Hey, hey, hey, Sam, excellent. Yeah, wow.
Oh, dude, well on time. We'll kind of like get this started a little bit there, Sam
will get the co-hosts in and then we'll do a little like a quick like professional beginning.
I mean, I'm dead excited. So Finn, I've just sent you buddy an invite. Yes. Oh, speaker.
No co-hosts. No. Okay. There we go. Hello, Finn. Good morning. Yeah, it's real good.
Six a.m. I'm up for this. You owe me big time. Let's go. Dedication. Oh, Sam, we don't sleep.
We are multi-continent. We scan from Bangkok to Portland. Bro, we have no chill. And why
not? I mean, come on. So what I'll do, guys, I'm just not going to mess around if the audio
is Gucci and, you know, on the recording, on the what we care about the archived version
on Spotify and stuff. Yeah, I'm just going to say it's an NPR beginning, which Finn's
going to love. He's going to put the violins in and everything. So without further ado,
those were being joined by esteemed guests. Good morning, Rag FM. It is zero nine hundred
in the morning on the US coast. We hope, guys, you enjoy this breakfast show because you
know something? This is one of those where it's like for us, you know, we normally do
shows where it's a sniff test or it's this or it's that like we can't come in like that,
and we went to like these guys are just going to be like, shut up. See you later. We've
got work to do. So yeah, man. Why skip like why now? I mean, obviously, slink is coming
out, but holy shit, there's like 15, you know, major DAP project founders and L1 project
founders that we've spoken to in the last year. Every single time skip comes up, it's
just like all those chads that are their response time. Honestly, that's one of the
things we have DMC on again, Galactic Maniclub. So we had Galactic Maniclub on again. And
then I was just like, I'm going to have to reach out to Sam and see if I'm on the show
cause Sam. Yeah, man. Welcome, brother. How you doing? Yeah, good to be here. Doing well.
Yeah. Thank you for the invitation. I mean, dude, you've got some of the most based like
takes there is in crypto right now. I think everybody's like IQ goes up on the radio TL.
So I want to say thank you very much for that. And I'm not coming to your book, isn't I just
know when we're on the money, right? Dude, I'm not going to mess around. I don't know.
Finn's got anything to say at the airport. I want to just ask his, listen, is there at
the stage where these are really hidden levels? I mean, what's the mission statement is it
like cause a lot of mission statements that build cool shit. I think you're building critical
shit. So what's your mission statement right now? Yeah. We, we build a backend infrastructure
to help app chain developers. So, you know, why, I think why you're speaking to some of
these L one founders and they, you know, are, are happy with, with skip is like, we, we
want to help them be successful. And we've gone through a bit of a journey to like figure
out what, what they need. We started with kind of very low level transaction supply
chain infrastructure, like MEV stuff. But then we kind of quickly realized that there's
only kind of a subset of folks that, that really need that. And we, we kind of moved
on to doing just more nuts and bolts things like making IBC work with, with our API.
We're doing a bunch of stuff with relayers that's going to come up kind of out soon.
So yeah, I mean, we're, this is also kind of in line with the Oracle. Like we identified
that as a big pain point for a bunch of these perps decks, DEXs that are launching. And
we actually just got like inbound requests from app chain developers. Like, you know,
can you build this for us? So yeah, I mean, first of all, I'm going to ask you like, that
is not the path to glory that you're taking there. It's like a laborious like public goods
kind of like pathways, you know, like, I'm not going to say like, why you're in the background
or anything, but you're not like these major like DeFi protocols or something like, so
something must drive you with the interchange. Like to, yeah, do you know what I mean? You
must be triggered by it's like, let's make the world better.
I mean, I, I've been working in Cosmos for a long time, like four years or so now. And
I did a lot of product work for like the Cosmos stack as a whole. So tenorment, Cosmos SDK,
IBC, just kind of like how to marry them together. And a lot of that thinking kind of made its
way into what skip is doing. I just kind of knew where a lot of the pain points were. And, and
skip is really like a product team. So we wanted to build, you know, solutions that that actually
address those pain points. And we, we do do some public goods work. I've done a lot of kind of
side quest type stuff to, you know, get the MetaMask integration done. And just lots of stuff
with like, you know, how to bridge over from Ethereum and that, that is kind of mainly because
skip is like super highly indexed on Cosmos, we just kind of need Cosmos to win for any of what
we're doing to make sense. The, we do monetize our products, or at least we monetize the Oracle,
like it's a kind of a SAS type model. So not everything is for free. But, you know, we're,
we're kind of hoping that, you know, the kind of highest caliber projects that are really doing
well and have the, the capacity to, to pay a premium can, can work with us.
Yeah, exactly. We have contracts with DYDX, we have contracts with Osmosis, Neutron, you know,
projects that we think are very, very strong. And
you've run me there, I was about to say, like, is this already, obviously, you guys developed,
and before you announced it, you went out and said, Hey, guys, look what we've got for your
platforms, are you go so you've already got deals done? It's like, boom.
Yeah, I mean, the Oracle in particular, like came from inbound requests, like we were doing other
work, working on this, like, block space auction that we developed block SDK. And we got requests
like, Hey, can you also build an Oracle? And, you know, the first time we heard that we're like,
this, okay, this is like a little bit out of our territory, but hearing that repeatedly,
you know, gave us conviction that we should, we should launch a product in this area.
Okay, I'm good thing to have you guys with this Oracle, have you had any conversations
with a terror at all or not? That's enough for Finn. I know he wants to.
