ZKPodcast: The Early Days of Cosmos, Chorus One & Epicenter with Brian Crain

Transcript

[Music] welcome to xero knowledge i'm your host anna rose in this podcast we will be exploring the latest in zero knowledge research and the decentralized web as well as new paradigms that promise to change the way we interact and transact online [Music] this week i chat with brian fabian crane the co-founder of chorus one the pos validator and fellow podcaster over at epicenter podcast we chat about the early days of crypto in berlin the role that epicenter played in his life and his thinking around the space he shares the origin story of

cosmos and the validator ecosystem as well as some backstory into course one the zk validator is now working with course one on two of the networks we validate on cosmos and osmosis cosmos was only announced after the recording so we didn't actually mention it in the show but i thought i'd mention it now now a few notes before we start in next week i will be taking the week off from the podcast so there will be no episode but in the meantime keep an eye on xeroknowledge.fm the website because we will soon be launching an updated version i'm hoping to do that during the break and there will be all sorts of cool stuff to explore there and while you're at it you may want to check out the latest jobs board after the last ck jobs fair there's a whole

new batch of jobs there so if you're thinking to jump into the space be sure to check it out i also want to thank this week's sponsor ey blockchain smart contracts with robust privacy technologies are the future of both business and finance at ey they are investing in tools like their smart contract review services to assess consistency with standards and best practices users can run pre-defined automated tests and simulate smart contract execution by configuring selected functions through their user interface to find out more about their technology and services visit blockchain.ey.com i've added the link in the show notes so thank you again ey blockchain now here is my interview with brian [Music]

so today i'm here with brian fabian crane the co-founder and co-host of epicenter and the co-founder of course one welcome to the show brian yeah thanks so much for having me anna i've been a big fan of your podcast so it's a great honor to be here well i've been a big fan of your podcast as well and actually that's where i want to start this conversation one of the reasons i also wanted to have you on here was the epicenter podcast for me was very important very formative when i was first getting into the space like this is what i was listening to and i don't know if you remember the first time that we met i fangirled i heard your voice like you were sitting ahead of me on a bus or something like

in mexico at devcon 3 i think and i was like i know that voice and i went up and i was like you're brian from the podcast i don't know if you remember this yeah i i do remember it was this polar chain party uh in like 2017 right that deathcorn in cocoon which was uh yeah sort of during the last bubble but yeah during that crazy time kicking off this interview i want to find out a little bit about where you started brian what was the starting point for you in this entire ecosystem yeah as a child i became or as a teenager i became quite interested in

like economics and i was reading you know like milton friedman and some of these libertarian ideas and this was very appealing to me and then i went to the us and i studied economics in college and then i was kind of lost because i was like i don't know what to do and for a little bit i tried to you know i did like an internship as an investment bank and i was like okay this is not it and then i was also interested in you know startups and so dabbled a bit there but there was also you know i was just working on things that i fundamentally just like did not care about and then i discovered like bitcoin so this was like in 2013 and that was just for me like immediately

it just felt like everything came together where you know there was this audacious enormous vision of like creating this new different world and they also felt like there was just you know enormous uh sea of possibilities of things that have to be done and things that could be explored and so yeah pretty much immediately like fell down this uh you know rabbit hole and at the time i was finishing a master's thesis i was sort of you know working on that but then i had moved to berlin and whenever i was like cycling around i was listening to let's go bitcoin and let's talk bitcoin had started like two months before but they were pretty

good you know they were putting out like two episodes a week so i was listening to like all of them and i was already quite sold on you know i did not know where to start i didn't feel i had any kind of you know useful skills at the time there was very little money at the time in the space you know like in in europe maybe there were like five companies that had raised any kind of financing and you know if someone raised like half a million this was like uh you know back then there was like the master coin token sale and they raised raised like maybe less than a million but that seemed like a lot it seemed like very much of a success so uh so i didn't really know like where to go and what to do but i did very much

feel like the podcasting is just a super powerful tool and you know i felt with podcasting okay i could like learn about the space i could speak with people about it i could you know produce something that's like useful to others get to know people but also to network and uh so then yeah then i basically started this podcast together with sebas yeah future like at the end of 2013. i also started like the bitcoin meetup berlin at the time so bruin hat had kind of an early bitcoin scene you know there was like room 77 where which was like the first place where you could pay i think like you know go to a bar and pay with bitcoin they started a burger

