[00:09] A: So today I'm extremely proud and excited to have with me the Legend himself, Sunny Agarwal. Yeah. Cosmos og, co founder of Osmosis, which is something that entirely blew up over the past two months. So thank you and also congrats to that and everything that you've done at Cosmos. It's really, really amazing. And yeah, I think today we're going to talk a lot about Osmosis, about the Cosmos ecosystem, about the Cosmos hub, maybe some thoughts about Emirates and gravitydex. I know you have some other thoughts there than some people over at Tendermint, for example. But before we get into all that, thanks for taking the time. How is everything going?
[00:49] B: Thank you. Everything's going really great. Just past the two month anniversary of Osmosis, which, you know, hopefully like should be a little bit calmer going forward but you know, still a lot. Yeah, having, having a lot of fun.
[01:03] A: Yeah. And it was actually funny because you guys launched on my birthday, so 19th of June is my birthday and it was, oh cool. Really cool birthday present for me. And then, yeah, a couple days later I think when, when the incentivized pools launched. So since then I'm a daily user and really love the simplicity and also kind of like everything that Osmosis offers and provides. And every day at 6pm here in Portugal, I'm on my laptop waiting for the rewards to flow in. So yeah, before we go deeper on Osmosis, can you share a little bit of context about your crypto journey and also how you then ended up in the Cosmos community and working also in Tendermint and those kind of things?
[01:50] B: Yeah, sure. So I guess, I mean, depending on how far you want to go back, I mean, the first time I ever heard about crypto was when one of my friends in high school told me this, like, dogecoin sponsored the Jamaican bobsled team. And I'm like, what does that mean? And so I went home that evening and I looked up Dogecoin and I read it and I'm like, wow, interesting. Then I obviously mentioned bitcoin, so I'm like, oh, let me look at this bitcoin thing. Oh, wow, this is really interesting. And so it's funny, like I, you know, I think like, I think for the Osmosis team, like, I think Dogecoin has like a really special place in a lot of our hearts. Right. Like that was my first entry into crypto and even. And you know, one of the other co founders, dogemost, like, you know, that's his handle online because like, you Know, he was dogecoin plus cosmos. Yeah. So, I mean, I got really more involved. Then when I got to Berkeley, I was like, you know, as a freshman, I was looking. I was a student up there, and I just, like, was looking for things to do. There was a bitcoin club, had like five or six people. I'm like, oh, yeah, I remember that bitcoin thing. I looked into, and I got. I went there and I just got really interested in it because I was like, wow, this is like. At the time at Berkeley, I was studying computer science and political economy. And I'm like, wow, this is like, a cool combination of these two things. And so I just got more and more into it. What happened was the club was only, like, five or six people. And so what we said was like, hey, problem here is no one understands this stuff. This is so complicated. And so we're like, let's start teaching people. And so me and two friends, we created a class at Berkeley where we started teaching people about bitcoin, basically, and how it works and everything. And that way we actually got a lot of people interested in it. We. We built up this entire community there. We created a new club. That Bitcoin association club kind of almost like, basically died. And so we're like, hey, let's create a new club called Blockchain at Berkeley. And we kind of funneled kids from that class we were teaching into creating this Blockchain at Berkeley thing. It became the largest blockchain student club in the world, probably. And, yeah, so. And also that's how I learned about crypto. Whereas, like, you know, I tell people the way to learn something is to sign up to teach it. And so. Because if you got to teach something next week, you better go fucking learn it this week. And so, yeah, so I got really into bitcoin, was not very. You know, it's funny, I go back to some of our old lectures. They're all still on YouTube, and they're all so, like, bitcoin maximalist because. And we're like, oh, there's no solutions other than lightning and yada yada.
[04:35] A: Which year was that? Which year?
[04:38] B: The. So the classes were 2016.
[04:41] A: Okay.
