Welcome everybody to another coinage chat GMGM or perhaps good afternoon, good night wherever the hell you are around this beautiful
This one particularly is good for me because a lot of people in our community of course being at community on show, steered by NFT holders, one of our NFT holders is Chad Bareford. He actually won our community vote to replace me as co-host, the founder of Thor chain, built on the Cosmos SDK. He can't stop raving about what you guys are up to.
because honestly it's not just Chad that's been talking about Cosmos being the project to watch. It's mostly everybody I've ever interviewed and I've interviewed some people. Let me just say of course Coenage made our mark with the Tara exclusive RIP Tara. That was another project built in the Cosmos SDK. So many other people talking about Cosmos
Why don't we just start for people who might not know what Cosmos is all about? Why it's a project that has so many crypto OGs talking about it? And the idea, I think, that's really caught on of interoperability in the space, kind of pairing blockchains together, why it has so much attention. Yeah.
I think it has a lot of attention because it really fits a very obvious next step in the evolution of how blockchains should be built. So the narrative I always like to acknowledge it too is how you had the development
of human civilizations where in the early days you had villages and kingdoms not very well connected with each other but like a little bit of trade going on. And what people realized that was through mass scale economic integration is how you get
You get this composability and lots of new things happen. And the way that humans did this for many millennia is these systems called empires, where you basically say, hey, we're going to put everything into one big political system. And then you have all this nice
Composibility and everything you know people are trading across continents like because they're all under these one Empire, but you lose out a lot of benefits as well You got to pay taxes to the capital. You got you know, I got to follow this like you know pretty strict set of rules you're not allowed to leave and Basically, you know recently in Latin
last hundred years of humanity, we basically shifted away from this empire model of the world to words this more nation state based nation say city state model of the world where you know we but the key is we have still have the list of large scale economic integration without this like large scale political integration.
And that was caused by a number of technologies, right? You have like obviously the internet, but you also have like, you know, institutions like the UN World Bank, I'm out like these like systems that are coordination mechanisms for nation states. And then you also have, um,
containerization, which is like what I mean by that is if you ever go to the shipping ports in your You know, you're a municipality go to yeah over here in New York We're gonna shit ton of those ships coming in and out all the time. Yes. Yes Exactly and you'll notice they all have the same exact like shipping container
And because the reason is that this is a standard that was developed in the 1970s, but now every shipyard has the machinery to handle these specific containers. Every cargo ship in the world is built to ship these specific containers. And basically that shows that through
now you can have like any Port in the world ship goods to any other port in the world Do we standards? So okay, so you know, what why am I saying all so I like to like yeah people are just tuning in they're like wait a minute It's a shipping space with sunny today. I don't confuse but yes keep going
So the block so how does a relationship blockchains is I see like the generation one of blockchains you had your like Bitcoin name coin Sia like you know these are all application specific blockchain Bitcoin was for payment Sia was for storage name coin was for a DNS, but they there's no way of these composing
together. And so they were very much like that V1 of the Kingdoms model, right? Yeah. So, come solve this came the Ethereum empire. And basically it said, hey, let's put everything into one standard system. And then we will have all this amazing
Composibility and it will be a great and it was true right like you had a huge boom in innovation What what with the other your empire? But it also came with these cons where you basically have like to pay taxes to the empire that comes in the form of needing to pay eat as transaction fees whether you're paying for the base
fees or for the data availability. You lose out on a lot of customizability when you're building on Ethereum. Cosmos comes in and says, "Hey, let's build this world of nation states for blockchains." Where, let's let every application, let's let every community have their own blockchain.
we still build this composability where you know the level two composability but with the level one sovereignty it's like you get the best of both worlds and so that's what you see this boom in what we call app chains where you know osmosis is an app chain it's focused on being
And the Dex Thor chain is another option also at Dex. You had Terra was an app, was an app chain focused on stable coins. You have app chains focused on liquid staking of app chains focused on being in bridges. You have all these different app chains. But then using this standardized protocol called IBC, it's basically a
Standard way of letting any of these blockchains built using this stack to talk to each other and so this is our equivalent of this like shipping standardization now you can have any blockchain that supports the standard talk to any other blockchain that also supports the standard Yeah, there you go. So you've landed it that that was the metaphor that everyone's like all right, where we're
Before we go in here, boom, sunny landed it there. Now you understand why we're talking about ships to start the space. But the reason why I think I love that so much and why I think so many people in the space have the respect for the cosmos ecosystem is exactly that because, you know, Web3R deals are not about having walls up. I think a lot of people see the echo chambers happening within these own communities and
And that's not necessarily great either because people over there and that community want to interact with people over here in this community and you have that going on with Cosmos and I think that that's kind of been intriguing to watch. And you of course, I guess personally have been attached to this ecosystem for quite some time, right? I mean, I think, I think, I'm wrong, but you started building the space, what, back when you were 19?
