Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Cryptocito: Cosmoverse – Where Cosmonauts Unite

Episode Date: October 5, 2022

We caught up with Cosmoverse co-founder and YouTuber Cryptocito, for a chat from this year's event in Medellin. We look back on the 2nd edition of the conference and how the ecosystem has grown since last year. We also dive into some of the announcements, notably, ATOM 2.0.Topics covered in this episode:Cosmoverse in MedellinCryptocito's background and how Cosmoverse was bornHighlights from the conferenceMesh security systemsCosmos community growthThoughts on Interchain Foundation (ICF)ATOM 2.0Episode links: CosmoverseCrytpocito's youtubeCosmoverse on TwitterCryptocito on TwitterSponsors: Omni: Access all of Web3 in one easy-to-use wallet! Earn and manage assets at once with Omni's built-in staking, yield vaults, bridges, swaps and NFT support.https://omni.app/ -This episode is hosted by Sebastien Couture & Sunny Aggarwal. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/464

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two days ago and we're going to do a recap of what's been going on here this week in Medellin. I'm very pleased to be with my friend and co-host, Sunny Agarwal, host of Epic Center and co-founder Ossmosis and the man himself, the man who made this all possible. The guy who brought us all here, hundreds of people to fly to Medellín, creptocito. Yeah, thanks for having me. I think the crazy part for me is that we really managed. should get everybody to come to Medellin because I know a lot of people they had some concerns about the city, about Colombia, right? When you hear it first time and you've never been here, your first thoughts are like, oh my God, it's dangerous. Everybody gets kidnapped and Pablo

drags this and that. But now people are here. And like I hear people, they say, next to you, we're going to do it again here. I don't want to leave. I think everybody's very excited. I just found out Sonny wants to see some hippos here. So there's a lot to see. A lot of cool, fun, exotic stuff. You also have a little story to tell. You can see on your Twitter, you posted that with the Paraggladding. Like there's a lot of cool stuff you can do here, and the people are amazing. The food is great. The city is just beautiful.

A lot of good bars, good parties. Whatever you want, you can find it here, except for Beach. That's probably the only thing that's missing here. But yeah, love Medina. Had a great time here at Cosmovords. And just thankful that everybody made it here, and we had such a great time. Yeah, there was definitely, I think, there was, like, concern that a lot of people had. I was in Berlin a couple of days ago for another call.

conference and like people were talking about hey I got to get private security and even I was thinking about okay do I bring my laptop should I bring my ledgers you know and then like as soon as we landed as soon as we arrived in the city all those concerns kind of went away and it's just like hey this is like a regular place it has an interesting history but you know as long as you're not like doing anything foolish like trying to get paid talent on Tinder or like scoring some drugs on the street you're probably going to be fine we wouldn't have done it if we weren't a hundred percent unsure how the city is. And I used to live here for a year a couple of years ago. So that's why I'm, I was very confident that everything will be fine. Can you leak some alcohol and where the next

Cosmoverse is going to be? Unfortunately, it's too early for that. And I heard some things. Yeah, there's some rumors here and there. I mean, I think in general, we want to make Cosmover's in places that are, that have high demand for crypto, but they don't have stuff going on every other week, right? For example, if you look at Berlin, like in Berlin, half of the teams are based there. There's like stuff going on all the time. Like everybody knows the city. Medellin is exotic, but there's 50 million Colombians. There's a lot of people that want to get into crypto, right?

We even had the secretary for innovation and technology from the city of Medellin from the mayor's office, right? And he even came to the second day himself just to listen to the presentation. That was honestly one of my favorite talks in the entire thing. It's really impressive what they've done. and everything that they're doing. I mean, of course, like, you know, he's kind of pushing an agenda or whatever, but, like, you know, it seems very impressive, like, all the stuff they're doing here to, like, help bring innovation

and, like, connectivity and get, have access for people to, like, learn how to program and things like that. It's super cool. Yeah, I think they want to position Colombia or Medell, especially as, like, the software value for Latin America. And, like, you could tell from this talk, and then there was also another governmental institution. They really want to push hard for that

and give all the students free laptop for example and like just get them into this internet economy. Yeah. And I think crypto can hopefully absorb a lot of debt because, you know, people here, if they learn about defy, if they learn about even staking and having sovereignty for their finances, I think it can have a big impact here, right? Colombia also has high inflation, not as high as Argentina or Venezuela, but still I think it's a net positive for the people to at least be aware what exists. And, you know, if they can, make another 10 bucks a month farming on Osmo, then why not? That's good for them, right?

So yeah, and I think that's how we also look for other places to host Cosmoverse, is to look at places that have high demand, high population, maybe a cool city, right? I think a big factor of success for this year's Cosmoverse was also that Medina is just an amazing city, right? So I think we also want to look at that, but yeah, we'll see. I think that we need a few weeks off and then we'll travel a little bit and scout the next place. Yeah. So, I mean, we haven't properly introduced you. I mean, the people who listen, I think, to the interop know who you are. I think maybe on the epicenter side, you know, some of the, some of the OG Ethereum people perhaps are not familiar with your work and your YouTube channel.

So yeah, who is Cryptocito? I started my crypto journey in early 2017, and I've pretty much done everything wrong for two or three years, aped into the next big thing, lost everything, believed everything, a bit naive for a long time, but I think everybody has to go through this once. But yeah, then when 2019 came and actually lived in Medellin here, I saw that, like, I feel like we've bottomed out, and I feel like, you know, we're ready for the next cycle. So I was preparing for that. I was reading a lot. I did a lot of events all around the world. I did a lot of research, networking. I think also talking to people at events physically is one of the best things and ways to learn about crypto to build up a network.

