Interoperable Infrastructure for Modular DeFi with Brainjar of Composable Finance

Transcript

and we're live I'm Sebastian cuccio and I'm the host of the interop theater op is a podcast it's all about understanding the economic decentralized networks that make up the interchain I'm here today with brain jar who is the CEO of composable Finance how you doing jar hey thanks for having me thanks uh thanks for being here I'm like really excited to finally have this conversation on the podcast and get deep into all of the uh Visionary aspects but also the technical components that make up composable Finance I think it's a project that like a lot of folks in the ecosystem are are exposed to um but uh for me like it's there's there's still some aspects of the

project that I really want to understand how it works and how it all connects to each other so really happy to have you on uh before we get started though uh if you're a fan of what we're doing here please consider subscribing hit the like button uh hit the Bell notification on your phone to get notified when new live streams uh go live and we usually go live on Thursday and if you want to support the work we're doing please consider staking to our fmos validator and the link is down in the show notes so that out of the way um yeah tell me a little bit about your background where you came from and um how you how you became to be a brain in a jar yeah so um I studied basically I always used to be interested in uh bio actually so I

was doing a lot of Bio research like worked it um like different research Labs doing like cryo em structured structural biology and then sort of studied physics and econ at Yale and then later on moved to do sort of like basically went full-time crypto and started writing um white papers for a bunch of projects in the space and like trying to help people sort of design protocols um then I basically became a like farming Degen when D5 Summer started in 2020 then started composable in 2021 and so you're like more more in you

study biology right I study Physics physics and econ in college but I spent a lot of my time doing bio research yeah okay like for um for like Pharmaceuticals or so it was basically like we were studying the Golgi apparatus uh which is this organelle in the cell that does like packaging of proteins before they're exported out of the cell so like heavy biophysics basically um which actually like a lot of people sort of like I feel like a lot of people in this space do come from bio because it's like a very mechanistic yeah um specifically biophysics like it's a very mechanistic ecosystem like having blockchains talk to each other is very

much so similar to how cells like talk to each other from a mechanistic perspective yeah that's so interesting yeah so I think it's like all this stuff really came sort of naturally to me uh so yeah it was definitely a good background for this space yeah cool um yeah I mean mayor Roy who's my my co-host on epicenter is also a biochemical engineer worked in Pharma for for many years and I've definitely crossed a lot of those folks you know in in crypto like physicists and uh and people who um say like bioengineering and that kind of thing so yeah interesting and um and so you know from from that like how do you transition uh

into crypto like you said you were doing some D5 djend stuff but like what was the moment where you said huh like these cells are interoperating in this way this is how it should be done in crypto yeah I mean so I think basically like I I was a Bitcoin Maxi in like 2013 2014 and then I covered it yeah and then I discovered uh ethereum and polka dot and Cosmos kind of like one after the other um and then I was really like excited about polka dot and Cosmos because for the first time it was like the prioritization of chains actually talking to each other which for me was interesting because we wouldn't have

this like k capability we would no longer have like this segmentation of maximalism um across the different ecosystems which like in 2017 2018 The Narrative was always like oh like East is going to flip Bitcoin and then there's all these like East Killers out there and I just sort of like realized at some point there's going to be there's going to need to be an interoperability solution that connects all of these things even if um like I don't believe that there's going to be application specific like chains I think there's going to be application specific ecosystems um that have application specific chains

but maybe like each ecosystem has like a specific blend of applications that exist within it um and so with that thesis I was like looking to see what was out there and research connects and research a bunch of other trusted Bridges and quickly realized like there is a need for this stuff especially with l2s coming out and yeah yeah I think just being a farmer and seeing like how bad the gas prices were when people were actually using the chain like the fall of 2020 specifically um I think there was like something really went off in my head where I realized like we do need trustless

bridging infrastructure but more more so than that like the fact that all these uh applications went multi-chain but then had segmented liquidity um there needed to be an application layer that actually people could build applications um that could unify and talk to all these different uh segments of a specific protocol across multiple chains so I realized there was this need and this I think the ecosystem that I realized we would need sort of like a robust infrastructure for this as an actual chain and also shared security and so we decided to launch as a polka

dot chain but the plan was always to incorporate things like cosm Blossom and IBC to achieve this greater vision and for me like this greater vision is just creating the best possible user experiences for people accessing web3 but like not actually just bsing about it but doing it in a methodical way yeah where there's like the contract layer IBC and the infrastructure yeah and reading through your docs and all the times that like I've heard you speak or I was at your event I was in Berlin a few months ago and you know there's a there's certainly like a very technical aspect to everything you're doing and like you're building really sort of deep deep crypto

