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Expanding Cross-Chain DeFi to New Domains - IBC Eureka x Elys Network
Recorded: April 21, 2025 Duration: 0:48:39Space Recording
Short Summary
Alice Network launches as a new DeFi platform aimed at onboarding non-native crypto users, achieving over 3 million TVL and introducing innovative features like smart shielded liquidity pools and prediction markets. The discussion emphasizes the importance of partnerships and regulatory compliance in driving growth and user engagement within the Cosmos ecosystem.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Hey, can you guys hear me?
I hear you just fine.
How are you doing, man?
Good, Hisham.
How are you doing?
Excellent.
Excellent.
It's great to see you all here. I'm excited to kick it off.
Yeah, same here, same here. Let's give it maybe two more minutes.
Cosmos slash host, is there any way we can get some music going?
From the production studio on desktop, we don't have that feature going on.
I see, I see.
Gotcha.
Gotcha. you all righty should we kick it off the show you good to go good to go? Good to go. Let's do it. Awesome. Welcome, everybody.
I'm out here in Long Island, actually, for Easter weekend. I hope everybody's doing well.
Today, we have a really exciting guest. We have Hisham, who is one of the co-founders of
Alice Network, which builds, I guess, like, raise your hand in the crowd
if you've used Alice before or been to the site.
Yeah, we definitely got a couple.
So Alice is, at a high level, a DeFi product, an all-in-one DeFi product that helps, I would
say, non-extremely native crypto users get onboarded into crypto.
non-extremely native crypto users get onboarded into crypto.
But Hasham, you want to kick it off by just saying,
giving an introduction to Alice and how you want to pitch it to the community.
Yeah, thank you, Mag. I appreciate that.
I appreciate the intro and happy Monday to everybody who's tuning in.
It's always a pleasure to be on stage with, you know,
such a prominent leader like Mag,
building in the Cosmos ecosystem
and just really guiding us forward
and making sure that we're presenting a unified front.
So I just wanna start off with that
because I think that's a really, really
underappreciated thing right now
in what's going on with our build out.
As far as LS Network goes,
we started building LS Network over two years ago
and our vision was really to take DeFi to the next level. Like, you know, we, we had seen the options out there,
whether it was like centralized exchanges where users typically, typically start off,
maybe they go in and they create an account, they buy, you know, a couple tokens to start
off, and they don't really know what's going on. Eventually, at some point, they'll graduate up to,
or become a little bit more familiar or technically
inclined to go and want to create their own self-custody wallet.
And then from there, maybe start experimenting
with decentralized exchanges.
So where we are trying to really kind of move forward
with LS Network is to marry those two,
to give you the very best features
that you can get from a centralized exchange, the ease of use, the ease of access, you know, just
everything there all in front of you in one platform. And then put that in a self-custody
platform where you can just access one with one app, but you're always going to have your tokens
in your own wallet. So that was kind of the premise of why we built Ellis Network. Not to compete with other decentralized exchanges,
not necessarily to compete with centralized exchanges,
but more to be like an augment or a hybrid of both
to give you the optionality.
And one of the things that I think we pride ourselves in
with Ellis is because of that,
because of the way that we're built,
our success does not rely on taking liquidity from another platform.
So we don't compete with Osmosis. We don't compete with Uniswap.
We don't really compete with Coinbase or Kraken or any of those OKX.
But instead, we actually use them as partners.
So for us, that liquidity flow back and forth is what's really good for a user.
that liquidity flow back and forth is what's really good for a user. You get efficiency,
you have lots of ways to audit off-ramp your assets, places to move it around, because the
flow of those assets is just as important as having the assets sitting on chain. So if you're
a brand new user wanting to get started with LS Network, and maybe you don't have a lot of DeFi
experience, we make it really easy. You can get on with a social login like a Google,
Apple ID, Reddit, etc. If you're already a pro, if you're already an advanced user, you have all your wallets like Ledger set up and everything, just connect your wallet and off you go. So
pretty excited. I'm excited to see what the feedback is going to be from the community here
and from any new users that we get along the way. Cool. Very cool.
Yeah, I actually found Ellis and started using it myself.
I think I was initially drawn in by the fact that there was
40% APR on USDC deposits,
which I still admit
this far later.
I think I've earned a lot of Eden rewards
from that. But I was
kind of shocked by just how smooth you guys made the experience and
how you introduced a couple features, but each one felt very thought out.
They all felt like they worked together really smoothly.
The decks felt like it had really great execution, even at low liquidity.
And are there any sort of highlights in terms of, I know you guys recently passed like 3
million TVL,
like any things you've learned
or any big developments that have happened recently?
Yeah, I think for us,
the thing that we're most pleasantly surprised by
since we launched four months ago
is the stability or maybe stability is not the right word,
the outperformance of our smart shielded liquidity pools.
