THE STAKING ECONOMY with Brian Crain of Chorus One & ICF

Transcript

welcome to the interop my guest today is Brian crane he is the president of the foundation council at the ICF and CEO of chus one in today's conversation we'll be talking about the staking economy raking liquid staking uh also his role at the ICF and uh the broader role of the ICF in the ecosystem moving forward I'm also dying to find out why he thinks you should be taking all your notes in obsidian and why you should be eating more steak before we get started make sure to hit the like button hit the notification get Bell And subscribe to get all my episodes and remember that none of what we discuss here on the interop is investment advice and if you enjoy this content please consider sticking with us we're live on OS cricks silver

osmosis Juno and noas just look for interop in the active set my guest Brian crane is coming up next right here on the interop [Music] GM hey hey thanks so much for having me it's great to you know do this podcast in another way with you yeah so uh actually it's funny how like there there's some people that listen to

the op that that have no idea that epicenter exists so you know for those of you who have not uh you know captured that piece of information you know Brian and I have been hosting a podcast together for uh almost 10 years uh since the the Wii early days of crypto it's called epicenter you should check it out uh it's uh it's much broader than I think than than the interop in terms of the content we cover U also those other hosts there including sunny agell and Fel Hearns and sometimes Felix from Chorus but um yeah we we've done this lots and lots and lots and lots of times but not in this configuration where you know I'm interviewing you so so yeah yeah cool yeah well thanks so much for having me I'm excited to talk about lots of things yeah there's lots to talk

about and you know I I wanted to get you on sort of it was sort of on the heels of your uh of the announcement that uh you are now a president of the entertain Foundation Council and you know I thought that uh it would be a good idea to talk about the ICF and talk about your role there how the ICF is you know has evolved over the years and like the direction that the ICF will be going in the future I think for a lot of folks in this space there's maybe sometimes some confusion about the ICF and its role Etc so like want to give you the opportunity s like you know yeah make that clear for for most people because I think it's it's helpful um also want to talk about yeah a bunch of stuff related to staking since course one is a massive player in

the staking uh ecosystem um but before that I I just want to like one small piece of housekeeping here for the audience uh I've decided to no longer do these live and uh you know know if you've been following this podcast for a while you know that I I typically record these live on Thursdays and that's been really great it's it was a really fun to do these podcasts live but um over time I've realized that live streams come with a bunch of uh well has have have a lot of issues and and mostly uh you know some technical issues that can happen uh also sometimes like I'm traveling and I don't have time to do live stream and I'd like to stay consistent so um that and a whole bunch of other reasons have led me to like stop doing live stream so these will now be recorded uh and and

released we'll still try to release them on Thursday every week uh but just you won't be able to come in and you know be in the chat room might be might be do doing some live streams in the future around like other kinds of content I think it'd be cool to do like a like a panel discussion maybe once a month and those could be live stream but at least the interviews will be pre-recorded and I hope that will help improve the quality but yeah with that out of the way um Brian yeah uh please talk a little bit about your yeah your background um and for those who don't know you have not been listening to epicenter who is Brian crane yeah sure um yeah I mean so I've been uh I I got interested in crypto uh 10 years ago a bit over 10 years AG 10 and a half years

ago uh when I you know learned about Bitcoin and I was interested in entrepreneurship and building companies so I had some interest in that and I wanted to do something there and I was also interested in economics and Game Theory which is mostly what I studied and then I was also interested and I think it had some sort of you know proclivity to ideas of you know decentralization Anarchy more libertarian type of idea so I think just sort of the political Vision that was with I saw in Bitcoin was very appealing to me so I I kind of got into uh crypto back then and was immediately okay this is the thing that I want to focus on uh I was always very you know I was never a

maximalist of any kind so you know new things came along it was very interested in it I mean we we at epicenter were always doing that right we would always you know do new episodes about whatever was most interesting thing and you know so I was immediately like getting into ethereum too and like beginning of 2014 and other things as well and um so then it happened that in 2015 the first time I kind of worked for a company uh which was building Enterprise ethereum applications and which was one of the first companies doing that and they were also building on they basically took the ethereum and said like hey how can we make you know Enterprise versions of this and so of course he wanted to replace proof of

work with something else and so that company became the first company to build on tendermint this was back in you know 2015 uh 145 I was there 1516 and uh yes it was kind of familiar with tenament and you know this company was contributing to tenament and then um actually one of the uh other people working at the company was Ethan Buckman um so he was an engineer at that company and then Ethan left and he joined Jay and he he kind of you they kind of co-founded Cosmos and then I I also left like soon after and I I joined the the company uh you know all in bits Inc or you know was Al often called

tenament uh you know which was uh founded by Jay and co-founded by Bucky and so I became like the CEO of that in beginning of 2017 and then we did um you know the the fundraiser uh I guess that's where the ICF will also come in uh in 2017 and you know I was working at that company uh throughout 2017 until the beginning of 2018 you know kind of helped you know yeah the fundraiser kind of the initial phase of the cosmos ecosystem growing that organization too so we grew that uh that year from maybe five people at the start when I joined to around 40 people at the end of the year and the organization was you know Big Mess but lots of great people were there

and uh who went on to do you know lots of interesting things I mean some examples are you know Sunny was there or Adrien Brink was there you know Chris go joined soon later you know there was like Ismael from Celestia was there once and Ethan Buckman was there and a lot a lot of other people too right who would F fed who AOS You Know Jack Zaki was sort of sort of there right I think he was not like full-time te member but he was still very involved as well um so uh yeah so I was basically there and then I there was a few things that

caused me to leave you know one was it was just a difficult environment in which to do productive work it was also the case that there wasn't like that much I didn't feel there was that much to do for somebody like me who was not a technical developer and you know this was like after the money was there the developers were hired you know they were basically working a building caus us to main net and uh yeah and we were just sort of waiting for this launch and then at the same time um you know it was very clear that proof forsake is coming and I was very convinced that we would have many different proof forsake networks and that that was the future of how blockchains are secured so um at the same time you know there was no staking companies back then because there was no

proof of stake networks that were alive and so we were kind of like well we writing all this software and writing these white papers and it talks about validators and and staking but like who's actually a validator like who's going to do this and uh so we were like okay let's work on this and so I started this company together with Mah Roy who uh you know is also epicenter co-host right so um so we've kind of known each other on that end for for a long time and so yeah we started working on that and uh this this was like at the start of 2018 really so about five and a half years ago and yeah with course one we've done we've worked on you know I would