11 yeah by burger and so there was a bit there there was you know some very early adopters but there was no meetup at the time that had like presentations and content so i also started that and you know ran that for like many years but uh yeah the podcast was i think was what helped me the most in you know getting to know the industry and now i think we're like basically still running right so now it's it's like 400 episodes and 2013 so that's seven and a half years now okay yeah so it's wild it's so interesting brian what you're saying about entering into the space at

the time where like if you're not a technologist if you're not a dev yourself i mean i experienced something very similar when i joined like i had worked in startups but the role that i had taken in the startup that i had done before i couldn't quite replicate in when you're talking about like protocol level development it was sort of so far from the customer facing side of things that i you know for a long time was also kind of like where can i contribute something to the space and it sounds like i mean you were there even earlier what kind of roles were there even like were there product roles or was it really really just the deep tech devs researchers at the time

i mean the thing that i felt i could do was like okay i can organize the meet up and then you know in the beginning i gave a lot of talks myself too you know there was like the ethereum white paper came out and i was like okay i'm gonna do talk about the ethereum white paper and like explain some of the ideas in there or like so i did quite a lot of talks in the beginning but there was pretty much immediately there were like you know 30 40 people who came to the meetups regularly and and it was like very informal and just different people doing different talks so you know that's the thing i felt i could do and then there was the podcast which again you know was accessible right like you just have to show up and ask decent questions and then i think you can like

do something useful you know we did do some attempts at creating some kind of you know co-working space but that didn't really work out at the time but yeah that was kind of what i felt i could do at a later point there was you know gavin came to berlin so gavin wood was working on ethereum and i think they came to berlin in like the summer of 2014 and you know i organized the meetup for like sort of the first meetup where they would like present ethereum at the time and uh you know sort of try to help a little bit them to you know sort of set foot in germany i did help also if

there was a german company where like all these developers were hired you know that was kind of a service provider to the ethereum foundation so like i helped set that up and i sort of tried to see if i could like uh you know help in ethereum which i could a little bit yeah that meetup by the way that meetup is so famous like i was not there i know at least six people who were at that event and who will still to this day cite it as like that was one of their first maybe blockchain events that's where they met like very key people that like influence their lives it's a really interesting one totally i think in the beginning these meetups were really awesome and you know

at some point i stopped doing them because it felt like they didn't have the same effect anymore also it was just the reach of the meetup is so much smaller than like of a podcast so but yeah i think in the beginning it was great and yeah so i helped a little bit with ethereum and then i joined uh this project called um aries industries at the time so that was kind of my first more proper job and uh is that a blockchain project or yeah so they renamed later to monax but okay i mean i think aeros industries monax was like also an interesting company of interesting ideas two of the founders were lawyers and one was a lawyer coder and they started working on ethereum like

before the term launch you know and basically were like okay how can we make um you know a sort of ethereum version that's more like in sync with legal contracts and legal structures and basically they wrote their own version of the evm actually you know one of the first engineers at that company is ethan bachmann so no way i worked with ethan back there like he was like i think maybe first engineering hire and i was like you know joined soon after he was very involved in cosmos yeah well so the story of aerys is very much linked to the story of cosmos interesting because they you know ares was um looking to build basically on ethereum but they wanted to have in a

different kind of chain fulfilling a bit of a different need and you know they they changed the edm with different permissioning but the other thing is they wanted to replace proof-of-work and then they were like okay how are we going to do that and then they found uh tendermint wow and tendermint at the time was like j and the white paper and a bit of code like a research project still yeah yeah totally but aries had raised vc venture funding so they had a bunch of money and you know there was like maybe seven people whereas jay was just jay you know there was there was nobody else i think working on tenement and so eris became the first user of tenement

and christine and then ethan was sort of spending a lot of his time uh you know getting paid by errors but trying to like fix tendermint and get it into some sort of like usable state you know and then that didn't really go anywhere i think the entire enterprise blockchain thesis i would say uh ended up being false like my my thinking around it was that i felt that the user experience would be like really hard and that it was just so far away to make like end user applications that would be compelling that i felt in an enterprise

maybe you could first get like some adoption and later would become but i think the thing that you didn't realize at the time was icos and just the economics around tokens that allow you to bootstrap things so fast and to generate so much momentum like before there's real usage and then on the other side you have all of these enterprise use cases where it's basically before you launch the chain you have to have these different parties come to some agreement about you know what are the rules of this chains how does it work and you have this sort of weird situation where

you know generally there would be a particular industry and there's something about this industry that you want to do different that's very inefficient and you want to like use a blockchain to make it much more efficient but then you have these competitors that somehow need to come together to collaborate but they're also competing and i don't think any of this stuff really went anywhere because they're it's just way too slow and complex and political and then you have to the sort of political issues in one organization multiply with the other organization totally it's interesting i've heard like companies try to use the blockchain element to just try to digitize a business like this is back in 2017 where they would use like we have a blockchain

which everyone was really hyped about so it would kind of get the attention of the higher ups but really all they were trying to do was change the organization at all and try to bring in like a digital thing and that just tells you about like where these orgs are at like they are not ready to truly embrace something as experimental as a blockchain they maybe would chase the dream for a proof of concept but like they're not even digital businesses yet on so many other levels right and monax had traction with like you know there was quite a lot of proof of concept there was some partnership with you know pwc and deloitte and you know ups and deutsche bank and swiss re and they're like many of these like huge corporates did build like pocs on it and

some of it was maybe even cool but you know i've been reading in the last days there's this great article about tesla uh often this like wait but why i don't know if you know that website yeah yeah i know right and it's interesting to read this where really it was sort of predictable like a long time ago that you know electric cars will be like superior and they will take over but all of these car companies they were just so stuck in you know this mindset of we have this uh normal gas car and we have to focus on making it like you know two percent better for next year and i think the ability to sort of