So again, for those who have not familiarized themselves with LS Network,
the smart shielded liquidity pools are our own proprietary design
on how we set up our liquidity pools,
which are currently all paired with USDC.
So in a typical decentralized exchange,
you're probably familiar with the AMM model,
the automated market maker.
Every time you make a swap within that pool,
if you're swapping tokens in there,
the balancer system automatically rebalances
that token pool to 50-50.
And then it relies on an arbitrage trader to come in
and essentially change the price back to market
pricing because when you're rebalancing the pool the price actually changes that is where you get
a market dislocation so if you don't have arbitrage traders coming in time to balance a pool the price
on that decentralized exchange does not match what it's actually reflected in the market so we rely
you know as a community as an entire community of our industry of crypto users,
we rely on arbitrage traders to keep these pools
relatively balanced and healthy
and reflecting accurate pricing.
With the smart shielded pools, however,
we use an oracle that feeds in the,
not just the price, but the liquidity out there.
So we match essentially what you can get
on a centralized
exchange so your pricing will always actually reflect what the market price is of that asset
so when a token gets swapped in or out of that pool the prices do not change so instead
the arbitrage trader is instead incentivized or the liquidity provider is incentivized to
actually bring in and balance those tokens back to 50 50 via a pool uh reward that gets passed to them in usdc so our our system is is um has
really outperformed if you look at like in the last four months if you watch how you know impermanent
loss has affected so many pools during this you know volatility of the crypto market ours have
outperformed by a wide wide margin so we're're onto something with our smart shield of pool design.
And the reason I wanted to start with that
is it's essentially the baseline,
the foundation for everything else we're building on LS.
So we have Leverage LP,
which is a chance for you to take a leveraged position
in these liquidity pools.
We'll have perpetual trading rolling out,
which again lets you,
if a user has liquidity in those pools,
a user can come in and borrow from those pools
to take a leveraged position from those pools a user can come in and borrow from those pools to take a leverage
position from those pools on a single token so if you're taking a long or short position on bitcoin
or ethereum or atom and then we'll have several other things rolling out so the the vaults right
now currently is the usdc earn so usdc staking pool which users borrow for leverage lp we're
going to expand that here in the coming week to include Adam. And then we'll have obviously a Bitcoin, Ethereum and all the
other major assets so that people can borrow directly from those tools. Yeah. So we're very,
very excited about those vaults opening up because I think a lot of users have told us
they want to do more single asset type approaches versus pairing liquidity.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
That was one of the things that I really wanted to when I first used the platform.
So very excited for that.
And Hasham, I think you and the LS team
have been some of the most outspoken vocal supporters
of Atom and the Cosmos Hub and its vision
and the Cosmos vision more generally.
We've been allies on that. and I'm definitely considered you guys to be Atom aligned.
I'd love to just hear a little bit about your reasoning.
Did the team just have strong conviction in Atom,
or what was really the catalyst that sort of drove you to
really going after the Atom community and leaning in there?
Always grateful for your support. We love this partnership and this alignment.
This is something that is not something that's just a, you know, a convenience
issue for us. It's something that we were born with. So when we ideated LS
Network, to your point, like we didn't just decide one day that we were going to, you know, start becoming more and more, you know, built towards the Atom concept.
Instead, we actually built that from the very beginning, from the early days of our white paper, you know, ideating the LS Network vision and mission.
It was always about adding value to the Cosmos ecosystem.
And the reason that's so important to us is no change should stand alone right i think i think we've
learned those from the from the early days that if you try to silo uh you know it's just a recipe for
um early termination of your vision right so the the biggest and best projects out there that succeed
are the ones that actually invite other ecosystems to be a part of
what they're building, right? And they're trying to essentially kind of build a global presence.
And what better place to do that, what better partner to have than Atom, right? Which is the
original concept of Internet of Blockchains. So for us, it made perfect sense to actually build
with this from the start. I think some of the other chains who maybe didn't know this, you know,
because it wasn't really a popular mindset, you know, three or four years ago, if they had started
building, it's harder for them to pivot. It's harder for them to kind of like incorporate this
atom alignment into their design. But you're starting to see that happen a lot, right? You're
starting to see a lot of chains go, okay, how can we incorporate this, this partnership, this
alignment, this collaboration so that we can
hand in hand go out there and co-market the Cosmos ecosystem to people outside of Cosmos?
Obviously, very famously with Eureka, the Ethereum community now getting connected and
many, many other chains coming in.
That's really what's going to open up the floodgates, so to speak, for people to come
and use the products on Cosmos.
And since Ellis is not trying to be
the end all be all for Cosmos,
we are trying to be an enabler,
trying to be a supporter of our friends
within the Cosmos ecosystem.
