CosmosAMA #3 with Sunny Aggarwal

[00:08] A: Okay, I don't see it on the YouTube yet. [00:18] B: Hello everyone. I think we're live. [00:23] A: Cool. I don't see it on the YouTube yet. [00:32] B: I see it. Hello everyone. [00:34] A: Okay, cool. [00:35] B: I think we're live. [00:37] A: Cool. [00:38] B: Okay, cool. Cool. Hello everyone and welcome. We have Sunny with us today for the Cosmos AMA that we have launched on Reddit and we have received so many questions from the community and Sunny had a really great time browsing through them and picking up like the questions that he liked. And we have compiled a list of questions that we will address today in this ama and hopefully you'll get a lot of your questions answered. So I think we can start right in. I'll let you know the beginning how you'll be able to collect your prizes, but make sure that if you hear your name and your question here in this ama, that means that you are one of the winners. So Sunny, if you are ready, we can start browsing through the questions that you have selected. [01:39] A: Cool. Yeah. Excited. [01:41] B: Okay, the first one, we have one from Sava235. What is the advantage of the blockchain created with Cosmos SDK? [01:52] A: Yeah, so there's a bunch of advantages for using the Cosmos SDK to build your blockchains. One is you will get your own personal blockchain. You're not sharing it with anyone else. And so that means you get the full throughput of your chain for yourself. And this also means you can sort of customize the chain to be specialized for your use cases. So if you want to do something more advanced on another like I call it sort of the sovereign chain model versus the empire chain model, if you're built which is like, kind of like Ethereum, you're building in someone else's empire, you have to follow their rules. You have to pay the fees in their token. On the Cosmos SDK chain, you can have your own token be used to pay fees. You can add like very complex features that maybe just aren't efficient to, to write in the evm, but you can write them as your own custom logic on the Cosmos SDK and you finally get a lot of sovereignty where you can instead of, you can have your own community run your validators. And this means you get a lot more governance. And I consider it like sort of soft security where a lot of people like to think of security only in economic terms. But really security also crypto economic security also needs to take into account social and political goals as well. So let's say you have a blockchain that's specifically for a specific community or a specific city. It'll be great if all the validators are also citizens of that city, because then they're not just economically incentivized to secure the chain, but also socially and politically incentivized as well. So I think that's very important. Just the ability to create all these cool features. There's a lot of stuff that you can do with the Cosmos SDK, given a lot of the features. We have this thing called Iterators. We have things like end blockers and it just gives you a lot of development features set that you just don't have available to you when you use something like the evm. Cool. [04:13] B: I hope we have answered Sava's question and we can move to the Next1 by Temidayo16 his question is for beginner intermediate developers, how easy is it to build on Cosmos? [04:32] A: Yeah, it's pretty easy. I would say, like it's definitely a little bit of a step up from sort of solidity development where in a different way like solidity development, one of the cons is you do have to learn like a brand new language and everything. But on the other hand, writing in solidity does abstract away a lot of complexity from you where you're sort of really only only writing your business logic. In the Cosmos SDK, the goal is to make it as simple as that, but because it is your own chain, there is a little bit more scaffolding that you have to do and this is something that we're trying to improve. I would say that building on the Cosmos SDK is more sort of for like the intermediate level developer and especially for people who are coming from like the web development world. I'm actually learning some back end web development myself just to work on some other projects. I found this cool framework called Nest JS and I ended up using it because I'm like, while I was going through it I'm like, wow, this is so similar to the Cosmos SDK. Just a lot of the design and architecture while I was learning, I'm like oh wow. This piece is basically the same as what we call handlers in the Cosmos. This piece is basically what we call keepers in the Cosmos SDK and this is basically what we call queries. Just going through that, it made it very simple. What I read is that Nest JS is actually based off. It's heavily inspired by Angular, which I know is one of the most popular front end web development frameworks. I imagine someone who has especially some experience with Angular would find themselves right at home building with The Cosmos SDK. So yeah, definitely we're aiming really much for that intermediate level developer, especially if they have experience with Golang or things like Angular and can think of like, has this good systems design thinking. [06:49] B: Okay, cool. Tomidayo, if you're here and listening, your question has been answered. Moving on, we have Another question from Sava235 again. What is the Cosmos Community economy and what are the incentives for users to actively participate in ecological construction? [07:11] A: Yeah, so the Cosmos Community economy, I guess what this means is like, okay, what are the incentives for users to participate? There's a lot of ways to get funding to be able to produce output, to give back to the community. The most obvious one is the Cosmos Hub community pool. What happens is that on the a percentage of all inflation on the Cosmos Hub goes into this, what's called the community pool. And that community pool can be used to do payouts to fund development or documentation or just any sort of ecosystem development. And so there's already been some usage of the community pool. So one of them was a proposal that was just passed like a couple weeks ago to add this new feature set called cosmwasm to the Cosmos Hub. And this general development of cosmwasm, another one was to improve the documentation around the governance system. And so this is really what we're trying to push people towards now, is to start using the community pool much more to do this sort of ecosystem development. But at the same time there's so lots of other sources of funding as well. So the other big one which has been used much more up until now was the ICF grants process. So the ICF or the Interchange foundation, they will do grants that you can submit grant proposals for sort of anything that, you know, helps the Cosmos ecosystem or even just decentralized technology in general. And ICF will usually give some sort of grants to help make that a reality. Then at the same time it's interesting we're seeing newer experiments where other entities within the ecosystem are also open to doing funding as well. So not just the icf, but also some validators have started their own grants programs and just different actors within the community. And so yeah, these are all great ways to get some incentivization to do general purpose ecosystem development. Cool. [09:28] B: I think we covered it. Let's see what other questions we have here. There are so many. Okay, let's pick another one from dustylanos27. Is Cosmos the project that solves the blockchain trilemma of scalability, security and decentralization, all at the Same time, yes or no. And if, why. [09:57] A: Yeah, so this blockchain scaling trilemma is this thing that was posited by Vitalik a number of years ago where he basically makes the claim that you can't get scalability, security and decentralization all at the same time. And what he makes the case for is let's say I wanted to, let's take a block size increase for example. So let's say that currently something like a blockchain is decentralized and secure, but if you increase the block size, eventually more nodes can't verify all of it. And that, that means that you know, the decentralization goes down because you have to be, have more resources to be a full node on the system. And then he makes the claim that a block size a multiple chains is equivalent to a block size increase because you just have, you know, either you'll have few nodes that can run all the chains or, or each chain will have fewer and fewer nodes running them. Which is true. But I think what it doesn't take into account is it assumes that both of the, so if you have, if you split one chain into two, it assumes that both of the chains are like running the same thing. Like you know, Vitalik was probably thinking more in the sense that they're all EVMs. And someone has an equal chance of wanting to use an application on any of these chains. And if that's the case, then they would have to be running node in all these chains, which is not feasible and thus decreasing the decentralization. But what we see in reality is the cosmos vision is when you have a multi chain ecosystem, each of these chains is a specialized chain, an application specific chain. And what happens then is very few people are users of every single application. Let's say I really like to use 0x, but I'm not a user. But to use 0x I need to run an Ethereum full node. And now I'm not just processing 0x transactions. Now I'm processing every single Augur transaction and Kyber transaction and cryptokitties transaction. You know, every, all these other transactions that I quite honestly just don't care about. I just am a user of 0x and I just want to process the 0x transactions. So if you get into a multi chain world, you only have to run the full node on the chains for which you're a user of. And because most people are not going to be users of every single application, it doesn't run into this scalability situation. And what's going to happen here is this is more allocatively efficient because what's going to happen is the more popular chains, the one that more people care about, they're going to have more people running nodes for and they're going to be more decentralized and secure, while some chains that maybe fewer