Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Skip Protocol: The API for Seamless Cross-Chain Experiences on Cosmos & Beyond - Sam Hart

Episode Date: September 13, 2024

Interoperability is the holy grail for a multi-chain future or the ‘internet of blockchains’. However, while IBC (inter-blockchain communication protocol) revolutionised permissionless cross-chain transfers, it was Skip Protocol’s Go API that took advantage of Cosmos’ infrastructure (and its numerous messaging protocols), to create an end-to-end interoperability platform, allowing developers to design seamless cross-chain user experiences.We were joined by Sam Hart, head of product at Skip Protocol, to discuss the challenges of interoperability across Cosmos & Ethereum, and how Skip:Go API & Skip:Connect push the crosschain boundaries towards end user adoption.Topics covered in this episode:Sam’s backgroundThe Other InternetSkip Protocol: bringing seamless interoperability to CosmosMonetization for Skip:Connect & Skip:GoThe Skip:Connect oracle and how Cosmos chains pull dataCross-chain MEVMEV blockersEthereum vs. Cosmos ecosystem development and activityEthereum bridges vs. Cosmos IBCCross-chain interoperabilitySkip’s multi-chain expansionEpisode links:Sam Hart on TwitterSkip Protocol on TwitterThe Other InternetSponsors:Gnosis: Gnosis builds decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem, since 2015. This year marks the launch of Gnosis Pay— the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Get started today at - gnosis.ioChorus One: Chorus One is one of the largest node operators worldwide, supporting more than 100,000 delegators, across 45 networks. The recently launched OPUS allows staking up to 8,000 ETH in a single transaction. Enjoy the highest yields and institutional grade security at - chorus.oneThis episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.

This is how you ultimately get composability of distinct distributed systems as you have more expressive systems for interpreting, querying, and just generally using the state of another chain. The Cosmos ecosystem, I think, gets it better than anybody, but it's just a really hard problem. When you're building a cross-chain transaction in Cosmos, you're most likely using Skip. Bitcoin signing is not the same as Ethereum signing.

It's not the same as Solana signing. It's not the same as Cosmos signing. And that causes a massive amount of pain. And that's one of the reasons that the ecosystems are so segmented right now. If you're looking to stake your crypto with confidence, look no further than Corse 1. More than 150,000 delegators, including institutions like BitGo, Pintera Capital and Ledger trust Coros 1 with their acids. They support over 50 blockchains and are leaders in governance or networks like Cosmos, ensuring your stake, is responsibly managed. Thanks to their advanced MEV research, you can also enjoy.

the highest staking rewards. You can stake directly from your preferred wallet, set up a white label note, restake your assets on eigenayer or symbiotic, or use their SDK for multi-chain staking in your app. Learn more at chorus.1 and start staking today. This episode is proudly brought to by NOSIS, a collective dedicated to advancing a decentralized future. NOSIS leads innovation with circles, NOSIS pay, and Metri, reshaping, open banking, and money. With Hashi and NOSSI and NOSIS VPN, they're building a more resilient privacy-focused internet. If you're looking for an L1 to launch your project, Nosis chain offers the same development environment as Ethereum with lower transaction fees. It's supported by over 200,000 validators making NOSIS chain a reliable and

credibly neutral foundation for your applications. NOSISDAO drives NOSIS governance where every voice matters. Join the NOSIS community in the NOSISDOW form, today. Deploy on the EVM-compatible NOSIS chain or secure the network with just one GNO and affordable hardware. Start your decentralization journey today at NOSIS. I.O. Hi, Sam. It's a pleasure to have you on. Yeah, great to be here, long-time listener. Cool. You have been in this space for a super long time. Tell us about yourself. Yeah, I'll give a kind of a bridged version, I guess.

I started my crypto journey, I guess, very close to when Epicenter started. I started listening to Epicenter really quite early. And I was living in New York City right around the time of Occupy Wall Street. So there was kind of like a milieu of, you know, activated political consciousness. And I was just kind of bathed in that. And a lot of my friends ended up participating in Occupy or kind of analyzing it from a more academic or like critical perspective. That got me just very interested in alternative infrastructures for, you know, new institutions effectively. and I've been involved in the arts for my whole life

and ended up doing a lot of kind of critical art projects or like interventionist projects around that or met a bunch of people that were involved in Occupy and like doing both of these things. And eventually I have a technical background. I worked as a research scientist for 10 years doing protein folding and bioinformatics work. So I was able to kind of bridge the gap