[04:43] B: Yeah. And then. So, yeah, so this my sophomore year, I. I learned about Ethereum, or not I learned about Ethereum. But, like, the first time I looked into Ethereum was I was at a hackathon, summer of 2016, and I was like, hey. With one of my friends, I was like, hey, I heard about this Ethereum thing. It's kind of Like Bitcoin. I heard you can build applications on top of it. And so then I'm like, hey, let's check it out. Maybe we can do something for this hackathon. And so we opened it up, and the entire. We opened up Reddit, like, the Ethereum subreddit. And the entire front page was the dao just got hacked. The world is burning hard. Fork the chain. And we were like, okay, yeah, these people are just insane. And so we just closed it and didn't pay attention to it again. And I, you know, didn't pay attention to Ethereum again for, like, another year, basically because of that. But that following summer then. So now this is the summer after my sophomore year. So it's 2017. I was. Someone actually convinced me finally that, like, okay, take a look at Ethereum again. It was one of the guys from Digi. So he was like, no, no, no, trust me, Ethereum is not a scam. You should check it out again. I did. I'm like, okay. And then I started working. I'm like, I want to learn. I'm like, this is interesting. So I want to learn more about this. So I signed. So I took a summer internship at Consensus just as an opportunity to sort of learn more about Ethereum. And so I started doing that. And then while I was there, I just got super into proof of stake, because I was like, whoa, this proof of stake thing, it's funny, someone told me about the Cosmos ICO or fundraiser, like, in April 2017, and I opened it. Remember Bitcoin Maximalist. At the time I opened it, I'm like, proof of stake, that thing doesn't work. And I just closed it and I didn't look at it again. And then fast forward two months when I was at Consensus, I just got so into proof of stake, I'm like, whoa, this is so cool. I spent that entire summer basically just reading every proof of stake paper I could find. And the one that I was like, the one I liked the most was the Tendermint one. Because I was like, whoa, this is so simple. And, like, it works. And, you know, we can ship this so quickly. And so I wasn't really having a lot of my fun at my time at Consensus. So I kind of, like, left and I reached out to the Tendermint team. I'm like, hey, you guys, proof of stake stuff is so cool. How can I help you guys? Like, and then they told me about Cosmos. When I reached out, I didn't realize that it was the same people working on Tendermint as Cosmos. And so then they explained to me, like, oh, yeah, this is this Tendermint stuff, and here's this larger Cosmos stuff. And I was just like, my mind was blown because I was like, whoa, this solves a lot of, like, the issues I had with Ethereum as well. And this is how you solve the scalability and the governance stuff. And, you know, like I said, you know, the DAO hack still was like this thing that, like, was stuck in my mind about Ethereum. And I'm like, what can't. We can't just start forking the chain every time that one person gets attacked? And so I was like, whoa. Well, Cosmos fixes this. You get hacked, you go fork your chain. Don't go fork my stuff. And so that's when I got really interested in Cosmos and I joined that summer as a researcher. And I was just learning so much. And then come fall, I was supposed to go back to school. And I'm like, honestly, I'm just learning way more from here than I am from school. So I'm like, so I dropped out to start working on Cosmos, and I've been working there since then. So that was summer of 2017, almost four years ago now.
[08:14] A: That's awesome. That's a really cool story. And I think one of the kind of, like, things that I have not really covered on my channel yet is the scalability of the Tendermint consensus algorithm. And as you talk about it, I think it would be cool if you can maybe talk a little bit about it, explain it in very simple terms. I'm not technical, none of my or most of my viewers are not technical. So if you could explain how Tendermint scales and how it is superior to other consensus algorithms, also pro stake based algorithms, not just proof of work, I think that would be really valuable.
