Rewarding Web3 Developers with Griffin Anderson of Archway

Transcript

we're live my guest today is Griffin Anderson he's the CEO of fee Labs they're the core contributor to Archway Archway is a cosmos blockchain that supports cosmosum and is focused on rewarding developers with interesting protocol economics Archway provides built-in modules that allows different on-chain funding mechanisms for developers so we're going to be talking about this today as always diving into the technical details understanding our choice custom SDK modules the funding economics that they provide will also get into cosmosum a little bit and understand how Archway is different from other Cosmo smart contract chains I'm also dying to find out why he thinks that most dapps won't be Sovereign app chains before you get started make sure to hit the like button hit the notification Bell And subscribe to get

notified when I go live every week and remember that none of what we discuss here on the Internet is investment advice if you enjoy this content please consider subscribing and also consider staking with us we're validating on evmo's Quicksilver and soon in just a couple of weeks we will be live on osmosis just look for interop in the validator set my guest Griffin Anderson is coming up next right here on the interrupt [Music] hello Griffin hi thank you for having me

yeah thanks for joining me on this one um yeah it's been a couple weeks since we've been trying to get this set up and like there's actually like a lot of things kind of going on right now that are kind of topical to um yeah cosmosum generally uh you know as uh you may have seen in the last couple of days that I wanted to talk to you about as well and um yeah I just released today like a basically my thesis for Cosmos for the next uh year uh people can find out on my Twitter and in it I I spend like quite a bit of time talking about cosmosm and I learned a lot about cosm wasm as I was writing this and uh I might take this opportunity to to pick your brain a little bit more about cause and wasm

um so yeah before we get started uh like yeah you've been to crypto for a while uh you were a contributor to ethereum you work on uh you worked at consensus you also worked at ignite uh or maybe it was still tenement then I don't know but yeah what how did you how did you get to be here on this podcast basically yeah yeah that's a thing for summing up some of that so um it was very fortunate enough to kind of jump into crypto full-time in in 2015 and and um jumped into the ethereum ecosystem right when it was uh basically went live with mainnet um and was one of the first hires over at a company called consensus uh played a number of different hats there with my time over there but was you know there

when the original Dow hack happened for those that were around that long ago on the phone calling miners forking the chain was um you know helped build Enterprise ethereum Alliance and opening up offices around the globe and just really was doing a lot of go to market stuff um when I had left I was I was running some product and Engineering teams around the data in the infrastructure piece of things uh that was being integrated into metamask and a lot of the other products folks use so I'm kind of have a product engineering background um and then I ended up getting picked up by by 10 Benjamin to come play Help on the go to market side of things where we started then came up with the idea of basically Archway and so we

started incubating um the protocol within uh tenement and then we spun out the company uh the private company which is now called phylabs out of tender mint and and started continuing to contribute to the archway protocol so it's been a really really fun ride been seeing all the ups and downs of of the blockchain crypto space for for a number of years but it's been exciting so I kind of forgot that Archway was incubated at ignite um yeah tell tell me a little bit about that and how how did that become a thing because you know there there's been a lot of conversations over the years about like having cosmoasm on the Hub and then like

that didn't happen and then like Neutron ended up kind of being the well I mean it you know it'll be a IV an ICS secured chain on the Hub um and then yeah then there's a there's Archway and so how did that came to be and what's the positioning here like relative to other chains yeah so um tendermint was looking and it was still named tendermen at the time for context before it got rebranded to ignite um tender mint was looking at the landscape of the cosmos ecosystem and um we started to really notice that you know the app chain thesis really wasn't coming up fruition um to the degree that that the community had helped IBC wasn't quite launched yet

um and we were starting to see other layer one ecosystems take off with very vibrant dab communities like the Solana ecosystem and so forth uh Juno hadn't launched yet uh had it integrated cosmosm into the protocol yet in that stuff so we started basically coming up with the um idea of of Archway basically um and built into it this reward system which we'll touch in a little bit um so yeah it got started from the point of view as we wanted to basically serve this close larger um dap ecosystem and it was really not being met by the other stakeholders in the ecosystem Tara really hadn't blown up at that time um so Tara was always built as like a

stable coin right it really was never designed to be a a generalized smart Contracting platform so what we've been kind of working on this problem for for a number of years um but that's kind of the how it got incubated um we continued to grow up the team and the size and then once we got to um a certain point it made more strategic sense um which was the goal is to basically spin the project out to its own um separate entities so it could focus in on just the specific problem um because at the time temperament was focused on all kinds of different problems and and so get this problem out so we can focus in on it um and then I've been working towards it kind of ever since so um that's a little bit of the history of like how it got started but we've been

working on this for over two years now at this point uh quite a bit of time and energy has been put into this protocol yeah and one thing that strikes me as interesting is that I don't know if there's any if there's any uh sort of Link there but um you know uh Archway has this this interesting uh kind of uh funding uh mechanism that that allows adapt developers to also earn part of the fees and so that there's like this kind of flywheel um evmos also has similar aspirations and you know Fede was also at tenorman I don't know if you guys were there

together but you know did these ideas basically get seeded at tender men that you guys just kind of like went off to do you know one in the VM chairman another a custom awesome chain and like how did that come to be um look I really love and appreciate the utmost ecosystem what happened was very spun out um uh to do fmos um and and so he at the time he did leave what we ended up doing I don't think most people realized but we ended up circulating the light paper and the technical papers around to a bunch of people core contributors within the cosmos ecosystem so the osmosis Community um uh saw the Who Saw The Light paper at most Community saw the paper and so

forth um and I think a lot of the key probably more well-known personalities within the cosmospace saw the opportunity that Archway was working on and and borrowed some of those ideas um those were you know V1 early drafts and then went out to basically um you know in the MMOs case they implemented it they implemented it slightly differently than the way we've been going about implementing it they've been able to get to Market we can kind of talk about the differences a little bit in the show but yeah I mean the the core team that was focusing in on this um you know it kind of originated from the quote unquote the archway Core Group uh but other groups have implemented fashion but they've also taken like a