say we've had a bunch of kind of detours as well where we kind of got a little distracted and uh but what throughout we've done is you know we've been working on staking infrastructure and uh we running infrastructure for around you know almost 50 different protocols um you know I think have something around like one billion that's like being staked through course one at the moment and you know we work with like various different um you know various different types of customers you know from normal people staking through Cosmos public notes we run like white label notes for some Partners we work with custodians you know wallets like

different types of uh you know crypto products institutions uh on staking and yeah definitely I would say if if there's a bit of a focus for course one I would say it's probably most at this point ethereum and Cosmos um yeah and you know there's some other areas where we pretty deeply involved for example me is an area where we've been doing lots of work in uh I think that's you know turning into a bit of um you know Focus area for for correspond like a differentiator for us um but yeah that's basically course one um in herbit of course yeah and then we we also I've also been pretty interested in urbit for a while and gotten pretty

involved in that so we do have a team uh we have a product and team called Red Horizon so you can check it out at Red horizon.com which is building uh herbit infrastructure for herbit for hosting herbit servers so yeah if anybody's interested in that uh it's all free at the moment you can check it out at red horizon. and get you know an orbit uh urbit Planet as hosted by AA you can like explore the urbit ecosystem so yeah so that's that and then I've so yeah so I've been involved in Cosmos basically since the beginning and then I think we had in this was like 2020 yeah it was was a bit over three years ago about maybe three and a half

years ago um well okay maybe now let's talk a little bit about the ICF just for a minute to give some some context on that so so the ICF was um you know ICF was set up when in the beginning of 2017 and the the cosmos fundraiser was organized by the ICF so basically uh people would donate you know Bitcoin or ethereum and then they would get uh you know kind of written into this file that we like oh this was going to be the Genesis distribution once Cosmos Hub launches and uh and and and um Bitcoin and ethereum went to this

Swiss foundation called the inin foundation and also 10% of the atoms went to that Foundation as well and there was not really any staff at the foundation at the time everyone is hired by um all in bids the American company or the German subsidiary or something but like you know through allm bits and um and you know the board had there was Ethan and Bucky was on the board uh so so Ethan Buckman from who's informal today and Jay qu were on the board and then I think some sort of Swiss you know lawyer legal person who was not super clued in uh and it ended up being the case that I think the two of them kind of stopped um you they struggled to it was a little blocked right like they

they struggled to work together so they were like okay let's expand the board and hopefully that's going to help with that so uh me and another person called Fernando pedon who's a computer science professor in Switzerland so we both joined the board of the ICF so I've been on the board since um yeah for about three and a half years and um and Jay left soon after because he was like yeah so yeah he he decided to step down and then since then uh you know it's been mostly three of us briefly have we had another person test on the board and uh yeah and then more recently like just a few months ago um BAS basically buy I sort of switched roles and I took over as president and he's he's still on the

board and he's like the vice president um yeah so that's that's kind of me and the thing the things that keep me busy that that's a lot and not not to mention that also that you're also on the board of the urbit foundation yeah I'm also Bo of foundation yes yeah it's a lot of hats man it's a lot of hats U no you know one thing that that's interesting here and i' I've kind of thought about over the years is uh and and I think what what a lot of people don't realize is you've been involved with a lot of projects like sort of early on and like close to Inception like so um you know earlier uh when you first got interested in crypto like you founded this Bitcoin meetups Berlin

Group which I I think in a lot of ways kind of seeded a lot of the a lot of the that Berlin uh crypto community that you know became so strong and you know remains like a very Central hub for crypto in Europe and you know like your involvement sort of that with that Meetup I think uh helped um uh helped seed that that initial Community uh then you know you were also involved like earlier with ethereum setting up um some of the organizations in Germany and uh helping set up the the German office of ethereum sort of again you know operating in the background but you know still like um contributing to those projects and then similarly with you know with monax and was previously a

Industries uh you know involved with with some of the organizational work around like building these early versions of of um of proof of stake blockchains that eventually became tenderman I think a lot of people don't realize like the the impact that ays Industries had I mean also Rick Rick Dudley was there and you know um like that company sort of like faded into in existence but like those early ideas seeded a lot of the ideas of that we all take for granted now like proof of state blockchains and stuff so yeah you you've been very like you know beyond your role at epicenter and everything like uh sort of operating uh at different levels of of these like early projects that have become massive and so yeah I I sometimes say that to people and oh yeah it's true

yeah yeah yeah and I mean maybe sort of like a little bit of a funny interesting anecdote regarding the monx eras so yeah it's confusing because it was called erors industries that was renamed in moonx but the so so that company was like building on tenament at the time and implementing their own evm and this was like it was like a single codebase right because it was Jay and then some areas Industries Engineers mainly Ethan I think um were writing this together and so I think at some point they started and the thing is like Jay is somebody who is I think pretty aware and thinks a lot about licensing law IP things like that and then Aras Industries was two of the

founders were lawyers so there like very thinking about that too and you know that ended up being some big conflict of like who owns what who owns controls what of this code base and then the sort of solution that they ended up with was that they would kind of segment this code apart and say like okay there's like the consensus layer and then there's this like interface and then there's the like VM evm built on top and then you know there was like the consensus thing was like tenament and the other thing was later became part of hyperledger but anyway it was like um Bor you know had some different names but that was basically owned by AAS Industries so this thing that became

kind of like a key thing for Cosmos as well around this separation between the you know consensus and the application on top was yeah I think to significant extent also driven by this uh you know that kind of ss industry involvement with uh you know building the original kind of tenament code base yeah I'm really looking forward to someone like writing a book about the history of Cosmos and like all these things you know zaki's early involvement as well and so yeah let's hope let's hope this hopefully car rousell will write this book someday let's hope this whole thing becomes like big and important enough that people actually want to do that yes yeah yeah uh so yeah before talk yeah no before we talk about chorus and

all this stuff like you you mentioned this earlier uh you said that the people should be taking their notes in obsidian um so other people have told me about this this software at least I've tried to send me notes in obsidian and and I I didn't really like pay much attention to it until now but like what is Obsidian and why should I be using it right I mean obsidian is basically like just a not note taking software and uh you know you can like write your notes yeah yet another note taking software it does have these kind of bir directional links maybe some people are familiar with that it's basically like you know I'm going to like I have daily note and I write in this daily note that you put like this kind of like square brackets square brackets and I put like

