Projects
![]()
No projects found
Investors
New
DAO Treasuries
DATs
Lend / Borrow APRs
Chains
Categories
Spaces
Does Cosmos Have a Distribution Problem? ⚛️
Recorded: Oct. 13, 2023 Duration: 2:07:31Space Recording
Full Transcription
Hey, everybody.
Just getting all the speakers up.
Spade, I sent you a co-host invite as well.
I'm not sure if you've got that,
but I think we need someone just to make sure the space doesn't rug.
Jack, inviting you up now.
Hey, folks.
I should have accepted the co-host thingy now.
Yeah, looks like we got you.
And, Zaki, I think you should be speaking now.
Are you here?
Yeah, I'm here.
Cool.
How has the post-conference week been treating you all?
Oh, yeah.
Very, very tough.
Obviously, we've had a lot going on with Neutron,
launching on Binance and various different exchanges this week.
So, yeah, you've been keeping us busy as always.
How about you, Jack?
Zaki?
Traveling much?
I've been in Dubai for the week,
which has been super interesting.
How's the mood these days?
Because I imagine, like, there's, like, the news is kind of, like, peculiar.
I mean, I think the, I mean, I don't, I haven't seen a huge impact from it, frankly.
Everyone's talking about it, and everyone is obviously sad.
But, you know, in some ways it feels far away.
But there's a lot of Israelis here.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Weird times.
Fucked up timeline that we're in, definitely.
Well, isn't this the reason why we started building, you know, social coordination systems?
Wait, what?
No, I thought we were here to make, like, unstoppable casinos.
Oh, same things.
Well, it was, like, it came up in the news the other day that apparently, like, Hamas had been funded by Bitcoin and all this kind of stuff.
And you've got, like, Wall Street Bets has been, like, reporting that this is still going on.
But I think they actually stopped doing that because of the transparency of Bitcoin, I think, back in April or something.
So, yeah, it's all relevant.
I like how they discovered it, like, this year.
Yeah, I mean, I think the unfortunate reality is that, like, most Palestinian wallets get tagged as Hamas wallets, unlike these, by these, you know, like, blockchain surveillance organizations.
And it's, like, it's hard to understand, like, you know, I don't think that there's, like, you know, the experience of being in Istanbul and the experience of being in Dubai would make it pretty clear that there's probably a significant amount of non-Hamas-related Palestinian cryptocurrency use.
But it probably all gets pretty, like, gets pretty extensively labeled as all being Hamas or, you know, otherwise related, unfortunately.
Yeah, that sounds a likely possibility indeed.
I think we might be having a few difficulties just getting a few people up.
I've sent Jack a couple of invites.
I don't know if you guys can see him up as a speaker.
He was, and now he's not.
We do have Feiburg, I believe.
Feiburg's on holiday, but he still made it, which is amazing.
How are you doing, Feiburg?
I'm doing great.
I'm walking back to the hotel.
So if you hear a noise in the background, that's Turkish cars.
But otherwise, great.
You're holiday in Turkey.
Yeah, that's right.
I'm doing kitesurfing on the coast.
That sounds fun.
That's a lot of fun.
That sounds pretty fun indeed.
And I also sort of, like, noticed that, like, are you not taking Turkish taxis anymore?
No, no.
I have a car now.
Turkish taxi, it's too painful.
I got a car.
Yeah, I'll admit, I share the feeling.
I had to jump out of a couple of them, which is not something that never happened to me before.
But that was an interesting experience.
If you jump out of a car, do it in the direction that the car is driving.
Otherwise, you'll have problems.
So that's my pro tip.
Elijah, how are you doing?
I'm good.
I've been itching to just say one thing.
The anonymous Neutron.org host, you have a beautiful accent.
It's amazing to hear you talk.
I look forward to when you unmute yourself and host the event every time.
So I just want to put that out there.
Much appreciated.
Do you know what?
It's, like, not the first time I heard that.
But to be honest, like, I can't stand the sound of my own voice.
So it's a bit weird.
I'm good there.
Thanks for asking, Avril.
And, yeah, coming back from Turkey, Cosmoverse was awesome.
It was a pleasure to see a lot of people in person and get lost in the venue space a few times.
So, yeah.
We got Sonny as well joining.
Yep.
I think Sonny is just about to come up.
Jack, I think you've, oh, no, it looks like maybe you're connecting again.
Jack, are you with us?
Might be having problems with Jack.
We'll keep trying.
I think we're slowly getting towards a full panel here.
Still waiting for Jose, I think.
But, Sonny, are you with us now?
Hey, hey.
Yes, I am.
Sorry for being late.
Yeah, no worries, no worries.
We're having the usual technical issues.
Just trying to get everyone up on stage.
I believe you're also on holiday at the moment, are you?
On a bike tour or something?
How was it, Troy?
I just got back, actually.
So, I'm in Istanbul at the airport right now, heading to Romania right now.
Wow.
What are you up to in Romania?
Just meeting.
Just like hanging out in Europe.
There's an urban conference at the end of the month that I want to go to.
So, just wanted to go somewhere to hang out in Europe instead of going back to the U.S.
Makes sense.
Nice.
Under your time.
How was Troy?
Ended up not going to Troy.
We ended up going to Cappadocia instead, which was still very worth the trip.
Which was very worth the trip.
I bet.
Not going to lie.
I felt the FOMO very, very hard, but had to go back for it.
A couple of matters, which I assume a lot of you have heard about earlier this week.
Namely, like, the listing stuff.
But, hey.
I think, let's check if Jose is with us.
He's not yet.
So, I guess, like, so, maybe let's ping him.
And I think we can probably start since we're 10 minutes in already.
Yeah, of course.
We'll kick off.
And, basically, I'm going to sort of let you kick things off.
And I'll get in touch with Jose while you're talking.
I think we've got Jack now, though.
Just double-check.
Jack, are you here?
Hey, guys.
Yeah, I'm just having a little bit of a connection issue.
But I'm here.
No worries.
Great.
Thanks for popping along.
Okay.
So, yeah.
We'll kick things off.
So, yeah.
Welcome, everybody, to another Neutron Spaces today.
This is Soi2 Studio hosting on the Neutron account.
It's a bit of a different space today.
We're not talking about Neutron or NTRN or Atom or the AEZ.
We're going to talk about the Cosmos ecosystem as a whole
and about a distribution problem that a lot of people seem to be talking about at the moment.
So, before we get into it, I just want to thank everybody on the panel today
for coming together to discuss the topic.
I think one problem that we don't have in Cosmos is a representation problem.
You can see here today we've got a big panel together,
thought leaders from across the space,
and we're going to discuss this with the community.
I don't really think the panel needs much of an introduction,
but for the sake of formalities,
today we've got Spade from Neutron,
Zaki from Occlusion,
Jack from Strangelub,
Sunny from Osmosis,
Elijah from Duality slash Neutron,
and Fiborg from Informal Systems.
We should also have Jose from Delphi,
who's been quite a key or one of the more vocal people on this subject.
He should be joining us and we'll try and get him up.
If you're down there, Jose, and I can't see you,
then please send a request and we'll get you up to speak.
Okay, so yeah, formalities out of the way.
I think it's going to be a good idea if basically Spade kicks us off.
Firstly, sort of by giving people an idea of exactly what a distribution problem is,
and then to sort of address the problem as he sees it.
Then hopefully we'll get Jose up here and we'll talk about Jose,
who's also been talking about this quite a lot.
Then we'll open up the discussion, talk about solutions,
and then at the end we'll open up the floor to community questions.
So yeah, Spade, what is a distribution problem exactly,
and why do you think that Cosmos has one?
Yeah, let's do it the other way around first.
Let's look at where we're at today, right?
So I guess I'll take it from my perspective first,
and then open it up to where is the ecosystem today, right?
So as all of you are aware,
we have worked our ass off to launch a blockchain this year,
and by all accounts it seems like Neutron has been fairly successful so far.
But the reason it has been successful is in large part due to the work of a number of folks
who are on this panel and beyond, right?
Who sort of pioneered the Cosmos SDK, Tendermint, IBC,
and a number of technologies that have allowed Cosmos to have a lead in very specific technologies
that the industry as a whole runs on today,
like proof-of-stake, liquid staking as an idea as well,
like land-based bridges, proposer commitments,
like delegated proof-of-stake,
all of these things are ideas and technologies that are now widely adopted.
And the idea of app-specific infrastructure as well
is sort of something that is becoming more and more relevant.
There's a lot of talks about enshrinement and in-protocol functionality on the Ethereum ecosystem.
There are entire stacks that are now also trying to cater to this
and in the Ethereum ecosystem as well,
despite the fact that they've been sort of originating in Cosmos, right?
So Cosmos is by all accounts an ecosystem of pioneers,
but while a lot of the technologies and ideas kind of originated
that like today are very successful,
a lot of them like we have a lot of mindshare and ideas,
but on the sort of like results and the economics,
like Cosmos today is like 2% of the DeFi TVR, right?
There's very few sort of like flagship applications
that are like recognized beyond the boundaries of Cosmos.
Most of the tokens are kind of like in freefall throughout the ecosystem
and not just because of the bear market.
Our user bases are kind of like very limited.
You know, like there's what, like 150 million users on Binance,
but like on most Cosmos applications,
you're, you know, tops like a few hundred thousand like accounts, right?
So clearly we failed to achieve widespread distribution
for the great applications that we're building using these great technologies, right?
And what I mean by distribution is the ability to take the products that we're building.
So, you know, the various like DeFi applications,
the various like technological stacks and distribute them to, you know,
users like and developers that will use them to do stuff
or to, you know, fulfill their needs, right?
So we're failing to reach the intended audiences
for these technologies and products essentially.
And so this seems to me like this is a problem that is not just, you know,
one project in the ecosystem, but really something that is like widespread.
We're isolated, like we're very well interconnected within the ecosystem,
but we're not very connected or we don't have a lot of mindshare outside of the ecosystem.
We're not spending nearly enough resources in reaching out to like the end users
that would use our applications.
And so the purpose of the call today was I think it's interesting as an ecosystem
to sort of like come together around what I think is the main existential risk
for every Cosmos app chains and every Cosmos project
and sort of like try to create like, you know, source the ideas and mechanisms
that would produce the highest return on investment for the ecosystem
in addressing this issue and also sort of try and further the collaborative spirit
in the ecosystem because it seems to me that we're in a situation
where competition doesn't really make sense since, you know,
fighting for a larger share of a very, very small pie is probably not the best strategy
when there's so much more that we could be doing in order to grow this pie
here in the ecosystem.
So I guess that's kind of like the thought and I'd love to get you guys' kind of like initial feedback.
Yeah, I mean, Spade, I think you're really spot on here in many, many ways.
But one thing that I would add here just sort of top level is
Ethereum is experiencing a distribution problem as well right now.
They have this core group of users that's kind of been with them from the beginning,
but that's kind of carrying most of the TVL and DeFi in the Ethereum ecosystem.
And I think crypto as a whole just has this user activation and distribution problem
that's really exacerbated.
And by the current market conditions, I think that we've got a lot of hopeful things in Cosmos,
as you mentioned, with the improved user experience and good teams launching
and there's like finally things to do here.
I think the bridging story over into Cosmos from the rest of the crypto ecosystem is a huge part of this as well.
But like the one thing that I would add to this discussion is like this is a problem with the industry as a whole.
We're not just facing this as Cosmos.
And the answers are, as you mentioned, to grow the pride, bring in new users,
whether those are institutional folks or new retail folks.
And I think that there's a lot of classic B2B and B2C strategies that we as an ecosystem could take to do that.
OK, so, I mean, just just before we sort of dig into all of that, because I mean, I tend to agree that it's not just Cosmos.
But but like for the sort of structure of the space, I just want to kind of focus on on the problems with with with Cosmos,
as people sort of see it to start with.
And one of the people who has been quite vocal about this has been Jose.
So, Jose, hopefully you can hear us now.
Are you with us?
Yep.
Yeah.
Great.
So just to sort of go back to what Spade was talking about there.
I think as I understand it from from reading your tweets, which one of them's up in the nest.
This is this is very much sort of your your thinking that Cosmos Cosmos very much does has a problem.
Would that be right?
Yeah, I think I think Cosmos definitely has a has a distribution problem.
I'd say like, yeah, the Spade Spade hit the nail on the head.
I think there's like two good indicators of distribution or sort of like users and liquidity.
But but then there's some like earlier indicators and sort of precede those which are like devs and VC funding.
Right.