people are users of, they will be less decentralized or maybe less secure. And that's, that's okay. That's how the system should work, because not everything needs equal security. [13:37] B: And now, in the light of what happens now with the Cosmos upgrade and what we are preparing right now, we have a question from mskiwi 206 and he's asking about this. Can you explain why will Protobuf expected to clear the biggest bottleneck in Cosmos, one that touches every layer? [14:05] A: Yeah, so the, one of the big changes that's coming in the next upgrade is a switch away from Amino towards Protobuff. So Amino is this custom built encoding layer that we built for the backend back for Tendermint originally. What it does is it makes it a lot easier to define structs in GO and then have them work with encoding right away. Initially it was not actually compatible with Protobuf. And this was a huge problem because while Amino actually does have a lot of benefits, there are things that are pretty well designed in Amino, such, you know, Protobuf doesn't have a concept of interfaces, which is something we do have in like Golang. And so Amino had these benefits where it understands the concept of interfaces. But the problem was it's just not a standard. It's one of those situations that. [15:15] B: Even. [15:16] A: If you have something better, sometimes it's better to go with what's the standard. Because what happened with Amino is while we built a pretty good library for handling Amino serialization and deserialization in Go, there were people who wanted to build client libraries for the Cosmos SDK in JavaScript or they wanted to build key signers in Rust and people wanted to build all this stuff in other languages. And the problem is we would have had to keep on rewriting Amino in every single language. When the thing is, with Protobuf, it has such a huge community behind it and backing from Google that it already has been written in every single language and it's been insanely optimized. And so just to deal with that, that's sort of why we've switched back to Protobuf after using Amino for a number of years, where we just realized that the ecosystem, the network effects of Protobuf outweigh its cons. And so hopefully by switching to protobuf it'll make it much, much easier for people to develop applications and especially things like client libraries and UIs and wallets and novel signing systems. That's the main reason for this switch back to protobuf. [16:48] B: Cool, thank you for explaining that. I hope you put some light on all the questions regarding what protobuf is. Let's go to the next one. Okay, wallets. Someone is asking what is the best wallet that you recommend to store or use Atom and experience features of Cosmos? And this is a question of. [17:18] A: Yeah, so the wallet, to be quite honest, the wallet I use mostly is actually the base CLI wallet. It's not exactly the nicest experience because you have to use a command line to do it, but the reason we have to do it is currently it's the only wallet that supports multisig. For my validators for Sikka, our account is a multi sig account for security purposes. And so that's why we have to use the CLI wallet. And it's nice because the CLI wallet is probably the most secure. It's the one built by the. It's built by the core team and it has the testing and everything done on it and it's open source. But yeah, obviously the command line using it in terminal is not the nicest experience. What I do for some of my other accounts that I do prefer to use Looney whenever when I'm on the web. I think their thing is pretty good. And then for mobile I personally like to use cosmostation. I know Looney actually just has they have a new mobile wallet out now as well in beta, but I haven't tried that check that out yet. So for mobile cosmostation is pretty good and for web Loony ends up working pretty well. And it makes it really easy for you for those I mostly just use it to withdraw rewards and redelegate and it serves its purpose pretty well. But if any wallet developers are out here listening, you know, someone please implement multisig support. I will switch to your wallet immediately. [19:01] B: Okay, you heard Sunny. So all the wallets providers listen to that. We are expecting more changes. Okay, moving on, switching from wallets to governance. Now what parameters are used for governance mechanism on Cosmos? And this one from David. [19:27] A: Yeah, so the Cosmos Hub Cosmos SDK has this feature called parameter change proposals which allows governance to change particular parameters on chain and without having to halt the chain and do upgrade, it just changes them on the fly on a running chain there's a whole bunch of parameters that can be changed to do this. The best resource to learn about all of them is Gavin from Figment Networks. He runs the Governance work working group and so they've put together some really good documentation kind of explaining what all of the parameters on the Cosmos Hub Governance are. I highly recommend checking out that and maybe we could share a link to it in the show notes or something. Yeah, if you just search Figment Network Cosmos parameter change documentation, that's where you'll find it. [20:35] B: I think we have Daniela here with her with us in the chat. Maybe she can help and just link it in the chat for all people who are listening. Okay, let's pick another one. Oh this. When I was looking through the question, this was one of the questions that I was looking forward to See what you have, why you have chose it and what you want to answer to this. And the question is let's make this exercise. If you could go back and change one thing in the design of Cosmos and what would that be? And there is a continuation question but I will just stop here just to pick your brain on this one and we can continue with the second part of the question after. [21:24] A: Huh one if I could change one thing in the design of Cosmos. That's a good question. I would say one of the biggest one was that Amino to Proto Buff and I think that like just a lot of the hassle around Amino I think, you know, I think it like I realistically I think Amino probably delayed the launch of Cosmos by like at least four months. And so I'm very happy to see that that's actually one thing that is now being changed and fixed so that I'm pretty happy about. So I guess that would be my number one. But so let me think of what's something that hasn't been addressed yet that I would have liked to change. I mean there are some like smaller, more technical things that I would have liked to change, especially when it comes to like Tendermint, abci. These are like very technical things. But like an example would be in the Cosmos SDK there's this concept called Check TX and deliver tx. And what it does is every transaction that gets processed it goes Check TX, deliver TX for one transaction, then it does the check TX deliver TX for the next transaction. I think this is actually a design flaw where really what it should be doing is doing all the check txs for all the transactions first and then doing all the deliver txs. And so this gives you a bunch of benefits. I think it will help actually quite a bit with Scalability it allows you to do soft forks, which is not really possible right now in the cosmos because of weirdness around cosmos decay. You can't really do soft forks easily. So I think that would be nice. Yeah, so I mean it's a pretty small thing to be honest, but I think that actually has quite a bit of potential. [23:35] B: Nothing on governance, nothing on token distribution. [23:41] A: Yeah. So I guess with those I think token distribution could have always been done better. I wasn't part of the team when the fundraiser happened. I joined like about two months later. So I didn't have too much of a hand in that. But yeah, I think in retrospect I think the fixed cap was not a good idea. I think that actually centralizes that. It just seemed weird that you had to participate within 15 minutes otherwise you can't participate in the fundraiser. And that was a bit off to me and I think that led to some centralization and so I have all sorts of ideas of how to improve that or how I wish it would have been done instead of. But you know, that's something that can't really be changed at this point. With governance I would say, you know, I think that what we have for governance is actually pretty good as a get go. I think like, you know, there will be a lot, a lot of things on governance are improving really rapidly. Like you know, more types of governance proposals are being created. Maybe one thing that would be nice is the ability to have like more liquid democracy style because right now you can only sort of delegate your vote to your validator and then override it yourself if you want to. But it would be nice if you could delegate your vote to anyone, not just your validator. So that would be a nice benefit I think. But that stuff is all on the roadmap I imagine. [25:16] B: I hope we covers part of appeal 007 question and his second part of the question was do you believe that the vision of a hub to connect all those chains Vic is still viable or do you expect that other chains will take over that role? Like for example Binance chain? [25:37] A: Yeah, so I mean I've sort of like flipped back and forth on the concept of hubs in the Cosmos Network quite a bit at its base I think assuming that all chains are using sort of the cosmic. If it's a network of just Cosmos SDK based chains, I actually really don't think the Cosmos hub is necessary. Where I think this concept or at least a lot of the way that people originally envisioned the hub as it's this security system you need One chain to provide a lot of central security for invariance of token supplies. I think that's incorrect. I think that every chain should sort of act as the hub for its own token. So you don't need the Cosmos Hub to provide token transfer security between chains. Like let's say for Kava, let's say I wanted to move USDX from chain A to chain B. I don't need to go chain A. I don't want you to go kava to Cosmos Hub to chain A. I can just go kava to chain A. And when I want to go to chain B, I can do that transfer on the Kava chain. That was not very necessary. But what I think the Cosmos Hub