Cosmos hub prop 98 AMA

Recorded: Feb. 7, 2023 Duration: 1:07:40

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Yes, yes, we're gonna start here in a second. There's a couple people that are gonna sprinkle in and then start answering and going over Prop 98.
on the Cosmos hub. We'll give it a second or two and then we're gonna get started. Becca, thanks for sending this up. Olivia, a career, good to see you, Jen. I don't know you, but you know what, dude, thanks for coming.
This is going to be the first of a couple of series of AMAs on Prop 98 and Proposal 98. So a little bit of background in the Alpha Growth is a funding platform for projects, ecosystems and investors for projects. We effectively helped them with funding.
And the form of grants in later this year and the form of investments, right? So we want to be the place where you set up a profile and we are the place that you set up to get grants right now. And the future we're going to set up set up a set up a profile on alpha growth and you will get you access to investors and getting ecosystems in
programs looking at your project. This is especially helpful if you want to go multi-chain and figure out where the next place is the build or the first place to build. So, you know, a lot of people come into crypto and they're like, "Hey, I'm just going to go build on ETH." Well, you have to be incredibly well capitalized and have an incredible amount of distribution if you're going to go build on ETH.
build on eat, right? So there's a lot of other options in terms of chains out there. There's 204 chains in existence that we're tracking to have some form of grants program or community fun. And effectively, it's really hard for projects to figure out what's the right chain for them, where it's should they build
and how they should get involved. So recently, about two weeks ago, a friend of mine, an advisor, a colleague in the Cosmos ecosystem was like, hey, look at this, Grants4PoZo coming up. Why don't you go and check out. They're going to be having a Twitter space around what they're doing for their Grants4PoZo and would love to hear your feedback.
having run in a couple of different grants programs. So we hopped in on this place. I think Asafi was like hosting it and was listening to the team and kind of like what they were doing and I was just starting getting like more and more concerned around effectively like how effective they would be. A lot of the talks
talks were about process, a lot of the conversation was around who's going to hold keys and what and kind of like the all the heavy process around the organizational structure of the thing. But there was a key thing missing within that proposal and within that discussion
which is what are you going to build? What are you going to go after? What are you going to get? And so, ask some questions in that space. Really didn't get a lot of confidence in what I was hearing in terms of responses. And so, we decided to add AlphaGoat to put our hat in the ring
And come up with a proposal that had a clear vision clear metrics. We put up a signaling proposal about a week week and a half ago. He got hammered with responses and community feedback and honestly took a little couple hits on the chin on on what we expected are excellent.
expectations of the cosmos hub and kind of what the community wanted and some of the language we were using around bridges and dot IBC. We're taken so we took that to heart. We worked hard over the last week, 10 days we had like probably 30 different discussions and conversations all throughout different individuals within the cosmos ecosystem.
to then put a proposal together that we're proud to put up and explain kind of like our mission that we understand what the the cosmos hub is looking for and we think we understand and kind of some of the complaints and the community feedback helped us take that
feedback and form a proposal that we think is best investment for the community and the hub. So to start at the top, basically back in December 19, 2022, there was a proposal 88, which was accepted to start adding attacks
to the staking mechanism within Cosmos and to add more funds to the community treasury. Part of the signaling around this was, hey, like, let's start collecting some funds to fund some things and fund some new development to really drive like utility to add them and add some more streams of revenue to the Adam token. Like, because currently,
Yes, there is utility for Adam in terms of security in terms of you know what it's done for IBC and kind of like where where it's at in terms of like seeking but in terms of like real yield utility right now there aren't a lot of real use real yield use cases and defy use cases on the hub right and we're not saying
suggesting that we're going to build it on the hub, but there is a new model coming up with the consumer chain narrative. It's risky, untested, and relatively unknown, but effectively, it is a way to drive more creative revenue and value to the hub and to the community pool.
With that in mind, we outline three things that we think as objectives and plus taking all the community feedback that can really help drive this campaign forward. Currently on Alpha Growth as of this morning, let me bring up the report.
very very accurate in this. We have as of this morning 860 exactly grant submissions projects that have applied for a grant came to Alpha Growth Setup Profile have a pitch and and pushed out a grant in our looking for
a place to build in terms of total projects that are connected as of today, we have over 1600, so almost 1700 projects that have came in connected and connected to their project. So right then and there, like that's our audience.
That's an immediate audience and our goal is to make over a thousand developer teams Cosmos aware Cosmos hub aware tell them about the consumer chain narrative replicated security the benefits of IBC and things along those lines Let me dive into that one for a second and if anybody wants to come up and ask
questions at any time along the way, please feel free to come up and we'll add you as a speaker so we can talk and dive in on to different intricacies. All right, so first off, in Cosmos Aware and IBC, right? So if you kind of think about what the problem is with bridges and current bridges,
A majority, I think it was like 70% of the total crypto hacks in the past year were bridge attacks and bridge hacks. I mean, it absolutely crushed the harmony chain, right, in the harmony ecosystem. It basically destroyed it.
A lot of developers who are new into the crypto ecosystem are not as familiar with the technology of like IBC as they are kind of bridges or just having a meta master building contract. So one of the keys to what we're doing is going
going to be bringing a lot of awareness to over a thousand developer teams. Just on our platform alone, we already have 1600. So a couple of email blasts, a couple of, you know, making them aware, getting educational content, creating that narrative.
creating that content and that conversation around IBC replicating security consumer chains is the first thing that we're going to do. But we're not just going to, you know, blast some emails. What we've seen helping other projects and other ecosystems grow is really around community.
