I'm not nowhere near to be a big account where Jack Samplin was kind of incentivized to take his time to show me into Cosmos, but I'm very grateful that he did.
And I think throughout the time, you know, I grew Cosmos grew. My account grew, my reach grew and everything exploded. So thank you so much for the congratulations.
When I saw it like crust 100K, I was very excited just to spend the weekend thinking back about the past years and how I got into crypto Cosmos and everything.
So it was a big personal achievement. So yeah, thanks for the congratulations.
Yeah, I'm sure you were still grinding even when you reached 100K. So back on the topic, we have Ether, which is a potential consumer chain.
Ether aims to be the canonical EVM of the ASE with a focus on atom. It's actually been a while since the last episode covering a consumer chain onboarding, mostly because the interchange security is currently undergoing an evolution that will facilitate consumer chain.
We recently announced the partial security and to learn more about partial security, be sure to check one of the latest Cosmos sub tweets covering the topic.
Now, let's go back on the guest today. We have John Weinmanner, which is here to share the Ether vision. So welcome, John, and feel free to introduce yourself.
Yeah, thank you. I'm really happy to be here. So yeah, my name is John. I'm one of the founders of Ether. And my connection to the team was, I actually come from the Ethereum ecosystem.
I'm a large synthetic staker. But my connection to Ether was, I was an early V Velo holder. And that's the DEX mechanism that we're going to be deploying on our chain. And we think the Velo drum team did a fantastic job with their like go to market strategy and the mechanism design there.
So yeah, I do mechanism design, and then I handle comms, obviously. So that's, that's basically a quick summary about me.
When you say that you're like, from the Ethereum community, like, can you maybe expand a little bit on that? I mean, you said synthetics, but were you involved in other projects? And what's kind of like your background? Are you more like an engineer? Or what's your story?
I see. Yeah, so I started off as a software engineer in web two, specifically in security. So I worked at Cloudflare for a couple years. And then after that, I worked at a I was the third developer at a cyber insurance startup.
And so yeah, when I say I come from the Ethereum community, I definitely wouldn't describe myself as a maxi. I farmed osmo very early on its launch last cycle, and consider myself more of like a values based investor, right?
And so a lot of the values that Ethereum and Cosmos share around decentralization and censorship resistance and that kind of thing is kind of where I come from. And then yeah, I'm a software developer. So I care about the tech stack and stuff being built, you know, well.
But yeah, when I say I guess Ethereum, a majority of my like trading and stuff happens on the Ethereum blockchain. But I'm not I'm not like, yeah, I'm not a maxi.
Yeah, I mean, if you're farming osmo since the early days, and sounds like you're almost like a Cosmos maxi at this point, og.
Yeah, I mean, a lot of my friends are, you know, Adam Wales. So,
so when you when you heard about like, maybe you can talk about like your customers story. I mean, what's kind of osmosis, the entry point? Or what was the entry point? And what, what are you how do you view the role of the customers have evolving over the years?
Yeah, so last cycle, I think crypto was still small enough, where you could follow everything that was going on on every chain. And at some point, it got big enough. And there was too much happening that I felt like I had to focus.
And so a majority of my holdings were tokens that were on the ETH. And so I chose to focus there. But my connection to osmo was, there was a project called DVPN last cycle, which some of you may have heard of.
And I was an investor in that project. And so when osmo launched, they were doing incentives. And that's like how I got that's how I got integrated with osmo.
Yeah, DVPN was actually one of the first project to migrate from material to cosmos. Actually, I think a lot of people from material came from that project. So it's actually interesting that you say that.
Does your team also have a background on cosmos tech? Or is it something that they recently started?
No, so I am the only person from the team that is not like a native atom community member. The rest of our team are large atom holders, including the devs. And so, yeah, that's where I was saying they initially contacted me to advise on the mechanism design for the velodrome mechanism.
But yeah, the rest of them have been in the cosmos ecosystem for multiple cycles now. And a majority of their assets are concentrated in cosmos tokens, cosmos ecosystem tokens.
Yeah, and actually, I think that we can see that from the language of it or comes because actually, it shows that they know atom and cosmos very well because most of the columns is someone that has been around for a while.
And I think every OG can notice that. So it's actually quite interesting because I see that you guys have a big alignment towards the atom, at least on your communication, then we will go through all the proposals and what is your goal and vision.
So maybe can you start to introduce a little bit the ether AVM and like just a brief overview?
Yeah, so the A3 VM is intended to be an EVM chain by atom holders for atom holders. We want to be a DeFi hub, where atom is the benchmark asset.
