Interoperable Smart Contacts on Cosmos – Jacob Gadikian of Notional Labs

Transcript

foreign [Music] and I caught up with Jacob hey how you doing I'm doing good man you I'm pretty good how are you enjoying the dean so far ah it's fantastic yeah um well I mean look up there this is a truly beautiful city yeah in

fact maybe the prettiest in terms of landscape and such I've ever seen plus we have nerd Festival 2020. yeah yeah definitely the nerd Fest in in the like sort of place we're at is uh is giving it some very cool Vibes definitely definitely so yeah I mean like I feel like you're kind of everywhere I see you on all the threads of like all the topics so I don't really know like where to start but I guess what's the thing that yeah like you're most interested in right now yeah oh okay well so what's taking up most of your mental bandwidth at the moment and that would definitely be multi-chain contracts okay um all right this is a good one yeah yeah yeah so like my expectation is that

most chains are going to end up having Cosmos natively yeah and that like we will okay past Paradigm of Cosmos and this is how I guess how fast the evolution is occurring in May or June 2020 we launched osmosis yeah and osmosis connected chains to other chains right so if you think of each chain like a computer okay now we have a network of computers talking to each other through the IBC relayers and um this is actually how I got started uh was you know one validating osmosis but then two

things started to move quickly I think because we began to relay other Chains would ask us to come and validate because we were relaying and really relaying at some scale but we were just moving tokens and IBC is it's a networking protocol it can do a lot more than just move tokens between two chains yeah um so since maybe August of last year I've been talking about all right when do we take the next step and I always figured that the next step would be application data moving between chains and currently I think we can see two

really clear paths to that actually happening one hand we have Quicksilver and basically go modules yeah that use interchained queries so if I want to know the price of assets on osmosis I can do that I can query the gam module or the t-wap module and I can learn about both current and historical prices and pouring the chain using interchange queries exactly yep with cosmolism I think it's easier though um interesting okay yeah so so you would have a contract that could call

functions on another contract another chain exactly does it go further than that is that it like I mean contracts I mean it's just like entertaining accounts and entertain queries well do you remember Napster I do okay so nature like you know your computer would download MP3s from other people's computer right yeah and you had a program on your computer your computer was connected to the internet and then your program it would talk to other instances of your program yeah if each chain is a computer and each contract is a program that can talk to other programs like it that's kind of where we're heading okay so if you look at say Juno and Chihuahua even okay you take

Juno and Chihuahua they both have all the necessary code in place to do interchange contracts or Juno and secret same thing yeah you can call the functions you can also query the remote contract um learn what its state is compute against that state commit that state to you know let's say chain a is making a query commit that and then do more things that could call even additional contracts Mars Hub I was just talking with Larry actually is going to really heavily use that pattern and um I think that this could as much as 100x

the transaction volume for relayers generally this will cause other problems you will solve those and what we're going to get though I think is a new breed of applications that they don't live on a single chain this new breed of applications could have a front end that talks to multiple chains and multiple contracts on multiple chains and those chains could synchronize their their contract State yeah okay so the contract State can get synced between those chains and but what so what are the applications here like well give me

some practical examples of things that one can build or maybe that I don't know are you building anything using this um this technology currently we're not building that we're kind of focused at notional on the layer below that yeah um but it's likely that we'll begin to I'd say you know in the next version of chain upgrades so like we're working on the code that that enables those features and we're also working on on various adapters like we wrote code that makes cosmosm support sdk46 uh we did basically sdk46 sdk46 is the the new version of the cosmos okay yeah

and we did the same with IBC we upgraded the IBC code so that it could support sdk46 and all of this is really in support of the multi-chain contracts there's a thesis here actually which is sort of if we as a validator as a relayer we support the development of all this technology that's going to make our validation and relay Services more attractive and it's also going to help you know Cosmos to grow in aggregate which as we've expanded you know that's become kind of a key goal of ours it's like if you're validating I think we're 33 to 35 chains depending if we count test

Nets that will be made next soon you know it just becomes a question of how do you actually support the development and growth of the ecosystem and we've decided to do that through writing software yeah and I think like it's such a good sort of combination of skills right to like be running volunteers but also be writing the software and contributing to software as a validator yeah it's like a great fit for those two sort of business models yeah yeah it is um the way that that started was was actually relaying because that got us good exposure to infrastructure problems yeah um now you asked about specific projects though I think that the first is likely

to be wind down um the second is um itself yeah so Jake has been doing a lot of work done like dauda has lots of potential for this kind of Crossing contract stuff oh yeah yeah yeah um yeah you know it would be coordinating groups uh between chains instead of just being you know fully dedicated to just one uh I think the implication for dowdo the ability for a dow to control a contract and for like contracts to control those I think is some of the most interesting stuff that I've seen say oh you know we've seen this in ethereum for for some time yeah like all the tooling is there to do