I don't know ICF for example and then I can click on that and then when it goes to ICF it will show like all of the places where and this was mentioned right so I think one of the sort of promises of that is that you can you know you can um take notes and then uh later link them together right and later kind of recognize the connections and stuff I mean I'm someone who's always taking lots of notes I have like thousands of er note for example that are just lost in the void right like there's all these notes never access them never reread them and and so I think one thing is that obsidian is something that you know is like very much geared for this linking of no notes and like building up knowledge over time

so one one way that people phrase it sometimes is your personal like Knowledge Management where you kind of build your own Wikipedia of like everything you across all the ideas H the thing that's also nice about obsidian is that it's it runs locally on your computer and the everything is markdown files it's basically just a markdown editor so in the end you will have like you know a folder on your computer and there all of the obsidian notes are all in markdown you can just edit them in any markdown editor too um so it feels like you know it feels like you have much more like ownership and control over it than with you know ever know or like Rome or softwares and uh

yeah and um I I would say I've been interested in this kind of productivity thing for a long time I also yeah and and so this this feels like uh you know really great for it super flexible and powerful and then does it work well in teams or because I'm always thinking about like how does this integrate in my team yeah so that is a great question I think right now the answer see like I think it should right I I think absolutely you should be able to like run entire teams on a tool like this I think my so my intuition is like that is the future however I think the

way it's built to mostly used is more as as like a personal system yeah and I I did actually tweet the other day I was like hey is anybody doing like team things on there um I think what obsidian also does is you can write plugins for obsidian so you they will like and anyone can write so there's loads of plugins right so you can so I think it is for example also a system that you know you could take and you could say okay I'm G to like as a company we're going to build on top of this thing and modify and develop it um so I yeah I don't think there's much team stuff yet but I expect that I I think this going to become uh used a lot by teams as well cool yeah I'm going to try this out um

and I I not to make this a whole like productivity podcast but uh you've already always had some good productivity hacks uh you you you tweeted this thing about the second brain course that you're taking and yeah so that's so okay so the second brain is basically kind of like a concept that you want to build like an external system where you keep track of all but you know you capture all your ideas and projects and notes and then you kind of organize them in some way you try to organize them around you know projects or like outcomes that you want to achieve in the world you know like actions you're going to take and you know that you basically build this one

system right where you could like every keep track of everything GTD is like those kind of the idea with GTD is it's pretty similar it's it's pretty similar to GTD I mean I've spent a lot of time like you know working with GTD learning GTD and stuff like that uh I've always kind of struggled with GTD and I feel like the second brain approach uh I feel it doesn't have the same issues as GTD so I'm pretty optimistic uh that's going to work and and and you can think of sort of the second brain is almost like if you think of like obsidian you say okay I'm going to use this obsidian thing and then the second way is kind of an answer of like okay how should you organize this entire

thing how should you set up this thing like what is the kind of the yeah and I'm sure people can use obsidian many different ways and people also use do the kind of second brain implementation with different tools right so people will use notion or or or obsidian and and or whatever like yeah I think yeah so I'm um I'm kind of using at the moment obsidian to implement this second brain thing and I'm I'm really enjoying it I'm having fun with it so and I feel like feel something that um you know can have a big impact on productivity and creativity I think I think one of the big promises that you

have an idea now and then it's like oh what do I do with this idea how can I develop this idea but if you have like a system you can like put your ideas in there and develop more time um that feels like very cool and uh and maybe like a final thing that seems kind of interesting here is if you let's say you use this obsidian and you really like capture everything and you know including you have like plugins where now if I have like Kindle highlights and stuff everything it goes into obsidian automatically and stuff so if you now imagine over time like all of the things that you come across the ideas the things you read you highlight like they go into the subsidi and thing I think if

you in the future have like AI llm model or AI That's like support you I mean it is going to be perfect for that right because all of your data is going to be right there in plain text uh yeah easily and just so it feels like you could all you you could all you could already build this right I mean like you could already have like a local llm running and um yeah yeah you could probably have local LM running like ingest obsidian like obsid so yeah I think I think that's going to be very cool and I think there's going to be a lot of uh yeah things people are going to do in this direction and it feels like like if you think of like sort of AI proving yourself this seems like a great investment to set yourself up

right by basically trying to really capture and organize the things in your mind in an external system that in in one in one organized external Place cool uh well I'd love to talk more about this but probably uh but yeah I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure people listening are also interested in prob acity hacks so um what's that course called second brain it's called building a second brain okay yeah I'll I'll link to it in show notes cool well you know let's um let's talk about uh let's talk about chorus one and and staking a little bit um you know cor chorus has been through chorus was around in 2018 I think right

yeah yeah yeah so I mean chorus has been through like lots of phases I I feel like myself looking outward into intercourse one you know so you guys obviously like started doing saking networks and and uh and taking like delegations from from users and then building out that scking infrastructure you guys have done a lot of development work also for uh other ecosystems so like you you've built software like in Solana and C you've done software for Axel and so like a lot of sort of Co co-development right of software with with those teams um you guys are also doing Investments like you have an investment team uh that that does like VC Investments and projects now with this herbit initiative so like chorus is

is doing a lot of things um uh in addition to like this white label institutional staking um yeah like what's the what's the strategy of the of the of the company moving forward and you know what are what's the kind of focus for for the company in the next like five to 10 years like what areas are you really looking at building up yeah I we have uh we have done a lot of different things um but I think today I actually feels like we're pretty focused and clear even though maybe there's still a whole bunch of different activities that fall underneath this direction but I would say on a high level this just our you know thesis is that um a lot of the world's economy and

kind of human coordination collaboration creation is going to operate on decentralized networks and using the de centralized protocols and uh then you need to have infrastructure that you know operates all this facilitate all this you know executes all these transactions verifies them creates those blocks or org orders them and you know this is where we're focused on right where we want to uh you know be one of the main companies that sort of facilitates this and enables this you know new more free open Dynamic uh economy so that's that that's our Focus so you know it's mainly that it means we run proof of stake networks but of course there's you know there's other

things right so there's uh the Meb work we're doing around that um and MB is really something where you kind of get a little bit more in depth and you you know you sort of look at this the role that the the validator has and how you can do it better more optimally and uh in a way that generates higher revenues um and then you know of course there's other things like you know operating Oracle networks or and a lot of effort from us has been I would say also on ethereum so building a great ethereum staking product which um you know which you can find it's called Opus it's you know it's live now um so if

