmos and the cosmos Hub over the past year year and a half so um

before we get into all of that Johan do you want to kind of run us through what informal systems is and how you guys got involved with the cosmos up um yeah so informal systems is kind of uh is a company that does a lot of different things um we have a a validator at informal systems both in they validate both in CA and also out of Cosmos I think they Theory validation and stuff as well um and there's an audit uh there's an audit practice as well so we do audits um and uh there's also uh you know core Cosmos development that happens under formal systems um so uh we are like the lead developers on the comet um formerly known as tenderman

consensus protocol um and uh also uh we contribute to IBC IBC reers as well and then also there's my team um where we work on the cosmos Hub um which is one of the you know one it was the first Cosmos blockchain one of the main blockchains in Cosmos perfect thank you and I guess like my number one question is what's been happening on the in the Cosmos on the cosmos sub over the past year I feel like there's a lot of both thought fragmentation as well as like different directions um yeah what's been happening yeah I could also just give like an overview of Cosmos in general if you're if you're interested um yeah so I think

you know I think Cosmos is um people probably know a little bit about it um but it's it's been the cosmos ecosystem has been around for a while about five years maybe um and it was like very ahead of its time um when it launched so Cosmos has always been it's been about the vision is is a network of interconnected app chains um and I think you know when Cosmos came out uh ethereum was kind of the newest thing out there um and it was kind of like the idea that if you were building uh a blockchain application you'd want to launch an app chain was was a little bit foreign at people they're like well shouldn't I just be launching a smart contract isn't that really easy um and it is it is easier to uh launch a smart

contract than an app chain but you get a lot of extra power and flexibility um and and potentially performance for an app chain which I'll get into a little bit more later but the other part of Cosmos is IBC which is the inter blockchain communication protocol um and IBC is basically a a generalized bridging protocol um so it uses a kind of metaphor of packets between blockchains um and over this of course I think token transfer is the main use but it lets you do a lot of other things which are pretty interesting um uh one of like just as an example there's something called interchain accounts which allows um one blockchain to control an account on another blockchain

um and so for instance what you could do is like if if this if a blockchain's treasury has like a lot of another blockchain's token it could actually vote in that other blockchain's governance um and and so that's just kind of an example of the of the power you get from that um and there's there's a lot of other stuff that um you know runs over IBC interchange security is actually one of them which we'll talk about as well more later um but that's kind of I think think the um good introduction to Cosmos um I think one other thing I can stop me here if you have questions I can also go into the history a little bit um but uh now keep going okay one one other thing about Cosmos is this doesn't have as much to do with the

technology um but it is also a very a very decentralized ecosystem um for a lot of reasons um one reason is just the basic architecture of it I mean it's giving it's giving you know Founders and Developers the power to to basically start their own chains um and so that does lend like with the smart contract platform you're not on ethereum I with rollups it's a whole another dimension also touch on but like you know in general stuff that's on ethereum is kind of like on ethereum um but with Cosmos you're starting your own chain um you're you're you're you can it kind of gives you a lot of power to do your own thing um and so that's made the ecosystem pretty decentralized then also just um there other like sort of more historical or

political factors which is there was kind of a big blow up in like 2019 um which led to a lot of the uh kind of um a lot of the marketing and promotion of Cosmos getting uh sort of disrupted uh over the past few years and the technical development always stayed strong but I think there's also just a you know if you go to like I was at consensus last month and you go to consensus and there's like you know a salana pizza truck parked outside given out free pizza salana pizza um and so you know that's something where Cosmos has been kind of missing from you know just missing from the table in terms of doing the marketing spend doing the events um doing that kind of stuff and I think um that's

another Factor why it it may be you you haven't seen as as as much of it um but yeah I think that the the technology is really strong and um a lot of people are also kind of um a lot of people are coming around to the fact that like I would say I mean I mean there's other ways to do it I mean there's there's polka dot and Avalanche um which are a little bit less maybe a little bit less Sovereign but kind of the same thing with with app chains um but I think that like for building an app chain like I think it's safe to say like the leading platform is like Cosmos SDK um if you're not kind of doing something completely custom and um so I think the technolog is doing strong and a lot of these app chains aren't even like Associated as

being Cosmos projects they're just using the tech um so there's like um bar Chain's one of them uh dydx is another um there's some you know some other projects launching um and they use the tech because it gives you you know gives you a lot of power and flexibility but you also have to build everything yourself perfect I um one thing that you touched up on is that rollups are on ethereum but a chain on Cosmos is its own chain I kind of want to we've seen app chains like the narrative come up and like get popular and it dies down for a bit and then we get another Resurgence of it especially as like chains get more expensive and there's more congestion um how do you

view that like a rollup versus a chain and like what's the is that like on the both technical level as well as like something you mentioned was maybe like decentralization at a different level as well yeah I mean I think um yeah there's a lot of different levels to it but I think on a technical level the way I view it to make it simple is there's a spectrum of like ease to power um that exists in you know in in the way you can launch a blockchain project um and so like contracts are on the easy side of the spectrum uh if you launch a contract you know you it's a one-click thing there's no there's no infrastructure to deal with um there's no um yeah you're launching the contract uh and it's you

write the code and you you press deploy and that's that's pretty much it um and with uh roll they're kind of you know in the middle of the spectrum um they are you know there is an infrastructure component there's more pieces to think about right now a lot of stuff's up in the air as well so there's a lot of uh kind of decisions to make work make you know to go through and um figure out how it's going to work and everything and there's also a little bit more of an independent infrastructure component where rollup has some of its own infrastructure um like potentially a sequencer or whatever um and uh for that you do get more power um so you could use you could use a variety of different proving Frameworks um possibly different