this and like there are many sort of contracts that just like you know organizations that that do this um but in Cosmos like the tooling's not quite there yet and like is still like that was great but it's still dependent on like these sorts of things existing and being well employed and so like really just looking forward for all this stuff to kind of like work um one of the things that we're thinking about at interop and the the validators that we're running I actually want to talk to you about this because sure I think you could really help figure out how they figure out the technical stack here is we want to do public goods funding from a validator perspective okay so like as a delegator you would accept to pay a higher commission when validating when delegating to interrupt uh you'd pay something like 20

commission uh we would we would take some percentage to run the infrastructure but then the rest would go to a dow and that Dao would be controlled by the tokens holders who will be actually to the delegators right so we need to figure out a way to have the delicate the the the voting power in this Dao to redirect your reflection of Delegation which can change right so there needs to be some sort of rebasing mechanism or I don't know what but that's the first Challenge and the other challenge is once the funds are in this Dow um how uh yeah I mean how to effectively how does that work where you know like the delegator gets to uh decide where those funds get uh get sent okay so like

that's that's like that's layer one uh phase two or phase one phase two would be to have this available for delegators to of any chain right so like if someone's delegating with you they can they can use our interface and say I want 10 or 20 or 40 or 100 of my of my rewards to go to the style yes and then I'm going to use that my like that money is going to public goods funding and then maybe even there may be even a third phase and the third phase would be to have you know the sort of like d-gen version that's like unregulated unstructured you do it you don't really care about like you know the implications you're sort of like fiscal implications yep but we could also have

a sort of institutional version of this that would have the Dao or at least part of those funds um be controlled by some sort of a non-profit right and investors could buy tokens delegate them and then get some sort of a tax refund because there would be they'd be effectively donating to a non-profit that's funding public goods yeah so like there's like different phases to this of course the legal aspects I think is like a very challenging one that we're going to try to figure out but the technical Parts where effectively you know you you need to rebase the the Dow thing um yeah that's doable oh okay good yeah that's definitely doable uh you could query the staking module to learn

who's delegating and then like I think it's not actually that hard that particular piece so making uh voting in the Dow reflect your current delegations yeah probably not too hard the next piece of that you mentioned a legal rapper yeah so I I would say to to speak with Jake about that Jake Hartnell yeah um because he's working on specifically that like integrating that with daudow and well so then okay I have a question for you though yeah which is kind of like Market appeal right public goods funding has I mean traditionally not been super great

this includes from like Community funds and stuff I think there's a project called comply okay and you may want to talk to them because what what I'm finding just after accruing some experience and validating and participating in governance and stuff yeah is that token holders are you know very deeply economically concerned you could say that's even the primary concern right yeah yeah and um so I mean you might want to Loop in um see this is where it becomes a security though right because like what you're saying is what what like like what you'd

be saying is that somehow your delegators would benefit from the fact that they're paying a higher Commission um they're not I mean well you're not saying that they're not benefiting I mean they're they're donating their commission right we're just helping them do it yeah like yeah I'm not I'm not sure that like I'm concerned that that might not actually accrue much in terms of delegations unless you're able to rigorously prove that you know you're impacting say like the token price of the chain or well a secondary value capture mechanism right potentially tied to your validator so I would I'd consider that portion of

it a lot now I like this and I think that okay next piece is hard right so you're advocating for public goods funding yeah yes this is good all throughout Cosmos I think that actually the greedy play is to do public goods funding um with some caveats so I'm sure you're aware that there have been governance proposals that have funded like questionable things and I'm sure that you're also aware that the majority of new and aggressive projects fail this you know it's over 90 might be over 95 percent so

how do you account for those two things right what you don't want in my opinion is to lose experimentation and I think we are kind of in Cosmos um because funding new work it often goes through governance yeah and I don't think we're looking at it in a realistic fashion you mean that governance isn't looking at Public Funding as a in a realistic fashion yeah yeah the the evaluating the the the sort of value of the things that we're funding their impact this sort of thing well yeah and then also uh getting used to a failure rate of around 90 yeah

um that's a hard sell but it's also the truth right like um any Innovative new Advanced Tech project the failure rates are actually very high yeah yeah if we stick with the current let's say very conservative funding model that we're currently pursuing we won't ever really get into I mean you I think you're setting up a VC fund you probably know people who run them currently so you probably know that they'll you know invest in many projects knowing that many simply will not work um yeah yeah exactly I'd love to see

governance get there yeah yeah yeah I mean we had already we had also thought of doing the fund as a dow but yeah I think the well one the tooling just wasn't there yet um but also at scale it's it's maybe hard to do due diligence um I think that's true yeah yeah and and also you know I have I have very sort of opinionated views about like what I want to fund right yeah yeah so like a Dao is just like like you know it's not to say that you you know one couldn't sort of be involved in both those things I mean of