Because like I say in the thread, the users for for any blockchain and especially something like Cosmos are the developers.
Right.
And so that's really like the first level of user that you want to attract.
It's developers.
And so and VC funding, because developers need funding in order to build teams to build products, which then attract users and liquidity.
And so, like, I think the problem for me is almost like further up the stack where Cosmos is not winning over enough developers.
And it does it has like a tiny share of like, I'd say, of the leading ecosystems, the lowest interest among among VCs to fund apps and Cosmos.
And I think both those things are kind of like existential threats to Cosmos.
Yeah.
And yeah, I mean, just one quick note on the developers, according to the Electric Capital developer ecosystem report, Cosmos has the second largest developer community outside of Ethereum, and it's still growing.
So I think that like that is one area we do punch above our weight.
But I agree with you on all the other pieces.
There is no second best.
I like how Tarun puts it.
Tarun has this quote, which is like, which is like, Cosmos's mind share to TVL ratio is like out of control.
And I think this sort of holds true.
I mean, I agree with everything that's been said so far.
I think Spade put the problem statement pretty well.
I think Jose's concerns are valid.
I also think Jack makes a very solid point, which is that like, you know, I think like, you know,
the Cosmos tech stack is also used for like a number of different things.
And so like the developer ecosystem around the Cosmos tech stack is like broader than maybe what like, you know, we think of the Cosmos ecosystem as like, you know, more degenerate DeFi users or, you know, just general DeFi users do.
So I'd also one thing that I think is like an interesting perspective here.
So I agree with everything that said, there's also like a structural component, which I'd be interested to hearing people's thoughts on, which is that like one of, you know, one of the reasons why Ethereum does have so much distribution is because the wealth creation that's existed on Ethereum.
That there's been like, you know, that Ethereum really saw the fruits of DeFi summer, both in wealth creation from like the core Ethereum token, but also from the ecosystem around that, where there's like a lot of people who created a lot of wealth that was like, you know, within either their on-chain wallets or within smart contracts that they're using.
Right. And then this sort of gives you, you know, launching off point or like a platform, you know, to, to then go and use that in other applications, you know, such that like, you know, developers or, you know, useful applications can find, you know, profitable opportunities.
Right. So there's like a lot of, you know, so just to like clarify, you know, Ethereum creates a ton of wealth. There's a ton of wealth on chain.
Now you have like a very competitive environment where developers are like competing to create applications that, you know, house and do things with that wealth.
And as a result, right, you create this very competitive environment for like this progressive, you know, for progressive improvement of applications.
I think Cosmos just didn't see that level of wealth creation.
Right. So we saw the opposite wealth destruction.
Yes. Yes. So we're at like a structural disadvantage in this way. Right.
Right. Where there are definitely a few Cosmos whales and there's even people in Ethereum who are really excited about Cosmos.
But we didn't have like this, like, you know, major, major event where like everyone got super rich and now is using it, you know, to attract developer attention and, you know, having all these developers and, you know, innovative applications competing for their attention as well.
And so I think like, you know, this, this is something that like I've heard Sonny say a lot.
But like, I think like, or maybe I've heard Sonny say in different ways, but like, you know, it's going to be very difficult to compete for like, you know, roll up liquidity for Cosmos, like Ethereum roll up liquidity for Cosmos.
Or it's going to be very difficult to like bring in Ethereum liquidity into Cosmos generally.
But like layers like Bitcoin and Celestia, I think are like more aligned with the Cosmos vision in the sense that in the sense that like, you know, there's not really that opportunity cost.
Right. Like if you want to use Bitcoin in like this trustless way or in this like trust minimized way, you don't really have any opportunities to like engage in like decentralized finance with Bitcoin.
Right. But with Ethereum, you have the entire Ethereum ecosystem to go out and use that.
And so I think like teams like Gnomek are like really exploring this really exciting path in my eyes, because if you like compare Gnomek to TBTC, I think they both have like pros and cons, of course.
But like Gnomek, you know, using their validator set to do a lot of like the signing and key management, et cetera.
And then also using that same validator set to, you know, to run, you know, interoperability with other domains.
Right. That same validator set is the one that's signing, you know, on IBC transactions or, you know, coming to consensus in order to like, you know, send messages from chain to chain.
You get like this security property, you know, out of the gate as well.
So I think like teams like Gnomek have this very like interesting perspective on distribution, which like I'd love to see like more experiments.
And then I think like Celestia, you know, obviously a slightly different beast, but, you know, another really interesting ecosystem to double down on and integrate with the Cosmos ecosystem and find points of synergy and see where it goes there.
But yeah, I'd also be interested to hear people's thoughts on like both the sort of like structural component that I mentioned and also like ways that we can either navigate around it.
Because, of course, it's like, you know, in an ideal world, we could say.
Just to help you know, I have a second, Elijah.
We're kind of, we're getting there like quite a lot to sort of unpack there.
And Spade popped his hand up.
What was it you wanted to interject with there, Spade?
Yeah, I just wanted to sort of like for structure, I'd love to hear Zaki, Jose, his hand, and Sonny's thoughts on like the problem definition.
And then probably I would suggest that we go into kind of like solution space, which I have a few ideas to propose.
And then we can probably sort of like take it from there and then sort of like enrich it with everybody's thoughts.
Zaki, do you want to go first?
I think Zaki might be trying to speak here.
His hand's gone down.
I got it.
You might be on mute.
I've successfully unmuted.
All right.
So, yeah, you, you, you, I've heard like the, you mentioned the word like existential crisis in the past.
So, yeah, definitely.
I mean, I was the, I was, I mean, I started talking about the existential crisis and what, like, I don't know, January, February.
Um, so like, I don't know, it was early, uh, um, um, that the, I was early to this crisis and I think it was relatively obvious.
I think there's a couple of things I will say is basically in the history of Cosmos in the past, there was only ever one app built on Cosmos that people actually really wanted to use.
Um, and that, that app was Anchor, um, and almost everything else was a second order effect to the fact that people wanted to use, um, Anchor.
I think, you know, like while we talk a lot about how great the builders on Cosmos are, um, the reality is, is that Cosmos has delivered very, very few apps that people wanted to use.
Um, and like, basically I would call the numbers zero until maybe two, three months ago.
Right. Um, so there's been like really, like, I think a lot of people in Cosmos don't use things in other ecosystems nearly as much as I do.
Um, and they don't realize how bad things were, where there was like literally nothing to use.
Whereas like, you know, I've been building in ETH land for, you know, two years in addition to the building in Cosmos land.
Um, and just like the universe of what you could do was so much larger, um, that it was like, why, you know, I was honestly like, why build it?
You know, the, the attitude of Sommelier for a long time is like, there's nothing here in the application layer of Cosmos, um, uh, to build on.
And everything that we tried, like, you know, we tried doing stuff with Injective and Sommelier and it went nowhere.
Um, uh, and, uh, you know, and whereas like our, you know, ETH ecosystem stuff has grown a lot.
Now that's all started to change now.
Um, you know, we've been working very hard on getting, uh, Sommelier integrations with Levana, um, and all of this stuff.
So I'm just like, you know, I, I could go, I could, I could go longer into that world.
Um, but then, you know, the other thing I've been doing is I spent the last, you know, two months, uh, in Asia and the Middle East.
Um, you know, talking to people here, um, learning about distribution, thinking about distribution.
Um, I've had a lot of interesting experiences.
I think the biggest thing that we ignore in crypto is we talked about the distribution of L1s.
Really the things that have in crypto that have historically had distributions are centralized exchanges.
Um, I think a lot of people in the space compare ourselves to Ethereum, whereas really what Cosmos should be comparing itself to is centralized exchanges.
Um, and I've like sort of built up a lot of thoughts, um, from like the learning here and, and I'm, and I'm like a baby, frankly, in terms of learning about the stuff right now.
Um, like learning about how centralized exchanges get at distributions in this part of the world.
Yeah.
I think that's a super strong comment.
Um, Jose, you kind of share this, uh, this vision as well.
You've been talking a lot about like recreating the centralized exchange experience.
Um, so why don't you take the mic next and then, um, I'd love to hear from Sonny as well, since we finally got him on stage and hopefully it seems stable for now.
Yeah.
A few things that I think like, first of all, like on the, on the developer report stuff, like electric capital, I think it, it tends to overstate, um, because it, it, it counts sort of the people working on infrastructure.
And it's much harder to count people working on apps on top of the ecosystem and like Polkadot has come in second, uh, most years are like top three in that, in that report.
And obviously like there's, there's very little apps that you can use on, on Polkadot.
Um, I think like using VC funding as a metric is interesting into each ecosystem and just sort of anecdotally as, uh, a VC as well.
So it's, there's just way more, uh, interest in funding for Solana based apps for even like avalanche based, like sub, uh, like, uh, whatever the name is, super nets, sub nets.
I always get confused between, between all these ones.
Um, and, and I think that's like, uh, an important metric.
And then in terms of distribution, I totally agree that like centralized exchanges are, are unfortunately like the things that have the most distribution of crypto.
And I think so far in crypto, there's, there's basically three things that people have, have, that have like product market fit in terms of people actually paying for them.
One is like spot trading in which I would include like NFT trading as well.
You know, just sort of tokens with pictures, like any trading of tokens on chain, um, leverage trading, which I would include perps, like just getting leveraged exposure to, to, to tokens.
And like if they're in block space, right?
Like, like those are kind of the three things that, that people are, are, are willing to pay for right now.
And so, so I think, um, I just have like a very similar framing of this, which is the thing, three things people have responded to and the people, everyone who's been onboarded from the centralized exchange responds to at least one of yield leverage and volatility.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think Ethereum does have distribution, uh, like between the theorem and L2s and, and, and everything that's happening there.
And like before the ecosystem, there's constantly, uh, like people building cool new stuff on Ethereum, including like institutions, build, build, building stuff on top of Ethereum.
Now, like, uh, I agree that crypto in general has a, has a distribution problem, but like, uh, Ethereum is, is by far in the lead there.
And kind of what I argue in my, in my thread is that like the way to like the ecosystems that, that win outside of Ethereum need to have very strong, like reasons for existing in like some dimension on which they're 10 X better than Ethereum.
Right. And like Solana is focused a lot on this, like OPOS, like only possible on Solana. And I think Cosmos needs to do like the same thing. Uh, I don't, I think it's going to be very
difficult if we're, if we're like mimicking apps on Ethereum, whether it's like perps or AMMs or whatever, and building them on Cosmos and maybe they're like marginally better because you can like integrate an MEV at the, at the chain level or something like that.
I really think need to think like first principles about how you can build entirely new and better applications on, on Cosmos and also to attract the builders that have like the imagination and the ambition to do that.
And like, we're seeing a lot of them, uh, choose like OP stack or even like the avalanche. Um, yeah, whatever they're called, subnet, supernets, um, and, and, and like other stacks other than Cosmos for doing the same with gaming, uh, projects and stuff like this.
And I really do think like a big part of that is BD, uh, is investing in BD. Like the Cosmos foundation was modeled after the Ethereum foundation, but Ethereum had consensus from the very beginning, right.
Which was, which was funding a lot of the BD efforts, interfacing with institutions, putting together stuff like the energy consortium and, and, and building up MetaMask and investing in dev tooling and Fiora and stuff like that, doing a bunch of conferences.
So I think like the, the BD side is like super, and, and, and in general, we're competing with every other ecosystem where you can talk to a BD person at like whatever the, the, the foundation is where the labs entity, and they will like basically show you on why you should build on that ecosystem, often offer up grants, connect you with other ecosystems.
Like it's, whereas the Cosmos, it's like, who do I talk to if I want to build on, on, on, on Cosmos, you know, and there isn't really a clear person to talk to a clear entity that can, they can get you through that process.
And so only the most ambitious, well-funded builders like the YDX can, can kind of like make that decision where they're just going on the tank.
Like everyone else is going to, or there's a long tail of people that will want some, some handholding.
And, and for me, that's why I like the, the BD part is, is really key.
And, and I think like, yeah, I was shocked when I found out the ICF had, had the amount of money it has.
Um, and I really think that putting that in, uh, like putting a lot of that into, into BD and like attracting app chain builders who can build new things that are only possible on, on, on Cosmos, um, is like a key, a key thing to, to kind of, um, to Cosmos winning in, in, in my mind.
Um, you know, all I've, I've been waiting for DYDX to actually work to like tell the story of what it took to onboard DYDX, because it, while DYDX did a lot themselves and helped a lot, there was a heroic level of effort required to onboard DYDX.