It makes sense that we want the users
to come in and use the other chains.
We want them to use Osmosis.
We want them to use Atom, DYDX, Noble.
We want them to use all these chains
because we are a helper, right?
We are one of the ones that you can take those tokens and then participate in
DeFi yield strategies on LS Network.
So we want all those, those chains to thrive.
Yeah, definitely a rising tide lifts all boats mindset, which I generally
ascribe to, you know, when I think, I think when we got into the Cosmos ecosystem,
we had this feeling that we were so divided, right?
And every chain is sort of fighting on its own
with its own community.
But that if we sort of banded together
and we rallied behind something,
we could be a lot more unified and attract,
and sort of like quickly change the story
that has been true of
Cosmos for a while, that it was fractured and there was infighting. Like that was really a
small facade. Like underneath, there was actually a huge amount of builders, including Ellis, that
if sort of rallied around the right core thing, could be a very competitive and very compelling
ecosystem to other people.
And I do think that's what we're seeing.
And I credit you guys for really leading the charge there and leading in.
I think you've been a leader in that movement, a leader in sort of the unification.
And one of the great things I think that we have now to sort of make that story true is
IBC Eureka.
For those who don't know, IBC Eureka is basically an expansion of IBC that lets IBC natively
connect to Ethereum, Solana, basically any outside smart contract network, which were
formerly fully off limits for IBC.
And Alice has been one of the first things, I think,
to deeply integrate IBC Eureka
and to create use cases for those assets flowing in from Ethereum.
Mishan, I'd love you to tell us a little more
about just how you've used Eureka in that sense.
I'm happy to talk about that.
And thank you to your team at Entertain Labs
for all the sleepless nights.
I know you guys are working basically 24 hours a day, weekends. I know this because we're messaging you all the time, right,
at random hours of the night and you guys are responding. So that means a lot to us that you
guys have shipped so quickly and so reliably and so securely. Like this is like really, really
impressive to see in this space. And it's what makes you guys leaders in this space and why you
have built credibility around your team
that we all wanna follow you in the battle.
So that's really, really important in terms of,
you know, setting the landscape and setting the tone
for how other actors, so to speak,
are conducting their affairs in the space.
With us, we were, you know,
when we set up the first connection on IBC, Rico,
we did it on day one, as soon as you guys were live.
We were just
absolutely thrilled when we saw the inflow of bitcoin you know as wrapped bitcoin and ethereum
has wrapped ethereum onto ellis network we saw over 1.1 million in assets flow into ellis in the
first four days and that was really really incredible yeah so with this what this indicates
to me is the appetite is there so there has been a demand for this for a while,
and they just needed somebody to build it, right?
And so you guys built it, and obviously, without that,
we wouldn't have this synergistic effect
where we can have users come in and then create yield from these assets,
earn a yield from these assets,
and then become more and more interested in what's going on
in the Cosmos ecosystem, and then branch off from Ellis
and go check out what dApps are going to be built on
Cosmos Hub, what's going to be built on Stride,
what's going to be built on, in various places.
So for us, this is really exciting to see that appetite
finally being addressed.
And it's going to continue to get better because my
understanding is you guys have many many more chains already ready to go and we're excited to
take advantage of that so we want you know we're excited for xrp solana uh avalanche any of the
main chains that you guys are going to be bringing to market uh we're going to get we're going to get
those connected and get those pools set up and we have obviously bigger plans on our roadmap in terms of order book,
RWAs, we'll be able to tokenize things like real estate,
and we'll need those connections from Eureka to be able to go and pull those
from wherever we need to.
And that's really the vision here is you guys enable us to make things super,
super easy for users.
Yeah, we're happy to do it.
Absolutely.
I mean, I'm very interested in general in breaking down the barriers for liquidity movement between Ethereum and Cosmos. I think for a long time, it's been really hard to do that.
And really, you know, you have to pay 30 to $60 to transfer between Ethereum and Cosmos. And I think that limited how much we could grow.
And Eureka, I think, was designed to make that super cheap, super easy, and super fast.
And I think what that enables and what I'm really excited about that personally, what
I'm really excited about is it basically lets Cosmos applications use liquidity and use users and access users anywhere as though they were local.
And that's one thing I'm really excited about enabling.
It's like, can you get Interop to be so good that you can treat a user on Ethereum like your own user as if they were on your chain, right?
It doesn't matter that liquidity is somewhere far away on Tron or, you know, Solana or Optimism.
You can access it super easily via Eureka as though it was local.
That, I think, is a huge unlock and what we sort of call the dawn of multi-chain applications.
