Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Cosmos: The Linux of Blockchains?

Episode Date: November 12, 2025

Captured live at Cosmoverse 2025, this episode brings host Sebastian in conversation with Michael (better known as Cryptocito, Cosmos investor via Cito Ventures) and Magnus (@0xMagmar, Co-CEO Cosmos Labs). Against a backdrop of institutional gravitas, central banks mingling alongside Revolut executives, the conversation traces Cosmos' arc across five Cosmoverses, from Medellín's raw developer fervor to the polished, enterprise-oriented event unfolding here. It's a marker of the ecosystem's maturation, one that demands Cosmos "grow up" to weave itself into the fabric of global finance, governance, and economies beyond its insular origins.Magnus lays out Cosmos Labs' forward path: Systematically acquiring and refining homegrown innovations, such as the EVM rebuild over six months into a core stack component and consolidating privacy primitives from projects like Secret Network and Penumbra into seamless, enterprise-grade tools. These advancements, long championed by Cosmos builders, now stand ready for institutional adoption. On quantum threats, enterprises show little concern for now, but the panel underscores blockchains' unique vulnerabilities: Unlike centralized systems, they require broad coordination for upgrades, where Bitcoin's inertia pales against Cosmos' app-chain flexibility, allowing isolated chain overhauls without dragging down the broader network, a resilience Ethereum lacks. Topics covered in this episode:0:00 Introduction & Cosmoverse Vibe Check2:30 Reflections on Five Cosmoverses6:45 Ecosystem Maturation: Grassroots to Institutional Focus11:20 Cosmos Labs' Roadmap: Unifying Privacy & EVM Innovations16:50 Building Cohesive Stack Features for Enterprises22:15 Privacy Tools: Secret Network, Penumbra, and Nym27:40 Quantum Computing Threats & Blockchain Vulnerabilities33:10 Coordination Challenges: Hard Forks vs. App-Chain Modularity38:25 Sovereign Day Argentina: CBDC & Gov Sovereignty Summit43:50 Leadership Adaptation & Community Inclusion49:20 Future Vision: Cosmos as Global Finance Enabler54:00 Closing Thoughts & Event ShoutoutsEpisode links: - Michael (@Cryptocito) (https://x.com/Cryptocito )- Magnus (@0xMagmar) (https://x.com/0xMagmar)- Gnosis (https://gnosis.io/)- Epicenter - All Episodes (https://epicenter.tv/)- Cosmoverse 2025 (https://cosmoverse.org/)Sponsors: - Gnosis: Gnosis has been building core decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem since 2015. With the launch of Gnosis Pay last year, we introduced the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Start leveraging its power today at http://gnosis.io This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: https://epicenter.tv/

Welcome to Epicenter. I'm Sebastian Cuccio and I'm here today with Michael, aka Cryptocito, and Magnus, aka Magmar. One of the things that I really want to make sure happens is that Adam feels connected to the roadmap that we have. It's challenging, right? And I think what we have done is emotionally processed to some degree, the difficult position that we were put in and make sure that we were building the bedrock. of a new kind of innovative cosmos that could expand beyond what we had been holding on to for the past five years. All the people that I've been in cosmos for years, I've been building on cosmos, and maybe don't feel included in this new vision. Like, why should they care? The industry is evolving. Cosmos needs to evolve, which is happening. Along the way, maybe some people will leave. Some new people will join.

But I think finally we have leadership that is also adaptive to where the market is going. Welcome to Epicenter. The show which talks about the technologies, projects and people driving decentralization and the global blockchain revolution. I'm Sebastian Kuccio and I'm here today with Michael, aka Cryptocito, and Magnus, aka Magmar, I guess. I always call you Magmar and people find it funny that I call you Margmar. Not in text form. So, yeah, I'll keep calling you Magmar. Before he said the show, here's a little bit about our responses this week.

This episode is brought you by NOSIS, building the open internet one block at a time. NOSIS was founded in 2015, and it's grown from one of Ethereum's earliest projects into a powerful ecosystem for open user-owned finance. NOSIS is also the team behind products that had become core to my business and that of so many others, like Safe and Cow Swap. At the center is NOSIS chain. It's a low-fee layer one with zero downtime in seven years and is secured by over 300,000 validators. It's the foundation for real-world financial applications like NOSIS pay and Circles. All this is governed by NOSISDAO, a community-run organization where anyone with a GNO token can vote on updates, fund new projects, and even run a validator from home. So if you're building in Web 3 or you're just curious about what financial freedom can look like, start exploring at NOSUS.io.

All right, guys, so we're here at Cosmoverse, Cosmoverse 5 in Split Croatia. How has it been for you guys in the last two days? I mean, I feel after good For me, it's always months of stress And anxiety and getting into it But seeing all of you guys here Seeing the crowd, the turnout, you know It's always nice

So now I'm actually chill I'm enjoying it And yeah It's like pressure's like Yeah Yeah, I feel you meant I feel good I'm good now

You have a right to feel good I think like you really put on a great events here Thank you as always Thank you So it's a little hard to get to I will say No but it's been really nice I think it's definitely a different vibe

than previous Cosmoverses that I've been to. It's a little bit more, I would say, put together, corporate, institutional, which I really like. And I think is also reflecting sort of where cosmos is going, where the ecosystem is going. Yeah, I think that's one of the things that's perhaps the most striking at this year's Cosmoverse is just how different it is from every other Cosmoverse

that I've been to, which isn't all of them. And just how many, like, how much the focus has been on institutions, on bringing institutions and sort of corporates on chain. And there's a, there's a real kind of, it feels like a vibe shift in Cosmos. And it's being reflected here. It's reflected also in Cosmos Labs' strategy for Cosmos and the Hub moving forward, which we can talk about. But I think like one of the things I was thinking about is like Cosmoverse to me feels always like a way to come and check in on the ecosystem. It's like an annual like take the pulse.

and I wonder like for you guys, what's the main takeaway at this year's Cosmoverse? Like if you kind of plot the five Cosmovests in your mind and what each of those events kind of represented as a moment in time, what is this moment in time? Yeah, I just want to shout out, you know, you've done an incredible job putting this on year after year. So, cute.