And the way that we found that that's best is you gotta get the alpha of these teams like younger and younger and younger so in terms of that looking into schools looking at a blockchain clubs at colleges and universities is something that we
think is going to start individuals early and get them Cosmos aware and IBC aware early on in the ecosystem. Community sponsorship, right? So that kind of like fits in that other category, other meetups and other like blockchain developer meetups across the globe. And then we've also found
that hackathon sponsorship is a tremendous use case creating either sponsoring a hackathon and having a prize or running an entire IBC app chain Cosmos ecosystem hackathon at the side events. So like as a side event that the Denver consensus
and why NFT and NYC, all of these projects are really good and events are really good to place to have side events and hackathons. And then on that developer acquisition, of course, we'll do marketing as well to these events. So we found some really good
success on LinkedIn. People that are kind of like looking for jobs on LinkedIn was one we ran advertising campaigns as well as DM campaigns on like then cocktail events, community building activities, social media campaigns on Twitter, making developers IBC aware, especially right anybody from like X
Harmony ecosystem is like an incredible Target because they understand exactly what happens when a bridge hack occurs So that's our first goal and objective the second goal and objective is to support the replicated security narrative by bringing 20 or deep-by projects to a launch
on the upcoming consumer change. So, moving in conversations with Noble and Neutron and you know it's like hey can we help out on this effectively or like if you guys win we would love some help, exposure and get awareness and projects to these chains but
You know that it's it's kind of like chicken and the egg right so they don't want to be kind of going and begging for for handouts, but any help They would they would like and so 2035 projects to launch on consumer chains. It's pretty straightforward. There's a lot of defi utility already with the
the app chain ecosystem, but it's not clear to the average consumer of what they can do with the atom token. By concentrating atom utility on a consumer chain, none of the value of the atom token will be lost in bridging to app chains.
Even though if it bridges the app chains, it stays within the Cosmos ecosystem, but it doesn't actually add a creative value as much a creative value back to the stakers and the holders of Adam and the Adam Toket. So by engaging on a consumer chain and bringing DeFi projects to a consumer chain,
It's not really leaving the nest in the state, right? The sovereign state of cosmos. We believe that we can do that in the span of four months. So we're on similar, it's stuff that we've done before in the past, campaigns that we ran in the past.
The question is we just need the funds to, in the narrative and to go ahead and for these defi-chains to place their guilt. So examples of this are our Dex's, our CDPs, our liquid-skate game derivatives, money markets, options,
derivatives, these types of projects really drive a lot of attention and APY. And these are things that the Adam can plug into on a consumer chain and effectively help out not only the hub, but the Adam token price and an awareness of
Adam and Cosmos in general. So that's our objective to get 25 different things that utilize Adam on consumer chains after the four months. And so the timing of this proposal, when it goes through, it will take about two weeks. The first consumer chain is slated to launch at the beginning of March. So it gives us
a two to three week time frame and timeline to start to gather attention and awareness about the consumer chains and start to get the narrative out there as we prepare so that we can shoot for one to two projects a week over the next three to four months, right? And within that time frame, I think that's a very
time frame to get these daps on. So projects and teams, they have a lot of options on where they can build. We're tracking almost $10 billion in ecosystem funds across 204 chains. So you have to bring the thunder. You have to bring a name
narrative, you have to bring funding and you have to bring a community and Cosmos has a massive community, a massive war chest and can bring it. It currently feels to us and what's the community is kind of signaling is that this level of attention and impact is
not explicit, it's implicit in some of the current organizations. So having that explicit as a goal, and maybe we didn't choose the right goal, but this is the goal that we've chosen for this proposal, is to bring impact on the consumer chain narrative. And then along those same lines,
The Cosmos ecosystem is very decentralized. There's good and bad around having a whole bunch of AppChains as sovereign nation states.
There's a large, large body of app chains. I think we're tracking 54 app chains currently and there's another 50 or so to launch within the next year. So there's a large, large undertaking in
of and it's kind of chaotic and it's good and bad. You know, I've just enabled more and more things within the ecosystem. However, understanding and drilling down or communicating to the non
the non-deep in the weeds, cosmos, degen is people aren't going to go and search 54 different websites to figure out what they can do with that. That's a problem. One of the questions, the key questions is what can I do with the atom token? There's not a single place where you can answer
answer that question and get a whole slate or everything that you can do with the atom. If you Google what can I do with Bitcoin, you can trade it, you can mine it, right? There's all these answers, there's like about a million different answers, you can lend it, you can borrow it, you can use
for payments, here's the stuff that you can buy with Bitcoin. That does not exist for the Adam token. When somebody is like, "Why should I buy Adam if you're trying to get new users into the Cosmos ecosystem?" They don't really understand what they can do with the Adam token. We need to make that
You can use it for payments, you can stake it, you can trade like borrow it, lend it, have options, on ramps, off ramps. I can buy it with a credit card, I can sell it and have it go to my bank account. I can use it for payments.
use it for cross chain. I can use it for liquid governance. I can use it to buy NFTs, right? Every single place that Adam can be used is something that we'll track down and look at. Now, once we do that and track down and look at that, every single place where Adam can be used, you're kind of creating a little
gap analysis here. And the gap analysis functionally serves as a thing where's the hole in the game, right? What other things should there be able to be done with Adam that we can't currently do with Adam? We call this token optionality and defy operations. The token optionality basically states that
The more things that you can do with the atom token, the more valuable the token becomes. And DeFi operations is the execution of adding optionality to the atom token. And so everything that you can do with atom, we list out, we make a calls and request the community to
basically say, "Hey, what are we missing here? What else can we do with it? Or can we do liquid-staking? Can we do liquid governance? Can we do payments? Can we buy NFTs with this?" Once we gather all of that information in one place, effectively you get a map.
of everything that you can do with Adam and then use that information to see what gapstead that the community wants to fill or think should be filled and things along those lines. Those are the three different types of impacts and goals and objectives of our proposal. We put some other KPIs down at the bottom
our proposal and our ask is in line with other similar ecosystems that we work with. We're not charging more, we're not charging less. I will say that there's one kind of key difference than with most ecosystems that we work with. That's a pretty big difference. Most of the times we are not the ones deploying the grid.