I started working at Unpositive when I was 19 back in summer of 2017. It was the summer after my sophomore year of college and I just started interning there and never looked back. I stuck with it the whole time through.
But yeah, no, I mean, so when we talk about the evolution of space to you, that's another one of the things that I was excited to get into with kind of an OG and building from the very beginning here is how the space has evolved since, you know, the times of you building back then to where it is now. Obviously, some of the communities that we're around aren't
know more. And obviously, I think some of the enthusiasm around tokenomics have changed as well. I mean, what have you looked at as maybe the biggest changes since you entered the space to where we are here in the year of our Lord, 2023, having now survived what was a very difficult 2022. Yeah.
I think, obviously, when I joined, I'll admit I was very Bitcoin-Maxi. At the time, I got into the space in 2015, 2016. At the time, Ethereum was barely a thing. The first time I ever heard about Ethereum was during the Dow hack.
kind of put me off of it a little bit. I was like, oh, these guys are crazy talking about forking the blockchain. What are they talking about? Eventually, I came around and I was like, oh, wow, there is a lot of interesting stuff you could do with crypto beyond just this payments focus that Bitcoin has.
like this cool idea of DeFi got really excited. But then, I've always had a little oscilloscope in my heart for Bitcoin. This is part of why one of the reasons I started working on Cosmos was this vision of Apple
and stuff was like an idea that originally came from the Bitcoin core dad's right like block stream was the one who wrote the white paper called side chains and came up with this idea of the hey we're gonna build up yeah their cake was hey we don't need to make the Bitcoin blockchain like all I
All these new features we're just gonna build all these new features on other blockchains and Bitcoin is gonna flow into that and that vision Really excited me and I was like yeah, that makes a lot of sense keep the core as Secure and simple as possible and then let let let people who want to go use it do that, but then they kind of like never
executed on it, right? And that's kind of where Cosmos, I was excited about it was I was like, hey, okay, this is our opportunity. Part of what I didn't get super into Ethereum early on was like, I was like, this is all really cool, but like, what is this eat shit coin? Like, what is a big coin? I was building that player for Bitcoin.
And so that's kind of like with cause notes. I was like, okay, great. We're going to build the app layer for Bitcoin. And obviously it's kind of like that goal, I think maybe got put on the back burner for a very long time because just focus on shipping so much other stuff, building the ecosystem.
and whatnot. And I just like in the meanwhile I saw Bitcoin development kind of stagnate a little bit which kind of made me a little bit disheartened. I think the big one was there was this upgrade called Bitcoin 19 that was really excited for back at like a minute half ago.
And that kind of got rejected basically. And that was basically going to make it a more trustless way of bridging Bitcoin onto other chains. Make it a more way. And I wonder if that came from like this concept of no, we don't want a bridge because we want everyone to stay on ours. And that's very antithetical to kind of
I guess what Cosmos is all about. Exactly. I just do think that the Bitcoin core devs are a little bit, you know, way too not open to new ideas. And like all the people who are really interested in like innovating kind of eventually left Bitcoin core dev and have shifted away. Yeah. But
It's like, it's actually a general friend of mine who was the one who built the ordinals and like, it was this like, even if ordinals itself is like, you know, whatever, like it is not the end here, what was important about it did was it showed that, oh, Bitcoiners
can get excited about stuff. And maybe do stuff to shake the system, right? I mean, that's so core to the idea of what Bitcoin did. It was shake the banking system. And there's so much focus on like Bitcoin money and banking and everything else. There is that little rebellious nature I feel like that has been reinvigorated with Ordinals being like, "We can fuck with your system too if we really want to," which has been kind#
of fun to watch and exciting, especially like everyone getting mad at people wearing wizard costumes at Bitcoin. I mean, that was another cultural piece that came out of it. But, but wait, go ahead. Oh, I was just like, yeah, I honestly, the work I was just joking, you know, someone earlier today, I was like, yeah, I think UD is going to like single handedly save Bitcoin because like,
the culture of Bitcoin, turning it from this like, you know, when we got into this phase, Bitcoin was like, this like, oh, this is like new technology and we're like changing everything. And I think it's bringing back the excitement and like, wow, we're like, disrupting things back to Bitcoin and like, bring them
magic internet money. Let's bring the magic back to Bitcoin. Yeah, it's been interesting to watch, but I do think that that's kind of core and what I was excited to talk to you about is this idea of bringing these communities together. Obviously, as a community on show here at Coinnitch, steered by NFT holders, Cohen by NFT holders, as we scale, our whole concept was, and if we have people from all over these
ecosystems. We bring in their ideas, their questions they can ask about, so long they can ask about Cosmos. They can ask about anything. And it brings, you know, their biases, obviously their abilities to pump their bags, but it brings everyone together, which I think is something that's missing in the space, which is also why I have a lot of respect for Cosmos. But the other thing too is, in my discussions, and I've chatted#
my years covering crypto, it seems to be seeing Yahoo and now at Quintage. Mike Novigratz is one of them who I think was talking about a lot of this stuff. He was like, "Keep your eyes on Cosmos." There's other people out there who have looked at this and what you've now built with osmosis too, and this idea of bridging assets and the energy into very specific products.