Tech and uh and that's super interesting but I think like through all of your communication and also like The Branding I think that what really bleeds through is this this idea that the user experience uh is is why we're doing all this right like it's not just building Cool Tech to build cool Tech it's like actually building um applications and experiences that people can use um and so yeah I think that's that's pretty cool and it's quite quite unique uh uh not not every you know uh kind of blockchain project I think looks at it this way um yeah I mean I think I think I agree with your with your with your thesis that there are application specific ecosystems and and then chains within

those and the need to create interoperability there uh is is really uh it's really critical and you know early early today like as we were I Was preparing for this I was thinking about like what's a good analogy because I'm trying I'm always trying to like analogize what's happening in crypto to what exists in the real world because yeah speaking with like investors and people who don't get it into like who needed some kind of frame of reference and you know like there's been this this concept of like city-states nation states and you know how cities relate to boroughs and uh this kind of analogy and I think one one analogy that might be fitting uh is to to look at you know the major Financial Centers in the world so you have like New York and like there's the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ

and then you have like the London Stock Exchange and then Amsterdam and maybe like the Chicago uh Commodities exchange whatever that one there is and like all these Financial Centers they all have you know they're kind of core proprietary infrastructure that's sitting there in in the building and like NASDAQ has all these server rooms where like companies can come and like put their put their algorithms there um but then there's like all these other kind of rails and and I guess like pipes that allow liquidity to move in and out of that like it might be a bank or something that you know is sitting in in New York but is also sitting in London and they get to move liquidity from like one exchange to another and like these are kind of the the you know compare it comparatively in crypto like the interoperability layers like allows

liquidity to move from one proprietary resource system to another proprietary system I'm just like kind of spitting this out now without having really thought so much about it but it feels a little bit kind of like that um when I'm looking at like what you guys are building with other folks in the space are building yeah I mean I think I think the biggest like like for me hello okay I'm back I think you're back yeah uh so what I've always likened this too

is basically um equities so there's the first ever post I put out on medium was about dtcc and what it did for the ecosystem so DTS dtcc is the depository trust Corporation not a lot of people know about this but it basically does um all the settlements for all equities across the United States and actually assets that are not settled by dtcc like leveraged loans like um Exotics Etc various derivatives these things end up taking like taking such a long time to settle like t plus 28 is like average for for leveraged loans

um but in equities like we had naisy we had NASDAQ we had all these different small little Brokers that made a bunch of money in the 80s that could quote better prices because they had a better relationship with XYZ exchange than some other some other broker um then Along Came dtcc which basically said okay guys all things now need to have a q-sip ID and all things now basically need to trade and settle according to our Ledger um yeah and that just ended up resulting in electronification right because then someone someone like dark dark pools said okay all I need to do is build a plug-in

on top of this settlement layer and I have a dark pool and that's when people like Robin Hood and and others a light really went off in their heads and said okay with with this electronification that just happened now we can make it such that a user buys a stock Google or something and they don't care which exchange who settled it why when it got settled they just know that they bought the stock and I think that's that is really much so like how I see things evolving in crypto as well like when you have interoperability and when you have orchestration you can then have Primitives on top things like Nev things like uh other sort of like uh Arbitrage

opportunities Etc and from there you then can have these like generalized application Frameworks like we've released some example uis of what you could build with xcbm and it's literally just looks like an email like you start with these assets on these three chains and you then want to compose those assets into these three assets on these three chains that's it and at some point too people may even stop caring about the chain that they're on and just know like where their money is um and so I think that's that is like what I'm hoping to do is is to provide the interoperability Primitives by extending IVC to other ecosystems provide the

orchestration framework with xcvm and then have like a bunch of UI tooling for people to actually build applications because this stuff can't just be a plug-in right we are also working on a plug-in which is a bit of an alpha leak for people to inter for people to be able to build um Integrations with xcvm that allow them to to do stuff from the front-end perspective it's called the cbm.js but for someone to actually wrap their head around how do I visualize a cross-chain interaction I'm pretty sure there's probably like 20 designers out there that actually could build a UI that's not clunky to show this because every single cross chain application is

terrible um or at least for the most part so I think you know that's also why we're releasing a ton of UI tools in the coming weeks and months yeah I mean I think I think it's like great to be opinionated about UI too right um because you kind of set standards early like look at look at something like like uniswap you know like that UI also although I would I would argue maybe that the unit swap UI was actually pioneered by shapeshift yeah yeah a long long time ago but you know what I mean like I mean once that UI has been established now everybody kind of uses that that UI and you know to have like strong opinions about how how that should look like I think it goes a long way in creating standards and that people people are used to like visually

used to like when they go on a website they know how this works um yeah cool yeah this is really interesting um you know the white paper talks about the composable finance Vision being similar to that of the the port control protocol which I I really like that analogy maybe maybe you can um explain that a little bit and then we can get into some of the some of the more technical stuff yeah I mean so basically like um everybody's looking for like the tcpip of blockchains and then like the https on top of that TCP is essentially IBC um I think it's like careless for any

like I don't know how much you want to go into like me ranting about IBC but basically like do it man yeah so you're on the right podcast for that yeah so I mean I think I think um our perspective has like really been shaped by the work that was done on IBC over all these past years and I've seen a bunch of protocols pop up and say oh we're going to create our own message passing or for instance layer zero who takes uh who basically took IBC and said okay all the work that like clients are doing let's just replace with oracles and relayers which is like I don't think people really care or understand the impacts of that

um until these types of things get hacked but when you really think about um what how do you onboard the next 100 billion dollars worth of institutional assets into the ecosystem do you really think a circle or a um institution like Franklin Templeton like one of these guys that has a lot of capital that's doing really important stuff for their clients across the global economy are they going to want to take a risk at all all and then have to go back to their LPS and say hey we've lost 300 million dollars to a bridge hack sorry so from my perspective when I when I learned about IBC all these years ago I

