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Behind the Science @0xMagmar
Recorded: July 23, 2025 Duration: 1:07:01Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent discussion, key figures from the Cosmos ecosystem outlined a transformative vision focusing on strategic partnerships, innovative project launches, and community growth. The emphasis on cross-chain collaboration and institutional engagement aims to enhance the ecosystem's capabilities and drive significant adoption, positioning Cosmos for a robust future in the crypto landscape.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Welcome to the lab, where minds collide, The science behind is about to go live.
Cirque in the house, mad scientists represent.
Breaking down projects, every single element.
Knowledge flows free through the cosmos sphere.
Innovative builders lend us your ears.
No gatekeeping here, just open exploration.
Cross-chain collaboration, that's our foundation.
The science behind.
Curiosity leads and knowledge combines.
The science behind.
Med scientists and friends redefining the science.
From osmosis to stargaze and beyond the experiment continues on building vagabonds
everything's connected in the digital expanse so tune in turn up give your mind a chance
jim jim meg how you doing hey guys good how are you i'm doing great man thanks
Hey guys, good. How are you?
I'm doing great, man. Thanks.
Thanks for having me on.
Yeah, no, no. Thank you for making yourself available.
Hope you enjoy the track. Custom AI.
That's crazy. I couldn't have done better even if I tried.
You can get a Cosmos Anthem in about a minute real quick.
So it's great, man, the things you can do with AI.
We'll get started in just a couple of minutes.
So for those that have already joined the space,
bottom right corner, there's a little purple bubble.
Give the space a like, give it a little retweet, drop a comment.
Always helps with the algorithm.
And I want to shout out to Anoya for this original song that we're playing.
This is Zerk of the Mad Scientist Collective, where everything's an experiment that's our perspective.
Let's dive deep with today's special guest. The science behind has officially commenced.
Nice.
Very well done.
Seems like people are tuning in, man.
This is a popular space.
Lots of folk want to hear
you, Mag. I think this is going to be a
great time.
Glad to hear it. Yeah. Hey, everybody.
Always drawing in
the crowd, so that's amazing to see.
Once again, got to remind
the folk here that just tuned in,
the space is recorded,
as well as for you, Mag, so you're aware.
We got lots of people actually listening to the recordings.
That's why we do this.
So many time zones within the cosmos, so it helps that we're going to record these.
And bottom right corner, once more, there's a little purple bubble.
Give the space like, give a little retweet, and we shall get started in just one minute.
Martinez, I see you with us.
How are you doing? Jim. Martinez, I see you with us.
How are you doing?
GM, GM, I'm good.
Do you hear me well?
Because I have connection this year.
No, we're hearing you loud and clear.
I hope you're smoking North Korean cigarettes or whatever. I finished them.
I finished them.
I'm searching some new weird stuff.
All right.
We'll finish North Korean cigarettes.
That's good.
Now, on to the new thing.
And I want to thank you, Martinez, as well,
for setting up this space with Mag.
And Mag, making yourself always available for the community
for these types of spaces, for all the events.
Really appreciate it.
Yeah, of course.
Always happy to be here.
You guys know I live within the community, so it's very natural for me.
He lives online 24-7.
Just like all of us, a true DJ night heart. Beautiful to see.
All right, well, let's get this space started. I'm Zerk, co-founder of Mad Scientist, and today we have the privilege, the honor, the prestige of having Magmar with us from Cosmos, co-CEO of Interchain Labs.
All right, well, let's get this space started.
I'm Zerk, co-founder of Mad Scientist.
And I think, you know, last time we spoke understand what has changed and the new vision of Cosmos.
I mean, I'm going right into it.
Yeah. So I think it's been about three weeks since sort of we announced this change in direction.
And, you know, it was a very tough week, I think, when we did. I had a lot of folks who, you know, were panicking, were, you know, having second questions about, you know, leadership and all these things, which I fully anticipated.
And I think, you know, just to set the stage of, you know, where we are right now, right?
We're in July of 2025. The ICL was formed, you know, where we are right now, right? We're in July of 2025. The ICL was formed,
you know, January of 2025. So we're about six or seven months in. The first two months of,
you know, what we were doing was really just, you know, there's no better way to describe it
than like draining the swamp. Like we had to get rid of a lot of different people, a lot of different teams. There was a lot
of hands in the pot and everyone knows what pot that is. And we just had to come in and take an
axe to it. And that was brutal. It really was brutal. I had, fire like 20 to 30 people within like a span of a couple
of weeks.
And we replaced the entire top level structure of the Cosmos ecosystem with skip engineers
and new hires, which, and, you know, we cut out this system, which was called the team of teams,
where there were a bunch of teams being paid by the ICF
to do all kinds of different things.
And I'm not gonna name names.
So that took two months.
It was a huge cultural shock.
We had to hire a bunch of people as well.
And sort of in that third month we were saying,
okay, well, we want to ship something too.
We can't just only have structural changes here.
We actually need to somehow figure out with the remaining team, how can we ship something
that would be excellent?
And that's sort of where IBC Eureka came in.
We had been working on IBC Eureka and the IBC team had been inspecting
it for a while. They anticipated, I think, another year or year and a half until it was
shipped. We were like, well, what if we can do it in basically like a month and a half?
And so the entire company just locked themselves in the office and grinded on it 24 seven across
the entire world. People were taking shifts in different countries until we ship this.
What I would think is, or what I think is like a beautiful product.
Like it's, it's incredible system, right?
It's fully integrated to skip go.
It has a fast transfer.
It's extremely cheap to transfer assets like ETH, et cetera, between different blockchains
etc between uh different blockchains and and between ethereum and cosmos and i think is but
and between Ethereum and Cosmos.
it laid the groundwork for a much more extensive ibc network than we've ever seen uh so so that was
an accomplishment um i think what we did not anticipate at the time is that um when you're
building a bridge uh you really need to...
Wait, can you guys still hear me, by the way?
Absolutely. I'm listening, man.