I found it because of osmosis. It's very interesting to think about it as a hub. Maybe we can shift the osmosis. This hub of where it sucks in people who want to find ideas, project, support them.
What have you seen with the way that Osmosis built in Cosmos has been able to suck in energy funds and crypto enthusiasts from across the ecosystem to find projects? What was the idea with Osmosis maybe start there? Yeah. So, it's actually started from a little bit of a different angle where it was.
We focused a lot back in 2020. We were sitting and we were like, "Okay, when we started working in crypto like in 2017, there was a few big problems out there. Let's say three big problems that we wanted to solve, right, which was, for for stake, scalability,
privacy. And proof of stake, I think we did it, you know, solve, like mission accomplished, like everything is running on proof of stake today. You know, now over 50% of crypto market cap is on proof of stake after the Ethereum merge. So, you know, we've done our job there. Skill ability, I think, is like well under
way I think enough people are working on it and like, you know, we've made a huge stride and I think it's like, it's more of an engineering problem at this point and it's like executing on it. I think the really, the thing that like no one was really working on it enough focus on was on the privacy side of things. Like I think, you know, one of
My whole thesis of DeFi in as a whole is like privacy for the individual, transparency for the system. And like that, you know, people ask what's the point of DeFi? I think that encapsulated right? You know, you look at a tradify, you actually have decent privacy for the individual, right?
No one can see like oh like how much is in your bank account or what not the problem is you have no Transparency at the systemic level you couldn't see what is FTX doing with all you know what are all the balances actually there in To call me you couldn't see oh where was like a risk piling up in the system who was like
You know, the people that were supposed to be ensuring things or they exposed to the same things they were supposed to be ensuring like you had no systemic Transparency and in deep right today, we almost have the opposite problem We actually have amazing systemic transparency. You can see everything right now. We have no user privacy and so I think that what
What really needed to be fixed is like solving this like how do we bring user privacy into divi and you know obviously we're stride to like you know the Zcash team really did a lot of the initial work and like bringing zernald proofs to Reality, but like there's a lot left to do still and so that was our we were like okay we want to build a privacy both
This is a problem. The problem was the mempools in blockchain.
are not private. Everyone can see the transactions you're going to do before you do that. That's a privacy issue. And so my co-founder and I, we started spending some time designing a system for making that private. And our solution is called Threshold Description.
And so we started designing that, building that out, and then eventually thought to ourselves, well, this is a feature, not a product. What is the product that we're going to build here? And so then we're like, well, a Dex, right? That's the first thing that probably needs this level of privacy. And so that's sort of actually how osmosis was born, the average
was like focus on privacy. But it came in and kind of fit a, we're like, okay, well, what we launched this on, right? Obviously, we ended up building it on the causal ssdk, on the causal staff for a number of reasons. One, obviously, we were well versed with it because we had been
building it for a long time. But also I think it was one of the only stacks that gave us the flexibility to experiment the stuff that we wanted to. A lot of the stuff you wanted to do with privacy, you just need to do it on a custom blockchain because you need to go at the very core
a blockchain and change how privacy works. You can do this on top of Ethereum. A lot of the biggest privacy projects tend to be working in Cosmos, whether you're talking about you have Penumbra, Anoma, Nim, and Secret Network, and even Zcash as I think building a Cosmos as Geekation.