anyone's interested in that check it out on our website um and and then working with institutions so you know working with custodians and uh different types of Institutions that are like all integrating crypto custody and staking into lots of different products so that's also a big Focus for us and yeah we do have some other things like we do have a we do uh Venture Investments too we've actually invested in a lot of different Cosmos projects um and C has definitely been probably our number one uh area of focus on the investment side what's the um what's your investment thesis with uh with course one Ventures

yeah I mean we had sort of defined a few uh verticals that we would look at so you know one was kind of like proof of stake so things around so that are proof of stake Network so we've invested in things around proof of stake as well like you know liquid staking protocols or you know we invested in rated for example like some data things around it um and then you know we also had to focus on Middle we so basically looking at some of these protocols that you know kind of sit in between you know maybe like the gra indexing protocols and things like that um so those are those have been uh some of our Focus areas um

herbit has also been a bit of um so we've also made quite a few investments in the herbit ecosystem um and then yeah interoperability is is a is another area where we've you know we've been um reasonably involved and active in for a long time and made a bunch of Investments there I mean is the thesis uh to some extent like interchain aligned or um because you you guys have done a lot of investments in Cosmos and broader than that yeah I I would say our overall uh sort of hypothesis is definitely that we are going to see uh you know that we'll have lots of

different proof stake networks and I think the Saida that they're like Sovereign and interoperable definitely is is our thesis right so I think a lot of um Investments do kind of reflect that in that you know we invest in different proof stake networks app chains um yeah and things that help them work well together yeah so I I wanted to actually talk a little bit about inoperability maybe this is a good good moment to to to talk about it so like uh I was talking with uh bo do of polymer like a couple months ago and I also did an interview with Sergey of AEL and you know coming to terms with like those

very different approaches right and I think like when when I when I talked to Bo I it kind of became clear what those two approaches were uh were aiming for and you know with IBC you the idea is to build a standard like build a protocol upon which you can build applications and and that protocol is like an open standard in the same way that SMTP is an open standard and that people have built um Ma you know different clients on top of SMTP and have built entire businesses like Gmail Etc um whereas the Axel approach is is more although it is a decentralized network it's more of a proprietary solution where axlr um builds the software to to to allow chains to interoperate but it's

not um uh it's not meant to be an open standard in the same way that IBC is or at least it doesn't I don't I don't think it is um from from the same sort of like semantic perspective yeah can you describe like in your view how you see these two opposing views or are they opposing right or or are they sort of like touching at the same idea and um yeah what yeah what's the for me I I feel like like the axar approach um although it scales really well maybe it doesn't allow for the same sort of permissionless innovation as you you can get with IBC or like other fully Open Standards yeah I mean so okay I will try to answer this now I do want to say that I'm kind of I hope I do not rep

misrepresent uh anything here so um I mean the way I would understand this on a high level and you know we we did do some work that's like a little bit related to this that one point we were working on in um a CO like a cello Cosmos IBC Bridge right and I think this may may illustrate this to some extent um IBC you know is great because it's very trustless and you know you just need a relayer who basically picks up the transaction on one chain puts it in the other chain and uh you don't need to trust this relayer it could be like anyone you just need somebody to do it I mean theoretically you could like do it

yourself but of course like you know you'll rely on someone to do that but you don't really trust them they cannot run away with your money and uh and you know that's really great the downside of course is that somebody has to verify uh you know did this token transfer happen and in the IBC case you use a light client for that and the challenge is with a light client well like let's say now how do you have a cosmos light client in cell I was like well I mean you could write it in solidity which is for example what we did right now the problem is that's like very it's a huge amount of gas that costs it's like very it's a lot of development effort it's complex so the axr solution is basically

that they say hey we are going to have a bunch of nodes that are going to run a bunch of validators or sort of operators that are going to run full nodes on you know both chains and then they can observe what happens on like Zell and then they just say hey this happened on cell and on Cosmos and then Cosmos is like okay cool uh and uh and of course of course the advantage is you don't need to build light cines it's like the the whole development aspect is like way way less complicated and it's more flexible right you can say hey you're going to do it with Bitcoin because they can run Bitcoin full nodes but you're not going to build a Bitcoin you're not going to build a cosmos light client into Bitcoin right that's uh probably impossible or at least extremely hard um

so I think Axel has the advantage that it's more much more flexible and uh but then has a disadvantage that it's not as trustless uh because you're basically trusting like a set of you know you have a set set of entities and you know the majority of them need to be honest but like if they all colluded they could maybe steal money right um and I think we can kind of see also different places so for examp and now now of course the challenge is if you want to if you want to add your chain to AXA you're going to have to go to the AXA Network and you have to say hey uh you guys need to start running notes from my chain and they have to say oh is this economically

worthy or not and maybe they're not going to do it whereas with IBC you know you can just connect and if there's like someone relaying it's like it's cool right like you don't need to get anyone's permission so I think for example if you see in the cosmos ecosystem IBC supported out of the box IBC is great right like and and there's not much um it doesn't seem like there's much value uh for Axel to but then when you come to you know bridging across heterogeneous ecosystems then sort of like axar approach um seems like seems like a good solution attractive solution of course there are also other teams right that are working more on sort of you know extend and axar

of course is itself an a cosmos chain and can itself use IBC to connect to any other Cosmos chains and and they also have this axle rvm right where you now can write applications on top of it uh that use this kind of intop Primitives and then I think you have other teams right that are also working on kind of using IBC to bridge to all the ecosystems and um I think you know two that come to mind here is like polymer and that you just mentioned and maybe Union that uh but I think there's there's a whole bunch more and um yeah then you know there different trust assumptions I think some are trying to use maybe ZK technology um ZK like clients and stuff

like that which I'm not like super familiar with but I think the idea here is that hopefully you could get to something that's like as trustless as IBC but that may maybe still makes it you know gas efficient and light and easier to support than uh than the current the current more like maybe a bit more like axar from that s in terms of the ease of adding new chains uh yeah yeah I think I think the the overlying O like the the the underlying idea here is that you know we have there's there's one approach that aims to create a standard upon which uh anybody can build like so so it's a

trustless standard and so for for example you know if you have if you have like IBC between like a cosmos chain and say like some heterogeneous secret system like ethereum um anyone can sort of build the ZK technology to do that now there might be different approaches to do that there might be like um uh there there would be different approaches to that right if you want to like be efficent have more gas efficiency Etc whereas like the Axel approach takes more takes a more efficient approach um but you do need to rely on the Axel Network and so you have to sort of like reason with the trust assumptions there reason with the possible censorship um reason with you know possible like sanctions and

enforcements and this sort of thing um but I do I yeah I I think that's sort of the way I see it I wonder if that like resonates with you yeah no I think that sounds um sounds good um yeah I mean so you gave a talk at nebul about the about the staking economy that I thought was really good because it kind of like looks at the entirety of the staking landscape and breaks down like different components of it so if anybody's like looking at get a very high level View and understanding of the staking economy you should definitely check out Brian stock at nebular it's on the channel um so one of the things that you talked about here was uh the staking landscape between