different route to implement it much much faster um but with that being said you know we really appreciate the way they've implemented it I'm really excited that the idea as a whole has really just gained a lot more adoption in Steam um you can see that most recently with like the Kanto ecosystem uh kind of copying or or I guess borrowing ideas from the atmos Community which I think originally originated from us so it's you know we're glad these ideas are spreading but we've been working on these problems and and they're quite complex and we'll kind of maybe dive into it a little bit more here yeah totally um yeah and you know just just out of curiosity like and then I'll start bugging you about this kind of

historical contextual stuff um tell me a little bit about the ethereum Enterprise Eliza because like I remember when that launched uh back then uh you know I was also building like an uh a an Enterprise blockchain startup um and there was a lot of discussion around then about you know Enterprise and sort of large companies uh using blockchains do you do you think that that helped move the needle and do you think that now we're in a better place or the ecosystem is in a better place um to kind of accurately

you know like do do business development in a way that will actually get large companies um and corporations just start using blockchain yeah um I think for background context so at the time there was uh most people probably don't realize but there was like R3 and digital asset holding um IBM those guys I don't know ask the historians what actually happened um some of them may be around in some form um the um at that time though so they were doing um private blockchains they were working

with a lot of Wall Street firms and um there was a need to basically um get ethereum introduced to more of the Enterprises and the institutional side of things it really didn't have mass adoption at the same time IBM was making a very aggressive push into Enterprises as well and there was a little bit of a fight over um you know which technical stack would win the Enterprise and the thought was if you if you won the Enterprise stack where Developers is being paid to basically build on a search insect that maybe in the free time they would like support you know the public Stacks that was kind of the idea so it was pretty important to win um uh the private sector uh so

Enterprise ethereum Alliance um I know consensus at the time was leading that we were leading the charge and we basically brought together a whole bunch of stakeholders into a room and Microsoft in Times Square there in New York and yeah um we got everybody together and started basically putting together the governance Frameworks for how the the association would run um it was basically meant to counter like a lot of the initiatives that like IBM was was implementing and things like that um and to support it it had a really weird effect um and not one that I I would have guessed but it got ethereum integrated into the large corporations into the

large Enterprises um and what ended up happening is the folks that were working on the Block chain groups in those groups ended up over the years all pretty much jumping over to the public blockchain side of things and now surprisingly they've gone like real defy Degen or nfts you see them all over the ecosystem now so this is like this big Talent suck it was a big Talent suck it just brought in all these these people and they were like nah it's more fun to work on the public side than in the yeah so um those were kind of the unintended consequences of of that strategy which I thought was pretty interesting um it also did legitimize ethereum and basically make it a household name

um and it obviously brought in institutional interests which is really important for any protocol in its evolution of development and so um while I'm surprised more l1s don't do that kind of stuff there is a bit of a timing game to all that but yeah that was the unintended consequences is it brought a lot of fresh Talent into the space and and now you'd be surprised those are like predominant dgns throughout all of crypto so it's kind of fun you've seen that full circle yeah yeah I mean I've often said that I you know I think that the ICF should just dump a ton of money into business development um trying to get Cosmos into the hands of Enterprise because I you know I feel

and you probably agree that uh that the cosmos SDK is just so well suited for the kind of progressive decentralization that Enterprise would be more comfortable uh leveraging or rather than well on the one side like going full decentralized right like being on the public network and I think that ethereum you know like launching an ethereum chain uh as a as a company doesn't carry the same kind of forward-looking uh Progressive integration with the public blockchain ecosystem that the cosmos SDK does where with the cosmos SDK you could you know

you could launch your Cosmos SDK blockchain as a standalone validator you know basically run it yourself whitelist everybody who who uses it and then progressively let people um uh more more customers use it progressively add in new validators and then at some point enabling IBC like going going all the way in the same way that um intranets turned into you know extra Nets and then you know basically went all into the public cloud and uh and I feel like no one's doing this Biz Dev work and it's it's just such an easy sell it's um and uh and yeah I would just I I think it's such like a such a missed

opportunity in in the cosmos ecosystem that we're not pushing this forward I I would say that's one of the competitive advantages that the cosmos technical stack has um but you know I think once again maybe we'll touch on it at some point in this call it's a lot of the challenges coordination around resources right yeah yeah and that's maybe the challenge is that the cosmospace has yeah well let's um we could talk uh pretty long about this kind of stuff I think but yeah let's let's let's let's switch gears and talk about Archway so so we we already mentioned that Archway is a smart contract chain that enables uh cosmoasm um but it's much more than that so can you can you explain what is the core

value proposition of Archway and I think for context what might be interesting is to um different how it differentiates from other smart contract chains you know including um you know the atmoses and the you know the even the evm ones essentially is what I mean yeah yeah um so from from our perspective let me show share with you where the idea originated from so the the idea originally originated so what was that tender mint and we are looking at obviously to to support dabs and personally um I I was I had lots of options in front of me as to what to pursue next

and I was disenfranchised with basically going out and you know building a dab on top of ethereum for instance or any other L1 for that matter um and the reason is because um as much as I I like these l1s they they have similar problems to like Web 2.0 platforms um if as adaptive up where I go build a dab on top of the protocol um you know if you believe in the fat protocol thesis the value kind of all um basically cruise at the protocol layer um and I kind of knew who the largest token holders were because I had been in the space for a very long time and I I often joke they're they're hanging out on a beach somewhere right now I'm just chilling at the moment maybe not

contributing as much as maybe some of the core contributors are in some of these ecosystems and so um you know if if I as a developer we're going to go build a Dap on top of one of these protocols I'll be viewing in transactions and users and activities to the underlying protocol but what does the protocol kind of give me in return you know what does it give back to me how does it support my community um and so that's where the idea of kind of Archway started to form where we said okay we're rewarding and we're incentivizing the miners and the validators of these protocols why aren't we incentivizing the developers or even more formally like why are we incentivizing all the participants of the protocol and so that's where Archway kind of came from in kind of the vision and so forth so