So like yeah, you know a lot of the privacy stuff happens and causes this one one interesting thing you'll notice Well, one of the things so when you talk about transparency versus privacy at a systemic level versus a user level I think that that's one that I'd love to dig a little bit deeper into based on what we've seen over the last couple years from
from systemic problems and collapses as well as personal stories too. If anyone out there is listening, we're about halfway into this space. If you want to retweet and bring more people into the discussion, we can get to questions on the back end. I think that would be exciting. So feel free to do so. And if you're just tuning in, we got Sunny from Osmosis here on the space.
with coinage chatting about this on the only award-winning community on show here in the web 3 space. And sunny one of the things around privacy versus transparency that I'd love to get your take on is kind of what happened with with Tara in an anchor because the idea there was all right everything would be on chain you'd see you'd see all of this and to your point
In comparing and contrasting FTX and what happened with anchor everyone saw the funds everyone could see in real time how many people were withdrawing funds from anchor and that kind of also reinforced the panic selling that I think was going on because everyone's like alright I gotta get out of here first So I don't know it raises new questions when you introduce full transparency in a way that you
know, in the banking collapse that we saw in the Silicon Valley bank, the same thing kind of happened even without that transparency because it was a small net community of founders all saying like, all right, Peter Teals tell us to get our money out of this bank because it's going to shit. I mean, what have you seen when you compare some of these things and how crypto can actually help when you look at privacy and transparency at a system at global
Well, I think during the great D-Leveraging of 2021, I was like 2022, basically leading from the terror crash on words, like you saw the great D-Leveraging 3AC, everything. And you have so many
of these centralized, non-transparent lending platforms basically go under because no one could see how levered up they were. While all of the on-chain systems actually fair and completely well, no.
None of the on-chain DeFi lending protocols or anything ever went under. Because everyone could see exactly when liquidations would have been triggered. And the whole mechanism is that you have these public liquidation points that everyone is like having as the full information around it can act based on.
So yeah, I think the terror situation was less of an issue of trends. I mean, that's an interesting point to make that like, yeah, like I think terror was, you know, it was a reflective thing where there was a lot of panic selling and that kind of cause the whole thing to unravel. But like,
There's a week and go into a lot. I actually am actually giving a talk this weekend at the Gateway conference, which is one of the big cause-hose conferences. It's my one-year terror retrospective. Listen, man, you and I could share a couple drinks and share our one-year terror retrospective stories on that.
of course it's been that we are also coming up on the one year anniversary of our terror exclusive with ducco and singapore as well but beyond terror just as one example i think you know with with osmosis is interesting because of the cannibalization a lot of people might look at it of money moving from one thing to another
without bringing more people into the camp. I don't know if that's necessarily true, but I do think it is an interesting way to discover projects in a way that's different than what Uniswap offers because it's on Ethereum. Then you've got projects like a cost that are real in building and trying to do things.
We also got meme tokens in the Cosmos ecosystem like Chihuahua token, which may have eaten up some of my money. Talk to me about what you've seen when you unlock that. Is it really fair to say that it's cannibalizing when you offer the ability to swap kind of transparently and freely between something and the other thing?
I've never heard anyone call it cannibalizing. I mean, our goal is going back to like, you know, what was what did Austin was on help unlock within cosmos was
It was very hard for a lot of these custom blockchains to get listed on centralized exchanges because for a lot of websites it changes. Plugging in ERC 20 is very fast. But like, plugging in the custom, a new cost, cost of the SDK block
chain was a lot of work for them every single time. That's why like AKT, like a Koch token, never got, you got this on maybe one exchange or something prior to Osmos' launch, but with Osmos' using this IBC standard, it was a
You know, if as long as your protocol supports IBC, it's a one click thing to like add added to osmosis and like and that basically made it so you know if you look at the cause of ecosystem as a whole it actually is like The second biggest ecosystem by like market cap like if you look at a
If you add up look at just take the top 200 300 assets by market cap and like the cause was ecosystem has like the second most after a theory and the Problem is you know, so there was also demand and for like untapped demand and like also is just
And we can come in and sort of serve that and be like, okay, look, here's the first time you could actually trade all of these assets in really easily in one place. So that was sort of our initial go-to-market. It's like, be the uniswap for the Cosmos ecosystem. But we didn't want to be just, you know,
Uniswap, I think, tries to be as just be this DEX. Or if this is a long time, it's just like, oh, it's just this trading interface, that's it, you do the swaps here. But now you see that Uniswap is like expanding what they do. They launched their own wallet now as well. They added this like NFT market
place. And this is an hour strategy as well. How do we really focus on the UX? And we treat osmosis as not just the dex for a cause, but also your wallet for a cause, osi, go system. Where it's like, hey, this is the way you can hold all your assets
on the osmosis blockchain on one site. Instead of having to go check your balances on like 20, 30 different chains, you can do it all in one place. You can do swaps here. We're adding a Steaking Dashboard so now you can start. Instead of going to every chain and having to stake there,
to mistake all from one blockchain chain user interface on osmosis. We just launched this app store on the osmosis website where you can start to discover other apps within the osmosis and causal ecosystem all from within one spot. So yeah, really
really leaning into being your portal to the causal ecosystem and eventually gone. Well, I think that's the interesting piece, at least for me, as someone who has been in crypto for a bit and tried to find real projects, the signal through the noise, I think. And maybe again, I don't want to shit on anything that's not
a real project because as we've seen, and I'd love to get your take on what we've seen in Shipcoin Spring and all the meme coins that have been popping up, but I do think that is an interesting decision for a lot of projects because I assume, as we've seen with Orchain and Akash, other projects in the space that might want to build and solve real things, you kind of need the
to work across chain or to solve things as you said in a more customizable way versus just being an ERC 20 token that might be very good at getting liquidity in terms of like having people discover your project if you're a shit coin you launch an ERC 20 you tell everyone go to Uniswap find us there versus build
building in the Cosmos ecosystem. What's your takeaway on that? If it was difficult for people to maybe launch a project and get listed on centralized exchanges, it seems like an interesting discussion to be had around. Sure, it's one way to suck a lot of money in real quick, but if you're a real project building, you can look over here.
