LIQUID STAKING COMING TO EVMOS

Transcript

foreign [Music] I'm here at Berlin blockchain week dapcon wrapped up a couple days ago it's now Friday I'm sitting here at full node with fidelica thank you so much for having me today yeah I mean it was kind of like a challenge yeah like a full no it was a breakfast and well here we are yeah pulled out the pulled out the gear and we're gonna do a little little uh catch up here um yeah so last time you were on was I think right for the podcast yeah on the internet I think was three or four

months ago so lots has happened uh since then in the atmosphere but also I think like in crypto generally maybe before we dive into Atmos um of course like the merge happened yesterday yep so where were you for the merge uh honestly it was non-paying much attention to like the log where the marriage happened but I was following up uh crypto Tweeter quite a lot doing this so you didn't go to like a merch party uh no I didn't okay no no I was like super tired trying to catch up with a few weeks of work um yeah yeah and understandable um and yeah what do you think this means

for like you know I mean of course like there's pretty significant implications for ethereum but I think like for crypto as a whole what do you think the the merge I think now it's it's even more clear the the most of the technology and the spaces or like the consensus engines are transitioning into proof of stake um it's gonna now that the technology is mature it's been proven uh running on Cosmos for years tesos and other blockchains in Parker Road as well on other major ecosystems in the space are running on proof of stake and and it's now clear that most of the blockchains are now transitioning to that um and so it's like kind of like

reconforting the the entire space is going uh in that direction and also it brings all like huge benefits for the ecosystem like new applications can start leveraging because of stake and like having like a new set of users that are not just holders anymore but also like active part of the network yeah through delegations yeah yeah I mean it does introduce some some complexities and like these are things that you know I think I've been talked about in at least in Cosmos in The Interchange for uh many years which is a problem of centralization of Power with you know large infrastructure providers I think someone I saw a tweet go by that of the last thousand blocks on on ethereum

mainnet like 400 and some were uh light on coins yeah light on coinbase had uh had proposed them um and this is also this is also an issue in evmos I haven't looked at the numbers recently but there is a high concentration or or there was up up until we'll talk about the foundation delegations but you know you know broadly in many Cosmos chains there's a high concentration of Power with uh top 10 top 20 validators and certainly you know coinbase and Kraken and uh and you know the exchanges take up a large uh portion of those what are some solutions that exist either like social uh sort of community Solutions or even Technical Solutions to

reducing the amount of centralization and staking yeah so um until now most of the like centralized exchanges that have been accumulating a lot of power voting Powers more specifically and different networks on on the call in the cosmos ecosystem have been doing so because it's easier for them to circumvent the uh unbonding period that is kind of like part of the security mechanism of uh proof of stake and so so for a user that wants to stake their tokens and then like immediately make them available by unbonding like they want to be part of the uh interest rates that the staking deposit uh rewards them centralized

liquid staking exactly and then like then you wanna like withdraw those maybe cash out or something like that and so like most in like other networks in the space um like all these centralized exchanges have been pulling all these tokens but they also have like a lot of tokens that are like available so they can you can for example like unbond those tokens and then like at the same time like transfer them over to like they usually immediately without having to wait for the unbounding period that was one and that's one reason why a lot of these um centralized exchanges have been like accumulating a larger amount of voting power besides the fact that they have also a large user group from from just

the exchanges like for example coinbase and the other mechanism that is in order to kind of address this problem um and and you already talked about this a little bit on Twitter and I'm not sharing your podcast but like about liquid sticking um there are a variety of liquid sticking Solutions the one on on ethereum of course being spearheaded by Lido because ethereum doesn't have a native in protocol staking mechanism as you can find on on Cosmos or polkador Etc so it falls it falls uh into like different applications that are doing this task and then for example

um on Cosmos now they're like multiple kind of like liquid seeking protocols chains that are have been trying to launch in the and and I think like stride already launched yeah straight ovary lunch and so far and then a quick silver and there are like a few others um that are also working on this at the same time like Neutron with Lido and then we are also going to be implementing liquid staking uh natively on the protocol so that not only users can provide security via staking but they can also have those tokens available uh for using them on on these different Atmos applications providing

even more utility for for the ecosystem so it'll be when you say it's going to be native on the protocol does that mean that it's going to be sort of integrated into the into into the application into the application or is it something that you you're not launching it as a contract on they have must change right so like the main difference and uh the main difference right now with the other liquid staking Solutions is uh they run their own liquid staking dedicated application specific blockchain um kind of like stake you can think of it as taking as a service where you are managing the different like staking positions across different chains and so like for example if you have atom connected to stride or