And right now, I think to most of the world, that heroic level of effort is invisible.
Um, but it's hard to talk about it without it actually having worked at this point.
Well, I mean, it might not have worked at this point, but, uh, it sounds like you were at least sort of privy to that, that initial onboarding that, that Jose's talking about.
Um, so like, what, what was the, what was the first thing that happened?
Who was the first point of contact in that situation?
Um, so by the time I got involved, so I got involved, I'll just like, I'll try and do the story real quick.
So, because it's, it's a very long story, but, um, I'd heard through the rumor mall, the DYDX was thinking about a Cosmos chain.
Um, they had made some initial connections with the ICF on the dev side and they, uh, and ICF people had helped them, um, with some of the initial ideation around whether or not their technical needs could be met.
Um, they had kind of tried basically everything.
They had literally like sampled from all possible things on the menu.
And that was, that is a thing that's reflective of their resources, right?
That they had enough resources to be able to like essentially do a technical investigation of, of everything.
Um, but they decided on Cosmos by the time, um, I got involved.
Um, and, but like, so, you know, they were dependent on features of what is now Comet VFT that were in deep, deep trouble.
Um, uh, the version of Cosmos, of, of Comet VFT, um, that they, uh, were building on top of,
was unreliable.
Um, it was extremely, uh, uh, it had a huge amount of problems.
Um, they needed a solution for native USDC, uh, in the, in the ecosystem.
And, you know, uh, ICF was completely unwilling to help it with that in any way, shape or form.
Um, they needed, um, uh, help with how to onboard users from Ethereum, um, in a seamless way.
Um, and so, you know, I spent a lot, uh, I mean, I, I think a huge amount of effort this year,
like we spun up an entirely new company for them, um, to facilitate USDC on the network.
We convinced, you know, Strangelove basically wrote the implementation, um, uh, of, uh, you know,
token factory for Circle.
Uh, we, a bunch of us have spent a lot of time with Circle getting all of this, uh, worked out.
Uh, we, we fired the entire team that was working on the consensus engine and hired a new team
at Informal basically to be, uh, uh, to like accept, to make sure that we would actually
deliver, uh, a stable version of Tendermint that could do what DYDX needed, uh, on time.
Uh, and there's still a pretty big lag between, um, on the performance side, between what their
full vision is and what Comet currently is able to deliver.
Um, and we need to solve that.
Um, uh, let's see what, I mean, yeah.
And I mean, I, Marco has spent an enormous amount of time with their team as well, and
the binary team is like making sure that, you know, there was support we've been on.
I've been on like design calls, like designing APIs to make sure their order matching would
have like a same maintainable API, the Cosmos SDK.
Um, and I, you know, you know, if you go look at the app, like I love reading the code
of the app.
It's like, it's absolutely fantastic.
Um, but like kind of the cause, you know, the strategy that sort of, I spent basically
all of my political and capital in Cosmos, uh, executing over this last year is like bet
the farm on DYDX.
Um, uh, because I don't think, you know, when we talk about all these other builders and stuff
like that, it's, it, builders are an important metric, but it's like, you need, you know,
for Cosmos to have a chance, we kind of need that.
We need like one app that gives us credibility and to a certain extent, Anchor, we used to
be that app.
And if we don't have that Anchor app, I think we're dead.
Uh, and so, yeah, I burned all my political capital in Cosmos, making sure DYDX got over
the finish.
That was a pretty intense journey.
Um, yeah, hope, hope it'll turn that all right.
I'm really looking forward to seeing it like in production.
Um, Sonny, do you want to, do you want to touch on like your understanding of the problem,
whether you think it's like psyops or not, and how you think about it for, like for the
ecosystem as a whole in osmosis?
Um, yeah.
Could you, can you explain what, again, what, what, which problem are we talking about?
I'm sorry, my, my connection has been coming in and out.
Um, yeah, so we're talking about, um, the hypothesis that I'm putting forward that Cosmos and that
I'm not the only one to put forward and that not the first either, but, um, that Cosmos lacks,
um, distribution, e.g.
the ability to reach new audiences and users and pools of capital to actually function.
I see.
Okay.
Um, yeah, so I think that the difficulty of attracting new users, uh, definitely comes
from, I think, a lack of, or a difficulty in just like the UX of the, of like onboarding
onto Cosmos, right?
Like, uh, a lot of people have MetaMask wallets.
And so, you know, the lack of MetaMask until very recently in Cosmos, but even right now the
MetaMask snaps are not really the like ideal solution, which is why we haven't added them
to Osmos yet.
Like, I think getting a more better natively integrated version of MetaMask is like a way
of like accessing all the Ethereum users.
But like, at the end of the day, I actually still think on-chain Ethereum users is just
such a tiny, tiny pond, right?
And that's why like we've been, you know, at Cosmiverse, like I talked to, I gave my presentation
on about a lot of the work that we're doing with account abstraction and smart accounts.
Because I think like, if you really want to like tap into all the centralized, you know,
like Zachary mentioned, right?
Like all the, who actually has the most distribution of centralized exchanges and centralized exchanges
and offer this like very Web2 style onboarding experience and login experience.
And I think that like, if we want to access, if I posted a video on YouTube, it's linked
to in my talk where like, you can watch like one of my friends who is a like software engineer
at Robinhood, like onboard onto Uniswap with MetaMask and it's like, you can't figure it
out, right?
Because like these UXs are so bad.
So if we actually want to like build stuff that is like, I was in a, I was in a, what
do you call it?
Turkey right now, right?
And like at the bazaar, there's, there's people who are like using like tether to like convert
into Lira's like this actually OTC stalls that do this, which is like really cool.
And like, you know, we should look at like, but a lot of it's been running on Binance, right?
And so we should really be looking at like, how has Binance done this like user onboarding
to like the farthest like edges of the world, right?
And I think, I think smart accounts is one part of that.
To answer the question about capital.
I found out a lot about how, Sunny, I found out a lot about how Binance has onboarded users
from every, every quarter of the world and like in my travels, which you talked about
Interesting.
I would love to learn more.
Yeah.
On the capital, I mean, I think right now the big issue is that there's actually been
like a huge lack of new capital in crypto, basically during the bear market.
There's like not really much new money entering.
It's all like the same money that's left over from the bull market, like sloshing around.
And I think Zaki actually put it pretty well when he's like, the problem is all the most
degenerate capital in, in Cosmos all got wrecked with Terra.
And so all the like risk taking capital that was already in Cosmos has kind of went to zero.
And so I think really the answer to new capital is like setting ourselves up so that in the
next bull market, we'll be able to onboard, bring in new sources of capital.
And I actually see that, like, I think that a lot of centralized exchanges are probably
going to actually run into more and more regulatory issues coming soon.
Right.
And like, I actually see this as an opportunity where this is like, you know, I don't think
we have to be stealing users from Ethereum.
I think we should be figuring out how to steal users from like centralized exchanges.
So yeah, preparing ourselves product wise to be able to onboard those users and bring
in new capital into the, into the space.
Or the new capital that's going to come into the space of the next bull market, how do
we make Cosmos be their entry point?
Yeah, completely agree with this.
I think that's a really, really kind of key point.
Sorry, Spade, I'll just, just quickly make this point because obviously we've had the
Binance listing this week and we've seen like an influx of non-Cosmos users and sort of
from the, from the ground level onboarding these people is really hard.
You know, everybody's asking what's the contract address, you know, how can I add it to my
MetaMask, all this kind of stuff.
This, this is all like real, real problems that we, we definitely need to, to get to grips
with for sure.
And that's even just the tip of the iceberg of people who are already using on-chain
infrastructure and products actually.
So yeah, completely agree with, with, with everyone's point and there are, this with
a really good, I've been, I've been trying to help some institutions who need to LP on
osmosis this week, who want to LP on osmosis this week.
And it's been, cause CL has turned out to make osmosis as, as predicted, make, made osmosis
more attractive to the institutional users, but it seems to be pretty painful.
I mean, I think like another thing that we spent a lot of time this year, like working
on is like custody support.
So, you know, we've had Anchorage support for a while, but like in the last like three
months, we've basically onboarded both BitGo and Fireblocks to support osmosis.
So hopefully with these, like the Anchorage is good for custody, but like BitGo and Fireblocks
do a lot more advanced, like, you know, you can do on-chain activities through these custodial
accounts, which is, uh, hopefully that will help make some of these institutional onboarding
scenes.
Someone on-chain, I didn't imagine they happened, it was me.
I guess that gives us a good segue into the solution part then.
And I, I'm conscious of this time and I think it would be great if we couldn't get a couple
of questions towards Ian from, from the public, but basically, um, we've heard a couple of ideas,
which I think we have sort of like rough agreement on in terms of like, what are the areas of
focus, um, for us to sort of like solve this problem.
Um, the first one being reducing barrier to adoption, I think both on the, um, sort of
like retail side whereby, you know, not having metamask is a big problem, but just like the,
how we interact with the applications, transfer assets, uh, within the ecosystem is also a massive
issue.
Although, you know, there are, um, a bunch of developments these days with, uh, packet forward
middleware, but also like the skip API and a number of teams that are working on this, that are making
things a lot better.
Um, and then on the institutional side, we've heard like Sony discuss about, um, kind of like custody and
on-chain access types of services, um, that are being provided by like for, for more institutional
type of profiles.
I think both of these are like very high priority areas, um, to, to be focused on throughout the
ecosystem.
The other thing I guess is we've heard as well, like, like Jose was making a point about, you
know, we, we, we have this stack that is tremendously powerful, um, but we're not actually leveraging
to build that differentiated applications, um, e.g., you know, like application specific
infrastructure in the ecosystem today is that they like still use in most cases as a very
accessory type of thing whereby, oh, you know, it makes the product marginally better, but
it doesn't turn it into something that is like 10, 100 X better than anything that the
competition is, is, is able to offer, um, from general small contract platforms, ecosystem
like Ethereum and Solana.
Um, and I think that's another major issue, um, that we should sort of like attempt to
fix by really doubling down on the best teams that have ambitions like the YDX to build like
meaningfully better products, uh, and bring them to cosmos.
So I think all of this to kind of like touches on some of the content of the discussion so far,
I'd be super interested to hear your thoughts on like, what are the further kind of like areas
of focus for us to solve this distribution problem? Um, one of them being, uh, actually,
how do we vampire attack centralized exchanges? Um, I guess Elijah, if you want to go briefly
and then Zaki. Um,
Yeah, I have one quick point, but I think it's very clear what we need to do. And I think pretty
much everyone should be dedicating their entire runway to this, but we should invest in really,
really sophisticated infrastructure, cloning infrastructure. This way we can, uh, uh, replicate Zaki,
right? So there's like state machine replication. We need Zaki replication. Um, and I think most
of our problems would be solved if we do this.
Proof of Zaki.
Zaki, do you want to go?
Um, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I will say that I actually have at this point been a little bit,
I, at this point I'm having a hard time thinking of something other than a perp decks, actually,
that there is, uh, um, like a huge, a hundred X benefit to building on the Cosmos SDK. Um,
like the two, like, like there's, so right now, uh, like hyper liquid is built on top of,
uh, like the tendermint stack, but isn't connected to Cosmos. And it's doing about $80 million a day in
volume and generally killing all of the Ethereum L2 perp decks is, uh, in a fairly rapid fashion.
Uh, it's probably like the most counter Ethereum dominance narrative out there. Um, and like if
DYDX kind of works, um, it will obviously, you know, we'll probably will be like well over 50%
of the perp decks market share. And the perp decks market share is 1% of the perp market, um, uh,
on a centralized exchanges. So like, there's a lot of room to grow, but like, there is an extent to
which like programmable block production and like programmable transaction matching and having built
in oracles kind of has like one, there's like one place where all those pieces fit together,
which is building perp decks. Um, and so that's like very much on my mind. Um, and then from a,
how do you vampire attack, uh, the, uh, centralized exchanges? I, I think I've actually kind of
started to figure out how you do it because, um, it turns out that finance very much does not own
the on-ramps and off-ramps of most of the ecosystem. It's turns out to be like local,
heavily regulated, centralized exchanges, um, that own the on-ramps and off-ramps of much of the
ecosystem. Um, and it's, finance is actually like where the, it's like the, is the, is the second
leap on most of those funds. And so what's actually the hard problem is, is actually how do you,
how do you make it, how do you build relationships with like Indonesian, Philippines, Vietnam,
centralized exchanges so that another destination where those users can go is like DEXs and stuff
like that. Um, and, you know, there's a lot of opportunity to feed those markets desires for
leverage, volatility, and yield, um, uh, that like really hasn't, hasn't been tapped into.