does, it has two main purposes. One is as the Cosmos Network expands to more non Cosmos SDK chains, essentially what's going to happen is, is we're going to need more and more interchange standards, the ICSs to allow these chains to talk to each other. So let's say we have a so you know, chorus one team, they're working on a IBC integration with Polkadot with substrate with parity substrate and it uses a different consensus protocol. And so if it seems unreasonable to expect every single Cosmos SDK chain that uses IBC to upgrade to support the ics, that lets it talk to the parity substrate chain. But the Cosmos Hub, it could basically its job is to be constantly upgrading to support all the latest ICSs. And so that way all the other chains they just have to make sure they keep up with the Cosmos hub. And the CASAS hub acts as a sort of universal translator. And I think that is actually a very valuable value proposition. And could this be done by other chains? Yeah, I'm sure it could be. It could be done by many chains. Maybe the Binance chain will do it as well. Problem with the Binance chain is it's not really even a public chain. Right. It's basically a permission chain at this point. So I don't know if it'll attract the same users as the Cosmos Hub would. But I think then the Cosmos Hub also needs to start adding all sorts of other features as well. The one I'm really particularly looking forward to is shared security style features which I think we'll get into in a later question. [28:47] B: Thank you so much. I think we have covered appeal 007 question first part and second part. And now we have a question from Henry Miller 33 and he goes into he might view this like a personal or not a personal question and it's about Your perspective of what happened with Zaki and Jay and update on where it is currently stands? [29:18] A: Yeah, sure. So, yeah, I think that Tendermint sort of had a bit of a, you know, communications issues internally and just I think a lot of corporate governance mishaps where I, you know, I think the. I think the Zaki. Zaki put it pretty well in one of his tweets where for all the work in Decentralization, unfortunately the corporate structure of Tendermint was structured in a way that it wasn't very decentralized at all. And so if you had a temporarily faulty node, things could, you know, the system, the Tendermint company wasn't very resilient in that case. And so that led to. And so essentially Jay kind of became a central point of failure there. And while he was going through some of his own like, stuff that kind of destabilized a lot of the company. But. And since then a lot of the. So Zaki sort of left to work on Occlusion and a number of people from within Tendermint also left to sort of work on. They went to sort of join the Interchange foundation in this subsidiary called Interchange GmbH to continue work on Cosmos. Some people left to join other projects within the Cosmos Network. For example, Federico is working on Kava and Jack is working on Akash Network. What's great is actually that no one left the Cosmos Ecosystem. Everyone is still working within the Cosmos Ecosystem to push that forward. And in a way what it did was it did kind of make it, this ecosystem, a bit more resilient, where for the longest time Tendermint was sort of the development company for the Cosmos Ecosystem, and now it's sort of more decentralized. We have Tendermint, but There's also interchange GmbH and informal systems and inclusion. And so we have. No one company is any longer that central point of failure. And I think this is sort of an inevitable thing that happens in any mature blockchain ecosystem. Like look at the Ethereum ecosystem. You have many development teams sort of working in parallel, rather than one team alone. And then also at the same time within Tendermint as well, we've been doing a lot of good work on sort of resolving a lot of these corporate governance issues that we had. And so we just published a blog post last week where we talked about. We set up a new board, Peng, who is the oldest employee at Tendermint, he's actually now the new CEO. And so, yeah, so it's great where things are actually becoming more decentralized and resilient both within the Cosmos Network, but also. But also within the Tendermint company itself. [32:32] B: Thank you so much, Sania. I hope we have answered Harry Miller's question about this and also all the other questions which are related to this one, which were like in the same frame. And now I can move on to Aquacate 30. If Cosmos allows the project linked to it to exchange tokens natively, would this mean that the exchange would take place without any fees? [33:03] A: Yeah. So just to be clear that the Cosmos Network isn't just about exchanging tokens, it's more about transferring tokens. And yes, there can be an exchange on the Cosmos Hub, for example. And this is something I'm actually pretty interested in seeing that happen, where an exchange will be built on the Cosmos Hub natively. But the part of this question I wanted to address was this idea of does this mean it takes place without any fees if we allow people to do it natively? One of the cool things about the Cosmos Hub is there's actually a feature where you can pay. We allow people to pay fees in any token they want, or at least any whitelisted token. This means that let's say you're using USDX right on Kava and you want to transfer it to another chain. Let's say you want to transfer that USDX to the Akash Network and you want to go through the Cosmos Hub. The thing is, you don't. Will you have to use atoms to do that? And the answer is no. You. The cool thing is on the Cosmos Hub, you can use it once it gets whitelisted, you'll be able to use USDX to pay your fees. And this is really great because I think it will solve what I think is probably one of the biggest UX issues with Ethereum. This is. You know, I just remember the day when I like tried to show my friend how to use DAI on Ethereum because I'm like, oh, this is so cool. Like, you know, we can pay each other really easily using this thing. Check it out. And so I sent him some, I made him make a wallet and then I sent him some Daisy and I was like, oh cool. And I'm like, try sending some back to me. I'm like, oh shit, you don't have any Ether. This is so annoying that you can't just send the dai. You also need to have some Ether to be able to use it. And I think that this is just going to be such a massive UX problem for Ethereum and I think it's going to keep getting Worse, especially with all this EIP of 1557 stuff. And so this is why I think that the ability to pay fees in whatever token you want on the Cosmos Hub is going to be sort of one of the killer features of the Cosmos ecosystem. Cool. [35:30] B: I'm just answering here to some people who can find us. Okay, moving on. What else? We have cryptoboy 9899. He says, what do you mean by Tendermint? BFT consensus mechanism of Cosmos project. I think he wants to explain more about what BFT is and what are the benefits of Tendermint. BFT consensus mechanism in. In Cosmos project. [36:04] A: Yes. Yeah, sure. So BFT protocols are sort of. So Tendermint was one of the first BFT proposals to use BFT consensus protocols in the context of blockchains. So BFT protocols have been something that has been around since the 80s or the 80s and 90s where people were developing all these consensus protocols. You had things like Paxos. And the one that's really important is one called pbft, where it stands for practical Byzantine fault tolerance. And it's this early consensus protocol that allowed a set of permissioned nodes to come to consensus on a value. But then the problem with it was it was not very scalable and it wasn't. It was, it only really worked in permissioned environments. And so consensus protocols, you know, the crash fault tolerant protocols which handle a node being offline line those, you know, had a lot of development working on them. So you have more things like Paxos and Raft and those are used. And a lot of like, like the cloud database stuff you use Apache, Zookeeper, Amazon's Dynamodb and stuff, they all use the crash fault tolerant consensus protocols. But BFT protocols, Byzantine fault tolerant ones like pbft, were kind of like put on the wage side because no one really had a good use for them for a long time. Then, you know, Fast forward to 2009 and Satoshi Nakamoto comes up with this new class of consensus protocols which I. Which I'll call Nakamoto Consensus. This whole idea of like, you know, building a chain and then the longest chain is the truth and it's more probabilistic than BFT protocols, which are actually more sort of deterministic. And then he built Bitcoin, all these block, this whole blockchain thing took off with this Nakamoto consensus. And what Jay realized back in 2014 was he went back and read a lot of the old BFT papers like PBFT and stuff from, from the 90s and he realized, wait, we can actually repurpose these to use this blockchain now we finally actually have a use case for these older BFT style protocols. And so he took PBFT and sort of modified it to solve a lot of the problems where, you know, he made it actually, we were able to make it much more scalable. We were able to make it using this new concepts of proof of stake. We were able to make it work in a more permissionless setting. We just made it work much better in a blockchain context. So it works much better in a peer to peer context and with rotating proposers. Basically, what Tenement did was it made a modern BFT protocol. It doesn't use Nakamoto consensus, it uses bft. It's deterministic. It's the term in consensus research. It's called, it's safe in asynchrony, which means in Bitcoin, if the Internet latencies exceeded 10 minutes, so if it took 11 minutes to send messages across the Internet, the system just wouldn't work. It would never come to consensus. The thing with Tendermint is it will come to consensus as long as messages are eventually broadcast. So it's called safe and asynchrony live in partial synchrony. And this is really good because this actually allows you to be a lot more scalable. Because what this will do is Ethereum has 15 second block times and that's kind of pushing it, to be honest, especially as they keep increasing the gas