languages to write your logic in as well uh and the Bas layer doesn't need to really know about that um and then also you can given that you know there's more control of the infrastructure you can do things like um improve the performance uh and also you know have your have your own block space have it so users aren't competing with other applications on ethereum for uh fees and and and stuff like that um and then app chains are on the U on the power side of the spectrum so um it is more work than a rollup uh potentially um although that's a big part of what we are now trying to we're trying to close the gap a little bit that's a big part of our strategy um but for that you get more power so you have a validator set and the validator set

can run um it can run logic that's um you know that's like outside of the actual chains logic um so some examples of this are you you can have you can have oracles built into the chain um so one is one example is like price feeds um I think I might be wrong I think dydx uses Oracle based price fees um uh there's another project Neutron which has price fees integrated price feeds integrated as well um and so you get this ability to have an oracle without there being you know like a third party Oracle Network like chain link or whatever it can just be built right into the chain at the base layer and basically be there there there's a lot of advantages that come from that you

know sovereignty is is one of them but also performance could be a little better and stuff too um there's other stuff like for instance like Celestia um you know they're they're building like a you know a DA layer sort of an L1 for rollups and um it's kind of a silly example but you know you you could launch a rollup on Celestia but you couldn't launch Celestia on a rollup um and I you know it's and what they're doing with with Cosmos SD and and with the cosmos stack is is their actually they've gone in and modified the consensus protocol um to uh to to have very very big blocks um which are you know well suited for for storing data and another thing they've done is they've added in um uh the validators can participate in data availability

sampling so to prove that they actually have the data um and so it's like I think app chains are the are are great are good choice for like the most ambitious projects um and there the trade-off is is a little bit more complexity difficulty um but like I said we're trying to close that Gap so that's how I view like app chains versus rollups um but in some ways I think that like the rollup vision is actually kind of very close to the app chain like it's kind of arriving towards the app chain vision of where you know people want to have their own execution environment in their own block space and then figure out how to connect to uh you know to to other things and what's nice about Cosmos too with with IBC is is that IBC is is just built right in so if you're

using the cosmos stack you immediately have um a very full-featured bridging connectivity protocol and it's it's free and it's open um and you can connect anyone else using it yeah I feel like most of the time what I hear is that IBC is generally the best like bridging experience or messaging experience between blockchains and as far as I understand it is um one thing you mentioned is that you're trying to close that Gap like rollups are easier to launch than app chains but you're trying what are some I guess concrete steps that you guys are taking towards that um yeah so so with the cosmos Hub um one thing so I guess I start by saying you know one of the things the thing that differentiates an

app chain from a rollup is um with an app chain you are you you have a validator set you have a decentralized validator set um that's actually another benefit I didn't even touch on there it depends on your perspective on things and and what you're doing as a project but sometimes um there's a level of decentralization that you get with an app chain with a validator set you don't always get with a rollup um if you have a single sequencer for example um and a lot of work in the world space right now is trying to bridge that Gap a little bit more by having like shared sequencers but those are kind of like you know they're solving that by being a blockchain at that point um but yeah there's this decentralized validator set which is great for decentralization but it's also like you know if you're just a

developer and you're trying to figure out how to get started and you're like man I gotta like uh you know we we gotta We Got to Now spend you know months uh finding all these validators uh and just just you know doing this BD effort of going out uh you know in the telegram you know Smoky telegram back rooms uh you know hunting up our validator set um it's uh it's not impossible obviously um but it can be distraction that people where you know can kind of turn turn you off if you on the other hand it's like hey you know we can get started right away um so if it's contract or a rollup or something you know um so one of the things we're doing with with uh with a cosmos Hub to try to bridge that Gap is with interchange security um and I'll

talk also a little bit more about that later it's already been in production for a year um but we're doing a new iteration on it which is um it's kind of the backend part of it is is in production now but we're also going to put the front end live pretty soon but basically it lets somebody basically who wants to launch a chain um build their chain and then put it up and launch it on the cosmos Hub what that means is that they put the chain up there everybody can see it uh we're also going to do Integrations with kind of like liquidity providers and launchpads and things like that to try to to bring things into one place for people but then as far as the infrastructure goes validators from the cosmos Hub validator set can opt in to uh secure that chain

um and so it brings everything to one place so it's not like trying to it doesn't become a BD effort to to hunt up a validator set it's just like you launch your chain validators start opting in um and basically your your chain when it when it starts running you have the validat start ready to go and um they're also bringing the security of like restak atom and potentially other assets as well um to the chain and and you've got the validator thing sorted out at that point um so that that's part of what we're doing to try to bridge that Gap I'll let you guys if you have any questions I've been talking for a while yeah yeah I I could definitely jump in here um so I do want to like touch on and go a little dive a little deeper into interchange security V1 uh

replicate security as also commonly called in the cosmos Eco um I think between 2019 and you know up until 2022 2023 there's obviously a lot of concerns about like the growth of the cosmos ecosystem doesn't necessarily translate to the growth of the cosmos Hub and it was always like that value cruel or that alignment problem I think that the wider crypto space has you know has right rightfully pointed out uh can you really explain what IC one was uh I guess my my general understanding of it is that it's really like a generalized probably the first generalized reaking protocol in the crypto space you could probably argue polka dot was probably like with its