And we want to add new utility to atom, you know, right now it's just used for governance. But we think it should be the main pair paired against all the tokens.
We think you should be able to minstable claims against it. And we think you should build a lend and borrow it just like other ecosystems do with their like main chain.
It has the deepest liquidity and some of the highest amount of like economic security from a validator perspective, but it doesn't get used enough to like, you know, given how high it is on those other two factors.
And so we think there's a gap there in the market that we need to fill.
Like from your perspective, because I mean, we've been covering the customs hub now over the years, you know, we talked a lot here with the core developers, core contributors.
There's a lot of like governance proposals every now and then that cost drama and get, you know, divide a community, sometimes reunites them.
What's your, how do you view the role of the customs hub in a broader customs ecosystem?
And why do you think that atom as of right now is not kind of the most liquid pair and all these other taxes or I mean, it is for many.
But you know, I mean, kind of like, yeah, maybe losing its position, some people say. So what's your views on that?
Yeah, I wouldn't. I don't know if we would characterize it as losing its position.
I think so, like to contrast with Ethereum very specifically, you can't really use your atom, right?
And so like to talk about how that affects price, it means a lot of supply is just sitting around available to be sold.
And so like one benefit of our chain is we aim to create liquidity syncs for atom, right?
So when you take atom or liquid staking derivative of atom and you lock it up to mint a stable coin, that takes supply off the market, which is bullish for price.
And similarly, when you provide your atom into an LP pool, it's also taking that supply off the market, assuming it's like locked or staked or whatever.
So, yeah, I think like those are the main reasons, right? Like if you contrast with ETH, ETH really saw its explosion during ETH DeFi like last summer.
And the reason for that was because ETH was getting locked up in all these various protocols.
And so that's that's good for price. And yeah, this comes back to us being like atom centric is a lot of chains.
And I don't mean to speak negatively about them because we like a lot of them, but it's like a side effect of their mechanism design.
They focus on their own token. And that is good for the holders of those tokens, but it's not necessarily bullish for atom.
And so we obviously will have our own token for all these mechanisms.
But the way we view success is, you know, like I'm in charge of the village on decks and like that will have its own token.
But our tokens are locked for multiple years. And the reason we're comfortable doing that is because we make money and the community makes money if we unlock a new utility for atom.
And I think if we do that, these other tokens will do well, too. But our primary goal is to add utility for atom.
Yes. So we can say that you guys fit to the narrative that that that is currently shaping up of the interchain money narrative.
But actually, as we were referring earlier, like interchain money right now is mostly basically swapping out on for other assets of one could argue.
So basically what you're saying is that the goal of Ethereum actually is increasing utility more on a DeFi level with more application and protocols.
But do you think there is still a strong demand in terms of EVM, especially for atom?
Yeah, we don't we don't look at it from a demand perspective.
We think that right now the EVM is the best way to unlock this functionality. Right.
So for better or for worse, Solidity is unfortunately the language that we write most of this in.
It has like the largest mindshare and stuff and it's open source so we can use it.
And so, yeah, like the value in our chain is less about who validates it.
And it's more at the application level. Right.
Like all of these money Legos already exist. And we think they just need to be combined in a specific way and to use atom instead of what other other tokens they were initially designed for.
And that combination should allow the Cosmos ecosystem to use atom in the same way that other ecosystems get to use their native token.
OK, thanks for the answer. And yeah, I think that it's an interesting vision.
It will be also interesting to see how it can combine with the Ethereum audience, because I think that one of the most powerful narrative for EVM is, of course, if they capture actually Ethereum users.
And in this case, you will capture basically Ethereum users but also have atom as main asset.
So it's a combination that I think it's not easy to do because you need to combine basically two worlds.
So that's why probably many of them have been facing some challenges in the Cosmos ecosystem.
So maybe how it actually differentiates itself from this other EVM that are trying to basically compete with the Ethereum EVM but in the Cosmos ecosystem?
Yeah, so I don't think it's from a technical perspective.
I think it's from a community and like a go-to-market perspective.
So the biggest differentiators are a lot of these other EVMs use their own tokens, right?
They don't use atom for gas and they're trying to pair the liquidity against their native tokens for whatever they're doing.
And they also have VC funding. So we have no VC funding.
So the seed round investors of Aether will be the atom holders who receive the airdrop.