We'd be super happy to work with Tara. And we are working with with Tara on some other stuff.
It's kind of a progression. So I think we want to, we want to make sure that like,
the chain has good connectivity, the chain has like, you know, integrations into wallets and
all that stuff. We just did a big push with the station wallet. So the like cross chain swaps,
and IBC transfers in the station wallet is skipped behind the scenes. And so like that stuff,
I think really makes sense as like a first step. And then, you know, once you have once users can
get to your chain, and liquidity can get to your chain, like now we we're in a much better position
to to work on like more sophisticated things. And the escape API is free right now. And that's
kind of in service of like, we want to supercharge the projects that we work with. And once they have
traction, like now we can, you know, we can like actually partner and they'll have resources to
actually like make an investment in a kind of high performance product like like Slinky.
Right, so I wondered out the phrase this question, and I just thought this was the biggest like
easiest way, sorry, easy way to do it. So impediment to like, say, successful DeFi on Cosmos,
you know, compared to say like Ethereum, and you know, it's always been that stumbling block
for the last few years, because I remember after the Stargate upgrade, you know, early
to 2021. We've been having Oracle conversations for very long.
Yeah. Yeah, Terra was one of the earliest, like, in protocol Oracle pioneers. And we definitely
looked at the Terra Oracle before we started. When we've seen a couple protocols come out since
then, like since the crash and everything saying they were building oracles, and you haven't really
heard much out of them since seems like maybe a harder undertaking than people might first
assume. I also like what Robo said about the path to glory, like, there is no path to glory,
if people like you guys aren't building the stuff you're building, because otherwise,
you end up with basically what we see a lot of, which is these down relayers, these hung transactions
and a bunch of end users that are like, where are my tokens? And that's never a good experience,
never a good look. So it's cool you guys took that step to like, build the stuff that maybe
doesn't get noticed right away in order for there to eventually be some path to glory later on.
That's good. You don't see a lot of people do that. Honestly, I'm incredibly surprised that
anyone even knows about skip, because we just build, like, back end infrastructure. We don't have any
consumer touch points, really, except IBC dot fun, which is like, actually kind of a demonstration
app. And like, we put that in the market so that other other wallets or DeFi front ends could like
just see what's possible. And that's all like open source so that they can actually like,
copy that whole code base if they want. But we've had so many people talking on the show about skip.
Literally, I'm saying this, this is why our DM just straight away after the show the other day,
we had a galactic mining gang or galactic mining club, you know, GMC on Monday. And the thing is,
a lot of people say about skip as an org mind. Your response times are insanely ridiculous,
the best in the industry. And I just want to shout out like a quite a few people have told us
that mindset. Yeah, this is something that we like really is kind of baked into the DNA of skip,
like we want to have great customer service. And, you know, I, I would like that that starts from
the top, like Barry and mag have, you know, are, are very dedicated. And like, they are the front
lines for, you know, integrations with partners. I do a lot of stuff as well. But that also just like
carries through the entire organization, like engineers are showing up in, in chats and like,
you know, down to help, like, on their vacation, like it's, it's like slightly unhealthy. But it's
like, that there's just a strong, like, I guess ownership mindset in the, in the company. And
it's like, we really want to make sure that our partners are successful, like people feel taken
care of. Sam, I know the one like, and no doubt you've grown, because you've grown exponentially
or when that happens, you know, you do grow within personnel. But what's your personal
feelings, your personal feelings, mine, about like, bloated teams in crypto? You know what I mean?
Do don't you like this ridiculous, bloated teams that are just like, Come on. How was the feeling?
Oh, um, yeah, I mean, skip is is about is 15 people now, I believe. We have two kind of two
and a half teams, ones for the API ones for the Oracle and block SDK. And then we have a small
team that's doing IBC dot fun stuff. We've been really kind of hesitant to grow. Because we want
to stay like nimble and, and make sure that like our we can ship quickly. For like large teams.
I mean, it's like, it's not for me. I get why it happens. You just I mean, if you have resources,
I think there's a big there's just like intrinsic motivation to try to throw people at problems.
So I don't know. I mean, what are I don't feel like there are that many like large teams in
Cosmos, though, like everybody's pretty small. Maybe they've trimmed a bit of fat that has been
so much. I think it's a direct result of there not being many wealthy teams in Cosmos. Everybody's
pretty, pretty lean. Yeah, maybe. But we've got some, I just want to say like, this is absolutely
for us. An amazing interview. Finna, is this going okay? Are you enjoying the thing? Yeah.
Loving it, loving it. Yeah, we've got some amazing people within the audience. I see tanks down there.
I see Mr. Fox is down there. I mean, some guy seems like a pretty cool guy. You know,
like first time waveform. Maybe. What he said about that, though, like when when when there's
a problem, people tend to just want to throw more people out. It's like, oh, you need this
done by this deadline. It's like, fine, throw five more coders on it. But then eventually you get to
the point where like your code is kind of untenable, because so many people have had their fingers in
it. And it's like, this doesn't work. And we don't know why, because like the eight people that worked
on it are no longer here. But we still have, you know, 10 people here trying to work on it. And
it's like, you can stay lean and get done your goal. Like, do it. Yeah. I mean, I see Erwan and
the audience, the Penumbra team is like, I am absolutely astounded at how much you guys get
done with a miniscule team. It's like mind blowing. Yeah, there's a lot of like these micro cell
kind of teams. So the only dev team that we've ever really been like involved with closely is
obviously the raccoon casino guys, one front end, one back end and a part time artist. It's like
literally when when it's that like small of a team and the community says, well, okay, we'll just like
run all the community shit in the morning. And for you, they can get on with the job.