Applications that are built somewhere but can coordinate and change and edit
the flow of assets anywhere and access users from anywhere. And I think that's going to be the
future. It just feels like that's going to be the future if you can make it possible. It's a
technical challenge. And that's, I think, what we're trying to do with the hub, right? If you
deploy in or around the hub, you can use Eureka to sort of access any kind of functionality,
users, liquidity in that way, right?
It's sort of your distribution point.
So what you said about us enabling you, that's absolutely the goal here.
So I'm glad that we've been helpful.
Going back to some of the stuff you mentioned
about the different features you're launching,
I know that there's Alice Predict,
there's some AI potential plans,
there's the order book,
there's different fee adjustments.
What's one thing that you're super excited about personally
that you'd love to hear
and explain a little bit more about?
Yeah, we have a lot on our roadmap, right? We have very ambitious goals. We're very lofty.
You got to dream big. You got to be bold, right? And I think that's one of the things that you
have set the tone with Eureka and with everything that you're doing to not transform the hub,
but really just put the hub in the right direction in terms of value accrual,
revenue generation, user adoption, and really making it integral into, like you're saying,
other people's ecosystem, whether they know it or not. So it's really, really fantastic.
For us, we have just this week, actually today, our Babylon pool just opened. So anybody who wants to earn a juicy yield under Babylon providing liquidity, come on in.
I'm the first liquidity provider there.
So I just seeded it today.
And then the couple of small parameter changes
that we just did really to improve the user experience
and really make the process just more efficient.
These are just more just like around on the margins, right?
Like, so we've reduced the uh the min swap
fee we have um we're changing the min slip just to 0.05 instead of 0.1 again just to make the
process a little bit easier for users um in the in the long in the long run they're not really big
like revenue hits to us so we're happy to do those for users just to give them more efficiency
um with the with the goal here of really getting our swaps
integrated onto skip.go.
So again, that's your product and you'd love it.
And my understanding is 80% of IBC volume
goes through skip.go.
So that's a place where we want to live.
I mean, that's a fantastic stat.
So it just shows that people want a one-stop shop.
Again, we use real data collection
to figure out where the users are, right?
So when we see that, we go, okay, we gotta be there.
So we're excited to have that.
So that again, these are just like small items
that we do just to improve the experience for users.
But with ELO's Predict,
the reason I'm so excited about this one is
Cosmos doesn't really have good exposure to this market yet.
We do have perpetual trading, we do have Leverage LP,
we've got a lot of great partners out there
and a lot of great friends out there
who are building really wonderful things.
I mean, DYDX, Injective, even NOLUS just came on scene doing great things.
And I'm just so excited to see what they're building.
We're building our version of Perpetual Trading, which is also going to be kind of boosted
by the really robust design of our SmartShield liquidity pools.
But we can take that one step further once Once we have an order book, and a user can bring in essentially any asset as a maker,
and essentially put it up and then make an in place a prediction, right? So place a prediction
offer, any market they want, they can put the prediction up, and then wait for a taker to take
the other side of that trade or that other side of that bet, I should say. So for us, one of the
biggest things, the reason we held back on this for so long,
we had been thinking about this for over a year.
We have really great community members who provide a lot of input on how this should
be built, helping us scope it out, spec it out.
So big shout out to them who were involved from the ground floor.
For us, it was always regulatory, right?
We always wanted to make sure that we were doing things in good faith
with transparency and making sure that we're going to get the regulatory approval to do this.
One of the things that we stay true to with ELS Network is we don't cut corners on regulation.
We are very, very communicative.
We actually contact government agencies.
In fact, I reached out to the SEC a little bit over a month ago
after they had announced their crypto,
SEC crypto task force,
I had contacted them to request a meeting
because I wanna get clarity on this stuff.
I wanna be able to roll this stuff out
and I wanna be able to offer some of these products
in the US because as you know,
some of these are restricted in the US
and the US has one of our largest user opportunities, right?
So that remains TBD. I did hear back from the SEC. They gave me the,
hey, we're a little busy right now. Check back later. So, hey, anybody here who is connected
with the SEC, I would love it. Please, please, please, please help me get a meeting with these
guys. I'm not too proud to beg for this meeting. So anyway, with the prediction markets, the real
thing about this is really the optionality, right?
It opens so many doors in terms of what the user wants
to put up there and what the taker,
the other person willing to take that bet wants to do.
So this is a huge revenue driver.
And the big thing is you don't need liquidity on chain
for this to succeed because the person brings
their own liquidity, right?