And similarly, if you are a large atom whale and you're debating which of these EVMs to deploy your capital to in order to farm or farm liquidity or whatever,
you will retain more of the ROI that your liquidity generates if you deploy it on our chain because there are no VCs with large allocations.
And then similarly, on our chain, you'll be able to pay for gas with atom and any other token you want.
And so it's, yeah, we think our mechanism will provide more return to atom holders than the other ones.
And so we happen to be an EVM chain, but like really anywhere you're putting your atom, even on non EVM chains,
we think we're still an attractive place because of the fact that we're not VC funded and the fact that we're atom aligned.
Are you also planning to kind of build out the application layer yourselves or what type of applications do you envision?
Like is it going to be DeFi focused or how is that going to work?
Yeah, so we intend to be DeFi focused and on launch, we will launch with the necessary primitives.
So at least initially we'll have a DEX, which will be a fork of Velodrome V1.
And then we're also planning on a stablecoin using liquidity where you'll provide atom as collateral and then mint a stablecoin against that.
And then we'll also have a lend borrow market.
But unlike some of the other EVM chains that have launched, we are not trying to pick winners and losers.
And so you will be able to deploy permissionlessly on our EVM chain just like all the other ones.
And so if you want to deploy a competing DEX or a competing stablecoin, you should be able to do that.
And then likewise, we are open to collaboration with the EVM community.
And we think any Ethereum users that happen to bridge over is a good thing and bullish for the atom ecosystem.
In the long term, our two communities have very similar values and very similar visions for how this stuff is supposed to work.
Like I will be the first to admit that the Cosmos ecosystem invented the app chain thesis that is currently playing out in the Ethereum L2 space.
And I think a lot of the Ethereum community admits that as well.
And we think in order for value to accrue to the chain, it just needs to use atom as the base asset.
And so it's not a threat if Ethereum users come over because the liquidity on our chain will still be paired against the atom.
And so when they're doing trades, they're going to be interacting with the atom ecosystem, whether they like it or not.
Can you maybe talk about the development of the EVM itself?
Because I think is it built on a fork of ethermint or what's the kind of version of the EVM?
And are you guys, is your core team actively kind of shaping that or what's the game plan for the EVM itself?
Yeah, so we actually have an announcement to make on this Twitter space.
We are going to be the first partial set security chain.
And where that comes back to your question is initially we were using EVM OS as our as our EVM runtime.
But as a lot of people who have paid attention to our proposal and stuff have seen, we have been working on it heavily modifying it.
And after launch, we plan to modify it even more because partial set security is not launching for a couple more months.
We're now taking this time to move off to something else.
And but we will launch the same day as partial set security.
Yeah, that's actually kind of a big announcement because I think most of the community wasn't expecting it because most of the validators probably were thinking about regular security.
But we are now introducing partial set security, which literally opens a new world for ICS.
So it's very interesting that we now have the first consumer chain basically aiming to launch as a partial set security chain.
Does this change your vision of goals on the project?
Like, is it still your draft proposal going to remain the same or is it going to change?
At a high level, it remains the same. So the benefits of partial set security for us is that validators who aren't comfortable with like the anonymous team or our code, they can opt out.
Right. And unprofitable validators don't need to run our chain.
But the benefit that we retain, which is important to us, is consumer security chains, we believe, are atom aligned.
And then similarly, partial set security chains are also atom aligned.
And that's what's important to us. And like the reason we were considering both of these options is because, like I said earlier, the value in Ather is not, we don't need to be a sovereign chain.
We don't need to run our own validators because the value comes from the way that we're combining the applications on the application layer.
And so this is another way to accomplish this. But yeah, we've been super grateful to Informal and Haifa for their support and advice so far.
And we're excited to launch partial set security with them.
Yeah, I was going to ask, like, what's the collaboration like with those teams and also with other consumer chains? Because with your background, you know, being from the Ethereum community, how do you view that kind of dynamic?
Yeah, they've both been extremely helpful. And we've been working with them extremely closely. So as some of you may have known, we had a successful testnet as a secure as a consumer security chain.
And they were, you know, instrumental in helping us run that.
But yeah, in terms of collaboration with other chains, we are talking with a lot of the liquid staking derivatives, including Stride, because in addition to SpotAtom, we also want you to be able to mint stable coins against these liquid staking derivatives.
And so liquid staking derivatives are an obvious candidate where we can collaborate.
But yeah, part of being out of mind is we want to to collaborate with everybody in the ecosystem.
And I guess like an example of that. So the way Velodrome is a fork of solubly, which was created by Andre Cronier.