and some of these folks who were interested in kind of rebuilding institutions ended up getting into crypto unknowingly. And I could kind of provide like a technical basis for some of that and just got really fascinated by the industry made, kind of got pulled into it accidentally and it's been, you know, a very interesting journey ever since. I've done a whole bunch of consulting projects with Ethereum protocols and Cosmos protocols

kind of all over the place. A lot of kind of product strategy, brand strategy, mechanism design, kind of ghost written or helped write a whole bunch of white papers. and then that ended up bringing me to Berlin at one point to work with a project here now called Radical. So it's like an open source or like decentralized GitHub alternative. So finished contract with them, worked on EIP-1559 a little bit as a kind of one of the many members who played a small role. And eventually the pandemic started. I didn't want to be living abroad doing freelance work.

So one of my closest friends, Billy Renekamp, was working in Cosmos at All In Bits. Kind of a defunct organization now. It kind of liquidated at the time. And most of the engineers moved to The Interchain Foundation, kind of primary foundation associated with Cosmos. He asked me if I wanted to join and kind of rebuild the Cosmos ecosystem. So I spent about two years there and made a lot of progress in reforming the kind of

meta organization that built all the technology. did, kind of wore all hats there. So I did kind of product strategy and a bunch of like deeper product work with like the whole stack. And then yeah, a whole bunch of kind of BD. Yeah, lots of back end work. And then last thing I did there was work on the atom 2.8 paper, which was kind of a beautiful failure. And at that point, I had just kind of like touched every part of the ecosystem. I was like, okay, I need to take a break, need to do something else. I completely failed at taking a break. I ended up joining Skip immediately afterwards, as well as co-founding this other project time wave, which builds this protocol-predical lending product,

which was kind of a something that emerged and an idea that emerged out of the atom two initiative um and yeah i'm happy to talk about either those those things today um i guess that was a little bit of a longer intro than i anticipated yeah sam it sounds like you're one one person startup i mean you've you've basically touched on all the different aspects kind of like from white paper to kind of uh tech stack to company structuring and governance and BD and branding did they meet any other people at IBC at all?

Yeah, I mean, there were a lot of other people at the ICF, but there were not as many people who had that kind of like broad context and I mean, I'm sure you know, NOSIS has a similar just kind of latitude and like the number of things that you're doing, right? Like how deep you have to go. And there are, I think there are these specific people that like have that full view. And like that's super, super valuable to just like kind of understand how the pieces are locked with one another.

Absolutely. You have a fairly eclectic background, right? Kind of you talked about kind of like arts and biochemistry and protein folding and so on. How do you, how do you decide what to work on. I mean, what does a project actually have to have in order to appear to you? Yeah, wow, that's a great question. I'm not sure I do decide. It's like decided for me. They come to you? No, I just like kind of follow my interests. Like that's really been like my gutting light is like, I kind of can't not work on this thing. I'm just kind of drawn to it, which has just brought me into some very circuitous paths.

and a whole bunch of different things. But yeah, I'm just like a very curious person and then kind of follow that line. It is kind of funny because I do play like a strategy role in a lot of these instances, which is like very much a kind of structured, or it has this kind of structured, unstructured aspect to it where, you know, given your position in the market and like what you're trying to achieve, what do you, what you're trying to do. But for my personal life, I'm just very like, okay, I'm going to float wherever it's just kind of most attractive.

Yeah, super nice. You're also part of the other internet, which is a super interesting research collective, whose outputs I consume with some frequency. They're usually very insightful. Can you talk about that and kind of we'll also link to that in the show notes because I think it's underappreciated the ecosystem. Yeah, absolutely. It's a very special group of people and organization, you know, pretty unique in the space.

And I mean, it is a research organization, kind of cultural research. We do a variety of things. Some of it is kind of these long-form kind of cultural analysis or kind of contemporary anthropologies of what's happening in crypto. Some of it is consulting work, so worked with Uniswap and Aragon and optimism and a whole bunch of other folks, mostly on kind of governance and, I don't know, kind of community development projects. And then there's kind of an internal side of the organization, which most people don't know about,

which is really about kind of personal development and learning. So there's like a reading group, and we've done seminars, like brought in lectures to, like, just speak to the group about topics that we're interested in. A lot of, like, political philosophy and, I don't know, practice. practitioners, they were doing, you know, work with municipal governments and things and things like that. So it's a, it's also, you know, houses a, a bunch of folks that have pretty eclectic interests and, you know, has a multitude of different projects that kind of reflect their skill sets and where they're drawn to as well. Yeah, no, it's a, it's a great resource.

go check it out people. So let's talk about Skip Protocol. So you are the head of product and strategy there. How would you describe Skip in a few sentences? Yeah. And it's maybe a little bit different than how you kind of introduced Skip in the intro, which is totally understandable. The organizations evolved a lot.