Very grateful also that this conference exists and that it's a great way for the entire ecosystem to come together and, you know, get a sense of what's going on. I think so my first Cosmoverse was Medellin and then we went to Dubai. I actually wasn't in Dubai. And then some of our team went to Turkey too. But comparing this to Medellim, I think Cosmos has changed, right? And I think whenever there's big change, there are good parts to that and there are tough parts to that.

Right. And I think one of the things that I really try to keep in mind is the change that we're going through, the right? right and the change that we need and I think what I really believe and I think this is reflected to some degree by cosmos universe and ecosystem is that we have to grow up right as an ecosystem we need to become a lot more forward facing we need to become a lot more dressed up to attract people who actually have businesses right and have economies and bring those into cosmos because the original, you know, ecosystem that was built up sort of organically around individual projects that, you know, it was kind of a very self-referential ecosystem. I see that evolving as into something that looks a lot more integrated into society, into finance, into government, etc.

And I feel that a lot here. Yeah, I think that's also been how we thought about this, right? I mean, you have, you're five on five. You've been to Lisbon. you know how... I almost did make it, but I'm very cool. Okay, you know how it started off as a very grassroots, you know, developer conference, developer ecosystem event.

After the COVID time, I just got into Cosmos. I learned about it from Jack Sempleyn, big shoutout, who onboarded me and, you know, taught me everything and connected me with people, and then I got really hoped about it. And I think back then it was definitely a different ecosystem. It was definitely a different vibe at the conference. now four years later you see Revolut is here

the European National Bank is here or Central Bank is here I mean it's a whole new paradigm I think for us as well and while I still want to maintain this community focus right and I've said this repeatedly like

I want customers to always be the home for cosmonauts whether you're a validator whether you are holding $10 worth of Atcham but you just want to meet Mac you want to meet Seb you want to meet Ethan or you want to meet Sunny who unfortunately are not here this time

but hopefully next year they will be there. You just want to meet your Cosmos heroes. I want Cosmos to be a place for them because I'm one of them, right? I'm also an independent community member who just saw this opportunity and took it in 2021. And I think here we are. At the same time, we also see that crypto is maturing. We have had a lot of panel discussions and topics on stage where what you just said also is true, right? And we are also a crypto business with Cosmiverse.

We also need to evolve, adapt and see where is the market going, right? What does the market care about? So, yeah, I think we're trying to evolve as well as an organization, as a brand, as a company, but also as a platform to be relevant for both the institutional side and banking sector, which you saw also on the lineup this year, but at the same time also for the cosmonauts worldwide. Yeah. I think what you said, Mag, really struck me is that Cosmos is going through a change.

And what that change represents, I think, you know, I have been sort of, you know, internally and also in conversations saying this for years that, like, hey, the ICF should have a more structured business development arm. There should be more work going out there talking with consulting firms to try to get them to put Cosmos into, you know, different. kind of enterprise settings. Cosmos is the Linux of blockchains, which means that, you know, the anecdote here is that none of the people who were building Slackware Linux in the 90s got rich because we all have Linux in our pockets now, you know?

And now that it's actually like the rubber is hitting the road, like it's a little bit, it's a bit scary, right, that that change is happening. But I think that ultimately it's like a right direction. You know, what I think the, the reluctance or the fear is that Cosmos loses some of its essence as this very grassroots kind of like movement, ecosystem. One of the things I thought, you know, I wrote down here is like, I think two or three years ago, there was this meme that Cosmos was respected by all the other ecosystems that like people in Ethereum really kind of respected Cosmos builders and the app chain thesis and that a lot of the innovation.

and Cosmos made its way into Ethereum and it kind of like built its respect around that. And, you know, I don't think we've lost that, but, you know, it's important to me. I think that Cosmos kind of keeps that space in the ecosystem as a place of innovation, as a place where people can try new things, build new ideas. And yeah, I wonder if that makes sense to you. That's something that you feel is important to maintain. Yeah. I mean, it totally does.

I think, you know, we were, I grew up in that cosmos, right, graduating. college. I started a company skip almost directly afterwards, which was, you know, very shortly, like, our first crypto conference ever was Cosmopers. Yeah. Right. And I think, and that was at Medellin. And we had a really strong sense at the time of what Cosmos was. And throughout the next three years, we were its biggest advocates, right? Or some of its biggest advocates. And we were loyal to the ecosystem. I think what really has happened, though, is it's become very clear to us. that the former version of Cosmos was not headed in good direction, right? There was not a really strong through line in terms of how we got from, you know,

basically where we were into something that looked a lot more unified and a lot more cohesive where people could feel like they had a place. And I think, you know, there were pros and cons to the fact that Cosmos was really decentralized, right, at least on the community side and on the contributor side. And so I think what we felt coming into the acquisition was there was a mandate for change, right? That someone, that the community needed some kind of shift, that the ecosystem needed some kind of shift. And so our vision for that and, you know, there was a reason I think we were acquired, especially since we had like a strong background in B2B sales and things like that, is to find a new market for Cosmos that could bring in the liquidity, the users, the cash, the capital, the direction, and the impact that I've always thought Cosmos could have.