what we've been doing is we've been working on a protocol uh that does exactly that that rewards the developers and the contributors building on top of the protocol and we do that in a couple different ways the three mechanics are uh is and this is what kind of sets us apart is we share part of the inflation or the emission schedule that um that normally just goes to um uh the validators of the miners running the network and we share a proportion of those rewards with the DAP developers uh the second way we do it is we do something called gas rebates uh which is which is delegated back and then the third is something called um contract premiums uh which is a proportion uh it's basically like an

added fee that the developer can basically uh set so um and just to clarify when I say we I mean the the archway core Community is working on these things um so what happens here is these rewards based on usage of your smart contracts all accrue at a specific contract address and then the developer can set those rewards and do whatever they want with them uh on deployment they can use it to redirect to their governance token holders they could use it to fund future development to the protocol uh they can use it to redirect to like a liquidity pool they could use it to redirect those resources into a dow it's

completely configurable in up to the developer to basically decide where those rewards go and Bradley's thinking it's up to them to decide what's in the best interest of their DAP in their community so it might be in the best interest just to give it back to the users to some capacity which is what we really hope will have in the longer term might be in the best interest to fund future development of the protocol might be in the best interest to um you know just just put it into a liquidity pool but it's all up to them to make that decision in the best interest of their community and it can be adjusted with time as well too so you can update those parameters at any point um and since it just the rewards go to a specific contract address it's just

whatever you want to build that contract to do you can do revenues split fees you can do you can pay back loans on the lending side it's there's all kinds of cool creative ways you can do but once once these rewards are more providable yeah so so there's three ways that you leverage here so one is to do this kind of inflation split where typically in most blockchains and it's inflation just goes to the validators and the delegators um here there is a split where part of those part of that inflation goes to DAP developers you mentioned uh gas rebate I think the first one is kind of clear-ish there might be some some technical

things I want to get in here but the gas rebates so it's not quite clear how that works and then then the third the third one you you mentioned is it's like a smart contract fee so here I imagine where you say okay as adapt developer I deploy my contract and anytime you're going to use it you're going to pay some flat fee uh for for using the contract on top of whatever Network fee uh might be might be applied for that transaction yeah so inflation missions is built into the protocol gas rebates we actually um in the latest version of protocol the communities burning 50 percent of the gas fee similar eip1559 on ethereum and then 50 is being redirected back to the DAP developers into a specific contract

address that they specify um and then so it's just kind of redirect so if you're paying um let's call it one atom for instance if you if you were on the hub using that equivalent um you know half of Adam would go back to the developer smart contract half the atom would get burned uh in this case it would be one Arch half the arch would get burned half the arch would go back to the developer and then the Nexus contract premiums think of it as like a toll on a road we just set an additional fee that gets calculated into the gas amount and that just there's certain reasons why a right the default to zero but there's certain reasons why a developer may want to charge additional um uh gas uh in order for somebody to

use their smart contract maybe they are covering the cost of off-chain operations um that that could be one thing maybe they think that the fees are insignificant and they want to charge more for it and they think you know by just charging a little bit more they can actually do something more with the protocol um and so there's all kinds of reasons why they may want to charge just just a little extra onto onto the flat gas fee that is calculated so those are the three different ways um is that kind of clear I said yeah that's clear so so the gas rebate it's it's essentially eip1559 where part of the re part of the burned uh tokens paid for fees uh part

of the token space for fees are being burnt and the other part are going back to the developer correct correct okay interesting and then can you yeah well in in the case of in the case of um of a chain like Arch like a cosmos SDK chain fees are probably quite low does that actually make up like a significant amount of Revenue like would anybody even use that yeah so that's why it's taken so long to get to Market here with the archway protocol and why we've been working on so long is because we're making pretty interesting changes to how the protocol Works uh similar to eip159 so uh we um have something called a minimum

consensus fee uh so we basically raise the level of the fee um in future versions of the protocol the community is working on fee markets so that the the fees are adjusted a little bit more dynamically to pay for Block space um it's even more complex because we even reward every single smart contract that another contract interacts with so for instance if you had like a D5 project that was looking up the price Oracle price on on Oracle smart contract um the Oracle smart contract gets rewarded in this case as well as the D5 Project based on on a gas usage and so what so what we had to do was basically

go out and measure the gas computation across all the different contracts and usage in that assembly line and um and then appropriately reward them with the right amount of rewards and um and so that's really where it makes very very where it gets really really interesting because then developers can start to focus in on just like small um Financial com small Primitives in components within the protocol as long as another dap is using it they're smart contracts they're going to get rewarded so you could almost deploy once build something utility based that everybody's using and if a whole bunch of other projects use yours you're going to get rewarded with time uh based on usage so

um it really makes we'll get into the use cases in a bit but these are the things that we had to build into the protocol in order to make this material so most like like you mentioned that uh most l1s in the cause most chains in the cosmos space right now validators except like zero gas fees a lot of times or really insignificant we had to make sure we were designing the economics enough so that like the rewards are actually um significant enough to the developers and to the teams that are building these steps and so we had to kind of re-engineer all this but from a technical perspective and from an economics perspective to make this work yeah well the validator aspect is the other thing I wanted to ask you because

like running a validator is already a pretty low margin business uh on most Cosmos chains probably even like a loss leader on a lot of chains if you're like in the lower uh range of the develop the the validator set um how how do you plan to make validators uh you know profitable um or at the least you know not lose money if like half of the inflation rewards are going to adapt developers not to say that they shouldn't go to deaf developers but like how does how does any how do those Economics work out yeah um I we we had this question a lot in the early days um and after talking to a number of