We are getting people up to the finish line. We are negotiating. We already know what the ecosystem wants and what the project wants. We help bridge that gap. This is a little bit new for us. We would have to set up a legal entity. We are looking at K-Min or BVI, depending upon lawyer recommendation, to legalize
deploy the grants. So that is a little bit of more of an expense that we've done before. And then the actual deploying of the grants and the milestones, generally that's handled by the foundations we work with. We would be aiming for smaller grants to be really straightforward, 2500 Adam, 5000 Adam, most of the time,
We think $25 to $50K worth of grants usually gets projects to move, especially if you have a tight narrative in a community like the Cosmos hub behind it. I don't think it'll be that much of an issue. Other things would be hiring a reviewing community from the community and looking for
developers from community members with reach and people that really understand the the cosmos hub, you know, culture to be able to align with that and then also anything over 10,000 Adam, we would require a higher
threshold of delivery, four out of five signatures, and anything over, I think 20 or 25,000 out of, I don't know if I put it explicitly, we would be sending to the hub in general or working with other funding mechanisms potentially either posting a proposal
on chain for really high value propositions. I think especially around finding out that one to two consumer chains, you know, because it is high risk in trying to find some app chains that would be talked out or convinced of running the consumer chain instead of running their own app chain is
is going to be an interesting conversation and narrative, but we're ready to take on the challenge. And that is my 20-minute spiel, sorry for talking straight for 20 minutes on what we're doing with our proposal and why we put our proposal together and what we're looking to do and to help the ecosystem out.
Questions, comments, concerns?
Alright, guys, okay, actually let me do both speakers, so please guys go ahead
Yeah, thanks a lot, Brian. I really appreciate for letting me come on today and you will explain to me. I read the proposition just recently and full. I read it twice. It's quite interesting and quite comprehensive. I have a few questions. I mean, I have to do. The thing I have to do is dumb it.
down. If I take in the whole proposition, it sort of blows my mind. And then the way you just explained it now, you made it a lot more comprehensive to people. And you actually mentioned something about how, let me just make a few things here. I was also part of the harmony. I invested a
lot of money in harmony and I did well with it. I got through the bridge and everything was fine until things went to, went south, but I hear there's a lot of people coming over from harmony and a lot of harmony has some great NFTs that kind of stuff. So just really quick, Crypto Seto just recently put out a
a video explaining this is about a week and a half ago explaining the new app, the consumer chain concept. And you have to listen to his video a couple of times to try to get the concept. You know what I'm saying? And so I have a number of questions but really quickly, can you summarize
even better than CryptoCito did. In a layman's term, call me a layman, how does this work? How do the consumers change work, and then we can go from there.
Totally. And layman's turn effectively a consumer chain. So, so let's start with the problem. The problem of running an app chain is that it's very expensive to attract validators. And then you have to give a large portion of your initial token set to validators that come in validators, right? So,
You know sometimes the bigger validators will invest sometimes you can attract quality validators if you can attract quality validators you effectively have to buy your way into validators right so it can get very expensive in on on one of the projects have been in the past I've seen it anywhere from like 1.5 million to 3 million ish and
or above in tokens. So the early validators accrue a lot of the value right out of the gate. And so the way that in a layman's terms, consumer chain kind of feels like the minor leaks, right? It's like, hey, we don't want to invest, you know, 1.5 million, 3 million in attracting like good and
validators, but we want to get our started. We want our own sovereignty, but we're not ready to go completely on our own yet, right? And so the promise is, hey, come in and run a consumer chain on the hub. And if you run a consumer chain on the hub, we'll share in the gas fees.
Well, we'll share the revenue together, but you don't have to go and get your own validator set because of the cost. Now, if I'm to be really straightforward, if I'm a consumer chain, after I hit some breakthrough amount of transactions or attention, I'm probably
thinking about how do I go and make my own app chain because I want to recruit all of my own revenue. So that is kind of like not determined yet on how do you attract and keep consumer chain in the long run. But to me, it feels like the minor leaks, I can spin up a subnet, I can spin up a consumer chain, I can share the security of the hub.
And then I don't have to spend a million or three million dollars attracting the right validators to get started. And when I have that short security, I have a tax, right? So token swaps attacks on gas. I still have to keep the atom validators and the cosmos hub validators involved.
have to basically pay them some of the gas that would come back to me, I'm going to pay to pass through to the validators. And then at some point in time, you know, there's a negotiation of, hey, there's more taxes or there's more benefit or more benefit to the validators because the validators, in my opinion,
You know, some of the smaller ones, especially it can get. Pricy around running a consumer chain if there's not a lot of gas coming through and I'm not enough revenue coming through. So it's TBD, but I would have quated to like running the store in a mall and renting space in the mall, right? You don't have the money to build your own building. You don't have
the money to build your own independent shop, you come and you rent space in a store. So that's what a consumer chain is. And there's rents associated with it. And if I can't pay the rents, there needs to be a way to kick them off. Or if I get big enough brand on my own, then I'm going to make my own building in my own store. And that would be my layman's terms way to describe consumer#
consumer chains and replicated security. Okay, great. Fantastic. I really appreciate that explanation because I like the example of minor leagues that makes sense to most people. As I said, you know, it's very nascent as far as the consumer chain concept. A lot of people don't know about it.