Right. And I think over the last nine months, we've thought about different places where that could happen. But one thing that always felt really true was we could go directly to institutions and get Cosmos to become something that they used. And, you know, I just came from Money, 2020 before this, which if anyone here hasn't, or anyone watching hasn't been to, it's a completely mind. changing conference about what we could be like, right, just in terms of it as an ecosystem, right? There's all the Fortune 500 companies there. There's, you know, parades, there's massive booths, there's ball pits. It's, it's like the best crypto conference times 20. And of course, it's super high budget. But the difference between that and Cosmos is just the fact that we haven't really found a real business use case. Right. And so from my perspective, if we can, you know,

you know, if we can change to actually go in that direction, it may hurt for one to two years. But after that, the rewards would be a lot greater. Yeah, I mean, I think if you look at other crypto ecosystems, I think a lot of them are actually in a very similar boat, right? Like, everyone is trying to also compete for institutional clients to get to get them on boarded, to build on their network. So I think we as cosmonauts, we're fundamentally committed and convinced that, you know, the app change thesis, summary, interoperability, those values that Cosmos pioneered

dating back over a decade ago at this point, I think we're all fundamentally aligned that those values are going to be the standard for the Web 3 economy from here on over the decades to come. So I think with that in mind, what we try to do with Cosmovers, what I try to do with media, content, everything that I'm doing is to just build the rails and platforms for those conversations to happen, right? Same like you mentioned earlier, you came to Medellin, which for me was the goat customers conference. So it would be hard to talk in the future.

But I think there was an amazing event that got a lot of people, you know, into the spotlight for the first time. Also, the same network had their coming out at Cosmur's saga, Babylon, right? I remember they didn't have a logo at that time. Like we had to cook something up on the spot to put in their booth because they hadn't didn't even have a proper logo. That's where we had our coming out too. Yeah. And I think that's, you know, that is very true. It is also, I want to state that very, very capital intensive to run events, to do events, physical events, to feed a couple hundred people for three, four days in a row. That costs a lot of money. So, yeah. And I think overall, the sentiment right now after a lot of the things that Cosmos went through, that crypto went through as an industry, right, which probably started somewhere in, and, like,

like May 22 with the terror collapse, I think we're still, that is still in our bones, you know. And now with this major shift that we're in from building this vibrant on-chain ecosystem to say, hey, we are targeting institutional clients and there's actually appetite, because we all agree, like, for them it makes them more sense to build on cosmos, right?

Why would they depend on another network? Why would they depend on another ecosystem instead of building their own rails? So, yeah, I think we're all fundamentally aligned. But, yeah, it's been a change, a transformative year or transition year for cosmos that, I don't know how long we'll still take to kind of complete or where we see the fruits of. But, yeah, it's been interesting for the past six months particularly. And, yeah, we'll see where we stand a year from now. Something that's so to me in both of your answers is that you said that, you know, there would be some time until we start seeing the rewards and the fruits of our labor.

And that brings me to Adam because I think that's a very important part of the story here. And like, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I'm going to paraphrase here what I recall you saying to me when we first talk after the acquisition. And was that one of your kind of main focuses aside from getting Cosmos and stuff like the SDK in institutions would be for. Adam to benefit from all of this value that was created. And I talked to some people here over the last two days, and I talked to a lot of people in Cosmos generally. I think one of the main things that I'm hearing is that there's, there's like Cosmos Labs' work that they're doing

and kind of the things that Cosmos Labs is putting out there in terms of the institutions that bring on board, etc. And then it feels like some black box, right, of like something's going to happen and then Adam Price will go up. And people feel like my sense, myself as well is like what is in this black box? Like what's meant to happen for those two to kind of correlate and for Adam to benefit from the work that you're doing? And yeah, so I wonder if you can share some thoughts there like at least directionally because I know that there's still some things that need to be figured out. But yeah, how are you thinking about that?

No, I think it's a really good question. And I think it's important also for everyone, especially at Cosmos. to ask these questions and to help us stay accountable and think through the solutions because the end of the day, I'm not a token guru, right? If I knew exactly what would make Adam go up, you know, life might be a little bit different. I think from my perspective, this is how I think about it, right? Adam is one of thousands and thousands and thousands of cryptocurrencies. And the bar for something to be valuable is a lot higher than it used to be when Adam was first launched, when it was genuinely the only way to invest in a multi-chain thesis, right, which is a very exciting thesis, the internet

of blockchain. A lot of people who are here today came from that time when they heard Jay or they heard Ethan speak about, okay, this is what the world's going to look like and they believe that. The truth is, that is no longer only our vision, right? That is the vision of Ethereum with their L2 thesis. That is the vision of, you know, optimism. That is the vision of arbitram. That's the vision of Avalanche with their L1 thesis. That's the vision of Cora, HyperLger, right? That has become not just a way, that cosmos has become basically a bet on that future, but it's no longer alone in there. And so I think the question that we have to ask ourselves is, where do we fit, right? What are we a bet on? and how do we be as innovative as we were six years ago today, right?