Sam, you know, for blockchain projects, things like marketing and community management, like
people like proper intelligent, you know, hire people like yourself, all that other shit must be
just from building cool shit. Yeah. Interacting in the public is not as a figurehead. I don't
mean that not as a figurehead, but you know, like the marketing and BD stuff and that it must become
like like so monotonous to a degree, like if you have to do it as a founder, there's founders out
their market and their own project, right? And it's like, I mean, I, I guess it's monotonous,
but like, there's kind of no replacement for like founder led sales. Particularly for, for like,
we try to interact with like, the most high performing teams that we can. And people want
to talk to the founder, people want to talk to the most knowledgeable people that are on the team.
So it's like kind of an undelegatable role. And I think you just really have to like,
get over the, the idea that like, sales is like a, I don't know, a derogatory word or something like
it. I think I might have meant it from a, what would have found a rather be doing,
like if there are obviously the quarter, you know, cordon or speaking to, like, I'm sure,
like you'd rather be cordoned or wouldn't you rather build and shit like, like,
that's how I feel anyway. Well, that's what I would say.
I don't know the, well, first of all, we are not typically interacting with like end users.
We're interacting with, you know, wallets and, and like, those are our wallets chain app,
app chain devs. Those are our customers, and they're, they're pretty sophisticated.
I guess one, one thing I can say is like, skip is a product team, like we are very product oriented.
And there, there's actually like no distinction between sales and product. Like, basically,
Barry runs product for the API, and does basically does sales for the API, like ag does product for
the Oracle and does sales for the Oracle. I do kind of like a little bit of both. And
like, from that perspective, like sales is or product is just like, where your, you know,
where your software like, touches the end user. And so you need to like, give that a lot of care
and attention. So yeah, like, that's, that's just kind of like how the lens that we take,
take to it is like, if the, the coding is in service of like someone having a good experience
with the software. So I'm going, I'm going Finn, because I'm not going to say I feel like you think
it's like in that movie Blackberry, where they bring in like the whole sales team, and the dude's
like, no, no, this is not what like, let us do it. And he's like, no, you need like these sales bros
to go out there and like sell your device. And he's like, no, they don't know what it is. They
don't, they can't sell it. But I'm interested to hear more about the, the new thing that they're,
that they're doing. But if you have more questions, definitely.
I want you to go ahead, go ahead, Finn, take over, take over for now. I'll wait up. No, no, no, no,
I would never do that. I just want to hear about Slinky. When you first mentioned it,
I thought you were talking about Slinks, like our friend was going to be in here. I was like,
what are you talking about? And then I started looking at it and they've got something called
Slinky coming out soon. And I would like to hear about that when, when you have the right time.
Yeah, I can talk about it if you'd like. Go on, Sam. Go on, Sam. Yeah. Talk about,
talk about that. And then we'll, we'll pivot to something else afterwards. All right.
Yeah. I mean, this crowd, I guess, is kind of familiar with the Terra Oracle. So like it,
there's definitely some similarities. The validators are performing the Oracle queries.
And they have a kind of sidecar process that they're running that like goes to,
you know, query coin gecko or Uniswap or whatever you can like program a set of providers.
The main difference between Slinky and the Terra Oracle is we now have ABCI++. So this like
Comet BFT upgrade. And that allows the Cosmos SDK application to have much more control over
how it interacts with the consensus process. And so what we can do is we can actually ask each
validator to submit prices, you know, what they returned from their query as part of the,
the consensus voting process. And because it's part of consensus, we can have strong guarantees
around the bounds on price updates. And we can have, we can kind of marry that to the consensus.
So like you, you cannot, you cannot create a new block without a new price in it,
for instance, like the chain will halt, like we can say that. And yeah, so you can get very tight
prices and you can do block by block updates. Because previously we're saying really bad
flashloan like exploits on things, haven't we? I mean, we raccoons got exposed to like flashloan
exploits, like double double transactions within the same block and everything like,
so this skewers everything. Yeah, so it kind of cuts out a bunch of middlemen like the,
you can still grab price updates from like pith or chain link or whatever.
But you can also just go straight to coin gecko, you know, you can query an Ethereum
node to get a Uniswap price. And it kind of provides a lot of like last mile
integrity to the dissemination of the price update. There's also some interesting stuff that
we want to explore beyond that once people have, you know, have the basics, they actually have
their price price update mechanism. Basically, you know, if you have a sidecar that's running
alongside the validator, you can, for instance, like disseminate IBC messages and make it just like
much more responsive and intelligent, like how IBC packets are routed through the network. So
that's the kind of stuff that we're thinking about. That's not like available today. But
the first thing that we're releasing is this Oracle product.
So, Sam, I mean, dude, we love this shit. And we talked about this tonight on a little warm up
space about how like we get all the facts out of the community. And then, you know, people can like
think about things or talk about things and debate them at a later date. Finn, are you back with us?
Finn went missing for a second. Finn, are you back? Yeah, we're good. I'm curious if this was
due to a lot of people's front ends not working after they were using CoinGecko to display
prices, but then anyone that was in certain places, it was breaking because CoinGecko was like, no,
you're in a place that we can't show you a price or whatever. So were you guys building this before
all of that was happening? Or is this in response to a lot of people's need for something other than
what CoinGecko or these other APIs were providing? So this all came together relatively fast. I think
we've been working on it for about three months. I mean, we had a lot of the machinery
kind of available from Block SDK and like previous work. I do want to be clear that
so CoinGecko is like a provider in our system. And you can choose multiple providers and like you can
kind of aggregate over a number of those. But we are not like a provider in ourselves.