And it's just something that I stumbled upon just a week and a half ago so that I don't know a lot so thanks a lot for for explaining that to me The minor leagues and if they want to do their own their own chain app chain later on they can do that sort of fostering their own To see if they're successful in the miners basically one of the other things I wanted to ask is
So what I see from this proposal is that with the consumer chain concept, there's going to be an explosion. And so basically what you're saying is that alpha is going to, alpha growth is going to be basically a marketing, basically marketing and managing that.
explosion. Is that what you're saying? Right. So I'm not trying to say, hey, the people that are already launching their consumer chains can't do it on their own. Maybe they can't. But if the hub is trying to put the best foot forward and really experiment to see if the consumer chains are the forwarded
future path and the best way to generate revenue with replicated security, then the success of the consumer chains is really important to make sure that they're successful. And the way to make a chain successful is to have things to do on the chain.
like Neuron is, Neutron is coming up with an EVM and on the EVM having a bunch of D5 projects and a D5 utility, right? So I think it's important to really help them put their best foot forward and have a lot of games to play when they come.
When we go into and talk to an ecosystem, we talk about you want to be like Disney World, right? So if you think of like Disney World, you go into Disney World that they have hotels, they have food, they have entertainment, they have rides, they have a police station, they have everything that you need to do without having to leave the ecosystem. So the end goal
or a win for us over the length of time. I don't know if it's going to be one consumer chain or ten consumer chains that kind of like effectively make this that you would never have to leave the cosmos hub to get done what you want to get done, right? And that's the vision of what I think a strong ecosystem like cosmos
Right, because they with four billion dollars in market cap available like why can't you buy a house? Why can't you buy? Have a debit card? Why do you need to leave and trade out of the Cosmos hub and the Cosmos ecosystem to effectively use and get the value out of the token? That's confusing to me that it's not
more obvious end goal, right? The true end goal, I think of any token is to become a commodity. And once it's kind of categorized as a commodity in the United States, I'm from the US, I'm putting those glasses on. The United States is one of the most restrictive when it comes to crypto, but I want your
classified as a commodity. All of these other unlocks occur. More institutions can hold the token. More you can trade on ETFs more freely. So you get a lot of mass adoption unlocks once you get classified as a commodity. So that's the other end goal.
Thanks for answering those questions. Yeah, that's something that the regulations coming down the line. A lot of things are not clear right now. I've read some news just the other day about something about
Dow governance or Dow regulation. I'm not quite sure I have to look into it. But the other the other thing I want to ask is is there a place on your site?
where this whole process, this whole idea, because it can blow away people's minds, where it's all really dumbed down that we can go to. And also,
I wanted to ask you a little bit about examples of past success for out-of-growth growth. What have you done in the past? Is there any sort of quantifiable
examples on your website or in your company's history. Totally. Yeah, yeah, let's break it down. The first one. Sorry, the word I was looking for was empirical. I would say we a lot of these
thoughts, we have kind of sold behind closed doors to ecosystems. The closest thing that we have to this particular plan is probably a set of medium articles. I think there's like 20 some medium articles out there that kind of if you read all of them or kind of walk through all of them, you can kind of
understand, it's been putting out articles for almost two years now. And effectively, like, here's the plan, here's the metrics, here's why, here's how we think, here's why we do what we do. But dumb down, a lot of these ideas are new, right, around token options.
These different purposes now and Ethereum could be used for more purposes. And then you kind of like look at the timeline and I've been in crypto the entire time so I can kind of see it. But if you kind of like analyze it with, you know, binoculars and in a microscope, each love each time that
Ethereum launched a standard or was classified as a commodity or was used for just one more thing, it became more valuable. People didn't need the field that they needed to just use it for speculation. I think a lot of the price pump in a
Ethereum last year was within the end of T-Crays. The only thing you could do with the only way to buy the blue chip NFTs and all of these NFTs was to buy Ethereum. So you're adding a ton of price pressure to Ethereum
and buy pressure to Ethereum because people wanted the NFTs, they wanted the status, they wanted it, and because there was an exclusive nature that you had to buy Ethereum to then buy the NFT to quote unquote be Web 3 and cool and hip, effectively the price of Ethereum went up.
because there was something more to do that was exclusive to Ethereum. Okay, other question. The next question. I'm sorry, I just have one more question. I'm not going to hog up your time my apologies. One of the things that you know, Tor bear famously, I'm going to paraphrase him here. He famously said, if you think you know cosmos, you don't know cosmos. I think that explains a lot of the
people in the community and including myself. Now, as for Proposition 95 and their ask and that kind of stuff, would you guys, I can see some bumping of heads or they're just a totally different aspect of cosmos. That's what I get and you guys are
going in a different direction with consumer chains. Can you explain some of the differences between your proposition and their proposition? Yeah, I know some of the people on the Ravure Committee have done work with them in the past and like each individually I respect each one of the individuals and was excited to see
something like this happened in the Cosmos ecosystem at the beginning of the call, it kind of went into, there's no clear vision, right? I think that was the thing that struggled with me the most. There's no KPIs, there's no like every single ecosystem that we work with, we have KPIs, we have a mission, do we need a race,
What is it that we functionally need to bring 100 dfi projects to a chain? What is the KPI? What is the mission? Because if you don't have that, if you don't have the goal, you just have a slash fund. And I've seen it in other
change where it becomes very insulated and it becomes proximity bias is a technical term on how we call it. It's in the proposal or is in the last proposal. Effectively, you fund who you know, right? It's just human nature. And especially if you don't have
And I'm okay with finding who you know if it hits the KPIs and the goals, right? That's totally cool. But if you look at the proposal, there's nothing around the goals. There's nothing around the KPIs. It really has a lack of vision of effectively what they're going to do.
