Privacy in Cosmos Live: Zaki Manian (Sommelier) - Navigating Cosmos

Transcript

all right next up i want to introduce oh i'm sort of not on the stage next up i want to introduce zaki who's going to be talking about navigating cosmos and yeah we found the mic for questions just for future q a's yeah it's this little thing just be sure to say the question into that so that we capture it for the live stream cool hey uh thank you very much okay so this is a talk that is tangentially related to this the topic of this conference which is the question of like how do i actually build something in the cosmos um and i think like one so like 2021 has been an enormous it was like an

enormously successful year for cosmos the ibc vision like finally came true and it basically did everything we we said it would for the last five years which is kind of wild but and now we see lots of lots of people building new zones uh lots of people employing privacy tech um i'd say one of the things that we do the worst in cosmos is it is extremely hard to figure out like how do you get all the knowledge to build the thing that you want to build um and the people who are so far been most successful at building things in cosmos tend to be people who've been in the ecosystem for a long time who worked at tendermint during the like when we were like sort of building all the uh uh

initial pre-launch things people who are like uh associated with the icf or an existing validator um these are the you know these are the people who've been building in cosmos so what i'm gonna try and do in this talk is kind of explain how does building stuff on cosmos work with some goal of trying to make it more approachable to people who aren't like already in our social network uh of people who like can like help you navigate um so cosmos is like highly decentralized there is no uh one labs company that like coordinates all the building that does all the all the business development um like there isn't

probably there there isn't even a single organization that probably has like the entire top to bottom stack of how everything works like in their institutional knowledge um like everything is highly uh decentralized i also think it's like very good that like uh it's very good for like resilience um this project is also essentially seven years old um like 2014 is really the origin of tendermint and the cosmos idea and the world of interoperable blockchains and so typically when you're when you're building in cosmos you will encounter situations where you have to like cross from like domain expertise to domain expertise to domain expertise you can't

just find like one organization partner with them and expect them to uh sort of help you so we're gonna try and figure out like in this world like how would you build something on cosmos um uh uh these are like common questions that i hear um like here are a bunch of like i like i want to build thing like i have discovered that i am at like some sort of technical uh impasse i don't know what to do next um this doesn't even get into the question of like how do i get funded though that has like largely become a much easier question because there it's like no longer anti-consensus to fund uh fun cosmos things um i don't

think that these questions are like the only questions or like uh uh the most important questions but like basically like uh from my little segment of like trying to help people build on top of cosmos uh this is a lot of i hear this a lot um the other thing about these questions is they don't tend to have one answer um there isn't only like part of this whole thing about sovereignty interoperability is there are like very many answers to all of these questions like i want to write an application that interacts with ibc and like want to do it like relatively quickly like you could write your application as a cosmos sdk module you could write your application as an evmos

uh smart contract you could write your application as uh as an agorax smart contract you could write your application uh in rust on top of cosmosome and like these are all answers how would you decide how do you like decide in this trade-off space um so why um and i i think there's a like to go even further down the rabbit hole as to why before i try and answer this question is the way cosmos achieves decentralization is we decouple research implementation and go to market at like a sort of very profound level if you think about for instance um the the the life cycle of ibc right it

was um most of the core research was done at like informal and the interchain foundation going back to like uh like extensive research on tendermint light clients um then implementation again was like split up among uh multiple organizations um and then go to market was basically done by osmosis um so like if that's a very unusual pattern in the technology industry it's a very unusual pattern in the blockchain industry and it like represents like the fundamental decentralization of cosmos and like wall um well while the story of like decoupling research implementation and go to market for ibc or like for ics for like token transfers over ibc is

basically done um we are still like there are many ways in which this like is in like in an intermediary state so like uh the auth z functionality for instance which lets you delegate account functionality like the implementation is done and shipped has go to go to market is still like in its early stages and there's like various validators like figuring out uis and stuff like that and eventually someone is going to nail it i think there are some things like interchange staking where we're trying to do a very sort of tightly coordinated go to market but that's more the exception than the rule uh in the way cosmos is like builds so you as a builder should not feel like you have to start

at the beginning at the research stage or that the people who are doing research on something like abc i plus plus are going to do the go to market for it because like historically that's not how things worked um so you as a builder should feel comfortable jumping in at any stage of this process and being like hey like i see you have been researching this stuff i will work on an implementation uh i see you have built something uh we could work on i could do it go to market um this is a is a sort of unique thing that exists within the cosmos ecosystem where you can grab these pieces of open source technology that we all build we are all basically fully committed to building in the open there's very little