Because we need to be that innovative. We need to be that ambitious. Otherwise, you know, there's plenty of players out there that are, you know, innovative and ambitious on different things, and we need to have our own track. And so the way that I viewed it is there's a lot of debt to pay off in Cosmos. When we came in, there was a lot of debt. That's how it felt. There's a lot of community debt.

there were people who were hurt by specific things in the past. There was a lot of like, you know, missing goodwill there. And you need to have that foundation to move forward, right? You need to have the foundation of people who are committed for the long term, of good projects, of good community members, of a cohesive community, of good conferences, of developers. That is your Ben Rock that you can build a new vision on top of. And part of that is also letting what is not. not good go away, right? Or accelerating the process of removing the dead weight on the ecosystem. And dead weight is a real thing, right? Dead weight is a real overhang that can prevent you from

innovating. And so it's challenging, right? And I think what we have done is emotionally processed to some degree the difficult position that we were put in and make sure that we were building the bedrock of a new kind of innovative cosmos that could expand beyond. what we had been holding on to for the past five years, right, as an ecosystem, which was this initial vision of what this could be. And a lot of that, a lot of that comes down to questioning assumptions, right? So the assumption was that the Cosmos hub would be the center of Cosmos, right? And that it would have this sort of.

It's in the name. What's that? It's in the name, actually. Exactly. It was a very, it was a very commonly held assumption. And the truth is that assumption never came to pass. Yeah. Right.

And so when we we do care about Adam, and that is the token that we want to drive value to, the way that we think about it is, okay, maybe that actually wasn't the right vision for Adam, right? Maybe the right vision for Adam is actually for it to be the currency that underpins the world coming on chain in a much more tangible way, right? In a way where people are actually paying an atom or using Adam to get services for their companies and they're using it as the connecting currency to pay in Web3, right? Dollar is the currency of Web 2. What could we do to make Adam the currency of Web 3, right, and have those interact together? And so that's the exploration process that Nico chatted through during his talk. I'd also like to add, like historically over the years, you know, thinking back from also where we first met in 2021 those times, I think Cosmos has always

been a very open ecosystem that was very welcoming to anybody, right? If you're a developer, if you're just any any type of person, right? You could find your people, right? Yeah. I think over the years, and I'm not sure what the reasons are for that, but I at least started to notice also that there was no, like you were saying, no cohesive roadmap. There was no, I felt like a lot of people

were not swimming in the same direction, but they were rather like swinging against each other. And that caused a lot of drama, a lot of things, a lot of missed opportunities as well. a lot of timelines that were, you know, that other ecosystems picked up and put into their roadmaps and ecosystems. But yeah, I think there's many ways on how there's a future in which Atom could become what you're describing.

I think a lot of it is also around just driving that awareness, like chasing that dialogue with relevant players and institutions, which we're doing, which you are doing, which I think we're aligned on that. because yeah I mean if you if you look at the ripples and xRPs of the world right they don't really have an vibrant on-chain ecosystem in that sense but it's a 200 billion dollar token in they do something wrong and what do you what do you think of if you hear xRP you think is the banking coin of the u.s right yeah so a lot of it also has to do with branding perception storyline really bringing this front and center over and over again.

And I think for Atom, like you're saying, there's probably a lot of depth there. But now also, what we've been talking over the years, there is finally a proactive vision from the leadership, from the foundation, Cosmos Labs, that is now taking more accountability, as you were describing, right? I mean, things were a bit shaky with certain things, but that's, you know, that's what it was.

I think now it sounds like and feels like there's at least some game plan and like a lot of very smart people that are actually thinking about the long-term vision here, right? So predate you to Barry to the skip team, now Cosmos Labs team to really put brain juice into this and to really evaluate and think and assess what could make sense, right? And I guess we'll see. I mean, crypto is also the thing. Roger just sat on stage, like, if you're there for a couple of years, it's basically hundreds of years in a normal time. So, yeah, it's very fast moving, but I think finally we have leadership that is also adaptive to where the market is going.

Yeah, I think that's true. That feels to me like, I mean, at least directionally, I think that Cosmos lab is taking cosmos in the right direction. And I think there's still lots of headwinds that will be faced. And that, you know, assumptions that need to be validated. And I think, you know, the App Chain thesis, while it has been validated in many of the kind of like Cosmos circles and, you know, maybe you can talk a little bit about some of the partners that are launching Cosmos App Chains, you know, in the broader crypto ecosystem, chains like Solana, like Ethereum, there's still some,

there's definite sort of like evidence that there's also other ways to build blockchain applications. Like, you know, if you look at base or any of the other kind of successful L2s. So, yeah, I want to give you also an opportunity to talk about some of the announcements you guys made here, some of the chains that are, yeah, what's the alpha? Alpha. This is always the annual Alpha podcast, every day.

So give a name. I will try to do. And by the way, I'm also expecting some alpha from you because this will definitely come out after any announcement you made here. So I think, I mean, to your point, there are many ways to build a successful blockchain ecosystem. And the truth is actually, at least in my opinion, there was really only one way that basically everyone bought into. And Cosmos tried was the first to try something else. Right. And the one way was basically you build an L1, you get a bunch of developers to build on the L1, everyone gets access to the same token with the same gas fees, and all the incentives are aligned because everyone wants that token to go up.

Right. This is the Ethereum model. This is the Salana model. Right. Everyone says, okay, I'm on Salana, right? I'm on Ethereum. So we're all building to make Ethereum better. They go out and they show Ethereum to their other developer friends, right?

And to investors. And then you get investors who have a thesis on Ethereum, right? or on Solana. And Cosmos took a huge risk in saying, well, what if we didn't do any of that? Yeah, you still don't say, Cosmos is different. Cosmos is different, right? Cosmos is...