It's a pleasure listening to you.
I know I'm not intervening much, but...
No, no, no. My screen went black for a second,
and then I panicked.
Okay, so we're back.
We're good, we're good.
Yeah, so what we did not anticipate was, well, when we shipped this thing, we shipped it around the Babylon launch, right? Because there are a lot of Bitcoin issuers like Lombard, which has, you know, a ton of Bitcoin and Pump and Solve and Lorenzo.
They all wanted to move their Bitcoin to Babylon, or so we thought.
And so we were anticipating, I remember telling people in our network, we were anticipating
billions of dollars transferred, like three to $6 billion transferred in the first week.
That did not happen.
And I think that was a huge learning experience for us because we said at that time, okay,
Babylon's going to figure this out for us.
You know, Longworth's going to figure this out for us.
Like, there's going to be incentives.
There's going to be a whole reason why people want to use this bridge to get to Cosmos from Ethereum.
What we ended up discovering was, you know, if you rely upon an external partner to do all of that, it's unlikely to meet your expectations.
And that's not the fault of Babylon.
I'm not blaming Babylon for this.
Babylon is executed extremely well given the circumstances.
But it did teach us that we have to grow our own ecosystem.
That was a lesson we took away out of that time.
And so that's what really pushed the EVM direction, right?
So the next two months or next two and a half months,
we've been working with a bunch of teams.
We essentially were trying to launch an entire EVM
with a whole ecosystem pre-built within six months,
which is very hard to air chain three years, I think.
And we found all these different teams,
Stride, Shred, Feather, et cetera.
We started to build the actual code base.
We were building a brand new EVM on top of the Cosmos hub.
We transitioned Cosmosm to be maintained by Hadron Labs
or Neutron so that we could focus on EVM.
And we started to approach the people you need to bring on
to actually launch an EVM.
So Block Explorers, right?
Etherspan, for example.
You need an Oracle, right?
Chainlink, for example.
You need wallet connections, Metamask and Phantom, ideally.
You need some kind of incentive infrastructure, right,
for these projects to launch.
So we were looking at, I think it was called fuel.
And as we did that, our uneasiness began to rise.
Gradually at first, but then it became very intense because we realized a couple things.
One, we thought that we could make the EVM differentiated from other EVMs
because of IBC or Rika,
so that we could have this property
that people deploy once
and then they can be live everywhere,
which builders loved.
Like that's a great pitch, right?
That people don't want to deploy outposts everywhere.
What we realized is that actually
a lot of the chain abstraction,
which that was trying to solve,
is being done at the wallet layer and would be done at the front end layer. There's like
great applications, for example, that use Hyperliquid and Solana, and you can't even
tell the difference between them. And so we said, okay, well, we're probably going to
be outcompeted on this because wallet layer moves very fast. On-chain code changes, especially
with Cosmos of governance governance are not very fast.
We're not going to win this in the long run.
And so we said, okay, well, if you don't have a very differentiated EVM, how much would
it cost to really do this right and have a successful outcome?
Right?
So for example, I don't know if people know about Astria, but it was the main share sequencer
in Celestia.
They launched an EVM with a DEX very fast, et cetera. They just shut it down. They pivoted completely out of crypto after
raising a lot of money because it's very hard to have an EVM go right if you don't pour the
right amount of money on it. And so what I mean by that is Arbitrum pays over $200, $300 million
a year in incentives.
And they've done that consistently for years.
Base pours huge profits into its ecosystem that are generated by its exchange business.
Solana spends a massive amount on developer outreach and the super team, etc.
It's like a multi-billion dollar enterprise. And so we're looking at this, we're like, okay, how can we believe that the Cosmos have
EBM, even if everyone loves Adam and everyone wants to come here, how can we believe that
this is going to be more competitive than these other guys when we have a fraction of
the money to spend, right?
And I think there's many people who would be in that situation be like, okay, well,
we did already bring in the teams.
We already talked to the community about it.
We should just ship it anyway.
But the way that I saw it at the time, and I think the way that our team saw it is actually
we don't really have the luxury of spending $200 million and then pouring it down the drain for another failed
experiment. We just don't have that luxury. And we got very frustrated with the fact that
we don't want to be building a business where we have to pay our customers. That's not what
customers are. You shouldn't pay your customers. Customers pay you, right? That's what defines a customer. And everyone we had to convince to build on the EVN, we either had to fund them,
pay them something, incentivize them. We had to buy all the infrastructure providers,
and it just doesn't feel right, right? Like that doesn't feel right. Like why we have this, we built such incredible technology
that we paid so many millions of dollars for over so many years. Why do we have to pay for people
to use it? That doesn't make any sense. And so that's really where we started to evaluate, okay,
really what has happened over the past six months that we could call a successful business outcome, right?
And when we look back, the most successful business outcomes
have been other chains launching on the Cosmos stack
and having an incredible relationship with us
and not denying their Cosmos,
unlike some other chains in the past.
Like they're very clearly Cosmos chains.
They are building incredible things.
They have large budgets and they're willing to work with us to build something great.
That is much more exciting from a business perspective.
And so we've executed a pivot to basically, or change in focus, to work with these kinds
of customers, people like Ripple, like Ondo, like, you know,
TAC, like Provenance, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera,
to bring them into Cosmos, launch chains with them,
and then monetize those relationships
versus trying to launch our own EVM
and sort of denying our history
as an ecosystem of sovereign at once.
Love it. So much to unpack here, but thanks for that intro.
And beautifully said, I think the story really makes sense.
Ned, you kind of explain it on spaces here.
So first things first, you know, we are the mad scientists.
We like to say everything is an experiment and
even a failed experiment is great because you get all these learnings from it right so perhaps
initially you know when you guys started doing all the research around pivoting cosmos to full
evm thing you didn't you weren't aware of all the costs, right, that were associated and all the, I'm going to call it what it is,
bribes that you have to give out to get integrations within, you know, some of the bigger wallet providers and all those things.