in cosmos that is like tightly siloed in some private repo that you have to like ask permission you can just you typically like see what it is that we're working on uh and jump in um so yeah this is the okay so the other thing is cosmos has a lot of documentation like tons of documentation documentation and source code documentation in the tendermint spec repo you know there's like a 20 page ibc spec um but i've basically seen very few examples of people succeeding in this ecosystem self-onboarding through our docs um like the docs serve a purpose um but this is

not like you can't do this via documentation um so one of the most powerful things to have in cosmos is mentors there are a lot of people like basically i would describe the like standard way things get built on cosmos is people find mentors in the who have like domain expertise on the things that are fake are providing like uh who can help them with like architecture help them with the trade-offs of like do i build my thing as a cosmos sdk module a cosmos smart contract uh an evm smart contract um and this is very much like the nature of cosmos

so how do i find a mentor um and this i think i'm gonna try like this part of the presentation is an attempt to like sort of like kind of list people who would help with like different mentorships and like sort of different technical verticals uh it cannot be a comprehensive list i probably i almost certainly forgot someone like i just put this together in the last like two days also i'll probably give this talk again um uh so it'll get better over time um but like there are a lot of people sort of sitting in this area of the room who like know how to build stuff in cosmos and you know you should take advantage if you uh are sort of not in the tent right now to like meet these people build relationships because they'll also be the ones to help you find like uh

uh so yeah people who have been building like the sort of core cosmos community have been working on this for something on the order of four to eight years um so there's like a huge amount of context um that like has been built up like they're they're basically like the only things that are the only blockchain projects that are as old as cosmos are like bitcoin ethereum and cosmos like we've been at this for a very very long time okay so like how does this how does like what is the general process of working in cosmos uh the general process of working in cosmos is um uh we set up a shared slack or a telegram group or a discord we recruit we like

try and like you find one person who kind of knows uh the sort of cosmos landscape of people and expertise and then we try to like kind of like uh bully invite invest make do deals like do business development um and then we uh uh uh sort of allocate that and then we start to have regular calls about like a given project uh like there's some regular touch point that gets built up uh everybody hates more calls but like this is seems to be the the best way to like maintain technical momentum over years um so there are like generalist cosmos experts um

and it's like um when i say generalist cosmos experts it's people who have some familiarity with like almost all of the pieces of cosmos um again not a comprehensive list uh but like uh you know this is like it's very very helpful to like have access to the generalist cosmos experts um and like if you kind of look at like what is going on in cosmos there is a lot of like uh there's a lot of kind of trying to like get access to those people find who to talk to um and um in order to sort of be a generalist cosmos expert you probably have to know a significant amount of about how tendermint works you have to have like

significant cosmos sdk dev experience and you need to have a significant amount of ibc experience at this point um otherwise you're really not going to be able to help um but the generalist cosmos experts are kind of the uh just sort of like the sharp end of the spear um and frequently like they also are sort of overloaded by like the sheer number of projects that they are like helping involved in advising et cetera so this can't be the entire world um and so you know all of these people are very active in the ecosystems but they also tend to have projects that they are like playing like executive level roles in um and you know people are busy um

so yeah i'm like i'm gonna give peoples like uh some combination of names handles like it's hard to navigate the space you can definitely find me online if you actually want to be like hey like how do i get in touch with this person the cosmos sdk is a uh is a little bit different because it is much less dependent on mentorship there are a bunch of sharp edges to the cosmos sdk especially around like how do you upgrade um from like one version of your module to another version of your module but like on the whole it's mostly just like a process of sort of learning as you go ibc on the other hand

has is like a is an extremely complex protocol where there's an enormous amount of domain expertise and people are able to pull off like crazy stuff um like uh you know getting like when like uh juno was restarted in order to update the ibc channels you had to pull blocks from like the pre-crash version of the like pre-security vulnerability version of juno and the uh post-security vulnerability version of juno uh and like push them over an ibc channel to update all the ibc and channels and like revive the osmosis like uh token trading for juno and like the ability to like understand how like all of these pieces