And we all find ourselves sort of explaining this to people all the time. Yeah, exactly. And it's, but still a lot of people don't understand that, right? A lot of people don't understand that Cosmos was built to be a different kind of experiment where it wasn't about, you know, everyone being on the same, L1 all pushing towards the same thing. It wasn't even like the avalanche model where they have separate L1s,

but they're all connected to the same core blockchain. You have to pay in AVACs to actually be there. And I think the big question that we had to ask ourselves this year, and honestly, you know, this was a really hard decision, is do we still try to make that model work, right? The model of where we have different chains and we have complete sovereignty and independence and interoperability, or do we try to revert,

to a Ethereum or Solana type model. Right? And so when we were thinking about launching the EVM on the hub, that was us thinking, okay, maybe actually we have to go to the other kind of model, right? We have to go to the unified. Everyone builds a one thing. It's all about Adam and, you know, screw the rest of the ecosystem or not screw them, but just, you know, it's not as important.

It's not aligned that kind of thing. I think what we realize is actually the bigger fish that we can go after is making the original model work, right? and making taking what I think traditionally is viewed as a weakness of cosmos and trying to turn into a strength. It's leaning into the edge of the edge. Exactly. Leading into sovereign gene.

Leaning an even harder. Yeah. Right. And so I do have a lot of proof points that we can point to. One of which we try to announce on stage, I hope, hopefully it came across. But we have won the official contracts to build the CBDCs for two major governments, both in Latin America right now. Another one is right under, is underway.

and is at the ending stages in Spain. Those two countries combined have a $600 million budget for building their CPDCs with us. That's also a partnership of Pearsest, I should point out. Separately, we have also closed two major Fortune 500 companies on building Cosmos chains. I can't speak to their specific names. They will come out, I think, hopefully in the next two to three months.

We'll see exactly sort of where their marketing teams are at that time. But in my opinion, those two chains combined, represent a larger market opportunity for Cosmos and everyone inside of it, the validators, the infrastructure providers, the block explorers, the wallets, the community members, the developers, bigger opportunities than anything else we've seen so far, right? But it is on Cosmos. And you didn't pay any of these people? No.

In fact, I hope they're paid us. I know. It's a crazy shift, right? And I do think it is on the people in Cosmos to be. open to that, right, to say, okay, what do I need to do to appeal to institutions, right? Because we can only do so much. We're trying our best for ourselves, but we can't change everyone else, right? And so, for example, for validators, getting their SOC2 compliance, basic things you have to do to work with enterprise, right? If you're a block explorer, making sure you have, you know, private, private dashboards

that you can offer, white-label dashboards, right? If you're, if you're, if you're in media, making sure that you have the right relationships and you know how to present properly to look professional, right? I'm not saying this is you guys. Hey, we got the proper backdrop. No, what I'm saying is you guys were doing really good at this, right?

Bloomberg, Adrian. Bloomberg's back here. Exactly. But I think these are the kinds of things that people really need to consider if they want to come for this ride. Yeah. Now my, you know, I did my intro in my videos.

Buenos Diaz, Buenos Aires. Not makes sense. Latin American sense. banks. We're coming full circle. I like that. Excellent. Maybe back to Medellin next year. Maybe. I mean, they will definitely be a part two of a chapter two of Cosmar's Medellin, guaranteed at some point. Have to do it. But yeah, I think to your point also, I think I'm personally like very aligned with that, with that focus on, you know, starting to also think how can you make money as an organization. I think for many, many years,

Cosmos has, especially Atom, right, has always given. He's paid a lot and given a lot. But I think, yeah, this is definitely the right direction and something of substance, right? Not just like, hey, this is what we want to do, but actually something that is happening. I think also, to your question on Alpha from our side, we are also looking at, you know,

always interesting regions for where we can do customers. You mentioned really was a bit hard to get to split. I agree for people from outside Europe, but actually for people from Vienna, from Germany, it's super easy to get to. So this year was really the theme around Mika, around policy. There was also the theme of this year's conference,

policy meets protocol, regulators from the Serbian Securities Commission, Bosnia, right? For them, it's just a quick hop or a quick drive. that said for next year very proud to announce hope this is coming out only after the announcement very proud to announce that customers 2026 is coming to hong kong that will be the first time we're properly in asia i should say i mean we've been to dubai but um yeah we're very excited for that i just spend a week there um scouting venues scouting places meeting people very vibrant ecosystem,

especially also in the fintech space, which I think fits very well also into what you're doing and also where the entire crypto space is headed, right? We also have very, very interesting talks with the likes of Heskey and Tether, right, and other organizations that are, you know, long-term kind of, you know, enthusiasts and organizations that are actually cosmonauts

underneath, many of them, right? They have either investments in the ecosystem or run infrastructure or those kind of things. So very excited for that. And I mean, like, yeah, there's like a huge Cosmos community. In Korea, that's just, you know, a few hours away. I think this is great. Very excited.

I think it's great taking care. It's also a direct flight from New York, which is. But it will be hard for people from splits to come to Hong Kong. Okay. So they had their chance, you know. They had a chance that I'm best to. I want to bring it back to the community a little bit because like, you know, I think it's great for Cosmos, the stack.