So to me, it was going to be very hard to be differentiated from other EVMs.
I think the space we had a few months ago, again, I come back to
that, I had asked, like, what is the differentiator here? And because EVMs are extremely competitive,
there's many of them. And like you mentioned, BASE has huge backing, Arbitrum, huge funds,
ETH as well. I mean, all the capital from the suits,
or they call it institutional capital, flowing into Ethereum.
So in a sense, it's kind of almost impossible to compete money-wise with them.
What do we have unique here in Cosmos?
And I think you nailed it, is these amazing chain builders.
And we should capitalize on them more than anything else.
And you're right, like paying for this makes no sense to me.
I think I'm probably familiar with the hyperliquid approach.
They don't pay anybody.
Hence, they don't have any OpenSea or Magic Eden marketplaces,
but they have, you know, these say builders that built out this NFT marketplace called Drips.
And now Drips is making money off
the fees. You know, nobody paid them, but they saw an opportunity, they seized it, and they weren't
paid to build it out. So I agree, like philosophically, conceptually, it makes more sense
for builders to come to Cosmos and try to capitalize on the opportunity instead of trying to get grants or sponsorships or just, you know, backdoor deals, right?
Yeah, I think that's basically true.
I mean, Hyperliquid is a very interesting case study.
So one, I don't know if anyone's used Hyperliquid apps that are on the EDM, but they're generally all extremely bad.
I think, like, it's highly oversold.
You try to go to Hyperliquid and use their apps, most are completely jank.
We have a team that works in our office that we incubated that is now one of the foremost
Hyperliquid application builders, and he is constantly complaining about how bad the EVM experience
But it doesn't matter for Hyperliquid because they have a multi-billion dollar revenue company
that is just buying the token ad infinitum.
I mean, it's like a $50 billion market cap.
I don't know if it's going to keep going. But you know, the all products don't matter
if you have a token that is going to infinity or has been going to infinity, right? Because
you will just attract- The main product is good, but yeah, those EVM apps, you know,
I agree, man. Lack of polish is the word I would use, but janky is, I think, a better-
If we launched that ecosystem on the Cosmos hub,
the same kind of apps,
there's no way people would be talking about it as a success.
There's no chance.
I think Hyperliquid can get away with it because it's like,
look, right now the only reason people are using
these apps is because there's a narrative that if you
try if you use the Hyper EVM apps,
you're going to qualify for the next airdrop.
We don't even know if that's true, but that's what people are saying.
And talking to my friend, he has the largest volume options protocol
in Hyperliquid called Opt.Fun.
It's actually one of the very few.
Oh, I love it.
We partnered with them a few times.
I love Opt.Fun.
Yeah, right.
He's my friend from school.
And he was saying the vast majority of their volume comes from like 50 traders. I love opt fun. Ryan? Yeah, right. He's my friend from school.
And he was saying the vast majority of their volume comes from like 50 traders.
And I think people just don't understand that this is all fake.
All of it is so fake.
All of the arbitrum stuff, all the base stuff, all the Solana stuff, it's like a couple guys
with big backs that are moving this money around. There's very little like real retail volume.
And like the only app that really ever worked on Solana, the reason it went from a complete
shitter at $8 like to where it is now, it's just Pump.Fun. And then if you look at all of the
things around Pump.Fun, right, radium, Jupiter, etc.,
they're all just fueled by pump.fun at some level. And now pump.fun has its own chain,
so it's like, what's going to happen? And on base, it's similar, it's all Aerodrome.
There's a couple apps on these things that actually have some real usage,
and then everything else is just an ancillaryary thing and those apps are heavily incentivized right it it it's like it like looking
at it very logically it's like kind of an illusion right and it's not an illusion that i was willing
to pay for at the price tag that that illusion costs and it's not an illusion that I was willing to pay for at the price tag that that illusion costs.
And it's not an illusion that I felt comfortable staking my reputation and Cosmos on building
just because it's like something that's worked somewhere else.
And I think what I was much more interested in was I was looking at Chainlink.
I was looking at Ripple.
I was looking at, you know, that's another good example of these kinds of products.
Well, let's start with those two, right?
Like the amazing thing about Chainlink and Ripple
is that they're profitable businesses
or they have real world businesses, right?
Chainlink doesn't charge in Link.
Chainlink charges in cold, hard dollars.
I can tell you, like that's what they wanted to charge us
when we wanted to launch the EVM.
And then they use Link in a very interesting
way basically to pay their operators on their decentralized Oracle network or they call it
DON. Ripple, you know, like I remember reading a stat which is Ripple says, oh, we have this
XRP based payment network. No one really uses XRP in their payment network. And it's kind
of unclear if XRP is really involved in any of these things. But it does have like a very major business appeal to real world businesses.
And then that has fed into, you know, basically the third largest token, fourth largest token in
crypto. And so I think it broke the illusion for me because I was like, wait a second, you don't
just have to do the same thing everyone else is doing and try to build an on-chain ecosystem where like the fees are gas and the gas is burning the token or whatever.
Like everyone's trying to do that.
You can actually build a differentiated real business and still have a top five token, right?
Or top 10 or top 20.
And I think it comes down to two things you have to do really well. The first one is you
have to one, build a real business where you have great customers that are paying you. And the second
thing is you have to do a really good job growing the community around the asset. Right? So I think
one thing that Ripple does very well, for example, is they have, you know, we may hate them or think
they're stupid, but they have a huge number of people that love that asset. And they have communities, they have, you know, sub communities, they have DAOs, they have meetups, they have, you know, like a cult like presence. And that's what I want to do for Adam. Like, I want the Adam community to be like the strongest token community in the world. And I think we have the capability to do that. We have a lot of the
underlying fundamentals to create a community like that. One, we have a very, you know,
we have a storied token. It was launched, you know, basically in the ICO era.