And the way that they launched was they gave NFTs, which incentivize liquidity for free, to the initial projects that like were long term aligned with optimism.
So like synthetics and a couple of the other ones that like chose optimism over the other layer twos. And that was partially to reward people who were optimism aligned and partially a way to bootstrap liquidity.
And so we will probably do something similar where we plan on giving NFTs to incentivize liquidity to any Cosmos ecosystem project that wants one, because if you've already been a part of this ecosystem, then that means like we are aligned with you.
And there will be extra incentives for people who commit to bribing more and maybe like stake longer and stuff.
But initially, from a protocol level on the decks, that's kind of how we think about who we want to collaborate with. Like we're not trying to pick favorites.
Yeah, it's actually super important that you mentioned a side because it seems that you're already basically starting to collaborate with the project within the atomic economic zone because the side is a consumer chain.
There is also a new drone that is a consumer chain. And technically, you will be your project will be the first CVM on the atomic economic zone.
So how do you see an EVM playing in the atomic economic zone, especially for collaborating with projects that are already in the atomic economic zone, especially in this case, a side.
Yeah, we just want to be like the town square, right? You can come from whatever chain you're on and come to a third bridge over to a third and and be able to unlock all the defy functionality that exists elsewhere.
And then when you're ready to leave, you can leave. And we expect it to be a playground for experimentation because, like I said, you can deploy on it permissionlessly.
And so if you have a new idea, you don't need to ask us. You can just deploy it and start iterating on it and the market will decide whether it's a good idea or not.
And if you're successful, great, because because our chain is out of mind, any success that you have is bullish for Adam as well.
So coming back to the draft proposal, because we actually haven't even got an overview of the proposal, how how you plan to share value with Adam and and his community and what kind of vision and goals are you setting in the in the proposal?
Yeah, so some of this I've mentioned before, and so it'll be a little bit repetitive, but I think it's good to clarify around this question, too.
So the number one way is we will pair our liquidity around Adam.
We want to have the deepest liquidity for Adam out of like all the chains.
And then, like I was saying earlier, our stablecoin will be backed by Adam and Adam liquid staking derivatives.
And so this will take Adam supply off of the market, which is bullish for Adam price.
And then I guess like one new way that I haven't spoken about before is we plan on contributing back to the Cosmos Hub development.
And so the first example of this is for Cosmos staking.
We're building a curve style locking mechanism where the longer you stake, the more rewards you earn.
And so this is not at the application layer, right?
This is at the validator layer. And we will contribute this open source back to the Cosmos Hub dev and development.
And anyone who's like if you're hearing that and you're interested in seeing it or learning more about it, like we would love to talk to you about it.
And then to continue on your original question, all of these mechanisms that we're deploying on the chain have their own tokens.
We're going to airdrop those tokens to the to the Adam community, just like we're doing with the aether token.
So they'll continue accruing value that way.
And then the benefit that the velodrome mechanism provides is if you're a new protocol and you want to bootstrap liquidity, there's not a great way to do it because you have to give incentives directly to LPs,
which does attract liquidity, but doesn't do it efficiently.
And the benefit of the velodrome mechanism is that if you're a new protocol looking to bootstrap liquidity and we're hoping that you would put your initial LPs on our chain because we believe the velodrome mechanism can attract more dollars of liquidity for less dollars of incentives.
So we think it's it's an easier way for protocols to basically launch.
Yeah. OK, sorry. Yeah. So can you maybe also attach some kind of numbers and on the rough timeline? I know it's always hard, but yeah.
So you said you're going to be the first PSS chain. Is there like a rough date for that yet?
And then also in terms of the airdrop, I think it's going to be 40 percent of the Genesis supply that will be airdropped, right?
Yeah, that's correct. Forty percent of the airdrop will be going to Adam holders and Adam stakers. Adam stakers will be getting more than Adam holders.
And so if you're looking to farm the airdrop, we would recommend staking Adam.
And then in terms of dates, we have not taken a snapshot for the airdrop yet. We'll do it as we get closer to launch.
And then the minimum amount will be less than one hundred dollars. But we haven't decided the specifics yet.
In terms of an actual launch date, we would direct people to the partial security roadmap.
So we don't have a specific date in mind. But on the first day that partial security is live, our chain will be live as well.
Yes. So on partial security, actually, we shared the Cosmos. I've shared an announcement probably was yesterday, I think.
So it's actually people can already start to see the ADR for PSS, which is basically a document of the initial design.
And actually, as for now, for the Cosmos sub improvement process, the first prototype will happen with the spike phase, which is actually the next one.