Jack, you've, uh, had your hand up there for a little while. Have you got something to add to that?
Oh, yeah. Well, you know, I just, I think that when we're thinking about what we need
to do to increase distribution, we need to think, think about the strengths of the Cosmos stack.
And those are things like software.
And we need to go find the users for those products. And I honestly think that there's a
lot of institutional users there. And I think that what we're seeing with provenance and some
other projects is like, we're starting to prove out that demand. But what I hear a lot of people
calling for is sort of like a centralized BD effort. We need BD, we need BD. The fact is,
is that, you know, Zucky and me and Marco and Sonny and a bunch of other folks have been multi-headed
Hydra for BD without any real support. And I think that this decentralization is more of a feature
than a bug. And what we need to do is lean into that and figure out how to build better support
mechanisms for those folks. And I think some of that work is ongoing, but I don't think we solve
it by creating some super BD team. I think it's solved by more decentralized coordination and more
effort there.
I want to, I want to second Jack on that. If you look at what's going on right now, you have a
Strangelove that is in touch with Hyperlane, with Wormhole. They are supporting us for IBC.
At Informal, we're taking on Comet. So we're in touch with Starkware, we're in touch with Aztec,
we're in touch with Polygon to help them use Comet as a decentralized sequencer.
And so I feel like, you know, this setup is actually pretty effective. You have people
specializing in different parts of the stack and going ahead and, you know, making the best case
for it. So like, I guess, I mean, like we, we also brought it in USDC too. So I think that,
I think the difference with like decentralized sequencing and stuff and
even the Hyperlane integration though, I agree. I think USDC is an example of this,
is it doesn't bring liquidity into the Cosmos ecosystem, right? It definitely increases the
shelf life, the Cosmos stack, right? You know, repurposing Tendermint as a sequencer for like,
you know, Ethereum rollups, I think, you know, definitely means, you know, more teams are invested
in the stack, you know, existing for years and years to come. But I think it doesn't really
solve the question of bringing liquidity into the ecosystem. I, and I sort of like,
I sort of disagree about the reason why I'm like jumping in this because I disagree about this BD
piece. I think like one thing that actually keeps me up at night is the failure to, you know, foresee
and, and be proactive about the, the maker, or, you know, any decisions that maker is going to be
making around like where to build their maker chain. Um, you know, I don't have, there were a lot of
people in touch with Rune trying to sell him on Cosmos. Like beforehand or after he made this before,
even before going at it. And I think the more guys just, uh, everyone's sort of jumping in a little
bit. I think, I think Fyborg had a point to finish and then maybe we need to get back to sort of raising
hands to, to make points. So, uh, so Fyborg, if you, if you want to go. Oh, thanks. Uh, yeah,
no, just, um, my point to finish, I think was just, uh, asking a question to Jose actually,
since I read the thread and I was, uh, curious exactly, you know, he said like the ICF should
take a more proactive role in making the Cosmos stack, you know, uh, expanding the Cosmos stack,
uh, improving distribution. I'm curious in practice what that looks like. Like it's one thing to say it,
but what does it look like in practice? What does he have? ICF has to do here.
Jose still with us. I think maybe, uh, maybe Jose's not with us. Sorry, sorry for cutting you off of
that jacket. I think you, you were talking, but it was, it was sort of, there's like three or four
of us all talking at once. Oh yeah, no, totally. I was just saying like, there was a, an effort to
try to bring maker chain in and you know, you can't win them all. Like some people just want
to fork the Solana code base instead of going to therapy. Um, I'm misunderstanding that like,
there's actually a decision that made around the maker stuff. I think like, uh, I don't know,
I talked to Rune about this. Like it's very much like something they're not starting for over a year.
Like, it's not like something they've made a decision along. It's like they, they, they,
they use the Solana code base as long as a stand in word to be like some app change staff. And so far
in their like research, that's what seems promising. And it's mostly down to performance reasons. Um,
maker is not a forgotten thing on Cosmos. I just want to make that.
Yeah. I think that's a good point. Um, but like, then we should write, we should have some sort of,
I mean, I don't know if it makes sense to even like organize it or what, but there should definitely
be some effort, um, and then some initiative in order for us to like, you know, service the needs
of like potentially a really big user of the stack that, you know, could bring in a lot of liquidity
into the ecosystem. What we really should be doing is like going to talk to everyone who is like
chosen on alternative stack. Like at Clause of Earth, I was chatting with the team that's building
Avails, which is like, there's like a spin out of Polygon. It's a DA layer. And they chose to build
on substrate instead of the Cosmos SDK, which is like, I don't know, we should like, why did they
choose to build on substrate? They said it was mostly like rust, right? No. Okay. Well, were they
pitched the wonders of Cosmos yet? Um, or like, you know, why did something like telegram, telegram
chain, like can like not use the Cosmos SDK? Like we should go out and like find all the chains,
like major chains that are not using the Cosmos SDK and figure out why aren't they using the Cosmos SDK?
Um, I've talked to a lot of them. Um, what's the general like overarching?
Um, programming language was a big one, like ton implemented Tendermint. Like they run the Tendermint,
they run Tendermint consensus. They just wrote their own implementation in C++. They actually sent
it to me before they launched and were like, can you look at this and see if it's right? Um, uh, and I did look
at it and saw that it was right. Um, uh, they did a good job of implementing it. Um, uh,
Avail, it was a couple of things. One, so Avail's market for data availability is very much ZK rollup
centric. It's kind of, so like select, like kind of the fork in the road is that like Celestia
prioritized optimistic and sovereign rollups over ZK rollups. And Avail was like, cause of,
you know, it came out of a, uh, uh, uh, polygon sort of ZK rollup maximalism camp. It like prioritized
and like the entire, like with the exception of, of, uh, consensus is ZK rollup. Like,
right. Like every other ZK rollup is written in Rust. Right. And so, you know, that, that was a,
that was a, uh, and like, so like, but like, you know, Avail is very interested in, in, in being
IBC connected. Like, I think, you know, the, the narrative of you can build like, you know,
especially with Polkadot kind of aggressively dying right now, it's like the narrative of,
Hey, like plug, like write a substrate chain. We have IBC for substrate that we spent all this
money on. Uh, you can just plug into Cosmos. You can, you can get price discovery on Osmosis.
You can get USDC from Noble, like substrate is now like a co-equal building environment is,
which is a reality that we're like, not quite there yet, but it's actually like, it's like,
it's like a plausible thing that we're like, not that far from. It's actually not a bad narrative
to say. And I think there's like a, definitely a story with like the entropy and avail about them,
uh, uh, plugging into the IBC ecosystem and essentially being much more natively part of Cosmos.
Okay. So, um, so just before we go to D, uh, we are coming up on the hour. Um, it was,
the space was scheduled for an hour. So if people need to leave,
then by all means do just, just drop down. No one's, uh, no one's going to hold it against you.
My diary is free. So I'm happy to kind of keep the space going. Um, so, uh, so yeah,
we'll, we'll keep it going. And if people leave, they leave. And if they don't, we'll keep going.
So D you've had your hand up for a while over to you. Thanks guys. Uh, yeah. So, I mean,
I won't belabor the point too much. I think ultimately what I see is, um, to bring in that new use,
I don't think going after ETH liquidity and ETH users is the winning strategy for Cosmos. That's not it.
The winning strategy for Cosmos. Again, I think it was already said by multiple people here is
bringing it by bringing in that new users is the only way we're going to be able to do that is
creating that new applications. Normies that aren't on chain today. They don't want like my wife,
she doesn't want leverage. She doesn't want to yield farm. She probably wants a really good social
application that also has like a P2P payments, uh, method as well. So nobody in the entire crypto
ecosystem, uh, across all ecosystems have not created, in my opinion, a good P2P payment solution that
also has like a non-financialized social aspect to it. So I think like something like that is,
if we can build that in the cosmos, uh, I think that is a way to bring in net new users on chain.
I think second, um, even though like all the, the decentralized coordination that I think is being
done and I like have all the respect in the world for the stuff that, uh, Jack is doing a strange
love Zucky, Thiborg and informal, et cetera. Like this, this behind, I don't want to say behind closed
doors, not like in a negative way, but this decentralized BD effort, it's, it needs to be
like, it needs to be more of like a central focal point. Like we need to be able to show the, uh,
people that are on chain today, the builders that are on chain and also net new developers that we
want to bring into the ecosystem that like cosmos is open for business. We need to be able to be at
the forefront. And like, I think doing it the way we're doing it today is I don't think a winning
strategy. Uh, and I think third, like we need to be earlier on in the pipeline and bringing in talent to
the cosmos. So like we need to be at every single blockchain club in all the top universities in
the United States and around the world. Like we need to be able to have like hackathons at these
universities because by the time people are on chain, I think a lot of college students are
already in Ethereum. Like we need to be earlier than Ethereum and how we leapfrog that is by again,
like having, going after the top universities around the world and having hackathons and having
grants paid out in Atom, paid out in Osmo, what have you, it doesn't really matter. But like,
we need to get earlier in the, in the, uh, I guess the talent pipeline. And, um, I think expanding
IBC to other L2s and whatnot will help. That will maybe move the needle a little bit, but that is not
ultimately like how cosmos is going to be able to supply it to Ethereum as like the dominant ecosystem,
uh, for the, like the future of finance.
I, I completely agree with the point on like being earlier in the pipeline. I'm not sure though,
about the no leverage, no, um, no rewards, no volatility element, because, um, I think we
also need to like recognize where blockchain is adding value and where it's not. And I think
there's a lot of these, like, so, you know, if you're making a social network for like journalists
that are censored by the state, then maybe that's like super valuable to have on a blockchain, ideally,
probably a private one, right. Um, to avoid censorship and such, right. But, but, but wouldn't
that same application just be better suited or better served by like centralized databases and
and such in the web to model is sort of like, I think one of the difficulties that we sort of like
bump our heads against as well, when we're looking for these, this sort of like more approachable
applications. Um, I do think though, like we had really interesting conversations at, at Cosmoverse
with a couple of folks and sort of like the framework that they presented was, um, included
like one category that was vampiring attack, like, like vampire attacking, um, existing social graphs,
and then basically, um, enabling either one of these three components that Zaki mentions of like,
you know, um, leverage volatility or, or yield on top of it, which, you know, provides this kind of
like financialized sort of like experiences, but does actually achieve adoption. Um, as we've seen
with like stuff like friend tech, for example, um, the, the question now being like, how do we mix,
like, how do we ensure that these systems don't just die after the, uh, the end of the sort of like
the initial hype, um, that they generate, I guess.
Yeah, I think, I think I, my point was in general, like, uh, no crypto chain, uh, application has hit
mainstream adoption because I think it focused on financialization too early. Like the reason why I
got into crypto was the idea of like decentralized ownership of like unstoppable protocols, uh, that
can do financial activity, that have social activity. And I think protocols that focus too
much on financialization too early, uh, are only going after like a subset of very, very small
niche in a group subset of people. And like the normies that we want to bring like the next
billion users on chain, or I would say the first billion users on chain. Cause we have like
10 users on chain across all these ecosystems today. Uh, and I think that to do that, it has to be a
non-financialized application because most people are not going to come here, uh, to, to lever up for
volatility institutions might. So like, I think obviously the work that like, uh, Sonny, you were saying
about bringing on fire blocks and Bitcoin and whatnot, like getting institutional, uh,
infrastructure is our primitives are going to be key to bring an institutional capital
into the space. And I think that maybe like starts to fly a wheel of getting more mind
share in the cosmos ecosystem. So I think that's incredibly important. It's like, I don't want to
say that financial applications are, are not, uh, important that they very much are. Uh, and I think
you could do a lot of interesting stuff with the cosmos stack that you can't do in other ecosystems.
But I think also to bring in, like, uh, I think Sonny was saying earlier, people are doing like
P2P payments, uh, paying in tether and whatnot. Like people, most people in around the world just
want to have like a really easy censorship resistant P2P like payments application, uh,
that also maybe have a social, uh, social like aspect to it. And I think if we can, I don't know
what that use case exactly looks like. That's better than web two, but if we can find that,
if we can try to attract the right builders to re-imagine what this application could be, uh,
and if it's good enough, like that's how you bring on the next billion users. Like it mostly starts
off with like a type of social aspect to it, but I think Frentech is going to pretty much die because
it's financialized too early. Uh, and we, we got to figure out a way to, I guess, find the,
find a middle ground. Obviously I don't have like the solution, but I would just caution that like
focusing solely on leverage and yield farming and whatnot, like that's not going to bring in
a billion users. It just won't.