disrupt yourself like that's really hard to do and then in this enterprise blockchain world you generally would want that all of these companies somehow together like disrupt themselves and it just doesn't really seem to work but in that tesla example like what happened instead was like a competitor came along that just leapfrogged so far ahead that like all of those companies have stepped up since then and have totally changed their internal paradigms but i think what you're saying is like you couldn't just count on those orgs getting together and making those changes as a coalition you needed that like

star that like surpassed them that they could aim for almost yeah and i think there is something just fundamentally better about public blockchains where you know you have this permissionless innovation and you know people can build something and then you can say okay i want to like join in on this versus you know you up from getting together and like making this grand plan of how the system's going to work so yeah i mean i think in the end to me it feels like public blockchains are just fundamentally superior to private blockchains and these permission blockchains and the pace of innovation has just been probably like 100 times as high in this

world so you know i guess we'll see what comes out of all that i have not followed it too much in the last years but i'm not so you're not bullish on that i want to go back to what you were saying about this sort of origin story of cosmos because you were really close to that so you were kind of in the thick of it it sounds like you were there when jay and ethan were getting together right so when i was like when i joined eris then you know i knew okay they were building on tenement and i was running the bitcoin meetup at the time so i was like okay let me let me give a talk at the meetup about tendermint uh so you know i gave this talk and i think we live streamed it and jay was

like watching it and it was like oh great talk you know because he was like oh someone's giving a talk about the enemy this is cool um you know actually at the time tendermint was also trying to do some kind of enterprise blockchain use case really yeah yeah weird okay they were trying to raise like vc money and they were targeting more corporates because they had a similar idea that they felt like okay this is where you're gonna be able to get some traction first it was not the thing for them and then they didn't really succeed with that but then this cosmos white paper came out like in this i think summer 16

and then you know i felt monax was not going anywhere so i left that and it was like okay what do i do next and at the time ethan had already left monax and had joined jay to work on tendermint and so yeah i was also exploring okay what do i do next and of course i knew knew about cosmos and i thought this was like you know very cool idea and cool technology and also something where i could help because it was like four developers at the time and there was you know when i joined it there was not even like a weekly meeting it was just like chatting on slack yeah just a group of people getting

together this is interesting i mean i want to revisit cosmos but this for me it's the first time i actually heard about an origin story of cosmos first of all and it's the first time i understand your connection to it because i've always sort of associated some like the work you do with that ecosystem but i wasn't exactly sure as to why but i want to come back to cosmos because i want to jump more into epicenter while all of this was happening while you were running these meetups you had started this podcast i'm really curious as a fellow podcaster what were those early episodes like like what was it like for you to do this were you doing it weekly right away were you just sort of doing it for fun yeah where did you start

i mean at first you know it was even like sebastian and us and speaking about the news in the beginning we didn't have guests in the first few episodes but then pretty soon we started having guests and started doing uh you know studying podcasts i mean we pretty much immediately were interested in you know kind of all things crypto like beyond bitcoin as well we started the podcast in december 2013 and you know that was just at the same time the ethereum white paper came out so i think also like you know one of the first 10 episodes or something is about like ethereum wow and you know we did episodes on like counterparty at the time and you know colored coins and just like whatever

that was was it hard to find guests back then like was it hard to fill a podcast about these kinds of projects no no even at the time there was enough going on that you could have an episode every week so no it wasn't all the i think i mean at the time it was still right like you could there was a bitcoin reddit which was the main home of the crypto community and it was still a time when you know if there was a newspaper that mentioned bitcoin then you know someone would go and like take a picture of it and post it on reddit and be like hey look someone mentions bitcoin this is awesome uh yeah so it was definitely very you know fringe still you know when i

sort of wanted to buy bitcoin at the time there was no real exchange in europe so you know i was using like local bitcoins meeting up with people in person cash these cash transactions so it was early but you know there was already community and and it was already growing fast at least it felt like that to me and then of course i joined the bitcoin community and i remember uh there was in berlin there was this bitcoin exchange berlin which was organized by this guy aaron koenig and he wanted to have like a place where people would get together physically to

trade bitcoin and like meet each other so it's a mix between like social thing and you know i went there to i think the first one of these and bought some bitcoins from the local bitcoins founder he was there and uh wow you know this was i remember it was like bitcoin was like at 70 euros or something like that and this was after the crash you know in early 2013 it was a crash and then it started rising and so i kind of got into it after that crash what had been the peak at that point what was right before then i think it was like 230 dollars or something okay okay 70.