Cosmos and ethereum and uh one of the unique things about Cosmos is this uh this you know governance right that like doesn't exist at least on the ethereum layer one um with regards to the fact that like people can uh on Cosmos chains can vote with their tokens um yeah how how how do you see those two things being like different and do you you know do we end up in a as liquid taking becomes more uh more prevalent and more used in Cosmos like currently there's a huge disparity between like the amount of tokens that are liquid Stak in ethereum versus Cosmos um do you think that as liquid staking tokens uh as liquid staking becomes more

prevalent on in Cosmos chains that there's a risk that liquid staking becomes a way like that ends up centralizing governance uh centralizes um uh the control of those tokens essentially in in those liquid staking protocols like yeah walk walk us through how we should look at the risks here right right yeah so I think this is that is an interesting uh topic so basically I think what you have in ethereum right in ethereum you say you don't have delegation but like if you look at the ethereum uh block Explorer you know you see all these validators and and there's just a number and you don't really know who runs this who

doesn't uh it's like very Anonymous as an e holder you're not really you know you you're influence sort of on who is doing all this work it's like very limited I mean you can you can stay sort of your own e in some way uh and I think as a result the the equilibrium the game theoretical equilibrium there is you know kind of and this is I guess where the Meb topic in because I think that's probably one of the key topics uh in sort of the differences here is that you know the equilibrium is like you know maximum extraction right like you try to just get as much money out of these blocks uh as you can and uh and that's not a bad idea right it's not it's not a bad direction right it's just this like

hyper efficiency thing now when you look at Cosmos Cosmos have very different uh staking environment a very different design right because in Cosmos the Val validators they get uh sort of their spot by the token holders and the token and and then you can see everything they're doing on chain right so now if you have a blockchain uh the validators are not likely going to do something that seems sort of you know maybe undermine the attractiveness of the applications built on that blockchain um by like you know maybe front running everyone and uh you know taking some of

their money away when they're trying to trade all right so you have you have this and it's just it's a system where it's much there's much more governance there is governance right in the cosmos chains explicitly so people can say hey we are going to go in a different direction we're going to change some rules we're g to you know slash this person slash that person Min new tokens so that's you know down ups and downsides right like I think the upside is that the cosmos networks are pretty like reactive and will be able to change course pivot you know more easily whereas ethereum has always been this kind of governance minimized approach or they're basically saying hey there's like no

explicit governance governance is this you know obscure long winded process happening on each Research Forum long discussions you know it's rough hard yeah so now when you take the liquid staking topic now if you have liquid staking on ethereum um like let's say Lio for example uh has now a lot of stake and Lio has a governance token right Lio has this kind of governance system so now of course the concern could be if you're on ethereum you're like hey actually we wanted to do to have this neutral protocol uh and we don't want this

governance layer and now we have have like Lio coming in they have a lot of market share and they have a governance system so you know isn't that threatening uh the network now of course the the the response from Lio there is well we are going to turn Lio in something that's governance minimized and more decentralized to basically be kind of in line with the ethereum philosophy so but I think I think there yeah liquid staking is obviously seen by various people in the ethereum industry as a you know as a as a sort of threat to a kind of government capture for ethereum I don't really agree with I'm not I would say I'm not overly worried about that I think the LI of community is very aligned and I think they are

going to design this in a way that a sort of minimal interference way because if they're not they just also risk uh getting um getting Community against them getting dethroned on the cosmo side I mean first of all liquid saking is obviously way way smaller right on on ethereum I think it's something like 30% maybe of the state e is uh through Lio and maybe some through other liquid staing protocol so it's it's it's a very large percentage the reason for this is mainly because there's no delegation because ethereum designed staking in a way that's like not user friendly for a long

time you know you could stake you could not unstake so the only way to kind of keep some control liquidity was stake through liquid staking protocol so you have a liquid stake asset so I think that led to liquid staking being so huge on ethereum on Cosmos staking is just it so by default it works and it's easy right like you just go in your capw and you delegate you st choose a validator stake and you're done right so that that I think that has great advantages right I think it it makes it much easier for a new validator to come in and you know it's easy for people to stake with them it's very difficult on

ethereum for example to build a staking product where you know you're are now going to stake with your e with some validator that actually is significant software development effort um so I think Cosmos has a lower barrier to entry for new validators which I think is great and uh now in terms of liquid staking capture I mean first of all what you don't have in Cosmo as drivers for liquid staking is this poor user experience and limitations um so I think that's um we don't have that driver and then so why would you want to use Liquid staking I mean okay on bonding period you don't have to wait two weeks three

weeks it's it's not really enough I think for most people to say hey I'm going to switch so I think the main benefit for staking on on Cosmos is going to be if people want to reuse their collateral in some way right so they're staking and now they want to do something else but I think right now there's just first of all a lot of people don't want to do that because that always means layering some risk on top and uh most people just don't want to do that and then the other challenge is of course now it's a bare Market there's a very very little defi activity going on so you your your ability to generate returns from liquid staking asset is like very

poor also there aren't very many um you know protocols in in the interchain cosmos space that you know allow you to utilize that collateral to borrow against it I think that's changing I think there's more and more of those that are coming in and and I think that that will probably drive more adoption of liquid staking but currently yeah yeah now I think the other question was is it a big uh risk for Cosmos chains from a sort of governance capture perspective and I kind of doubt it because let's say now you have 20% of Adams are held through stride or something some liquid sing

protocol I mean okay they can of course they could start to vote in governance but I mean they're probably going to do I I think in the end they will do some you know they will do some pass through thing where like you know State adom holders will do the voting so it's should be reasonably aligned and I think you always have the possibility right to for governance on let's say the cosmos hop to kind of intervene so for example it would be pretty simple thing right to say hey uh liquid staking protocol are not allowed to vote in Cosmos hop governance right you could just make governance proposal if people maybe people majority will agree with it

because they feel like hey they're actually a threat and it passes and then I don't know maybe you just Blacklist a bunch of addresses that are used by these liquid staking protocols and they can't vote in governance right so it's hard toce though I mean because like addresses I mean people can just like move addresses around make privacy protocols make make this harder I mean it's not impossible I mean is a liquid staking protocol going to like Shuffle their coins to try to circumvent that no they're not right yeah um I mean so I think the flexibility of Cosmos governance actually means I think it would be easy to react to theid sing protocols and so I I I think that risk is pretty low something I was thinking

about earlier I I was talking to a team today that are you know building a pro a protocol that would allow you to utilize you know your your your Stak assets um uh to as collateral and you know we're talking about this this this governance pass through and and I had a thought which was you know if you take a step back and look at like Quicksilver and their whole philosophy around governance pass through it it's always been clear for them that uh this was very important that you we want to give users the ability well first to decide which validator they would stake with and and also which uh they give them the ability to vote on governance and have full sovereignty over that which was a very different approach to strides and uh and