Yeah. I noticed, uh, Chris, Chris Amani's here and, uh, and the listeners, I know he has some
thoughts on this. I don't know if you guys are interested in kind of bringing him up, getting
his, his two cents on it. Yeah, of course, uh, Chris, if you want to just, uh, make a request,
we'll, we'll definitely bring you up. Um, and like I said, we are, we are kind of running over. So
at some point we will start to invite people, but, uh, I know for example, Jack has been fighting to get
back up on stage and we've now got him back up. Uh, so Jack, if, uh, over to you, if you've,
you've got some comments. Oh, no, I was just, I had to jump real quick for a couple of minutes
and then I'm back up, but, uh, yeah, just wanted to rejoin the conversation here.
No worries. Elijah. Yeah. So, so I was just going to say, um, I think like, uh, you know,
uh, for capital made some interesting points, uh, but I, I tend to disagree pretty largely. Like,
I think like, it's easy to say like, Oh, wouldn't it be like, you know, great if we had some, you
know, perfect social killer app that everyone wanted to use and had censorship resistant P2P
payments and everyone would love that. I don't think like that's the reality of the situation.
I think like crypto is really good at a few things, very obviously. I think like friend tech,
I will argue like is only successful because it is a financial app. Like it would not be, you know,
like, and, and, and most of friend tech is actually not on chain. Any of the social components
of friend tech are actually not on chain, right? They're, you know, it's, it's on an app on your
iPhone or Android or whatever. Right. The, the, you know, elements that are on chain are the ones
that are financial, right? It is like the bonding curve, you know, aspect of it. Um, and, uh,
there's sort of like P2P payment side. It's, it's like a very easy lift as like a developer to build
something like that, right? Like every blockchain has P2P payments. Um, and there's like, you know,
a million checkout with products, right? Coinbase has a Coinbase commerce and, you know, um, you
know, Bitcoin has, you know, like, you know, check out with Bitcoin or like there's some Bitcoin
companies that do check out with Bitcoin and, you know, there's some Ethereum companies that do it
just for Ethereum. You know, there's like, there's applications like these that exist that just like
let you do payments. Um, so I just want to like, I just want to like double click on it and just,
you know, reiterate that friend tech is like the super components are not on chain. The, the,
the social, you know, the financial components are on chain. Um, and so I think like,
it just reiterates like crypto is really good at a few things. A lot of those things are financial.
And I, I think like, you know, we can try to drift away from that. Um, but if you even look at like,
you know, the most interesting applications of crypto to gaming and, you know, other situations,
I think a lot of them are financial. Um, I think some of them are a little bit more like,
you know, like long-term interesting stuff, you know, like, like this, uh, autonomous world stuff,
I think is still interesting. I wouldn't say it's like entirely financial. Um, but I will say that,
like, I think a lot of the most interesting things are financial. And if we look at the
successful social applications in crypto, they have like large financial elements and
that's usually where the crypto comes in. Um, so yeah, I'm just putting that out there.
Jose, you've, uh, you had your hand raised for a while. Uh, just another reminder for Chris,
uh, if you, if you do want to come up, then, uh, then please request and we'll bring you up.
But yeah, Jose. Yep. Can you hear me?
Loud and clear. Nice. Yeah. Um, on the, on, on the topic of like Ethereum users,
I do think they're like two separate strands and both are super valuable. Like one attracting
kind of net new users to crypto and the second one on just like going after existing Ethereum users.
Um, I do think like always going after net new users and, and net new experiences is,
it's a bit of a, uh, is like somewhat of a trap. Like I think to some extent we have to accept that
there are maybe, depending how you, how you, how you look at it, like a hundred thousand or so users on
chain. Um, and rather than like kind of hating on that, it's worth realizing that probably the highest
willingness to pay like demographic you can find anywhere, right? Like there, there's like
alluvium crowdsale or whatever had less than a thousand participants raised 72 million. There's
plenty of examples of this. People aping nearly nine figures into base out of, off an etherscan contract
without even a front end. I'm like these, these things are, are huge opportunities. Um, and I think
building applications around that and around like proven use cases like speculation and financial,
financialization is important. It's just that, uh, Cosmos versions of them have to be sufficiently
better to warrant people moving over. And I don't think that's like an infeasible task. Uh, I think
there's a bit of, people are a bit defeatist about it. I think the last poll market showed that a lot
of youth heads are definitely willing to move over to new ecosystems provided there's like new yield or
just like net new interesting opportunities, whether it was Solon or, or, or, or Terra or Avax,
right. All, all sort of prove that in their own ways. Um, and I think that'll come back. I don't,
I don't really think, uh, most people care about like ETH alignment or ETH security. Um, I think
it's a bit of a meme right now. I think most people care about being able to use MetaMask and it being
really easy. Like most of these rollups don't even have sort of like permissionless fraud proofs in,
in, in production. They're like multi-sigs. You know, people aren't analyzing that and looking at the
security trade off. So I do think if you can, if you build net new, like better applications,
you can attract those users from Ethereum. And to some extent it's a more proven market than going
after like Bitcoin users, right. Which like every single, like we've seen a bunch of people try and
get Bitcoin people to, to do stuff, whether it's on like the stacks of this world or like the Bitcoin
rollups and like that, that's been really difficult. I am hopeful. I think, I think there's like,
all those strands are interesting, but I think like, it's really important to also focus on
bringing ETH users over. I think it's like very much feasible. Well, very much feasible,
but you do need like net new applications and creative builders. And for me, like the way that
you get that, uh, I mean, there's definitely some of it that can be top down, like brilliant people
like those on, on this call, um, sort of doing, doing brainstorming on what those applications
could look like, you know, putting out requests for builders, requests for protocols. But I think the,
the main way that you do that is through BD. It's, it's through getting out there like, like
Evercapital said in, in the universities, um, doing DevRel, like having a, a BD function,
just talking to a lot of builders who have cool ideas and, and having like a portfolio approach to
it, right, where you're, you're getting a bunch of builders to come and try things. And some of them
will work hugely, right, which is what we saw with, for instance, Solana last cycle, uh, which now has like
a few applications, which I'd say are reaching like some, some decent traction. Um, and like,
yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm, again, I have huge respect for the efforts of, of Jack Zaki and others on,
on the BD side. But I'm like on the total opposite side that, that decentralized BD will, will work.
Like I really think you do need centralized BD with real killers that can run a whole process that,
that, that can like follow up Esther, but that's their full-time job that they're going to universities
that they're winning over these builders because other ecosystems have that, um, it's proven its,
its effectiveness. Um, and you just can't compete with that in a, in a decentralized way in my,
in my mind. Yeah. I think that one thing to think about when we're thinking about these
centralized efforts in other BD communities is like, what's the cost to acquire a consumer
and like how much does that consumer bring in? And I think that if you actually dig into the
numbers on a lot of those things, they're incredibly in the negative, i.e. they're spending a lot of
money to bring in very marginal users who aren't making a huge difference. And then those users end up
getting taken by other ecosystems in many cases. Um, so I think that this like winning of centralized
BD strategies, there's a lot of factors that aren't being considered. And when you look at some
like traditional web two metrics, maybe they're not nearly as successful as we think they are.
And I think that, you know, parity spinning down their BD efforts sort of shows this in a real way.
Um, I think like one of the value props from a BD point of view that actually Cosmos kind of
historically has neglected is more like the number of counterparties that are willing. Like,
I, I actually think that like the efforts, the BD efforts on Ethereum are like, kind of like the
things that have worked on Ethereum have been, and like worked in, I think Ethereum the most is,
has been, uh, like one is the number of like the number and diversity of counterparties that use
Ethereum. Right. And I do think that that's an incredibly valuable metric. Um, uh, the,
another metric that is, um, that I think is like really valuable, uh, around a theory that like
Ethereum has gotten, uh, right. It's like value of assets issued on chain. Um, like asset issuers
are really critical. Um, I think things kind of fall out of, of those, of those kind of core,
uh, those core metrics. I think like one of the biggest challenges of that, like, you know,
kind of like loop back to the beginning with like what Jose has said is a big part of like how the ICF
sees the world is literally the only metric they track is how big their treasury is and how rapidly
they are spending it. Um, that's probably the only KPI that exists. Um, uh, and like Brian's response
to Jose's tweet was like reiterating that that is the core metric of the ICF. Like this is how big
our treasury is. This is how fast we're spending it. Um, and there is largely no other goal. There's
never been any other goal at the ICF. The stated purpose of the ICF, uh, was to shift IBC, uh, and
the, and the Cosmos stack. And there was never, as there's never been a KPI that existed at the ICF
after that. Um, and it is going to be really, it's really, really hard to retroactive, like retrofit
those KPIs, uh, uh, onto any of the existing organizations. So I think like one of the biggest
challenges then is like to have a centralized BD effort and to have a BD effort that makes sense,
right? The other thing is like, you need to have a central token. Uh, you need to have a token that
like accrues value from the BD efforts. Um, even if the, if the value that accrues is just like hype
value. Um, and you know, this is, this becomes like sort of like a, you know, why like, you know,
this idea of having more organizational structure that's like funded in Adam, incentivized in Adam,
um, is a thing, but that requires like a whole decentralized governance process that has been
incredibly slow moving. Um, and you know, I'm grateful for all of the people who have participated
in it. Um, but yes, it is, it is a, it is a, it is a bit of a tricky thing and I don't anticipate
anything changing at the ICF, um, ever, uh, I expect that their, their metrics will always be,
this is the size of our treasury. This is how quickly we're spending it. Um, and, uh, I don't
think that that will ever change. And I think that there needs that way, if there's ever going to be
an institution in Cosmos that has a different KPI than that, um, it'll have to be spun up kind of de novo.
There definitely seems to be some sort of, um, coalescence around this,
this argument of, of, of centralized versus decentralized BD. And, uh, that might need a,
another discussion sort of in its own right by the sounds of it. Um, but sort of, uh, to put that
to one side for a second, Jose was, uh, was keen to speak to Chris earlier on. He's, he's come up.
Um, so welcome, Chris. And, uh, yeah, Jose, maybe you want to just sort of remind us what, what you
would, uh, what you were hoping he would talk about.
Uh, no, I just, I've just, uh, spoken to Chris about this a bit over, over the last few weeks.
And, um, I know they have, yeah, he has some thoughts on that. Also a lot of experience in
web two on the BD side. So just wanted to get his, his take on this whole, on the Cosmos distribution
properly and how he's, how he's thinking about it.
Yeah, sure. So, um, you know, first and foremost, I don't have a ton of experience. I just,
I've been with Tara for, um, you know, I think we're coming up on, on two years and a few months here.
Um, and I don't, I don't have a ton of experience like monitoring or understanding what ICF has done
historically, but I do want to say, um, I kind of agree with both Jack and Jose in a way.
Um, like first and foremost, like all of the stuff that's been built by, I think we're like nearing
an inflection point on UX UI and Cosmos and, and all of the tools and infrastructure that's been
invested in, in this kind of organic decentralized way, um, feels like it's just right on the verge
of paying off in terms of abstracting away, um, what is currently an impossible UX UI, um,
between all of these chains and tracking what happened afterwards. And so like the work on IBC
hooks and, and IBC in general and packet forward, packet forwarding middleware, I feel like it,
like there's an opportunity in the next couple of, um, maybe months, maybe in the next couple of
quarters to like really leapfrog, um, a lot of other ecosystems in terms of like the applications
that can be built on top of it and abstracting all of that away. So first and foremost, I think,
you know, as much flack as they've gotten, and again, I don't follow this that closely,
like a lot of the work that's been done has been incredibly valuable and, and the applications that
that Tara's building are going to take advantage of that. So I want to acknowledge that. I think
I also, what, what Jose said, I do think there needs to be some kind of centralized effort.