first with uh with par par chain par slot auctions um but can you like briefly explain like the difference like what is iv1 uh and what were like some of the Lessons Learned I think that at for says maybe the wider Cosmos Hub community has taken from uh ics's V1 successes and it's poal failures and how icsv 2 which we'll get into in a second kind of improves on on that um yeah yeah so um absolutely ICS V1 um we also Avalanche I think should be mentioned as well but again like polka dots somewhat like a restak but it's not completely generalized I guess but like icv one um uh was a protocol it is still I me we still have it pretty much within icv2

it's it's still an option um but basically replicated security meant that consumer chains that's terminology for that's equivalent to kind of like an AVS if you're using IG ler terminology but um consumer Chains would uh get the entire validator set of the cosmos Hub um and well not the entire validator set it's like 95% by power which is actually like maybe half of them by number because there's like a long tail um but basically they would get the whole security of the cosmos Hub and it was very high security uh it also it was launched with uh alongside something called adom 2.0 um which was kind of that was other whole thing I don't know if we have to get into that here it could be fun if we have some time at the end to talk about it 2.0 but um basically there was this vision of

having it be like uh almost like sort of like a super app um like where you would be adding functionality to the cosmos Hub by having these chains that were running secured by the entire Cosmos Hub validator set um and I think we learned a lot of lessons I think we actually learned lessons from that that like protocols like like like Igan layer will learn in the future um and well I'll tell you what that is but like basically it's like um first of all one of the one of the issues there were was we're trying to get the entire validator set to run every chain um and it is a good fit I think so that we do have two chains on there that actually you know quite successful um you know as far as you know at least within the cosmos

ecosystem which is H stride which is a reaking protocol um and then Neutron which is a kmm smart contract smart contract langine platform um and these are good fits for replicated security because they're big projects um have a lot of momentum have a lot of Need for security um and so it kind of makes sense but we found with definitely some smaller some smaller projects then you know as we're encouraging them as well is like you know started to um try to get on that and it requires a governance proposal to pass so you've got to get since you're making every validator run it you kind of got to get it approved you can't just let people do it permissionless it doesn't work um and so they found that there was a

lot of friction um so validators be questioning you know why should we run this you know is this actually going to be worth it for us etc etc um and it is a large validator set so um you know you are if you're making everybody run this chain you are you know potentially using a lot of resources um in terms of validators spend and their their time and everything and so we found that that the level of friction um was was just it was just too and uh that is what we're addressing with with icv2 but there's another interesting lesson which I think we will see play out with with Igan layer um which is or maybe they I don't know maybe they have a really smart strategy to get around it we'll see but basically that is that when you have new projects

launching even new projects that are relatively successful have a lot of Buzz and momentum like stride and neutron and you have you know like3 billion dollar worth of TBL Stak um the staking Rewards uh it's hard it's hard to actually it's hard to put out enough staking rewards that once you split it between $3 billion of stake uh it's it's a big number for people you know arriving their wallets um and so even even with these projects that were pretty successful it it was kind of like perception like hey what's it you know what's it doing for us um and I think that this is something there's other reaing protocols out there like you know like Babylon Igan lay and they have even more

tvl um they're getting huge amounts of t um and you know I'm actually I got to check what the status of IG is right now but as far as you know when I was really looking at it a lot like a couple months ago they're not really in production yet I'm pretty sure they definitely don't have the rewards going yet um but that's going to be something um where you know we'll have to see how that plays out um when those when when that yield starts hitting and that yields not maybe not what people expect um that's yeah that's also something we've dealt with icv2 we'll see how it works but yeah guys have any questions or no no questions I think Picacho probably can jump in here as well but we both were actually on an interiew a podcast episode with stream I don't know what it was month

month or two ago we brought this up because this is generally I think a lot of the things that the cosmos ecosystem and probably polka dot and and avalanch degree too have like learned about reaking and security as a service is you're putting your assets your your pristine collateral asset your eth your AV your dot your adom whatever at risk for potential slashing even though I ler doesn't have slashing alive yet today there's an opportunity cost as OC with doing that and these consumer chains to your point or abss no matter how successful are not going to be able to generate meaningful yield um at least sustainably on day one right like look at some of the most successful

applications out there um let's look at dydx sorry dydx may be a unique example but outside of per texes for the most part they don't generate enough Revenue to Warrant the security or the the yield required to make securing your chain worthwhile and I don't think IG lier has really solved what that solution is yet um I think there's going to be a um a partition uh of like paying security providers First so like the node operators themselves and then coming up with a different payment structure for the delegated portion of stake um but really what it's going to come down to in my opinion is just liquidity mining uh leveraging some type of inflationary

token uh like what we've seen with a lot of Cosmos app chains to secure their own validator sets and it's really going to create down only tokenomics so that's why you need to come up with some or down only price action that's why you need to come up with some other way of aligning the incentives of the reaking platform and also the the abss or consumer chains themselves um which I think is and this is kind of me I think Shilling the cosmos hubs uh I think strengths compared to other reaking protocols is other reaking protocols don't have onchain governance and governance for the most part is usually a thorn in the cosmos hubs and other crypto protocol sides like nobody likes governance it's messy but I do think