And it definitely started out as like, at MEV infrastructure company had product very similar to the flashbots MED relay but today basically what we realized is that

like MEP is not really a product it's more of a phenomenon or maybe a business model if you're kind of structuring it or problem totally It's a force to be reckoned with.

It's also kind of a lens that you can bring to product development. So that's kind of how we approach things today. The first thing that we realized was, okay, if we're going to be like a cross-chain MEV organization or if that's something that we're interested in, we need to have more cross-chain economic activity happening. So we just started working on that problem. Like it's actually really hard to do. And it's completely, it's unsolved today.

Like there are, you know, domains or like coverage areas where you can get a decent experience, but it's really, if you kind of deviate from that path, it's an absolute nightmare. So we started in just kind of solving that for Cosmos, have done a whole bunch of kind of full stack modifications of the mempool, the fee market, the IBC, the interoperability protocol, like just basically every layer of the stack to kind of try to smooth out that experience. A lot of that work kind of focused on transaction building or, it was in order to deliver an experience that was kind of close to the user.

We also, in order to kind of make this experience seamless, we also needed to work on the kind of node architecture itself. Cosmos is a network of sovereign app chains. So we built a fee market. We built a kind of transaction builder that's internal to the to deployed nodes. And what we realized there is that a lot of that work looked a lot like an Oracle of some kind. So we kind of evolved that product suite into an enshrined Oracle that many app chains

in the ecosystem we're using, including DeidX and Neutron and others. We're kind of syndicating that and deploying it more widely now. So the kind of unifying umbrella there is we're basically building tools for sovereign chains and trying to kind of pick off the problems that are most important to builders. And there's a whole bunch of things that we want to do in the future to improve that experience and make it really easy to deploy your own app chain. Just in case that hasn't become abundantly clear, you guys are on Cosmos. So why was interoperability problem before?

Because Cosmos is very much devised with kind of like this interoperability mindset, you know, front and center. So I mean kind of like IBC is kind of like the causing for Cosmos, right? Totally. I mean, obviously the Cosmos ecosystem, I think, gets it back. better than anybody, but it's just a really hard problem. First of all, like, what does interoperability even mean? Like, what is, and who is, who or what is interoperable with, you know, with what? You're working in a kind of network of networks, you know, it's a distributed system

that has heterogeneous architecture. What IBC gives you is a standard message path. system and way of kind of creating like an assurance around the the the who your counterparty is by like having the chain itself authenticate messages and that's kind of it actually like that's that's the core of what ibc is it's actually just kind of like a natural solution like oh you don't want to introduce a third party when chains are talking each other that's kind of the core thesis and then there's you can build other things on top of that. So you can build a fungible token protocol, an NFT protocol, a kind of remote access or remote authentication protocol. So even just in the fungible token case, because IBC is a point-to-point

messaging system, its security kind of relies on, or it assumes that you don't want to introduce third party, like you want to communicate directly, basically means that you can't. You can just send a token directly to any chain at any time and have it produce the correct representation. So you typically need to unwind tokens through their issuer, their issuing chain. So we're now getting like, you know, if I want to send my atom from neutron to osmosis, I actually need to send it back to the Cosmos hub, and then I need to send it to the Cosmos Hub, and then I need to send it to osmosis and there's three different chains, three different distributed systems like involved here. You're actually creating a workflow between these things that's completely asynchronous.

So there ends up being these kind of middlewares that you deploy on a chain in order to interpret messages in order to like forward them on to the next domain. That's just for fungible tokens, which is like very kind of structured process. If you want to do anything more complicated than that, like you want to compose the application behavior of three different protocols, this is going to get way more complicated. And this is one of the reasons that we kind of went in this Oracle direction as well as, okay, you want to dynamically read state from a different chain and then, you know, be able to, you know, like this is how you ultimately get composability of distinct.

distributed systems is you have more expressive systems for interpreting, querying, and just generally using the state of another chain. Yeah, long story short, it's just a really hard problem, and we've thought really deeply about it, but it's about the most challenging thing that you could possibly approach in order to get really good composability at that like, application level. But Cosmos was kind of devised in this application chain architecture. So how did things work before Skip? Or what were the things that very concretely you added to kind of help devs cross that bridge?