it crashed yeah something like that and then you know i got into it and it started rising very quickly and it was interesting because i had this perception pretty quickly that you know people are gonna basically look at this and they're going to say well there's some probability that you know the world is going to adopt this and understand this and if that happens obviously the value of bitcoin could be enormous right much much bigger and so if you look at this and you say okay there's like a non-zero probability even at one percent probability i mean i thought it was much higher but like let's say somebody felt even like even then it would make sense to say i'm

gonna put some money in that so i felt there was this self-fulfilling prophecy that would basically like get to mass adoption so quickly and then we had of course the 2013 bull market that brought a lot of people into the space and you know i felt that okay we were like on track to like mass adoption very quickly and yeah that didn't turn out to be that way it was still a few years off i guess i don't even know if we're there yet yeah um that's crazy though wild times i wonder like given where you were positioned and the fact that you were interviewing all these people and you had seen sort of the early ethereum stuff

i entered the space so much later and i entered in berlin which is very ethereum focused in general so a lot of my understanding of the space starts at ethereum and then goes out from that but you were there before ethereum then after like i've always recognized a bit of a schism between those two ecosystems like how have you navigated that like you were also very bitcoin were you skeptical of ethereum at the beginning or were you like i'm into it you know i was like unsure if it would work but like it was always clear to me that this is like a very cool idea that past potential and i never had this uh i would say more tribal tendencies and episode used to be called

epson and bitcoin yeah and the meetup i started was the bitcoin startups berlin meetup and at a later point renamed it to the blockchain meetup berlin and there was definitely some people who were like absolutely not happy about this um i would say we were fairly involved in the whole block size debate as well where did you land on that debate what did you want i mean i was very much in favor of increasing the block size like uh the arguments against it just did not make any sense to me and i felt they were like intellectually incoherent and i remember we did a podcast with

mike kearn he was a google engineer and he discovered bitcoin maybe 2010 and he wrote the bitcoin java implementation it was maybe the first other bitcoin client and he was like communicating a lot with satoshi as well so he was like very very early and then we did a podcast with him and you know he was much like bitcoin development is ground to a halt and you know he was basically sort of making a lot of very negative predictions about what would happen when the blocks get full and it was like it's imperative we increase the block

size now and then i remember when we had that podcast you know that was then on reddit you had like a thousand comments and it was very controversial it sounds it was very controversial especially it was i guess there were a lot of these disagreements were there between different bitcoin developers there was you know my kern and garen and driessen were kind of the main ones that were in favor of increasing the block size and then you had on the other side you know greg maxwell and some of the other especially that would later kind of aggregate in block stream that were against it but this was not so

apparent that there was these divisions and you know it's kind of came up and you kind of stepped into it maybe by accident a little bit there yeah yeah so we did also you know we did some podcasts with adam back and greg maxwell too and we you know sort of had these uh aiming guns here was pretty involved in that debate too because he was very much on like he was definitely on the increasing block side i did become a bit disillusioned with bitcoin then because i just didn't feel the arguments against increasing the block size were intellectually honest you know now in retrospect i think maybe it was a good thing that

it wasn't increased i'm not sure i think the only argument really against it having been increased or for like leaving it the same is that you know if it is this kind of immutable thing and you cannot affect the rules and this barrier is super high it also makes it much harder for you know governments regulators etc to go in and demand a the amount of change exactly so i don't know if the block size had been increased maybe it would have sort of shown this path of like okay here's how you change some of the core rules and so in retrospect maybe it wasn't a bad thing i don't know

but the arguments were around decentralization and those just didn't make sense and i was hearing you know there was this debate last week that i watched where there was also elon musk and jack dorsey and stuff and you know musk was also like basically bringing up the same thing again it's like this is not making any sense right like the i mean this was written in 2008 and if you think of like how much the internet speed have increased like that the block size is still the same i mean there's no technical justification for that but one of the things i wanted to actually ask you is like what other episodes do you really stand out to you like must

be so hard because you have 400 episodes i know maybe you're not on all of them but like you have a lot to choose from but yeah is there any other like big highlight episodes where you're like this was a thing yeah i remember we did an episode with juan about ipfs maybe that was like episode 100 or something like that but that was pretty amazing one where i think i mean he's just such a incredibly eloquent visionary so i you know we had some we did a bunch of episodes with italic that were great i mean i very much enjoyed the bitcoin episodes you know with like my current garden and reason yeah another one that i guess i remember

was we did an episode with amy gonzir and vlad zamfir about the doll you know because they published this paper of like oh these are some of the issues with the doll and then we did this episode with them oh yeah the dao yeah so we did this episode with them and we're talking about it and talking about okay you know like also these curators and like always in you know centralization and control there and then and then they had like the hack happen like a few weeks afterwards and then afterwards you had the sec report and they were like quoting our podcast as like evidence against that that was security so that was pretty funny were you interviewing a lot of people during that time

around this topic like all the different factions and different proposals were you following that i mean i'm not sure we were doing like that i think we did a few episodes on it i don't know how don't remember exactly how closely we were but i definitely remember that one where we talked about you know some of these posts about like issues in the doll yeah i think this is something that sort of inspired you know frederick and i when we started this was the idea of not making a podcast that just follows news it's much more about exploring a topic i feel like epicenter is definitely in that camp like you guys seem to like explore your own curiosity a lot like you look for