validators I think a lot of the validators understood this point where um you know at the end of the day they're kind of subsidizing their rewards today in order to um in order to basically grow the development of the protocol right to get more dapps and more ecosystem participants and overall it's in their best interests to do so because that drives more activity which hopefully then impacts um you know the the tokens that they're staking and so forth and so um it's kind of like subsidizing rewards today for validators in order of incentivize longer term development um but what we found to talking to validators is like there's a pretty substantial capex investment to invest

in the protocol right and they don't always recruit you're about either but you don't always recruit that right up front it takes time right and too often you see these chains where you know it's like Community chain or something like that and maybe they don't have as much of a robust community and and like they you you invest them in all this infrastructure you spin up these nodes you keep track of the community and so forth and then it's just like the ROI just really doesn't pan out for the invest for the validator and so the point of view I think most of the vouchers have taken with us is like um look we are giving up some but you know we don't really have high inflation in the token economics like other protocols it's it's a lot more in line

with something closer to the cosmos Hub but you're basically foregoing you know rewards today in order to subsidize the development of of the protocol in the future and I think most validators are in line with with that vision okay so yeah I'd like to get into the the modules that you guys have built because in addition to um you know some you know pretty vanilla uh Cosmos SDK modules you've built a couple of extra modules tell me a little bit about what those modules do exactly and how they interact with the protocol um yeah we can dive into it on this call I'll talk real high level but I really

encourage um you know the the community to basically go to the website and read the technical paper there's going to be a very detailed outline paper that walks through the very specifics and the mechanics of all the different modules that were added um and the changes to them and the adjustments so when that's published I think the community is publishing it closer to mainnet but when that is published I recommend everybody sit down and read that um generally speaking there's there's two functions we do I'll talk at the function level one is tracking the re the gas spend across all the different contracts and the next is the distribution of the gas right and so those are basically the two functions we're basically doing and that's been implemented across several different

modules and it adjusts and it touches different points so it's this tracking module and the rewards module so tracking just like looks at gas consumption across the whole chain and then rewards is the one that's responsible distributed internet yeah okay correct um and then there's and there's been a lot of modifications to like wasm d and a few other things in order to make these changes and so um we it would probably take me too long to kind of go through all the details here on this call but I encourage the community to to jump on the website look at GitHub uh to get a full understanding of how this all works actually I'm kind of like this this is a technical podcast so I'm kind of interested in like going a little bit into the technical okay yeah yeah um uh yeah what yeah what are some of

those yeah how do those modules kind of like um yeah how do they interact with the other IBC modules and also yeah what what changes have you made to azmt in order to um make them work um yeah so um and we probably should also get just uh somebody a bit more technical than myself on this call but what we're really doing yeah yeah too um the biggest thing has been accurately measuring the gas computations of on the tracking side so there's been a lot of work into that and there's two gas computation uh measurements we had to measure in the protocol so one is at the

wasm level and one is at the SDK level most of the folks that are rewarding folks like like how it differs from like something that most implemented is they're doing it based on governance and they're basically just doing gas rebates they're not sharing um part of inflation they're not sharing contract premiums what we've had to do is basically um measure uh the gas computation both at the wasm level and the protocol level um and based on you know every single contract in that assembly line and obviously they can be really long if you have 15 different contracts calling each other out for different things it can it adds up the other issues is handling like a lot of the error handling and

default handling so if one contract um had a contract premium and then that requires this other contract in order to execute this transaction had to add an additional premium to that which adds additional premium so forth and so we had to measure that and handle the air handling across all the different contracts in order to make this work um the rewards distribution side is pretty easy I would say on the token economic side one thing we really made sure that we did was um the payout is always going to be less than the gas consumed on the contract so on the reward side so that avoids some of the Civil attacks and it's Dynamic based on block space so as more and more block space gets used within the

protocol the payouts actually adjust slightly in order to avoid like um like a civil attack where somebody comes in and tries to spam a lot and take up a lot of blog space to Halt the chain what we do is we actually shrink it more and more and more the rewards dynamically based on the amount of block space that's being filled within the protocol so there there's been a lot of work done at understanding the community has done a lot of work on understanding how block space works the computation the execution minimum consensus fees um and understanding like you know the minimum number of transactions we expect contracts to receive things like that so all this work has been built into the protocol on the rewards distribution

side to be more Dynamic and adjustable uh based on like usage to basically it's not like a flat fee it will change dynamically based on um a usage of the protocol altogether which is kind of cool okay how hard is it how hard is it to track uh gas consumption across so so the way this works basically is like a user calls a contract that contract executes some logic yep you know maybe it calls on another contract that contract could call another contract there might be a chain of contracts being called they all correct they all kind of call back to the main one um that tracking module is is doing this computation or this this this tracking

for every user transaction correct uh correct yeah and we're tracking and it had to be done within the block right there's no iterative process in the protocol you can't just go and exit data repost it back on chain and so that's where some of that complication is so yeah what we're tracking is like total gas spend for the whole contract and then measuring the usage of each of these different smart contracts both from like the gas rebate perspective from the inflation perspective and then from the contract premium perspective and so let's have that already I mean like I I mean you you at some point you have to know how much gas you're spending right like would you not uh total yes but some of these variables were never made public

so we had to make a lot of adjustments and expose these variables it was exposed internally into the wasm D file but it wasn't exposed like publicly to other modules in the cosmos SDK so we had to make that happen Okay so like the user knows how much gas he's paying and then like the end when the when the transaction gets posted at to the block that information comes back uh but it doesn't get communicating to other like other modules can't capture that information they don't have access to that information correct so we've had to express those methods and keep track of that data and everything else within how much of this okay this is interesting how much of this to your

tribute to um just well I guess I guess my how can I I guess what I'm trying to get to is why why is it that like modules aren't aware of the cost that Cosmos and contracts incur is it because they just were never yeah I mean like the design decisions were made long time ago in yeah there's a lot of before Cosmos before um even consum and just like the design decisions never adjusted for this type of use case right nobody had ever