Um, or at least that some kind of centralized effort could potentially be, um, positive ROI,
but I would also agree with Jack and that if you, if you applied web two metrics to the,
the types of money that's been spent by some of these other ecosystems, I doubt any of them would
make any financial sense. Um, and it's just because like crypto hasn't solved the retention problem
yet. Right. And so when you're working on a funnel, you just typically, you rarely in any
web two company that I've been a part of would throw a bunch of money at the top of the funnel
when you haven't figured out how to retain those users. And so, yeah, they've been effective at
like getting people in, but I don't think they've been effective at getting people to stay,
but that isn't to say that, that we can't try new things and apply these metrics and these
frameworks for evaluating spend, um, especially like BD spend or sales spend, um, on like a small
scale to see how it would work. Right. Like, like, is there a middle ground where,
you know, ICF doesn't completely pivot. ICF doesn't completely, you know, pour millions and millions
of dollars into it, but you create some small team. Um, you give them a defined set of metrics
and you let them build out a pipeline and, and like apply basic web to customer acquisition strategies
to it and see how it works. Right. Like it feels like there could at least be some kind of
experimentation that could take place. I agree. I tend to see the problem with this though,
is like, who's backstopping that BD effort? You know, does the ICF spin up an entire like
consulting business and start competing with a ton of different folks in the ecosystem who also like
provide that work, look at informal and strange level on this call, as well as other folks.
Um, or is it just sort of like teeing up things for other builders in the ecosystem and helping
connect people? I think if it's B, that's a really great way to grow it. And back to the
the comments around like making, making people really wealthy and like how Ethereum has been
successful, Cosmos has made a lot of validators and other infrastructure builders able to make
a living in this ecosystem. And, you know, if the ICF starts competing with those folks,
that's to our detriment.
Spade, you've, uh, you've been waiting a while. You've, uh, you've got your hand up.
Yeah, sure. I think like, I think that that's really interesting conversation that I've been
sort of like trying to wrap my head around, but, but, um, I think that second type of like BD effort
that we're discussing right now, it probably should be conducted actually. Like, I think there's a paradox
that I find interesting, which is that that second BD effort should probably be conducted by
sort of like the, the, the, the platforms and application teams themselves, because they're
a lot better placed to have kind of like a view of exactly what products can be built,
what teams are capable of doing this and, you know, like to, to actually reach people and
build things that, that are valuable. And there, there may be ways, although I think they're probably
not obvious due to like conflicts of interest and all of these kind of like, um, complexities
in making robust systems, um, for, for, for the support to be, to be granted. But like,
so my fundamental like belief here is that like, I think these teams to teams like, um, ourselves,
like, um, Chris's teams as well should be the ones doing this effort and should be supported
in doing so to really bring distribution to the ecosystem. But I think the paradox lies in the fact
that the, at the end of the day, the, the sort of like experience that Chris is talking about,
which by the way, I fully agree with, um, the, the sort of like logical conclusion,
the way to frame this, in my opinion, is it's abstracting the chains away. Right. And so you
have this kind of like, kind of like interesting sort of, um, sort of like dichotomy between like
the chains themselves as entities, like prominent, prominent entities are conducting the BD and basically
like driving the ecosystem and application build out. Well, at the same time, you know,
that for us to be actually able to vampire attack centralized exchanges and, and, and other types
of institutions that have reached distribution around, you know, crypto, like cryptography and
blockchains, um, you need to completely abstract away the platform, you know, the, the sort of like
the general gist of, of the idea being like, oh, you know, when you're, um, using a website,
you don't think about like AWS and whatever. Right. And I think that's that intuition is kind of like,
it's, it's, uh, directionally correct. Right. We have made a lot of, um, of progress thanks to
like teams like Strangelove and others, uh, in terms of like that IBC UX, um, routing,
aggregation, and, and all of these things. Um, there are teams like Cosmosis who are doing
like similar work to what we've been thinking about, like for, for a very long time at Neutron,
which is, you know, how do you create this kind of like, um, the wallet itself even is abstracted,
but you have that sort of like access method that allows you to hold, move,
funds and access applications like throughout, not just Cosmos over IPC, but really throughout
the entire industry. So that at the end of the day, what the user sees is like one app that gives
it a portal into anything that like DeFi has to offer really without really having to think about
these contracts of like a bridge, right? Like as long as we keep thinking about bridges as bridges,
we've basically failed our missions. Like the bridges themselves shouldn't, well, not that they
shouldn't exist, but they shouldn't be something that are on the top of the mind of the end of
anyone really what the user should do is access applications. And maybe that requires some,
you know, management to get the assets where they need to be. And, but, but that should
be completely abstracted away from, from, from what people think about. Right. And so, um,
you know, I, I think it's like a, a super interesting kind of like bunch of discussion
that we've had today. Um, and just wanted to kind of like wrap, wrap this into sort of like what I've
been thinking about this. Um, Zachy, I see that you have your hand up. Do you want to go?
Yeah. I just wanted to like, um, make another just comment, you know, about like process and
structure here, which is the, one of the capabilities of the situation, right? Is that like
the decentralized BD network, like came into existence? Um, it's not just that, you know,
the strangers and the informals who are on these calls, it's like Cosmo station, Kepler,
all of these things own pieces, significant pieces of BD flow. Um, and another problem that
like, because we're not like essentially a new ecosystem and instead this thing exists,
right? The role of the ICF in BD has always been very unclear for specifically this reason. Are they
supposed to feed deals, uh, to these entities or not? Um, and the, and it like imposes an additional,
so like the Solana foundation also like doesn't essentially own customer success or like from
their, from their top of funnel in any way, shape or form, they feed, they feed out all of the,
all of the inbound out to like this network. But, and like, if you, if you are a little bit more
familiar with the Solana ecosystem, the failure rates on BD efforts are
incredibly high, um, because of this, because like you have BD teams at the foundation who like,
you know, bring in a lot of deals, um, and very, very few of those deals end up turning into like
things that are actually launched on chain. Um, because like they, you know, they die somewhere
in this like contracting process and like, um, and consensus on the other hand, like owned a lot of,
of, of deals in hand and got a lot of things over the finish line. Um, uh, uh, though a lot of like,
you know, consensus built apps ended up not being dominant in care in their category, like Uniswap built
AirSwap and stuff like that, uh, killed AirSwap. But on the other hand, it's like consensus did build
end to end solutions. Um, and some of those solutions ended up mattering. Uh, and so, uh,
it is, it is very tricky actually to kind of try to retrofit any sort of centralized coordinated BD effort
onto like the existing network without torpedoing all of the things that already exist. Um, and that's
another incredibly difficult thing to engineer, um, inside the foundation structure. And definitely,
like the current foundation leadership is extremely unaware of exactly like, you know,
where the interests are, where, what, what people are doing, what deals, uh, fortunately,
I'm not in the consulting business. And so I just feed deals to other teams.
Okay. So, um, we've, uh, we've got, uh, some fresh blood up on stage. Uh, we've lost Sonny,
we lost Jack. We've got Jack back. We've also got Fiborg back. Um, so, uh, one of the new guys up to
speak is, is better future. I believe off the top of my head is, is co-lead of the, uh,
Atom Accelerator DAO, uh, better future. I believe if you've been listening in and you've, uh, you've got
some comments. Yeah, sure. Uh, thank you. It's been a good discussion. I missed the first part of it,
but it seems to be a discussion about kind of the proper, um, topology of kind of BD teams within
kind of the, the, the inner chain, um, within the AEZ, uh, you know, around the hub. Um,
from Atom Accelerator DAO standpoint, definitely, you know, doing grant making, we, um, find from
time to time, there's a need to kind of structure the, the deals. And we end up kind of getting bogged
down with, you know, members of a part-time reviewer committee kind of getting called into
the task of, of, of, of structuring to, to kind of make, you know, uh, a project and the milestones
make sense. Um, and you know, there have been a number of cases where we could in the negotiations
with teams, um, return a portion of like, I'll give the, the Mystic Labs kind of wallet as an example.
Um, we were able to negotiate a 33% revenue revenue share, um, back to the community pool. And there's
quite a few cases where that that's possibly the case. AA DAO is very kind of focused on,
you know, the, the Atom value accrual problem, um, which kind of puts us in the, in the,
you know, the AEZ primarily, although there's possibilities where, you know, a deal with say
Uniswap could bring value back to Atom, um, which would take us out of the AEZ. Um,
I think for our phase two renewal mandate, um, we, we want to split the grant kind of
reviewer committee function with also having a parallel BD function and using the BD function to,
you know, do the, the origination and then the structuring and really with an emphasis on
bringing kind of revenue share back to the, back to the community pool. Um, so, so yeah,
those are a few thoughts kind of provisionally from AA DAO.
Okay. Thanks for that. I mean, we're actually sort of kind of really focused on, on, on a wider
Cosmos distribution program, um, problem at the moment, uh, rather than sort of being a specific,
specific, but I appreciate your thoughts. And, uh, I think five book had some, had some response to that.
Yeah. I got a bump. I got a bump. I'll catch you guys later. Thanks, Leiborg.
See you, Jack. See you, Jack. Uh, yeah, just on the, on that, actually, I think, um, like one very
important thing for, for Cosmos is for Atom to succeed. I'm actually curious, I left for a second,
so maybe it came up, but I'm sure, I'm curious why this didn't came up before that, uh, you know,
for, for an entire ecosystem to invest in itself, there needs to be a shelling point. Like there needs
to be a token here that people can ape into. I think it was Zaki or Jose that mentioned that the use
case for crypto are, you know, spot trading derivative, all of that is, uh, is speculation.
And to do speculation, you need to have like an asset that you can clearly identify as, you know,
the asset of the core ecosystem, uh, that's sort of not for the sort of ecosystem. That's it for
Ethereum. I feel like, you know, without that in Cosmos, all the efforts in BDE that you can have,
whether it's from a centralized entity or decentralized entity are essentially in vain.
I think you would lose a, you would, you would completely, you know, um, be unable to measure
any metrics without, you know, any focus on Atom. So what, um, I just wanted to plug in here that
informal system is, uh, is making a prop to switch the funding for the Cosmos hub team from the ICF
to the community pool. And maybe, uh, you know, that's a plea for the ICF to not withdraw, uh, this,
this, uh, cash, this, uh, liquidity that they're going to stop paying to informal and instead keep
for the stack. And I would like to see them use that to grow the AAZ and specifically focus on Atom.
And I think that would be, you know, a very important marketing effort for the entire ecosystem
to double down on Atom.
I, I, I partially agree with this, EG. I, I partially agree with the, like, I mean, I, I strongly agree with
the idea that in this industry, like having a token that pumps is sort of one of the things
that has been kind of like instrumental to driving interest and help motivate adoption because we're
still, you know, de facto in a place whereby there isn't, there is a degree of effort that is required
to onboard to any ecosystem or blockchain stack. And unless you have some sort of intrinsic motivation
in doing so, or, you know, extrinsic in some cases, like some people literally pay, uh, to,
to own, like for, on, for users to onboard themselves, like that can be a strategy, but as,
as was discussed previously in this conversation, it tends not to be super, uh, high ROI. Like,
I do agree in this, in, in this regard, right? What, what, where I sort of disagree is
at the end of the day, like, I don't think, um, like Atom can be accessed anywhere essentially,
right? It can be accessed on osmosis. It can be accessed on Ethereum. It can be accessed on
centralized exchanges. And so having the token pump is, I think a great thing and would help
Cosmos for sure. It like, you know, if anything, it would increase the security of the Cosmos hub
itself, as well as that of every consumer chain, it would make Atom a better meme, a better driver of
attention and, and, and, and interest in the ecosystem. Um, but, but I do think that like at the
end of the day, if Atom is not like what matters is not really Atom, it's what app you can access
Atom into. Right. Um, and, and, and I think that's what we should be focusing on.
I mean, like, just, just to sort of jump in there. Um, I, I do also sort of see where,
where Fibro is coming from and it relates to a space that we had on a Monday night where we sort of,
as a community interviewed some Solana users, uh, and we were talking to them about why they are not
Cosmos users. And, and one of the, the plain and simple reasons is that it's sort of the,
the UX problems that, that come from having multiple tokens around the ecosystem.
You know, you, if you're a Sol user, you use Sol, you buy a little bit of Sol,
that covers all your gas, wherever you, wherever you want to use it. It's not so much about the
fundamentals of Atom. It's, it's more about the, the, the UX of having a single token and not having
to have different gas, different tokens for gas on different chains.
Well, I mean, the gas point is an interesting one. And like, in fact,
that I'd be very supportive for, you know, Atom to be accepted as gas on every blockchain.