I wonder how much of that like uh you know people sort of want but don't use right it's like yeah of course like I I want full full control over you know which validator I'm going to to stake with and and and and my governance votes but actually like most people don't like don't really take M put much consideration into which validator they uh delegate with uh nor do they vote on on governance right it's like um yeah so well I don't know I feel like in Colm actually quite a lot of people do so sort of um care about their valid I mean of course yeah Val now yeah but I think I think people in our

circles do but I think a lot of like yeah of course a lot of people don't also that's a lot of people don't yeah yeah I mean like it it it it feels like there's um you know the search for for efficiency and here it's like the search for Capital efficiency leads you to potential centralization right and like similarly to this whole interop ability approach right the search for efficiency and interop ability leads to um you know more more trust having to be put in this thing right so I feel like there's there's sort of like a a tug between you know full uh full sort of decentralization um and some amount of

like having to deal with the pain of of the inefficiency of that system while at this on the other end like if you're looking for efficiency you're you're going to have some trade-offs that will pull you away from like full decentralization full rights on governance and like uh all all of the all the nice things that you know typically people associate with blockchains is is that something you also see like and you know here is the case like I think it's also the case with in terms of uh you know sequencers right for for l2s where uh as we try to um break up the stack right and like have l2s that are fully Sovereign from from the L1 well you come you ran into this problem of of of sequence or

centralization and like as you try to decentralize a sequencer well then you introduce like more complexity um which might not be desirable yeah yeah I mean I think this is a definitely a big there's also some sort of pendulum right it goes in one direction I think there's always pressures towards centralization there's always pressure towards like you know efficient gains um aggregation of things and then I think there's also pressures the other way right where you say like okay now you going to decentralize this I think what's interesting on ethereum and you know I've been spending good amount of time on that in the last months to try to understand that is you know how you really

had you know ended up with a very different model from Cosmos where you have these validators but actually the validators don't create the blocks and you know there's these block builders that are actually creating the blocks and others like searches that submit transactions and bundles these block Builders and uh and then you have Rel layers and so you and you have like different types of Dynamics and economic incentives on the different levels um so I think we you know we're seeing a lot there and it's for example interesting it's also interesting to ask there you know how like how centralized decentralized is ethereum what you look at you look at like the stake or do you look at the block build building market and um yeah I think

that's it's just one of the yeah one of the one of the sort of perennial um tensions in in crypto but I think in the end I think in the end you want these protocols to be open and you know permissionless and uncensorable right and I think if they are I think the most efficient Protocols are going to be like that and and and probably the sort of end state is that you know you need enough decentralization to guarantee those things but you know like you want to balance that with you know having lower cost and higher efficiency and you

know speed and throughput and latency yeah can you talk a bit about some of the work you guys are doing on meev course yeah sure so we've been uh I've been interested in me for a while I've done a bunch of work on this I think the the the work has sort of different flavors you know there's more like research work um and then there's more like practical work on the research work uh you know for example we've been working with dydx on uh looking at how me should work on dydx so dydx is of course interesting because it's an it's going it's a Cosmos app chain it's going to be Cosmos app chain uh they're also using their validators to actually do matching of order so they they actually

taking on some of the functionality from an exchange and of course exchanges are the main places where Meb is taking place so it's like an interesting question of like how should the chain like dydx manage this um manage MV so we wrote kind of you know long research report on this which has been published so you can check it out and uh you know I think a lot of these ideas are getting implemented um when it comes to um how you know DX chain is going to work and how they're going to approach M on the on the ethereum side we've sort of been doing more like practical work uh which has been around optimizing um me rewards so basically seeing like you know what are the

different things that determine you know how profitable the blocks are that you end up mining when you're the proposer or you end up kind of proposing uh when it's your turn and uh you know Gathering data and you know we're running now a sort of modified e client at least on some validators um and you know seeing yeah and and sort of to to optimize some of the things there and I think that's been really interesting in terms of learning a lot and it's also been great in that we've been able to you know generate higher returns than normal e validators and I think that's uh yeah that's that's kind of what we're doing there and you know we so you're running

your own ethereum client you guys are buly I mean it's it's just a it's the existing client right with a small modification okay is this open sourced no this is not open sourced no okay so it's a course one Secret Sauce yeah exactly but but there is a blog post um if you go to the course one blog and maybe you can link to this um that actually goes into a lot of it's called me matters uh and it goes into a lot of detail on what we're doing there so I think if people are interested um they you can learn a lot about um how we've

approached this and and also about how the whole block the whole this whole process works of uh blocks being produced on ethereum and it's it's a very interesting I think most people have no idea about this I mean even I was fairly clueless about this until not that long ago I mean I kind of had some understand understanding but it's um it's really changed dramatically from the way it used to work in the past and that the way also that other blockchains work and uh yeah what about the I mean what what about the work being done in the cosmos side of things like um are you are you excited about the M work that's happening there like you know from skip for instance or I mean we we we we do have we are kind of an advisor

to skape as well we've been working with them pretty closely you know we're sharing a lot of the research it was definitely great team and um yeah I mean I think CH the challenge a little bit right now is just that there is not um it's not not that much going on um and I think you know Skip obviously built their solution for osmosis which I think makes a lot of sense right they were just kind of capture the most uh most obvious MB and sort of internalize in the protocol um and then you know I think dydx is probably going to the most interesting chains in this Regard in Cosmos um but I think it's I think that you know where we sort of arrived at in