And then sometime around when COVID started, I just bought a camera and started to record because like I said, I've done so much wrong. I sent coins to the wrong address. I got hacked. I had coins on wallets that don't exist anymore, on exchanges that don't exist anymore. And I think, I just wanted to share that learning with people that are maybe new to crypto, because it helped me in the beginning to learn from others that have done this before. And then, I don't know, in the beginning, it was just random. I just clicked record and talked about whatever. But then I found the cosmos, thanks to Jack Semplein.

He got me into it. He had a call with me. This was pre-IBC, and he walked me through everything, and he was so passionate about it. And then the rest is history. I mean, from there, I just went deeper, deeper, deeper. connected with everyone. I also like the ideology a lot about cosmos because I think before that this Bitcoin tribalism came up really big and I really didn't like that. And also I think crypto YouTube was, I think still is, but back then even more so was flooded with bybit leverage

traders, referral links here and there. I just don't think that's too valuable. I mean, everybody can do whatever they want. But yeah, I just wanted to make a more fundamental content channel and yeah, now I'm just basically all in on Cosmos on that end, but I'm also very interested in other ecosystems. I'm not just only Cosmos, but that's where I spend most of my time. Yeah. Yeah, that's it. I think we all share that, yeah.

Your YouTube channel, I know for a lot of people, it's like how they got into Cosmos. So many people are like, oh, I found out about I got into the ecosystem through you. It was really funny because I think I've been on your podcast, like, on your channel a couple, a bunch of times and you're always interviewing me. So it's really fun to like turn the tables a little bit. Oh, yeah. I enjoyed that, actually. It's cool. I don't have to prepare much. So how did you go from having a YouTube channel and a lot of Cosmos videos to organizing Cosmoverse? I mean, I've done events before that. I've actually done one here in Medellin before.

I've done one in Buenos Aires, like a general crypto event. And when I was living in Shanghai for my exchange year... When were you living in Shanghai? 2018. 2018, okay. Yeah, I went there because I still... I studied Chinese and economics in Germany, but then I had one exchange here in China. And that's where I met other guys and we co-hosted Crypto Mondays in Shanghai, which was really cool.

It was a big success. So I always had this background of like doing events, getting people together. I think that's also what I love, my skill is just connecting people. Yeah. Right. And like the goal for this customer was also like to just get all of you guys together, lock the doors for three, four days. and then you guys talk. I just enjoy it.

But yeah, so the background and the passion just for connecting people. And then, yeah, it was coincidence and luck, I guess, and the right timing. When I moved to Lisbon last year, that I also met the right guys with Basil, Fabian, Yuri. Because I could never do this alone, right? So when we saw that, hey, there's Solana Breakpoint and there's East Liscon, East Lisbon and Liscon and whatever. ever, an avalanche house. Like, why is there no cosmos event?

Like, there needs to be a cosmos event, at least in this week, right? At least one meter. Because I knew you were coming anyways, right, for all these Ethereum events. Yeah. And then we basically came together and we said, let's make a meet up at least. And then this meetup idea, so like, maybe we can have some presentations. And then maybe we can even fill a full day. And then it turned out to be two full days, 700 people,

people showed up. But I think, yeah, this was also, I think, the first time of the years that everybody came together in Cosmos. So it was just the right timing, luck, and, yeah, the right city to start. Like the first Cosmos conference and kind of the only Cosmos conference that existed before that was the interchange conversations that happened in Berlin. And it was like this kind of, you know, it was cool. Like to see like this first Cosmos conference and there was a hackathon and of first like Cosmosm was built there and everything. But then like, I remember seeing Cosmovers. I was like, what the fuck is this?

Like, who's organizing this thing? Is the ICS behind the ICF? Like, who is this? And yeah, I mean, like, I totally get this whole like, hey, let's do a meetup and then it turns into this big thing. Because like we also had sort of similar thing with Nebulaur where, you know, at first I wanted to do like a kind of side event with ECC and then it became like this. I mean, not as big as the Cosmoverse, but it was like, you know, 300 people and like,

and now we want to turn it into a conference. So things in Cosmos like really are accelerating. And, you know, the size of this and the events that are happening, like, just really, I think, proves that. Even, like, this, this year's causal verse from compared to last year. Like, I feel, it feels like it's like, I don't know how many people showed up. It feels like, like, at least three times bigger or at least with the energy and everything. Yeah. And, you know, and we're in a bare market now. So, you know, that's, and also, you know, there's no fair market in.

And I was like I said, like, last year, it was like sort of co-located with, like, all these other conferences. So there was a lot of spillover people I know. You know, there wasn't great security. So I know everyone was just like walking in without tickets, which is great. They were learning about cosmos. But here it's like, no, everyone was here came specifically just for this event, right? They had to come all the way to Medellín for like a cosmovirus. So it just shows like how much the community has grown in the last one year even.

We also got a little bit of credibility, obviously, also for Colombia from DefCon, right, which is happening in a week or two weeks in Bogota. But I think, yeah, like you say, I mean, I know you told me this in the beginning, like, you believe that Cosmverse deserves its own conference, right? Not cloud chasing other events or other communities. Like, we're big enough to do this. And I think this year, Cosmiverse has proven that we actually are. And I think in total, we had over 1,500 people there. Insane.

Yeah, that's crazy. There were, like, people showing up. I didn't even know. like crazy, crazy people. I may have told people that, hey, if you don't have to take it out, I was like, just show up. What are you? Turn you away? No, I don't think we'd turn anybody away. At least I'm not aware of that.

But I think from over 35 countries, which is, that's the crazier part to me. Like, there were people like, like Jacob, right? Jacob flew in from Vietnam. Yeah. Like, that's a crazy trip. That's a 40-hour trip. And now he's going back with an Osmo tattoo. I don't know.