thought of this before um we've been pioneering in that so just it wasn't just ever designed for it for this specific use case yeah okay interesting what what are your thoughts on like this cosmosm SDK idea um like it's designed in a SDK are you talking about deploying On Top of the Hub are you familiar with the CW SDK that Larry engineer is working on uh Vaguely Familiar with it uh maybe for our audience you could just give out right yeah so if I mean basically what what the idea is that he's stripped away all of the uh Cosmos SDK modules and also like a lot of the rappers because

there's like a ton of rappers around cosmosum to get to awesome D there's like I don't know six different or something he Stripped Away all of it and he basically has a cosmoasm VM that's talking directly to ABCI so a lot of that um a lot of those uh you know kind of layers of abstraction uh are kind of you know done away with and it optimizes um Communications directly with with tenerment uh but then the idea is that all of the cosmos SDK modules and you know this is not production ready or anything I don't know if he's got any funding with this or not but um all the modules would be built this cause as cosmos and modules and and be uh you know in trouble have parity and

then the idea is that like basically you can just run a cosmos chain as a full Cosmos SDK or sorry as a as cosmosm and then you know like developments much faster you can like update modules like with a lot less pain um yeah yeah thanks for for sharing that with the audience yeah I am I'm familiar with that we're kind of doing the same thing on some of our stuff so like for instance we don't have um uh the lockup module um built into the protocol we rewrote that as smart contracts investing smart contracts things like that for all the early contributors things like that um airdrop similar so uh we've already pulled out some of those modules baking it right into the protocol does make

optimization sense but there are there's just a few modules you still need um built directly into the SDK so you don't have it's like it's um it's a goal my understanding from a technical perspective that we're all trying to skate towards but we're just not there yet in terms of because there's a lot of dependencies on on local modules yeah yeah and where where developers are um are are getting these revenues like you said earlier that the revenues that developers are making they're going to an address [Music] um is that a is that a contract that the developers or is it could you just be like any uh any wallet address like how does that work it can be a wallet

address it can also be a smart contract address uh it gets predefined on deployment so you just deploy where you basically deploy the contract ad if you wanted as a contract address or user address on deployment in your smart contracts I believe it can be updated as well with this signature but um the rewards all go to that specific address wherever you're located and then um you know depending on how that functionality is built that then allows for you know it to be redirected to governance token holders where you would basically claim as a governance token holder it could be like put into a multi-sig where um you know you can withdraw or approve

certain transactions can be thrown into a dow whatever the case is so um yeah so it's it's it's it's decided on deployment of the contracts initially yeah I could see this being used with Juno uh and like Dao Dao for instance like yeah where I mean you have very strong robust Dow tooling over on Dao Dao you could have your your um you know these revenues go to a a dow and then like have the community vote on like how those tokens you know that Revenue could be used um which brings me to my my next question which is about which is about Juno uh so yeah Juno is you know probably the the most uh used and well-known uh cosmosm chain right now in the inner chain uh Neutron will also

launch uh yeah at some point on um on the Hub well as as an ICS chain I guess like from a go to market perspective and like it you know you you've done a lot of good Market work so I guess this is maybe like one thing you thought a lot about um what what do you see because yeah because there's so much traction they're already um you know you know first first to Market sometimes is also like the one that gets to go to market um sure what what do you see as the risk that you know some of these other I can see particularly Juno like all these ideas are it feels to me like they kind of align with the you know the Juno uh ethos to some extent right where it's

like very developer focused or whatever like I could totally see you know Jake coming out in a couple years or a couple months and saying like Hey we're gonna like start doing this kind of like Revenue share with our developers and like Juno V whatever is going to have this in there um how how do you yeah how do you think uh Archway will will different like be truly differentiated from other chains that have you know fairly large developer communities and like lots of tooling and stuff like that yeah yeah that's great um and look we're actually really supportive of like Juno and neutron for instance I think the public likes to try to create this like they want like size they want drama in the cosmos space and we actually are are

pretty supportive of those communities because ultimately it it it it pushes cosmolism from the tech much farther like we don't really see we see them very much as complementary I I hope Juno forms into more like I'm gonna make an example like a kusama type thing like an experimental chain where folks are like experimenting trying different things trying new features we're very focused on this reward stuff we're going to continue to iterate um down this path the archway Community is and um to Court's custom fees and everything else and so there's there's a whole bunch behind the scenes that we're excited to kind of press into this area and into this direction um I'll put it this way so we were asked

by the The Hub to basically be um you know interchange a chain secured by by the inner chain and we did turn that down because um look while I I think it's good for the Hub you know for the chain itself the challenges is you basically have to give up your economics and um in order to basically participate in that type of protocol and since we're very economics heavy and our rewards are basically already going to uh significant amounts going to developers that did make economic sense in V1 of of the implementation interchange security and so not only you're giving up your economics you're also giving up your sovereignty um and from our point of view it's like

we believe you know most use cases probably should be built as daps not as their own self-sovereign chain only in a few cases does it make sense to really build as a self-sovereign chain and if you're relying on the Hub and the valid ears it's going to be much harder to have faster iterations um it's going to be much more difficult to try new things experiment Etc and so we kind of noticed that with implementing the gravity Decks at tenormate on the Hub where that didn't really work because it they didn't iterate fast enough and osmosis was set running as a separate chain and they were able to iterate much much quicker than the hubs to deal with all the politics and everything else and so um I don't think there's a good or bad I

think all can exist in in this this big big space in this big ecosystem but from our sense it didn't make any economical sense from the developers point of view and we already as a community have a lot of interest from you know validators and developers and everything else we weren't worried about like a secure security issue or not having enough funds to secure the chain so we just we it didn't make sense for the timing of it all um you know and I I hope the Juno Community continues to experiment um there there is you know some pros and cons of how the communities are structured so I think all our community chains the biggest difference here is um you know behind the archway protocol there's a couple core entities that are