In fact, you know, Neutron, it is accepted as gas. And I think that's a really good thing
and a really good, like UX improvement. But I would go as far as to say, like,
just like we need to abstract the way the, the chains, we need to abstract the way the
gas fee constructs from the user experience. And so, you know, having multiple denominations
being accepted makes sense to me. Um, I do think that like Atom is a more natural
shelling point as, as, as, as long as we're focusing on kind of like just,
you know, Cosmos and its UX, like it probably is the denomination that we should choose as gas
denomination. But if our infrastructure allows, we should probably have multiple or any literally,
um, and Osmosis built something that goes into this direction. It is very easy to replicate with
any other decks that has that, that, that sort of liquidity. Um, and it is, you know, decently
possible to do with like application specific infrastructure to completely remove any barriers
to like what denomination is being used to, to pay gas fees. Um, so I, I think like that's,
you know, that's a good point though, but it, it, to me, it's more part of the fundamental,
fundamental problem of like, Oh, our UX sucks and we need to work on it. Right. Which I completely
agree with, but, but still like, I think the, like, you know, for better or for worse,
I think the fundamentals do, um, do play a large role. Right. And, you know, to Zaki's point,
like the, like volatility is, is, is part of the equation. And I think we've seen this with like,
you know, Terra classic kind of like had all of the perfect ingredients for, um, to become like a
major success. Right. It had, although in sustainable, very, very high and satisfying stable coin yield.
And it had Luna, which was, you know, this, this, this crazy, um, appreciating asset that went,
you know, from like from a few cents to a hundred dollars and like, like it, it drove people to look
into Terra at the very least and to eventually on board there. Right. And so like, that's why I'm
saying I agree to, with Cyborg's point on, um, one, it makes sense to use Adam widely in the ecosystem.
Um, you know, in fact, that's a big thing that, that we're trying to do in like
curating and nurturing and collaborating to grow an ecosystem or neutron. And I do think that like
as a gas nomination and such, it makes a lot of sense. Um, it also makes sense from the perspective
of like driving attention through, you know, um, volatility. Um, but I also don't think that
it solves the end game, which I think is more about, um, really focusing on like actually addressing,
um, demand from, from, from, from users when it comes to volt, like volatility yield and, um,
um, um, I forgot the third one, but yeah, Chris, anyway, go.
Well, we'll just, just, just a second before, before Chris jumps in. Sorry, Chris. Um,
just on, while we're on this subject, I think, um, as I say, just, just to try and not labor this
point too much about one token for the ecosystem and that kind of stuff. But, but one idea that came
up in the community at one point, I think it was on the cosmos forum would be the, for example,
you could hold Atom on the cosmos hub and use that as gas without it being actually on the
other chain. Like, how, how do you guys feel about that? Is it, is it technically possible?
Would it improve the UX of the ecosystem?
I think it's possible. And I think like these kinds of technologies and such are like
interesting developments. Like what, what, what I think is important is like
the goal should be to abstract away fees and to do so in a way that's like very safe, um, as simple
as possible, ideally that can be easily adopted throughout the entire ecosystem so that we get
rid of this hurdle to adoption as soon as possible. Um, but yeah, like now which mechanism specifically
we use I'm less concerned about. So, so I mentioned, uh, sorry, but a future just, just to cut you off
because, um, Chris was going to come in before that. Um, so, so yeah, I, I just think this is a
really good idea that we could potentially explore. It's probably not the, the forum to actually explore
how exactly, how exactly we go about it today. Uh, but I definitely think this is a good idea that
should be on the table. Um, so, so yeah, sorry for interrupting you before Chris, if you want to,
if you want to go ahead. Yeah, I think, you know, I, I feel like cosmos has always had a very long-term
perspective and I think if you're focused on the long-term and look like we have our own token, um,
we have no reason or incentive. We have no like incentive alignment with Adam. And so just to make
that, you know, obviously that might color a little bit of my perspective, but I think,
I think when you put the token price at the beginning of the process, you're making a huge
mistake. I think everything should be focused on users. I think everything should be focused on
applications. I think token price is an outcome. And frankly, it's one you can't control. You can,
we've seen this, right? Like anything you do with tokenomics or anything like that to try to get that
pump happening. It's short-lived. You know, I feel like you're almost worse off for it to go up and
then go back down than to just have it gradually build over time or just stay stable and build
organically. So I think you've got to think about like, if you're really going to do like a BD effort,
I think you've got to, it's got to be focused. Your vision, your strategy has to be focused on users.
It has to be focused on applications. And I just want to say like, you know, I've done this before
in web two and the token and web three adds a different dynamic. And
in some ways it makes it easier, but it makes it, it also makes it easier to get distracted because,
you know, every minute you spend sitting around, like talking about tokens going up is one minute
that someone else is going to spend talking to your users about how to make their lives better.
And the long-term, like the end game, like Spade said, is the long-term end game is users,
right? Like that's all that matters in the long-term. And so if you're really focused on
the long-term, that's where we should be focused. And one other point, like,
you know, in scaling, like, like I've built like outbound sales teams before, right? And it's really
hard when you can sit around and naval gaze about why it wouldn't work or what wouldn't happen or,
or like, like all of the downsides. And is it ROI positive at a certain point?
You just kind of have to throw a few resources at something and start grinding and get out in
front of people and get feedback, share that feedback, iterate on that feedback and,
and continue to invest. And so like, there's definitely, I go back to like my original point
is like, I don't think anyone should be, I don't think that there's the starting point for this is
like to go spin up a polygon, um, scale BD effort. I think it's like, can we all chip in
whether it's ICF? I don't, I don't know, like, I have no clue about these organizations. So keep
that in mind. Um, whatever organization it is, can we all contribute to a fund or whatever it is that
has a small team that can craft a vision and a strategy for execution. And that strategy would be
within three months, that strategy will be invalid because they'll learn a lot, they'll pivot and
then they'll continue. But like, there's just no substitution for just getting out there,
learning, iterating and adapting. And, um, yeah, those are kind of my two points. Like,
it's gotta be user centric. And at a certain point, you just kind of have to go,
you have to go try and learn.
Yeah, just want to just to answer Chris, you're absolutely right. I should have said the ICF should
focus on the Cosmos hub, the protocol, not Adam, the token. And one, um, one idea here,
yeah, what, what, uh, an idea of, you know, what's one type of idea that I'd like to see happening
is them incentivizing teams, uh, from the ecosystem to move into Cosmos. So we've had recently
MakerDAO actually laying out their decision to possibly fork Solana versus, uh, coming, you know,
into Cosmos, the same way, the way DX did. And the, uh, the reason was that they didn't feel like
they had enough support from anyone, uh, not from the ICF. The ICF was specifically mentioned there,
that there was kind of a lack of, um, you know, consistency, a lack of leadership here. So what I'd
like to see in terms of like concrete investments, not really BD per se, more like, um, you know,
offering, getting to MakerDAO and telling them, okay, we're going to sponsor you coming into
Cosmos. We're going to pay you, uh, you know, we're going to pay you in cash. We're going to pay you in
resources. We're going to pay you in support. Like this can take different forms, but actually
making them take the move to, for instance, launch a consumer chain on top of the Cosmos hub using
shared security. That would be like one very concrete use case where the ICF could be providing that
DD function, um, using some, uh, some of the, um, liquidity they have in order to grow, uh,
the Cosmos hub and by extension Cosmos. I'm not sure how realistic this is.
Like, I, I don't know if Maker would want to be, um, necessarily on replicated security as a stack
because I assume that they, they would probably, uh, I don't know, being from Ethereum, maybe like
opt for like restaking or, or things like this. Um, or, but I could be completely wrong.
And then the other thing is like, I think by support and lack thereof, I'm not sure it's
about money, right? I think it's about the ability to have somebody in front of you that knows exactly
what you're trying to do and that knows exactly how it is going to work with a given technology
and can help us like, and can help you like, you know, debug, um, fix any issues that, that you're
having any, like fill any information gap and that kind of stuff.
And so like the ACF certainly has some financial resources that can deploy and perhaps, you know,
perhaps that would help. But I think, I think the bigger problem is that like information,
knowledge and expertise is fragmented in the ecosystem. And so in fact, it's very difficult
for you to sort of like find one, uh, a one-stop shop that will tell you everything that you need
to know about Cosmos. And you kind of have to manage, um, this kind of like coordination yourself
with all of the, the, the great entities in the, in the ecosystem to basically get these
things, right? There's very simple things of getting information, getting to ship your products,
fixing problems, that kind of stuff. Um, but surely Zaki has a lot more color on this since
he was involved in this process, like a couple of times already.
I'm sure he does just, just before he goes ahead, Feiburg, you, um, you sort of left and came back
and there was, uh, probably a big chunk of the discussion that was basically around sort
of centralized versus decentralized BD. Um, I personally, I think it might be like, uh, you
know, worthy of a space in its own right. So potentially something you, you could, uh,
set up at another point. Um, but Zaki, uh, yeah, uh, space, uh, interested to hear your thoughts.
Um, so I, I guess I would, I would say that like, yes, like integration, engineering,
customer success, like not having that in sort of any entry point is a huge, um, barrier to entry
to our ecosystem. It's actually kind of shocking the extent to which the ecosystem
has survived and, uh, managed to acquire users in, in spite of those things being
completely non-existent and barely available. Um, uh, it like, it continues to shock me to this day.
Um, I kind of, you know, the idea of having like, uh, uh, like any sort of KPI around users,
transaction volume assets, anything that was like actually supported at the ICF council level is like,
kind of like almost, it's like such a, like, would be so different from what we've currently
experienced that, or like what has ever existed in this ecosystem that like, uh, it's almost,
it's difficult for me to imagine it. Um, uh, so yeah, I don't really know. Uh, but that would be the,
that's like, that it would be a complete sea chain from what the ICF currently does, uh, and require
like to have even another, like a single other KPI other than how quickly we spent the treasury.
I see Brian in the audience, actually. Um, Brian, you might be interested, like, um, I'm,
I'm sure you've been giving a lot of thoughts to like ecosystem biddy recently. So if you want to,
um, share, um, feel free to request and we'll bring you on stage that you can share. Um, I also see
bendy's requesting, um, the mic. Here we go. He is. Yeah. Yeah. Bendy's actually just, uh,
messaged me to say he has the answer to everything. Oh, wow. So, uh, this, this should be good.
Yeah. Typically understated on my part. I was like, I've got this solved guys. Don't worry.
Um, no. So I think what some of the things that struck me really are, I guess, things that I've
experienced firsthand at AA now or kind of been witnessed to remotely. And I think that there
are some real advantages to the decentralization, which is that, um, it allows you to get teams that
are closer to the ground to do the actual work rather than everything having to come up from
some sort of, um, you know, it allows you to stay small and nimble and be reactive.
So for example, um, F Capital was talking earlier about programs in universities.
The easiest solution to that is find local community driven teams that want to do those
things and get them to go and do them rather than trying to come up with some sort of global program.
That's relatively simple to do. I think the hardest thing is then how you do the
information sharing. So literally listening to Zaki, Sonny, Jack talk about different versions of the
maker conversation as they know it is painful to me because we're having to try multiple approaches.
There's no really good information sharing. And that, uh, that coordination overhead is the cost of the
decentralization. And I think there are kind of some fairly straightforward structural things that if
everyone went into here in the kind of way that Chris was saying that like, okay, interested parties
come together and collaborate in some way, there is some form of information sharing, and there is potentially
some sort of centralizing information sharing and task management. And then you do have someone
gets allocated being in charge of the success of onboarding X team. So they can go through them and
then bring, take them to the individual experts that they need at those points. It doesn't mean that we
need a ICF style, you know, multi-million pound initiative. We have all the skills to do it.
We just, what we don't have is the coordination to bring those in at the right time. And I think if
people are genuinely willing to put their time into that and are willing to go with the coordination,
this is not an insurmountable challenge in any way. And we can play to the benefits of being a
decentralized and diverse ecosystem. And I think we can even attempt to do this in a fairly transparent
manner. Obviously, with some of these things around BD, you have to kind of redact some information
because it's always going to be fairly confidential. But I think there could be some better KPIs produced
that would allow people to know there are X number of conversations going on at this level,
there are X at a medium level, there are X at a grassroots level. These are the university
schemes we're doing. And I think kind of trying to then leave the kind of user acquisition to the
applications and focus the BD on acquisition of developers to build DApps. Cosmos has done a
really fantastic job of building on infra. And it still has some amazing infrastructure building teams.
And I think what we really need is to make sure that we're bringing on all of the applications and
the applications in turn can then be empowered to bring the users. So I think this is a very layered
structure. And it's about everyone knowing their part in it. And at the moment, I don't think anyone
really knows what part they're meant to be playing. So as much as I say, I've got the answer.