to play grants to. And so they're creating an inbound mechanism. And you know, that's a strategy. Hey, we're cool enough. We're popular enough that we're going to get hundreds and hundreds of inbound grants and ideas and then we'll kind of bless what we think is best. But without an ortho star, you can't really
tell whether it worked or not. You can just kind of say, "Hey, this thing kind of emerged." What we're seeing is we're an outbound firm. We will go out there into the wild. We will go and meet with people. We will talk with people. We will gather inbound ideas as well, but you have to go outside of your nest near
comfort zone. We have a like 12th person team that's hammering on discord and telegram with projects every single day and we've met over 2500 projects in the last year. So, handrails I see. Okay, last question. I'm sorry then. I'll go. I'll just shut up. You know, as
Everyone knows in this community who knows me. I'm very against 95 and very much against it for some of the reasons that you stated. And I'm going to continue to be against it to the end, even though I think it's going to pass. So we had a number of validators come on board. And I'm really happy about that as far as on the note.
the no side. So, and Pupmost just recently, if anyone saw that on Twitter, that was entertainment. Now really quickly, as far as their ask and your ask, how do you differentiate the two? You know, I noticed that your timeline is a little bit shorter, and for example, if there is
success in the first four months, then what would happen after that? Yeah, we would extend, we would reevaluate, and we would do more community discussions and figure out what the next thing is. Do we need to find more consumer chains? Do we need to double down on token utility for Adam? What's the next mission? This is something that I
think that we can knock out of the park in a smaller time front line and a smaller time frame. Part of that is being able to replicate what we've done in the last four months with another client. And effectively, I'm very confident that we can replicate that success with the budget that we put forward.
What we would do after, and I think this is a kind of key differentiator. There's been indication that the reviewer team said they'll do a nine month commitment. And then after that, they would go on to do something else. This is what we do. This is what our company does. Our company gets funding for projects in the form of grants and investments and will continue to do so.
So from now, I don't know what's going to happen in a couple of years or could be some regulatory thing. Like I don't know. But as long as this business exists, this is what we'll continue to do. So, you know, we've helped out three other Cosmos chains in the past.
early on we ran all of the marketing for some millionaire finance. So if you from like February 2021 to January 2022, if you if you interacted with some millionaire finance, we were up we were there pushing ads getting influence and involved.
getting Zucki blog, podcast meetings, running the events, running all of their marketing. So we're familiar with how to acquire and attract TVL and help make a couple of introductions that kind of kicked off their second round of funding. So that was cool. We've helped
helped out Paloma, which is a chain they might be launching today. They went for a mainnet yesterday. There were some issues and so they were going to relaunch a mainnet. We've helped them kind of scope out a grants program as well as token utility and DeFi operations that something we're talking as soon as you know the Dow
We will be putting a community post and a community proposal there that is likely to go through. No promises on that, but we're excited to work on that. And we've helped out Kava since we started in September, but we didn't really start
We've been starting with mid October and so we've been helping Kava get a whole bunch of projects in the in the DeFi realm and I'm very excited about that engagement as well. So we've also helped out near. We recently got another project to near. I think we're
Like it's not 20 projects to near, but it's somewhere, you know, a couple, you know, it's not crazy amount of projects to near, but Aurora we help bring over 40 different projects to Aurora EVM and you know,
Unfortunately, a war launched right into the height of the bull and it's just been down only. And so they canceled their grants program along the way, unfortunately.
But you know, we learned a lot and I think that's one of the other key things too is You learn and make a lot of mistakes running a grants program in your first couple months, right? I mean the
The individually the other team is talented, but we have the experience and we know how to negotiate and we kind of understand what is a ridiculous request and what's a valid request. We got another handout.
Hey, thanks for taking my question. You're going to hire four out of five reviewers and one of them is going to be a community member. Is that how I understand it? Four community members.
four community members that you that you guys will personally hire and then we will vote Okay, so when you hire them what are your qualifications and are you going to be looking within the cosmos to hire? Okay
Exactly. Looking for core devs and people that want to get more potentially exposure to, you know, there's a lot, I was a deaf, right? And there's a kind of like a turning point in your career where you're like, okay, am I going to develop forever or am I going to, you know, go.
do something else or run a business or management or whatever and I and I think there's a lot of like core developers and some of the recent drama There's some really highly likely candidates that yeah, we do we are gonna need help from the community to to review on some technical things on what are the possibilities and Can this be done with the
consumer chains and consumer chain limitation and Cosmos hub limitation. And, you know, from an EVM defy aspect, we have that covered from some of the core Cosmos integration and alignment. Yeah, we are, we do need other help and some reviewers from the community.
Okay, and then last question, how are you going to mitigate when you hire, say, a core dev? They may have an ulterior motive.
How are you going to reel in special interests and potential, potential people that are willing to just vote in a project based off of backdoor dealings? Because that's been a huge concern of
a lot of retail investors. - Sure, Rebecca, do you want to talk about how we talk about projects for other clients, if you're available, like how we generally run our meetings? - Of course, you can do that.