And we do not solve the problem of bad data. So if you have one provider that's CoinGecko and
you've, you know, everybody's querying CoinGecko and CoinGecko goes down like you're still fucked.
So you need to, you know, if you want to avoid that problem, you want to have multiple
providers and an aggregation method that allows you to kind of sort through independent data and
make sure that you're getting, you know, your prices are not originating from a single source
that provides, you know, has a single source of failure.
And that seems to have been what we were seeing is that people did not use multiple
sources and they are now or some of them are. So that's really interesting.
Yeah, eventually I would also like to grab price information off of chains.
So you could grab like an Astraport price off of Terra, for instance. And then you can have
an IBC query of the Terra price, in which case, like, there's actually no.
So you'll have the same like block by block price update.
But there's like no trusted entity in the middle. It's like you're just trusting the Terra validator
set. That maybe doesn't sound as important if you're just like getting an estimate of
what the price is. But if you're doing things like borrowing, you want that Oracle to be as
accurate as possible. So you don't get those wicks that, you know, just liquidate everything
accidentally or on purpose, whatever the case may be, like we've seen in the past.
I like that idea of just being able to either take an average of all of the different data
points at the time rather than just depending on one, especially when that one gets infected or
something. Yeah, right now we do a stake weighted median and can get into why. But basically,
it's like a little more robust to manipulation. You can also do like aggregation over multiple
price sources. So it's all I mean, it's just software. So it's all programmable. And
we're starting to talk to like the first integrators about like what,
how they actually want to use this thing.
So I'll say tanks here. I mean, are we are we pivoting in tanks on a
tank? So it's like Sam, it's an in house joke, you know, a tank every time it comes in the space,
he pivots. So two things I want to talk about. If is that okay, Sam is a time wave.
Oh, Sam, I've just heard you might have to put yourself on mute one last week. I think we've got
hot mics mean you. Sorry, bro. You and I should say sorry, dude. Sorry, apologies for that. It's
probably me, by the way. So yeah, a time wave. I mean, you can just talk to us about time wave,
right? Let's plebs, you know, let's go. But this is the real thing that I'm going to ask,
you know, on the 25th of January, you put a tweet out all cosmos SDK chains.
And 0.46 and above, obviously, we know what that is, can now use the Dow Dow interface
to build complex transactions that will be proposed to governance and executed by the
change governance module, fully expect I mean, you missed the subject out there, I'm expecting
it's like I fully expect I've got no doubt that's what you mean, fully expect Dow Dow will become
the primary governance interface for cosmos. Now listen, bro, I'm not going to come in and blow
your trumpet. I'm just gonna say this. I woke up. I saw that on the tail. Dude, you didn't even
know man, I'm like Mary Poppins. It's like the sound of music in my house. I'm out there in
the mango trees hugging them and everything they are. Oh, to sound music. I mean, you're talking
my language. So if we can have a fun boy moment, Sam, I mean, do you want to just explain like that
fucking tweet, bro, please? Yeah, I mean, I was just kind of repping a feature that Dow Dow
released. Bensky in the the audience here works, works with us at Time Wave also works on Dow
and Jake is here. So I mean, shout out to them like I'm just, you know, talking about their work.
Basically, he's lovely. Jake is a friend of the showman. He's lovely. Don't worry about him. He's
Gucci. So something that I worked on a couple years ago, that's like really just rolling out
in the ecosystem is a change to the governance module that makes it so that instead of just
having these like for proposal types, you have like community spend, upgrade, signaling and
parameter change. You, the governance module actually works like any other module. And you can
make a proposal that just has like a JSON object, or like a message. And so the governance module
can then execute like whatever. And the whatever can be like, oh, the governance module like
wants to instantiate an inner chain account, or it wants to interact with a DEX directly, you know,
if it's on the chain, it can do anything that like a normal user can do. So huge design space there.
However, one, there are only a few chains that are like, oh, four, six or above.
So there's still there's still a bunch of chains that are like on SDK 0.45.
And even if you are at SDK, oh, four, six and above, there are no UIs in the ecosystem that
support this functionality. And I was like very encouraging of Noah from Doudow to add
this functionality. So you can craft a message and do this kind of like arbitrary
execution of SDK messages. So it's just going to open up like a lot of very
novel things that chains can do. It's actually really hard just to say like, what's going to
happen here because like literally anything a user can do a chain can do now, which is very, very cool.
I also I don't think that many people have used Doudow because it's it had historically been
like a little bit confined to Juno. But for anyone here, like it, it supports all
Cosmos SDK chains now. And it is an amazing interface. So like, yeah, we know we've done
over 80 props. I think we're probably gonna be the first. Oh, I think we're gonna be the first
Doudow. Rack FM Doudow is going to be there. Get up here, Jake. Then sit down there with you,
man. No, Sam, come on. Dude, come on. We need some right curve balance. Get up here, Jake.
Dude, we've done 80 odd props or something, but we've done like mad airdrop shit like Doudow,
Doudow, coin holder stickers. We've just fucked around. I mean, isn't this what it is like? So
we've got this rec clip down. Then he'll send you an invite. He's my dog spin. Have you got any spare
keys? How many joke? I might have a couple of them. You know, we're doing this like social experiment,
like, can we get governance to get the certain points? And how do we really we how to sorry,
I'll rephrase that. How do we relieve these bottlenecks and chalk points of governance?