was like okay this is like the only trustless bridge out there period and that's just the reality um and I think where IBC was limited initially was IBC wasn't able to go across the ecosystem but now we've obviously changed that by bringing that to polkadot we're bringing IBC to near and a whole bunch of other chains in the future it is really hard right like um speaking with like other Bridges they always mentioned that building IBC connections are really hard and it is really hard because you have to do so much political like uh discussions with so many different protocols you have to make protocol changes you have to update repos from different maintained by

different organizations but once once it's done something like this that is trustless is actually something interested interesting for a large player to get involved with to do bridging because again there is no reason for a circle or or a Franklin Templeton or any of these guys to get to want to do bridging if they're going to even have 0.0005 percent of risk um because they just don't have to take that risk right they're big enough for like their two percent apy is enough um on U.S treasury notes so I so fundamentally for me like I believe the the future of interoperability tcpip for blockchains yes there will be people who

say okay it's expensive it's slow but that's really that hasn't even been shown yet right like layer zero says okay we ripped out the like client because we expect it to be expensive with ethereum 2.0 it's like okay guys uh sorry expect to be expensive with eth but then actually if you look at East 2.0 it's possible and it's doable and all like they're basically just saying this stuff is expensive and slow because they don't know what they're talking about basically so I think a world in which we expect to see like full trustlessness and TCP will Converge on IBC once all this noise of like excuses

basically goes away um I I I haven't had the the Xerox guy the um the layer zero guys uh on but and and I haven't dug deep into like I read the white paper when it first came out and but everybody that I talk to seems to have this this gripe with with that project that it's like that you know it had gathered all this hype but that it's not very not very secure I think someone well there's like two multi-cigs yeah I mean the reason why people specifically in the cosmos ecosystem don't like layer zero

is because how IBC works is you have to basically submit a block you chain a wants to submit a message and it there's two things that are required you need to you need a um a block header submitted to the next chain and you also need um a confirmation proof right and so in IBC context these things get hashed and are passed by a relayer and the like line of the other chain on the other side um my client of chain a on chain B verifies these things and that's fully trustless no need for a centralized Authority in the middle well layer zero did is they said okay block header we're just going to have an oracle figure that

out no problem and then we're also going to have the relayer say okay this proof is legit as well so now you've taken both of these components that are like essential to confirming a a cross chain transaction and giving them to external third parties who if they're the same they can just pretend right um so yeah and there's like no matter what they say like pre-crime stuff that they're putting out like the end results of this and I don't want to make this whole podcast ripping about layer zero but like the end results is they've really just like misappropriate like it proves that ibc's extendable to other ecosystems if they're using this Tech

right this concept but they're also sort of like blaspheming IVC because IBC is supposed to be trustless and they've now taken both pieces of verification and given them to centralize third parties yeah yeah and I think like to to an IVC Maxi uh to uh to someone who believes in IBC um I think that's the sort of sacrilege and yeah well let's um let's let's dive let's dive deep here so you know composable has you know many different layers uh in its stack and you mentioned the the

Picasso para chain we'll we'll definitely get to that um but I'd love for you to walk us through like the different layers of the stack and what each layer what is the kind of role of each layer maybe we can kind of stop uh after uh for each after each layer so um you know just to kind of summarize here as we go into this uh there's the composable xcvm which is the cross chain virtual machine um similar to say like an evm on ethereum right like I think what most people have like that idea of a VM and then there's the routing layer which um has a role of routing different transactions that are explicited inside a contract written on the VM

um then there's the Picasso chain which I think from what I get like uh acts as the way to actually send transactions across on on chain and where Picasso uh is relevant is that it is IBC compatible and then there's Mosaic which is a bridge but I'm not quite sure where that fits here so that's kind of my high level understanding please tear that apart yeah so how this stack was basically envisioned is like the sort of similar to The OSI networking model so you have like and and I don't have it in front of me but it's basically like application layer presentation layer networking layer blah blah blah Hardware layer infrastructure

layer something like that and so um how we decided to architect our stack is xcvm is like the orchestration layer then you have um the transport layer which is IBC and we we also make xcbm extendable so someone does want to use layer 0 or something they can then from there you have the um the infrastructure layer which is this uh and then before transport there's routing layer which is just as you mentioned makes a decision of a pathway for execution for a generalized function like swab and then at the bottom you have this infrastructure layer which is our pair of chains so starting with starting with a pair of chains actually

um we have built basically two pair of chains a kusama pair chain and a polka dot pair chain kusamas Picasso polka dot is called composable and what they are is basically imagine them as kind of like Cosmos SDK chains but they're just written in substrate in a different environment with share security from the relay chain um what we've done is we've built you know we've had to build a lot of Primitives for the polkadot ecosystem for the polka dot ecosystem to actually have D5 so we've built a DEX called the Pablo decks and we've also built uh Apollo which is an oracle