course like having a dow that funds things is is interesting because you get to see all sorts of other projects and also projects that wouldn't get DC funding right yeah things that just don't pass they're not economic economically viable for for investors but they need to get funded so that's that's the kind of the motivation to do this uh this project and so yeah we're in the initial phases of scoping it out and like having conversations like this is also very interesting from sort of practical perspective but like also the technical aspects I'm curious how many people have you spoken to about that that editor model where the fees are higher but you're funding public goods yeah like quite a bit yeah yeah yeah and what were what were the responses

pretty unanimously positive yeah yeah now you know whether or not people just like the idea or whether they would actually delegate to a validator in the sinking 20 is a different story but I mean there is precedent for this so like in fmos you're aware that there's a top five validator top 10 validator that takes 100 commission I have most for volunteers yes and there's another one in there that takes like 30 I think they're funding some sort of a workshop or I don't know but like this this exists yeah and like what I'm saying is let's let's do something similar but where there's an actual community of people that want to delegate their funds but also you know investors that are looking to uh invest in crypto but are

also that also have this kind of like ESG you know maybe okay angle to their Investments and their you know they're investing in the crypto they're getting rewards for the for the further investment by delegating and getting staking rewards but they're also getting to you know do this this sort of virtuous thing of funding public goods yeah and uh yeah what do you yeah just maybe like we can wrap this up but what do you think of uh what do you think of out of 2.0 and what was announced this morning okay wait all right first of all it's my takeaway um not really because like okay well the vision is quite clear yeah I have I have a bunch of questions

that I don't have answers to about specifically the nav portion yeah the vision I'm I'm curious like uh in in what ways if at all skip will be involved um skip skip this is Mev yeah exactly and Emmy V is kind of new to me um and I actually like on a chain by Chain basis no show is going to ask the community if they want us to do a skip I find their work really intriguing but you know that they're I think that there could be trade-offs the scary kind right and the cool thing about Skip is that they've been really really direct with

me on all this stuff uh and so I'm very interested to see their work evolve but with with atom 2.0 all right my my downside or my question actually not even a downside is the Mev stuff and what's your burning question oh my burning question is are we optimizing the stack for Mev or by okay because we're gonna make all of these new technical features that in my opinion it looks like they can be used for Mev or against MAV even more interestingly it looks like we're kind of turning the Hub into a Mev platform

I you know like I I would be really interested actually if you speak to zucky ask him this question right because I think I talked to him this morning you did yeah okay yeah and did he tell you like we're turning the Hub into a map platform or no no he didn't tell me we're throwing the The Hub into a meth platform but yeah I'm not sure what is what his opinion is on this because like there there is this I think this um this dichotomy of you know some people think that Mev is good and that I mean like that Mev is going to happen and we should just have like marketplaces for you know like the market to to like extract the value and and reallocate it in ways that make

sense and then you have other people on the other side that think that we should try to battle like combat meth right and I was talking to perhaps a couple weeks ago and he says when you try to come Batman you're just like moving those externalities somewhere else and uh you're making a trade-off about like where the the Mev is effectively um extracted and so I I think that I'm of the opinion that you should just let the market figure out figure it out and yeah I'm also quite new to Medford so like yeah you had a few conversations but I'm I'm I would tend towards being more uh on the sort of like Market aspect and in this case I think it makes sense for the Hub to have these functionalities internalized and yeah like the auction

mechanism I think is cool so like basically you can have Builders and this is the way I understand it's like Builders like skip or Mecca Tech or whatever like they just basically now get to auction off uh or prepare participate in an auction to um to bid for Block space and then the validators get to auction off their block space but there's there's an assurance so so for the Builder the block Builder there's an assurance that their block is is going to get executed which is not the case now because now like if you run skip or or Mecca you're effectively like that they are trusting that the validator is going to run that block right that's right the

validator could take out the transaction that is paying the Builder so yeah I think I mean my and this is you know just from hearing this today yeah my gut reaction is that it's yeah it's a good advancement yeah I you know it like it's I think it's very interesting the oh there's there I mean like because it also seems to involve ABCI plus plus yeah and okay so it seems like the the atom 2.0 question kind of segued directly into Mev I think this is because this part that I find most interesting I think it has the most promise and the most Peril at the same time liquid staking kind of Falls in this category too yeah uh we we

contributed uh to that module to kind of get it ready for uh IVC and cosmosum and in it I see something that couldn't be built without a blockchain something very technically bold and something that most likely does increase risk Mev I kind of feel the same way about and so like I don't you know my thought on this right now is sort of keep coding and we've set the direction there will be governance proposals and things so you know if anybody wants to pull brakes on stuff there'll be a good prop to do that right now I don't want to pull the brakes I'd vote Yes uh both actually but when I did that I would talk about

the risks I'd say like no I'm not certain but I like it yeah cool all right hey thank you thanks so much man seriously man