And I'll tell you something about governance. It's not been on people's doors. So I've been
a fucking politician the last three weeks. I've been knocking on people's DMs. Like,
we've got votes up. We've got like, this is after tagging people. But I'm getting it through
governance. Anyway, I'll shut up. Because I don't know, I get excited about Doudow. We're really
like, Oh, I don't. JXAery knows. I mean, Sam, it's really enlightening. We're talking about Doudow
all the time on Rack FM. So I think it's a wonderful opportunity to have Sam here. And he
has a ton of perspective on governance. And thank you, Sam, for all the work you've done
in Cosmos governance. Holy shit. Yeah, thank you.
Um, I, yeah, one thing I realized recently is that just not enough people know that Doudow has
this like cross chain support. So, you know, if I had one request for people in the audience,
it'd just be like help promote that that idea so that Doudow can actually get that exposure from
from other chains. I'm looking at one of one of the rec clip props. And you've got like 10
active votes here, which is insane, because you don't usually see that much participation in this
stuff. So I think whatever this door knocking that Robo's doing is definitely like doing the trick.
We're, we're going to go back and look at the actual prop to mint clip. So guys,
Yeah, I'm saying, I'm saying out of the recent ones, like the one that you just put up,
there's already been 10 people voting on it, which is crazy for how long it's been. Like,
yeah, people are using it and it's working well.
It's been up 28 hours. So we've just refined governance. We've just been like, right. Okay.
So I said 36 hour period, 33%, we can do it because there's not that much of a vested interest.
It's just voter fatigue, bottlenecks, choke points, every single thing must be done in all
of our power in the early stages to relieve this moving forward. So this can be applied to real
like high level blockchain governance in the future. I don't know. I don't know. I might be
talking shit. Yeah, definitely. One of the things we want to do is, you know, we have the
doubt out apps, which work for douse, and we want those to also work for chains, like a change
should also be able to like mint a collection, you know, or use an app like as a chain, provide
liquidity on osmosis. And Sam, you've probably you might already talked about this, I kind of
joined a little bit late. But you should share some of the amazing stuff you're doing with that
time wave, like that is really fucking next level shit. Yeah. Yeah, so this, the time wave stuff
came out of two things. One was like some of this work that I was doing on the gov module and like
Cosmos hub governance and just being like this sucks, like we can't do a lot of things that we
want to do. And the other was the the atom to work. Basically, folks from that initiative,
we just like really enjoyed working together wanted to, to continue that. And we linked up with some
some folks from doubt out so Ben and the audience here. And the there's really two things that time
waves working on. One is just making it so that very simply, like a community pool or a Dow
Treasury can, you know, in a kind of like Dow native way, manage their portfolio. And it's not
like super, super sophisticated. It's just like, can can the Dow go into stable coins at like a
at a rate, you know, like at some rate, can a Dow like, move some of its tokens into the
liquid staked versions of the token so that like it can accrue some of the yield. So basically,
and this will be integrated into doubt out, which I'm super excited about. And you'll be able to do
like a Terra prop or a proposal on a doubt out that says, hey, we have like X number of whatever
token, and we want 25% of that to be in stable coins. And then proposal passes. And then in the
background, we'll just make that happen for you. And, you know, naively, you would think like, oh,
we can just like trade it on a DEX. Like, you can't you can't do that, because the, you know,
the proposal might take several days. And, you know, you can't like execute a trade because the
order will go out of range. So what we've done is, is created this like auction system
that allows for like cross chain arbitrage. There's a whole bunch of like,
kind of programmatic decision making around like how much to auction. And the idea is like,
basically, oh, you know, in a week or so, you'll kind of like level off into that like 25% target
of stable coins. So it's just supposed to be like a big convenience boost for dows to like,
pay your contributors in stable coins or like, not lose money, because they're,
they have like native tokens. So that's it. That's one thing. And then the other thing,
also kind of like originated from the the atom to kind of concept, but we've like generalized it a
lot. And it's effectively like doubt a doubt agreements. So you those doubts, that could be
like the Terra governance module and a DAO that lives on Terra. Or it could be two chains. And
the first thing, the first agreement type that we have is like a liquidity sharing agreement. So
you could move Luna tokens and your rack DAO tokens and like put them into an LP pool together.
But we're going to kind of iterate on this and add more agreement types. And what we're trying
to do here is like, you know, if chains or dows are like, you know, sovereign economies, you know,
they're like, they're kind of like countries. Like, no, you know, the way that like countries,
like grow is they have trade relationships with other entities, you know, like, Oh,
I have like an excess of wheat, and you have an excess of steel, like let's trade. And
dows are the same, like, there are complementary skills and resources that they have.