that some kind of bilateral alignment where you come to some kind of agreement with each other like hey I will secure your protocol for this long and I will maybe take it on the chin for now that like the yield won't be worthwhile but eventually maybe we agree that maybe we we change the cost structures uh you kind of let the free market play out but I think allowing oning governance to kind of lean into these protocol service agreements uh is actually something that is a unique selling proposition that the cosmos Hub has that other permission fully permissionless reaking protocols don't have yeah we're we're looking at doing something like that it's not in icv2 right now but that is is something we we may add um but uh yeah so I I think well I think it comes down to I

mean I think the yield just has to be like I think it has to like you know I think the valuable service is being provided just have to be realistic about you know what's you know how big it's going to be at first and not try to over a lot of things will happen in the cosmos actually if you look back at like uh cosmos had a pretty big bull market in like 2022 a lot of chains launched and stuff like that and a lot of them had very high inflation at first um and it's like a sugar high or something I mean it's like you you it it it it creates you know it's like an airdrop it creates a lot of activity um but if you don't have a plan for how to taper that off it it can be painful later um and I

think that that's just a thing you know has to be managed um these are valuable services but you just don't want the expectations to get way ahead of the reality um but I can talk about icsv 2 and kind of how that works how we're addressing these kind of things um yeah so icsv 2 one of the things about icsv 1 is that it had the whole validator set securing every chain um and that is more secure than having so in icv2 we let validators opt in and out so they say I can they can say I wanted to secure this chain or I don't want to secure this chain and so it's a lot more flexible it can be made permissionless we are making it permissionless um but from the security perspective it's first of all like it's

a lower dollar value security that's not really the important part though there's another Factor though that like um is another fact is that the only thing that's actually slashed for with with interchange security um is um is is double signing and that's the case for most reaking as well um I think that's probably going to be kind of the case for Igan lir that's certainly the case for Babylon um and and that's uh igen the enan uh team did a great you know the igen token paper is actually a really good look at why how this works and why but it was something we knew about we didn't maybe have it as clearly kind of articulated as they do in the igen paper but basically if you have the entire Cosmos sub validator set um validating they they first of all

they get slly double sign but also if they do stuff like incorrect execution which is where a validator like basically lies to a bridge about what happened in the protocol like what the transactions were like it says yeah we were given all the money by everybody on the Chain like you know Bridges don't really check for that um uh without ZK proofs and stuff which don't work yet um and so that that's like incorrect execution there's other things like Oracle attacks there's a whole class of things that validators secure chains against which are actually not slash and the reason they do that is kind of unclear um but the two leading theories are I mean it's like in the real world it works but but basically it's token toxicity is one that's where basically if all the cosmos of validators say

we're going to take all the money out of neutron or whatever then the cosmos atom is going to crash because it's like um you know obviously garbage uh if that's the level of security that they're just robbing you know everyone blind um and then there's also social slashing um which is the idea that somebody's going to like start a new Hub and it's going to not have the validators who did the bad stuff in there um and so if you just have a smaller validator set that are like opting in to validate you get like maybe you got 10% of the validators on this particular consumer chain they may not be as motivated by those factors um because they don't know for sure they're going to be removed from the from the main chain and they also don't know uh they also like the token toxicity

might not really be it might be diluted by the fact that there's such a small part of the of the whole validator set so that was that was part of why we launched with replicated Circ security first because we were worried about these kind of issues um so anyway with with icv2 uh you like I said validators can opt in and they can opt out of consumer chains and so what that allows is for a consumer chain doesn't have to have the yield to be able to service three3 billion do with a tvl right out gate um they can they can start with a smaller validator Set uh with a lower staked amount um and they can ramp up to the level security that they need um and so that and and the other thing is it makes a permissionless so um you're

right right now we're in like kind of in the in the very first version of icv2 is like you still use a governance proposal because it's like dos reasons really boring technical reasons but next release um we're making it fully permissionless and basically you'll be able to start a consumer chain no Governor's proposal no nothing and um and that that that's also that's also great at reducing the friction um what you do need if you do that like back to the security thing um and the igen token and everything is that you do need a way for validators to misbehave on these consumer chains to be slashed even if it's not double signing um and Igan igan's way of solving that is um

basically uh it's kind of like governance but it it involves them forking the entire token I think that's going to be really high friction um but I guess probably now is not the time to really get deep into that but um that's also possible in theory on the Hub you could just say well the entire Hub is going to hard Fork if a validator double you know if Val sorry validator you know does incorrect execution on a consumer chain the entire Cosmos Hub is going to hardfork and remove them um that's kind of how igen works like that could also work with Adam as well U Maybe you know maybe they the community would decide to do that too but we will we're also working on a feature right now called fault resolutions um and we should talk about that more actually after for Capital but uh that that's basically a

vote which is a vote to slash the um the offending validators um and it's kind of interesting in the igen paper they say well voting is not good because you could people could compromise the vote there could be bribery they could bribe people to vote you know not to slash them or whatever stuff like that but the thing is that here the vote is actually just the first step um obviously hopefully it never happens at all because there's like this punishment hanging over people's head but if it does happen then first of all you try to slash them the vote if there is this like bribery attack which is even smaller likelihood that that happens but if for some reason the governance is not correct then you can go to forking the main token um so having those security measures in place

um you know allows us to have it be where you know people people you know validators come in Secure consumer chains you know secured by adom um bringing a lot of stake to secure those chains and have everything work be flexible permissionless and secure that's awesome yeah definitely want to chat offline about uh about uh what you call it fraud resolution uh yeah uh uh fault resolution fault resolution okay we we'll chat about that because I have a lot of thoughts there hey guys permissionless the event for crypto natives is heading west to Salt Lake City and we're bringing the biggest names in crypto together for an incredible campas event join me and the rest of blockworks on October 9th to