Quicksilver you are going to be minting a liquid sticking token on stride or on on depending on the implementation this is like implementation details but it's ultimately the chain that is doing this or through either different Technologies like interchange accounts or interchange queries Etc fmos will be implementing those sorry not those interoperability Solutions but liquids taking natively on the protocol so that you don't need to rely on an external chain um so it's like a it's like an improta Cosmos module okay so it's at the protocol level yeah and uh we are we're still in the face of like scoping out

which is exact implementation that we're gonna go for and once we have more details for that um we'll be sharing that with the community there are different options the main one is the one that uh the inclusion team has been working on for the in for the past few months or like half a year I'm not sure but uh yeah the the liquid sticking module that uh that they started working on so as a user I was thinking about this you know recently like as a user of you know many different chains so you know for instance one may have tokens take on on on on Cosmos natively on osmosis maybe even through super fluid

staking and you may have ticket a token staked over on on evmos what's the benefit for a user like how does a user reason about uh deciding whether they stake with the liquid staking module directly on the Chain if the chain has such a module or through a protocol like stride or Quicksilver um you know it all comes to like security and incentives in my opinion so for example like from our point of view uh we don't want to expose yet most chains to additional like security um like additional like surface of attack by having another chain managing the security of the most Network um but then there's also like incentives

that you can be providing if you use any of these other um protocols like strut or Quicksilver Etc um so in the end it will be up to the user to choose like which of these are going to be more beneficial to them um but what we want to enable more specifically with our implementation is not only allowing end users to be able to stake their tokens but also allow smart contracts on Atmos to be able to use this liquid sticking module so for example you can imagine an index of balloter so you can group them via uh I don't know like the valuers that are

running ecosystem friendly setups sorry eco-friendly eco-friendly setups um or balladers have been in the uh in the Genesis that's that vote on every proposal exactly so you can build different indexes and you can build out a whole application that is directly connected to staking Logic on avmos and have like have a new set of possibilities for staking that are that are specifically applications level urging it okay yeah that's cool so yeah what else is on the roadmap it's like this is all interesting Alpha I think I don't know a whole lot

about this but yeah is there anything else that's on the roadmap that is particularly interesting yeah so we are we're working on some like improvements to the AVM making it more modular and so connecting their connecting for example IVC director with ABM is one of our main priorities so like the same way then applications could be talking directly to the staking logic we could have applications also sending transactions um via IVC to other chains or for example to osmosis or Cosmos Hub Etc and so having that more like be a more easy flow of tokens own to other to other chains or like incoming tokens

to be represented natively on the evm without having to go through the step of like the user having to manually convert those yeah um that could be like a huge ux win absolutely um and so like those are the ideas that we're thinking for the next step on the roadmap okay and what about bridging uh you know since we last talked of course the The Nomad hack um you know Atmos was a pretty heavy user of nomad and and many of the many of the dexes on evmos like diffusion or avmo swap or also using Nomad assets lots of people like

lost money I myself included like so you know like there's been some amount of pain I think uh for Atmos users with regards to this and like yeah what's how is that progressing and how is at most sort of you know recovering from the externalities of this yeah so no man it's it uh no money is taking different measures to ensure that those funds are recovered I think they've already recovered something like yeah 25 or something yeah I'm not sure exactly I haven't been following out with the latest amounts but they're working with different institutions to

try to recover those funds for the end users so once they have I guess recovered like most of the most of the amounts so Adobe like a claiming process okay recover back some of those um according to the the announcement that they made um for us of course it was like painful um to see the total value log decreasing but at the same time now we're taking a more resilient approach of working with different applications on Bridges so now instead of like Atmos having like a sort of like a canonical Bridge uh we're talking to the bridges and introducing

them with applications the mining different assets to be bridge over via different networks and yeah those bridges from different networks so it's a more neutral approach on in my opinion a more resilient approach but it also has like I would say negative consequences for the end user in terms of user experience because then there's like the fungibility issue of the tokensah have been Bridge via one Bridge from one Bridge uh versus another bridge and so like the the role will be and different like stable yeah like stable swap protocols and applications that will be able to provide like fungibility for those and you'll be able to swap them