There's complementary risk profiles, complementary functionality. And, and the idea is that we can
create an agreement where, you know, the kind of specialization of each can really
complement one another, and they can do something together. So we're hoping that like, it kind of in
my mind is like, okay, you have, you have this like, L1 blockchain model where it's like, okay,
everything hooks into Ethereum, like, Ethereum is the like, arbiter of whatever. And like, that's
like, not what we have in Cosmos. Like, what we what we need to do is, is like, have small entities
that can aggregate with each other, and like, do things together and like build upwards. And so
like, this is a set of tools for doing that. Like, we kind of like create an economic structure and
like set of trade relationships and like agreements with each other, that like allow us to be more
effective, more efficient, and like, and hopefully just like less, like more peaceful, like, that
there's, I think if we actually have kind of like a stake in one another's success, then we can, we
can like, appreciate that success a lot more, you know. Oh, I love you. I'll tell you what, you're
golden, aren't you? You're absolutely fucking Gucci, you son. Nice shit, Sam. Like, I'm listening,
and I'm so much, I love this kid, he's class, isn't he? And this is what we said earlier. No,
we said earlier at the beginning, oh, we're not going to like put you through the sniff test,
because like, skips like, you know, upper echelon. But like, bro, I mean, you come across as being
just a really fucking nice guy. And Bey-Bans, I mean, our hostess with a more stress has just
joined us. Look at this Bey-Bans, we've got Jake, we've got Finn, we've got Sam Hart, we've got look
at the tank, we've got Crypto Dungeon, Foxy and all I'm listening. How are you doing? Are you okay,
Bey-Bans? Well, I'm good. I threw out my back, so I'm definitely just listening right now and
hanging out. It's still tough taking a shit, is it? I bet it's really still. Sorry, we do expect a
lot. We were talking about that. Oh my goodness, how is that? I'm really joking. Wrong show.
He's laughing, but Bey-Bans, I mean, Sam's been a great guest at Don't We Love It when we get like
the great guests on, you know, when we're proper. I've been hyped, like, literally all day for this,
but it's ridiculous. I ate four boiled eggs earlier, so hyped up. What does the four boiled
eggs do for you? Does the protein provide you with the strength that you need to ask the proper
questions? I need to understand these four boiled eggs. The cholesterol? Did you skip home
economics a lot? I mean, what school did you go to? Obviously, I weren't teaching you what a man
needs to eat. He saw it on an 80s movie where the dude was waking up in the morning and he cracked
eight eggs into a blender and then just drank it, and he felt amazing, so he started doing that.
I don't know. I tried to tell him not to, but you can't tell him anything, you know. You know,
I've been trying to tell him that Roadhouse, that can't really happen, but he doesn't listen, so.
So, we're about to bring in a curveball, actually. Listen, guys, we had about a 15 minute, like,
little warm-up, but we were just doing a test where, baby, what happened on the test?
We lost you and I'm like, oh, shit, what's happening? You lost me because I'm working
from home today because I can't move, so I was talking with my client. My client called
me about some stuff, so I had to get off the phone. Okay, so, before we start the show,
we had a 15 minute warm-up, and CryptoSailor was up talking to Oracles, and I said, hey,
listen, you know, another convo, you're more than welcome to let come up. He's been so patient,
invited him ages ago, now he's popped up. I'd love to give him a mic. He's probably
got a really good valid question for Mr. Sam Hart. Go ahead, CryptoSailor.
Thank you very much. Is my great new mic working well for you still?
Are you Gucci, or are you Gucci? You Gucci, go ahead. I told you earlier you were Gucci.
Thanks. Appreciate the chance to meet and talk with the team, and Sam, very interested to learn
more about this project. Admittedly, I'm very new to this project, although I'm very familiar with
the Cosmos SDK. I happen to have been the casual associate of JQuans back in the old, old days,
and so I've been following Tendermint since the beginning, and now Cosmos. So I'm very,
you know, the first part of the discussion was related to Oracles, and yeah, that's a different
discussion, but I was actually just a little bit more interested in the whole notion of extending
and, you know, enhancing the ability of inter-chain communications, because these are, of course,
features that would be great to have in any decentralized application, especially in a
Cosmos app, and I was just, you know, forgive my ignorance. I haven't had a chance to go into the
GitHub or anything yet, but from my understanding, it seems like as you're providing these new ABCI
primitives and things like this that are dependent upon essentially the new Comet BFT API,
you're providing a suite of code-based primitives that can be used in any Cosmos SDK project,
which then enhanced this interoperability through standard protocols that you guys have developed.
Is that kind of like an accurate synopsis?
I would maybe like caveat that a little bit. So how I think about it is
Skip is trying to build kind of like a modem or something for your blockchain,
and, you know, when you connect your computer to the internet, like, you know, you plug your
computer into the modem, or like the network card, maybe a network card is like a better
analogy, like it's a network card. You know, it's integrated into your computer,
and what it does is it like just provides some intelligence about like how the ISP system works.
It does kind of internal routing into different channels within your computer,
and it just like, yeah, provides that like base level of intelligence so that you can like
have a better experience like interacting with the World Wide Web. So normally blockchains can
take in transactions, they can interact with IBC, but we build a system where you can divide
those transactions into lanes, you can add oracle messages at the top, we just kind of like
make this much more programmable, and in the oracle case, like more secure.
So you can have strong assurance that like, oh, this number of validators has like reported a
price of, you know, within some band. Yeah, so if you want to, just to kind of like extend this
analogy, like if you want to write a new application for a desktop, you know, you start with software
that like understands how to interact with your network card, like it has like interacts directly
with the network drivers, and it just makes it like a lot easier to like know when messages are
coming in to like block messages when the application like isn't being used, and you know,
just kind of like enhances the experience of the application developer. So I was a little bit like
a strained analogy, but yeah, I was mostly kind of just thinking about because as someone who's,
you know, built Cosmos app chains, much of what is possible within the SDK, especially more modern
versions, is you could do it in an ad hoc way, what you're describing, and I'm trying to also
kind of break down, it sounds like you're also providing a service. So not only is there
extensibility of the Cosmos SDK that I could use for any app chain, but there is also a service
that is providing some type of external consensus over messages that would then be acceptable through
this kind of protocol extension. So the protocol like the slinky the Oracle is run by the node
itself. It's all it's like all part of the validators setup. skip can play a role. If the
chains like desire to, to kind of sign off on certain providers, that can also be gated and whatnot.