Yeah, I can hear you. Yeah, so basically if I understand the question correctly, we give them the call. Like the first of all, like we bucket the clients, it's either two, two, one, two or two, two or three. And basically when we get on the call with the project, we ask them on their background, what they've done before, what's the
composition of the team, how they actually genuine revenue for them, how they're sustaining themselves, what's the idea, and by idea I mean like what's the problem they're actually solving and what trends are they're also following. And then obviously you know timeline, two launch ones,
Yeah, that's important. Yeah, I'm sorry for the win. You got to win. I'll answer it to a little bit on this. So we have
We have twice a week we meet with two of our foundation clients and we basically say, "Cool, here's, here's, and we usually start with the hottest, what we think is like the best projects in their criteria and then we go down the list
And here's like, and I'm on the edge about this. And sometimes they're like, no, no, no, we want that. Or like, no, we don't want that. So like, that's what we would need from the reviewer community at least once a week, one hour meeting to then pitch these different projects. And you know, we most of the time we would stay out of it and let the reviewer committee decide
And the reason why we would hold a vote is if we, you know, to break ties, if you will, right? And use that as a tiebreaker. What we're bringing, if we thought it was like a high quality tier team, and we thought, like, so the reviewer committee, sure they can make introductions and stuff, but effectively, like, it's all
more job to bring, prepare and represent the projects in the best light that we think will have the best utility and impact on the hub and then the reviewer committee will then decide you guys are idiots. Oh no, this is great. What about this? Well, I think that
another one over there is going to be better. So let's keep that conversation going. And we take that feedback and we adjust and we iterate and you know, this is where the real work is, right? This is like this negotiation between another party of who's going to choose to deploy the grant and who finds the grant.
should it be the same people, right? And there's another idea he embedded in here that like, you're going to get the highest quality inbound flow. And you just don't. The best people are busy. The best people have other options. The best teams and developers have tons of other options and things to do.
And I think that's a big, and that's where most of the work in this is, is deciding what you want, going out and getting them, negotiating with them, and then choosing. Like we have one client right now where we're looking at like three different options of a
a champion money market. There's like three different proposals. One is like millions of dollars in liquidity incentives, one wants $6 million in investment and one wants a $2 million interest-free loan. They're all really good
And so we brought all three to a chain and we're very excited and proud of that we did and we already have those relationships and one of them has multiple billions of dollars at TBL and multi-chain strategy is in their
is in their strategy this year and they're looking for more trains to build on. So a lot of the work for us has already been done and we can easily bring things to the Cosmos ecosystem because we've kind of done the work already and there, you know, a lot of these teams just aren't Cosmos aware.
Brian, just, yeah, sorry to interrupt. You're good. Go for it. Brian, just at the risk of being redundant here, I'm sorry, I was taking notes as you're talking. So on the review or committee, one of the problems I had with 925 is that they're self-appointed and I wanted
I wanted the members of the community to be representative of the people, the small communities that are out there, you know, the racks and there's a lot of smart people in those communities that know a lot more than the people who are on 95 and it may assist me when they were interviewed by some of the members of these communities.
the racks and the wrecking and stuff like that. I don't know which ones they were, but they were kind of dumbfounded as far as answering those questions. It's a good thing that you're a former dev. That's great. So as far as filling these positions on the reviewer committee, is there a way
vote for for for cause most of vote for them or select delegates that they can vote for. I don't know how it would work. I don't know how any sort of on chain voting would happen. This I'm a I'm a dunce in this area. So can you please explain that a little bit or the possibilities. The other part is is the last thing is too loud
two last things accountability. How would you be accountable for spends and that kind of stuff if you haven't gone over it already and then one of the big problems with people from 95 is that they are not communicating with the community at all and that's a big bit that rubs everyone really really wrong. So especially
me. So if you can explain one of those two things. Number one, the reviewer committee being elected. Number two, accountability at the end, the four month period and three communicating with the community. And I'm done. Thank you. Actually, Brian, can I ask you a question right now? Yeah.
because you actually brought really interesting point about the community is not communicating enough with community and from the outside it kinda looks like they do. My question is just like how best and most efficient way a community and you kinda community in the agency should communicate their progress with the community.
Because that question was to you.
you could or I'm sorry totally missed it I thought I thought it was something that she was adding my apologies. No question was how how do you feel it's best to communicate with the community? Well based on 95s I mean you said that they were communicating
I've communicated with them to some extent and then I had an old, I sent them a very long DM and they never got back to me so I was a little bit, I'm still waiting. But the thing is is that communicating with them is actually asking around because a lot of the people that I meet in spaces they're just very
very intelligent, they understand what works and doesn't work in cosmos. They've been through it, they've experienced the failed projects, they've invested their time and their money into those projects, and they know a lot. And so I think it's very important that they're listened to and that
you know as I said people from that community those communities are selected to be actually on the reviewer committee so the other part is you know I think I don't know the best forum for communicating with the community is whether it's spaces or what how
you but you maybe you could own and shed light on that. So I missed all the questions. I would I would like to mention that 95% of my information is about the Cosmos ecosystem and about what depths are doing
comes directly from crypto twitter from the twitter post. Very rarely do I find myself on commonwealth. So just speaking from a retail point of view that's where I get my information.
The commonwealth is pretty much dead from what I hear.
Yeah, I think, you know, we have a playbook on how to communicate every week. We kind of, this is where it gets interesting on what we could and should post. Like, we have, you know, we have a target, right? The target is like, let's call it like 700 different projects that are in our part.
target pipeline, we have declines, we have negotiating, we have deploying on test led, going live and live and complete. And so we have a whole entire pipeline kind of CRM. Now, where I don't know what to do on this to be really
quite frank and having is, are we okay to like release the project names that we're in talks to, right? And at what point maybe as they get further down the funnel and they're, we're in negotiating this like, hey, we're going to add your name publicly that we're in negotiations with and before because like, you know, they can
get a lot of flack of going multi-chain and a lot of like kind of heat from the other ecosystems that maybe that they have initially built on as they go multi-chain, they're going to kind of be upset that they're quote unquote "lead" in the ecosystem.