size. Because if it takes, if it ever accidentally becomes longer than 15 seconds to propagate blocks, the system won't come to consensus. But because Tendermint is safe in asynchrony, we can push the block time as low as we want and still be okay. So if we wanted to say, okay, block times are going to be one second, but it turns out, you know, Internet latencies go up to two seconds, it's okay. This consensus protocol will automatic. It's like reactive. It'll automatically adapt to these changes, which is really cool. This means we can get much faster block times. And more importantly, because Tendermint is deterministic, this means we have instant finality or one block finality, where once you see a block, you know your transaction is done and it will not be reverted. It's not like Bitcoin where you have to wait six blocks or something in order to be confident that your transaction won't be reverted if you see it once it's done. And so this provides a much better ux, really. And so this is some of the benefits of BFT protocols. And ever since Tendermint came out, we've seen a lot of innovation on the BFT protocol. We see stuff like Hot stuff from the Libra team. That's a cool one. We see teams like Celo. They've actually done a lot of cool work. A lot of the Ethereum Casper work is heavily. It's almost like a hybrid between Nakamoto and BFT consensus. And that's heavily inspired by Tendermint. And then it's cool. We even see some new classes of consensus protocols being built today that I would say aren't Nakamoto Consensus or bft. And so the one I would like to highlight particularly is Avalanche. So it's. It's. It's this new consensus protocol that was developed by this, like, anonymous team called Team Rocket. But it's a really cool, brand new class of consensus protocol that is neither Nakamoto nor bft. So if anyone's really interested in consensus protocol research, I recommend checking out Avalanche. Some pretty cool stuff there. [42:55] B: Cool. Okay. Elan Morrell has a question regarding banking, and he wants to know if Tendermint or Cosmos could eventually be like, the technology that allowed open for global banks to connect seamlessly, given that they all, like, adopt blockchain, let's say, with a solution, for example, like Ripple. And if so, how do you see this process of global financial interconnectivity happening in the next few years? [43:30] A: Yeah, I think that that for me is really one of the goals where I would love to see a lot of banks sort of start to use blockchain to provide sort of this common connectivity and API layer. I think, for example, one of the issues with rip, but at the same time, I think, you know, one of the things with Ripple was it tried to get all these banks to use, like, a single chain. What I imagine what's going to happen really is you're going to have many banks all going to want to want their own private ledgers, but then you want these ledgers to still be able to interact with each other. That's one of the cool things with Cosmos is it's not just for public chains. You can also use it for private chain and let private chains interact with each other over ibc. I think this is really what I see things moving towards. I met some people from, you know, the JP Morgan blockchain team, and they were, you know, pretty excited about IBC and integrating it with some of the stuff that they're doing and you know, I think there's, you know, just this whole notion of banks using blockchain. I think that the main, I think, you know, this. It's definitely a far cry from like the crypto anarchy of bitcoin and stuff where started. But I think there's still a lot of benefits that can come from that. A lot of it, especially around things like openness and transparency and just general, generally like technological changes. Like here's like a really weird specialized example. But in the US we have this thing called reserve requirements which says all banks have to have, let's, you know, whatever their outstanding deposits are, they have to have 10% as reserves. And so what we do today is we do something called lagged accounting which basically says at the end of every two week period, the Fed goes and looks at the average deposits that every bank had and at the end of the two week period they have to have that many reserves in their system. The problem with this is that just means banks are just going to lend freely and then at the end of the two weeks, if they don't have enough reserves, the Fed will just provide them with the reserves because the Fed at the same time doesn't want the banks to default either. So really the reserve requirements, not doing anything. They had something called contemporaneous reserve accounting back, they tried it under Volcker back in like the 80s I think. And what that meant was no, no, no, at any given moment the bank needs the proper amount of reserves. But it was just an accounting nightmare. No one could keep like, you know, the ledgers of the banks and their own system. They weren't being able to remain in sync with what the Fed had. It was just, it was a nightmare. And so they got rid of and they went back to the lagged accounting. But you know, today, you know, we have a way to make these systems much more open and being able to remain in sync using consensus protocols and things like ibc. And so, you know, maybe we could actually go back to trying to use contemporaneous accounting again and actually have it work in, you know, using the modern technology we have today. And this is like an example of, you know, we want to sort of move towards a more harder money and like, you know, more disciplined monetary policy. But we could do it and we can do it using blockchains, but still working with the banks rather than completely undermining like, you know, subverting them altogether. So I think this is definitely a very valuable vision of the future of blockchain. [48:02] B: Cool. Coming from a banking sector Myself, I cannot wait to see this happen. Disrupt the corporate. Yeah. And now coming back to the next question, it's also related to a recent Cosmos Unchained series that Unchango had with Cosmos versus Ethereum and Heomapu is asking related to this, does the Cosmos network team recognizes Ethereum POS as a competitive platform? And after Ethereum's post upgrade, what is the competitive strategy of Cosmos? [48:51] A: Yeah, so I mean, I don't know if we'd say it's competitive. I mean the goal of. One of the reasons I personally started working on Cosmos is I just wanted to see Proof of Stake become a reality and I just didn't really like proof of work and I thought Proof of Stake was the future and I just didn't. I was working at Consensus at the time and I didn't like the direction Ethereum was taking with Proof of Stake and I just thought the Tendermint approach was so much more realistic and simplistic and just can be executed on faster and we'll see it in reality. And I guess that was true because you know, we Tenderman Proof of Stake has been alive and Casper is still in development. But I don't think it's competitive as much as, you know, we just had different ideas on different priorities on the design of the Proof of Stake system. We were heavily going for simplicity. They, they really, they took a very liveness first, not safety first approach while we took a very safety first approach which I think was the right decision. And you know, we haven't seen any liveness concerns happen on any Cosmos networks yet. So that's pretty good. And so yeah, I mean we're happy to see how the Casper stuff comes along. I. We did. So yeah, like Adriana mentioned, we did a Cosmos unchained session like two weeks ago with Danny Ryan who leads up a lot of the ETH 2.0 stuff for the Ethereum Foundation. And so if you're interested in learning a lot more about the details of where Cosmos Proof Stake and Ethereum Proof Stake sort of differ, definitely check that out and go into all sorts of stuff. Another one would be Cosmos Proof of Stake. We have delegation in protocol while Ethereum does not. And I think that is actually a huge difference and I think that will cause a big difference between the two. And when it comes to competitive advantage, I would not say Proof of Stake is not the competitive advantage of the Cosmos network. Proof of Stake was just something that was like a bare bones minimum that I think any modern blockchain should have have the real Differentiation of differentiation between Cosmos and Ethereum is this notion of one chain to rule them all Empire model versus this multi chain mindset. And so that's really if you're trying to decide between building on Ethereum or on Cosmos. I don't think the proof of stake is what you should be looking at. It should be about what blockchain architecture you want in the ecosystem layer. [51:48] B: Okay, so enough with the competition on Ethereum. Okay, what comes next? IBC again. What's your vision with ibc? Like many blockchains running for different purposes and different utilities, tokens circulating through a Cosmos hub system to trigger like a smart contract or another chain or the result of a calculation triggering the reading of an Oracle and payment and all being linked through Cosmos. Can you describe what you imagine to be like a realistic future with IBC or other partners? And this is from Belangeis is back. [52:31] A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think what you describe in that question was very much like what I would like to see. Yeah. So you know, I can imagine a world. I gave this like, I always used to have this like story of like you know, a user story in the Cosmos network. So maybe I'll see what I can remember of went something like, you know, okay, I make, I take a bunch of my Bitcoin and move it onto a Dex chain. No, no, I take a bunch of Bitcoin and move it on to like a casino chain where I play some games and you know, win a bunch of money on that chain. And then I can use IBC to sort of transfer that to a more mixer chain like a privacy chain, something like zcash. So zcash is actually working on implementing IBC right now or you know, integrating with Cosmos. And so I use it, I can use that as a mixer and sort of get some cleaner bitcoin out and then I can move that to a Dex chain and swap it for some usdx and then I can move that to a