that are contributing actively to the protocol um and um it's just it's just designed so instead of like volunteer uh contributions and submissions there's a little bit more Focus behind the scenes in in some areas not to say that Juno doesn't have a lot of structural organizations just structured differently um and and so that brings out pros and cons to how the protocol works and operates hmm what um you mentioned this and you know we I mentioned this at the top of the show that you think that not all uh that that not most dapps will actually will be Sovereign app chains and that that will only make sense in certain cases uh what are those

um yeah what are those cases where where do you think that app chains uh throughout uh you know make most sense yeah here's the metaphor I share with a lot of folks um if you're familiar with Web 2.0 um you know in your building a web app you're gonna try to get to Market really quickly and what are you going to do you're going to go build your web app and deploy it to like a Heroku a digital Ocean or Google app engine some sort of platform as a service that can get and just host your website real easily um without you having to worry about about all the infrastructure behind the scenes or anything else as your startup matures and you you grow you start to move your infrastructure over to like

more of a larger Cloud hosting service like AWS Google Cloud um Microsoft Azure and you start to control how the servers work the storage Works behind the scenes but you don't have control of the data centers but you have control of the compute sources and so forth and if you get very very very large then you move over to your own servers in your own Warehouse I have a Twitter thread right now that is basically this whole thesis but yeah and you control your whole you control basically the full stack right and and so similar maturing is probably happening like if you want to quickly get to Market go and go build on any of the L ones

um I'll say why Archway because Archway gives you a on-ramp into your own custom chain it's much easier to migrate from one Cosmos chain to a standalone chain than it is to migrate from let's say the ethereum community or an optimistic roll up into its own Cosmos self-sovereign chain you're gonna have to switch wallet providers infrastructure you know the whole nine yards all the integration stuff has to come from bootstraps so um there's a much easier path to building on top of something like Archway and migrating to your own self-suffering chain if you need that long-term road map and growth but similar to how startups are built I just don't see a world where um you know everybody is going to need a completely

um their own custom chain you have to bootstrap a validator community you have to have the resources to secure the networks you have to get all the integration providers involved and what we're going to see here and I think we're already seeing it it's like the wallet providers all the supporting infrastructure they have a lot they have a lot of diminishing returns so every product that they integrate into their service like there's probably not as much value they're going to receive similar to like why a validator can't support all Cosmos chains because you know there's going to be some that are more quote unquote profitable than others yeah and so I just don't see a world where there's going to be um you know thousands and thousands of

different um maybe I don't know what the upper limit is going to be maybe it's ten thousand eight thousand but I just don't see a world where everybody has their own custom chain I just don't see that that that happening I think we just there's so much interest in Cosmos right now so you have all the interest coming in and then but I think you're gonna have like probably big three in every area will kind of like work itself out you'll have three amms that kind of way in I think you're gonna have give or take you're gonna have um you know three generalized smart Contracting platforms I think you're gonna have a handful of winners and it's going to get a little bit more Consolidated here through this bear market so that's kind of my thoughts on some of this stuff I hope to be proven

wrong but but that's that's my thesis behind some of it yeah I I've totally aligned with it as I said it's something I've been also thinking about a lot because they're you know there's a lot of I think uh the narratives right now around smart contract deployment like smart contract chains and then modular chains and app chains they all sort of exist in um uh you know as as individual narratives but to me they're just part of the same narrative it just it it's it's more of a question of the degree to which uh you need uh customization and control of the stack

um for your application and so I sort of see like I totally see it in the web too space the web too kind of framing because this is where I I came from right to where you know your your smart contract on a on an ethereum chain or on Juno or on on Archway is akin to like using Squarespace or something like that and then and I think the modular stack really fits nicely in here where a sovereign a sovereign roll-up or a settlement roll up well a settlement Roll Up is more like using digital ocean right like you you have access to the execution layer but you don't really have access to the infrastructure and then a sovereign roll-up is like building your business

on uh on AWS or on Azure uh there's a high coupling between like there's going to be high degree of coupling between Your settlement and execution layer and also like the data availability layer such that you're going to get like high performance there but if you want to move that execution settlement layer to somewhere else like that's going to be a pain right because it's it's so coupled together and then app chains are like fangs they're you know they're Facebook and Microsoft and Google they're building their own data center they're building their own underwater C cables they've got their own hardware and they have perfect vertical integration and like economies of scale throughout the entire stack and you know 20 years ago lots of small to medium-sized companies

had their own data set like I worked at a video age video production agency like the like early 2010s and we had like a rack of servers in the office to store all of our email and everything this was commonplace 10 years ago you know it's still quite common back then um as infrastructure has matured though that has become just a game that nobody plays anymore just because it doesn't make economic sense that's only reserved for really big companies that really want to control their entire stack so I I see a lot of similarities between how the web has evolved in this in this in this analogy and yeah it's it's uh it's cool to know that other people are also

thinking about the same thing we think about that too internally at phylaps we've even run some analysis we there's one number we throw around sometimes um and don't quote me on this but I think it's like three million US Dollars it takes to basically run a chain a year you know um so it's like and that's basically to make sure that there's enough rewards going to validate or so that they're compensated to run basically the servers and I think that's where that number is derived from but don't quote me on it so I I think like that we think through those things quite a bit and um similar to your point I think the use cases you know trading makes a lot of sense maybe as its own self-sovereign chain because everybody's fighting for uh fast finality and fast processing of transactions and so that makes a lot of

sense to do customization at the protocol level to make those optimizations to solve that specific use case but like I don't see it at like an nft dab level I just you know it it just doesn't make any sense from my point of view from a technical perspective yeah no I totally agree I think it's gonna I mean as as there are more and more like you know this cost is this three million okay let's you know consider it to be maybe somewhat accurate right uh it's going to become more and more prohibitive for uh it'll be more and more prohibitive for new entrants to the ecosystem to go out and build out their whole like validator