um which is like the first Oracle in the polkadot ecosystem that actually works we've also built vaults in there called cubics we've had to build a lot of fundamental basic infrastructure for the pair chain itself um to actually like run and and do D5 things and we consider Picasso to basically be this and and composable to basically be this like uh um cross chain Hub in a way where like you have a decks on there there's a bunch of different connections so other chains over IBC there's it's also connected to pair chains um and eventually you want to connect it to eth2 and stuff like that then when we

had all these initial pieces we said okay cool but you know this is just polka dot and I don't really like have any attachment to to like seeing one specific ecosystem succeed I want to see all the ecosystems in crypto that people care about like included in our solution and so we said okay well this is a very base level customized infrastructure um that we can you know quickly perform runtime upgrades Etc Next Step was then to build um to build IBC to other ecosystems and that's actually where that Centauri if you want to pull up that graphic again Centauri is is what we call our bridge to Cosmos

and so what we've done is we've had to basically so a lot of this work actually started um a bunch of people were working on this in the past it never really got much traction um and things were blocked for like ever and ever and so last year we then came in and started meeting with people like Jack informal tendermint and quickly got all the pieces together and realized okay this is what we have to do on the uh polka dot side this is what we have to do on this on the um Cosmo side as well so from there sorry just just a brick in here what what is the what was the motivation of of building uh building

this on as a polka dot parachain um or yeah instead of a custom chain or or anywhere else or building your own chain for instance yeah so I think for for us we were interested in in really like pushing forward uh with a stack that we were comfortable with and that we really like were excited about so we really like substrate where everyone on the team is also like rust maximalist um so we had like substrate is a very nice framework to actually build blockchains and I honestly believe that at some point there will be substrate chains in the cosmos ecosystem right I'm also like interesting I could imagine

there being chains running move in the causes ecosystem as well so like I think substrate is a great framework to build blockchains um and for us like being able to do a bunch of these interesting things that we couldn't do with the causeless SDK makes these defy applications cheaper and faster um than we would have otherwise using another stack okay so so this and and so I you know I'm not super familiar like with the polka dot ecosystem like it's been a while since I've kind of peered in there um explain just for for me and also perhaps our listeners who are more on

the cosmos side what is the difference between a Picasso or sorry a polka dot parachain and kusama yes so kusama was designed to basically be this this test net but eventually like they were they had to like there was so much tvl and value in kusama that it became like the d5d Gen Hub like all the VCS were interested in polka dot and then when they all got air dropped kusama they all just like basically got out of their kusama positions and then suddenly like all these D5 d-gens like were like oh what is this like testnet token let's let me go buy that or and they were handing it

out for free back then too and then all of a sudden like there is this flourishing community of of degens in kusama but not in polkadot and and now it's sort of turned into this like he big ecosystem that I don't think polka dot even anticipated would happen um so for comparison it's it's as though we had kind of a in Cosmos like the cosmos comparison would be if if there was a a sort of test that Cosmos Hub and test meth osmosis and like all these other chains sort of like living on test net validators but at some point that thing would kind of become a thing of its own with its you know token value et cetera I guess the difference is that here that in polka dot there is this

notion of uh of you know the the the the the parachain and uh and uh the relay chain and so sort of like parachain that draws the security um from the from the main um from the main chain okay got it yeah definitely yeah I mean so I mean but this is changing in the cosmos with interchange security of course yeah these things are becoming like very very similar I'd say the biggest difference at some point is going to be xcm is not extendable to other ecosystems whereas IBC is Cosmos SDK is is go based so naturally like rust Maxi is going to have a hard time

building a blockchain in Cosmos yeah I think I think the informal team are working on a on a rust uh IBC implementation and maybe even rust tenderment right yeah yeah they are they are we're actually working with with them on uh on ibcrs um and tender NRS but but these things don't change the fundamental building block um so where where does xcvm sit in in this in this um schematic that I've got up on the screen so this is actually just a diagram of how the the bridging Works between Cosmos and kusama basically okay

yeah so this is this describes like how do we connect chains over IBC like outside of the cosmos ecosystem and like you can see there's a bunch of different pieces right there's ivcrs we have to do things on the polka dot side with palette IBC we have to do things on the cosmo side so so these things are like super uh complex and annoying uh but we've sort of brought all these pieces together and now we're getting them audited for for a launch okay so so looking at this on one side we've got the we've got IDC and this beefy light client and then there's a relayer and so the relayer uh is kind of similar to an

IBC relayer where that that tendermint IBC palette over on Picasso is able to validate transactions over um on the cosmos side and and sort of vice versa so it's sort of akin to IBC but cross chain between Cosmos and and like polka dot ecosystem exactly that's right very cool very very cool um yeah I've got a couple of charts here that I pulled from your from the white paper um yeah I guess I guess this here is where the xcvm and the routing um you know sort of sort of materializes

and so the um the cross chain virtual machine is where one would write cross chain apps uh yes and that sits over on Picasso is there an equivalent of that like on on Cosmos or on other ecosystems or is that yeah so yeah actually xcpm is chain agnostic so you could actually deploy a xcvm contract on any chain we're also doing multiple sdks for xcbm so initially it'll be cosmosum so you can employ this on any cause of Muslim chain then we're also building this yes we're also building a solidity SDK for this as well um we're building a move SDK potentially like deciding what happens with that ecosystem but the idea is like these