Yeah, I think it's just a, the difference is kind of like the theoretical versus the practical. we were really the first team that was kind of serving multiple customers with that specific agenda of like, oh, we want to make these flows better. Osmosis was kind of a power user of IBC, but their workflow is just kind of like drawing assets in, right? It's kind of one-way flow and they can kind of simplify what they need to do.

We're kind of serving all chains at once. And so we need these much more intricate dynamic flows to be available. The problem that we ended up solving first was just how do you build a transaction? Yes, it's technically possible to build a transaction that's going to have this behavior. But the practical reality of that is like, okay, well, you need to understand. understand what the fee token of this of the counterparty chain or all the intermediate chains are. You need to understand what kind of fee market they have. They might have different fee markets. You need to understand what the fallback behavior is. If something doesn't get executed,

there's just like all of this information and context, like what the token denominations are. What are the signature schemes that each of these chains have? have, there's actually a, even though something's technically possible, just performing the right sequence of actions is immensely difficult. So that was kind of the first thing we solved is just, we have an API that does transaction building and delivers that to a wallet or a front end. So we power a lot of the transaction building in the ecosystem cross chain. And who are you users for this API service?

Most of the major front ends in Cosmos and a bunch of the main wallets. So Kepler, Leap, there's a metamask extension that uses KIPP. And then osmosis, neutron, D-YDX. Yeah, I mean, it's the main way that you get around. It's a little bit hidden in the background, but when you're building a cross-chain transaction in Cosmos, you're most likely using Skip. I shall also mention we're not Cosmos-specific per se. Like we kind of extended into, so Cosmos technology is extended into a whole bunch of different

domains, and then we've also kind of adopted some other bridges. So we're actually the, we do the most volume or like, we're one of the only providers that's able to do CCTP transactions between different chains. We actually, there are routes that are non-cosmos that we serve. We're one of the best ways to do any kind of hyperlane transaction. We're working with a bunch of Bitcoin L2s and things like this. So we're just kind of going where, I guess the kind of territory that we're, or our coverage areas continuing to increase as we see demand for these things. So CCTV being the circle protocol, right? Okay.

For devs or projects that kind of use your service, how do they pay? So is it kind of like on a transaction basis? So how do they pay for your service? Yeah. So our two main products right now are this Oracle service. And we have the API. And there's kind of a structure, or like a semi-structured model for payment on both sides. It's a little bit dependent on the nature of what you want to do.

So there's a number of like special cases. and we do a bunch of like kind of custom work for folks. Like, you know, DYDX, we did like a ton of custom work to get exactly where they wanted to go. On the Oracle side, we have like service contracts, yearly service contracts, which is a kind of standard Oracle model. And then on the API side, Skip Go is the name of the API. we take a percentage of the fees taken by the affiliate. So if you're not charging, then we won't take a cut.

But if you are charging, then we'll take a percentage of that. Okay. And the oracles that you are offering to kind of enable this interoperability or the seamless interoperability, what kind of oracles are they? Are they kind of decentralized or are they kind of just fees? that you pull from somewhere and put on chain? Maybe just worth backing up for a second.

Like what is a cosmos chain? So it's a delegated proof of stake chain that is run by, typically anywhere from 20 to 100 validators. And the Oracle system that we develop is integrated into the binary and the validators set up. So all the validators are running the Oracle.

There is a module in the binary that does some interpretation of incoming messages. And then there's a sidecar process that's run by each validator that will query a variety of providers. And those providers can be programmed by the, the application chain. So DydX, for instance, uses

primarily price feeds, but from a number of different providers. So for any asset, it will want multiple providers. Some of those might be uniswap. So it could just query chain state directly. It could include proofs of that chain state

if it wanted to. Or it could be Binance, Coinbase. It can aggregate locally, on the validator. And then the validator as part of its kind of consensus voting process submits its aggregated price or aggregated data. And then the chain then does a second aggregation to find a consensus value for whatever state you're trying to to include in the application.