[08:51] B: I think the main thing that Tendermint does differently than many protocols is its focus on safety and fast finality. So what that means is you have two types of protocols or two main classes of protocols. You have like, BFT protocols and you have Nakamoto protocols. And Nakamoto protocols are things proof of work, which is like this idea that, okay, you build blocks on top of each other and you eventually get finality. While BFT protocols like Tendermint, were basically this idea like, hey, let's start, let's make a block, let's finalize that block, and then start working on the next block. And this is called the safety property, where, like, you know, the chain should never be able to fork because it's always like only you know, you, no fork should be allowed and this fight. And Tendermint provides something called, you know, asynchronous safety, which means let's say all the Internet lines in the world were cut. It, it'll be fine because Tendermint will stop. It will be you. You can prioritize safety or liveness. And Tendermint says we're going to prioritize safety. If all the Internet lines are cut, we're going to halt the chain, everything's going to stop. And once the Internet lines come back, then we'll keep moving forward. Something like proof of work will say hey let's they prioritize liveness. If you cut half the world from the other half will happen is both now you'll have a fork in the chain where they keep going forward. And this is kind of not so. So why does asynchronous safety and liveness and partial synchrony which means that like you know, once, once you know, it doesn't matter when the lines come back. As long as they will come back, you can make, you can make progress. Why is this important for scalability is because you can now run as fast as possible. Why are block times in Bitcoin 10 minutes? It's because if so, you know, blocks take time to propagate over the network and there's like delays and latencies and if you ever had a situation where block times or latencies or anything became more than 10 minutes, Bitcoin would never be able to resolve. Right? It would, it would be in this endless forking situation. Same thing with Ethereum, right? Like, I mean they, they, they push it much faster with like 15 seconds. But if like block times or like computation times or network times ever took more than 15 seconds, you'd be in this like weird situation where you never get consensus, what with Tendermint, because you're safe first. What you can do is you can like optimistically push the block times as low as you want. So you know, currently I think most chains use as 5 second blocks. But like if you wanted you could be like hey, if you want, if your goal is just to go as fast as possible, you could say hey, let's bump those down to one second blocks. And it's okay if it takes more than one second because the chain is safe. And it's funny, this happens if you notice on osmosis this happens up at the epoch time because the computation that currently that we do at the epoch time is really long. I think it's getting to the point where it might be a couple of minutes actually, which is, you know, we should fix that. But the beauty of it is because of Tendermint, it's okay for us to like put the block time as five seconds and have the computation take two minutes because the protocol is like, you know, it's okay, we know how to deal with this. We don't have to like panic if the block, if the computation exceeds the expected block time. Otherwise if we, if we weren't having this, we would have to make all blocks like two minutes long just to fit that one epoch block. So.
[12:35] A: Okay, and what are your thoughts in kind of like connection to that on something like DAX directed asiclab graph technology, Something like hashgraph is using? I know back then like when I started to learn about consensus algorithms and also read Ethan's and Jay's paper about it, which got quoted a lot by projects like Hedera that implemented then the hashgraph algorithm or CASPER CBC which now also launched recently. What are your thoughts on these kind of like modifications or do you think that's the next step in evolution or are they different or maybe you can talk a little bit about that and share some thoughts.
[13:14] B: Yeah, I think that those are, I think hashgraph, the gag stuff is interesting. You still get some sort of like more trailing finality instead of like fast finality. And part of the problem challenge with that is it's very hard to do things that require strict ordering because you know, you, what's nice about tendermint is like you can propose a block because you, and you know that you can have it. So you, you're kind of pretty confident that all the transactions will pass because you know the state after the previous block. But in a DAG style system essentially there's no one proposer. And so you have like, you know, the state of the blockchain from a little while ago. And so it's like know you have to design it. So you're like making transactions that are interacting with the state of the blockchain from a minute ago because that's the only thing that you have certainty over. So that's sort of why it's a little bit slightly weird. And so yeah, so that, that's basically like I will say like I think the DAG thing that I'm the most excited about is Avalanche. And I, you know, I remember when Emin who, when Goon like first told me about Avalanche, like you know, before the paper was released and stuff, he was like, you know, there's this I'm like, whoa, this is Iota. But like fix it fixes all the problems with Iota.
[14:35] A: Yeah, right, right, right. Iota. They were one of the first ones extremely hyped in 2017 with the tangle and then actually still to date in Germany. So I'm Germany in my country, they're like extremely excited about it still today. But I think they had some issues there where they had to roll it back or freeze it for some time. So I'm not sure what's the current state with, with these guys anymore.