these what happens is when an xcbm program is deployed the messages that actually get sent is basically like you know swap here lens here et cetera Etc these things this route gets determined by the routing layer which basically is a network of solvers that come together to say okay the user wants to do X here's the best way to do it and then once these instructions are created by this routing layer we can then send it uh the over messages over IBC so it's like a whole instruction set gets sent from one chain to the next to the next to the next for like an asynchronous passive X path of execution um and how this works is through

interpreters so Picasso has an interpreter that can interpret a message and then do something on Picasso so you don't need to deploy this on Picasso to actually run an xcvm contract but we obviously prefer if you do because it's easier like and that's what we're like shipping as the V1 but in the future it will totally be chain ignostic yeah and so that's interesting I I didn't realize that you guys were building um also xcpm like sdks for all the different chains um why why did you build it as a cosmosm uh sort of contract and not as a as a Cosmos SDK module for example is

something that sits much closer to tendermint yeah so um so that's a great question so first of all like we are we were we're super interested in like walzem-based smart Contracting and so for us like as a pair chain we were first thinking about okay what are we going to have as the contract layer on our chain Inc is not a viable solution so we built cosmoasm on our pair chain which is like the first time anyone's ever brought cosum Watson outside of Cosmos they should probably rename it at this point um and I think from from our perspective right to shift a instruction set you don't necessarily need to have these things in

a module and so we just kept seeing multiple different chains like Juno osmosis adopting cosmosum and we just said okay if we can tap into the Cosmos on developer base um and have them create cosmosom contracts it's probably an easier time to get to MVP than someone building a you know a full-on kind of like module specifically however these different interpreters that I mentioned will will have to build a cosmos SDK module interpreter for chains that don't have cosmopolism for instance yeah on on polka dot we've already built um a module called palette xcvm which

which for chains that don't have again cause Muslim that's how messages get interpreted um and then on solidity we have to write a slightly smart contract Aptos you have to write a move a smart contract near we have to write a near contract so for every chain we have the same logic in the same types of interpreters but specific to what that chain needs for the logic to be passed okay interesting wow I'm learning so much here um cool so and then you know how does the VM reason about the different uh finality types so you know across the crypto system we have like probability probabilistic finality which would be

something like Bitcoin or ethereum currently then we have like um on the other end of that we have absolute finality so like tender mint and then there are chains that sit somewhere in between like provable finality like things like the um Casper finality Gadget and um so how does the VM then like when you're writing an application and then you know you're executing some transaction where tokens are moving from one chain to another and getting sent over here like uh swapped Etc um are there you know specific sort of ways to deal with that when you're getting a call back like how does that work yeah so it's all dependent again so that's why the interpreters are

basically chain specific because they deal with that basically yeah so The Interpreter receives a message do XYZ on this chain and then The Interpreter itself goes out and calls the different things for you so what ends up happening is is you you don't have um you don't have a world in which you're now like sitting wondering what happened to your to your transaction is is it final or not because The Interpreter is calling it for you and The Interpreter understands what's actually happening like on a low level of the chain itself okay and it's able to send back like some maybe some progress so like okay yeah you know if the transaction is taking

say five minutes because you've got some finality that's not as Pro as as absolute as a temperament than the the user interface would get back some kind of information some kind of message about the status of all the transactions yeah so think of it as a circuit right so it's like it's The Interpreter first then you have one two three four as far as like whatever different functions getting executed and then always the last step Loops back to The Interpreter tell The Interpreter you know these steps have been have been completed uh so this is like and you could also make it such that each individual step is you know communicated back to The Interpreter as well we're actually releasing a cosmo verse like I don't

want to reveal so much Alpha but basically like there's a Dev interface that lets people be able to like see you know what's actually happening so but shortly after Cosmo verse like we hope to release a V1 that lets people be able to use this Dev interface do these types of funky cross chain actions so yeah cool yeah I think people in the chat are excited about all the alpha that's being dropped here yeah let's keep something for Cosmo first um cool um and then yeah I guess like who are the who are the different uh up

participants in in all of this right so yeah I I guess like each chain uh has its own validators but who who's participating in routing how are they incentivized yes and yeah so routing routing layers like something we're going to work on next because it's like actually not as difficult as the other pieces because building a a incentivized solver pathway situation is like really not uh it's been done yeah so and the math is the same as like basically Dex aggregation um the hardest part there is monitoring so we're actually working on monitoring first right because if you as a solver

route someone through to Terra and Tara is going through a 99 destructive death spiral like you just mess you just basically like screwed over the user that was accessing this application and you as a solver like you kind of to like take responsibility for that and that's that's where we're going to have to figure out like the economics of slashing so having solvers put down Stakes for specific recommendations um and having monitoring tools basically like serve as a single source of Truth to potentially slash uh solver who's provided this like route um so the the people who are really focused

on this like the the core different players in this is we need the relayers to relay to other ecosystems so we could run relayers anyone can run a relayer that's not a problem um and that's really like the biggest the biggest sort of player for us to expand and then for us to bring IBC to other ecosystems we actually need each individual protocol team to play ball with us that's why we had to put out this near NEP 364 that took us like eight weeks to get past and we're actually one of the first teams outside of near to actually get an NEP actually passed so that paves the way for