hear for more than 200 Industry Titans including Nick white from Celestia shiram from Igan and keone from Mona the conversations at permission list will be covering the hottest themes in crypto including modularity reaking the Bitcoin and Solon ecosystems Ai and crypto rollups l2s institutional adoption and of course the November election that will be right around the we couldn't be more excited about this event and it's happening in one of the most beautiful places in the US ticket prices will be increasing towards the end of June so get your ticket today make sure to use the code so I get some credit and bragging rights from the rest of the team uh use ZX10 for 10% off on your ticket one more thing we're also hosting the permissionless re hacka font in

collaboration with bidle box the theme this year is a multichain future to build a better cross chain experience so I don't have to have a heart attack every time I bridge to a new chain I'll hack of participants will receive a free ticket to attend permissions so if you're a developer come join us in Salt Lake City team up with fellow devs and build the multichain future polygon Labs is developing the next generation of open- source ZK Tech to aggregate crypto liquidity and user bases empowering developers to grow in a unified web of interoperable chains with the a layer the a layer is a machine for Network effect don't worry about bootstrapping liquidity just build anywhere in the a layer to tap the liquidity and users everywhere to support the aggregated future and boot scrap quality project the polygon Community grants program was

launched with 1 billion tokens All For polygon Builders season one of the community grants program is live right now and features 35 million in madic to support the next generation of polygon projects for Builders on polygon or projects interested in migrating these grants are for you join the aggregated future and feel empowered to grow in an infinite web of unified interoperable chains apply today at polygon.net of interoperability is here with the launch of teleporter Avalanche becomes a seamlessly linked network of many sovereign blockchains that communicate so smoothly they feel like a single chain teleporter is an evm compatible cross-chain communication protocol built on top of avalanche for me it allows any

evm chain on Avalanche to send messages assets and data to one another in a simple fast affordable and secure way teleporter and Avalanche work messaging provide a new foundation for how Avalanche blockchains can communicate and help how developers can easily build cross chain applications out of the box build anything you want any way you want on the eco-friendly blockchain designed for web free death check it out by clicking the link below how exactly does cosmos Hub in this ever growing list of new reaking protocols out there what is like the pitch if you're building in the C in either the cosmos ideally the cosmos ecosystem but in generally if you were trying to build your own app chain um why the cosmos SDK why the Cosmos Hub

because there's Cosmos chains that are currently planning on potentially leveraging igen layers shared security solution through ethos which we won't we don't have time to probably get into weeds there but more generally speaking like what is the differentiator for the cosmos Hub uh and maybe this is something you want to probably elaborate on like what Hydro is maybe like other services that do security aggregation like I'm sure there's a handful of things we could tap here but yeah like what is the differentiate that Cosmos has the cosmos Hub has that maybe some those other reing protocols don't have um yeah I mean we're we're try so what we're trying to do is we're trying to make it excuse me a little cold but um we're trying to make it so the cosmos Hub is the best place to launch a chain um and

I think like you know I think that security is kind of slippery topic uh it's not necessarily that people you know you always need the highest security or that's necessarily going to um having really high security is going to make your product successful you're launching um I think you need enough security that it's secure um but what we want to provide is the easiest way the best way to you know best place to launch a chain but really you know the easiest way to launch a chain a you know fully Sovereign app chain find a validator set um and you know yeah and and and launch your chain and I think what what we're trying to do also is not only like we I think you know the cosmos has been missing like this kind of value

capture mechanism for sure with the cosmos hub um and we want to improve that but we also just want to improve Cosmos as a whole and kind of look at you know what's you know what's stopping projects from launching app chains and and and and address that um so a lot of our Focus now is kind of on like the uh how the you know how chains deal with the validator set um how the how the developer experiences around that um and then also things to help chains get launched um so like I said we have this uh new front end that's coming out for it and um one of the features there is we're doing these um these badges uh which will let like basically it will

allow for Integrations with launchpads so um you know services that provide things like airdrops uh or liquidity support or whatever whatever it is um that'll be integrated there so we want to kind of make it like if we're launching app chain this is like you know for a variety of reasons the best place to do it um the um um and and the fundamental part of that like the the base layer of that is the validator set is the is the method to to get connected with this validator set very experienced validator set um and to find the validor I want to opt in to to to run the chain um I think um yeah Hydro I I'll mention that really quickly um that's another thing we're working on um again with the you know the goal of of of making Cosmos have the best place

launch a chain um that is a it's kind of more of a defi thing um but it's basically a platform where um people can uh so it holds it's like a liquidity pool holds it holds atom um and other tokens as well we're bringing other tokens in too liquidity sources and there are voters who it's a little bit like uh curve Wars was um voters can lock up uh St atom which is a liquid stake atom and they lock it up there and then they vote on where the liquidity held by the contract will be deployed um and so that's something also um that's something that we're is you know is is something be accessible generally to

projects whether or not they're launched on the Hub as consumer chains but also there's a special uh like trunch of liquidity that's devoted especially for you have to the requirement you have to be a consumer chain to use it um and so that's where you know when it change launching a lot of time um you've got low liquidity um and either it's liquidity on the Chain's own uh token um or it could be you know if they're launching a trading venue um maybe they want more liquidity in terms of like um you know stuff like stable swaps uh or or whatever and so that's um that's a way for the the kind of the the cosmos H like the atom Community get involved in voting on like you know how are they