It's just the way it is, right? On the reviewer committee and selection, you know, a Dow tooling is a concern. I'm not really sure the best way to do it. I think that, you know, we could do polls, we could do individuals, we would just, you know, set up like a normal job page, right?
And there's a couple people that I would have been recently kind of let go of their job positions that are like star candidates that and there's people that are potentially even on the reviewer committee of 95. I think if we're in a scenario where both pass.
getting somebody from both on both reviewer committees would be something that I would say would be a net positive thing. So we have an open communication line between, you know, both Dows. So that's something that I would look into. I think I'm going to miss a question.
So currently with ecosystems and foundations, we do weekly reports. We meet, most of them we meet with twice a week, some of them we meet with once a week, and then we would do a very similar thing in AMA and hopefully that would pull a lot of people
We would set up a telegram group specifically for the grants program so that people want to engage there and we would do a weekly Twitter spaces and then if the projects that we're talking to were interested in being part of the conversation,
like, "Hey, can we talk about you in public?" Yes or no. I just talked about three different large money markets that I didn't release their name, but we could talk about them in that capacity if they weren't willing to release their name. Yeah.
The King!
What is up? Hello, Brian. Hello, Mike. It's not earlier about Mike. Using Cosmo awareness among young developers, especially universities.
students, right? Yes, sir. Yes. I wanted to add to about how university students can get into the community.
Got it. So this is a great question. We have previously sponsored Franklin Dow. It's the University of Pennsylvania Blockchain Club. They run events. They are part of eating you, Dow, which is part of BIT Dow. And they're literally
helping us. It's really interesting. They write up research reports for venture capitalists that hold tokens, dependent on different governance votes, right? So what they'll do is they'll, some of these VC or will hire
these guys and then basically have them have the students do the research so that can get involved with Encrypto and there's a lot of builders. Obviously the blockchain at Berkeley and Sonny coming from that there's a lot of impact. The earlier and younger you can get to these individuals the better.
So we're compiling a list. We're in touch with five different university blockchain organizations. Admittedly, most of these are in the US. We do need to get exposure outside and global presence and we're work on that. But effectively funding different
key parts of the world and the student organizations and making them cost most aware and make the education on IBC, the problems around, you know, the billions of dollars and 70% of the hacks this past year were bridge attacks and getting that story out there and that
simple narrative out there that it doesn't need to be the case with IBC. Well, we'll get students aware, involved, and start looking towards the Cosmos ecosystem. Obviously, there's more things that we could do in terms of grants. There's communication across all the other 54 app chains.
Say, hey, who wants to hire a student, you know, or, you know, get interns. So maybe there's a there's a program that we can get and it was like an internship program this summer and across the 54 app chains. And you just have to start get started and experiment to be honest and then figure out what works and then iterate.
That was cool. Actually, I'm actually part of the blockchain community. We just say goal of trying to view awareness of different web-treatment assistance. I think we have a couple
systems of Solanas, stats and software framework. And I think it would be nice to also work with cosmos, you know, try to establish a cosmos ecosystem here in Africa. Especially in our various universities in Africa. We have some cool developed over here also.
Yeah, I mean, that's something we definitely can use help with. There was another question and gots that an answer about accountability. Effectively, we are requesting a level of grants money that is high impact short timeline.
Our KPIs are very straightforward. We're an organization, we're a business. I'm pretty doxed out there. There's reputation risk involved here, especially doing this in public. It's kind of scary. But we didn't
We didn't say we're going to bring 100 Daps in four months. It's I think 20 is something that we can effectively do. Everything that we've kind of listed out, we've done before accountability and the spending, we should probably along with the Daps and where they are in the negotiation.
cycle and where grants are in the conversation we should probably put out like a weekly or monthly spend report on kind of like you know where tokens were spent and how much grants are left over and how much ad spends left over and that's something that we should do at least on a monthly basis.
Yeah, that does.
One of the things that I've been reading recently is that some people recommend that tokens get vested based on performance. I know that something you're not going to like, but it's a good thing because
certain amounts of tokens will be released upon successful results. I don't know how you feel about that or whether you have the funding yourself to do this. That's a hard question to ask and it's a hard question to answer. So sorry to put you on the spot that Brian, but that's going to come up eventually. It's actually not that hard to answer, right?
And this is a conversation. Like if your polygon comes up to us and you know, we've been in talks with them, they're like, no, we're good. They got a massive BD team. Their team is, they got like six, seven people per vertical, right? So like for NFT culture, they got like some people. But the
But what point is this right if we go to polygon and go hey, what do you guys want they go? Okay, give us like you know something like of the EMM like voter escrow plus money market or voter escrow plus options We're gonna cool when we see it will bring it to you selling polygon to
and getting a grant from Polygon to a DAP is an easy, easy sell. Getting a DAP to stop whatever they're doing and take a risk on the Cosmos hub, on consumer chains.