[14:59] B: Avalanche is done correctly. But, but here's the thing. I don't like Avalanche for proof of stake. That's the thing, I don't. I think like if you're using it for proof of stake, like whatever, just use Tendermin instead. What I find super interesting about Avalanche is I've had, I love web of trust based things and I like, you know, I think there's different ways of doing civil resistance. You can have resource space like proof of work or proof of stake or, or you can have reputation based civil resistance mechanisms. And that's like what a web of trust is. And so I've always had this question of how do you design a consensus protocol based off of webs of trust? And you know, there have been people who've tried that, like Stellar tried that. But you know, if you look into it, it turns out Stellar ends up becoming very centralized because of how it's designed. Like the consensus protocol has like fundamental issues with it. When I saw Avalanche, I was like, whoa, this might be the solution to create a web of trust based consensus protocol. That's not what ABBA is doing. Like, you know, the team behind that's building the ABBA blockchain and stuff. That's not what they're doing. But I think there's a way where you can take that consensus protocol and use it to make a web of trusting. But I don't know if anyone's actually working on that right now.
[16:11] A: Yeah. But it's very interesting to also see what other companies and projects innovate and maybe take over some parts of that. And I think also Tendermint is one of the most widely adopted proof of stake based consensus algorithms and some have used it and modified it. I think even the Binance people, they have done kind of like their own version of it. But anyway, so the vision of Cosmos then in the first place is basically to create this Internet of blockchains, right. To envision this multi chain futures where you have millions of blockchains and that obviously includes some sort of technology that enables connectivity and seamless transition and seamless connections between sovereign individual blockchains, maybe even from different consensus algorithms. Right. And that's why we're seeing now also a lot of bridges emerging, different models, right. From very centralized ones that require custodians like rep. Bitcoin, but also completely trustless and decentralized ones like something like ibc. Right. So can you talk a little bit about the, your views and thoughts and ideas about interoperability in general and also then maybe dig a bit deeper on ibc?
[17:25] B: Yeah, sure. So I mean interoperability is a sort of, I just always thought as a necessity because I thought I saw that the multi chain world is inevitable. Like I, I just, you know, and today that's not a controversial thought, Right. I think today everyone believes that like everyone knows there's gonna be many chains.
[17:46] A: Except the Bitcoin maxis. I think they are still. Yeah, some of them are still in delusion.
[17:51] B: Yeah. And, but then you have like, I think like you, you rewind like four years ago. I think everyone's like, oh no, what do you mean? We can just put everything on Ethereum and it will scale infinitely. And you know, that's just, that's what I call a vertical scalability where you take one blockchain and try to scale it as much as possible. And it turns out that, you know, I'll say the, the person, the team that's doing the giving, giving that the best go right now is Solana. Right. I think Solana is making a lot of like, good innovations on making vertical scalability better. And I think they'll do a lot. But at the end of the day I think they're going to hit the roadblock where I think you still need horizontal scalability that comes from having many chains that are interoperating with each other. And so the goal of, you know, so we saw this as an inevitability that we need many chains. And so the question was then, okay, what are the tools that. And then, you know, there's a second bet that we make on top of that, which is that we believed in application specific change. You know, you could have a world where there's many EVM chains interoperating. And I think that's kind of where, that's where the rest of the world is right now. Right. They're like thinking like, oh, we're going to have Polygon and BSC and Ethereum and Arbitrum and optimism and like we'll have all these like EVM chains. But we're saying like, no, actually we think it's going to be even different than that. I think we're going to have all these application specific blockchains and I think it comes down to the fact that like when you have your own blockchain, you can do things with your chain that wouldn't be possible if you were sharing with another chain. And it has to do with scalability stuff where I think that any non defi application will usually get priced out on a true and complete chain. And I think that's interesting. Why you see so many of the Cosmos chains are actually non defi applications is because like, you know, those are the applications that got priced