We can talk about this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But. We got to talk about the legendary stuff. There's people that flew in from Australia, from Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea, a lot. Korea, a lot of Korea is. The U.S., from India. A lot of them, exactly.

Some people from Europe. Yeah, so I think that's a cool part. And like you say, like they're just, they just came for this specifically. And also like a lot of Latinos, right? Like we got people from Argentina, Mexico, Peru, Chile, the Dominican. Dominican. The Dominicans are crazy. And you can also tell, like, talking about where to host Cosmosmos next, right?

Like, you can see where already small communities exist, right? Like, the Dominican Republic is a small country, but they have already, like, 30, 40, hardcore cosmonauts, right? And they're super pumped and excited to maybe one day host Cosmverse there. And, you know, why not Punta Kana? So there's some beach vibes there. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it was insane.

I mean, like, I think all the people that were staying, you know, staying in this whole area where we're all, you know, cosmonauts. And, you know, I just, like, see people with Cosmos T-shirts everywhere. Like, the locals listening. I'm like, what's this Cosmos thing? Even, I mean, even some wood drivers either came to the conference or like, oh, yeah, you're also from this Cosmos event. So, like, the locals are hearing about it.

And the funny thing, like, here the restaurant down there, which is actually a big restaurant, they just told me yesterday when everything was over. They told me that this is the first time ever that we're running out of food. And it's like crazy. Like every single room in the hotel was booked. They have 300 rooms. I think nearly 200 were from cosmonauts. They obviously still have other people here.

And it's an international big hotel, right? Like people just come here anyways. But nearly like every room was booked. We booked every single room for the conference. Like every single meeting room, every single conference room, three different floors. I think from like the amount of like detail that went into this they never had this year. Yeah. The region team booked an entire hotel.

I was talking to Greg and he's like, yeah, we just went on Airbnb. We booked like all these rooms in this boutique hotel. And it turns out we just had the whole hotel. So they're like throwing parties in the sauna and everything. It's wild. So what's, what were the kind of big highlights for you guys here in terms of announcements? I mean, like obviously there's the Adam 2.0 announcement. Maybe we can talk about that.

But yeah, maybe before we talk about that, what kind of other important highlights? Yeah, I mean, I think there was a lot of different things. I think, you know, I got to talk about some of the mesh security stuff that we've been thinking about for a long time. And just, you know, I think it's something that we kind of all intuitively thought about and knew it that was going to happen in Cosmos. But, like, it was able to like, I don't know, formalize it a little bit and put the ideas down into. like comprehensible. So that, yeah, I think that was really fun. And then on top of that, just like, I don't know,

just like seeing a lot of the more underground projects, like talk a little bit more, like Babylon, for example. Super cool. Yeah. I did an interview with Fisher. Oh, nice. Yeah. Yeah.

So that's really cool. You know, and just like seeing an update on like what everyone is working on. Yeah. So that was really just fun to see. So yeah, talk about this mess security thing. Like you said, it's something that, I mean, certainly I've been thinking about, like, you know, in sort of abstract ways, but never really, you know, put a name on it or this idea that basically chains can secure each other and create this kind of like strong bond between like all chains.

Yeah, the idea is just this is that, you know, the point of cosmos is, okay, interchained security is not supposed to be a hub and spoke system, right? If we just end up building another hub and spoke system, we're no different than every other ecosystem, right? Pocod, Ethereum, with their roll-ups. Everyone is building like one central chain and then a bunch of things that depend on. And that's like, you know, that's cool. But like the point of Cosmos is like to build this like truly decentralized system, no one chain at the center. And to do that, how do you make that work, right?

So or how do these sovereign, how can we have a network of many, many sovereign chains. No, we go, I often go around, pitch this app chain vision to people, but then their first question is always like, wait, but how is this all going to be secured, right? Don't you need like Ethereum level security or polka dot level security? And the answer is all of the app chains are going to secure each other. So it's kind of like the NATO model, where it's like, okay, NATO is a collection of sovereign countries. They all have their own governance systems. They don't interfere in each other's internal politics, but they have a joint security mesh where if any one country gets attacked, all of them sort of rush to each other's defense.

I love how you always bring this back down to geopolitics. The geopolitics analogies that you provide to kind of, you know, help understand how this is going to work are so effective. And when you gave this slide with like the NATO, all the NATO countries and like all the alliances that they have and also this kind of like this shared security that, that, uh, that exists between them, I think is like a really accurate analogy of what this might look like. Yeah. So, you know, I think that's, yeah, so, you know, we've always thought a lot about, like, when we're designing Cosmos, like, two, it's a little bit of a technical system, but it's also like a political economic system, as Bucky would like to, Bucky likes to say. And, you know,

when we're thinking about the technical side of things, we often look at the internet for inspiration. When we're looking at, like, the political economic situation, we really, do like to think about like, oh, how do communities form, you know, how do sovereign communities interact with each other? And, you know, as like, as Bucky like to say, what we're building is, you know, we're not building the world computer in Cosmos, right? We're building the community computers, right? And how do communities interact in the real world? Their blockchain are going to have, like, similar interfaces, you know, relationships as well. How far do you think is Indochain security or the endgame for internet chain security because there's like version

one obviously which is very static in that sense and then version two version three how far is MASH security because I still have to listen to your talk because I was just running around I couldn't that's what plane rides are for man just download all the talks but how far is that away MASH security your MESS security idea from the end game of ICS? Yeah I think it's obviously a little bit more complicated for sure than the V1 What mesh security really is is the V3 design, but run bi-directionally. Instead of just one chain providing security to the others, security in multi-directions.