Yeah, so the question right now, I think that a lot of founders might be facing is especially in the bear market. If you're trying to just get attention and we've certainly seen a lot of people right now be able to get people to send them money by launching a shit coin right now in the ERC 20s shit coin.
Versus like actually trying to build something that might have a use case down the line building the cosmos ecosystem Like you said, there's a larger hurdle to get listed on centralized exchanges perhaps or at least there was but you know that might be where like real developers or builders want to go to solve their problem Yeah, it's you know
Sometimes it's the same side of things are obviously changing. I think sometimes changes are starting to realize how fast the causal sequence system is growing. Coinbase just listed Osmo last week basically. I think they are definitely expanding.
realize how fast cosmos is going and are rapidly building the infrastructure to do that. A lot of infrastructure providers as well, custodians, fiat on ramps, they're all starting to support more and more cosmos assets. So we're starting to see a lot of the infrastructure that, like,
Basically for a long time, Cosmos is now the second thing that integrators integrate. First they tackle the EVM ecosystem, but then the next thing they go to is this Cosmos, Cosm-Wasam development ecosystem.
Salona and stuff, but I think just by a number of developers, like developing a cavity number, like projects and stuff, I think Cosmos is very much like number two right now. Oh, you touched on my cannibalization point a little bit there, my friend, because that is one of the things, see you and we saw this after the collapse of a few chains.
you know, the idea of other people trying to get Tara developers to come over to their camp, Polygon and Solana were kind of also NFT projects by the way, increasingly mentioned Ornals, bunch of people saying come build over here, put your NFT, bridge your NFTs over to us. And so there is kind of like this ongoing competition, and I guess that's natural for any space to kind of save
build over here, build with us. How have you seen that change maybe in the bear market versus the ball and people are a lot more searching for signal to say, no, we are the hot space to be right now. Yeah. So I mean, I think with the terror stuff, like, you know, I think a lot of lead X terror developers ended up coming to osmosis.
largely because there was already a huge overlap in community like Osmosis was the biggest Dex for USD and like the stack the Cosmosom Devon Famer because the same that we had on Osmosis as there was on Tara so you look at a lot of the projects
They have migrated all into osmosis or other cosmos ecosystem projects or like chains or just building their own cosmos chain like a giraffe for example, right or white whale and this is a number of these So you know, I think right now
The focus has for us at least, you know, we were able to like bring over a lot of these terror projects and our goal was like, let's help get these projects launched. And this is sort of what's been happening. You know, we're starting to see that now where you know, these projects that I've been building for the last, you know, you know, terror crash.
in, it took them a couple months to get their bearings again and now like six, nine months later now they're starting to launch. They had Mars just launched their lending protocol on osmosis. Like two, two months ago you have StreamSwap just launched, you have the, the Vina is launching their Perks Protocol on osmosis
is probably a week or two, you have Calc, which is like DCA tool. So our goal has been sort of less on like number of developers. Like you're having a lot of developers, but not a lot of useful products on how well we can hold for just for the nosmosis.