But there is there is kind of a an optional role that skip can play in order to kind of ensure
service quality. But the the system is like in no way dependent on skip like it just runs on the
chain runs in in the same runtime as the replicated state machine or in a separate runtime.
So the there's two parts. There's a SDK module that like takes in messages. And then there's a
sidecar that is basically just does the the HTTP query and formats the response to insert into the
chain. So there's Yeah, that's kind of what I was hoping to get to is, because I obviously,
let's say I was building large scale infrastructure at the enterprise level. And let's say, you know,
the throughput required for such an ecosystem would require, you know, multiple blockchains,
multiple instances of not only one replicated state machine, but multiple replicated state
machines, and then you need a lot of interoperability and efficient interoperability at that.
So in that scenario, if there was a service maybe that was, you know, independent of, as you say,
the SDK module, then the appropriate approach might not to be to use a service, but certainly
the SDK module itself would be entirely relevant, relevant in that scenario, correct?
If you're trying to like enhance the, like the latency between the messages between the chains,
is that kind of where you're going? Well, I'm, you know, from my understanding, and thanks for
taking a little bit of a time here to maybe go through the basics. But yes, the ability for,
let's say, decentralized application itself, as the network to interact with local applications
on chain, and or facilitate communications with other blockchain networks connected through IBC,
that seems to be the primary use case of the causeless SDK module you've developed. Am I right?
Yeah, it's to basically secure the very end of the transaction supply chain. You can give,
you can have this kind of like consensus grade assurance. And then you because you have this
like sidecar process, you can use that to interact with outside services. So in the Oracle case,
it's like coin gecko or Uniswap or whatever. But you could have that for IBC, right? That's only
for external to your own interconnected ecosystem of blockchains, like you say.
Yeah, so you could imagine putting a relayer in that sidecar. And this is kind of like we haven't,
we haven't built this yet. But like this stuff we're talking about, at least, you could imagine
putting a relayer in there. And now you just have like, an assurance that all validators are running
a relayer. And if you have that on both sides of a chain, then you know, you could you could have
very fast relaying. So we're, we're like totally, you know, drawing board with that kind of stuff.
And we haven't made any like specific commitments, but that it's a design space that we're super
interested in. And it does get to your question about like, can you enhance the the connectivity
or like the decrease the latency of multiple chains interacting? Like, yes, you can. It's just
kind of not available today. Okay, okay. Yeah, because I think, you know, first of all, as I
said, I've been following Cosmos for a long time, and it is kind of the beginning of the internet
of blockchains, for sure. And but of course, you know, we, I think, obviously, is not expected to
see every single Cosmos SDK chain is going to be connected to or through the Cosmos hub. And
there's plenty of use cases for independent ecosystems of interconnected blockchains. And
that's where increased performance and extensibility of the IBC protocol and is specifically going to
relate to security, which is if you're creating, like you said, you know, end, endpoint, consensus
security on these transactions, I can see that being very relevant, you know, outside of just
the Cosmos ecosystem itself. So that I think is a tremendous value point.
Yeah, there's, I'm sure as anyone who has sent any kind of cross chain transaction knows there's
a lot of things to fix. This could be, you know, it's a nice tool to have. But there's, you know,
there's a pretty complex supply chain, I think there needs to be a bunch of fixes that are made
along the way. So another thing that I've been working on is like fee abstraction. And we have
a bunch of really good solutions for that. But they're, you know, in future releases of the SDK,
so it's going to take a long time to roll that out. But like, a combination of these different
upgrades and technologies, I think is going to make really enhance the speed, reliability,
and, and like user experience of the interchange. So it's a little bit frustrating that like this
stuff doesn't come sooner. But I am very excited about some of the stuff that's in the pipeline.
Yeah, and I would just I won't take too much more time here. But I would just say shifting years.
As you said, there's a ton of stuff that still needs to be done with IDC.
And that's just the beginning of interconnectivity at layer one. And then we've got, you know,
you know, infrastructure layer and layer two and interface layer. And there's just a tremendous
amount of work that still needs to be done in this whole entire industry. I'm interested in a kind of
a different topic, which is my own experience recently of going from just doing development
to potentially launching a project. It seems like there's a tremendous barrier, a gap of
understanding with existing, you know, flows of funds that can help improve these or, you know,
improve the ecosystem or do this work that isn't done yet. What was your experience? How did you
what's kind of this scenario around the business side of your project and how that all started?
And what are you experiencing in the industry that's maybe some of these barriers to getting
this stuff built? So for Skip, Skip is venture funded. I was not directly involved in that,
in the fundraising process, but, you know, it's well capitalized. For Time Wave, the whole project
is bootstrapped. So we financed a lot of it out of pocket. And we got a couple grants from
AA DAO and Stride, like pretty modest grants to build some of the initial prototypes.
So I mean, but in the last year, just to answer your question directly,
it's been really challenging for teams to find resources. I think that's changing.
Changing for a couple reasons. One, there are grant programs, a number of grant programs that
are coming online, or have come online. So the Neutron grant program, like a bunch of these
chains are now establishing grant programs. I think it is really going to help kind of seed
like basic software development. And then, you know, we're not in a bear market anymore.
So that's helpful. And I think that like the outlook on Cosmos, from an investor standpoint,
investor standpoint, from what I gather seems to be the sentiment has changed quite a bit. So
my hope is that those things together will really make it so that new teams
have a much easier time getting initial resources to start development.