For my understanding, I believe the informal team had actually paused development on B2 and B3 because they found, they thought there was like issues with it. And so what we were able to do was like help them explain like, oh, this is actually how you solve this issue and this issue of this issue. And now I think they're like pretty on board again with moving towards this idea. So I was chatting with Gian yesterday about like, you know, I think they're also really excited about mesh security as well and we're going to help like build this. I know, I know the, I know Jake from Juno is like so excited.

He's like, he's like ready to start hacking on it this weekend at Hackawsm. And he's like, okay, we're going to start building a prototype right now. Like him and Ethan Fry and I are, I think we're going to try to like build some, some primitive pieces today. obviously this is all going to mean but you know this actually an interesting thing it's like kind of like randomly independent one thing i think i've realized by just talking to people at this conference and just like seeing how the state of development is i think that we have to start treating cosmolasm as a more like core piece of the cosmos stack where it's just like so much faster to do fast like really quick progenping in the cosmos SDK is really supposed to be this

like kernel level code you know if you need to touch the deep stuff like staking or how transaction fees work that stuff should really be in like cosm in sdk but like you know defy logic or new ibc protocols that stuff is way faster to write in ibc and i think all cosmoosum yeah yeah in cosmosmuseum and i think that like all cosmos chains actually going forward or cause SDK change at least should implement some sort of uh permissioned cosmolasm like similar to how osmosis does um and i think chains that don't own honestly, they're going to be like kind of left behind. We've actually added, you know, we have our first core module that we've written in

Cosmossom now, which is IBC rate limiting. It's like a way of, you know, dealing with hacks and stuff where it's like, it says, hey, only 20% of an IBC channel, TBL or whatever can go every six hours or something. So basically all your IBC can, all your IBC transfers are going through Cosmuseum. They're not going through the like kernel level. Well, they go through the causes. Okay, because the IBC module is in. SDK, but then the I when it receives fund IBC packet, it passes it to the

Cosmwasum contract that does the rate limited and then the Cosm and then the Cosmolome contract it's like a the middleware stack is in Cosmossum. This is so interesting. Okay so with regards to with regards to like this permission permission, permission, um, thing you just mentioned can you explain what what do you mean by that? Why would it be permission? Why would just be permissionless? Because I don't think that, you know, you don't want a permissionless chain or anyone can start deploying whatever you want.

Right. It's just more of a way of like... Oh, I see. So you're saying that chains should deploy Cosmuseum as a way to implement other sorts of functionality for their chain and at a minimum and then perhaps like some other like... Exactly, yeah. So like this IBC rate limiting contract, we are going to add it to osmosis, but you know,

I'm sure other chains will want to add it as well, right? Okay. And so, you know, yeah, it's just a way of iterating more quickly on features. Yeah. Okay, like as opposed to say like the Ethereum route where they've built all these, um, these four core functions like into the EVM, you know, in Cosmos, it would be better to build them as contracts and you have the core modules call them. Exactly.

Okay. Okay. Very interesting. So one of the things that our team has been working on a lot over the last like, you know, three or four months is like deepening the relationship, like the inter, how easy to, you know, because right now you have a lot of teams who are like very Cosmos SDK focused, right? Like they don't use Cosmos. Then you have a lot of teams that are very Cosmwasum focus.

So like, you know, the Confeo team that builds Cosmwasum, they kind of really only think in terms of Cosmwasum. Juno is very much like, you know, their core chain is very, very minimalistic, and they have a lot of cool logic on the Cosmwasum side. But Osmosis, we have a lot of stuff happening on the Cosm-SdK side and a lot of stuff happening on the Cosmwasum side. And so we've had to spend a lot of time, like, making the interaction process between these two systems, like very seamless.

list. And so, yeah, so, you know, I think that tooling that we build is going to start to be able to be used by more chains as well. What do you think in that context then around the Prop 69 implementing Cosmuseum on the Cosmos Hub, which failed? And now they're building Neutron, which is a smart contract platform. So what are you thoughts on that for the hub? Oh, I bought a guess on Prop 69. So I think it was like a no-brainer. Yeah. What do you think about? Yeah, I mean, hearing you now, I think that perhaps it makes sense to, implement it on the cosmos chain as on the cosmos hub chain as kind of a permission thing so that more functionality will will come to it yeah i i also felt that uh having cosmouism on on the

cosmos hub was was not yeah i think i've already known that as well and like yeah it's not the role of the cosmos hub so i think especially after adding two point oh probably probably nine wasn't for permissionless cosmwasom it was for permission to cosmoism oh wasn't okay and like i said i don't think it's the point of it is not to add more functionality to the hub necessarily right it's it i think it was to be able to like add new ibc protocols or you know for example you know uh the composable team is building the substrate i bc yeah but how it's actually the i bc client is actually going to be written in cause in wazum and so it's like i don't know i feel you need to this more and more of the stack is going to move towards that yeah i mean maybe after osmosis

implements this and, you know, starts building useful features in Cosmosm, and maybe other changes will start following that model. I mean, that's kind of what I think that's what our plan is, like, you know, we're just to start the mesh security process with chains that have Cosmosom enabled. So, you know, we'll have osmosis and Juneau and Stargay's and everyone start doing the mesh security, and then hopefully more change will start to add it. So, Adam 2.0, big announcement. Did you, uh, did you plan this before with the- Did you know about it?

Did you know the details? I didn't know anything. You didn't know the details beforehand? No, I mean. You didn't see the right thing? I could have pushed for it, like for, you know, simply a white paper draft, whatever. But like, I didn't even ask too much.

I wanted to get surprised myself. But yeah, it was cool. It was awesome. I also, like, that they chose customers to, like, share all this. Like, because you asked early for announcements and, like, across the board, almost every presentation had some alpha in it, some big announcements, right? Stuggles, they also announced on stuff. Intercooled staking or something like that with their NFTs.