um for IBC to near so as far as participants it goes like all the stuff we're doing is like there's like the dev side as far as like developer advocacy to get people interested into using xcbm but then when you go sort of like lower level into like interop like IBC that's when you have to start talking to protocol teams directly soon we're gonna have to start speaking to polygon so we're gonna have to start speaking to EF when we're doing these types of things um to extend IBC I think you know because the name of the I think I need to get a bell every time someone says interoperability I need to I think so full disclosure like I'm I'm speaking with your team about

um being part of your your sort of infrastructure so uh you know there's your oracles and collators those are part of the relayer uh like the relayer component right so so the oracles and collators so oracles are basically what I mentioned previously is like the Apollo Oracle it's like the first time there's an Oracle in the actual dasama ecosystem think of it like band but for polka dot and kusama yeah collator is basically like a validator for a cosmos chain um so that's what a collater is okay and one of the things that I thought was interesting about the

in the white paper is that you make use of relayer sets uh uh can you explain why uh yeah so this was a proposed um so back in the day when we hadn't thought more deeply about eth2 and the merge seemed like a very far away forgotten concept um we were exploring like how to bridge to non-non like client based ecosystems places like Solana et cetera and so that's where like this relayer set TSS stuff comes in it's like bridging to other ecosystems that don't

have like clients to be honest like we've shelved a lot of those efforts because we're IVC Maxis now and like we just don't really believe that any like I think there are some ecosystems where it's like legitimately really difficult like Solana because they don't have like clients but like if eth2 is possible like I'm sure wormhole a trusted Bridge like people trust Wormhole to some extent like I'm sure Wormhole could just sit and own Solana and then like you know we could be the the canonical like East Bridge that's trustless basically I'm happy with that future yeah makes sense

and I think one one component we haven't talked about maybe briefly here is Mosaic and um how does the Mosaic fit into all this yeah so Mosaic was going to be basically what I mentioned which is like a lot of this like non-like client-based bridging okay so what we ended up doing is we've learned a lot from from building those types of bridges things like having the gas token on the destination chain having uh like Crossing swaps actually route through pools with good liquidity um making sure that there's an option to cancel a bridge transaction after it's been started like all these different things we've learned and so now Mosaic

is going to become this product for that encompasses like all of our different Bridges like this the Centauri stuff the near stuff we're doing um and it's basically going to be like the ux of our transfer sort of like same way axillar has satellite.money okay this will be so it's like it'd be a bridge product that anybody can use and that yeah isn't quite like the full extent of you know amazing ux like kind of right there in in your app but something that's a bit more you know manual um for users yeah I mean I think I think basically like you know trustless bridging is fantastic but I think a lot

of the reasons why people people really like trusted Bridges is because of these ux components right and these things should just happen underneath under the hood so the idea would be someone goes to our Mosaic front end they're using Centauri and these other trustless Bridges behind the scenes but they still get these benefits of gas tokens on the other side like these these nice ux components just are options and I don't think we've ever seen that type of stuff like wrapped into a trustless bridge before and so that's like really our Our intention is to make things as seamless for trustless Bridges like for trusted Bridges trust lists

basically great well yeah I'd love to talk a little bit about the work that you're doing on IBC uh because you guys are working on extending IBC so let's let's dive into that a little bit Yeah so uh I as I mentioned the near NEP 364 um was was merged last week or to actually this past I I forget what day it is uh Tuesday it was merged so um that's that's been kind of like the the a pretty big highlight for near so now we're like pretty much on blocks to proceed um with the actual integration of IBC

there um so that's going to take a little bit more time but like we're very confident in our work there um and the near protocol team has been super supportive as far as um IBC itself between polkadon and kusama we released a Blog two days ago where we said we're using IBC to bridge polkadon kusama which has never been done before so that's going to be the first sort of major key Milestone to tell people okay look like we know what we're doing with IBC we've brought it to a whole another ecosystem and it's being used as the underlying backbone of a bridge that's bridging to ecosystems has never been bridged before from there that paves the way for us to actually

release this Cosmos Bridge so the bridge the bridge between Cosmos and kusama to start with so we're already like um speaking to a bunch of different Cosmos chains to try to like release that bridge um and have it like fully touch that test net ready um and then follow that up with the near work we're already starting to investigate polygon and East to so yeah So when you say when you say like that this will be released as a bridge and I guess in the first iterations of this this means that one would have to go to this kind of interface as you would with you know uh any any other Bridge whether it's like Wormhole or connects or

whatever execute those transactions but the dream is that you know basically just in your wallet um you can have some atom and you want to move them over to kusama and uh your wallet in the background just making use of this bridge to send those assets over without having to like Leverage this sort of interface yes yeah that's where that's where then like xtbm and stuff becomes interesting right because for instance like osmosis could could just add an xcbm interface to their front end that talks to our chain for instance um and have if someone wants to trade Adam for DOT or dot for atom uh then you could just do that all from us osmosis

and on the backgrounds messages are being passed the assets are being moved you're signing transactions with your Kepler wallet but the reality is like you just end up with DOT on us on Cosmos on us yes and then would it be um for the for a user would it be like a wrapped asset or would it be more akin to an IBC asset that's kind of like native to the chain it is important distinction it's it is not a wrap that so it's it's wrapped in that like it's so IBC is burning Mint or burn mint it's also like lock and release situation but like IBC is basically native right so there's no like you don't print like Centauri usdc like that