So it's an Oracle aggregator protocol in a way. Is that fair to say? Yeah, I think that's fair. Kind of all oracles are Oracle aggregators to some extent. It's a little bit of like a back end detail, but any decentralized feed is some kind of aggregation. That's fair, yeah. Yeah, the main differentiator is it's, there's no middle, man.

Like, even Skip is not a middleman in this process. It's just, it is run by the validators and the chain. They are fetching the data. And then it is like you come to consensus on the data. So Skip develops a module that you can run. And then we, you know, we're kind of on hand for maintenance and things of that nature. But we're not running an intermediary service. Why did I think that you guys primarily do MEV, like cross-chain M-EV?

I mean, we did at one point. I guess there was a question of like what even is M-E-V, but I guess we're more on the M-V generation than M-EV extraction side now. We have developed a number of products that had this character. We've all been sourced all of them, and they are in production. So the first one that we developed was a product for osmosis, which was a, again, it was a module that lives inside the binary of the osmosis chain. It's live today. And it automatically backruns transactions in order to, it does cyclic arbitrage.

kind of before a searcher is able to extract that revenue. This is something before we did this, like people didn't think was possible. So it was kind of cool to demonstrate that it's viable to actually do solving like in protocol. It's been really interesting to see this is kind of like rebranded as the application-specific sequencing now. But yeah, if you want to see an example of that, it's live on osmosis.

It was a little bit osmosis specific, so it was kind of a one-off. We also developed another product called the Block SDK, which is also deployed in a number of chains in Cosmos. What the Block SDK does is it allows you to create programmable lanes for your block space. so you can say basically you create different kind of sub mempools and then different block building rules for each of those mempools.

And so you can have different kind of basically transactions come into the main mempool. There's kind of a hierarchical filter in which they get sorted into these different mempools. And then

you can program program them to do whatever they want. So some you could have a free lane, for instance, just transactions of this type are free or they're free up to a certain number per hour or something like that. Transactions that are from this user or from a user that has this NFT, you know, have a reduced rate. You know, you can you can kind of do whatever you want here. So we've seen, you know, a bunch of creativity kind of applied to that system. Again, we had to kind of build that system to realize like MED is maybe not like a business model so much as like a tool. And so we just open source that product and, you know, I've helped a bunch of people to integrate it,

give them some advice on how to use it, but it's just kind of freely available for the ecosystem. MEB has caused a large amount of controversy in the Ethereum ecosystem. How has it gone down in the cosmos ecosystem? Was it equally contentious? No. I mean, for a couple of reasons. One, there's just way less economic activity in Cosmos ecosystem. So MEP is going to occur when there's a high degree of, you know, when there is value to be extracted and when there's a lot of contentious state. And Cosmos kind of has, its general like architecture is one of less contentious state.

You know, you're separating applications into their own domains and there's less economic value. currently. So that both of those together mean that the kind of severity of MEP and some it's just something that's like way less of a dire issue. It's still there and it's still something you want to address and kind of give give attention to, but it's more of a background thing and again, more of like a lens or toolkit to bring to a problem. Yeah, just as a background, kind of like on Ethereum, there were times when, you know, 1% or so of total value transacted was extracted. Do you have an idea of what the equivalent percentage is on Cosmos?

I don't. I mean, it's so small that it like wasn't worth tracking. Like that that's kind of what we're talking about here. It also, a little bit depends on what you're talking about with MEV. So the cyclic arbitrage that we're now doing in protocol for osmosis, that was the largest source of MEV in the ecosystem. Like backrunning, right? Back running.

Back running. Back running on osmosis. Back running on, okay. That's super interesting. That made up like 90% of MEV. That is now being captured by the protocol. Is that MEV? I, like, the protocol is capturing. it. Yeah, that doesn't matter. So basically to me, MEPs is everything that kind of, where kind of

you can extract value or something can extract value by changing the context of the transaction. And you're doing, you're very much doing it, right? But it's not minor extractable value. The protocol is extracting it. It doesn't matter. This is what I'm saying. The, the definition here is relevant. I mean, it's, are you familiar with MEP blocker? Yeah. Yeah. So kind of like it's a protocol that we built on Ethereum. And basically it also does the same. So kind of like it prevents front running and sandwiching and it kind of gives back 90% of the fees that are crude through backrunning, I should say. And I mean backrunning, to kind of to give a very simple explanation here for backrunning, it's kind of like for instance, if you change the price of something on Shane by you. your own transaction and then kind of there's there's a value in kind of bringing that back to where it should be and that's kind of backgrounding so kind of in a way it's kind of benign M.EV and that kind of like nothing is being extracted from you. You're just not a very sophisticated trader

and that kind of like someone would have would have upped that anyway and kind of like yeah. And we actually on Ethereum we see that that backgrounding is a fairly minor percentage of of MEV. Why do you think it's different on cosmos? Why is backrunning specifically a smaller percentage? Yeah, so why is it a much bigger, so comparatively a much bigger issue on osmosis than on Ethereum? Oh, well, you're just saying the distribution between top of block or stat arb and backgrounding. I mean, the reason is like really stupid, which is that like Ethereum,