If you haven't listened to this, I mean, it's pretty cool stuff. Yeah, I think Atom 2.0, I mean, this was, I think, for a lot of Bider Rumors sell the news event for the conference. But then also Yelena dropped the couple of consumer chains that are coming with USC, obviously, being a big one. But you guys also have been involved in, I think, getting this done. And yeah, I think Atom 2.0 is obviously a long play, but I think it's the first time that there's a specific roadmap for the Cosmos Hub. And yeah, we'll see how it plays out. But I think they're still, I think that they're putting it on the firm now, then there's still some feedback and it has to go on chain.

So I think it still needs a little bit maybe also to be refined. But I think in general, it's a pretty cool thing. Touches about, touches on a lot of the things regarding the hub and atom, not just inflation, but also governance, some of the additional utilities, right, to also make the Cosmos Hub and service provider for other chains without having to enforce dependencies on the hub. So yeah, we'll see. I think I'm excited about it,

but I'm excited about a lot of change in cosmos. But yeah. I'm quite optimistic about M2.0. I think that it was like a necessary thing in order to bring actual value and utility to the cosmos hub and sort of set it on a track to remain relevant long term. As an atom holder, I'm quite excited about it.

Also as someone who's been a, core believer in the cosmos vision, like the app chain vision and like everything that, you know, you guys have been working on for the last whatever six years. I think it's great. I think the, yeah, like I wrote this blog post a couple of weeks ago basically like asking a question, like can interchained security save the cosmos hub from becoming irrelevant? And I think like item 2.0 also is a step in the right direction. I do think that the, I think that the cosmos hub needs many, many, many more chains using internet chain security if it wants to stay relevant. I think like this is a great announcement set, right?

Like five or six chains. So basically like there's going to be Stride, USCC. There's this flash that's a MEV chain, staking, liquid stake. Quick Silver. Well, Prick Silver is not, they haven't like yet in a incident. Stride going to be using. Stride is going to be using it. Yeah.

I tweeted about four or five of them. Neutron, of course. But I think that there needs to be a real concentrated business development effort on the part of, say, like, the ICF and informal and all these teams to start doing business development. And I think that there's an opportunity. I talked about this on the panel that I hosted with Marco and owner. There's an opportunity to really position Cosmos and the hub as sort of an enterprise-grade ecosystem where more like traditional. companies and institutions can start using Cosmos. And the way I see this is the Cosmos SDK is absolutely perhaps the best technology stack

to start building decentralized applications and progressively decentralize them. So you can literally use the Cosmos SDK as like a database, right? It's just like a transactional database that allows you to build logic into it. And then over time, you know, companies can start opening up their, their permission model by adding validators, adding partners to the validator set, white listing users, even maybe doing KYC with white listed addresses if they need to, right?

If they're regulated in such a way that they need to be compliant, they can do that. And then over time, essentially like plug into the internet in the same way the companies in the 2000s, like 90s and 2000s were going from intranet to intranet by enabling IBC. I think that's, I don't know like who needs to do this, but like someone needs to build

the framework and sort of handhold companies through this process. And I don't know if it's the ICF or like the builders program and what, but like it needs to happen. One of our like biggest investors it's a ribid capital.

Yeah, you told me that man. But they, you know, they are one of the biggest like traditional fintech VCs. You know, they were early in any fintech company you can imagine. And then they've been doing crypto for a while as well. They're very early and quite based. But they

one of the reasons that they like bet big on osmosis was that you know they have this giant fintech portfolio and they just believe that like one day all of these fintech companies are going to have their own blockchains and you know cosmos is the staff to do that and osmosis is the center of cosmos and so they're like okay that's you know this is why but like that idea that like hey all of these companies are going to start to migrate onto their own sovereign blockchains yeah it makes total sense like i mean you know when when we're building stradum in in 2015 we were already using tendermint with our customers. And the challenge that we had back then was that there was no ecosystems, right?

We were trying to build consortions, which like, there was no costas SDK. There was no Cosmosis SDK also. But like the challenge that we had is that we were trying to build consortiums. And it just wasn't working because like that's an enormous feat. But if you have an ecosystem that already exists where there's economic activity, where there's liquidity where you can build a business and and start sort of like redesigning existing business models to work on on blockchain, like cosmos is the perfect place to do it because there's activity there but not only that because you're as a company you know you're able to build your application in a permissioned or more like

controlled way and then over time and depending on your business needs open it up to other to other plays in the ecosystem if you wish which is something that's uh you know just not possible on ethereum because like because you share the security with all the chains you share the bandwidth with all the chain i mean maybe with the Ethereum to too like that's changing a little bit but But the cost of just seems like the perfect way to do that. Yeah, but I think we also see that we actually have proof for that already because we see from both sides, right at the institutional side, there were also a couple of big VCs here at the conference. And they didn't make a big thing out of it, but they would just want to make their homework. And then I had a live stream last week with Fanak, which is a $19.000 fund.