So I can share an exit date, but I will say that there are a lot of progress in there.
So we will update the community as soon as possible.
And on that side, you basically said that there is actually a lot of value shared with the Cosmos sub, which is actually interesting because it's the first time that I see an upcoming consumer chain showing so much alignment with the Cosmos sub.
Because basically your entire brand is focused on autumn. Even the proposal is super pro autumn and all the consumer chain as well.
So actually, my question would be, what is the value for either itself, like how either itself sustain and what kind of revenue you have for basically either as a partial security chain?
Yeah. So for the Ether token, for those of you who aren't aware of how optimism works, it doesn't work this way right now, but it will work this way when it's finished.
You bid OP in order to be the sequencer, which is where the MEV value from the chain accrues.
And so similarly to that, we will be directing a portion of the MEV back to Ether holders, and then some of that revenue will also be used to incentivize both ADAM and Ether pairs on the chain.
But that's where the value of the Ether token will come from, is basically the MEV value of the chain. And so as the chain grows and as volume increases, that MEV will also increase and then the value of Ether should follow.
And then similarly, if we fail, there will not be a lot of MEV generated and it won't be very successful.
Yeah, I think that's a fair explanation. Also, if the community has any question, I was reading section, actually, we also read most of the question, but if anyone has a question, feel free to jump on.
I will say that another interesting aspect is that if you launch as a security chain by Cosmos sub, actually, you can leverage the Cosmos sub-brand, which I think is one of the biggest advantage that usually consumer chain and Cosmos sub security chain versus the security chain have, because you're basically already getting an important level of security, but also the confidence that people are in the Cosmos sub-brand.
So how can you plan, basically, to go to market and say, hey, we are the AVM security by the Cosmos sub, do you have some strategy on this side?
Yeah. And so a lot of this we're borrowing from the Velodrome team because we think they did an excellent job with their execution. And so to kind of outline their strategy, Velodrome is specific to optimism, right?
They have zero intention of becoming like a cross-chain DEX or like spreading to other non-optimism chains, which is partly why we're able to fork their mechanism in Cosmos without competing with them.
And so like the focus on a single ecosystem is important. And that's why we're choosing to focus on Cosmos, because nobody has done it in this way yet.
And then the second prong to their go-to-market strategy is they have the approval and buy-in of their ecosystem, right?
So like the Optimism Foundation grants them a ton of OP to be used as incentives. And similarly, they donate some of their revenue back to their retroactive public goods funding.
And so that's where like the Cosmos ecosystem comes in for us, like we want approval of the hub because we know that this doesn't work without it.
And then to, I guess, talk about the initial go-to-market strategy, the mechanism starts with very high inflation, right?
And the effect that this has is that if you are an early adopter and long-term aligned, this allows you to accumulate it faster.
And in this point, I'm talking about the Belladrome mechanism, not necessarily the aether token, right?
But over time, the inflation goes down.
And so the effect that this has is when we distribute the initial NFTs to Cosmos protocols,
the ones that choose to incentivize liquidity with us and choose to buy and lock the token can build protocol liquidity that is sustainable because the locked aether or the locked Velo determines the share of LP rewards that go to the LPs.
And so if you are able to buy and lock enough Velo to incentivize liquidity without bribing, you can now sustain an LP pool kind of indefinitely if you start doing it during the high inflation part when the rewards are high.
I'm not sure that's a bad explanation. Does that make sense?
Yeah, it makes definitely. I mean, I'm not I'm not an expert in that field, but I think you are actually doing a very clear overview of the project so far because because it's pretty easy to understand also for the community.
So props for you to using a language which is actually very easy to understand.
And actually, I am fascinated by the fact that you are mostly basically taking inspiration from the optimism ecosystem, which actually has been very close to Cosmos in terms of strategy because they have the OP stack, which is reminding sometimes of the Cosmos stack.
There is actually already some synergy in comms regarding this ecosystem in particular.
Yeah, I think you're kind of attacking the same problem from opposite angles, right? In Cosmos, IBC is like a vertical integration and in optimism, you're building the same type of chain, but it's more horizontal.
So they're they're both equally composable, but the dimensions in which you compose are different.
Yeah, definitely. And and I think that now that there will be soon also IBC in the layers to ecosystem, I think that we will validate further our thesis.
So I think that actually chains that are secured by the Cosmos sub will have an interesting future because there is actually a lot of potential in having all this atom economics on brand and Cosmos brand still, even if some people try to distance themselves from this brand in the past.