And it's great for Cosmos. the thesis that institutions, that major Fortune 500 companies, that governments are using the cosmos stack. But all the people that I've been in Cosmos for years, I've been building on cosmos and that maybe don't feel included in this new vision, like, why should they care? Like atom holders, why should they care? People who have been bullish on Cosmos, the ecosystem for years. Why should they care? And I think the bigger question is, what can, can they do to participate in this new direction? Like what's the action point,

the kind of call to action for people? Yeah. And I think this immediately gets back to the question of who is the community, right? So for example, you know, I don't want to name specific games, but if a chain adopted the open source Cosmo stack and then attracted a bunch of retail investors who bought the token, are they the community that we feel accountable to? Right. So under that model, every, you know, member of the 200-ish chains or more chains that is launched would be a member of the community that we would feel responsible for, right? And I think from our perspective, it is really hard to do something that will appease all of those individuals, right? Because a lot of these chains are fully sovereign, right? It would be like if we were the UN and we tried to appeal to the citizens of every single country. right well the truth is they're all totally different they all want totally different things and so the

un oftentimes gets caught up doing nothing right because they can't agree on anything and so i think what our job is to do is to present a future to go after that future to help that future succeed and then bring along whoever wants to come with right and so i think the the core thing that i'm looking at right now is okay who are the people who are positively engaging with this bishop right if they're you know know, if they're sort of caught up in the past or they were super excited about, you know, some other version of cosmos that they got excited about previously, there's not much I can do for them, right? Or there's not much that the cosmos can do for them. I think it's really important to me right now to know sort of who is interested in this and who's not, right? There's a number

of ways to get involved. The first thing is there are going to be new chains coming, right? And so when we talk about people are bullish on the cosmos ecosystem, I would invite them to have a slightly more expanded viewpoint of what that means, right? It doesn't have to mean exactly what you thought it meant two years ago. It could mean enterprises coming on chain, right? It could mean major gaming companies or IP companies coming and launching, you know, their anime, their anime IP on chain, engaging with that, right? There's going to be many options for individual community members to get involved,

whether it's on the fintech side and they're interested in making money, whether it's on the, you know, entertainment side. And we're going to make that very open and available to these people. But I think it is on them to sort of say, hey, I'm willing to expand my viewpoint of the new things that are coming and I want to be engaged in those versus, okay, I remember these 10 chains from three years ago. They're not doing so well, so I'm upset. Yeah, I think there's definitely no black and white. on that, answering that. I think, you know, the institutions that are coming in are probably as much valuable as, you know,

the regular atom holder that has $100 of atom, but it's just very passionate about it. It's coming to all the events. It's active on telegrams, active on Twitter and socials. And I think a lot of the times, and I'm noticing that as well and getting some of that feedback is, you know, those retail community people feel that,

now that the institutions are coming, they're a little bit scared that like, okay, that means we're cut off from everything, right? And why is this? I mean, they feel, I believe that the feeling is that, you know, they're not as valuable or not as respected or important. And I think there's maybe something to that as well. But generally speaking, I personally at least feel that's why I said in the beginning to make it very clear, I want customers to always be a home for every customer.

Monard. Where is a solo validator that is, you know, running an atom node since a couple of years or whether it's, you know, I don't know, Revolut or some larger institution that is just interested in joining and being here. So, yeah, for me, that's why I said. Like, it's not a black and white. I think the industry is evolving. Cosmos needs to evolve, which is happening.

And, yeah, I think along the way, maybe some people will leave. Some new people will join. But, yeah, I think in the end of the day, it's really important. important to also still make sure that those that have been around, which still is the case, right? There's many autom holders that probably bought the top at $40, but they truly believe in the vision. They like the sense of belonging to this community, that they also feel that there's space for them in the future. And I think that is very important. And also challenging for you, I guess, to figure out how can we, how can we solve that? How can we make that clear? And I guess maybe

it is also where we can come in as Cosmores, right? Because the way I always see it, and I said this to a couple months or around a year ago, I think when we had a call. I said like the way I see how Cosmos is structured organizationally is like a network of L1s, right? So you have Cosmoverse, which is an independent sort of an organization. You have Cosmos Labs and there's other organizations.

Some of them are more active or less than they were a couple years ago. But I feel like there's definitely a lot of like independent contributors that are still there. They are still passionate. and they are trying to also adapt to this new environment in the same way how you are adapting to the broader environment, right? And I think that's going to be interesting to see how that will play out. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, on your point about making sure that the people who have been in Cosmos stay involved, I do think that's important. I think one of the ways that I've tried to do this, and I think Cosmos has tried to do this, is just be very active. right so I'm a Harry

you know out of participant in the in the let's call it the Adam trenches you know in a sort of ridiculous way I mean I've done things sort of as crazy as give out $40,000

during the most recent flash crash to like individuals who were suffering I think one of the things that I really want to make sure happens is that Adam feels connected

to the road map that we have right because when it's disconnected or atom is is something that's just like a side project or that's how it's viewed. It's very hard for all those people, including myself as someone who's a huge atom holder that, you know, I purchased that much higher than today's prices to feel connected to our enterprise side. And I don't think that has to be the case, right? And so a lot of what Nico chatted about on stage was, you know, three things that we're doing. The first one is a massively

expanded delegation program. You know, it's a two Xing in size to $40 million. where we're going to be giving out a lot more delegations to individual validators that do things like media, do things like outreach, do things like, you know, building dashboards, building communities, all those different things. The second thing that we're doing is we're commissioning a huge tokenomics revamp. So basically what that looks like is participating in a research process where we have a bunch of experts talking to professors at Columbia, etc., to think about how does Adam tokenomics best fit our uppermics? fit our updated roadmap? Because the truth is, all of this doesn't matter if Adam goes down, just consistently. Right. And so we feel like there's a lot of pressure right now to make Adam look like something that's investable. And I think right now, we struggle to sell it as an investable asset to institutions. But that can change, right? That can change. And that's what we're hoping to