going to uh sort of like give give these chains that are launching like extra juice and which ones the best ones to bet on kind of get involved in that way the way you guys are thinking about Hydro is it is there a attempt to make Adam more money like I don't like saying like money like but is that the main focus I think Ethan likes the term what capital interchain capital asset um yeah I think that's that's part of it um I think you know our Northstar is best place to to launch a chain um but that's also I think there is a side benefit Adam's already very very liquid um it does like I don't know hundred million dolls of trading volume a day um so it's

pretty liquid token um but yeah we we do there there's there's there's a lot of synergy where it can help a project um you know get their liquidity off the ground it also gets Adam into more places um and makes it more of a common token um you know used throughout Cosmos and and and Beyond so that's definitely a goal as well one thing I I actually wanted to ask for a bit now is Babylon and how you view that as a is a shared security asset and like do you think it I guess EOS also kind of relates to this like is that a worry for Adam at all or is this something that you guys are thinking about depending on how much is bridged obviously and how much is utilized but like if it was what are

some consequences to that um yeah I think so so uh Babylon um we work you know we work closely with them actually um we are Cosmos would probably be like I think they they want us to be like the second AVS on Babylon after Babylon chain itself um and so the way we see that is like you know there's a lot of uh there's a lot of Buzz around the Bitcoin L2 space um and generally where that comes from is that um you know at least how I see it is that you you you have people who are trying to build for Bitcoin users if you're thinking that like you want to build let's say like a you know a lending market for Bitcoin or

something like that and you want a lot of Bitcoin Capital come and you want a lot of bitcoiners to use it um it's you know for for Bitcoin people a lot of time you know it's they like they don't want to use it unless it's like you know on bitcoin they don't want to mess with like alt coins or whatever you know so um you know maximalists or whatever right so it's like I think there's a lot of cache that having it secured by Bitcoin can bring to a project and the way we look at that is that like again you know for us it's not necessarily purely about the security um it's it's it's about like you know it's about making the best place to launch chain so with the Babalon integration what we're trying to do is um provide an option you know for maybe for Cosmos projects that

do want some extra Bitcoin security as well but then also for um projects that are building uh Bitcoin l2s we think that the cosmos SDK is like one of the best ways to build an app chain which an L2 ultimately is um and so we want to provide those projects with a way that's you know EAS way to launch um so get their validator set together um get their chain up get it running and um yeah that's kind of our that's our North Star that makes sense one thing that I feel like we keep touching up on but it's like it's not the elephant in the room but it's there um value acrel to Adam and I know this like this is one of

the big ones in the cosmos um how what's your take on this how do you see it develop what are some things that you guys want to actively do and like anything that you are very upset about very happy about I want like everything that you think about this essentially the raw emotions of Jan TR back well I mean a lot of this stuff happened before my time but I know about it I mean I was following the cosmos space since the since it came out but I I've only been working as a core developer for a couple of years um but you know one of the things um you see this a lot still you see you see it everywhere all over the place it's the most common thing is that like you know somebody's going to somebody

comes out with a great new idea and uh you know they raise money for it and they're like yeah we're gonna figure out how to make how to monetize this later you know um like I don't know like in the Facebook movie you know where they're like you know what's you know a million bucks not cool you know what's cool is a billion billion billion bucks like that was because you know Mark Zuckerberg wanted to put like ads on the first version of Facebook so they're like we're going to figure out how to monetize it later it's like a it's a good problem to have or whatever um and that's kind of I I think like I wasn't there but like that's kind of I think the attitude um that you had with Cosmos when when the Ico was raised in like 2017 um and so uh you know they built

this great great toolkit great platform for building chains they also built this great uh communication protocol between chains um and there was originally some thoughts maybe that the cosmos Hub like maybe there's a benefit f it with IBC if it like goes through if it goes through a chain like it's a cut a hub chain like that or the IBC pack goes through that chain before it gets the other chains really supposed to go to and you still see this architecture with other you know connectivity protocols like um I think I think Wormhole conct wrong but it's definitely Axel for sure it's definitely a thing where it's like yeah it's going to go through our chain um but what they found building IBC is that you don't necessarily really need that um and it may even be more efficient if

you don't have that um and so they're like all right let's engineer this the best we can and that's been great for the growth of IBC and I think for Cosmos as a whole um that it didn't have kind of extraneous you know value capture things in the middle of everything um but then for the cosmos Hub it was kind of like well you know we don't need this this routing Hub necessarily it pro it could provide a small benefit sometimes we won't get into the details of it it's pretty deep but like uh in general a lot of times direct channels are are are good um so that was kind of I think that was the original sin um is probably not having a monetization strategy in the first place um I think that what we're doing icv2 would have actually worked really well

back then I still think it will work well um but um basically like um I think for that like the strategy is more like looking at like just looking at like what's what's Difficult about about start not trying to get in the middle like IBC but looking at like you know what's about starting the chain and trying to address that um and there you know there have been a lot of other there there also part of it is that it's so decentralized too is that there's definitely a lot of people who have a lot of different ideas um that they'll have a bright idea and and kind of like you know um wake up one day and you know post it on the Forum um but there isn't necessarily the the funding or the execution actually make