It's been at the top 100 for five plus years, which is an incredible accomplishment. We have
a hugely distributed token holder base across Korea,
across Japan, across South America, across Europe, across the United States. And we have,
I think, like, basically, the narrative of the thing that is proven to be the most true
in crypto since Bitcoin, which is that there will be many chains, right? Cosmos was the
first to believe that and the first to ever say that that would be the future. And at the time in 2019, when Jay and
Buckman got on stage and said, okay, there may only be two chains right now, but in the future,
there's going to be many more. People thought they were completely stupid, right? And now look at the
world. How many chains are there, right? How many new L1s? How many new L2s? How many new L3s? How many new Validiums? That was the right thesis. And this next stage of the business, which is actually
bringing real businesses into that narrative, building L1 chains for real companies.
Absolutely. I love what you're saying. And, you know, just to close the loop on the EVM thing,
you can check my DMs. Trendy's here. Martinez is here. I was never a fan of it. I always like the first initial vision of Cosmos, which is, you know,
helping people build these incredible chains, or in this case, helping businesses build these
incredible chains. So to me, it makes a lot of sense. Saw a tweet as well, I think a couple of
days ago, somebody saying if Cosmos actually captured the value of the technology that's behind all the chains that
are successful, I mean, it'd be like top three by market cap, right? Like, or maybe top four,
wherever you want to put that, but we just forget how many of these bigger chains use the tech.
So let's segue into that. I think that was always the question around the Atom token is the tech is incredible. We have mega chains using the tech. And I mean, I know this is a difficult question and you know what's coming up, but how do you intend to kind of capture that value? I mean, you probably get it all the time as well through this pivot, which from my understanding is partnering with businesses, helping them launch
with each other. So how do you think Adam can capture value here? Because the tech was
going away for free. Yeah, I think it's a great question. And it's definitely a question
I'm highly prepared for, of course. So I think like, yeah, just to validate what you were saying,
I think if you look at the Cosmos ecosystem page, no one else in the world has an ecosystem page like we do.
When you look at all the companies and just incredible size of chains and technology that is built on the Cosmos stack, it's unbelievable.
What does Optimism have?
Okay, it has Sonium, a non-live, half-baked Sony chain. It has Base, which is huge. But who else has, you know, Polygon?
Who else has Binance Smart Chain? Who else has Ondo, Baruchain, DYDX? Even Hyperliquid uses
Comet BFT. Who else has Toyota as a customer? They use Comet BFT to control the remote unlock
between their electric vehicles and their remote keychains. There's nothing that compares.
I challenge anyone to have a list that compares. And so I think the question really is, well,
And so I think the question really is, well, how can we turn that into something that works
for Atom, right?
Because Atom is the thing that funded all of this, right?
Atom was the original token.
It's the original thing that funded the ICF, which funds all of the development of the
stack.
It's been, all of that has been Atom funded, right?
And I think that's really important to remember because I think the people
before us in leadership forgot about that for a very long time. And from my perspective,
there's a couple of ways and I try to be realistic about it, right? You can't go to these customers
or future customers and act entitled. You can't say, hey guys, we, Adam funded all of this stuff that you're using,
please, you must pay us because it's the right thing to do
or you owe it to us or anything like that.
They won't listen to that, right?
No one's gonna listen to that.
Imagine like, I don't know,
you know, let's say you use Linux, right?
Imagine some guy from Linux came out and said,
hey, you've been using our tech for a long time.
I need you to pay me ten thousand dollars for every year or or a thousand dollars for every
year that you use it's like those wiki donations right like come on give me a little something
yeah exactly like the answer is no right and and there's no reason to believe that people are going
to be responsive um so then the question becomes well how can we change your viewpoint from we are owed
this money to, okay, actually we are starting from a very strong position and that all these
chains use our tech so we have a unique distribution platform to their chains, right?
We wouldn't even be getting in the door with Ripple or with Ondo or with any of these guys if they all used OP technology.
The fact that the Cosmo stack has been free for a very long time and because it's been the best for a very long time,
gets us in the door with customers that can pay and are willing to talk to us and very excited to talk to us
because they have problems
that have stemmed out of their usage of the stack that uniquely we can solve.
So, for example, when I was working at Skip or the company that I co-founded before it was acquired by the ICF,
we sold an oracle called Slinky.
Slinky was a boat extension based Oracle.
It used some of the newer features of Comet BFT.
And we sold that for $250,000 a year, up to $2 million a year
for like our premium plan with a bunch of support, et cetera.
That was flying off the shelf.
This was towards the end, right before the acquisition happened.
There's a reason we got acquired, right?
Things were looking very good inside the business.
And what we were selling was basically an addition to the Cosmo stack.
It was Cosmo stack specific.
And it was a product that would basically let you have a bunch of Oracle prices for assets that other Oracles did not offer, like Chainlink.
We sold it to DYDX.
We sold it to Celestia. We sold it BYDX, we sold it to Celestia,
we sold it to Neutron,
we sold it to a bunch of the Bitcoin L2s,
we sold it to a bunch of the ADSs on Eigenlayer.
And what we realized through that is that
what you think of as Cosmos,
meaning like Stargate, Osmosis, et cetera,
is like the very top of the iceberg.
There are so many chains that you don't even know are using the Cosmos SDK that are.
And when we framed the Cosmos SDK as a platform, meaning, hey, if you guys are using the Cosmos SDK,
even if you don't identify as a Cosmos chain, you can use our product, we were able to get really large sales.
And so I think that's how I view this next stage of the roadmap is we have
250 listed chains using the Cosmos SDK,
probably realistically,
thousand plus other ones that we don't know that are using the Cosmos SDK.
We have a bunch of people moving to build L1s.
There's a huge space here of customers that we can begin selling infrastructure
and services to around interoperability, oracles.
We can have a third-party marketplace where they can have DEXs, they can have lending
products, et cetera, and we can monetize that for Atom directly.
And the last thing I'll say is when you say monetize for Atom,
it doesn't have to be complicated.
How does Hyperliquid monetize Hype?
They buy the token.
It's a very simple equation.