Ethereum has more tokens that are listed on Binance. So you can do statar between finance and Ethereum. And there's just like less tokens that are listed on centralized exchanges in Cosmos. Yeah, there is stat art. And I think it's like increasing over time. But yeah, it's a really trivial answer. Okay. Yeah, that's fair. what do you think of protocols that kind of like prevent MEP completely? So for instance, there's shutter, right? Kind of, that kind of, that encrypts your transactions before they send to the MAM pool and then it kind of decrypts them only once they've been included in a block.

Do you think that would be a good technical solution to kind of just completely do away with the problem? Yeah, so completely is a strong word. So we worked with osmosis on like an early version of their threshold decryption thing, which has not been deployed yet. It's been, but they, you know, helped to kind of initiate that idea. So we've done quite a bit of like research on this topic. One of the reasons it hasn't been deployed is it kind of only becomes an issue at a certain level of of MEP. that you might be concerned about. Okay, this is a, it's a tool.

It really depends on what you're trying to do. So in the Ethereum context, like, as far as I understand, Shudder is like trying to do something from main chain, right? Yeah, it's live on Nosis chain right now. But kind of like, yeah, obviously kind of like, there are discussions whether to also deploy it on mainnet. Yeah.

But it's like the beacon, you know, that's kind of where it's targeting, which is, you know, has like this high degree of composability. There's lots of contention. This is a, so like that is a different environment than one in which you're just doing like a ticketing app or whatever. And like there's maybe not a lot of M.V. And like, so the way that it's going to behave the incentives for kind of like, you know, the way that you break this thing is you. you go into the like co-location and you try to to deliver transactions or get information as quickly as possible from like a third party exchange. I think that all the more economic activity you have, like the more you're going to be pushed in that direction, it's a little bit of a cat and mouse game on how to how to ameliorate that. but deployed an environment like ticketing app for instance maybe it's just not even worth like doing that whole thing

and you're just never going to have that kind of behavior and so it could just be fine it could be a nice thing that's like out of the box for a system like that and just eliminate some behaviors that were like kind of easy to do previously and that just like that class of whatever searcher is just like never going to

exist because they're not you know, getting the $10 on the like advanced ticket is like not worth, you know, co-locating in a data center in Japan. Yeah, that's fair. Can we talk, can we zoom out a little bit and kind of like talk about the Ethereum versus Cosmos debate? Because kind of like you've been kind of like in this ecosystem a super long time. And as you say, there's way less economic activity on Cosmos.

but Cosmos does have this kind of like inbuilt interoperability, which now things to skip maybe is also usable. And kind of like, why do you think Ethereum sees so much more economic activity where kind of interoperability is much more an afterthought for us? And I mean, we've seen this over the past two and a half years or so, right? Kind of like we've had four and a half billion. in bridge hacks. So

why, I mean, from kind of like a first principles approach, the cosmos ecosystem makes a lot of sense, right? Why is a why is cosmos less successful?

There's a bunch of reasons. Some of them are very like circumstantial and path dependent. I mean, the main development organization completely melted down and fragmented into now like 10 different or entities, which is very interesting, super decentralized ecosystem. Maybe there's not a consensus opinion, but I think this was actually really good for the cosmos ecosystem. Because kind of like the, I mean, all in bits and kind of like the leadership, everything was a little bit disfutable.

functional. I think kind of like having that fall apart, I think there was a really good thing for the ecosystem. Would you see this otherwise? I mean, I don't think it's black or white. Like, it was good for some things. It was bad for others. Like, if you want Adam token number to go up, probably bad for that. But it did allow for just a lot of, kind of all of these fragmented entities like started their own thing. And so there was just like a, you know, there was a lot of creativity that was kind of brought into into other projects. This is one of the reasons that's really fun to work in Cosmos is like it really is kind of a bastion of like new ideas. and you get to try stuff out.