The maker. So person goes, I'm gonna put up $100 and we're gonna put a bet on this. chain for this to succeed because the person brings their own liquidity right the maker so
person goes i'm gonna put up a hundred dollars and we're gonna put a bet on this and the other
side takes that bet uh we are just the the intermediary that just connects the two peer to
peer and then we take the fee from that a small fee right so to make it uh obviously worth their
time to want to do this transaction so that that is something that I get excited about,
because as our volumes grow, and as it starts to build more and more, you know, excitement,
and the user base gets large enough, we actually take a portion of our revenues, the protocol
retains the so two and a half percent of overall system revenue goes back to Adam Stakers, that's
15% of protocol retained revenue goes back to Adam Stakers who provide network security for LS. And then we also take another 15% of protocol retained
revenue to purchase Adam into our own treasury. So we actually started doing that. Yeah. We started
doing that last, I believe we kind of finalized that deal with you guys a couple months ago.
We started buying Adam. Granted, we're in the early stages. We're only four months into our
journey. So we're very low revenue right right now I'll be transparent about that because obviously with 3 million TVL and we have
about 40,000 monthly active users 5,000 daily active users I believe we're approaching we're
not quite at the point where we can significantly buy a huge amount of Atom right now but we did
start buying Atom for our treasury which we're very excited about so we think the next couple
things that are going to really unlock this are going to be the perpetual trading and then being listed on
skip.go uh since there's so much ibc since there's so much uh ibc volume going through skip.go
that'll be a real revenue uh revenue generator so every time somebody makes a swap and it routes
through ellis it will go towards the purchase of adam which we're really really excited about
that's really cool wow and i think i did the numbers a while ago, which is for every $3,000 of Perpetual's trading
volume on Ellis, it buys a dollar worth of Atom at that range, which is really cool because
volumes in perps markets are huge, right?
When they're successful.
You look at, you know, DYDX, I mean, as of a year ago, it was doing like, I think, a billion dollars of volume a day, which I hope you guys can grow to.
Obviously, we'd love to be an accelerant towards that.
And I think it's a really cool thing to show the Atom community, hey, we are so bullish on this thesis and we're so bullish on the hub and being connected to the hub that we want to basically
use our own application to acquire an Adam position. To me, that's really awesome.
And for any Adam community members in the crowd, the way that I sort of approach that on a personal
level is if people are willing to take that kind of bet on us, then I'm willing to take the same
bet on them. And so I'm a huge user of Ellis,
I've been a big supporter,
and I've generally tried to provide a bunch of product advice
and things like that to try to help out.
But that's all super cool.
And unfortunately, I don't have a connection
for you at the SEC.
In fact, if I did,
If I did, I have a couple questions myself probably.
I have a couple of questions myself probably.
So I suppose one of the things that I wanted to dig into a little bit more is this question of liquidity, right?
And, you know, all of these products and tools basically do better and attract more fees as liquidity grows.
What are some things you think we can do as an ecosystem
to increase liquidity?
Like, what do you think is missing
if you could wave a magic wand?
That is a great question.
Obviously, this is a very complex topic.
For us, we're actually happy to see that
the growth that we see on Ellis
and in general within Cosmos is organic, right?
That's a really, really important thing
because it's not VC driven.
It's not, you know, because it's not VC driven.
It's not any specific whale here or there.
It really is just a community of bottom up users
wanting to get real utility, right?
So I think that's a really important foundational aspect
of making sure that somebody doesn't get hurt
in the long run.
Too often we see these chains that raise,
not to mention names, and I don't mean this
in any negative way because we have a lot
of great partners who have done this.
But let's say a chain that's raised like $100 million,
well, they have many, many VCs involved
and they're all trying to exit their positions.
And so if you're the buyer of these launches
and the buyer of these tokens,
you now have to figure out how to get it out
from underneath this really heavy weight of VC selling.
And that's just unfortunate, right?
There's not much really you can do about that design.
Like it's just the way that it is.
VCs have to make money.
And this is not a negative thing about VCs necessarily
because VCs are such an important part of seeding development, right?
Without their funds, we can't build.
So I have a positive view on VCs.
I have a positive view on organic growth. I have a positive view on organic growth.
I have a positive view on really anybody who wants to be a participant in this space.
And I think that's important.
Just quick, I do think it's very interesting, though, that two of the largest successes in
crypto over the past year, one is Hyperliquid, one is Pump.Fund, neither had VCs. That's very
Neither had VCs.
That's very interesting to me.
interesting to me.
And those are really great examples
because the early users didn't feel a need to exit.
They didn't have to exit
so they could redeploy into another project.
And that's really just more of a mechanical thing
because over time,
the project will succeed or fail on its own merit.
So that's more of a short-term thing.
So I know that was kind of like a little bit of a diversion from your question but the reason i wanted to
mention that is the organic growth that we see uh is a really great sign not just for ellis but
within the cosmos ecosystem when you're talking about this macro backdrop we're we're facing one
of the most difficult uh you know geopolit geopolitical, monetary, fiscal policy environments that
we have dealt with in a very, very long time.
And that backdrop is really hard for any company.