Yeah, if you get money in, you can spend it on Atom.
Boom, you're done.
Yeah.
Anything else is honestly kind of uh probably uh
like disingenuous right people were saying for a long time like eath is ultrasound no it's not
it's not ultrasound money it's inflating like a motherfucker and like same thing with solana like
he's inflating like crazy and sure if you want to have a huge amount of transaction fees, that can be a lot.
But even Solana's transaction fees don't look anything like the amount of income that comes
from like a properly scaled SaaS company, right? What are we talking about, Solana? Like a billion?
A little bit less than a billion? That's nothing compared to what we could build with a properly
scaled SaaS company that we sell the Cosmos stack to institutions and use that revenue to buy out.
Like, it's nothing compared to that.
Right.
You mentioned the magic word here, you know, in terms of what the vision is.
So I'm going to take a pause here.
I mean, it's good.
Okay, Martinez, I don't know that you did the sound effects or you had a question?
Go ahead and then we'll get back to Mag.
Yeah, yeah, you know, we with Zork like an old couple.
We know each other so well, that's why he pronounced my question.
So I have flash question from audience.
And let me say it in rephrase the question for audience are there are studies
showing that in FinTech a profile picture picture with a scientist attracts more people and inspires
more trust and something like a depiction than of death so my question is uh what about uh pfp okay we okay you don't have to answer that
okay my question is actually you know as i understand customers moving uh on to b2b so
moving on to B2B, so business for business, right?
And how you see and where you see the retail and marketing
and the marketing part as a community part.
So how you will use retail and evolve community in customers?
That's a good question.
A much better question.
Yeah.
Well, I'd like to say I'm not the founder of Cosmos, right?
I'm not the founder of Atom.
I didn't create it.
I came in as a community member, right?
And as a builder in the community, and I built my business, I built my life, and I built my friends, and I built my everything
since basically my entire professional career
in this ecosystem.
I was, I think, like many of the people here,
I was trying to understand what's going on.
I was trying to have a financial life within Cosmos
by building a company, Skip, that used Cosmos
technology and serviced Cosmos chains, et cetera.
And so from my perspective, I feel like retail, right?
And I think I act like retail in a lot of ways.
I don't feel responsible for the creation of Adam because I wasn't responsible, but I
do feel extremely excited about it and dedicated to it.
And so I never view retail as something to use because I'm sort of in the same boat.
I had to buy all my Atom, you know, like I had to buy it with cash.
And you know, I bought at prices a lot higher than this.
So like, I'm also in the red red, I know how that feels, right?
I didn't get some Adam that, you know,
a cent or in the ICO or anything like that.
So I think from my perspective,
what I really like about the Adam community
and what I think is really exciting is we have some,
I think of the smartest people in the community.
I think for a long time, the Adam community was villainized by the powers that were.
I think that was totally the wrong decision.
And I think that was really stupid.
And I think we lost some great people that we could have kept around.
But I think the things that I've gotten from the Adam community, and a
lot of this happens in the Adam community chat, and I highly encourage you guys to join if you're
not there yet, is I get a ton of ideas, a ton of inspiration, a ton of relationships and connections
that are actually very sophisticated. Like one of the guys in the Adam community chat messaged me
after we made this pivot announcement and said, hey, I run one of the largest NGOs in the world.
I won't share the name of it.
And after your announcement, I can connect you to our guys internally and we can start
thinking about building a Cosmos chain together that has like 100 million users in sub-Saharan
Africa and the Africa region and East Asia to help them adopt payment
solutions because they don't have banks, right? That was an Atom community member.
And so from my perspective, it's only been a massive accelerant, like having a community
around this. And I want to grow that community. I'm desperate to grow that community. I'm always
thinking about how can I grow that community? How can I empower people to grow that community. I'm desperate to grow that community. I'm always thinking about how can I grow that community?
How can I empower people to grow that community?
How can I do right by that community?
I spend so much time talking to that community.
I mean, if you know me in the Adam community chat, I'm like always talking because I love
it, right?
Like it's distracting sometimes, but I love talking.
And I feel very close and very like on a similar boat to the community members.
And I really value their opinions. So that's why I think the strategy is two prongs, right?
There's the institutional business side, which I'm going to get, I'm going to put a tie on and
put on a jacket and go talk to those guys and bring them in and build a proper sales team
around that. I don't need help with that so much. But on the retail marketing side,
this is a movement that we're all working on. We're spending a lot of time on it. We're investing
in it. We believe in it. We've been through thick and thin. How can we grow this community to other
people, especially now that I don't feel bad adding people to the Atom community because we have a real future, right?
And we have a very powerful engine that is powering Atom
in the Cosmos hub that we've never had before
with the ICL and the ICF and the treasury, et cetera,
fully dedicated on that mission.
So that's really where I hope to empower people
in the community to grow it to a scale
that it's never been before, is my dream.
Nice. That's a good sound effect. Great question as well, Martinez.
Yeah, you know, I want to add a few words.
Not only I, I think Zork and all the medsciences team, we really appreciate your open mind and no border style because you
know it when you have some response and get connection it inspires because you see and feel
that not only you interested in development uh i mean change of weapons or community developments
and that inspires much much thank you Thank you. You, Nico and Ape Guy, thank you.
Ape Guy, Gorilla Guy.
Yeah, but I agree man.
It's lovely to see the transparency that comes out.
You being a D-Gen bag holder like us,
I mean, it feels refreshing to hear, you know, somebody so big, so top of the food chain coming to the chat on a mad scientist space.
And really, I think, very open to anybody's space when I think about it.
So it's cool. You're doing an incredible job there.
Yeah, I mean, and also, like, I really don't see myself as top of the food chain.