It's super complex, and it does rely on a lot of spirit of cooperation. But, you know, spaces like this
can't do anything but help.
Yeah, I completely agree on the last point there. It's been been really productive today.
And so just to sort of sort of paraphrase what you're saying, basically, you're saying that
almost sort of decentralized inputs into this process with sort of a centralized team.
My sort of question to that would be sort of like, what do you do with what comes out of it?
What goes where? What do you allocate everywhere? But interested to hear what the what the panel
thinks on what Bendy thinks, unless you want to correct me on what I've just said.
I suppose I was thinking of if you are, I think the most important thing to think about is if you
are a potential application or developer, what experience do you want to have? You don't want
to be pushed from pillar to post, you want to have one place you can come and say, and stick your hand
up, or you can meet someone at something and go, oh, great, they're going to take me through this
process from start to end. And even if then we're queuing in different teams during that process,
it feels better for that person. It's a bit like some of the stuff that people are talking about,
about actual user experience when they're using a chain now, where you can, you could use multiple
protocols, or you could be across lots of different chains, and you wouldn't necessarily have to know.
That's what we're going to have to recreate for Bendy.
I just want to jump in on one thing, which is, there is a capital base that's required to this.
For example, it took hundreds of thousands of dollars that didn't come from DYDX to do DYDX,
and the hundreds of thousands of dollars came from me.
If you don't have the ability to spend money and a budget, and the ability to come in and pay for
a security audit, or get a contract written, or pay a dev to do a thing, these are functions that
aren't really well represented. If you've got to go to a foundation, council-level meeting to get
every single thing funded, it's kind of pointless, right? The reason these things get, like a lot of
things in Cosmos have gotten done is because I have paid for them. And that is just as much
of a missing piece in this whole decentralized. And Strange Web is paid for a lot, and I'm sure
Informal is paid for some things here and there. But this is another missing piece in our
organizational structure. If everything is decentralized and you have to go hat in hand
because you're like, okay, this project needs this funding to succeed, it becomes pretty difficult.
Right? And even if you look at the Ethereum Foundation paying for the Uniswap security audits,
right? Hayden had to beg for money for a lot of places, but at least the EF came in and supported
him to get Uniswap audited and Uniswap B1 out the door, right? When every VC thought Uniswap was
uninvestable. There definitely are these, there's a lot of missing pieces in the Cosmos ecosystem.
Just briefly, Zaki, Jose was talking about this idea of the EF potentially allocating budgets to
specific teams to conduct exactly the operations that you're sort of like discussing, right? So
like contracting somebody to build something, auditing, like sponsoring an audit and that kind of stuff.
What do you think about this idea as a process, I guess?
I'm a little bit skeptical of this, knowing how the ICF has operated in the past, because again,
they are going to track, they generally spend a lot more time thinking about how they've spent money
rather than what the outcomes have gotten. And, you know, whereas like,
I have been, yeah.
Yeah.
In absolute, like in absolute, like the mechanism itself, like regardless of like the context.
Yeah, I wanted to defend the ICF a little bit, that in that they, they already pay the teams,
like Informal, like Strangelove, to support, essentially the developers of Strangelove and Informal
choose which project they want to support. When, when we're talking about like, you know,
small projects, like, you know, there's a problem with Hermes. Hermes is part of the ICF,
of the Cosmos stack that is supported by the ICF. Hermes developers will go and support these teams.
Yeah, I understand. I understand, of course, but I think like, what we're talking about right now is like,
the tasks that are required for onboarding new projects to the ecosystem, which might include,
like development or audits or like customizing some part of the stack, which then would be like,
definitely in the purview of like these teams. But yeah, Zeki, so like, briefly on the mechanism in absolute,
and then Brian, I'd love to have your, your, your point of view as well.
I guess we can stick directly to Brian. Okay, never mind. Go, go, go for it.
Sorry guys, we got a little bit mixed up there. I'm not quite sure who's talking. Bendy's had his
hand up for a while. He wanted to reply to something that Zaki was saying. So I'm just
going to unmute everyone, let him do that. And then we'll, we'll get to the five log again.
We'll get to Brian. Bendy.
Thank you. Um, yeah, well, first of all, um, if, okay, uh, that, um, ignore my hand if it's
showing up for you. Um, first of all, thank you, Zaki for, you know, financing these things.
It's really important that someone does, and it's great that you've done that. I think one of the
things, again, from my experience on the DAO is, had we needed to get the community's approval for
every grant that we've had, that would be an unmanageable system. And I think that one of the
things we have to do, whether it's from the ICF, whether it's from community pools, is create teams
that we trust with remits we understand and that they understand to allocate the funding that they
need to do so when they need to do it. So drawing up that budget is a real challenge, but it's
definitely something that needs to happen as part of this. And we have to kind of be comfortable
with the teams that are created that are going to do it. One of the hardest things is building
those teams because people immediately talk about conflicts of interest, et cetera. But really,
for this to work, we have to accept that that's alignment of interests,
that actually we all benefit from this pie growing that we keep talking about. But if we prevent all
the individual bakeries from being part of that, the pie growing ain't going to happen. So I think
there's probably some checks and balances, probably some thinking through of it, but I fundamentally think
that we have to find ways to bring people together. I'm going to have to
develop a, do some stuff now anyway. So, but thank you very much to Soy and Spade and everyone who's
been, you know, for coordinating this and for all the speakers. This has been an excellent space.
I really appreciate you guys.
No, I appreciate you coming up, mate, and solving everyone's problems.
And I'll speak in the DMs again soon. Thank you.
See you later, pal. Okay, Brian, your turn, mate.
I think Saki brought up a really important view point, which is he has an opinion, he has a thesis,
right? And that thesis and that opinion, he personally invested in. And so when you kind of
distribute and decentralize opinions, some of the purity of it kind of can get lost in the froth and in
debate, right? So when you look at ecosystems as a whole, the number one thing that they want to
drive is fees. To drive fees, they need to drive transactions. For transactions, they need to drive
users. For users, they need the trading volume or TVL. But at the end of the day, like you kind of have
to like scalp out what people want to do is trade something that they want to trade or engage and adapt
that they want to engage in. Like if you think about how hard it was to acquire Bitcoin or Ethereum
at the beginning, you had to jump through all these hoops. You had to do command line stuff.
It was just like insane. But that promise and people wanted that asset. So if you don't have
something that people want to trade or engage with, like it doesn't matter, right? So the demand has to
be embedded in there. And we work with like 10 different ecosystems. And effectively, that's all that
matters at the end of the day. Like the tech is cool. Everybody's got, the tech is, you know,
updating and across the board, tech is getting faster and faster and modular and decentralized and
TPS. Like it's all becoming like a blurry mess. And the real champion dApps and developers,
they want to get paid. They want to get paid and then they want to get support to build where they're
going to build. And so if the kind of anecdotes that we use to talk this about, there's a couple
different anecdotes. One of the anecdotes we've been using recently is that like every blockchain
needs to act like a private equity fund with like a roll of thesis. Another anecdote we use is that
every blockchain is like a streaming service. And you're going to go to the blockchain that has the
show that you want to watch or the dApp that you want to use. And if you use this framework,
then every blockchain with an ecosystem fund is kind of like a producer. And they need to,
you know, like go to the talent, they need to produce a dApp, they need to produce a show
that people want to use. And so while a lot of the concentration I've found in Cosmos is that
like the infrastructure layer, you know, Terra did a really good job at, hey, here's some crazy
dGen like dApps that people want to use and let's get them engaged. And I think it doesn't need to be so
Ponzi-fied and so dGen, but if there's something on, you know, Neutron or something in the Cosmos
ecosystem that people want to trade, or it's an exclusive asset, that becomes very, very valuable
to the ecosystem at large.
Yeah, I tend to agree with a lot of that. Just to say Spade had to drop, he's had to jump into a
meeting that he should have been in an hour ago or something, but this space has gone long over
schedule. So I think we will start to wrap it up pretty soon. We've got CuriousJ, also from the
AADAO, bit of an AADAO invasion today. So yeah, CuriousJ, if you'd like to make your point, and then
we'll probably start to wrap up the space. Hi, thanks for having me. First of all, it's been a
great discussion. It's great seeing everybody in Cosmos come together and, you know, at least agree on
the problem that we have on Cosmos. And, you know, personally, I saw this problem two years ago,
and I think the Cosmos problem is that it's so decentralized and has been focusing only on tech
stack, but there hasn't been, you know, teams to really showcase the products that have been built
for it. And that's something that we realized that AADAO, and obviously I know we're focused mostly on
Atom and AEZ, but, you know, having like a subDAO or interchain DAO that can come to enterprises and even,
you know, build a blockchain for them, build a DAB for them. You know, it's good building, you know,
these decentralized apps with Ponzi trading and whatnot, but that's not really going to be
sustainable moving forward. Like, we need to figure out a way to use Cosmos tech stack to build
real products that people can come in and use, because we have such a diversified infrastructure,
right? We have Cosmos for DABs, we have Cosmos SDK, we have app chains, we have IBC. You know,
even since the IBC days, we had two years to really showcase that it's been the best
interoperable product we had in crypto. And we didn't really do much to, you know, gain adoption
other than within our own small ecosystem. And it wasn't really until Terra that came that kind
of showcased that. So, you know, we have to look at what other blockchains have gone right. You know,
with Terra, obviously USD was a failure, but what it did do is it captured a lot of developers,
a lot of interest, and you know, even became a threat to Ethereum, based on how fast it grew.
And a lot of it came to UX, a lot of it came to just meeting customer demand. So for Cosmos,
like we're, I see it as a more mature ecosystem. And the fact that we have built such technology
that is ready to tackle, you know, web to and bring those companies in and solve real problems
for them. So and I think we do need like a centralized or collateral, collaborated effort,
whether it's, you know, sub DAOs voted in by the community, or, or have some some kind of
collaborative effort by developers and the leaders in Cosmos to kind of build something to solve these.
That's pretty much it.
I appreciate your thoughts. Anybody on the panel got anything to add to that or respond?
Okay. So as I said earlier on, we're now running over two hours on the on this space. I think it
has been really productive. There's a lot to digest. So it's a good job that it is recorded.
But we will start to wrap it up unless anyone on the panel has any any final comments.
I'll throw one last comment real quick, the the the mission of Y Combinator is build something people
want. And to, you know, get in crypto, it's, you know, build a debt that people want to use,
or have an asset that people want to trade. It's really that simple.
Yeah, that makes that makes a ton of sense. Brian, I like your producer analogy, every blockchain
needs to produce the apps that the customer base wants needs and finds benefit from. Building on
Bendy's comments, I know he had to go, but maybe we can all think about the question of, you know,
how would we create a decentralized coordination mechanism for all these different,
you know, decentralized BD teams and efforts. I agree that if we lose the decentralized kind of
roots of the ecosystem, which is our strength, you know, we, we, we, we lose a real advantage,
but this coordination overhead problem is also a true problem if there's, you know, eight, 10,
15, 20 teams, and they're not in sync with one another. And they're, you know, funding redundant
versions of the same thing, or the competing, you know, to bring the same kind of chain to the
ecosystem, or maybe, maybe there's, you know, a certain set of, you know, developments that are
taking place within the hub, you know, kind of team at informal that would make, you know,
a project that AADOW funds to be obsolete. I mean, these are the kinds of things that just
don't make a lot of sense. And yeah, a question that we can all think about, I don't know what the
answer is, but how do we do decentralized coordination? I think that's a very good question.
And there's, there's probably been a lot more questions raised than answers today. I don't think
we ever really sort of intended to, you know, magic bullet this, this, this issue in one space.
So before I kind of end the space, I just want to say, firstly, thank you to everybody who joined in
the audience today. Thank you to all the panelists who are still here, all the ones that weren't,
and also all the ones that we, we just couldn't kind of squeeze into the space for, for the invite
in the first instance. I suspect there's going to be more spaces on this. Neutron will, will,
will happily host those or, or attend other, other spaces that people want to start sort of set up to,
to discuss this further. And just to, to kind of close things out with, with something a little
bit Neutron related. We do have another space coming up on Tuesday where we'll be talking to a new
project launching, launching on Neutron called Amulet Finance. Uh, that space will be hosted by Cosmos
Club and, uh, hopefully we'll, uh, we'll see some of you on there as well. So yeah. Um, thank you again
to everyone who came today. Uh, it's been long and, uh, very interesting and, uh, yeah, an absolute pleasure
to host. So thank you very much guys. And we'll, we'll see you again soon.