ecosystem when there's no real guarantee that the validators are going to be making any money there uh and that there's like long-term alignment and so yeah I think like Celestia and and that whole narrative around the modular stack and the promise there that you can build an application at a fairly low cost and um and also get security at a very low cost I think it's really interesting for like that middle a lot a lot of the Middle Market yeah it's kind of funny to say like the Middle Market in crypto because like the Market's so not that's stratified but like there's there's your smart contract like applications that are probably in the long term gonna be for really small business hobbyists you

know this this sort of thing and and testing and sort of like Progressive iteration right like uh product testing from from our perspective and then and then that Middle Market I think probably will go to like a more modular stack um and you know ethereum also you know in the whole roll-up Centric Vision I think you know fits into that as well and so just a highlight you know it's not the old MBA metrics that triangle where it's like you you have to optimize either for cost time or in this case like control or customization it's like you can have full customization but it's going to cost you a lot it's going to take you a lot of time you can lose some of the control but it's going to be much cheaper and quicker to get to Market so it's just depending you know there's it

depends on what solution and problem you're trying to solve um and so we don't see ourselves as like there's no like winner take all it's just whatever's best for the developer and their specific use case yeah um what is the what's the road map or kind of the path for uh an application built on Archway or you know on any smart contract chain for that matter to move up the stack move up this this kind of complexity Matrix where you start as a smart contract and at some point you know you maybe want to become an app chain what's that what's the path look like yeah we've been thinking about that a little bit more in detail um the archway Community has and I know

the cosmos Community has to um you know the natural thing might be moved to like um a chain that's secured by um uh like like using interchange security and just move to its own self-operating and do the compute on another chain um with interfaces on the main Hub that's one possible solution um there's another where you could see developers just spinning up a plain vanilla cosmosum chain and then just redeploying their smart contracts to that plain vanilla causal Muslim chain I know like the Saga group's kind of thinking through some of that a little bit uh um and so that's one possible route on some of this stuff um you know the the question here is

just like um I I guess more of like why and if you're going after a specific use case like trading you're probably better off just building a self-sovereign train or something like that um but I like I said I think in most cases I just I don't I don't see a path for them meaning or wanting to move to their own chain and I think they're going to realize that there's um a lot more hitting costs associated with it than people probably realize because you have to get all the partners integrated into the chain as well um and the community doesn't and that's no no tall order yeah yeah I think I think there's going to be

a small set of use cases where it makes sense to to have a sovereign chain and and for the for those that are already Sovereign right the the star gazes Etc of the world uh yeah I think they can grow to a size where it continues to make sense for them to be their own Sovereign chain like they're not going to downgrade to something else um and I think there's a lot of change that will find I was talking to uh I was talking to uh Rick Dudley a couple weeks ago and you know he was saying like a lot of chains will find their Niche yeah yeah and what that means is whatever the biggest dap there is will become basically the app chain for that

dap so you know ethereum it might be like uniswap is you just ethereum just becomes like a kind of uniswap chain and also uh like verifying proofs for all of the all the Roll-Ups uh you know it could be that Juno just kind of becomes a big dab chain right like it's just that's the main use case people just use uh sorry Dow chain right right yeah okay chain exactly it becomes hypnosis chain of of Cosmos yeah in a way right and and I feel like that makes sense long term as just as as there's this consolidation that you mentioned earlier right yeah the

archway Community sees that Vision too I think one of the things that also differentiates us is it's not the technical but it's the use cases and what's possible so like Archway and the reward system enables all kinds of use cases so if you had an oracle service for instance and you're posting pricing data on chain those Oracle smart contracts are getting rewarding now you have a um a sustainable model for the Oracle service provider okay similarly if you had for instance um like an asset back stable coin I'm just going to use example like usdc on top of Archway every time usdc tokens move or transfer they get rewarded well now you have a sustainable model for

usdc they don't have to do a fractional Reserve banking things like that so Archway is more geared towards like off-chain asset issuers coming on chain because we provide them like a sustainable rewards model to support um tokenizing their underlying asset class um there are certain things like we're very big in like generative art kind of stuff I think you're going to see that being very successful on Archway in particular case another great use case is like on-chain multisig will be really big for Archway because every time you sign a transaction those those multi-sigs are getting rewards the developers behind them so you're going to see very specific use cases where our choice is more geared towards than like just a regular generic chain which is

also what makes it differentiated from every other L1 because everybody's just doing copycat um you know copy copy paste D5 copy paste nfts the whole nine yards and look that's great and all but like that's not pushing the space forward at all we're much more interested in new verticals and new use cases that can't be done on any other L1 or any other Cosmos chain and that's why the per Clause the design the way it has been because we think there's this this really really big space that's untapped hmm yeah I want to ask you also about this uh this whole configio public goods uh thing um so basically confio they are the core maintainer of cosmosum they announced

yesterday that they are stopping all funding um there's a tweet that uh where they've announced like okay they're not uh they're not uh funding future versions of Cosmos I believe and they're they're not uh upgrading cosmoasm to support like the new versions of the cosmos SDK and they're not doing any new PRS or you know bug fixes or anything like that uh right before this there was a Twitter spaces going on where they were talking to the community and like trying to explore options here and you know confyo is you know a company of about 25 employees and uh um you know essentially I think has received very little funding for this

for this thing that everybody in Cosmos uses that's you know um powering potentially like billions of dollars worth of value but they can't get like the two million dollars a year or something that they need to keep the team running um yeah what are your thoughts on this and and you know I think it kind of also ties in a little bit to um the yeah this this this funding idea uh with with Archway of finding like you know funding mechanisms for for projects yeah first uh my heart goes out to the team that they're great if you haven't met them or talked to them

um they tend to be really supportive of of all Cosmos ecosystem and Cosmos chains um we've been uh trying to get them more involved um Fly Labs has software devco we're we're also uh supportive of a lot of the technical stack we've been driving goaling compilation so you can write smart contracts and go and compile them up to awesome things like that so um we're we're big supporters and maintainers of the technical sac and and continue to contribute in different ways like for instance Area 52 on the education side is another great example if you haven't played with that highly recommend doing it's a fun tool to learn how to build Walzem contracts um yeah look I I think um it's a problem the tragedy of the comments right like like it's it's a