for a more quality or a quantity approach where it's like, hey, let's find like the teams that are actually like really high quality and work with them to ship products on on osmosis. And like, you know, we don't need 20 shitty lending protocols. We need one or two like really high quality
cannibalism of developers are really like finding the one thing I like to say as well is like I think the don't I think the theorem and Cosmos are the only two Missionary driven ecosystems rather than mercenary driven What do you what do you mean by that? That's an interesting distinction there. I like that
That, like, most of the developers in these ecosystems are here because like, very philosophical alignment with the values of the ecosystem, more so than
And then, like, you know, a lot of the Salonite developers, I saw Salonite crashed like they jumped onto Aptoce and sweet and stuff. And, you know, they'll probably jump onto the next thing. Same thing with a lot of the EVM.
clones basically, like people would just go to wherever, like the, you know, liquidity mining incentives were, right? Like, okay, I can go to play on Apple Android now, okay, then I can go to play on Polygon, I'll go play on Phantom, like whoever's paying the three of these incentives. While, you know, I think the Ethereum ecosystem,
Ethereum itself, very missionary driven, people are there, they will live and die by it. And I think like Cosmos there's like Cosmos community that will live and die by it. - Yeah, I think that's an important distinction to make to you. And we try to do that with our prior,
episodes into the salani ecosystem the idea of what exactly are all these chains building for in your right to point out there's a lot of clones and how do you distinguish yourself from the other one if all you're doing is building a lot of things because most like I said if your whole thing is around inner chain compatibility then it's distinct from what we're seeing in other places where it's building up walls and
and having people stay in your camp, which I think is an important distinction to make for anyone listening who's never heard of Cosmos before. I don't want to steal too much of your juice from the speech you're giving in a week for your years retrospective on Terra and I promised this to be the last question I asked you before we move on. But what was your
biggest takeaway from the terror collapse as someone who's building in the space. I was mostly disappointed with the lack of the there was an experiment that was set out to do like no in the terror team
like missing us in the you know, cause of this office like years ago, back when he was a tiny project, they were they explained to us the stablecoin design and I was just like, what? Like this makes no sense. This is a lot. But they were like, no, no, no, no, it doesn't matter because as long as the like
like, we're going to build a real economy that drives demand for the system. And this is how true fiat currencies work. Right? Like, they fiat currencies remain stable because they have a real economy behind them. That's like driving the demand
for the system. And they have this like tax loop sort of thing. And that's what the whole idea behind the tarot tax and everything was. And so they were really, you know, that was like the premise of the thing. And they kind of started doing that, you know, you had, try, they were building this payment stuff, you know, okay, maybe it's unclear now whether how much of that was true or
were not with the tri-stuff, but it seemed like there was something there. They had the DeFi ecosystem building with like mirror and all the DeFi products. But then at some point maybe they got greedy and they just like, "Anker was the scam," right? Where it was like, "Oh, what happened?"
What it did was it shifted from being true organic demand for this stablecoin to being almost all inauthentic inorganic demand that was not that fled as soon as things got shaky. And that was like the problem, right?
Everyone went running for the doors as soon as things out a little shaky and so For me, I think building algorithmic the odd currencies like stablecoins is the is necessary for like the success of the space like without it like what are we like if we're are just all gonna use USDC
Why are we doing this? I'm disappointed and upset that the crash of Kara caused by greed probably set the space back by years.
the innovation, no one wants to be the one out there telling you, saying, oh, I'm built, I'm working on new designs for algorithmic stablecoins, right? You're going to be like, kicked out of the room. And so, yeah, we need to be doing, right? We need to be like, bigger, how we, the goal, I got, like I said, I joined because of Bitcoin and
goal was to build like sovereign non-state money. And I think Bitcoin, what I, I guess what I realized through my study of monetary economics and stuff, like Bitcoin is a digital gold, which is great, but like you know, the gold standard fell apart for a reason. It doesn't make for good money. And it doesn't
other things. Along with digital goal, we also need digital native fiat. I think you're right. I mean, that's a thing. As a mission-driven project, I mean, Do-Kwon was spot on with what you just said. Everyone else is looking around.
around, being like, "If we're decentralized and permissionless, how are we going to have a centralized permission stablecoin being the thing that everyone uses as our unit of economics?" And everyone's like, "Okay, well, I guess this thing will be the answer." And so I don't know what the next answer becomes, or maybe more importantly, what the next big thing is if it's not just
Oh, you can earn a juicy, juicy yield over here that sucks more money into the system. Like what you see as the next big mission that will attract people back into crypto because not only did that collapse that people back, you then had the FTX collapse that said, I think the more mainstream people who were just thinking about crypto, not even the technology, but
just maybe just, you know, the only person that they could identify in a lineup is SPF and now he's down too. So I don't know what you think, you know, that also did to the space, but what you see as the next big mission that will drive people's enthusiasm back into saying, oh yeah, crypto is where it's at.