change. Right. And Adam has a lot of foundations that I think work in its favor, the fact that it's broadly distributed, that there's like a broad distribution set of holders, that it's integrated in all the centralized exchanges, it has like wallets, it has, you know, like good RPC infrastructure and all those things. So like that, we need to kind of capitalize, I think, on that as we make it more investable. I think also, sorry to make sure, but like that's actually the biggest strength of our term is that it's been around for five years on the market. And, you know, every year there's, you know, every year there's. a new atom killer, like we're going to be the new, we're the new cosmos now. I mean, most of these

tokens are either not live yet or they're just, you know, they just launched and they all go through their little honeymoon phase and then they come down to Earth and then you'll see, you know, after three, six, nine months, is the leadership still aligned after they did their TGE? Many of them usually like cash out and just say bye, bye, that's it. So that's the biggest strength in cosmos or Atom specifically that it already went through that multiple times, multiple leadership changes or survivors multiple insane events

that went down in in the cosmos history and it's still there and it's still in the top 100 I wish it was in the top 20 of course but it's still there even though it has crazy inflation even though you know

Terra went down all these things and liquidity drained entirely in cosmos two and a half two years ago so in spite all of that it's still there and I think that alone

is a big achievement I think surviving in cryptos the single most unreaded achievement as an organization, as investor, as a token, right? So. And it's not just the token. Like when we go to companies and we tell them, we started in 2019, they're like, wait a second, you've been around for six years. You know, most of our competitors have not, you know, they were, they were in diapers sort of as a project when we started. And I think that has made it a lot easier for us to execute this new roadmap too, right? Because we have the battles box. We have the trust. We've had

major chains launch on our platform. And that gives us the opportunity to sort of expand on that. Can you talk about the technical roadmap? And what should people be excited about in terms of ConsumstisDK evolving from here? Yeah. So I think when you talk about the technical roadmap, there's the parts that are perhaps exciting to devs

and the parts that are exciting to like a more retail audience. For developers, I think they can look forward to a lot when it comes to us trying to productionalize the Cosmos SDK and come at BFT and IBC for institutions. So on the one hand, we are building out a lot more tooling to make it easier to launch Cosmos chains. We're making it easier to manage validator sets. We're making it easier to connect your chain

to other blockchains over IBC orica. And then we're also making it way faster. And what I mean by that is it's easier to set up a chain, but then also the chain itself is going to be a lot more performance. So we've done a lot of research recently into expanding the TPS of Cosmos chains at a base level. And the way that we've done that is, you know, definitely watch Barry's talk if you want more detail on this. But we've been implementing some new innovations that have come out of consensus research like BlockSTM and what's not?

Block STM. Block STM is essentially a paralyization framework. It makes it a lot easier for Cosmos chains to parallelize actions that were normally serial. So in particular, block production versus voting on a block, these things can now happen at the same time versus having to be step one, then step two, then step. three. So they can do a lot more at once, basically. And what we're hoping to get to are TPS numbers that take advantage of the fact that you can just get a lot more out of a specific app chain than you can a massive shared L1. Right. So we're hoping to overtake the TPS Solana within like a 12 month time frame. So that means getting above, you know, basically 50,000 TPS, at least,

at least in terms of our measurements. And then also being able to implement a lot of the new modules and features that a lot of these institutions are asking for that make it easier for them to adopt Cosmos into their existing stack. I was talking to Barry this morning about privacy, and that's been one of the- Privacy is big. Main things that institutional clients want. What's your vision for bringing privacy into with Cosmos stack? I'd say there's a couple things we're exploring. So right now, one of the biggest blockchain success stories is Kantem, which maybe you're familiar with you're not. But it's a private institutionally focused blockchain that a bunch of institutions are investing in and deploying on. And the only thing that I think makes it special is that

it has some degree of privacy or confidentiality. From our perspective, there are, you know, obviously there's always multiple approaches to go about privacy. The most traditional approach is actually very simple, which is just have a private chain, right? Don't expose your chain to anyone who you don't want to see. Right. So you just have sort of inside the company, no one else can see it, you know, it runs in the background. That's the most common way, and that actually works a lot for specific use cases. The second question is, well, what if you want some kind of public presence, but also to keep some of that privacy? So what we call this is more like differential privacy, or basically maybe you have a private chain for some transactions and a

public chain for others, and maybe they connect over IBC. I think that the place where it gets really tricky is if you want full privacy like full ZK or threshold encrypted environments or sort of trusted encryption environments or threshold encryption, all of those are much bigger technical lips that honestly even the most privacy forward chains haven't fully figured out. Is there anything you can take away from some of the open source things like penumbra for instance or any of the kind of like attempts in cosmos to build private chains? Are there any kind of interesting technical takeaways that we can utilize? from these?

Yes, decks. I mean, Pernumbra is incredible technology, truly groundbreaking in terms of how they brought out such a degree of anonymization around sort of their wallet creation process and other things. I think all of that tech is very interesting. It's just very heavy, right? It's very heavy tech, meaning it's expensive,

it's slow, it takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of specific kind of knowledge to operate. And so institutions are generally a little bit afraid of signing out for that kind of commitment from our experience. I also want to add, like, I think if you look at any vertical within crypto tokenization, privacy, defy, whatever, you always end up seeing one of the top contenders being actually built on Cosmos technologies. So I think a lot of the innovation has already happened within cosmos. Customized for those fields, right, which is also why we established this track system.