ideas that you're into not necessarily like just reporting the latest thing yeah yeah no definitely we i think that was always our approach to it yeah cool where we last left off in your stories is sort of the cosmos world had just started but i also want to for sure get to in this show course one and that project so yeah where were you at and what led you to actually start a validator on the side of having this podcast that was getting more and more successful yeah so i mean i was working uh a tendermint and i joined tenement where i think it was like four people there was you know ethan jay pong and then me and ethan frey i think

joined at the same time so you know it's a small team i mean i joined in like january and then in april or something like that there was the fundraiser and in that year the team grew from you know icf was established and the team grew from you know five people to 40 people wow and tenement was very much of a mess as an organization and it was just very difficult to like work effectively in in that environment and you know i also help with full note you know this kind of initiate that in berlin but then i you know i felt like a bunch of stuff i worked on had come to you know some reasonable closure and just wasn't

that effective in this and then it again was clear to me that proof-of-stake is the future of how blockchains are secured i mean this is not i would say an original insight at all i mean ethereum had already written in the white paper in 2013 right about switching the proof of stake and tendermaine was also like around the same time the white paper and so it was clear to me that uh and you know tazos was also working on it then and uh you know i thought okay we're gonna have all these proof of stake networks but like in in the cosmos ride baby had this role of a validator but i'm like who's going to be this

violated there's no nobody is working on this and you know it just felt like somebody should should work on this and focus on that and so we started course one so it was actually in mexico uh that we in concord that we decided so my hair and i uh there was actually after the defcon there was kind of like a cosmos like retweet which was you know the core team and a bunch of other people and my hair was there as well so my co-founder of course and um you know we decided okay let's we'll start this company and so then i left tenement and we started uh working on this validator at the time it was like how do you run a proof of stake validate

real no idea and we were also not you know we did not have any knowledge about you know infrastructure and neither of us is really software developers so it ended up taking us basically over a year you know almost a year and a half to get to the point where you could like okay we can like run the cosmos validator like reliably cool what was the challenge was it finding people because i mean also at that time like cosmos it was still on test net i guess during that period yeah yeah so the test and there were test nets and there were several challenges definitely finding building a team was not easy so i think

we also made some hires that didn't work out and then so we lost a lot of time that way and the other thing was also we did not really know where to focus so the first engineer we hired had this idea that okay you have to have like automated failovers because we were like uptimes are very important so we have to have you know multiple validators running in different data centers and then if one goes down the other one automatically takes over so we're like okay that's that's what people are gonna expect and so we've got built that now that's not easy to build and so we spend a lot of effort in that we spend a lot of effort in you know developing a tool for like key generation and key transmission you

know that you could like split them back up and that thing i think was probably like a good investment and right thing to do but for example the automated failover was definitely the wrong thing to do in retrospect and it was you know it's a bad reward for how much effort it was just didn't to make any sense this is before these networks had launched maybe tesos or one of the early ones may have been there but like how were you funding this at the time actually yeah no there was not anything yet i mean tesla's had not launched so there was no stake network that was live at the time i mean maher and i you know we have both made some money from like ethereum and bitcoin and so we we put in some money and then you know

it was a small thing like we didn't pay ourselves and you know it was like five people and so we had like you know three people to pay in the first year and uh but yeah we were basically you know funding it we did also try to raise venture capital money in like 2018 uh and that didn't like work out and then we kind of switched a little bit where we also started thinking like okay let's focus more on like earning revenues instead of trying to you know concoct some story that like would appeal to vcs and that was also i think a big turning point for us because uh it just allowed us to focus much more

on you know actually building the company and improving things uh whereas before like so much of my energy went into this fundraising thing and i was pretty bad at it so um yeah having had a startup and having had the investor pitch experience myself um it is a time suck that you can't even imagine and i completely can imagine that the minute you decided to drop it your focus returned and you were able to actually like build so much faster yeah i know it made a very big difference and then yeah and then i mean cosmos a big concern at the time was you know exchanges and custodians are totally going to dominate this validator game and

also there was this idea that it would be this commodity business and the competition is fully going to be on price and commissions are going to go to zero and then there's not going to be a business there and i think that was a big question mark also internally you know we had a lot of discussions about that we're always like wondering is this true is it not investors it was very much that perspective like yeah they just did not see sort of the you know traditional network effects and you know fly wheel that you know you have maybe more traditional startup companies yeah but this is crazy i'm just trying to picture like you're building out this company and testing out like validation strategies before there was a live network and

there's all these ideas it sounds like these like conversations happening around what would happen what could happen like trying to almost game theorize like what will happen down the line and you're trying to build a company like running while like these sort of pegs are probably changing where did you land with chorus one like what strategy did you end up deciding basically upon launch of these networks so you know one thing was we were running these validators and then you know cosmos launched and then you know some uh i guess loom was the first network we launched on and then cosmos and then there came some others and you know this wasn't making like much money so we were also wondering