from like one stablecoin to another yeah so like um I think this Kinesis is one of those yeah I remember speaking with another team also that like were seemingly building something similar or wanted to build like some sort of curve uh like application yeah I think that's cool and I think it's it's one of the real unsolved user experience problems you know even with things like curve it's hard to identify like the canonical you know USD USD stable coin like there's so many different derivatives and you know evmos is taking one of Osmosis for instance has taken one approach to having a canonical bridge and that that's that's

the the stable coin that appears like in their um in their General application interface but then of course like if you go into Frontier you have the gravity ones potentially some other one so it's I recognize it's a complex challenge to solve uh and you know I hope someone finds a solution right because like for users it's yeah it is confusing and I think even in diffusion it wasn't always not just infusion maybe but some of the other uh dexes as well it wasn't always clear that like the usdc that you had was Nomad usdc and a thousand people sort of complaining about that too is like correct hi I had no idea that this was Nomad usdc because it hadn't been like properly identified

in the in the ux they were using they were like calling in uscc yeah because it was like the one with the most liquidity yeah yeah um yeah yeah and I think in that case for users it makes sense to be at least now while we are still in the situation where you know you have bridged assets and there are not fungible uh they're not directly fungible um for application interfaces to be like super clear about the fact that like this is not the same thing as like this other thing and certainly it's not the same thing as the real thing and here are the risks that you know you incur by holding this asset and sort of like being clear about what those risks are and

I think yeah just growing awareness around those things is really important um yeah I wanted to talk about the the foundation delegation announcement um yeah and so full disclaimer like so uh interoper received a foundation delegation uh you know thank you for the foundation for delegating to us and um also if you're listening and you have Atmos uh please consider donating or delegating to uh to interrupt links in the show notes um so yeah what's the reasoning behind this program and what's the goal in here so the foundation delegation is meant to be rewarding like contributors to the network in different areas and also

providing like public publicly available RPC uh nodes for the rest of the users and applications working with the community running relayers Etc like ecosystem and and so on and so like the this is the first run of foundation delegations we haven't finalized the first round so like you will be expecting like more movements and movements and the in the valuers and yeah um and like yeah so I guess I'd say that's the main reason and yeah like one of the main one of the main concerns we've heard so far from our users is like the distribution of the voting

power across the different values yeah this is trying to go in that direction and trying to improve some of these concerns uh and certainly we're gonna be looking to contributing uh like in the in the direction of the centralization so um going to a more like a bit more technical point when you go when the tokens are distributed the tokens are minted on on every day at the same time uh when those things are distributed they are distributed to the validators first in the in the uh the same ratio of the voting power that they have and then they're like allocated to each of the delegators so by evening out the um the

or like making a more uniform uh set of balladers with more similar voting Powers you're also even out the rewards to the specific delegators um and so that's kind of like the rationale for for like pushing a little bit further in this direction as well um I know that and we're well aware that this also like the foundation delegation because like we're trying to improve the decentralization as well as well also comes and affects the current APR of the chain but I think like as a as a community we also need to push further for the decentralization of power yeah I I think

yeah I think everyone's in the cosmos ecosystem at least is probably I mean it is the chain with the highest APR uh for delegating for staking um yeah I'm I'm you know we're happy to take a cut on to take a cut on that uh if it means that uh if it means that the network is more decentralized and of course over time like this staking reward is going to go down to like much more reasonable um reasonable rates so people should expect this to go to continue to go down and that's one of the main reasons I mean that's one of the main reasons why we want to push for liquid staking so that once uh once those rates are more stable

uh and like the adoption of the of the different applications is more stable like grows over time sorry um we will be able to have all these liquid sticking Atmos available for the end users to interact with the different applications yeah um so that will be like an extra utility for for these fmos tokens that will be able to use and applications and also be transferred over to like other chains in the in the Customs ecosystem or evm ecosystem as well yeah yeah very cool um yeah so you're mentoring at uh East Berlin which is the hackathon that's

happening this weekend uh is anybody building on that most you think um I haven't follow up with it like what are the specific projects uh from all the devs that are participating but I'm really looking forward because it's been it's been it's been a while since the last one um so really looking forward for this uh this year's Edition after so long yeah yeah back after three years I think so yeah very cool all right thanks uh thanks for coming around and uh I guess people could see you in Medellin yeah yeah well the team will be uh in Medellin um we'll be also giving more information about the the next uh steps with or like the roadmap of McDonald's talking a

little bit more in depth about like those uh critical issues that we've encountered so far kind of doing a recap of of uh the past years since launch Etc so like and what's next as well for for the protocol cool all right cool thanks for coming in thank you so much foreign [Music]