I appreciate that perception, I mean, and also like I really don't see myself as top of the food chain. I appreciate
that perception, I suppose. But, you know, I'm sitting here in my fucking Brooklyn, small
Brooklyn apartment, you know, drinking a Red Bull, you know, at my desk, like I probably
should go to the office an hour ago, but we have this. And it's a grind. I'm grinding. I'm just working really hard. And I'm trying to do what is right. I'm trying to fail fast. And I feel a lot of responsibility because up until basically six months ago, you know, I was pretty quiet in the ecosystem. And I was just coding and product managing and trying to build things for customers that they wanted.
And like the big guys were, Kepler,
who was a big customer of ours, UIDX, et cetera.
Being catapulted to this position now,
I just want to make it good.
That's my only real goal.
I just want this to go really well,
because I think like how much more exciting
would all of our lives be if adam turned around and became a top five token right if we actually
were able to execute a turnaround from what i would argue is one of the most hated assets in
the industry what is something that people shit on i wouldn't say we come from luna mag
but that's like get right like Adam always survives is the problem.
And so people just have such a vision that Adam needs to die for some reason.
And every time I hear that, and this is a toxic trait of mine, I'm like, okay, well, it's not going to die.
not going to die. And what if it actually is, you know, worth $100 billion? Like, it's so
And what if it actually is worth $100 billion?
motivating for me to have this happen. Because I believe in the vision of Adam, it's been right
the whole time. You know, I think it's just been a failure of execution. And I just want to show
these people, like, I just want to just stick them into the mud and just like show them that this can work and this can be successful.
And that the ecosystem that I've bet my career on, right, since I, for now, over five years or like four to five years, like that this was the right choice.
Right. And that I'm not an idiot. Right. No one else here is an idiot.
And I truly do believe that. So there's a lot of personal motivation in doing this.
The cucarachas of crypto is Atom holders. I guess, I don't know. I don't think it's that catchy.
Let's pivot to what you're saying about the future of Cosmos, the future of Atom, which is providing software as a service,
the SaaS model, right? So I'm not, you know, I think Polygon has something around that with their,
I don't even know what they call it anymore, I think Aglare. And I do think they take a lot
of inspiration from Cosmos in terms of everything they do. But on that note, I'm not familiar with too many chains
that are offering this. Maybe can you enlighten me a little more about how does that work? Where
do you even start? And anything more you can tell me about this SaaS model that you guys
want to be implementing? Yeah. So SaaS, if anyone is unfamiliar, means software as a service, right? So you're selling
software, basically. So, you know, the different times that people have been asking for, for
example, like a licensed version of the stack, that would be an example of SaaS, right? You'd
be selling the stack to people for money.
I think from my perspective, one, it's a little bit too early to say, I mean, we're what,
like two weeks into this new direction.
It's too early to say what is the killer product here, right?
We know that everyone wants to adopt the L1 stack, but it is unclear at this time if we fully,
let's say we licensed that stack, which we can't do for retroactive versions, we can
only license future versions, would we lose a lot of customers, right? Because there are
examples of great L1 stacks in crypto that are licensed, actually most of them are, like
Arbitrums is licensed, AVAX is licensed.
I think the only one that is actually potentially open source is this one called Commonware.
There are many examples of those just not taking off
because people don't wanna buy licenses
if they don't have to.
So I think the first thing that we're doing right now
is we're running this pilot program.
What that means is we are getting in
customers from all kinds of industries. So we're talking to folks in the NGO space, we're talking
to folks in the gaming space, in the media space, in the banking space, in the CBDC space,
in the global payments network space. And we're going to them and saying,
what is your level of familiarity with
Brickdale?
Are you interested?
And if so, do you want to work with us to build some kind of sandbox slash pilot thing?
And the customers who are approaching for this are major institutions.
These are folks that are huge and have multi-billion dollar profit lines at the bottom of their
balance sheet. And from there, we're starting
the process of, okay, what can we be building that no one else is building that will encourage
these people or let these people come on chain? And then how can we monetize those relationships?
So I can say, for example, one of the products that Skip built that everyone wanted, right?
Seemingly, or a lot of people wanted was SkipGo.
If you've ever used SkipGo, if you've ever used IBC before SkipGo, you'll understand what I mean.
It was like a massive unlock, right?
It let people use IBC in a much more friendly way.
And now it's behind everything, right?
It's behind Kepler.
It's behind, you know, all the transactions going into Say.
It's behind BYDX onboarding.
It's become a very widely adopted tool, and it makes revenue.
I won't share right now how much revenue it makes,
but one of the things we're exploring right now is,
can we just immediately just turn on that revenue
to actually go towards buying at it?
Because we have that revenue now. go towards buying at it, right?
Because like we have that revenue now, like it's in existence.
It's not hypothetical.
It's very real.
And I think that was done by the way we came up with that product was not in isolation.
We came up with that product because we talked to a lot of customers about what their issues
were, right?
And one of the number one things that we heard from everyone was it sucks in IBC that you
have to pick your relayer and hard code in the number of your relayer.
And that every time I send something from one chain to another, it usually gets lost
because it's some weird wrapped version, right?
It was completely unusable.
And so we're like, how can we build a solution for that?
Right.
And therefore, SkipGo was born.
We plan to do the same thing with institutions, right?
Because that's how product development works.
So you talk to the institutions, you get them interested.
You know, a lot of institutions are interested in crypto now.
You talk them through what they know,
talking through what their problems are,
what's holding them back.
You know, is it risk?
Is it compliance?
Is it, you know, it lack of proper infrastructure partners? Is it missing integrations with their existing systems, their internal systems?
And then you just start to build solutions, right?
And what we know is that for the most forward institutions that have finally made the jump to say, okay, this makes sense to us.
We want to go and we want to build a chain.
Those guys do not build smart contracts or rollups often.
They don't.
There's some exceptions to this, Robinhood, which I think is actually going to be an L1,
but just using the ARPITRUM stack.
But all the people at the end of their life cycle, when they're ready to make the sale,
they want to build L1s because they want full control.
They want sovereignty, right?
They don't want to have their stuff run by somebody else's infrastructure.
They want interoperability with the rest of crypto.
They want to get access to those users.