And this guy, like, you know, we're just talking on telegram right now. And he's like, man, this is cool, this is cool. He couldn't be here this time, but he watched, or I think at least is watching all the presentations, or at least the ones that he's interested in on the stream. But yeah, they're super interested and hyped about it. And I think the fact that Cosmos is not top down in that sense where there's one organization that does all the marketing, all the conferences, all the investments, all the BD, but there's like different teams that all work together.

getter sometimes in a good way sometimes there's drama but I think that's very interesting that's a different vibe that we have in Cosmos-esque to compare to any other ecosystem you can even see that with Cosmosis I mean what we did with Cosmores we couldn't do it in other ecosystems

like if we did it in Solana Solana Foundation or whatever is running break point like we can't do that yeah IOHK is running the Cardano stuff Perit is running all the Polka that stuff New Foundation is running all the new conferences and all this stuff. We could only do it in Cosmos. So because there is no central giant entity that runs everything and that wants to be everywhere. And I think that's a cool

thing. And the second thing is also project wise. You see DYDX is the best example, obviously. I think they had some people here actually. But they just chose Cosmos for the app chain architecture and for because it fulfills whatever they want to build. And you see more and more projects now, doing their homework, potentially also migrating over to Cosmos, either their own chain or building on any cosmasm chain out there, and there's multiple out there that you can use or use interchain security. There's so many different ways, and I feel like it's all coming together, I think, over the past years, ever since I joined, Cosmos was never the flashy project that had a lot of hype and,

you know, crazy stuff going on, but I think now it's all coming together in a very organic way and very naturally, and I think that's the most sustainable way. Even though Atom didn't pump on the Atom 2.0 announcement, I think long-term, Atom and all the other coins in the ecosystem will gain more and more market shares because it's just built in a more mindful and sustainable way. And you can see this across all teams, like literally, Osmosis team and the Stargay's team, the Juno team.

They're just so focused on building. And also that attracts real users, real protocol revenue. I think that's way more sustainable than having a quick pump because some VCs buying it and then, you know, slowly it dies off for a long time. There was another conference going on at the same time in Singapore, token 2049. And like everybody was saying there's like 65% VCs here and, you know, like not very good. Nick, the Celestialore made a tree, like, thank God this conference thing in place. It takes all the boring VC to see you guys to this event and we can have fun here with customers. But on the note of like centralized sort of, you know, planning that, you know, you know,

You know, there is, I think, some debate around whether or not it helps long term to, like, align people on, like, you know, shared visions and aligning people on, like, building the right things. You know, in Cosmos, we don't really have that same sort of, you know, centralized planning as perhaps in Solana or some of these other ecosystems that you mentioned. But there is the IACF. There is, you know, interchange inBH and, you know, informal systems. and to some extent, ten or men ignite. And they still hold, I think, a lot of the power and perhaps sort of memetic power as like these institutional organizations within cosmos.

There was a presentation by Ethan Buckman, and I also did an interview with him, if you want to watch that, it's on the channel, where he talks about redesigning the ICF. What do you guys think of, you know, yeah, what do you think of the ICF? And does it need to change in a more sort of centralized planning, more in the route of like Salana or some of the other ecosystem or does it need to just be kind of a

steward that helps the ecosystem go in a direction i think sunny can talk more about like because you used to work at tenement right so you can talk more from an insider perspective but for me as an outsider i think um it's cool to see how these institutions exist and help fund projects the ecosystem development all these kind of things and also conferences but they don't want to be necessarily the center and the central point of attention and everything, right? They didn't want to say, hey, make this, you know, make this the interchange the ICF conference, right? They gave us the support. They came full force, informal send 20 people, a lot of people from the ICF here, a lot of people

from Ignite here. And, yeah, they just want to be part of it, but they don't want to enforce to be in the center. And I think that's really cool to see him. And then I think founder-wise, right? Like, if you look at any other ecosystem, you can see one or two main figures, right? We had it in Terra with Doe. We have Charles and Cardano, even Vitalik. Even though the Ethereum Foundation probably doesn't hold the majority of the ETH in circulation,

still Vitalik has a big impact on the development and roadmap of Ethereum in that sense. And in Cosmos, I think most people don't even know who Jay and Ethan are. Yeah. Like they're super passionate, but they don't also want to be in the. in the center and get all the attention, right? So I think that's a net positive for the ecosystem because it doesn't really make any dependencies. And you know, you can see like in Cardano, right?

Like, Charles is so controversial for many and people just don't like him. And that's why they don't like Cardano in general. But I think we'll never have this problem in- Cause for me, unless Sunny gets crazy, I don't know. I'm still convinced that Jay's, you know, departure was 20% convinced that it was like performance art. It was his way of pulling a Satoshi.

There was a very smart move. If that's true. But yeah, I think that Cosmos survived this. I think in 2020, a lot of people thought Cosmos would be dead. And like I said, on stage, the way I got in is because I bought some atoms somewhere and I didn't even know, I forgot about it. And I'm like, okay, should I do my research or should I just sell it? And luckily I started doing my research.

But at that time, I didn't even know what Cosmos was. Like, there was no one talking about it. It was completely dead on social media. Yeah. Because it went through this self-destruction, but survived. And I think, yeah, also now with the recent, the most recent division of tournament into three new entities. I still don't understand what's going on there. I would love for someone to explain what's going on here and who's behind what.

But, yeah, it could be another episode maybe. Yeah. But I think that's just. like further dilutes their power and impact. And I think, Hey, I think the test here is, it's simple. It's like, look at any ecosystem. And is there one person, essentially, that, like,

if that person gets hit by a bus, would the community continue to exist? And I think that in cosmos, I don't know who that person is. Like, I don't know, like, one person in cosmos. Like, if something were to happen to them, that the ecosystem would cease to exist. For other ecosystems, I really think that that's really kind of debatable. And, yeah, I mean, I think,

it's great. I think it also creates some challenges in terms of coordination. But, you know, if, personally, I think the ICF's role in sort of the, you know, these institutions, I think their role needs to be to just kind of steward and, you know, curate in a very light touch way, those sorts of things that the ecosystem work on and, like, the direction of the ecosystem. And so, like, you know, I think Bucky, you know, he, you know, he set sort of a vision and, like, I think also Zaki and, you know, of course, yourself, Sunny, like, you know, you're all very influential. and you guys help sort of broad directions in the ICF and these institutions that can play that role. I do think that the ICF needs to be more transparent, though, and sort of more open generally.