Ethermint chain or to a Cosmos chain and you know, make a smart contract there where I, I bet someone on put it in a prediction market and then you can get Oracle data from the BAND protocol and the Oracle data could be transferred over ibc. One of the key things is that a lot of people think that IBC is only about token transfers, which is just not true. You can do any sort of cross chain communication or ibc. So eventually you know, you could do things like Oracle data over chain. You could do. We have this ICS in development but by the community called Interchain accounts where you can have an account so you could do sort of transactions across chains so you don't have to have an account on the other chain, but you can sort of do an account. I could have an account on the sunny chain and I want to make a transaction on the iris chain. I can do that without actually by just doing a transaction over ibc. You can even do smart contract calls over ibc. So one of the things is there's not a lot of good smart contracting frameworks up until now that support cross chain or cross shard calling. And this will be one of the big challenges for Ethereum, especially figuring out how to get an EVM to support cross chain calls. But cosmwasm is actually doing a really good work in developing this. So what you can do is you can do a cross chain CosmosM call so you can have a smart contract on CosmosM on the classes hub call, a contract on the straight edge chain. You could do these cross chain calls, you could do NFT transfers. Yeah. So it's not limited to just token transfers and it'll be really interesting to see what further ICS the community comes up with and what are more use cases that end up happening. [55:54] B: Cool. Should we take a question from the chat here also? [55:59] A: Sure, sure. [56:01] B: Okay, let's browse through here. Okay. Sasha says when can we expect private computations allowing for private smart contracts easily integrated in tendermint based network? [56:19] A: Yeah, to be honest, I don't think this is something that the core team is really working on right now. I think there's a number of projects within the ecosystem that are working on stuff regarding this. So for example, Enigma, I know that they've been doing a lot of work on integrating private computation with cosmwasm, so you can check out some of the stuff that they're doing. I know Chris Goes, who's sort of the lead IBC designer. He has a big interest in eventually working on some privacy over ibc. So you know, that, that, that, that's definitely something to, you know, chat with him about. But I don't know, I don't think that's necessarily at the top of his priority list right now. But you know, yeah, if you're interested in working on privacy within the conference SDK, that's really will be done heavily at the application layer, not at the SDK layer. If you're interested in working on these kind of things, definitely reach out and we'd be happy to guide you on how to start doing it and how to start integrating it. Into the Cosmos SDK. [57:38] B: Cool. We have another one from Sisla and he asks how do you see the community increasing utility of the Cosmos Hub? Like more apps, more txs and, and how do you gain out of it and well, only the community pool can actually be a part of this. [58:01] A: Yeah, I think one of the things that Tendermint and a lot of the core teams past couple of years we spent a lot of time improving the Cosmos network and Cosmos ecosystem and to great results. We have all these amazing products, projects building on the Cosmos SDK. Now I think what next would be we should spend some time really improving the Cosmos Hub. Basically Gaia is like literally basically just the most bare bones possible Cosmos SDK chain and that doesn't really make for a particularly valuable chain. Right. So I think what Gaia needs to start doing is start integrating more advanced custom features, features that are Gaia specific. And so some of the things I'd like to see are I think a DEX on the Cosmos Hub would be extremely useful. So probably in my opinion something more Uniswap or AMM Automated market maker style would be a good starting point. And I have a lot of ideas for that. I have a blog post you can check out called it's on my blog called you can go to sunnya97.com and it's like three rows down, it's called Dowifying Uniswap Automated Market maker pools. And so something like that would be really cool to have on the Cosmos Hub. And then really I think the shared security is the other one where a lot of chains may not want to find their own validator set. And then what they can go to the Cosmos Hub validators and the Cosmos Hub validators can put their atoms at risk in order to co validate these new chains and then they will be payments that will be made in order to get the chain co validated. And I think that this shared security is probably one of the most important value propositions of the Cosmos Hub. [60:09] B: Okay, what else we have here? Want to take like a glass of water or something? Are you okay, cool. We have a few more questions left. Okay, moving on. We have one from Karan Magnum. He asks or she asks for creating app specific blockchains. Why should any developer should choose Cosmos SDK instead of other SDKs? And what's your competitive advantage that attracts developers towards Cosmos? [60:49] A: Yeah, so I would say some of the other options for SDKs would be sort of, you know, it's not an SDK per se, but it's the development framework which is Solidity and the entire EVM ecosystem. The other one would be Parity Substrate. And then there's a lot of new ones sort of in development. So you could check out Agorax system called. They have a really cool smart contracting framework called Jesse. And then there's, you know, whole bunch more, you know, Movie M and all these other ones. But I guess I, I'll compare the ones that are, I guess what I'd say are the three most popular which would be Substrate, the Cosmos SDK and Solidity. And I think what the Cosmos sd. Oh, and of course Cosmos Cosmos, another great one. But I would say what makes Cosmos SDK a really good framework is if you're deciding, I would say the primary decision you should make is based off of what language you want to write in. So if you want to write, if you want to write in like Rust, you should go use Parity Substrate. If you want to go write in Solidity, you should use Ethereum if you like, or evm. And you can do that on the, on a Cosmos chain. You could use Ether Mint and have it, you know, still writing Slidity, but still launch it as your own sovereign chain or. And if you want to write and go use the Conscious SDK. And I think it's a good middle ground position where, you know, the goal. It's definitely much more secure and easier to write in than Solidity, but it's not as like esoteric and difficult to use as Rust. It's really, you know, Go is such an easy language, you can learn it in three days. It's just like, it's a pleasurable language to write in. And you know, I've used Substrate as well a long time ago. So like basically like almost a year ago. So I don't want to speak too much about like the differences of it because, you know, I'm sure a lot of things in Substrate have evolved and been made much better. But at the time that I used it, I would, I would just say that I felt that the Cosmos SDK was easier for me to wrap my head around. I wasn't really that proficient with Rust, so that was part of it. But I just felt like a lot of the abstractions and stuff in the Cosmos SDK just seemed to make lot more sense to me and it was just much more legible and I could see everything that was going on. While Substrate felt to have a little bit too much magic happening in the back end that I couldn't see what was happening. That kind of made it difficult to work with sometimes. So I would say that would be sort of my recommendation. I think all these frameworks are, are really great and I recommend you know, people try all try out all of them. Try out substrate, try out CosmosM, try out the Cosmos SDK, try out Solidity and see which one feels right for you. [64:19] B: So without being biased, Cosmos SDK is the best. [64:24] A: Yeah, I would say it's the most developed. That's the thing I feel Substrate is getting better and better but it's just a year behind. That's just what it is. I remember when I was using substrate Back in September 2019, I felt like wow, this feels like what using the Cosmos SDK was back in September 2018 where it just a lot of stuff to. For example, this is a cool thing that we have in the Cosmos SDK which is called the simulator which basically allows you to automatically run like fuzz tests and run a lot of transactions against your chain. And it is so useful for finding bugs in your system. And this is something that just wasn't present in Substrate at the time. And so it's just further along and more developed. [65:19] B: Yeah, we've been putting out of years into it so it's fine that we are had. Okay, moving on to Defi since it's been such a hot subject in the cryptosphere recently. And here's a quote from Vitalik Buterin and quotes him and says higher defi interest rates come with unstated risk attached. Vitaly Buterin said. And so how do you think about this? [66:00] A: Yeah, I completely 100% agree. Like you know, I feel a lot of defi shills. Like talk about like oh look, guaranteed 7, you know, 8% interest rate. Like you know you should be using storing all your money in this thing because like look at all the returns here and it's like I don't know like first off I don't understand who the Heck is paying 8% on an over to borrow an over collateralized loan. That seems like wacky to me but I mean regardless but like you know they say it's like 8% trustless and it's like that's not right. Like I am certain that the risk, the riskless rate of return on capital is not 8% and like if you assume like you know, even you know, I don't know how much I really believe in efficient markets especially after like the past couple of months in the stock market. But you know, if you even have like some level, you know, it's somewhat true, you know that 8% is not real. And that means that either it's like so immature that like something is going on, but even then there are some pretty mature players acting and