doesn't exist right so uh as long as we can get the chains on the other side to recognize dot as the native asset that's being brought over over IBC and they add it to their assets module it'll be considered native we we will on our side make Adam osmo all these assets even some cw20 assets like native uh Assets in our assets palette so those chains need to basically recognize the same the same thing and then they will not be considered wrapped and they're actually just IBC native assets okay and uh what's your you know what's your view on like

you know avmos's role as um you know as a bridge to the to the cop from between like the ethereum ecosystem and the cosmos ecosystem and um what kind of complexity is that uh because now you know the cosmos ecosystem isn't just IBC assets but it's also you know these potentially these um erc20 wrapped assets that are coming into the cosmos ecosystem through this other route which is yeah you know whatever bridges are connected there I guess like Nomad or axillary yeah or axelr [Music] um yeah we were talking I was talking about this I think with um

I think with fed a where you know you could end up in a situation where you know you're moving tokens kind of in a circle and like they just kept they just they're just being like wrapped and and you know you have to like unwrap them when in fact they're just going back to the main chain um yeah I guess it's like a broader question about like the complexity of like fungibility uh across across across chains when we're wrapping assets um what what what you know in terms of user experience I think that this is one of the big things that we haven't quite figured out yet is like how do we create fungibility between tokens that essentially are the same I mean that's that's the thing like do you even want that right because if you have actual usdc and Nomad uscc and Nomad just got

wrecked for 200 million dollars plus uh or however much it was which ended up for making the peg of nomad uscc basically worthless yeah like I think that it's I think that basically if we start referring to assets like axle usdc Etc as like canonical usdc um we're basically like rugging users and it's nice from a from a ux perspective like if x floor gets hacked you just basically mapped actual usdc to real uscc which I mean there's already USC coming to Cosmos anyway right so yeah

I mean I think it's best to just I unders I think that there are ways so that you can get rid of the rapping unwrapping problem and that's IBC right but when you introduce a trustless Brit a trusted Bridge you have to put those three letters in before it to let the user know okay like this isn't just uscc like I also have Bridge risk here yeah so yeah um yeah I mean I think I'd like to talk a little bit about you you mentioned that there would be a decks on the on the parachain um yeah but what's the what's the pro what's like the role of this decks and

um yeah where do you expect the community to come from yeah so the role of this text is basically just like you know Picasso we intend to connect all these different chains so like let's have an amm on the chain that is like connected to all these connections so liquidity is going to come from the polka dot it's going to come from kusama it's going to come from near hopefully also comes from Cosmos um and I think the rule basically is it just becomes like a counterpart for osmosis within the polka dot ecosystem and I believe that like the world in which someone can swap like say there's an atom osmo pair on osmosis and there's an atom osmo pair on Pablo like imagine

a user on that has osmo on Picasso can just send the osmo to the pool and then have the opposite side of the tray to get executed on osmosis right I think that's really interesting because then when you have like two liquidity pools that can now perform swaps between each other like things become cheaper because you can introduce this this layer of cows like Coincidence of water months like order matching between the two amms so I think you know it's not a competitive products to osmosis in any way it's really just supposed to be like another cross chain amm out there uh that serves as this like decks for a hub that includes Cosmos polka dot kusama near

and all these other chains we connect to okay also just because like in all reality has there been any defying polka dot no there hasn't so we need to actually so I think like one of the major reasons we're still in the polka dot and kusama ecosystem is like I think there's a big opportunity there's a lot of TV out there there's a lot of dot Maxis there who don't want to do anything else on other chains so let's introduce cool D5 Primitives we can get some of that tvl and hopefully like Cosmos and ear and other places can benefit from that because if the dot Max these Minds become a little bit more open there is a ton of tvl locked on the relay chains right a lot more I don't know how much I don't know if Adam has

flipped dot yet but like I don't think so so I think there's like the dot tvl that's not being used it's like fresh dry powder that can flow into all these ecosystems yeah well that brings me to my next question is like what what do you uh what is your outlook for the polka dot EC system at the moment and and I guess I maybe could preface that with all a lot of the conversations that I've been having with people um in like sort of in the polka dot ecosystem and close to the pocket ID system um feel that there's been like lots of missed opportunities and you know there's there's a there's a

Time window here where polka dot has to you know kind of change the course uh and you know sort of remain relevant in the face of you know ecosystems that have a lot of well Cosmos one I mean like that is one ecosystem I think right now that has a lot of hype and um I think a lot of people think it's a little bit under the radar and but then you know there's just E2 and Celestia yeah and like there's a lot of competition and a lot of um a lot of developers are choosing to go to these other ecosystems and so yeah I'm curious with your since you you guys have been in the Pokedex because of somewhere how you feel about that I mean