okay is there really a business there so then the other thing we did was we started saying okay let's do more work where we are getting kind of paid for like contributing to protocols and we had worked on this failover uh solution for cosmos and then we were like maybe we can like do something like that for like another network you know we had met the solana team they were just starting out and they were very helpful in giving us like intros to all kinds of vcs even though i hadn't even met them at the time and so you know when we went to san francisco with like work from their offices and my hair and i spent quite a bit of time with uh with

them and then we're like okay we can do something like that for solana and so we started also working on solana and you know we had some grant from them and we're working on again in retrospect it was like a terrible project to choose but it meant we were like very early on like engage in solana and like also contributing to you know like finding issues and uh building tools it sounds like i mean that's that's sort of you start to become more than just an entity that runs infrastructure into maybe an entity that's like building infrastructure yeah if not you're maybe you're not deciding on the spec of the client or whatever but you're actually

building the tools yeah so we were doing that and then you know we were also exploring different ideas we had a bunch of like uh a bunch of different business ideas especially my hair has like it's very creative he has like you know had some very like visionary ideas that you know would spend a lot of time exploring and like should we do this should we not do this in the end often the decision came down to well you know we can't kind of keep running the values and do this other thing because we're like we're just too small to handle that and then we're like well we don't want to quite like abandon the validator work and so we ended up kind of like not pursuing most of these ideas

yeah but interoperability i would say is one area where that kind of came up over time where we felt like okay this was just uh going to be important then there's something we wanted to work on partially it was because some of these ideas for protocols that we explored they relied on there being interoperability and something like ibc existing and at the time it was like seemed quite far away so like yeah maybe we should try to like accelerate that these bridges and interoperability exist so that then later like we could do some of these other ideas yeah we started working on on interoperability we had like also a bunch of different projects there we did

some work on like substrate to cosmos ivc bridge and then uh sort of like upgradeability of ibc we are working on a cosmos seller bridge now we've also done some work around interoperability uh around solana how big is course one today so now we're 20 people it sounds like such an organic growth too it's like you started maybe very much from this validating space but getting these contracts along the way you were able to build up this project how many devs do you have yeah i mean maybe around 15 let's say cool probably around half is more like infrastructure and

validators and then the others you know working on some of these protocols you know i guess one more thing we've also been quite involved in is you know liquid staking so we we also like understood that that would be a superior product in in many ways but we were quite cosmos focused so we were looking at it a lot through the lens of like how could this exist on cosmos and we received a grant from the icf at the time and then we wrote this research report so there's you know like 80 100 page document that i think especially felix the huge amount of work on but also on on one of their cosmos

hackathons we actually built a liquid staking you know liquid taking for cosmos uh so we built like probably the first you know first version of a liquid staking protocol so we did that at the time now cosmos there was a bunch of challenges and not like making this happen for cosmos but then later there is especially around the pdp team uh started working on lido uh which is basically this is the same idea but for ethereum and uh you know then we became quite involved in lido and uh you know contributed to that we're one of the initial validators and have now also been building as a light of for solana oh interesting this is also uh one of

the things that you know we have like a team working on what exactly is liquid staking yeah so basically when you're staking then what happens is that your token gets put into some kind of escrow at least it's true for most proof-of-stake protocols because their protocol needs to have like access to these tokens to be able to slash them and because it says like okay you know it has to be locked up also so that you're kind of like liable for your actions but you know there's some serious downsides to this for users i think the two biggest downsides are that if you now want to sell this steaking assets you have to first unstake it or unbond it

and you have to wait and then you can sell it so in cosmos this is like three weeks other networks vary you know some of them are a month some of them are shorter some of them maybe two and a half days uh in the ethereum it's like it's forever for now yeah yeah so that's one thing and then the other big one is you know that if you're staking your tokens like you can't use your tokens also for other things at the same time and uh you know in particular a simple example is maker you can put eth into maker and then you can get a die loan out but if you're putting ether into maker then you're not earning the staking

rewards and you know let's say there's now five percent or something that you could be earning in in essence this is kind of like you know an interest you are forgoing by doing that so it would be really nice if you were able to put you know east into maker but also stake it at the same time so that you can earning your second rewards on the collateral and you know that's pretty huge i think it's like a very big economic effect and so the idea of liquid staking is basically that you you still have the original staking token being put into this escrow but then you have another token that gets issued that basically represents a claim on that token and now that other token of course i can transfer to somebody

else so i could use it as some sort of collateral for other things without really affecting the underlying protocol uh and then you know you're basically addressing both of those issues so that you're allowing people to circumvent the on bonding period they can sell immediately and you also allow people to reuse their staking assets in your d5 and in other applications i actually remember when i first heard about it was like zcon1 and somebody had the idea also for adams the idea that you could use some claim on it but yeah i'm curious when you first heard about that yeah or who you heard it from i mean i think this is something that like came up for us in the process of also like trying to fundraise right because a

big concern that investors had was that exchanges would be too powerful uh in this and they would have this sort of insurmountable advantage because they can already do this to some extent you know because in exchange could say okay you know we're like collectively staking all the atoms but you know if you want to go from adam to like something else and like someone else like you don't necessarily have to go through an unchained on bonding transaction but in exchange can on their database change ownership immediately and then of course you also have a factor that in exchange can say okay you know like you can be on the exchange and you can like stake your tokens through the exchange but i mean why not