Yeah, I've personally been a big believer in web of trust systems for a long time and how do you build on-chain decentralized trust graphs? And I think that became
so much more important after this like AI emergence right you know I don't know how to describe it because people in the field obviously knew this is not my thing for most of us I'm sure Chashy BT took us by surprise right it's like wait this is what was capable like I
I did not realize that. I had a friend who built this prank call app that he could call people with a fake voice and it would generate what to say and stuff. You have the cops called it. I think cops are the parents house or something.
It's scary because we're getting to a world where you're not going to be able to, we need strong cryptographic identity systems where you need, if you want to, you're not going to be, you're going to have AI agents trying to impersonate your friends and family and when you're just talking to people online, we need
need like cryptographic identity for how to communicate with people. And so I think that building this like infrastructure for getting crypto wallets into the hands of everyone is like a vital importance and like a renewed vital importance
to me. And I don't know if that I answered the question of what will bring people into crypto, but I think it's definitely why it's a lot more important. And I think, you know, hopefully there's going to be a lot of people focused on that problem. Yeah, I think, you know, I think you're right to point out it's Shatchy BTAIs.
you know, appearance on the scene caught a lot of people off guard and now you got Sam Altman basically being the voice of everyone, everyone in Congress listens to the guy, but he's also, you know, he's got his own project, we spotlighted World Coin and what that maybe is doing when it comes to identity on chain, but I think you're right. There's all kinds of shit that's now possible here.
I don't know which one terrifies you the most because we asked Greg Ossuri He was on the show and he was talking about chat you be teaketing turned on plugged into the internet what the hell could happen there I'm always constantly talking about maybe perhaps bounties and everyone else you got flying drones around Eventually, there could just be floating bounties on kill this person and you have to pay him to survive. I don't know
what it looks like man but it scares the shit out of me and I imagine as someone as smart as you you probably also have your own fears or maybe not maybe they're all over blown what's your take I'm not sure if I'm like super worried about like I do not know knowledgeable enough to know what the
limitations are right now. Are we like, you know, I have some friends who are like, oh my god, we're like in the process of an inventing God and like, we're gonna, you know, age eyes around the corner. And I don't know about that because like, you know, I feel like AI goes through these like periods of like, you know,
So, I don't know for a near age of I. But just that what we do have today, I think is going to be so like we barely scratch.
the surface of how much stuff is going to change right now with just the technology we have today. Like every single new Photoshop thing, we're like caught. Yes. Yes. I didn't say anything, right? Like, just what we can do, like, well, you know what's like the craziest part to me when I find someone hilarious is that like for the longest time
like we always are like, "Oh, automation is going to come and replace manual jobs. You know, you're going to get rid of the way those are going to lose jobs." And there's a truck driving, and it's funny that it's actually the creative jobs that I don't want.
You know artists and your writers and you are just a surprising outcome. Yeah, you're right. It's all the truck drivers. You're like, "Good luck. We're going to need you, BI for you truck driver." And then it's like the guy who's in the creative office doing the old animations and everything. He's like, "What the hell happened?" Yeah, no, it is true. It does happen quick. That's the thing.#
I love to have you back on the show by the way. I'd love to budget some more time to dig deeper into all this stuff because that's what we try and do. And one of our last episodes did just dig into AI and what that's doing for the music world and how web3 music might be able to help. But tying it back to Cosmos and where all this stuff goes, I mean, what do you think really
Unlocks the one advantage that Cosmos has over the rest of the crypto environment comes into all those other projects the idea of where this goes You know we've talked about a cost this week if people are listening our episode about a cost and what the decentralized cloud can do to maybe solve the chip shortage problem that's happening right now because all these models are very energy and computing power and
And I think the ability to go
modify the blockchain to do these UX flows and features that you couldn't do on generalized blockchain in a faster iteration speed. So, like, you know, account abstraction and stuff that's like, have slowly coming about on Ethereum, like we've had this tooling and stuff.