I mean, I've worked on, like, the very beginning of proof of stake, very beginning of liquid staking, the very beginning of restaking, the very beginning of like, you know, just this, a lot of this MEV stuff that we're now talking about. And it's cool to talk to Ethereum people and be like,

oh, yeah, like, I did that. And, like, we've explored all these different ideas. And it's actually a really nice dialogue to be able to have some of that experience. But yeah, I mean, it impacted the go-to-market for the primary asset for sure. I think the architecture, you know, doing one chain, it's easier. It's just easier to do.

And to bring that to market, to create a unified experience around it in order to kind of get initial traction. Cause was never had that. So it was like always dealing with the problems that were anticipated for, you know, a market that was several years down the line. And now it's nice to have them. But yeah, it was a little bit like cart before the horse maybe. I do think Ethereum would have done well to have more of an emphasis on interoperability from the beginning. It's like very hard to back into that.

Because they're competing solutions, nobody's incentivized to use something that's invented today or kind of like forced in by, you know, Ethereum Foundation leadership. Yeah, I mean, a lot of it is just kind of like a cultural or like normative thing where you think about the ecosystem as one that has interoperability or like that's kind of a core asset. Like everybody's just like, yeah, I use that. That's my default. And that helps a lot. Yeah. So I totally agree that. is kind of like, it's to do with kind of like standard settings.

So kind of like on Ethereum, we kind of, we know what the fee market is like. And yeah, by the flip side, interoperability is kind of like was underspecified and kind of like the protocol ex ante. We do see a lot of interesting solutions, though. Do you think they will reach the same level of security as IBC? eventually? I guess I just see them a little bit as like apples and oranges. Like the whole security model is just different.

It's different, yeah. There is an assumption that you're using Ethereum for quote-unquote settlement. You know, the market maker is taking on the risk of settlement oftentimes in these fast transfer systems. IBC is just like more of a standard, standardized process. Yeah, it's a little bit hard to answer that question because they're kind of different animals. So in Ethereum, you can reason about Ethereum security, but every single bridge has a different, is different. It's like its own snowflake, which is kind of messed up, to be honest.

And then there's all these different fast transfer or kind of slow transfer settlement processes that you can take. and there's heterogeneous messaging and heterogeneous, like, authentication. And in cosmos, there's heterogeneous security. There's heterogeneous domains, but like standardized messaging, which is kind of inverse. Yeah, it's a totally different system. Do you see applications working cross-ethyurement cosmos in due time? So kind of like when I talk about kind of like actually user adoption, kind of like having NUMEs use things that are powered by blockchain infrastructure,

I usually posit that kind of no one will have to know what's kind of powering the application that they're using. Do you envision there kind of being this cross-ecosystem operability where kind of like I can send things from Ethereum to cosmos, or messages or kind of like have kind of flit between the two of them without knowing that I'm currently doing that without with that kind of being totally abstracted away from me. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's already happening in certain, in many cases. So first of all, it depends on what you call Cosmos, to some extent. Not sure we want to get into this, but like, Cosmos is both a,

You know, an ecosystem, there's the Cosmos Hub, which has an asset, which is like pretty distinct in a lot of ways from the ecosystem. There's a stack of components that many of these projects are building with. And then I also like to say that there's kind of a, the stack you can even kind of decompose into like a set of specific components, you know, the Cosmosis SDK, Comet. IBC and then just like a general pattern of like, okay, there's a state machine framework, there's a consensus algorithm and there's a message passing system. And like that, that kind of looks like, you know, the jam stack or something like that. It's just like, that's a pattern that's like adopted everywhere. But those specific components are actually all over the place, even in a lot of Ethereum projects. You just kind of don't hear about them. It's just

they're useful tools. So is that like, kind of? cosmos interoperability. Like, maybe I, you know, I talk to a lot of Ethereum projects that are like, they want to use the Cosmos 50K for this random thing. Like, yeah, happy to talk to you. Like, it can do XYZ. User never knows. You know, it's like the same signing algorithm. It just does what you wanted to do under the hood. Comet similarly is used all over the place in a bunch of Ethereum projects and elsewhere. One thing that's been very interesting is that restaking projects are using the Cosmos stack in a number of different places. I think it might be the most popular restaking architecture.