out on Ethereum and stuff because of fees then. But then on top of that, you know, you get, you can do functionality that you can only do on your own chain. Like, you know, for example, on osmosis, we're working on like native batching for, for the Dexes. That's something you need your own chain to be able to do very easily. Like all, all these and you know, having control over like your upgrades, adding new features if you have these forks, like, how do you, you know, how do you make sure the entire universe doesn't work just because one person had an issue? So yeah, that's where we, you know, application specific blockchains now. So to make this vision happen, we had a bunch of tools that were like, okay, what are the tools needed to make this work? One was we said it would be better if all these protocols had fast finality because you can't do cross chain communication until you have some notion of finality on one chain. And so you can treat finality as okay, maybe when something is 20 blocks deep on Ethereum that's good enough to be finalized. But it's like, you know, if you can't get. We were like, okay, to make the UX good, we need fast finality. And that's why we created Tendermint. Then we said, okay, we need, we need to make it easy for people to create new blockchains, right? If we believe in this application specific world, we need a way of people to create application specific blockchains. And thus the Cosmos SDK was born. And then finally we were like, okay, we need a way to make it easy for all these application specific blockchains to talk to each other. We need to create a standard protocol that's very easy to integrate that, you know, you just add it in and you can start talking to all the other blockchains and that's what IBC was. And IBC is, you know, like you said, it's just a bridge protocol. Right, but it's a generalized bridge bridge protocol. It's a generalized decentralized bridge protocol. Instead of, you know, currently what you see happening is you have all these like bespoke bridges popping up everywhere where you're like, oh, okay, let's build a bridge from ETH to Terra and let's build one from ETH to secret network. And all these are custom bridges. And the problem is these are all very like a little bit hacky. You know, bridge stuff is hard, right? I mean, look at what, what's happening with Thorchains, bridges or what's happening happening with that poly network stuff. It's like really hard. And the reason IBC took so long to ship was because we spent a lot of time thinking through like every edge case that's possible and like, you know, formally verifying the properties of IBC to make sure that hey, this protocol acts the way we expect it to do. And so that's why, you know, having this like building out this like really safe like generalized protocol and getting that adopted I think will be the way you get to many, many, many chains, not just a few chains.
[22:46] A: Yeah, and in that context, somebody also asked me this on my community on Telegram. The IBC kind of like interoperability structure and architecture has these relayers built in. Right. And I think today also this got published on minscan that you can now see who are the relayers and how many channels they have. Can you talk about in the long term? Because I think right now they don't have any strong financial incentives. I'm not too plugged in on that. But can you talk about the financial incentive structure for the relayers and how we can make sure that there's incentive to add more real layers and kind of like decentralize this function of ibc.
[23:30] B: Yeah, so I mean we've been thinking about this a lot, especially recently because you know, there's been some stuff going on with relayers. So you're right, currently the protocol has no inbuilt incentives for theirs. And so what we did initially was we basically went to two companies and we asked them, hey, can you guys just run relayers for osmosis to all the other Cosmos chains and our foundation will just pay you. And so, you know, we went to informal and bitwit and they did an amazing job, you know, like, especially on that initial spikes that we faced and like, you know, informal especially just with helping us debug and everything. And so we just paid them directly. We had like a service agreement with them. But then it's like what happened is there's more relayers started popping up, right? And like, you know, Jacobian, like notional, he had like started running really? And he was like running one of the best relayers. Like he was like relaying so many of the packets and like, it's like, okay, but like, how do we compensate him, right, because we already had this. And like, you know, there they got to the point where there was like 20, 30 people running relayers. Maybe like, let's say 10 people running relayers. And it's like, well, does that mean our foundation. Our foundation is not. Doesn't. We don't want to go start creating service agreements with 10 different people. And this is. It just gets unwieldy for us at some point. And