And oftentimes, we are already organically, without any payment, one of their top choices.
And they're usually deciding between us
and like two other stacks.
And historically we've never been in those conversations.
And so we would lose the deals
just because no one was there to talk to them.
So step one is like really getting there to talk to them.
And that once they're ready to make the move
to actually build a chain,
usually their budgets look like something
like 10 to $40 million,
right? There's massive opportunity to monetize these customers and they want to be monetized.
They want to work with a team that they're paying that is actually doing things for them,
right? Unlike trying to force down some kind of licensed version of the staff down everyone's throat who doesn't want to pay for that. So that's where we're starting. And that's where we've seen the most traction so
far. Beautiful. And, you know, it seems to me what you're doing here is you're selling, you know,
the shovels to the people looking for the gold rush, selling the tools for people to build out
the blockchains. And we always know it's kind of a profitable business that has no,
you know, there's no capacity there. Like Pump, people were not making that much money,
but Pump was always churning those fees. Same for Hyperliquid. I don't know any good perps
trader out there, but they're churning in the fees. So here, selling tools for these big
institutional partners to create their own chains.
And if their product is successful, good for them.
But if not, they're paying you guys licensing fees or however you want to monetize that.
Right. So it seems to me a very sustainable model.
Yeah, I mean, it's it's it is the model, right?
If you look at anything outside crypto, every business has two numbers they care about,
operating expenses and revenue.
When the revenue is greater than the operating expenses, you have a profitable business and
you won't die on some timeframe, right?
If not, you will die in some timeframe.
And right now, 99.9% of everything in crypto is going to die on some timeframe,
right? With a couple exceptions, right? Chainlink is an exception. Ethereum, just because they have
unlimited funds is an exception. Solana is an exception. But the reason that these big
foundations are exceptions is because they have used their own token to create treasuries that are so big that they just,
the interest off of those treasuries is funding their entire operation. They could be building
bananas and, you know, throw, or they could be growing bananas and then throwing them at a wall
and they would still live forever, right? There's no, there's no challenge in that.
We don't have that luxury. We do need to create a real business here because we don't have a $10 billion treasury where just the interest on that is like $400 million. So we're trying to be very realistic about that.
That makes sense. Absolutely. So a little trickier question here. And I know, right, the SaaS model still early, you guys are working, getting deals had developed a few things that people enjoyed and paid for.
So I think it could happen most definitely.
You talked about the community earlier, and I'm wondering, and I don't want to get back to the EVM pivot,
but were there any builders?
Because we lost a few builders within the Cosmos, which I think is sad. Do you think now that it's back to Cosmos first,
less EDM talk,
do you think they're going to come back
or have you chatted with builders
since this kind of announcement
and what are their thoughts on it?
Yeah, I would say...
So there's two kinds of customers, I think, or maybe three, right? There are the smaller Cosmos chains that, you know, they do not have the money to pay for anything.
In fact, a lot of them are asking us for money to sort of support their operations.
There are, you know, I would say, you know, folks like Bad Scientists or folks like Backbone Labs
or folks like, you know, a lot of folks in the Stargaze community who are building culture
on top of existing chains. And then there are some of these newer customers that I'm chatting about
for these larger companies that are, you know, want enterprise level solutions or enterprise
grade solutions to build extensions to their business, right, and want to pay for that.
You can't monetize the first two, nor would we want to, right? I'm not going to go to
Stride or I'm not going to go to Ellis or I'm not going
to go to whoever, insert Cosmos chain sub $500 million market cap and demand them to pay
for services. I'm not going to do that, right? Because one, it doesn't make sense. And two,
these guys have been through a lot. And if I can, I want to support them.
The second class of people, folks like you,
I definitely don't want to monetize.
I have no interest in doing so.
But I do want to engage heavily in this retail and marketing
direction and this push that we're
trying to do internally to grow the Atom community as much as possible. The third bucket, which are these like external customers,
that is the part that we've never invested in before, right? As an ecosystem. And that is the
part where I'm going to be spending the majority of my time. I think it's good for everyone,
right? If we get huge companies to deploy active ecosystems in Cosmos and they're using IBC,
that's going to be good for everybody.
That's going to give more places for people to go.
It's going to bring new money into the ecosystem.
It's not going to pump all the tokens, right?
I think people oftentimes incorrectly assume that my job is to make all the tokens go up.
That's not my job.
I'm actually only focused on Atom.
And I think that is unfortunate for folks who don't hold it.
And my focus is on doing right by basically the Cosmos ecosystem, the Cosmos-like vision as a whole.
But I think it will, at a minimum, bring in more opportunities for those other
chains with their own tokens to monetize themselves, right? Because we all know that when a customer
comes in like BYDX, now all of a sudden there's a new ST token to launch for Stride. There's
a new asset to list for Osmosis. There's a new NFT collection for Stargaze to launch. All of these new entrants
fuel the economy of the interchain. So I hope it will be much more, I guess, less competitive
with a couple of the folks. And I think we've already started to see that a little bit.
You know, we're starting to build closer relationships now, I would say, with Osmosis, building closer relationships with, you know, like Celestia a little bit.
We're starting to build closer relationships now, I would say, with Osmosis,
And I think there's more room for collaboration under this new model versus before I think it was a little bit competitive.
Love it. Martinez, you had a question. Go ahead, man.
Love it.
Martinez, you had a question?
Go ahead, man.
Yeah, yeah.
I just remind, you know, as I observe for now, a lot of change, Celestia or a few more,
they turning off their inflation or till zero or making, for example, will give us taking uh taking benefits for those who will
stake with them and participate not for all or celestia will turn off uh post system onto
proof of governance so my question is how you see in a near future, Atom, economic and inflation problem.
Do you see inflation actual problem or not?
Is it pushing the price or it's okay for the stakers on the industry?
Because starting from Atom to zero,
this problem doesn't solve.
And I'm curious, I think it's important part.