It's hard for any blockchain.
It's hard for any small business.
So when you think about trying to succeed with this kind of headwind that's kind of
really creating a lot of uncertainty, if I could wave the magic wand, I would hope for a better macro environment.
That is the number one thing in terms of what's holding really the whole industry back.
But it's not an indictment against Atom or Bitcoin or Ethereum or any of these other chains.
It's just more of, hey, we're liquidity constrained right now.
And that's just a problem across all sectors, all industries. So we know that just like every other time in history, that these liquidity
constraints will ease at some point. So having the mindset of going, okay, well, we got time to
build. This is great. So as builders, we don't have to chase markets higher. We can actually
just keep building, keep shipping. And then when the liquidity opportunities start to present themselves, we're going to be in a great position for this big infusion of liquidity
that comes in at the right time. Nobody can guess when that time is. You can make your predictions,
you could make your educated input on that. But at the end of the day, we don't know if it's going
to be three months from now, six months, a year. What we do know is if we keep building, we'll be ready for it.
And again, magic wand, I want it tomorrow,
but it's not going to happen tomorrow, right?
So that's one really big piece.
The second piece is building something users actually want.
And I think we have, we talk about this all the time.
We've been talking about this for five years.
Utility, utility, utility.
When are we going to build something
that users actually want? And chain but after chain after chain
after chain we have really really cool developers right really awesome teams visionaries they come
in they build this really cool stuff but it's nuanced or it's very very niche and it's very
like hey you got to be pretty well versed exactly it's very fascinating stuff right very capable very
amazing uh like technology but it's not really something somebody can like plug and play like first. Exactly. It's very fascinating stuff, right? Very capable, very amazing technology,
but it's not really something somebody can plug and play, like put their hands on it,
all right, off I go. In the same way that I could download something from the Google
Play Store or the Apple App Store, and I'm up and running, and I'm just having fun with
it, right? So when we get to that point where we're actually building real utility products,
and I encourage every developer to temper your like lofty you know
technical expertise and goals in terms of like building something super advanced to actually
make the ux and ui like more uh mainstream ready and if you could do that earlier if you could do
that earlier in the process instead of trying to capture a niche or a set of early users i think
you're going to have a lot more success in this next phase of crypto build out, right?
Because you have a bigger audience watching
and they're just waiting for something to do.
They're waiting for an app to play with.
So I really do believe that the next iteration
of crypto growth is not going to be a bunch of layer ones.
It's going to be a lot of applications.
And this is where Cosmos is perfectly suited
because of the app chain thesis, right?
You can build these applications as app chains, yes, or layer ones, but they really are apps.
And then they will live around that IBC eureka vision.
I was just talking to the CEO and founder of Dungeon, right, Dungeon Games.
And they were talking about how, you know, maybe they want to dispense with IBC connections
across all different chains and just route everything through Atom.
And I was like, oh, that's a pretty interesting idea. So things like that, where you start to see things flow a little bit easier, the applications are easier to interact with,
that's going to be the next thing beyond, okay, having a great macro backdrop for people to
inject some liquidity. And I think the rest is just ride higher for the next 10, 15 years.
the rest is just you know in uh ride higher for the next 10 15 years yeah uh i mean i think some
of that is definitely true obviously macro helps a lot i do think though that there are specific
things that cosmos has never tried uh that we know work and all they require to do is sort of
coordination and money right and you know, we kind of have both covered
because one, the coordination is getting figured out, right? Like this is sort of the purpose of
the leadership change and all the different, you know, coordination around the Cosmos Hub.
And the ICF in this case does have money, right? And there are a lot of VCs sitting on the sides
waiting to deploy that I've been chatting to who just need a unified story of where to put it.
And so I think one of the things that we're really going to try to do is accelerate the process of getting liquidity into Cosmos, you know, forcefully, but then also sustainably so that we can support applications that are around.
And the thing that you said, and then we can, I think we're,
is this space an hour?
I think it was like 35 minutes, right?
I got time.
If we want to go longer, up to the audience.
We'll go longer.
There's no rush.
There's no rush.
What I was going to say is, now I sort of forgot what I was going to say.
About that coordinated effort, yeah.
Right, the coordinated effort and getting liquidity into it.
And the other thing that you said that I really feel is we're not building the things that users will stay for, right?
And I think that is something that I think you guys are trying to do.
And, you know, it takes time.
It's harder to do than just building what everybody else is building.
The things that I want to see built and the things that I want to use Cosmos' resources
to build are differentiated things that we actually want to use, right?
For example, I don't want to be using my bank anymore.
I really don't.