the dydx thing is actually that you know it's more something that validators not going to do meev you know like that's kind of the that the chain basically says hey we don't want validators to do M to like you know manipulate the order of transactions and all that kind of stuff and then have you know some enforcement mechanisms to ensure that that really happens that way but I I have actually little doubt that um and I hope I hope I'm characterizing correctly what where dydx is ending ended up with but I think I am um and and I think that's really leveraging the advantage of being an app chain and having like delegation and the valid set that's like

accountable in the line of chain that you can do that kind of thing and I think it's that's going to be a very big advant Advantage for app chains over projects building on you know ethereum yeah I mean so I I had uh Magnus on the podcast last week and we talked about this this block SDK that they that they built and uh yeah I mean this this is sort of like what you're what you're what you're hinting at here is just you know the the validators are not going to have uh the final say or at least in large part on how the block is built that will be the application will decide how the block is built and that's in large part due to apci Plus+ that now

allows this and the block SDK is a way for the application to dictate to the validator how they will build the block essentially yeah yeah I think that's also very interesting as a maybe sort of generalized approach for how this can be done in na chains yeah yeah and there there is some work being done on ethereum here he talked about this this Pepsi uh initiatives P PC I don't know what it stands for but um I've got I'm not familiar with that one yeah so it's um yeah unbundling I'll put a link to it in the show notes as well but yeah this uh this article in ethereum research um towards protocol enforced proposer commitments Pepsi okay which probably

take seven years to roll up but um yeah cool yeah I want to talk about the ICF a little bit if you have a bit more time um sure let's do it so yeah you you you just became the the the foundation council president so I think for for a lot of people in the space and like people in crypto Twitter and like the broader community and Cosmos I feel like a lot of people don't necessarily understand what is the ICF like just organizationally you know like how many people are there and like you know I think a lot of people see the ICF as this kind of massive of organization you know with like tons of resources Etc and that may be true but we'll we'll

find out here um but then but then also like its role and its mandate and also the fact that it has you know these uh that it is a Swiss foundation and it has a sort of legal framework around it so maybe un unpack all that for people and maybe paint a a clear picture of just what the ICF is and what his role is yeah sure sure yeah I mean so I mentioned earlier right basically ICF was like set up in the beginning in Switzerland as a Swiss Foundation Swiss Foundation means it's a nonprofit it doesn't have any owners right the organization um but it has a sort of mandate no it's I don't think it's own B

with people either it's basically it's just it's basically uh an organization with assets and with a particular sort of mandate for what to do with those assets and it can use assets you know as long as it's within that mandate and then there's a Swiss supervisory body that will like you know do Audits and check that that's actually being done and you know the Mandate is it's kind of Broad in some way you know it's just like Foster decentralized Technologies and uh you know Sovereign I I don't remember exactly but you know basically on a high level you know support Cosmos ecosystem Network Sovereign blockchains uh interoperability and um yeah that's basically what the ICF uh you know that's what it is and what it what it

mandate is um the current you know currently I think the ICF has a bit less than uh you know it's something like 270 million uh Swiss Franks in assets or dollar no that's dollars $270 million in assets and you know that mostly derives from the atoms that the you know the foundation originally received when it was set up and and also to some ENT from the Bitcoin and Eve that was uh gotten in the uh the fundraiser there and uh you know it basically has this These funds to use for that purpose and uh the main thing that the foundation does is the foundation funds Cosmos development

so the foundation does have its own team so it has you know some operations Finance team it has a team around marketing and Communications and then it has an IBC team right that's that's doing IBC go um developing IBC go and um but but but the vast majority of the budget goes to other organizations that are building you know open source software uh around the cosmos ecosystem so these are things like you know Comet bft you know sort of the the tender or the consensus Comet bft it's IBC you know where the ICF funds a variety of different organizations it's a cosmos SDK it's um

the cosmos Hub work you know around like interchange security things like that uh it's also like CMM to some extent so um yeah so the ICF basically like funds these different teams to build that work that then ends up being you know open source and uh so yeah so I think the the COS the ICF is definitely the main funding entity for for all of these uh efforts um and then you have a variety of different companies like some example are informal systems so so the company Ethan started there is um you know um binary builders that was sort of spun out actually those people mostly used to be at the at the

subsidiary of the ICF and kind of spun out into their own thing um Marco and own a bunch of others that are doing Cosmos 6K and they are also running something called the builders program program uh which is also funded by the ICF the builders program is basically like a program where people can go to if they like they want to spin up their own Cosmos SDK chain and they want help you know they want to help figure out tokenomics and legal setup and you know strategy so the buy new Builders is kind of a or the builders program is something that's supports those um those people tries to get new chain into the cosmos um yeah and that's kind of what the ICF basically does right the main

thing is fund these things in the cosmos ecosystem you know to to move things forward and to also make sure that you know even in the bare market right things things keep getting built and the technology keeps progressing yeah I mean I think that's um that that's pretty clear and I think yeah maybe what what are some of the things that you think uh people get wrong about the I yeah yeah I mean I think the thing that people uh the thing where it gets a little bit tricky is that you know if you if you look at these things like Comet bft Cosmos I

mean there these are very complex projects and um there are teams that are driving this that are generally like outside of the ICF and of course if if you compare the ICF with other foundations right with like let's say something like um I know ethereum Foundation or like many other foundations they are very they have a much more that also the road map and the direction it gets driven by the foundation and I think at the ICF it's just the case that all the people doing that kind of work ended up uh you know they kind of let left early on and went to start different

organizations in this Cosmos ecosystem so I think often people sort of want the ICF to maybe have this role of you know this is the direction this is where we're going and this is something that the ICF is not particularly well set up to do right so the ICF I think has been very much of a neutral entity we've never voted in governance and you know we certainly try to participate and contribute to this this process of you know where should Cosmos go what should we prioritize um but we're not really set up to drive this uh now I think it is it is who do you think should take

should take sorry who do you think should take that role is it I mean because you know we had a Twitter spaces this week where we were talking about like vision and sort of like carrying forward to the road map and everything do you think do you think it would be necessary for at least some organization or like if it's not the ICF then maybe another organization or like a group of organizations to to to take on that role and sort of like directionally leading the space whether it's like the interchain stack and the interchain Broadley or even like the cosmos Hub yeah I mean I think when it comes to the particular projects we have actually kind of gone in that direction right so where we had you know for example there