Like, I feel that it's sort of an opaque organization that it's been hard for a lot of folks to kind of like understand what they're doing or, you know, who's responsible for what or whatever. And like, if they can just be sort of providing more on the ground support, I think it would be great. I think one thing that's kind of good that's happening right now is the ICF has always been a little bit pulled in two directions, and it was unclear a little bit, whether they were supposed to be the foundation for Cosmos, the ecosystem, or for the Cosmos hub, the chain, right? These are two very different things. And I think part of like this reorg, structural reorgs are happening right now is like the hub team that was at the IG is going to be moving to informal. And so that's going to like, you know, I think Informbo is taking on a little bit more of this role of being like a lead dev team for the hub for the hub. While now the ICF can focus on being not not hub focused, but being ecosystem. And so that's part of like what we're doing is what well with the new builders programs and stuff where it's like getting so currently the ICF's, you know, its main treasuries all in Adams, right?

and it's using atoms to like find a lot of these open public goods but like you know i think that the public goods funding should be resilient against like just the at you know it even if adam doesn't make it but the cosmos because of some does we should you know public goods should still be being funded and so more so what we're building towards is making sure that like hey more chains are able to contribute to this like pool of capital yeah that that are working on public good so like if you're working on core cosmos SDK stuff or iBC stuff you're not getting paid in just Adam, but you're getting upside of Osmo and Juno and Secret and everything, like, all this whole stuff.

And then also just, like, coordinating better on, like, how do we market the ecosystem as a whole, like, getting this, like, narrative around the IBC and the interchain. On the note also of, like, who is running the show, I think in Cosmos, we still have, like, all these teams, they still have one or two people that you associate the project with. Like, for you, in Osmos, there's a lot of people associate that with you. and Stargays, a lot of them associated with Shane, but I think, like you said earlier, like if one of them would get hit by a bus,

I mean, there's still so much behind that, right? Like so many other, very smart developers, they're also very well connected with everyone. I think Cosmos the Cosmos development is also like a mesh network, right? It's like everybody's like helping each other and they're like all very collaborative.

I don't, honestly, I mean, I've been around in other ecosystems also before Cosmos, but I've never seen something like that. Everyone else is more competitive and like they're more tribal tribal about their own stuff and I feel like in cosmos it's more of a joint effort between all these teams and even though you fuck it up sometimes if you are willing to to make it better the next time I think there's always still conversations going on like I think people are not really salty about it at least on the developer side on Twitter of course

different thing but yeah I think the builders in cosmos are very collaborative and I think that's the real core strength of the ecosystem. So Adam 2.0, what do you guys think? Will it save the hub? Price target. That's what I'm at the price target. This part is of Adam 2.0 that I like and that's parts that I don't. Okay.

What do you like? What do you like? Parts that I like, I think the allocator process, like, you know, this is something I've been pushing for a long time, which is, you know, the Cosmos Hub has a high market cap. It should be using its community pool to invest in new projects and help bootstrap them. And, you know, As well has been doing this for a while, right? Like, we've had, we do these loan swaps.

You do with Stargays. We've got it with Axelar. But I think that, like, you know, and that's how us also has been able to build a close relationships with a lot of these projects. And I think the costals hub should like start doing similar things as well, using its much larger, well, yeah, much larger like economic might right now. Okay. So I think that's like, makes a lot of sense.

But then, you know, things like the interchain scheduler, I don't really think make that much sense. You know, we had a panel on MEP. I missed it, but I'm going to watch it on the plane. Multiple people have told me it was their favorite. It got a little spicy for sure. But yeah, so, you know, I just don't know if like, I don't, I'm not sure who the customer of the interchange scheduler from the causal hub is going to be when I think it's going to be more chains are going to want to control their own MEP capture. And so, you know, it doesn't make sense for osmosis, for example, to use the hubs interchained scheduler, for example.

I think the schedule is primarily for consumer chains, right, on the hub. I was even talking to the neutron team, even they were, like, it's still an opt-in thing, and they're like, wait, we would not, why would we want to do? Yeah, okay. But I think the allocator is definitely very interesting. Also, that the cosmos hub has a stake in other networks. What do you think about the inflation monetary policy implementations or proportionate? At least.

To be completely honest, I didn't read that part. That's like the least interesting. I think it's very cool because it creates a revenue stream for the community pool. And I think that's super important because there's now, I think, less than a million atom in the community pool. Osmo, how much Osmo is in the Osmo pool? Like a lot. Close 40 million Osmo. Yeah.

So that's crazy, right? That's like $45 million or 43. And the hub has 16, 14, something like that. So I think there needs to be definitely a revenue stream. I think with that in mind, they also propose now to have a nine months high inflation of Atom, where some of it goes into the community pool, and then it goes down gradually, I think 10% per month or something like that to a floor of 300K Atom per month, which would bring down the inflation, I don't know in numbers, but like a lot.

And I think with that in mind, like Atom can also, I know we talked about this also a long time ago, like that atom can be the money of cosmos, and I think monetary policy is a big thing of it, about it. But I think with that in mind, and also some of the utilities that I mentioned, I just briefly skimmed through the governance part. There's also a whole governance section in the white paper. I don't know if you read through that, but I think there's a lot of interesting stuff, but I think this is also stuff that is probably more long term. This needs to be seen.