allowing people to use that to fulfill some sort of margin requirement or you know to use it in another way so it was you know it was very obvious that in exchange could kind of circumvent these issues quite easily you know it was like obvious to ask the question okay how could you do this uh on chain and basically through tokenizing the steak assets you sort of mentioned you're doing ethereum with lido and some sort of lido for solana but do you imagine this existing for all of the chains eventually yeah i i think so there are like different uh often technical challenges in making it happen you know like for example on

cosmos today there's no smart contracts on the chain so how do you do it maybe if you do it with ibc i mean this is happening you know people are also developing like a second for cosmos so like you know you could use ibc or maybe cause them wasm or but like you know it's not necessarily easy we're also seeing that now with uh building this for salon it's just it's a lot of work and it's a lot of complexity but in the end the advantages are just very large so i think you will see this for pretty much all the chains and it's an interesting question actually to what extent individual validators will even survive right or if if it's all going to be in

in some kind of liquid staking solutions i think that's like very possible the validation world is fast moving i you know also want to mention on the show since i have you here um we just i think a month ago when this is aired we launched our first kind of partnership with you guys so the xero knowledge validator is now working with chorus one on some of the networks that we're working on and the first one was osmosis and i'm glad that i'm having you on with that live and i can like share that i just mentioned osmosis and i kind of want to revisit like since you've seen cosmos through this entire time like where do you feel cosmos is at today it

still seems like it's a bit of a center like you guys are still very active on the zones and chains that are built on the zones but yeah what does cosmos look like to you from where you're sitting today and maybe we should also work in the fact that you're also like involved in the icf and stuff like that yeah yeah exactly so basically the interchange is a foundation uh you know like like the ethereum foundation for ethereum is the interchan foundation for the like kind of cosmos ecosystem and uh i ended up joining the board of that about a year ago uh so and uh i've been on that and sort of you know like uh contributing to the cosmos ecosystem through that but yeah if you look at cosmos i mean you know in cosmos you had a few core

technologies right you had tendermint you had cosmos sdk you had ibc uh maybe you can say cosmos hub and i mean overall it's pretty amazing like the amount of success that cosmos has seen right like tendermint uh you know when the test net still for cosmos there was you know like sometimes down times but it has worked extremely well and it's also something where you know we we run validators on around 25 networks now and maybe 10 of them are built on tendermint and on the cosmos sdk and you know it's even something where you know if we are onboarding a new

cosmos sdk network you know like in some cases is like uh takes us like you know two hours to do it whereas like you know you can have some totally different network and it can be like you know months of work to like understand how this thing works so i think tenement and cosmos sdk have been like hugely successful in dramatically lowering the cost of like launching a new chain uh really lowering the cost for validators to support it like it just works like very well and i think there's also some other things that have not received that much attention but are like working really well which i think for

example governance is in if you see like a lot of these ethereum dolls and they may have some governance token but you have like one percent the two percent of the token supply is actually voting on things so you could easily have some big whales kind of stuff turns the vote in another way and so i think these carbon systems don't really work very well but the cosmos governance system really has worked well and you know because in cosmos for those who are not aware right basically what you have is that if you are staking and if you don't vote in the governance your vote gets voted the same way as the validators so this kind of this expectation does or isn't that okay

validators should pay attention to governance and participate and of course they're like running infrastructure and they often have like professional teams so they kind of understand what's going on and and so you have this very high participation in that you know often you have uh you know 50 of stake or more that's like voting on each governance road and at the same time you also have the feature that like you know as an individual you can vote directly and in the beginning you know i was also wondering are people actually going to do that but it's pretty cool now to see how much participation there is in cosmos right where you often have now you know close to 2 000 i think uh token holders who are you know like exercising those rights and the idea of

cosmos sdk was that you have this modular framework for building blockchain so you can write different components as these modules and then combine different modules to make a new blockchain you know so you have like a staking module and you can just take that or you can governance module can take that or like some other module and i think that's you know it's working well and you have a whole variety of blockchains based on the cosmos sdk you know from cosmos hub osmosis region uh terra and you know many others and then i guess the final thing is ibc we've been working quite a bit on ibc but like you know we we've hassle internally and it was all filled like

questions on like you know is it gonna work or is it too complex you know that was a big concern but i feel like the osmosis launch and i think you mentioned you had a podcast on this but the osmosis really to me i think the user experience that you see there with ibc it's just really nice and ibc is that glue that basically like creates the story like the cosmos story always existed but it was really these like independent planets or zones as you want to call it yeah um and it was really only until ibc launched that you could actually see cosmos in its fullest form it's been really cool to see that yeah yeah absolutely and i think also maybe some of the special thing about

uh cosmos was you know i think most many blockchains they uh you know they focus a lot on like raising money and working with investors and so there was a big focus on okay how is there going to be value captured by some token and jm bucky but i think especially jay had a like just a huge aversion to any kind of vc an investor and he did not want to speak with any of them and he was just not motivated by making money at all and so i think that's also like kind of you know special about cosmos where the atom as a token doesn't even have any kind of like privileged role in the