and cause most for a long time. You know, as much as today, you can actually already pay your transaction fees in any token you want. I always found that to be one of the biggest UX hurdles of like, "Oh, you've got to go use this specific token to pay your fees." I remember like a few years ago what happened was I was like, "Show
a friend how to use die for payments and I made him download an eith wallet, sent him some die and I'm like cool, send it back now and then he couldn't because he didn't have any eith and I'm like this is so silly. So it's like you know, but fix that at a theory of you have to like build these like higher
level protocols that don't get full adoption because they're not the default path. While in causals, it's like, oh, we can actually go fix the blockchain to allow you to pay tokens, pay your fees in any token you want. Or the privacy stuff that we've been talking about, right? It was
like, oh, we can just go make it like build these privacy primitives into the blockchain itself directly. We can, there's also what's cool is you can also like find new sources of revenue for the blockchain as well where like you have, you know, a lot of this like, MEV,
you currently that gets like given only to validators and like has been done off-chain systems like flashbox. We build these on-chain protocols that can be smarter and like actually capture instead of leaking that value to external parties, it can actually be captured on-chain and distributed to like the
native token holders of your chain. So this is like very new sort of new revenue sources for token holders in other interesting exhibition area. Let me ask you this too just to kind of wrap up because covering this from the CNBC and Yahoo world, I think you're right. So much of crypto had come from banking, finance,
and what's this going to be about? And then you had regulation come in and the whole idea of, all right, we can shut all this down. And we certainly saw a way of that now. You know, regulation, at least here in the US, is taking a turn for the worse. And, you know, we've talked about how this election might be huge for what happens in 2024. But when you look at maybe the idea of turning it off choke#
If you got a unit swap and it's all in a theory and there's certainly a choke point there. If you've got, you know, what Thorchin's been able to build and the idea of just kind of being able to switch from whatever to whatever, and Osmosis as well, the whole idea of where regulation actually even matters, are we too far to where any regulator would be able to turn any of this off?
I don't know. If you just, if they can just go get USDC to like freeze transfer as they probably like destroy all of it during a defy. And so it's like that's definitely the choke point getting like fixing
One of our focuses is by the next bull run, new crypto entrance should be able to onboard into osmosis directly, not onto Coinbase.
There's a new goal around there's a lot of people getting interested in crypto. They go onto Coinbase by some Bitcoin ether and that's where they stopped. Less than 10%, probably less than 5%, probably ever make it onto actually using a blockchain.
How do I think there's a lot of things that lead to that like I think the way central exchanges have much better UX better custody a fiat on ramps is a big one and so our goals how can we like mirror as much of
that in a decentralized way on osmosis as possible. So, you know, this is why our big focus on the account abstraction and BC wallets kind of stuff on the custody side. We work, we've been doing like multiple fiat aggregated on ramps, but what we're doing is having aggregator that sort of aggregates over different on fiat on ramps.
and then let into stable coins on smooths and then you can swap into any asset in all smooths. So like trying to build the buy cell widget on Coinbase, but as decentralized as possible, it's obviously impossible to get fully there because
at any point that you're touching the Beyond Rails, it's a choke point, but like how can we integrate as many options as possible and like decentralize over them, route through whoever's giving the best price seeing and stuff. So there's definitely choke points and I think the best thing we can do is like
start to chip away with as many of them as possible. Yeah, I think it's definitely spot on. I mean, I think everyone gets sucked in through Coinbase. That was me in 2014. My brother gave me half a Bitcoin as a graduation present. Never stopped letting me know about it. Reminds me every single goddamn day that that's what he gave me. But after that, it became farther and farther along to
me another bowl cycle, then took me the last bowl cycle to jump into osmosis and touch the cosmos ecosystem. So I think that definitely is the evolution. So that's smart. We always wrap up sunny with one big bold call. We let our guests make a claim that will come true in 2023. I want to give you the time to
make one big bold call for something that we can hold on record and bring back when either you're right or you're wrong. Either way, we'll give you a props or we'll say, oh, we're going to have Sonny back on to talk about why that didn't happen. What do you see as the big bold call for everyone to keep their eyes on in crypto in 2023? Hmm. That's a good question.
I think I already touched on this, but I think people are definitely underestimating Bitcoin. I've been saying this for a long time, but I think people may be starting to see it now, but I think it's going to go exponential. The amount of developer activity on top of Bitcoin's
especially like people are going to. And I think like Bitcoin core development is going to start to speed up again where like the I think there's a cultural shift happening in Bitcoin right now and like. Yeah, like I've always been skeptical of the flippening and I'm like I'm more confident that ever that like the
mentioned Chad Bareford, Greg O'Sury from Akash, would love to have more Cosmos ecosystem members as our co-owners, but the founder of Osmosis, Sonny Igarol, thank you so much for coming on, man. Would love to have you back. Thanks again for taking the time. Awesome. We'll have you back on soon. Everyone listening, you can learn more
more about our project at queninch.media. Subscribe to our episodes on YouTube. We do these every week, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, and new episode out for our subscribers. Thanks again, everybody. Enjoy the rest of your day. (upbeat music)