But I think we are witnessing some sort of renaissance of this terminology. So that's kind of interesting.
And I've been trying to accept the community request to speak, but I don't know why today Twitter is bugging.
So basically every request that I've been accepting is bounced back.
So I'm sorry for that. If everyone that has been requesting to speak is not able to join, but Twitter sometimes play these games.
So sorry for that. Yeah, maybe have a question because I'm sure you've got a lot of questions and feedback, right?
So maybe you can like address what are some of the most frequently asked questions that you guys got.
And for anybody that's like tuned in now and listen to your explanations of everything, like how can they go?
How can they get in touch? And yeah, what's the place to learn more?
Yeah. So with the announcement of partial security, a lot of the questions we're getting around, are we still using EVMOS and Ethermint?
And so I want to be clear that we're no longer using that. And then the second question that we get a lot is about the nature of the anonymous team.
And so I wanted to take a second to address that as well. We don't fault anyone for being suspicious of us because we're anonymous.
That's a perfectly reasonable position to have.
And I understand this is our cultural difference between Cosmos and Ethereum, where in Ethereum, anonymous devs are much more accepted.
And so the example that I always go to is Yurn, Wi-Fi. A majority of their team is anonymous. They are headed by Banteg.
But he's been around for so long and their team has been around so long, providing value back to the ecosystem that everyone agrees that they are good actors.
And so our goal over time is to build up that same reputation. And so like one of the reasons we think we're sort of allowed to be anonymous is A, we're not taking any venture funding, right?
We paid for the development of all of this. And so we're like, we don't feel a reason to doxx from that perspective.
We'd kind of like to remind everyone that operating in crypto is dangerous, especially if you're based in certain countries.
And so some of our devs have those similar concerns. And then from a code perspective, the mechanisms that we're forking are audited and well understood.
And we are only changing them to use Atom. And so you should easily, if you're suspicious about like a rug potential, you know, and you can code, all of our code is open source.
And so you can go and verify what I'm saying. And that like, obviously, we're changing these mechanisms, but we're doing it as narrowly as possible just to support Atom.
And our tokens are locked for a long time. And you can verify that as well. And like I said, this will succeed or fail based on whether it provides utility to Atom.
And so, you know, if we fail, it's because we failed to unlock the same type of utility for Atom that other chains have been able to unlock.
I feel like there was another part. Oh, yeah. So the last part of your question was where to go. Oh, go ahead. Sorry.
Yeah, I think that's a very realistic kind of explanation. Right. And I mean, you know, Satoshi is also like nobody knows who Satoshi is.
Like our entire industry is built on that. Right. And I think I also understand, like specifically in customers, I think it's a very strong culture around the transparency of developers.
And by transparency, I mean, like a lot of the core developers are out there. I remember when I got into Cosmos, I felt like the whole content creator and influencer scene in Cosmos were basically the developers.
Right. Like Sunny, Jax, Zaki, they were all like kind of like the main influencers in Cosmos.
So I think that's kind of like culturally the difference between Ethereum and maybe even other ecosystems. Right.
Like there's also like Avalanche and Hedera way more institutional. But I think generally it's a big retail community, but also it's very involved.
And I think that's what makes it so different. And I don't know if you've been following all your governance stuff and over the years. Right.
But I think Cosmos also has the most active governance, which is great. But also it causes some kind of friction sometimes.
Yeah. No, I haven't been following it very closely until recently, but now I try to follow it pretty closely.
And I think like this is a going back to the anonymity. We've been getting a lot of pushback from validators and understandably so. Right.
They don't want to run code they're not familiar with from a team they don't know because they face like legal liability and that kind of thing.
So we understand where they're coming from. And I think this is where partial security is a fantastic fit for us because it gives them the opportunity to opt out if they if they aren't comfortable.
But yeah, I think like the only way we're going to be able to build up a good reputation is over time by acting in the interests of the Adam community and and you know, with integrity and and we plan on doing that.
Yeah. And before we get back to the like, where can people go? I got a question, written question from crypto Chuck here who is trying to get on.
But he sent it to me. So he's saying, what's the approach from a ether to acquire new users? Cosmos currently has several EVM chains.
And so on. How are they going to differentiate and acquire users?
Yeah. So initially the main way that we're going to acquire users is through the velodrome dex mechanism.
Should I give a an elevator pitch for that real quick?
OK. So, yeah, the problem that the velodrome mechanism solves is that in any ecosystem, you have a lot of liquidity that sits unused.