it happen um and what that does it's not bad having all these ideas um but what what it does do is it makes it confusing if you're looking from outside and you're like what does you know uh what does the cosmos Hub do and then you got you know one guy saying it does this someone else is saying it does this other thing uh so it can be it can be confusing um but I guess I can also lead into like what we're doing in formal so um at informal we uh you know like I said we we do a lot of core development there's there's a core development organization called the ICF uh and they pay for the development of the cosmos SDK and the and IBC um obviously Cosmos would be nowhere without that stuff but it's not really in their mandate or

really their nonprofit like Charter to actually fund the cosmos Hub um they were funding the cosmos Hub teams though um they had an in-house team and then we we kind of took over last year inal dead um and um so but but for for this year for 2024 we actually last year we put up a funding proposal for the for the community um and so we raised our funding like directly from the cosmos sub community pool in a decentralized way um and so what that's given us is is given us the ability to kind of really like focus in on like a particular use case and like really make it real and make it happen um and so that's kind of

that's our Focus that's how informal is related and we have to you know we also you know we're accountable to the community um we have an oversight committee um and uh we it's like you know we we we have to present our progress to them you know every quarter got that meeting coming up actually um and you know what our plan for the next quarter is and stuff and also uh for 2025 we're going to be putting up another funding prop so it's entirely you know as like kind of the decentralized nature of Cosmos it's entirely Community funded um and and and and run to some extent a year from yeah a year from now two years from now what like where do you think the cosmos Hub is in in your Ideal World and I would also

say what in your opinion is like the end game for the cosmos H think five plus years out what what are the services the cosmos hubs offer in consumer chains um what are maybe there's some technological breakthroughs on like the fraud proof or ZK proof side um like what do what do you think is like the the real endgame for the cosmos Hub as a security provider and as like um a plat a service AGG Ator itself like it's a platform uh I think it was like the portal to the rest of the cosmos ecosystem it abstracts away the rest of the the IBC uh abstracts IBC underneath it abstracts away the the different app

chains um but yeah would love to hear like your perspective because you're you're you're closer to the metal than anyone else pretty much throughout the entire crypto space as it relates to Cosmos Hub um what do you think there's certain features you you'd like it to see uh and yeah give give your your hope youum take but would also love some like realist uh side to it as well um yeah I mean I want the cosmos sub to be the best place to launch a chain um I think you know and obviously as part of that we want to have a lot of consumer chains um we want to have you know not only you know a few great consumer chains but also lots of small ones um and really it's it's got to be about providing value um and so you know we and I think

you know that's we have to provide value to be successful and so we want it we want it to be like you know you know you can you can launch you know you can find your own validator set you can launch your own app chain with your own validators that on Cosmos Tech and that's totally fine um but the we want to be the easiest way and potentially the most secure way is to launch it on Cosmos subub um so that's kind of that's the vision um you know at least for you know for interchange security um and I think that everything has to kind of flow from providing providing value to someone um I think in terms of more real IC takes like um oh I haven't covered rollups either I think rollups are really important and and U and ZK validity proofs obviously I'm very

excited about the the technology just like you know everybody uh in the space is and we actually have uh this is kind of not fully like announced yet and stuff but there's definitely a lot going on behind the scenes to to integrate rollup technology um but like you know like I was saying it fits within that framework of the eased power Spectrum um and so we want there to be rollups for people like if they don't need necessarily everything app chain gives we also want there to be an easy option for the muncho rollup on on the cosmos Hub um but then also kind of a cosmos flavored you know I mean we want it to be with Cosmos SDK still and so that they could pretty easily transition their logic um up to an app chain if

they decide they want to add some more power functionality or whatever um that's kind of my vision um I think I mean I also like to see Adam use as as collateral and as liquidity as well um but I I to personally me and I'm opinion is different on this but I think that that like the use of a token as liquidity um and collateral and stuff like that it kind of flows from um the uh how valuable that token is in other aspects and I think for something which is kind of more I guess you know a work token if you want to use that terminology it's not just a meme coin like Bitcoin or anything it's like actually supposed to do something I think that has to flow from like um from from from providing value and and like what I just said about you know

being the best place lunch chain in terms of a more realistic take I think like um I I actually feel like you know Cosmos like app chains and and and and Cosmos app chains built on Cosmos are in like I think in in maybe the beginnings of a small upswing um right now um like I said I was mentioning like with with bar chain others that are launching a cosmos um you know if not the cosmos Hub um but I think like the the reality is it still is on the power side of the ease power spectrum and I think that like by the very fact that you're making an app chain it does mean that you want to do a little bit more work um and there are things you want to customize on your underlying platform um so I think that's that's like the realistic

take is that like is like kind of knowing our place um and providing other options but also um I think you know I think there you could ask questions about like yeah are you know do most projects need uh you know maybe they don't need all that power maybe your roll Up's good enough or you go further this something the ethereum community grappling with a lot and you know maybe most projects don't even need a rollup maybe they just need a um they just need a a a smart contract in which case you know salana is very fast and good performance and everything so um I think that would be the more realistic take is is is is is looking at like you know um is looking at who needs it but I think from what we

see now I think we see that the idea of app chains it's catching on more and more um even if that's kind of in the form of rollups love that I I do have one uh I think followup we didn't touch on it and I'm not sure where it is like in the priority queue for for developer uh yeah I guess developer Resources with icv2 and hydro um what are what is the work how much work is still being done on Mega Bloks is that still something that's like in the pipeline or is that more so uh put to the back burner and if you could explain like at least at a high level what Mega Bloks is for those that may not know yeah uh okay so Mega Bloks is uh that was a that was a paper I I put out last year um and I think