fit together is extremely domain specific um i think like building new ibc application protocols interoperating smart contracts with ibc uh doing ibc state machines that are not based on tenderminder or the cosmos sdk all of these things hugely domain a huge amount of domain expertise that is like slowly being built up and slowly being disseminated into the world there's still like a lot of a lot of like missing pieces but like help is available um until recently i would say until basically like maybe the last few months i would basically say that building a non-cosmos sdk sdk tendermint app was basically like not

something that was had was like something that was a well-described uh uh process um it's a thing that a lot of people are interested in because they want to bring code that was written in like other ecosystems they want to write their application in rust they want to do they want to use advanced cryptography it's becoming much more approachable to do this because you have like enoma and uh penumbra building uh with open source repos and like being able to see like how they are solving all of these problems and it's actually becoming like much more likely that someone uh someone could succeed um bridging is like another uh sort of huge topic so you want to reach like

virtually everybody who builds in cosmos kind of comes to this question of hey uh like ibc is great um the ibc ecosystem has many billions of dollars of assets but it is not everything um i want to be able to talk to ethereum i want to be able to talk to uh avalanche i want to talk to all of this these other things um there is a huge amount of of like enormously complex stuff going on in the bridging space in cosmos um and that's another sort of very tricky piece to like understand do i use the gravity bridge do i use axillar do i use uh uh do i use gravity bridge do i use axle or do i use uh uh wormhole like how how what is my bridging story going to be

and how i'm going to interoperate beyond the ibc world enormously complex topic definitely requires mentorship um otherwise you're just going to like stumble over the same problems that like many other projects have so you're interested in building cosmos you don't know uh what do you do now so like the best things to do are to like dm people uh uh find people on telegram five people on twitter tweet about it i think i follow like basically every account that has ever tweeted anything interesting about cosmos um like you can dm me uh we'll help you like i do read cold emails to occlusion uh hello at occlusion.io um

probably don't respond to them as much as i should but i definitely read them and i'm sure there are lots of other ways to like get in touch with other cosmos ecosystem participants so thank you very much [Applause] thank you very much thank you is there any questions maybe before zaki goes away questions uh i'm just gonna throw it so please catch it nice catch and no

sorry but that's what we're gonna do so if anybody has a question you just have to catch the pillow cool um so obviously like that comes off a lot of the more technical our building side yeah like do you have any guide for like the more like governancy like marketing bd side of like the time yeah i could have given like a whole talk on that um i honestly think so like that is the that isn't like another area that like so okay so there's like a couple of stories here like one is like um like every other part of cosmos works the same way as the technical piece i.e

there isn't like a central uh there isn't like any central entity that does anything uh like our most effective marketing channels are like a random swarm of like awesome youtube people um and like twitter and like twitter influencers who have like built organic communities of of sort of like cosmonauts um um you know like strange love and cryptocedo like do like regular uh uh like youtube live streams in general like getting like into that community is a great way of like commuting like communicating to the faithful um you know from a fundraising point of view there's like an like like most crypto funds have like a are like fairly positive about investing in things in cosmos uh because ibc worked um and so

like it's generally easy to do that and like sort of general uh uh crypto pr there's also like a lot of overlap in like pr firms that a lot of different cosmos projects work so like you know you can get intros and be like sort of in the same network so yeah cool thank you i'll do i guess one more question yeah sorry so thanks so if um if the goal is to keep well let's say to scale the ability to support new projects that are building uh do you imagine it as basically keeping this general model of mentorship but adding you know going from like ten to a thousand of these mentors and sort of experts who can help or

would you expect that at some point it will need to switch to some other model for like incubating and supporting i'm like i'm kind of fairly bullish that like we're going to be able to like scale this way of doing things like it like works well like a big part of like what is i think glorious about cosmos is also that there's like we designed a system that like doesn't have the gatekeepers for making big changes that like other ecosystems have like you can just like build a project connect permissionlessly connect to the ipc network like build your own marketing channels and like do stuff and like bring value and attention um and you can you know if you want to like build a new more advanced version of

tendermint you don't have to like even talk you don't have to convince the tendermint team just like build it and like connect it to ibc and like people will be like oh that's awesome and maybe people will upstream what your stuff um i think this like sovereignty plus interoperability model is very amenable to this like kind of like organic expansion and all we have to do is let's sort of like take like is like make sure that we like are steadily turning every like successful builder into like you know half a dozen more mentors and we can just like like organically scale to like the ends of the earth so thanks will all right okay one more round of applause for zaki