Like, I would love to be able to put my money into a place where I know it's safe. And basically have a checking account that I can pay out, you know, use to pay off my credit card and my debit card with a higher yield than my, you know, JP Morgan Chase checking account, which is 0%. Right. So it's a pretty low bar. We don't really have good solutions to that yet. We don't really have good onboarding and offboarding in Cosmos to the same degree that we could just pay for things with Apple Pay or pay for things with credit card or debit card. We don't really have all those tight integrations you know you can't check out with uh atom or check out with usdc or usdt
if you're you know trying to let's say buy something online like there's so far to go
in terms of distribution and we can do those things like those are possible like we really
can get them done um and and we're working on them right now and i think one of the things that i think
them right now. And I think one of the things that I think people in crypto forget is that crypto is
so hard to use that any additional complexity that you add, it just makes it already way harder than
anything that they're used to. Right. And I always try to tell people just like dumb it down, make it
really simple, make the main user flow that you have super clear
so that people can understand what to do when they get to your site, because attention is small
and attention is expensive too. But yeah, I'm super excited. I think we are trying to incubate
and we're curating these sets of builders that want to build something different. I expect there
to be a lot of different experiments
coming out in Cosmos for the next couple of months.
And that's really what I wanted
because we're going to need to iterate
until we get to something that really works well
as an ecosystem.
And yeah, I view Alice as one of those experiments for sure.
Those are really fantastic points.
And I love that bank example. That was actually one of the things,
you know, we have advisors who come from TradFi and our main architect was from Credit Suisse
and Mitsubishi Financial. So we always wanted to have a look and feel that was very institutional.
And so if you look on the LS app, app.ls.network, when you sign in or connect your wallet,
you'll see that our dashboard has that TradFip all right we try to give it uh give you a portfolio balance view a rewards view
you know we really try to take the best elements of what works for a user in their existing you
know financial life so to speak uh and then put those into ellis so you'll see not just the
portfolio balance and ease of access of like seeing what you have on your you know in that wallet but also our reward tiers for example or you know our our user like
membership tiers we call them right so we have like a bronze silver all the way up those are
those are essentially we spend a lot of time working with our advisors on those because
they're supposed to replicate the loyalty programs that you see from like airlines or credit cards hotels etc which are highly popular in fact we we did a big study on one airline
where their airline miles program is worth two billion dollars alone just the miles program
just the loyalty program so wow we think yeah we think those coming to crypto are super important
one it's a user acquisition and retention strategy but but two, it's great for a user.
We want to reward users.
We want to give them discounts.
We want to give them access to really cool premium features
by being a loyal user.
So it's really a benefit to both sides.
I think one of the things that we're excited about is,
in the long run, we want these membership tiers
to unlock a lot of great things for users.
So not just discounted swap fees, which we offer now,
but for example, access to the pro AI trading tools
or AI vaults and strategies, et cetera.
We were gonna charge a subscription fee for those
going forward when they roll out.
Maybe it'll start off pretty small,
like 4.99 a month or something like that.
But if you're a premium user,
if you're a loyalty member, whatever,
you will already have those included.
So that's just an example, right, of like how we want to replicate that feel of your existing, you know,
your favorite platforms that you like to use because you're a gold, diamond, platinum member of whatever your bank or airline or credit card, right?
So that day is coming.
Yeah, and we can even think bigger on that, right?
Like what I mean by that is what if you had a Cosmos-wide loyalty program, such that you could create usage of one application if it has some kind of partnership with the other application, you could even share loyalty like that.
These are the things I think you can unlock via coordination.
And you see this all the time, right?
And you see this all the time, right?
Like you sign into Hilton Honors and it says because you're a, you know, Delta SkyMiles member, you know, you have 20% off.
Or, you know, I see this all the time in general when it comes to like crypto as well sometimes.
It's like I got CoinTracker for free because I use Coinbase.
Like I generally think something like that could be coordinated ecosystem-wide, which would be really awesome.
That's an outstanding idea.
We're open to doing that.
So anybody who wants to partner up with us on that, or if you want to lead the effort and we'll join in on that loyalty across Cosmos, I think that's genius.
Because essentially the loyalty program that existed beforehand is being an Atom token holder, right? And I think that was, you know, in version one, so to speak, or version zero, if you want to call it that,
it was kind of more airdrop focused. That was your reward. And now we're taking it to the
next level, right? It's revenue generation, it's value accrual, it's, you know, supporting
development to the next level with direct application development onto the hub, and then
furthering that revenue share, revenue distribution kind of concept.
So yeah, so adding like putting it like a formal loyalty program onto this at the Cosmos Hub level, you know you got my yes for sure.
That would be so cool. Just a fully coordinated loyalty program.
And you could get like, yeah, I think stuff like that are the kinds of things that we want to start doing and using the Hub for in terms of like wide scale coordination efforts that help applications work together and encourage collaboration.