I think short term, the monetary policy adjustments are probably the most important. thing on that because yeah needs to generate revenue for the pool and also be more sound money in that sense yeah do you think do you guys think the other chains like you know will osmosis start adopting like some of these tools like the allocator or reviewing its monetary policy in order to make it more like sound money yeah bosom is pretty cool i'm going to argue that office is already doing most of these things uh you know we've already been doing loan swaps we've We've been working with Skip to build MEPE systems into the protocol already. We've had staking derivatives for a long time, and we just called it super fluid staking,

but it was staking, it is a form of staking derivatives, right? And then, yeah, interchange security, you know, we're working towards the mesh. And, yeah, so I don't know, I feel like this is actually stuff that Osmosis has been working on for a while as well. I feel like the Hobbes version of these things, I feel like there's all these categories, almost, like how to do MEP, how to do staking derivatives, how to do allocation system. And like, you know, both Ophmosis and the Hub have like different flavors of each one. And I think, you know, people pick which one that they, the flavors that make more sense. Yeah, no, that makes sense.

Yeah. I think tokenomics, right, it's awesome is pretty cool. There's a, right? Yeah, I think one thing people don't realize what awesome on tokenomics is that like, you know, it is actually, you know, fixed cap, right? And so people like, oh, it's this like superinflationary thing. And it's really not right. Of course, in the beginning, it had to be because you have to roll it out.

But that's also why everybody enjoys crazy APRs. Initially, what we needed was a distribution. We didn't have a distribution. You know, osmosis never had any sort of ICO or anything, right? So we're like, okay, we can do a little bit of an air drop to have some initial distribution, but really we want like the air drop to go to people who are committed to osmosis, right? And how did we measure that? We were like, okay, well, who's providing liquidity, right?

And that's just the way of what it was was an extended ICO, right? The super high inflation over the first few years was to do the initial distribution to the early adopters of the protocol. So before we wrap up here, what was the sort of highlights? Let's talk about the legendary stuff that happened, the legends that were made. Yeah, I mean, obviously, Jacob's tattoo is incredible. I think it also came out really nice. Like the guy, and the guy, I know this guy for a couple of years, the tattoo artist, very nice guy. And he literally, this is last minute stuff, right? And he just brought a table.

He brought this stuff. And then people just came right next to the DJ at like 2 a.m. And they show you like, I want this picture on, you know, I want this tattooed on my neck or whatever. And he just had a piece of paper. And then he with a pen, he just wrote over it. And he just made it like free hand. Like he didn't have real equipment. But the way it came out, I think it's incredible.

So maybe for the epicenter listeners here, we're not familiar with this whole story. So like Jacob, Jacob Giddiquan, who is founder of Notional, it's a validator, also contributed to the ecosystem, has been talking on Twitter for some time now that he would get an Osmosis tattoo and maybe some other tattoos. And what was your role in like, you know, organizing this and making this happening? I have nothing to do. I mean, you got the tattoo artist. No, I mean, of course. Like Jacob said it.

I'm like, I can get it for you. you know, we got it done. I think one of the conditions was that he would overtake Wasmonton and the validator set. Yeah. And I think on the day, a few hours before it actually happened. So I don't know who contributed to that. But I think it was just fun to see how the community is passionate about it.

And, you know, the scene when this happened, like, we're downstairs. So it was in this club. You guys can go on Twitter and find videos of this, but it was in this club. And there's like a DJ up there. And then because there was like this kind of higher spot, right? And he was there in the corner with this light. And it just, it was such an interesting scene. It felt like, I don't know, some like mob boss, you know, up there, you know, like, you know, looking over like all of his, all of his subjects.

Yeah, it was such a cool, cool. There's an incredible picture on Twitter where he's like, yeah, holding the phone. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And you're in the background and Ethan and Yelana and the tattoo artist and it's crazy. He's like this thing would be meme three years. And I thought, okay, I thought it's Jacob

and the Quasarra co-founder. He also wanted to make one. But the tattoo artist told me that nearly 20 people made a tattoo there. Wow. And some people got lifetime access to Cosmoverse? Is that real? I mean, there was this... Some people got Cosmoverse tattoos.

There was a guy at 1 a.m. And then I stood next to him and he wrote something on telegram and he showed it to me. And I just said, yeah, sure. Like, yeah. And then he sent it and like, yeah, CryptoCito stood next to me. And like, we got approval.

I don't know. I don't even know if anybody did it. Some people did get like the kind of cosmos zero thing. But yeah, crazy. But I think this is, yeah, the first time also that everyone is coming together and partying, having a good time. I think it's also super necessary. Because after all, it's like behind all these, behind the crypto ticker on Coin Gecko,

there's like people, right? Yeah. And you can see some people like techno. You can see what's their favorite drinks. You have cool conversations with them. You can, you know, I had a shisha with Ethan Buckman. I didn't have one with you, Ed, and I'm angry about this, because you promised it to me. I'm here for a few minutes.

I don't know. I'm salty now. But, yeah, it's just cool to like, you know, really, truly meet. And sure, again, you've seen the talks, you've seen the announcements, coins didn't pump. But that's just the surface. Like, what's behind this is like all the conversations. I just talked with Dan Lynch in the hallway, and he's like, man, they're so cool. tooling that we're building and like I'm super excited and Jake is super excited and like just all the

builders and the community coming together and talking meeting each other building friendships relationships I think that's the real value of these of these events so really but I need two weeks off now yeah I need sleep what's next for you are you going to take some vacation I want to stay here for a little bit two weeks probably and then these dominicans are like come to the punta car it's so close like I'm just probably going to go there and then from there back to Lisbon. Yeah. Will you be in Lisbon like in November when all this stuff's happening? Yeah.

I'll be there until mid-next year for sure. Okay. Yeah. Cool. I think we can, I think we'd say this is a good, good note to end on. Yeah. Yeah. All right.

Thanks for doing this, guys. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Yeah. It's been a pleasure, yeah. Thank you for joining us on this week's episode. We release new episodes every week. You can find and subscribe to the show on iTunes, Spotify,

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