were like different Cosmos SDK teams in different places uh and you know then we were like okay no binary Builders is like you know that's kind of the team that like is the product owner of this and they're driving it forward and uh and I think with the cosmos hop it was a similar thing where there's like actually Cosmos hop teams in different places and then we would like okay the cosmos Hub work that gets funded from the ICF is kind of coordinated primarily and driven by uh informal systems so I I think when it comes to sort of you know the technical road map and progress uh you know of the cosmos hop at least to the extent that it's getting funded from the ICF I think that's mostly at

informal and and I think that definitely has its Advantage but of course in the end [Music] um you know the adom holders will decide right as we see in governance votes right and and so um they they can always have their own Direction and vision and yeah have a great answer of course it's it's it's a it's a sort of double-edged thing right on the one hand you're like hey it's great because it's very decentralized it's open people can just come bring up ideas and uh and that's great and at the same time it helps a lot if there's you know someone who's like this is the direction where we going and um gives that kind of

clarity and guidance and and it can make things easier and and I think that kind of leader Cosmos does not often this is like one person right that is the founder of a project and has huge public sature and they have a very clear vision and the cosmos doesn't have that and you know that's blessing and a curse um I do hope that in the future we will be able to coordinate better in you know using governance and onchain mechanisms to kind of you know make decisions agree on things empy funding um but yeah it's it's it's it's it's definitely a challenge for

sure yeah it it feels like um it feels like a challenge is very it's it's quite unique to Cosmos and and I think I mean I'm not entirely sure of this but I think probably there are other big software projects that you know suffer maybe not in crypto but like thinking about like Linux for example like the Linux kernel I don't know I think there's like probably a lot of organizations that are driving that you know certainly a lot of web Technologies right there's not like a single organization that's driving the development of HTML and C++ and the standards there it's a Consortium of you know lots of different companies and stakeholders Google you know and like Facebook and like tons of other companies that are part of this w3c Consortium you know I think for a long time in crypto broadly we've we've kind

of like talked about whether or not we would need some sort of Consortium um you know this something we were talking about I think like five six years ago you know um that never really materialized but you know I wonder if if if in Cosmos uh you know there would be a benefit since it is very decentralized and that is I think a benefit I think it is a benefit because we get lots of great ideas and then also you have like uning governance that's that's that's a part of that decision process if if we would not benefit from having a some some sort of a formal Consortium body right where like people different stakeholders teams working like product owners Etc the ICF token holders can kind of like come together um

and um have a a forum where the vision can be discussed where like the directionality of the software can be discussed and then those those conversations also like feed into governance uh on like onchain governance Forum posts Twitter spaces Etc yeah yeah I mean I think there's um definitely um definitely I think a lot of things can be done on on that front and I think I I totally agree I think that's an important thing so now that you've like moved into this role um what what areas would you like the ICF to say like uh you know improve on or are there

like specific areas of development that you that you're interested in building out at the ICF yeah I mean I think there's a there's a bunch of things that are sort of the areas of focus uh at the moment I mean I think I think one thing is the extension of the foundation Council uh yeah so basically we we want to add some new people to the foundation Council and that that's kind of going on at the moment we've received quite a lot of applications uh you know a lot of like great applications you know at the moment like going through them interviewed some people we re interview some more people and I think we'll you know we'll soon add a few more people and I think that that's an important thing it's been kind of for for a long time we're like hey we need to do

something there and I think um you know I'm happy that that that's kind of should be happening very soon uh you know another thing that that the moment's going on uh that's you know high priority is just sort of budget for 2024 so you know how much is going to get funded for different areas you know the organizations that are going to get funded uh so that's something where you know the ICF focused on there's this kind of process where different organizations are trying to give input and I think that's that's something yeah we need to get done and then in terms of you know areas of improvement I think the one of the most important ones is that the ICF needs to

do a good job at giving out the money it does right we want to pay the an appropriate amount we don't want to P too much we don't want to pay too little we want to give it to the things that really have the biggest impact if something's not working we should stop giving them money uh and I think all of that that's that's actually very challenging to do because these are complex software projects and um yeah so I think that improving that is is is probably the number one priority so that we can give funding uh more effectively better you know with more data more understanding and uh we are also looking to hire at the ICF um for this so if someone's like super interested in this

uh you know reach out so I think that's that's something that is you is I would say is one of the most important areas of focus um I think another and then it gets a bit more um yeah like I would say I would say in other area that there could also be improvements is around the communication marketing and communication and I think the um you know the ICF could play an important role and and I think this is also something that came up in Twitter spaces you organize right in terms of communicating to other ecosystem you know what is the cosmos SDK like what's the cosmos Vision why should we build on

Cosmos like how does it work you know uh where should you go and I think you know that that's happening like to some extent but there's no question that I think we could do like a much much better job at that and I think that's also going to be one area where you know we will make sense to to invest and improve our capabilities yeah you you you'd be surprised just how many people reach out to me and ask me for an intro to the ICF and my response is usually like well I mean the ICF like why and then they're like oh because we want to work in Cosmos like well the ICF is not the right organization to to talk to directly because they're you know you want to be talking to the individual teams I think no later than like yesterday you know we had another

request and um and and then you know I I I think I think some something useful here would be you know at a maybe like some kind of a craphy of like all the different teams and what the responsibilities are and you know who are the sort of key people and product owners um and then you know maybe to some extent you know uh like a um ecosystem representative or like developer relations representative at the ICF that can like take calls and make introductions because you're you know like want to have you know they want to have a call with someone um and sort of the way to field you know those requests to different places in the

space um that feels like you know an easy uh an easy sort of easy thing to implement right and and um yeah and it would add a lot of value yeah no absolutely I think that that that could make lot of sense yeah yeah cool well I mean I'm excited for the future of the interchain uh with uh with with you at the Helm of the foundation Council I think uh I think uh you'll do a great uh did a great job and like hopefully um um you know hopefully the ICF I mean I know the ICF will will greatly benefit from from your leadership there and and of course like bringing more people also into the foundation council is is really

terrific like bringing more more ideas and more diverse backgrounds into into the decision-making process and yeah so I think we'll end it there um it's getting really hot in my studio right thank so much for all your work I think you've done such a great job too with like you know the I mean communicating and like just exploring the cosmos ecosystem bringing the great podcast content here and and then if you you know very excited about what you going to do with your Ventures Cosmos focused interchange Focus Ventures fun as well yeah I mean there's no other space I'd want to be spending time in right now so so yeah we're we're also very bullish on the interchain and we want to yeah we

want to like share this content with people like so that they understand just how great the tech is and then we also want to invest in great projects that are you know utilizing that Tech so cool all right well thanks so much thanks Brian