But I wanted to stop for a little bit and just see if we can open up the floor to some questions from the community if there are any.
if there are any.
I just want to say one thing,
which is I think for the first time
really ever in the past two years,
I'm super excited about crypto
because I think we have a shot now
in the US and elsewhere
to build applications
that we really want to use
and can replace different elements
of our lives.
For example, I'm really excited about using crypto for tracking loyalty. I'm really excited about using crypto for, you know,
basically creating really censorship resistant DVPs like Sentinel. I'm really excited to use
crypto for basically banking supplements or banking replacements and, you know, having all of my
life sort of move on chain as it becomes more safe and more possible and more interconnected.
And personally, that's what gets me up in the morning is just thinking that one day we're
going to wake up and I can just go to my Cosmos app and I can use everything, right? And it's a
more free, more exciting, more more fair more lucrative financial system
and system for for basically doing anything right and that to me is what the internet of blockchain
should be it should be an internet that is a replacement for our own and i think we're getting
there um so that's that's what keeps me going uh i i think you know i just want to say sean you you
guys are a huge part of that.
I want to give you guys a massive shout out
for building something really product-focused
and something really good.
I know there's a long way to go,
but, you know, this is just the beginning.
We're just getting started building this new internet,
and I absolutely see you guys as a prime application on it.
So, yeah, with that,
would love to pass it over to the community, see if there's
any questions. Yeah, thank you, Meg. While we wait for those hands to get raised, I do want to say,
yeah, I love the vision that you kind of lead the ecosystem with. And it's so refreshing to see
people catching on to that vision. You know, what I like to say is, if you loved crypto as money,
you're really going to love it as digital assets and software, if you loved crypto as money, you're really gonna love it
as digital assets and software.
And that's where the light bulb goes off
over most people's heads is when they make that determination
that, oh, I can do more than just spend it.
I can actually do so much more in my life with it
up to and including everything that I could already do
on a previous generation of the internet,
but now in a decentralized, secure, tailored, custom manner where I get to share in the rewards,
I get to share peer-to-peer, and I get the transparency. To your point about the regulation,
the regulation side has been a battle for us and a headwind for so many years,
and it's finally starting to ease. walls are coming down which we need to be
taking advantage of right we need to absolutely run with that ball as fast as we can uh because
this backdrop might not always be so you know so friendly to us and we got to take advantage of that
so so i encourage every builder every founder uh you know this is gonna this is gonna be a hot take
take the masks off take the costumes off all right right? Like seriously, like we gotta go up there
and talk to these guys at government, right?
Like I need you guys with me.
I need you guys to get serious.
I need you to dox if you're comfortable
and let's go talk to these guys in Washington, okay?
Because otherwise they're not gonna take us seriously, right?
So let's take advantage of that backdrop.
So anyway, let's see, do we have any questions yet?
Any questions from the crowd?
I was going to say, Hesham, I'll only go to Washington if you fly me there, because I know you're an Army pilot.
That's right, I'm an Air Force pilot.
Probably can't get you on a C-17, but I do fly for a major U.S. airline.
But I do fly for a major US airline.
Generally, I don't talk about that employer because I don't have permission from them necessarily to talk about it.
I'll talk to their PR team and get their formal approval.
And I could probably start talking about it.
They're generally very like, you know, they just want to make sure I go through the proper protocols since I'm not supposed to be advertising Ellis and my other employer at the same time. But for those of you who follow me on LinkedIn or see some of the other stuff I do,
you'd probably be able to put two and two together to figure out who I fly for.
But yeah, if you're ever on my flight, come say hi.
Come up to the flight deck and we'll chat.
Only for Ellis holders.
Exclusive membership benefit.
Cool.
All right.
I don't think there's any questions from the crowd.
One last chance.
Okay.
Does that mean we did our job and we answered everybody's questions?
Hopefully.
Hopefully that's what it means.
I'm sure you'll get questions DMed to you after.
Well, awesome.
This was really great.
Thank you, Sham.
For folks in the crowd, give Alice a shot.
I really like it.
It's a really cool application.
There's a lot of places to put your money and to try things out.
I'm sure there's a ton of guides online, too, about what you can do.
I've generally had a really good experience.
had a really good experience. It's one of my most heavily used Cosmos applications at the moment.
It's one of my most heavily used Cosmos applications at the moment.
And it is an extremely Atom-aligned application and team that we work closely with and we
bounce ideas off a lot. So big supporters. And yeah, Sean, thank you for everything.
Thank you, Meg. I appreciate the opportunity to be on stage with you. As always, you are the GOAT.
And to the Interchain Labs team, thank you for your round the clock uh development and you know putting adam on the map so looking forward
to the next time thanks guys long way to go thank you appreciate everybody see ya Thank you.