I really appreciate that. I'm happy to connect with you. I've been a part of some
interestingly successful projects before. And I'm looking for, you know, as you say,
the first steps to getting this going. And I think just, I think what is...
So we'll probably give you one second, bro. We give you like a shitloader run where
listen, I'm not going to cut you off.
Feel free to cut me off. I'm just talking until you
Oh, no, no, no. I'm listening. We booked Mr. Hart's calendar. We did it properly.
Listen, we're going to because it's not just that as well. It's like on the button. I mean,
we're going to spin up an unrecorded to read after this to discuss a lot of things. But
Sam, I'll tell you something, shall I? We've got a very educated audience down there, right?
Crypto dungeon and tank, another bit. Now, when they want to come and speak, we invite everyone.
When they want to come and speak, they will. But I can tell when it's a good choice,
when they're happy in the audience, like sitting back, listening, popcorn, at work, whatever.
I mean, you've been an exemplary guest tonight, Sam. And I'm glad you come on, bro.
Like this has been insane. I'm really, really happy, Sam, that you've come on and blessed
FM. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Yeah, you've been a wonderful host. Thank you for having me.
Well, mate, this is, I mean, we love IBC maxis. And, you know, I think you're an IBC maxi, aren't you?
Of course, gotta be. Yeah, Jake, what do you think? I mean, you know, there's a few projects,
like, honestly, like, what can I say, like, TFM, you know, working in the background,
squids, working in the background, like, these guys are grafting skip.
There's people that are just unrecognized heroes. I mean, they're in it because they don't want to
be heroes, right, Jake? So it's like, kind of like, we should like, at least like, just make people
aware that, hey, these projects exist, right? Or they're out there. I mean, everybody knows, but
the public, the general pleb should know. Jake, any words before we end?
I'm just a huge fan of Sam and everything Sam works on. And it's really great to have Galaxy
Brains like him in the ecosystem.
Is that the new terminology? Galaxy Brains, right? Okay. So Sam, sorry. Did I call you a
giga brain? Sorry, we need to be Galaxy Brains. I've just been corrected by a senior, senior
senior in the gym. And then there's Galaxy Brains, okay?
I like that. I like that a lot. I are thinking in, you know, 5D.
Where's the biggest plan? It's like, like on Hitchhiker's Guide, the robot on the plane,
on the ship. He's giving me a brain as big as a planet.
Oh, I grew up on that Douglas Marie, isn't it? Not Douglas Marie. What's called Douglas?
Adams, oh my good, 42. The meaning of life, the universe and everything. So, like, literally,
I grew up on that English TV program as a kid. And then my dad was like, oh, there's a book.
Like, let's teach you this shit. And I'm like, all right, okay, let's go.
Anyway, though, I want to literally, before we give Sam the closing mic, I'm just going to say,
things like robot, when we're on the hour, we get the, like, hits on Spotify and that, like,
rather than the two hour shows and shit, right? So, like, this will be on Apple, on iTunes,
it will be on Google Podcasts, that will be on Spotify. This will have a class beginning,
a class outro. But, Sam, before we wind out, we're going to just give you the mic and say,
dude, it's 2024. We're on the pinnacle of the world. We could be going one way or the other.
Bro, how do you say the future? And, like, like, if we were talking in 12 months' time,
like, how would you be feeling?
I don't know. I'm just kind of excited to be out of hot water, finally. And, like, actually,
it feels like the vibe has shifted, which is just super nice. Like, people can build interesting
things. Like, I want to see more fun, cool applications. Like, just stuff to do. That's
kind of what it's all about. So, yeah, that's what I would hope for a year from now is just, like,
there's just all kinds of, like, really interesting, weird, esoteric stuff that is
being built on Cosmos that's just, like, this is strange, but I like it, you know? Like,
that would be an ideal outcome. Applications, guys. Applications, not app chains, applications,
which is where June is going. I'm excited about that. But, yes, Finn, Bebans, any closing words
before we end the show and do a little unrecorded after show? Any words?
Obviously, Bebans is giving you to the mic. He was the gentleman. I mean,
that was the cue for you to speak first over him. Come on. Bebans, any words?
Hey, listen, there's a delay. Chill out. So, I just, my words are, my kids see how much time
I spent in Web 3 and trying to learn, you know, just learn and get information that one of my son
is taking a coding class now. So, this is people like this, these situations spill over into our
children when we make them important. And so, like, I was just really happy that my son takes cues
and say, I'm going to take a coding class, you know? So, that's what I get from being with you guys.
Oh, kid. That's awesome. That's super awesome. Say what I mean.
Go on. My kid trying to build robots. We're building a robot now. So, super exciting stuff.
And all built on the foundation, the tools that all you guys are building. So,
it's really cool. You couldn't do something like this, you know, 5, 10, 15 years ago.
So, just keep on keeping on. Fuck all the noise.
Did you just swear there? We've gone the whole show. No one's fucking sworn.
And yet, no one's fucking sworn. Okay. End it. Let's go. Let's go. Here we go.
Guys, this has been, once again, an episode of Rack FM. It is the 1st of February 2024. We are
going to spin up a little after party, but never mind. And right about now, you're probably going
to hear Finn's raps coming in. So, from all of us in the studio in Bangkok and, obviously,
New York and Portland. Good night. God bless. We love you wherever you're on the world. Take care.
And, Sam, thank you so much. What a blessed, a blessed appearance on Rack FM. This has been
one of the greatest shows I've ever been part of. Good night. God bless. See you later.