It's kind of that and the OP stack seem to be used most frequently. But it's not branded as such. It's just, oh, yeah, like deploy an ABS, but you're like using the Cosmos 60K. and Comet and maybe even IBC in some instances. So that interop is already kind of happening. We just, it's a little bit more under the hood. The things that are most annoying are signing. And this is just a general issue across like Bitcoin signing.

It's not the same as Ethereum signing. It's not the same as Solana signing. It's not the same as Cosmos signing. And that causes a massive amount of pain. And that's one of the reasons that the ecosystems are so segmented right now, in my opinion, means you have different wallet ecosystems. You have different, the kind of front door for users ends up being different. So signing abstractions, like MPC style protocols, I think, are going to be important for

like solving things at that layer, but that's going to take a little bit more. long time to transition. Beyond that, there are different message passing systems. There are different middlewares for routing messages between different domains. There are different, you know, you have to pay with different fees so that kind of all these things need to be solved together in order to get user flows that are really seamless. It's happening, I mean, and like I was saying, at the beginning, there are specific routes today that cross multiple different chains, multiple different ecosystems, and they're great. They work, they work great. It's just going to take a while to kind of like expand that to the point where it really feels seamless everywhere.

Can you give examples of where you think it feels seamless now? Yeah, so you can go from, If you have USDC on Solana and you want to send it to osmosis and buy whatever osmo, you can do that in one click. And it's very fast. That's cool. So CCP opened up a lot of these routes for us. We are working on a fast transfer system that's going to allow for similar interoperability between some Ethereum domains and Cosmos.

We also work with a bunch of the roll-up ecosystem, or modular ecosystem. So we've been doing, I mean, similarly, you could go from base to a roll-up that's using a hyperlane bridge in one-click today. and fitting all the pipes together to make that work because it was pretty crazy. And you might end up with an account

that requires a different wallet at the end. That's kind of annoying, but you can't actually send the transactions or send the tokens and have them arrive at the other side. So do you see Skip kind of going this multi-chain route in kind of making things easier for devs because kind of like as you explain currently, this is primarily on Cosmo's only. Do you intend to kind of expand into this cross-chain world?

Yeah, I mean, I would say we're already kind of expanded. It's just going to be incremental. So we are working with a number of restaking projects or folks that are using KOS 60K in different domains. We're actually even integrating with non-cosmos projects, like our, or projects that aren't using Cosmos technology. So we're looking at shared sequencers, for instance, and just deploying our sidecar process in order to feed Oracle messages directly into the sequencer. And there actually isn't Cosmos SDK necessarily involved at all. So yeah, there's different kind of levels of interop here.

And I mean, one of the challenges is just kind of knowing where to put your emphasis, because things kind of go in all directions. So there's a lot of people who are using the technology in one way or another. And, you know, we're trying to see which way the wind's blowing and how that kind of aligns with our with our business and who we want to develop relationships with. So what would you say? How is the wind blowing right now? So what's in the pipe for skip? Well, a couple things.

First of all, we're like constantly just doing a lot of work on the core stack. And so we're doubling down on that. Kastastik has a ton of adoption. and we want to be, we want it to be better, want to be easier to deploy. We want to just be more standardized and just less sharp edges. So that's something that we're working on. And then there are a bunch of users of the technology that we want to work with or are working with. Like I said, restaking projects are, is just good.

a natural fit for us. We would also love to see more projects deployed directly into, you know, using the technology alone. One thing that's like a little bit of a contrary intake that we have, I have, I guess, is proof of authority is like totally under leveraged. when we've used it in certain instances and worked with projects using a POA chain, it's actually really nice and kind of, yeah, I mean, it's like a great deployment loop. And for a lot of use cases, I think it's absolutely secure enough. It's absolutely like decentralized enough. There's just a lot of like low security or like thing. And there's a lot of ways to enhance a POA system, particularly with three-state. and things like this. So that would be a way, you know, that could be like a new market that

could open up. And yeah, like I mentioned, the shared sequencers is something that we're kind of exploring at the moment, integrating our Oracle into that. These Bitcoin L2s are like really heterogeneous in what they offer. But we're, there are a few projects that are a natural fit and and we're starting to work with them. Yeah, super interesting. Looking forward to seeing that. Where can people find out more about Skip? Yeah, so we just did kind of a rebrand and changed our URL.

So it's skip.bill. And the Twitter handle or the X handle is still at Skip Protocol. Perfect. Super nice. It's been a pleasure, Sam. Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for having me. This was great. Thank you for joining us on this week's episode.

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