I think like polka dot builds Great Tech right like there's there's nice technology maybe a lot of people don't see that um but I you know I'm keen on staying in the Pokemon ecosystem for for the foreseeable future um and hopefully like we can try to drive some like adoption of like what's actually happening over there but honestly I think what's going to happen is like again I can't emphasize this enough like the biggest most bullish piece of polka dot is Dot like this asset is so valuable and so liked by so many people um

that I think it could be a very solid base asset for a lot of defy across so many different chains um so I think as far as like relevancy goes like so long as doc can move to other ecosystems and Maxis can stop being Maxis polka dot has a future um I think also polka dot will live on with substrate as well like people really like substrate I really like substrate I think even if people become Standalone chains et cetera et cetera they still bring substrate with them and they still want to they still want to maintain an outpost in polka dot as well so I think no matter what like there is a place for polkadot and it's it's

because of substrate and it's because of thought the actual asset but yeah I think in the future like to be honest with you some Cosmos change don't need to be Cosmos chains they can be Roll-Ups on Celestia some pair of jeans still need to be pair of chains they can be Roll-Ups on Celestia or polygon of veil or eigenlayer or any of these other or even eth2 right so there's just like going to be this feature of like what's the actual necessity for app chains do Cosmos and polka dot become layer twos on ethereum basically uh yeah so I don't know I don't know I think for the foreseeable future this like roll up Vision this modular stack vision is like a little

bit further out I'm a big believer in and I definitely believe in like the execution layer D.A settlement layer thesis that Celestia has I think that everything will Trend towards application specific Roll-Ups but I think it's a bigger story than that I think we still need monolithic blockchains to do specific things but those things could just be in the execution layer like fuel um yeah yeah no I think I think that makes a lot of sense and I feel like there's a I feel like we're at the beginning of a real um shift in terms of how we look at these ecosystems and that shift you know

in three or four years from now we're going to look back on on these times as when things were like extremely segregated and vertical vertical and and I'm not I'm not my thesis on how this looks in five years is still not exactly clear but one thing's certain is that um the boundaries of each of these ecosystems is about to get very porous yes and uh you know when when I when I think of what that is I like you know immediately I think this is this is The Interchange really like it is it is really the internet of blockchains where um different different chains are sent economic centers and they they communicate with each other using different protocols and certainly some

of those some Protocols are going to win out others or others are not and there will probably be dominant ones but but yeah you users will use applications and they're not going to know where their tokens are going or how they're getting transferred or like where that liquidity is getting swapped um yeah I think like it's a it's a it's a it's a great future it feels like yeah I think so too and I think for us to prepare for the modular stack like we really want to become like um fuel is like the execution layer for the modular stack Celestia is like the DA for the modular stack there isn't an interoperability solution for the modular stack that's what we want to be basically um and but again this is like some Galaxy brain stuff that like I don't

want to leak on this podcast but yeah I think that's really like I think you know IVC we're only we're only scraping the surface of what IBC can be used for yeah right and that's all I'm going to say for now yeah I know look when just just something like entertain accounts and entertain queries I think is going to uh create such an explosion of innovative Innovative use cases that um it's gonna be so cool to see like the next year uh I think it will be very very interesting yeah absolutely so what's the road map and uh what are your big Milestones coming up so big Milestones October um hopefully we're we're aiming to

launch our ksm.bridge over IBC that kicks off the launch of everything on Picasso Apollo Pablo um the Pika Picasso token tge um then after that probably like the bridge to Cosmos first and then V1 of xcbm by the way also before all this will deploy causal Muslim on the Chain too yeah okay so all these things and then basically like uh bridge to Cosmos then xcvm V1 that's basically like the next like we've been

working on this for a very long time so like and this is why because we wanted this launch to Encompass everything defy bridging xcbm and cosmosum so um yeah so that's basically the the big goal for like the next through end of year basically is to get all these things done and uh yeah tell us more about this this tge and uh yeah there'll be a token sale yeah so uh yeah so the shipment of the TG begins with an lvp so someone wants to buy a pika to set the price through this LBP like balancer LBP style copper

launch situation that's the beginning of the tge so someone anyone who wants to do that they can do that on tge date we'll release the actual date when we know it but the biggest uh thing we've needed for the tge right is like liquidity it's like who's going to actually use the Pablo decks and now that we have this KSM dot bridge where we've released this right it's much more simple for people to understand okay dot is going to be the main liquidity token used within Pablo and within like the the overall sort of like Picasso launch strategy so all the pieces are there now we just need to make sure these things are safe and audited before we ship them out to users

and to be honest internally like we have a big team um and we also have like a dedicated QA and testing team so like when we say QA and auditing we won't just mean like someone like I don't know if you've seen the meme of the guy going like this like smart contract otter like we mean like NASA style Mission critical treatment of software so that's why these things take a little bit of time when we say QA and audit so it's a bit so the launch date is a bit nebulous but we're we're hoping that this uh what we've forecasted makes sense but of course things come up in audit so we can't really commit yeah yeah well uh over at uh interrupt Ventures which is

my company you know where where uh we're seriously looking at um running some some oracles uh and or and and uh and uh collator uh infrastructure so you know hopefully we'll also be part of uh part of the early uh early Genesis of the network awesome great um Ray jar thanks so much for coming on it's been really interesting love uh love getting deep into uh into you know blockchain interoperability and uh looking forward to having you on again soon yeah thanks so much for having me really appreciate it cheers