then how. And if we don't want to do it for everyone, how do we be like, oh, we want to work with you, but not with you? You know, that's kind of seems a little bit weird. So I think we definitely need a way to build the incentive incentives in the protocol. So I would say there's two ways of doing it, right? I think there's like the better approach, which is like actually build something natively in IBC where it's like, okay, whoever's sending the packet cross chain is paying the fee to the relay. That would be the ideal, I would say. And that's how you. Option number two is relayers. So users relay their own packets. So imagine on like on Kepler, when you make a cross chain thing, you also then make the IBC trans. Trans you yourself make the IBC transaction to do the relay. And so, you know, there's a typescript relayer that's been built by the Confio team. And so what if we integrate that typescript relayer into Kepler, so then we allow the users to be their own relays. Essentially that's option two. I think that comes with some UX issues, but, you know, it's, it's a possibility. And then option three, which I think is what we're like looking at right now, we're considering, you know, in the very short term as like until option one works is maybe just having it. So instead of the foundation paying people, we actually turn. What if we turn it into a little bit more of a competition where we say like, okay, we're going to. Is there a way for the community pool of a chain to pay relayers but based off of the number of packets that they relay, essentially where you say, okay, we're paying this many OSMO per week for relayers, if you relayed 50% of the packets, then maybe you'll get 50% of that like of that week's bounty. And so it kind of turns into a race almost for like relayers to just be the fastest at relay, which I don't know if we is what we want to do because maybe you just get into a situation where one relayer just is always winning and getting all the incentives. But maybe on the other hand, maybe that is what you want. I don't know if that forces people to get better service. I don't know. I think it's a hard question to solve. Right now we're figuring out the stopgap solutions like that. While the IBC team kind of works on the building protocols actually into IBC natively.
[27:27] A: Yeah. But I think it's an important thing. And especially now that IB IBC gains kind of like more and more adoption through osmosis, Gravity Decks, maybe other defi apps and NFT stuff also maybe that eventually plugs into it. So I think it's very important and exciting. Definitely we'll keep track of that. And I think that's also one of the reasons why it's very, very important always to follow you guys on Twitter because you also sometimes publicly. I like how you all like with each other, publicly debate those things and brainstorm publicly on Twitter. I mean it's awesome to observe those things. But yeah. Before we get into the origin story of osmosis, I'm personally excited to hear your thoughts about bitcoin today because you just said you used to be a bitcoin maxi, but now you're kind of like envisioning this multi chain future. And we already have it basically. So what is your thoughts on bitcoin today? Do you think it will ever improve or kind of like switch maybe even to something like proof of stake or what are your thoughts and your ideas about bitcoin?
[28:31] B: Yeah, I mean, so I don't know if you saw. I tweeted like maybe two or three weeks ago that what did I say? I find it funny every time someone realizes that the entire cosmos community is just a bunch of undercover bitcoin maxis. I don't know if that's actually true, but I always say people like, I would still consider myself a bitcoin maxi. I would consider Ethan Buckman a little bit of a bitcoin maxi. I think Jay, as Well, a little bit. I think, like, I think a lot of the core people still are. Bitcoin was where we came from. I got into Cosmos. Part of the reason I got into it was I was like, hey, we can build the application layer for Bitcoin where I believed in this idea that, okay, the bitcoin chain is just this money chain. It shouldn't be an application chain, but we need Bitcoin to flow off of that chain and into applications on all these other chains, and Cosmos is how we're going to do that. And to an extent, I think, I still believe that. I think that, like, bitcoin is still the best crypto currency that exists right now. I'm a little bit more separate about my, like, view on cryptocurrencies. I, like, I, I'm not a Austrian economist. I'm not an Austrian believer anymore. I'm, I, I think fiat is actually really cool. And I think, like, digital fiat, I love the idea of like, algorithmic stable coins and things like that. But it, but out of the crypto assets, I still think bitcoin is the best one. And so I, you know, I was at Satoshi Roundtable last week, two weeks ago, you know, got, got participated in my annual bitcoin circle jerk. But I mean, it's cool because, like, I think there's like, cool stuff happening on