While underneath, we are a Cosmos conference, but we are also. tailoring it to those verticals, right, to appeal also to those other institutions and participants in those areas. And if you take asset tokenization alone or tokenization, I think there is a lot of innovation that happened. I think if the Cosmos Hub or Cosmos Labs and the general stack roadmap, I have to re-listen to Barry's talks. I was just like running along back and forth about conference organizer. Yeah, I'll take them a week, a week to go through all the talks. think if there's a very cohesive, going back to the point earlier, cohesive attempt to unify a lot of these innovations that happened, which I'm sure in a lot of these projects,

like if you take private salon, secret network, penumbra and Amada, right, all cosmos built, there's so much innovation for many, many years that cosmos people, cosmos developers have pioneered. And I think now it's the time to unify that and to turn it into a product offering and sell it to institutions. And I think that's the plan. Yeah, I mean, that's what we did with EVM. And we purchased the underlying technology from EMS. We took that, you know, it wasn't fully formed. And we spent six months completely rebuilding it, but building on top of the core ideas.

And now we have it as a full feature as part of the stack. And it's the most widely requested feature of the stack that we've seen over the past, you know, three to four years. So I think there's definitely an opportunity for us to do that again. Great. Yeah. One thing I was thinking about while talking about privacy is recently there's been increased awareness of the oncoming threat of quantum. We recently did a podcast with John Lillick of Ethereum fame and a quantum physicist who is building a quantum resistant blockchain. And I think the episode probably came out before this one.

But, you know, John's thesis is that, like, we're very close to most blockchains, just being completely vulnerable to quantum computers. And not many blockchains, at least, you know, of the majors, they like top 20 are taking this very seriously, in his opinion. I tend to agree, as I've done more research on this. Is this something you guys have thought about? And, like, are enterprise clients worried about this at all? I don't think I've ever heard.

an enterprise client asked me about quantum computing. I mean, the truth is when people say that blockchains are at risk of sort of a quantum innovation that could make them unsafe, what they're saying is that, you know, basically RSA is going to be hacked, right? You can essentially, like a reverse engineer the prime number creation that happens during this, you know, RSA encryption process. And the truth is, if that happens, the whole world is fucked, right? everything is encrypted via, you know, those different methods.

And only recently have people started to move things to like elliptical curve encryption that, you know, is much more quantum resistant. And so I think it's like, what is society going to look like after quantum computing comes out? Yeah. I do think, though, that most of the things that rely on encryption from, that are more of the same institution are centralized to update encryption schemes and say, you know, banking bank database

encryption is a lot easier than doing a hard like doing a hard fork on Bitcoin and having everyone have to sign a transaction that moves their tokens into a new address. It's quantum resistant. And so I think I think blockchains are

it's like a particular problem that's not the same as military technology or banking technology or financial markets technology. There's a particular challenge with blockchain is like coordination is hard. And then you need, to have, in most cases, at least as I understand it, you need to have individual users perform in action to be shielded from any attack. I mean, I think like, you know, even I use like Bit

Warden for my password protection, right? They can't take my, hopefully they can't actually see what's in there, right, because it is encrypted by my password. I will have to take action. I think when it comes to Cosmos, you know, this is one of the greatest things about Cosmos is that individual chains can collapse. And the overall. is not affected. This is not true for Ethereum, right? If the chain collapses everything under Ethereum just completely implodes. And so I think the risk factor that we have around this is a lot lower because we can individually update these chains, right? And because there is a history and a practice of validators updating these chains frequently, right? That's not true on Bitcoin,

right? That thing never updates pretty much. And like Ethereum only really updates every so often. And there's a big, there's like a huge marketing campaign around it every time it does. And so for us, I think it's going to be a lot easier for us to build whatever kind of security solution is necessary to keep these blockchain safe. Right. Yeah, I think another thing too here is that having quantum resistant blockchains will greatly affect their performance. And that's assumed that I think a lot of chains will have to deal with and find solutions too. Also, maybe the quantum computers are running the chains in the first. I don't know. You got it's kind of quantum computer run a blockchain?

I don't know. Hey? Cool. I want to take an opportunity just to kind of plug our event in Argentina. So we're, we partnered to organize a new event series called Sovereign, Sovereign Day. We did Sovereign Evm Day in, in Cannes a couple weeks ago, or a couple months ago.

And now we're doing Sovereign Day in Argentina. So yeah, the vision here is that like, everything we talked about right here, like, We want to bring this vision of sovereignty, this kind of app chain vision to the next frontier. And Sovereign Day is kind of a place where we do that. So I'm really excited to be doing this. And yeah, maybe talk a little bit about like what you expect, what people can expect there. Yeah, sure.

I mean, also extremely excited. I think, first of all, you know, the reason we wanted to do Sovereign Day and sort of the Sovereign Series is because sovereignty is a concept is something that really nice. connects what Cosmos is and always has been with what the world wants, right, and what institutions want and what governments want, which is sovereignty, right? They want their independence. They want the freedom to grow. They don't want to be interfered with by others. And I think this is going to be especially a good one because, well, it is also only the second one. And the last one was great. So hopefully another good one where basically we can invite a number of the CBDC and central banks and, you know, governmental leaders of the area of Latin America to come there and talk about sovereignty,

talk about their country's sovereignty, and talk about how that is so close to what we can offer in cosmos in terms of technological sovereignty and where those things collide. I'm super excited about that, and yeah, hopefully, yeah, the second one will be as good or better than the first one. Guys, thanks so much for taking the time. Congratulations on yet another incredible cosmiverse, and thanks Mag for taking part. Thank you, sir. Thank you.