Right. And so to use examples from the Ethereum ecosystem, like eat die has billions of dollars in it.
But when you look at how much volume it does relative to how much liquidity is in there, a lot of that liquidity is being unused.
And so the way that the velodrome mechanism solves this is it creates a marketplace for liquidity where instead of fees going to LPs, they go to a new type of actor called the velo voters.
Velo voters are actors who lock up velo in exchange for a pro rata share of these fees and they vote every week where to allocate the velo rewards that go to LPs.
And so this marketplace now has buyers who are velo voters who are buying the velo and then LPs who are earning the velo as rewards and dumping it either to compound their LP position or like compensate themselves for the impermanent loss they receive.
But the benefit of this mechanism is that you earn more rewards. Right. And so like coming back very specifically to his question about how we'll incentivize people to bridge over.
My guess would be that wherever you're providing liquidity right now, we will be able to offer you a higher APY or a higher APR per week.
And so that should be attractive. And like the economic incentives there should attract a lot of people. But over time, this creates a flywheel where we hope you stay because the inflation will be high initially.
And so that will reward people who buy in from the beginning. But over time, it's going to get less profitable. And at least with velodrome, like the metric that we track on the decks, is that like a year ago when Velo launched, 100% of the voter revenue was coming from bribes, right, which is protocols who deposit incentives for LPs.
And as the decks grew and got market share, now over 50% of the revenue is coming from fees. And so if you look at velodrome on optimism, I don't think they have more TVL than Uniswap at this point, but they do have like a majority of the volume.
And so if you look at it holistically, VE Velo voters are basically in control of where the liquidity goes on optimism now because they manage to get the network effects.
And so we think of the high inflation as a growth mechanism where it will only be high for a short time. We plan to use that short time to generate interest and to kind of get the flywheel going.
And then at some point, like a year after, it'll start going down. But initially, like it should be very profitable for people who choose to play.
Yeah, we have Mike on stage. What's your question, Mike?
Yeah, I have a question. Can you guys hear me or no?
Yeah. Okay, cool. Yeah, I come from the Ethereum ecosystem too. So I had a question for you regarding the VAE NFT. And I think this is probably a decent opportunity. Do you plan to use those to trade on like NFT marketplace like Omniflex or Stargaze?
Yeah, so the Velodrome team is not against people selling their positions, right? And I've even sold a bunch of my VE NFTs. And this is the benefit of representing the position as an NFT.
So for speaking with Velodrome or for Velodrome, their NFTs typically trade at like a 20 to 30% discount to compensate for the risk you're taking of like having the locked collateral. But yeah, we don't care which NFT exchanges you choose to trade them on.
I think that that should be your way to like get exit liquidity if you need it. And we want to encourage trading of these NFTs anywhere where people want to support them.
I actually have one last question. Then if there isn't any more questions, I think we can slowly wrap it up. Actually, the branding of ITER reminds me of Juno. And I'm saying this because Juno was very similar to ITER approach in the beginning because they basically were obviously found that they had this strong alignment with ATOM because basically the brand was the sister of the Cosmos sub.
So there was a lot of similarity in that. And Juno, especially in the beginning, was super successful also as a smart contract platform, which also either will be. So do you guys have been inspired in some way to what was the Juno journey in the Cosmos ecosystem or is something that I only noticed actually? And it's just my theory, basically.
Yeah, I don't know if we were necessarily inspired, but I think we're definitely aligned with them ideologically, right? And yeah, if that makes sense. But I wasn't the like inventor of ITER. So I'm not necessarily sure how it came to be from there. Like I came in, I was basically the last person to come in because I just consult on the DEX part.
But yeah, like we like them and we are making a lot of the same design decisions and choices that they made probably for the same reasons.
I have one final question because honestly, for me, like hearing this is very refreshing. Like I've been around in the Cosmos sub for many years. I know so has Robin many in the audience. And I think the Cosmos ecosystem and specifically the Cosmos hub have always been very serious, very formal.
It's kind of like slowness development and not too much degen stuff there, right? But I think listening to you is like you sound like you have a lot of experience in the Ethereum DeFi ecosystem. You also sound like you know kind of which DeFi protocols in Ethereum work and why. So I think bringing this experience to the Cosmos hub is very important, especially right now.
We also had a spaces last week with a team from Asteroid that are building the inscriptions protocol and CFT 20s. So yeah, I feel like there's a whole new kind of wind coming into the Cosmos sub ecosystem. So my question is my final question is like, how do you view view atom and the Cosmos hub? Like, where do you think it should go? Where do you think it aligns philosophically? Where does it fit into like the broader crypto ecosystem?