cosmos ecosystem i wonder what your take is on binance chain also built on tendermint you're not validating on it yeah i just wonder like you know we're talking about that ecosystem would binance ever use ibc like could they click into all of this yeah i mean i i think they i would guess they will use ibc so actually you know you asked earlier about like those podcast episodes i think maybe the episode that has like influenced me the most was actually we did an episode with with cz okay in like 2018 and this is an episode that maybe we listened like three or four times and like i have a lot of respect for cz and for also for binance something sent you know

i think they did you know it's of course a double-edged sword in many ways and i think it's clear you know today binance chain is like not decentralized at all right you have like maybe five validators and they all seem to be run either by binance or some sort of friend of finance uh [Laughter] yeah associates there and i do think that binance chain is probably going to struggle to be you know decentralized enough to withstand regulatory pressure so i'm not like too bullish on it but also not very informed about it so it's very diplomatic of you it sounds like you're giving a lot of um

like credit to how effectively they've navigated in this space like it is kind of amazing that they've been able to like maneuver and move and shift like what they are so often so quickly yeah absolutely no i mean this isn't it's insane right i think binance today i was told this recently is like 4 000 employees now you know and this was uh they started 2017 maybe what was it like that's when i first heard about them yeah it was 2017. it was the summer of 2017. and you know it was also when we did the podcast with cz no i had worked on the cosmos fundraiser and been

involved in that and you know in cosmos we had like from cosmos white paper to fundraise it was maybe a bit less than a year like nine months or something right and uh you know there was a lot of work with lawyers and foundation and setting up and worrying about which kind of jurisdiction and how to do it and there's a lot of work that went into this and this was also typical of like what you saw in other projects i felt like and then when we were speaking with zz it was just like okay he had basically you know heard about ico and was like okay i think we're gonna do that like the same day and then within two weeks they had like their white paper

published fundraiser completed and like you know raised 15 million and then just of course they ignored like any kind of regularly concerns and like you know they didn't i mean they're very risk-taking but uh just the speed at which binance uh operates and has scaled is unbelievable i mean there's i don't think there's any other company that has reached such a scale so fast like in human history so when we did the podcast with cz finance was like nine months old and they had quarterly profits of 200 million in that quarter like more than deutsche

bank i think it's a pretty amazing story now i don't know how the story is going to continue right because i think they're very vulnerable to regulatory crackdown and i think the backlash to crypto is going to increase and they will bear sort of the weight of a lot of that at some point in this journey that we described you left berlin you abandoned this place of room 77 what are you up to now yeah so in january uh my wife and i we moved to portugal so now living in lisbon or near lisbon and uh yeah it's a beautiful place

actually there's quite a lot of berlin refugees from berlin [Laughter] here um i mean my wife had wanted to live somewhere warmer and more mediterranean for like a long time and you know then we decided to come here and i think it's a it's a nice place the timing is great though because it does seem like it's now emerging on the at least the european stage as a hub so it is emerging as a hop in the sense of like you have a lot of crypto people moving here you know in like some other places like of course one we are incorporated in in switzerland zug and i think there there is like an understanding of crypto and

the sort of appreciation of its potential and like the support of it and you know even in zoo we can pay our corporate taxes in in bitcoin or ether but it's pretty amazing i don't think portugal is like that i think in portugal it's something where like i i don't think there's an understanding of crypto i think it's to some extent it seems a little bit of an accident that they have this very crypto friendly taxation rules and you know it's just a nice place to live and so like the bunch of things that came together for people to come here but i do think this is going to be one of the big themes in the next decade is going to be this kind of clash and conflict between nation states

and crypto and i think it's the whole moving to a different place you know with your company or personally i think that's going to be a key you know key lever that you know krypto also has to be able to maintain some of the you know flexibility and ability to create beyond the you know confines of regulation you know if you look at technology then i would say how the internet has developed we have built like very powerful tools of surveillance and control and if you look at china today you know with their social credit score

and some of the things they're doing there they're really developing like tools to basically completely subjugate a billion people right and that's very menacing and very concerning and i think crypto is the only kind of response that i can think of but of course that's going to be enormously threatening for like the nation state so i i think we're going to have some yeah there's going to be a lot of conflicts some wild times in the future [Laughter] well brian i want to say thank you so much for coming on the show and sort of sharing your story through

also like in the past very wild times um and i want to say obviously good luck and i'm so excited that we get to work together going forward as kind of validator partners it's always good to catch up with you yeah absolutely it's a huge pleasure for us of course to work with you and zk validator and i think the whole idea of having like you know validated who's always like an advocate for privacy tech and has more of a more of a kind of philosophy and and value-based approach to it is super cool so i'm really excited that we can like support that and work together with you on that and thanks so much for having me it's been a like a big pleasure thanks again brian

i want to say thank you to andre the podcast producer henrik the podcast editor and tour listeners thanks for listening [Music]