like doing arbitrage here. So that means there are some risks that are not being exposed. Whether it's like smart contract risk or. Or that's probably one of the main ones, or custodial risk. And people need to be careful with what they're doing and don't. Just don't believe. And people say the same thing about staking, right? People like, oh, look at these returns on staking. It's like, no, no, that's not real returns. Right. First of all, people say it pretty disingenuously where they say, where they don't take into account inflation. And so they're like, oh, look at these 15% returns on this thing. It's like, yeah, but not really. And then they also don't explain like the risks involved with staking as well. So yeah, I'd just like to see more people be more upfront and not call this stuff riskless when they're not. [68:27] B: Yeah. And also cautious. This reminds me about the early banking days in which, for example, you had an interest at the bank or majority banks have like, I don't know, 2 or 3% interest. And then you have that. You have those dodgy players on the market that offer like two or three times the interest, which is like the normal interest on the market. And of course that those gains come with higher risks for all parties. So yeah, a lot of cautious for everyone when they see these high rates and to dig more into what is beneath them. Okay, talking about risks and how we can do to best minimize them. Airdrop Earth is asking about what are the risks and best practices for like minimizing this risk when you are delegating. And again, the question about the atom wallet that he should use or she should use, but we have already covered that before. So let's stick to the first part of the question. Like best practices for like minimizing your risk when delegating. What should an atom holder do to minimize this risk? [69:46] A: Yeah, it's a hard question, but you know, what you're trying to look for is looking for validators that are secure and, you know, trusted because you're basically trusting, trusting your money to them. And so, you know, you should look at things where, how public and open are they with their community? Do they have like community channels? Are they responsive to questions and stuff that come in? You should, and then you should be able to ask them about their Setup, their validator setup and you know, things like, are they using HSMs, are they running in physical data centers, how, what kind of sentries are they using, what kind of alerting systems are they using? Are they, do they have any other sort of like, interesting systems that they've come up with for security that maybe other validators aren't using? So yeah, being able to ask these sort of questions to your validator and then especially I think the biggest one is just expertise with the software. So this is like, if you look at. So there's been one case of slashing, of double signing slashing happening on the Cosmos Hub and it happened to a validator that just wasn't very familiar with the software. They didn't understand what like some of the config settings did, and they thought it did one thing when it really did something else and that caused. And then they ran two things at the same time and they ended up getting splashed. And I think that really came from a lack of deep familiarity with the system. And so, you know, there's a lot of great validators who've been really like spending a lot of time deep diving into the code and haven't to really understand it really well. So, you know, you look at some of the validators like Bee Harvest or Figment, and a lot of these validators just really understand the code really well. And I think that's probably one of the best value propositions that to look, look into one of the most important pieces when it comes to the security of the validator and just, you know, obviously just to show a little bit for myself, you know, I also run a validator called Sika and you know, having been one of the core developers, I think, and my partner Dave, who, you know, he was one of the core developers of Tendermint, I think that we really understand the code better than almost any other validator or many of the validators. And so we hope that, you know, you, you consider us for your delegation. But what we really recommend is actually to split up not just choosing one validator for delegation, but really choosing like delegating to multiple validators. Early on it was, it used to be really annoying to do this because you'd have to like withdraw rewards manually from every single validator and it was just a pain. But now with like a lot of the wallets, it is like very easy to delegate to multiple validators. And so I really don't see any excuse not to. It's like, good for you to diversify your risk and it's good for the network. To help decentralize the network so heavily recommend delegating to a number of good secure trusted validators. [73:24] B: Okay so they should do their research, learn about what the validators are, make sure that they understand exactly what everyone is doing and what the participation is and their knowledge. Check their website, they have a lot of information there regarding their infrastructure. Follow up on their history in the Cosmos hub like if they had any incidents, if they had like downtime or any problems since we have launched last year and collaborate all this also like what existing voting power they have at this moment and maybe if it maybe it's best to like Sunny said, choose a couple of validators and distribute the stake to a number of them and make sure to monitor them. Set up your alarms. We have so many tools in the ecosystem that you can use to set up your alarms on the validators that you choose. Make sure that they're on track, that they don't commit any faults and if by any chance you want to switch them, there is no problem. You can make a redelegation and nothing gets lost in terms of the reward that you are getting. Okay, I hope we have answered his or her question. And now olhav here on YouTube chat, he's having a question for you. Okay, besides share security because share security is apparently a very hot topic now again what other ways are there that will contribute to add on value post IPC. [75:15] A: Yeah, so I think a lot of them do come from sort of things around the shared security stuff but I think there's other things in a similar vein and so what I mean by that is things like data availability solutions. So I think this could be really valuable where a lot of sort of systems, like a lot of scalability systems on Ethereum for example, like a lot of the roll ups and whatnot they often require a place to store their data and I think the Cosmos have validators along with providing shared security they can provide data availability guarantees where they essentially act as sort of a storage layer for a lot of the the other systems and I think that could be a really cool use case or another one would be you know, not just you know Share Security is basically a validator signing up to run a another blockchain node and being slashable if it for any faults or like any certain conditions. But you know, why does it have to only be software that why does it only have to be blockchain software that they run? Why can't they be running other software as well as part of their so that it doesn't have to be running a blockchain node. But let's say I wanted to hire a validator to act as a watchtower for me, right? Like so they can watch my payment channels or let's say have like a Kava CDP or a maker cdp. I want them to watch my CDP is and you know, refill them in case that they get under collateralized, insufficiently collateralized. And so having the Cosmos Hub validator set act as sort of a computation layer for hire, I think that has the potential to be a pretty cool use case. And so really being able finding use cases like this will I think be really useful for the Cosmos Hub and the value proposition of atoms. [77:25] B: Yeah. [77:25] A: And then also the other one was the Dex. I think having a Dex on the Cosmos Hub would be massively helpful. [77:34] B: Yeah. Okay, moving on. We have another question from olhub here on YouTube and he's asking like, which specific about technology and strategy of Cosmos is making you believe that it will be successful and what does Cosmos plan to do to attract more users in the upcoming time? [78:04] A: I would say the piece I find the most is just the ease of development. I think I've done a lot of solidity development before and I've done a lot of Cosmos SDK development before. And I would say that when I'm writing a quick application, like something small, like a quick contract, I do prefer to use solidity. But when I'm writing a really complex application, if I'm writing a Dex or I'm writing a DAO or I'm writing something more complex like this, I feel the Cosmos SDK, it's just much more easier to write these sort of complex secure systems. And I think that that is going to be sort of one of the main value propositions that brings people to building on the Cosmos SDK. And the other one was that UX1, like I said that. Well, I really do think it's a killer feature to allow people to pay fees in any token and not have to have Ether to pay your gas fees. And I think that UX difference is going to be huge. And so I think, I think that's sort of actually probably one of the other main ones. I, I would be, yeah, I actually that's even the main one. I think that's such a big thing. But you know, it just feds me. I get really fed up with the Ethereum community that they're like, I feel that they're very short term thinking in that like, oh, this will bring value to Ethereum. By requiring it to be used for gas fees. But really it's going to drive developers away just because it hurts the UX so much. And yeah, how do we attract more people? I think it's by like focusing on a lot of new use cases. Our goal isn't just to aim for the same developers that are already building on blockchain. Obviously there's a lot of great projects, projects sort of migrating from Ethereum onto Cosmos. So we have Aragon and Enigma and Binance. A lot of people are migrating. But I think the other goal is to really attract new developers. So web developers and the whole world of developers out there, other than what