And invest the time is a risky narrative that we don't have an acquisition cost yet for right so there's not a lot of education out there. There's not a lot of content like around the Cosmos narrative. There's not a lot of different materials. There's not a lot. Okay, let me see who's the board like Cosmos is
decentralized. What are we going to do? Like show them community form posts? No, we have to make the content in the developer journey very easy and consumable. That is service fee that is something embedded in our ask because we won't be successful unless we do that.
totally on a commission basis. And there's a couple of chains that we do go on a commission basis. The asks are very simple. They're just simple blocking and tackling. They have history and they provided us with a ton of marketing materials.
centralized though too right so we're like hey we just have to take the narrative provide the marketing materials we tested the narrative we came back to them say hey justice this is the feedback we're getting and then you know it's it's working out pretty well but eventually they basically came back to us and said hey can you can you
you work on the sequences and the narratives and the creatives around the pitch as well. And now we're on a retainer basis with them because we do it so much. So what you're asking us to do on a peer commission basis is take on the risk of iterating on a narrative that we don't know what the
acquisition cost is going to be. We don't know how much education that there is. We don't know what the hit rate is. We have zero information on what the conversion rate is going to be. And then within zero basis conversion rate effectively, you're asking us to invest our time in a, you know, by time in the team's time.
to basically do that for potentially something that in the future that gets rejected by a proposal. It's just too risky. So is there a scenario which the community rejects this and goes, "Hey guys, we actually want you to..." And just getting this feedback in above itself is really hard.
So, you know, we've spent just on this alone, this proposal and our team, thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars to kind of get this together already, right? So, if there was a way to say, "Hey, can you create these materials?" And then go,
So here's an experimental budget to go test and see what it's going to take. And then we had a system and that coordinated to then, so we know what it's going to cost in our side to do it. And then we could communicate the cost on our side and then how much profit we need to make against that above and beyond that.
cost and we are able to make that test experiment then and had an exploratory budget to figure that out. Then yes, that's something that we could take on. However, because it's so decentralized, like that might take two or three months to kind of go through that process.
Right. And to figure out how to navigate that.
Yeah, we don't know how to do it incrementally, right? The way that kind of like, I mean, you know, just the proposal, you know, fee alone is, you know, $3,700 or something like that to even put up a proposal. So, and then we, we
took one of our developers time to really, "Okay, let's run a node." Now we know how to run a validator even so we could run a validator too, but we could run a node, get the proposal up, communicate the proposal. There's not a very good incremental, experimental way to test this out, unfortunately.
[sniffing]
All right, just to recap, anybody else wants to ask a question, please feel free to come up, but I'll just recap. The reason why we stepped up is because we saw some inefficiencies or deficiencies in kind of a
a proposal that was out there and there wasn't a clear vision and mandate and objectives and our three objectives are really straightforward. Makeover a thousand developer teams, Cosmos Aware created developer and project awareness campaign around replicated security and consumer chains.
We want to support replicated security on its launch and help find educate recruiting deploy grants to 20 or more DeFi projects that will launch on the consumer chains and then we'll also be on the lookout for one or two consumer chains and finally we
map. All of the utility and infrastructure on Adam to be able to answer the question, what can I do with the Adam token? Because right now across 54 chains, we're not sure what are all the things in retail or unless you're really deep in the cosmos ecosystem and you've been in for
years, you don't really know what you can do with the Adam token. It's not easily accessible of all the things that are available. And then after we have a list of all the things that you can do without a token, we can create a gap analysis and maybe another proposal on top of that to figure out how we can close those gaps.
Alright, I think we should wrap it up at this point. And we're going to do this again, probably in a couple of days, if Thursday or Friday and then do it again next week. A couple of different people who said if you have any content materials or recorded spaces on how you're thinking about this have kind of asked for this.
we thought it, you know, get, be good to like get this up right away and put this recorded spaces in their hands, talk into a couple validators and here's our pitch and our proposal and, and get it more publicized. Thank you everybody for your time and I'll see you on crypto Twitter.
Later. Yeah, thank you everyone.

FAQ on Cosmos hub prop 98 AMA | Twitter Space Recording

What is Alpha Growth's role in the crypto ecosystem?
Alpha Growth is a funding platform for projects, ecosystems, and investors in the form of grants and investments.
How many chains have some form of grants program or community fund?
There are 204 chains in existence that have some form of grants program or community fund according to Alpha Growth.
What was missing in the proposal and discussion that led Alpha Growth to create its own proposal?
The key thing missing in the proposal and discussion was a clear vision and metrics for what the project would build and achieve.
What was the purpose of Proposal 88 accepted in December 2022?
Proposal 88 accepted in December 2022 added taxes to the staking mechanism within Cosmos and added more funds to the community treasury in order to fund new development and drive utility and revenue to the Adam token.
How many grant submissions does Alpha Growth have as of this morning?
As of this morning, Alpha Growth has 860 grant submissions from projects looking for a place to build.
What is Alpha Growth's immediate audience according to the podcast?
Alpha Growth's immediate audience is the 1,600 projects that have already connected to the platform and set up a profile.
What is Alpha Growth's first objective for its proposal?
Alpha Growth's first objective is to make over 1,000 developer teams Cosmos aware and IBC aware by creating educational content and community outreach.
What is the second objective of Alpha Growth's proposal?
The second objective of Alpha Growth's proposal is to sponsor blockchain clubs at colleges and universities and other blockchain developer meetups across the globe.
What is one way Alpha Growth plans to get individuals aware of Cosmos and IBC early on?
Alpha Growth plans to look into schools and sponsor blockchain clubs at colleges and universities to get individuals aware of Cosmos and IBC early on.
What is a use case for hackathons in Alpha Growth's proposal?
Hackathons are a use case in Alpha Growth's proposal for creating awareness of Cosmos and IBC by either sponsoring a hackathon and having a prize or running an entire IBC app chain Cosmos ecosystem hackathon as a side event at other blockchain-related events.