Sure. Yeah, definitely have thought about this question um many many ways done a lot of analysis on it i think maybe one of the best
ways to answer this is uh this is a question for everyone listening uh put up any emoji if the staking rate
or the
concept of staking and
earning rewards was part of the reason
why you bought Adam.
Are you talking about
inflation or are you talking about
expected airdrops?
Because to me they're different things.
I'm talking about inflation.
I'm talking about the staking deal, the 16% APR.
If that was part of the reason?
Okay, we'll see the emojis here.
Yeah, if you guys stake Adam for the 16%, please put up some emojis.
Let's see what happens.
I see two, three, maybe four.
Okay.
I think they got like 10, I think, total, if you scroll down.
I think like if I'm being completely honest, right,
I think the truth of the situation is that a lot of people buy Atom because it has 16% APR.
I'm not saying it's good or bad, right? That's just the truth. Like people look at Coinbase,
they look at the assets, they're like, what crypto should I buy? And then they see Atom with 16% APR
offered on Coinbase. And they're like, oh, that's amazing. Adam could go up and I could earn 16% on top of that.
Right?
So I think the question we need to be very clear about is,
are we willing to lose that use case?
Right?
Because if the truth is that if we remove that safety deal
and it's a 0% APR token or 1% APR token, essentially the same as zero, will we stop having people buy Adam, right? Or will a lot of people
sell Adam? If that is the case, perhaps we want to reconsider our strategy. It is not lost on me
that the price of that feature is extremely expensive for all the people who are not staking Adam.
If you're staking Adam, you're gaining Adam at the same rate that it's inflated, right?
So you're actually not getting diluted at all.
But if you're not staking Adam, you're just holding it, then you are getting diluted, right?
And you would expect over time, all else being equal, that the value of your holdings would go down by 17% diluted, right? And you would expect over time, all else being equal,
that the value of your holdings would go down by 17% per year, right? If you were thinking,
it should stay flat. And I think we just have to really think about that very realistically,
because it's easy to get rage baited, especially when the price goes down into thinking, oh
my God, all this money is going out, into thinking, oh my God, all this money
is going out.
All this money is going out.
All this money is going up.
Yes, there is a lot of inflation that is taking place, but it is also one of the reasons why
probably you and probably everyone else in the ecosystem bought the asset to begin with.
Right.
And so it's a trade off there.
I think usually when I think about, I see the experiments happening in
other ecosystems, to me, that's a great opportunity because we're going to be able to get to study
for free what it looks like for another token to drop their staking rate to zero or close to zero.
Like we'll see, right? Is it extremely exciting? Is everyone purchasing all of a sudden? Is it leading to long-term sustainable gain?
Or is it actually removing one of the only reasons people bought the token in the first
place? And therefore, it actually just turns what they had into something that is worth a lot less.
And so... I don't know. I'm going to push back on this. I mean, we have Bitcoin with no staking
rewards and people love it because the number go up. Hyperliquid has like 2%, which is meaningless in a sense. I don't know any, well, I guess some people stake EF. we differentiate from bitcoin with no staking right adam has differentiated with staking
that was always its thing right that's why people bought it versus buying just more bitcoin
like again it's like this thing of things work that was a good that was a good thing i agree
airdrop idea is the best one because i can say a lot of my friends stop staking and uh entering to defy
because there is uh no point taking at 16 percent at year because at the end of the year uh maybe
50 70 70 percent you i mean talking will dump and it's no point stake without any benefits besides just staking a pair.
So you guys think, let's say we just remove the staking deal right now, right?
We put it at 0%.
I put up a proposal, somehow it passed.
Do you guys think that would be good for Adam in the long run?
for out of the long run.
If there is buy pressure through the SaaS model and token number go up, I think so.
I think you do need a small incentive for validators and so on.
But it could be like instead of 16, it could be two, right?
And there's the buy pressure, the demand that comes in with very little inflation most of
the time, you know, to me, conceptually,
number will go up. And if number goes up, you can do whatever you want in this world,
people will be happy. You can, like you said, throw bananas at a wall, and people will not care
just because their bags are pumping. Yeah. Okay. So you've established what,
their bags are pumping.
Yeah.
Okay.
So, so you've established what something that I have, I agree with, which is to actually
make Adam go up, right?
Or to make anything go up.
Removing the inflation is actually not the most important piece.
What is the most important piece is getting people to want the asset.
And there is an open question about whether the inflation is getting people to want the asset. And there is an open question about whether the inflation is getting people
to want the asset. A lot of research or a lot of just reality when you ask around is
that the inflation is something that people considered when they want the asset. And if
you get rid of it, like you said, maybe there's no buy pressure, and then we have something that
we don't want. And so I think
introducing structural buy pressure, of course, in any situation is going to be smart, and will
give us more flexibility to experiment with the staking rate. But I don't think starting from the
staking rate is the right approach to begin with. I think you need to start from, do you have
something with buy pressure? Yeah, fix the man first and then we
can talk about fixing tokenomics or inflation so i love that yeah logical very good martinez
that answer your question yeah yeah i i actually like when magmar to pronounce med scientist. We need to cut it off. It sounds good.
I do have to run.
I have another call.
Look what she did.
No, no.
Okay.
Let me close it out.
Okay.
No, no.
I usually run these an hour tops.
So thank you for the extra time.
Really appreciate your time.
Again, the space is recorded.
Thanks to the audience for tuning in.
Thanks, Mag, for answering all the questions,
tough questions, even silly questions from Martinez.
Appreciate you being a community member like us.
That's how we feel about this.
And how, well, wishing you the best of luck
in all the future endeavors.
And obviously, I'm hoping we can schedule another space
in like six months or something like that
when some new developments come or even three months.
I don't know.
Whenever you have some really cool news to share with us,
we'll be looking forward to it.
Sounds good.
Thank you, folks, for having me.
Yeah, much thanks.
Bye-bye. Thanks, everybody. yeah much thanks bye bye
thanks everybody once more
and enjoy the rest of your lives
like Martina says