the blockchain ecosystem are already has and so really pitching them on, showing them how how similar it is to web development and how easy it is to do development on these blockchain systems and hoping that brings some new users and developers into the ecosystem. [80:45] B: And also regarding what you we have discussed before about Dexs and how those might be like a good addition to Coin Cosmos. There is also like this proposition by B Harvest now about his proposing a design of a DEX on the hub and I will just link the forum discussion here in the chat. If everyone or someone is curious to read more about this, here is the link. Okay, moving on. We have just a few more questions. Is the concentration of atoms on exchanges taking participation that could lead like for example to high inflation in case of, I don't know, low staking and how. [81:36] A: Did you repeat oh yeah, on exchanges. [81:41] B: If this is like a threat or not for Cosmos? [81:48] A: Yeah, I think it is. I think it has the potential to be. I don't think it is right now. You know, Binance has its validator that's you know, pretty big. It's not the largest, but you know, I think if they wanted to make it bigger, they probably could. And I know, I heard Coinbase just started staking atoms like last week or something. So we'll see how they rise up the gather more stake quickly. I think the biggest thing, the biggest risk when it comes to these exchange validators is how they share rights with their, with their users. So one of the problems, for example with Binance is if you're on Binance and are staking and they're staking on your behalf, you don't get any governance rights. Right. Like if you delegate in protocol to another validator, let's say Seca, you if Sika votes one way that you don't like, you can vote yourself and override Sika's vote, but you can't do this on Binance. This is an example of something that I think the rise of exchange validators is inevitable. But what I would like to see is for us to push more to at least make sure that certain delegator rights are preserved, even when going through exchange validators. [83:39] B: You have a proposal for that, right? Like for proportional voting for Cosmos Hub. And I think we have discussed about how we can implement that for like exchanges like that using like a common pool. [84:00] A: Yeah, it is an idea of how you can, you know, one address should be able to do partial votes. So I could be able to say, you know, 60% yes, 40% no, which sounds silly, you know, like, am I schizophrenic or something? Why am I doing two votes? But what happens is sometimes addresses don't represent one person, it actually represents an organization. So, for example, Tendermint, the company has a couple addresses and, you know, different employees or shareholders within the company might want to vote differently using the atoms. And it would be nice for us to be able to sort of split our vote like that. Or if you have Binance, you know, they have a lot of atoms on their addresses, but they could be able to vote and say like, you know, 60% of our users want to do this and 40% want to do this and so they can do that sort of split vote. Yeah, so this is, this is an idea I definitely floated around on the, you know, different on Discord and on the forums. I don't know if it's on the forum, but I haven't, I haven't written it up as a formal governance proposal yet. But yeah, I should probably get around to doing that if anyone wants to help me do that, you know, reach out and would be happy to collaborate on writing up a proposal together. [85:15] B: Yeah, I think you should definitely write it up. I think this is like this amazing idea that can also allow users, like you said, centralized exchanges or other users like companies which share many stakeholders to be able to actually vote and that vote to actually represent the opinion of that company or the opinion of that exchange in terms of considering all votes from all users. And in this way you are also answering this big question like why aren't exchanges vote? Why isn't voting allowed on exchanges? And this can open up a whole new door to allowing users that from a preference or another are staking their atoms on exchanges to also be able to. To exercise their vote. Yeah, let's do it. Okay, moving to the next one. I think this is like a very technical thing, but I'll Just leave it to you. Like, how do you make it possible for Cosmos SDK developers to easily rotate application specific block strings without having to code every bit of functionality in your applications from scratch? [86:51] A: Yeah, so I think there might be some typos in this question that made it a bit hard to understand. But in general, if I understand that general idea, what it's asking is how do we make it easy to not rewrite everything from scratch. This has two parts. One is the modular ecosystem of the Cosmos SDK and is really great. If you want to, let's say you're building a chain and you need ability to have some sort of auctions on your system. Well, go check out the Kaba code base. They have built some really well designed auction modules for their application. And given the modular design of the Cosmos SDK, it's very easy for you to sort of fork their auctions module and reuse it in your application and you know, maybe change a few things as you need to. But and this makes it so you don't have to rewrite everything from scratch, this modular ecosystem. And as more and more people use the Cosmos SDK, it will just. The module ecosystem will just get richer and richer until you know a lot building a new application. Well, it might even just get to the point where it just plugging and playing a bunch of existing modules together. Then the other piece of this is one of the main pieces of feedback we've gotten from a lot of developers of the Cosmos SDK is when you're developing, there's just a lot of scaffolding code. There's a lot of code that you have to write just to get started. This is something we're heavily trying to fix right now as well. There's a couple of tools being built and we're building one of them internally at Tendermint. I think it's called Scaffold, where it allows you to very quickly and easily set up a lot of the boilerplate code. That way you only have to write your application logic and not all of this scaffolding code around it. Tendermint is working on basically improving this even further. We have a team dedicated to developer experience to sort of make this process much easier. And so hopefully that will keep getting better. [89:14] B: Cool. Okay, what's next? Okay, I think this is someone who would like to try Cosmos SDK and he wants to know, or she wants to know if do you need like advanced knowledge to be able to build command lines like CLI and REST servers or how easy is it to use it? [89:38] A: Yeah, so this is by the same person who asked the last question. I say it's kind of almost a follow up where. Yeah, I think this is something that like, you know, it's not too hard to do it. Like for example, the command line, we use this like go library called Cobra, which is pretty good. But yes, this is an example of one of the scaffolding things that we'd like to make easier. That's what the Devex team is working on. One of them would be if you have a bunch of handlers, it'll be nice if you could automatically generate all the CLI and rest endpoints for it. Or if you have queries and not have to write them from scratch. If you're interested in helping on this or even have any feedback on things you have issues with or whatnot, reach out to us and talk to our developer Experience team. And so that way we can just improve. That's what we're working on. And so we just want to hear from the users and help make it as easy as possible to solve a lot of these pain points. [90:48] B: Yeah, some great stuff coming up in the near future. So stay tuned and hear from us. We have, we are preparing some really cool features that will help like this developer experience to be as smooth as possible and as easy as possible to grasp for, even for people who don't have like this high knowledge of coding. Okay. Cosmos and Polkadot. From Cosmos and Polkadot, the two most promising projects of blockchain interoperability. What is the way Cosmos solves blockchain interoperability and what are the differences between Cosmos and po? And I believe we have already addressed that in a number of blog posts that we have written and also in some debates that we have. But I'll just let Sunny like make like a short overview on that. [91:53] A: Yeah, definitely. I mean there's a lot of great blog posts and stuff definitely already out there. Recommend. This is like one. Yeah, you can just search for it. Cosmos for versus Polkadot, there's some. I really like this one. I did a podcast with Jason Choi like almost a year ago I think. But like that he had this good write up after that podcast where I think that's definitely one of the best explanations and there's some other ones that was like some that are co written between us and the Polkadot team kind of explaining it. So definitely check those out. Yeah, I would say the main differences to be honest are the framework, you know, I, you know, Polkadot only release you have to write in substrate. Cosmos, you have to use cost SDK. But we're working on all these new stuff. Like you know, like I mentioned this chorus. One team is integrating substrate with ibc which is pretty cool and exciting. And then the. In Polkadot you sort of have to. You don't you. They heavily encourage people to use the Polkadot shared security system. Like. Like the Polkadot ecosystem I would say is the set of chains that are sharing security with Polkadot and everything else is sort of external to the Polkadot network. Cosmos we see like more like any chain that is supporting IBC is part of the Cosmos ecosystem and the Cosmos network. And then we will optionally have allow people to do shared security with the Cosmos hub. But it's almost just a difference in positioning where we don't think it's like a be all end all if you're not doing shared security. Well, Polkadot is really heavily encouraging people to do that. And then the way we do shared security is pretty different actually to Polkadot and Ethereum 2.0. [93:55] B: Okay, so I have