it's it's like I don't know if you guys read the John Charo blog post we're all building the same thing um and it's one of these things that's in kind of it's in the sort of Universe of I didn't really even know it at the time but it's in the universe there's like a universe that exists between like you know P ups and then even like some of what like salana is doing to make their you know single chain thing faster um but Mega Bloks anyway the point of Mega Blocks is basically that like looking at the market I was thinking you know like you really the best place to be is like um you know in terms of like lock in I guess uh you know and and in terms of value like there's a lot of value in interoperability like IBC that's pretty

asynchronous but like there's also like um synchronous interoperability is is really really great um I think like and and I think you know obviously like everything can be done um like I think like in that blog post I I just read it that's why it's on my mind but like you know John makes the point that like you know the internet is all asynchronous and you don't notice it because it's fast and it works well um but as a developer I know that dealing with asynchronous systems is always far more complex to dealing with synchronous ones and so an example of that a concrete example is that like let's say um you know I I use the example of urine I don't even know if urine's around anymore but urine is kind of like a defi aggregator and so it would basically like you know you could get access to

like you could buy a token which was representing some really complicated like Arbitrage play between dexes or something on urine and so when urine run those strategies those strategies in ethereum's asyn in ethereum sorry synchronous programing model on the ethereum base layer you make one transaction that like runs the entire strategy that moves the tokens all over the place rebalances everything gets everything out gets the yield out all happens in one transaction um that's really nice for the developer you just write it everything you want basically step by step in the code but then also it means that if something goes wrong the whole transaction fails and you're not stuck you're not stuck just because you didn't have enough gas for like a

particular step or something you're not stuck like halfway through with all your and like a weird token you got to unwind everything and like reverse you did so that's like the power of synchronous composability um and so Mega Bloks was kind of an an effort to look at like Hey how do we make lighter weight blockchains that like have this synchronous composability with each other um and the idea was that you'd basically have them all run on the same consensus layer um and basically when you did transactions between them those transactions would all go like in this kind of big like Mega transaction bundle um so we did a little bit of uh a little bit of technical research work towards that in the first quarter of this year

and um when we looked at what we built we just kind of realized like you know what this is actually just a shared sequencer so so that's what's happening when I was talking about the rollups that that kind of has gotten spun into that project um and so we're still you know we're still working on that it's actually not even just the informal Hub team um there's other teams that have kind of taking it on as well um and so I think that like once you're in that universe um you know there is a lot of complexity and stuff to rollups and it's like a lot of stuff doesn't work yet with the proofs and everything but um I think when you're in that space of looking at how do we make people build something that's a lot like a chain but maybe it's easier to launch and then

maybe has more of these kind of synchronization capabilities um but doesn't necessarily have the power and the flexibility of an app chain I think probably you know doing that as something that's kind of a rollup related thing is best and that's what we're doing with Mex so so we had we had a really good conversation today I just want to like summarize what I guess my understanding is for what the future state of the cosmos subub is so effectively like a year from now um if you want to launch an app chain in the cosmos ecosystem you can come to the cosmos Hub and potentially as like as little minimal quick clicks as possible you're going be able to launch your app chain choose the amount of security that you want from the cosmos Hub you're be able to choose the the uh portfolio of

assets actually secure your your chains so adom Bitcoin potentially other Assets in the future not only can you get shared security through the cosmos Hub you're actually going to be able to uh there's be a capital formation Marketplace which is being uh coined as as the hydro platform so you're G actually raise capital from Adam stakers which potentially creates as like for form of money or makes adom this a more Capital like asset in in the interchain um and then third thing is there's potentially uh going to be a future state where you're going to be able to launch app CH or I'm sorry roll apps or rollups on top of the cosmos Hub and it's going to be uh kind of like a shared sequencer offering whether that's either on the cosmos Hub directly or as

a consumer chain uh but again that maybe that remains to be seen as more more future State um do do that right I guess the overall end Vision Cosmos hub from your perspective it is the best place not just to launch a chain but to grow your chain get users and get Capital uh is that the case we want to bring the um you know we want to bring the power and the flexibility of app chains to uh you know to a greater number of developers um and help them you know make their make their product successful is there any place that our listeners should check out to keep up with informal systems you your thoughts the cosmo sub anything specific uh yeah I mean um we have a Twitter uh this probably the best way for you know

obviously up to up to dates of cryp Twitter um it's like Cosmos Hub um I think I'm pretty sure that's the handle yeah Cosmos Hub um my Twitter ISJ trach um I don't necessarily I I don't I don't tweet that frequently like you like a few times a week maybe and also a lot of times my tweets are more um like memes or whatever so probably the at Cosmos Hub account is you know maybe the best um the best place to really get the um you know and then there's also the um I think it's at informal systems um I guess I should have these these these written down the hand but at informal system um informal Inc ininal NC so just got it one of my 2024

predictions was that you were going to become more of a thought leader in the crypto space I want to see you tweet more John I think you everyone knows freom everyone knows like all the other players work dude like yeah yeah I it's it's true but yeah your code your code to tweet ratio is too high on the coding side you need to actually you need to get boots on the in the trenches on on the crypto Twitter and post more yeah yeah okay I'll I'll try to do that David yeah no problem thank you again John appreciate it thank you for coming on yeah thanks guys are you currently building on polygon or interested in migrating season one of the polygon Community grants program is live right now and features 35 million in madic to

support the next generation of polygon projects builders on polygon these grants are for you join the aggregated future today by applying at polygon.net right [Music]