Like if you think outside of Cosmos even, how does it? Yeah, so now we're just speaking for me personally, but I won't name the chains that I don't like. But I will say that Cosmos and Ethereum are basically the only communities that I do like. And the reason for that is because I think we agree that we're up against state actors, we're up against, you know, actual censorship type of threats.
And so when I play this like crypto ecosystem out like five, 10 years in the future, I don't think there's one chain that wins. I think there's probably like five chains that win. And that's because the liquidity like whales need deep liquidity to trade with other whales, and there's just only enough liquidity for like some small amount of chains to win.
But you will pick the chain based on the technical trade offs. But right and so like Cosmos sort of has this like vertical integration, if you're a dev looking to build a chain, and like the Ethereum ecosystem is kind of going more horizontal, but they both end up at the same destination.
And at least to me, what's important about them is they both like value censorship resistance and decentralization over speed, right, which is not to say that they're slow, but more to say that like the number one priority is not necessarily being fastest and not because being fast is a bad thing, but because to survive on a five to 10 year timeframe,
you need to be one of these chains that like achieves product market fit and lasting duration, like you need to have those base attributes fulfilled first. And so yeah, we think, like we agree, Adam has done a great job building its ecosystem, or the Cosmos has done a great job building its ecosystem.
And like, we're glad to hear that you you feel it's refreshing. But we view it as a market opportunity, like there is just so much Adam laying around doing nothing. And the amount of money that can be made if you just give people a way to play with it, we think is such a huge opportunity, and such an obvious way for, for Adam to kind of cement itself as, you know, one of the chains in cryptocurrency in the future.
Yeah, I think for me, the refreshing part really is that like, there's a fresh new team coming in, that comes with a clear, actionable roadmap, and just launches, right? I mean, we're not there yet. I think we're still a couple weeks out. But I think there's a clear plan and clear pathway that you guys have laid out. So thanks a lot for that. And like, you know, for me as a autumn holder and believer in autumn and the Cosmos side of the world, I think it's a good thing.
I think the past years have obviously not been been easy. But if you look at the competitive landscape of other ecosystems, I think item is still, it's still relatively doing well, right in a grander scheme. We've got a lot of jobs, we've got a lot of, you know, interchange security was shipped. Now it's kind of evolving. Like I said, asteroids, I think for those that haven't been there last week, like that was super interesting about inscriptions and CFT 20. So, yeah, I think that's it.
So, yeah, I'm, I'm excited. I don't know, Rob, do you have any final words? Final question?
No, I think this is the best closer that we will get because has been quite inspiring hearing your words. And I think it's, it's very nice and refreshing to see all this new energy coming around the Cosmos sub. So thanks everyone for being here today and sharing your vibes and your ideas and especially the community to listen.
And I think we can, we can wrap it up and see you in the next episode.
Yeah, I'll just say that if you're interested in talking to us, like if you represent a protocol or you have more questions, we're open and willing to talk to anyone. You can DM me on this account, you can DM our main account. And then I'm on work cast now, which is like the L2 based Twitter clone.
And so happy to engage with anybody on there too. But yeah, if you're, if you're interested in participating in our future launch or like integrating with us in any way, we definitely want to hear from you. And if you have concerns too, we want to hear from you as well.
Yeah, I was gonna ask because I think some people were also asking about a discord or is there a telegram chat or
not yet. But actually, that's a good point. I will create a discord. Well, we were, I think, planning on doing that closer to launch. Okay, but yeah, now that we're starting to do marketing, it probably makes sense to have it now.
Yeah, sooner the better, you know, and I think there's like, I mean, I'll also see like some people have been commenting under the tweets. And I think it's good to get the conversations going, you know, amongst the early like contributors and people that provide feedback.
So yeah, yeah, people have made valid criticisms of us that like we don't have emails at our domain yet. And then like the main reason for that is literally we've just been heads down to endev.
But yeah, now that we're getting closer to launch, and now that we have more breathing room with partial security, we're going to start working on all the other stuff that needs to happen. And so yeah, people should be able to engage with us in a lot easier ways in the near future.
Sounds great. Yeah, thank you so much for all the explanations explanations and for your time. And yeah, thanks for having me. This was fantastic.
Yeah, thanks. And I think that the community now has a clear view from matter. So I think this is very important going forward.
Thanks again, everyone. And see you in the next episode.