just linked a bunch of like an article and the podcast in the chat here and people who are eager to find out more just look that up. And also feel free to come back with us if you have more questions. We are always on the chats and everywhere. Okay, going back to our questions, I think we have two more. [94:24] A: Well actually number 23, maybe we should do that because it just sort of leads into that one. [94:30] B: Yeah, sure. Okay. Interchange staking. Okay, that's a hot one too. And co validation design Cosmos Hub, how that difference from like the sharding mechanism like you see in Polkadot or Ethereum 2.0. Yeah, definitely a hot one. [94:50] A: Yeah. So this is kind of what I was referencing earlier where I think the Polkadot the way we. At least the way I intend to see shared security which is, you know, it'll be up to the community to decide if this is what they want to go with. But I think that the I take a more. I'd call it a Hayekian approach to shared security, which is sort of the whole cosmos ethos itself. So in Polkadot and Ethereum 2.0 you'll have a large set of validators on the root chain or beacon chain or whatever you want to call it. Let's say it's a hundred validators or let's say it's a thousand validators. And it will say okay look, U50 validators on this chain, on this shard or parachain. U50 on this one, U50 on this one. U50 on this one and it does this randomly and they just get shuffled around and you know, it's kind of the protocol just tells validators what to validate. What we see in the Cosmos Hub is a more Hayekian bottom up approach where a chain can come along and say hey, I want to be co validated and this is my reward, we'll have this much payment or this is the fees that we have, or this is the reward structure on our chain. And every validator can individually decide whether they want to co validate that chain or not. What will happen is some chains might have, you know, hundreds of validators deciding to co validate while some chains might have 10 validators deciding to co validate. And that's okay because once again not all chains need the same security. The cryptokitties chain doesn't need the same security as the MakerDAO chain. It's just. And this more Hayekian bottom up approach, it provides more better allocated security. This also means, you know, when everyone has the same security, that means some people are overpaying for security and that means some people are underpaying for security, which is not good. It also provides more scalability where this is also sort of how we punch through that Vitalik's trilemma. Because you know, some chains might, some validators might say I'm a big validator and I want to validate as many chains as possible. When some validators might be, I'm smaller, I only want to select a specific handful of chains that I want to validate. And this is good because now we don't restrict people on, you don't need to have the capabilities to run every chain in order to run a few of them them and so has these like scalability benefits that way allocative security. The whole lockup system in Polkadot just never made sense to me. Like why are people locking up dots to get parachain slots? Like why not just do direct payments? That just never quite made sense to me. But yeah, and so those are some of the differences. And if you're ever interested in learning more, feel free to reach out and chat. This is, like I said, this is something that I think the Cosmos community should and will hopefully start to focus on much more. And so hopefully a lot more details. [98:29] B: Coming out soon for sure once we'll be let's say done with Stargate and IBC enabling and we'll be able to focus more on this. And I'm sure that a lot of interesting proposal will come along this way. Because I mean the sole purpose of everyone is to make the atom valuable and interchange staking or share security kind of allows that that to happen. So a lot of room to discuss on this and a lot of proposals to be sketched. And we have one more. Okay, DeFi again, hottest blockchain topic right now. What is your opinion about defi in general and if you think that defi will disrupt or not the existing financial system and oh, what is Adam approach towards the defi sector? [99:37] A: So my opinion on defi. Yeah, so I have a lot of opinions here. So I'm a huge fan of the notion of defi. Like back in 2017 and everyone is hyped up about Web3 and all that. I don't know. I was always of the opinion that money and finance is probably the most useful thing for blockchains. But I think what's. I'm not too pleased with the defi ecosystem right now is it's kind of, I don't know, I'd say it's uselessness. It's not very useful right now. And it's like, I think it all stems from this over focus on trustlessness. And because everything needs to be trustless. You have like, you know, for any lending protocol you need over collateralization, which is just, you know, that's absurd. Like, you know, if I want to lend and I want to borrow money, right, like to buy a house, I'm not going to put down, it doesn't make sense to over collateralize using a liquid asset to get a loan. That just seems weird. So I think that the value of defi should really be to focus on openness and transparency. Openness in the sense that anyone should be able to participate, not like these random arbitrary restrictions we have today. And then the transparency. I think a lot of, I think a lot of the problems around 2008, like the reason it blew up to the extent it did was due to a lack of transparency in the system. Like, you know, it wasn't caused by this. But the reason that a small problem blew up to the extent it did was that there was no transparency into the financial system. You had these like, you know, these weird financial instruments that were collateralizing this thing that you know, or you know, there were side bets on this thing that were like collateralizing this thing and. Or you have these like insurance companies that like, you know, they're supposed to be insuring this thing, but then the same thing that they were insuring, they were exposed to it on their own balance sheets. This lack of transparency I think led the problem to blow up to an extent. It should not have. And I think that that's something that blockchains and defi can really help solve. And so one of the things I've been super interested in and I'd like to see more people pursue this line of rethinking is on I think identity and reputation is extremely important. And so things built with web of trust is something I'd really like to see people looking into. And I have some ideas on like how to build like decentralized lending platforms that take into account web of trust based reputations. And so anyone's interested in working on these kind of things definitely reach out to me. I'm looking for someone to sort of, you know, pass on all my research to and see if anyone wants to take it up. [102:57] B: Okay, so definitely a lot of takeaways from these ama. I hope we answered a lot of interesting questions here. Let's see if there is anything left here in the YouTube Zoom. Okay, Aria, one last question. Does IBC have room for fearless blockchain alternatives? [103:24] A: For what? [103:24] B: For fearless or no fee? Like no fee blockchain? [103:28] A: Oh yeah, yeah. I mean whether IBC costs fees is up to the, the blockchain. So you know, you could have, your blockchain could have no fees and then the other chain does have fees. So you know, someone will have to pay the fees on the other chain but your side doesn't have to pay the fees if it doesn't want to. Eventually there might be this like concept of fees for relayers on, for IBC relayers but currently that's not present in the IBC spec. So relayers are kind of running altruistically right now or with like payments on the side. And I think a lot of people are sort of. There are some people teams that I know of that I'm advising who are actually building relayers and really helping make the fee payments process over IBC very seamless. So if you want to, you know, send a transact IBC transaction from the, you know, Kava chain to the Akash chain, you know, instead of you have to do the IBC packet here and then the IBC packet here, you know, they will make that as seamless as possible. So it'll be exciting to see what kind of new services and stuff pop up around this. [104:56] B: Yeah. And I think we have covered it all. Thank you so much San. This was amazing. A lot of interesting questions from the community. A lot more questions here. Also on the chat in the live ama, it's always a pleasure having you as a guest. You are full of resources and we are so happy to have you with us and I hope we'll be able to do this somewhere soon. Also, for all the participants from the ama, we'll be posting a list of the questions that we have selected in the session and also that will contain like the handle or the Reddit handle or the YouTube handle that was used for that user. Please reach out to me. I will be needing your Twitter handle because for the first time we'll be using this amazing app that was developed by one of our community members. It is called Cosmos tpap. And what does this mean? Is that we have put the Atom in our Tendermint handle and we will distribute these tokens from the MA through this automated Cosmos T boat. That means that every time I will mention you in the handle, you will get that distribution of the Atom in an account that was created automatically for you by Cosmos tbot. This is like a very exciting app we have in the Cosmos ecosystem. We are so happy to be able to use it today with you and you'll see that it's so easy to use. Okay, so for distribution, I will post this entire list in Reddit and please make sure to send me messages, private messages on Reddit with your name and Twitter handle and I'll make sure to distribute the amounts by tomorrow for everyone. This has been an amazing ama. I'm so happy we have hosted it and for sure we'll be making more of this in the future with Sunny and maybe other guests also that would like to come and share their experience or their knowledge with you. So thank you very much. Thank you for sticking with us for almost two hours now and see you all next time. Thank you, Sunny. [107:43] A: Thank you, thank you. [107:44] B: Bye.