free public good that anybody can use um personally I I believe all the chains that that are active need to really step up I was told that several folks that were um we're not live yet we don't have our our the tokens are going but the objective in the call was to to obviously um if a governance proposal came in the community was planning to support configio um and bring them on as advisors and everything else um that that would be the Hope from the archway Community side I know other governments I know other community programs basically reneged on their contracts to configio so that that's kind of hurtful um I would say um it probably should be coming from ICF informal like I think the funding needs

to come from The Hub uh to fund development cosmosum is becoming a core fundamental piece that that everybody's using and I think as a community we should uh vote to give them um you know a healthy uh allocation um and so that that would be my thoughts is like it really should be coming from there because it's core fundamental work um and then the rest of the change should should step up and support them um it's it's a tough problem you know there isn't real great easy answers here um but you know we're we're here to help support in in any way we can within our um uh financial means yeah I think so yeah I think the solution uh you you kind of nailed it

there I think like ICF uh needs to step up in a big way um yeah primarily because uh it is contributing not only to you know bringing uh I mean to to the entertaining ecosystem as a whole but also attracting developers uh to the ecosystem uh again more and more developers are interested in cosmosm like we're hosting a hackathon this summer and you hope to have like 200 people there building on cosmoasm um and other possible stuff right so like it's it's a very attractive uh environment for people to build with and um and yeah I mean like The Interchange uses it on their website it's like uh it yeah it it feels obvious that you know

much of the funding probably should come from from The Interchange Foundation um yeah I hope I hope this will get resolved because it's just like it's just like another one of these Community I think there's there's only a handful of real contributors to the cosmosum technical stack today similar to the SDK there's just not that many um we're fortunate enough we have we have some smart folks here over at five Labs that are contributing in different ways but I would say um you know like we probably as a community Dean to do more coordination the goal with all these technical Stacks

doesn't matter who's who started it or or the current state of things is to decentralize them as much as possible and not rely on any one centralized entity right that's that's the goal of decentralization so um we need to support each other but we also need to be moving towards a world where um where everybody steps up and contributes in different ways and in different capacities yeah um well that's a good yeah good message uh what's the uh what's the road map and and also what's the go to market like what kinds of projects are you targeting uh what kinds of projects do you expect will build or are you building on

Archway and uh when's uh when's launch due and I'm asking also because uh one of the things that we're trying to get set up here is that projects that we get on the show we also would try to run validators for and uh it was I was looking I was like oh well it seems like you can't run a validator for Archway at the moment as far as I can tell uh what's yeah what's up yeah the community hasn't launched the network yet um the community the last I heard in in the internal forms is looking to launch the protocol um in in around Q2 is is kind of the time for mainnet at this current stage of things um so getting really excited if if you are validated there was another community and the foundation launched a

validator delegation program highly highly recommend if you you haven't signed up for that to definitely get involved there I know delegations are being allocated as as we speak from the foundation um so that's that's one side of it the um yeah so it launches launches around um most likely the community is gonna have to vote on it but it's it's anticipated to be Q2 and um yeah that's kind of the excitement of the timeline um in terms of use cases there's several um you know I would say uh typical D5 projects building on top of the protocol um a lot of nnft projects the the interesting thing though about the projects that are launching on top of

archways they're taking the traditional like D5 model and doing it differently like a lot of projects aren't launching in conference token on top of Archway and the reason for that is like from a developer's perspective as soon as you launch a governance token you have to deal with the regulatory side as well as you have to maintain the community and everything else and you don't want to like rug pull your community to your like that and so a lot of developers are building I'm surprised building D5 projects on top of Archway and but planning to come in with more of an experimental point of view basically not launching a government's token using the rewards to cover you know maybe expenses or something like that but um that's really really what's so

interesting about the protocol so yeah no governance token or they're using the rewards in a unique interesting way to basically supplement um you know basically having um anything like subsidizing LP pools or whatever the case is so really interesting things like that we have a couple nft projects um in the community that are basically launching nft stuff where they um they actually use their rewards to subsidize uh gas fees so like there's no gas fees for early onboarding which is kind of interesting um so a lot of the use cases are really adapted or unique use cases that maybe change defy or nft originally you're

going to see a lot of toys being I call them toys being deployed like simple cool fun toys to play with as use cases but like I said I'm much much more interested in like really unique ideas that that haven't been thought through um deploying on top of Archway and that's what's going to be really fun because you're not going to find those steps on on any other L1 yeah so launches do sometime this year so like Q Q2 Q2 uh the community is leaning towards yep okay cool and um yeah how can people learn more about Archway and start building on the platform yeah definitely follow Twitter Twitter Archway HQ um I know a lot of announcements are out that

way um obviously go to the website archway.io um and docs are at docs.archway.io um in there there's several Community test Nets already being run Lots explorers you can already start building and deploying dapps you can start to play with calculators that understand what your rewards might be of those steps um so uh they're clis and a whole bunch of developer tooling there and documentation so definitely take a look at the docs if you're a developer um definitely enjoying Discord I know the community is pretty strong in Discord as well so definitely if you have questions there's a lot of folks helping out on Deborah outside Community side things like that so definitely enjoying the archway Discord if you

haven't done so yet already um in telegram but I'd say just join the Community start getting involved ask questions about what are cool ideas or projects you want to build and I think you're going to be pretty inspired about around a lot of the use cases around Archway so definitely join the socials check out the website and follow along great well this has been really fun conversation I really enjoyed diving into some of the technical stuff but also talking about the industry and also Cosmos ecosystem on a high level so yeah thanks for coming on yeah thanks Amber thanks for having me I appreciate it no worries and to our listeners thanks for for watching and also for listening uh I go live every Thursday so if you're

interested in following live streams do subscribe to the YouTube channel and if you enjoy the work that I'm doing you can also stake with interop just look for interop invalid reset thanks a lot I'll see you next week