bitcoin right now. I. Michael, I don't know if, you know, like, you know, I think my Twitter name right now still says like, Sunny Agarwal. Hashtag OPSI TV or something, because OPSI TV is this like, Bitcoin op. So, you know, the most recent bitcoin upgrade just went through that will activate Taproot and now sort of the political game to decide what's the next upgrade is starting now. Like, okay, you know, bitcoin should have another software maybe in like a year or two. And like, okay, what is the software going to be for? Right? And so one of my friends, Jeremy Rubin, he's been working on this thing of like, called Sapio, which is like a smart contracting language for Bitcoin, but it requires this opcode to make it even more trustless. And so I'm like, trying to help him do that because once we have that OPCTVS enabled on Bitcoin, we're going to be able to do much better. Trustless bridges off of Bitcoin. And once we have trustless bridges off of bitcoin, amazing. Now we can start bringing it onto Cosmos and using it everywhere. And bitcoin can be the Currency of the interchain, which I think will be really exciting. And then you asked me, do I think bitcoin will switch to proof of stake probably in like 30 years. I mean, it's fine, right? I mean, I think that's okay. I mean, I don't think that's the. A big issue. I think that it's funny, actually. After I left Tendermint last year, like in June, I was like thinking of different things to work on. One of the things I maybe spent, you know, maybe a couple days, like brainstorming is how. How do. What if I. What if I work on bringing dogecoin onto cosmos? Like, I coordinate like a fork of dogecoin and like put it onto the cosmos SDK and proof of stake and everything. And then I did a bunch of research into it and I came out with the conclusion that no one cares about dogecoin anymore. So I'm like, yeah, exactly. And it's like, well, fast forward now. It's like, okay, well, I was very wrong about that, that no one cares about dogecoin anymore. I think crazy. Yeah, exactly. And so I think it's so I still. I saw. I think it's still like a potential future where like, all right, you know, Elon Musk cares a lot about this, like, environmental stuff. It's like, all right, how do we get dogecoin onto proof of stake? And this will be the sample for when bitcoin does it, 30 years from now.
[32:47] A: Plus, if you migrate dogecoin and you can just forget and give everybody free coins on the cosmos chain. Plus you have interoperability, right? I mean, you have already access to other chains and decentralized liquidity protocols like osmosis, like gravity Dex now. So I think it would make a lot of sense because right now dogecoin is just by itself and it doesn't do much besides waiting for the next tweet of Elon. And I think at one point when he stops trolling maybe. I don't know what's going to happen there. I mean, and I think what you have on the Osmosis website, the dogecoin logo is actually 10 times cooler than the real dogecoin logos. I really like that one. But yeah, so that's really cool. I also had one thought about. Yeah, so about the bitcoin maximalism thing. I think that you just have a different. A kind of like more neutral perception of maximalism. Because when I hear about maximalism, I immediately. My brain connects it to tribalism, right? To. Okay, this only is going to win. Everything else is scam, everything else is a shitcoin. And you have this fanatic tribal behavior, especially in the bitcoin community. But now also more and more Ethereum community and now Cardano community, right? They're launching smart contracts in a couple of weeks, apparently. Let's see if that's going to happen. But you see more and more tribal behavior, as in, you know, people being really fanatic about their bags. And I think that's not what you are. But I think your point is that you really believe fundamentally that bitcoin has great properties and it's one of the soundest forms of money out there, probably. And I think that is actually true. And I consider myself also a bitcoiner or bitcoin person from that angle, even though I don't push it so hard and still believe in a lot of other projects. But I think. Is that how you would describe it as?
[34:43] B: Well, yeah, in a way, I'm kind of trying to reclaim the term maximalist. I'm like, oh, how I pitch it is, what does it mean that I'm a bitcoin maxi. I'm trying to maximize the potential of bitcoin. The term maximalist was created by Vitalik as this kind of slur against bitcoin maximalists, which at the time the bitcoin maxis were very sort of annoying, but kind of like a way of reclaiming it. And I think the problem is, I think like, a lot, there's often like a little bit too much. Do you know what the no true Scotsman fallacy is? No, no, no, true Scotsman fallacy would be it's this, like. It's like this logic fallacy where you're like, oh, let's say I make the statement every true Scotsman loves whiskey, right? And then you're like, oh, no, but my uncle doesn't like whiskey and he's Scottish. And then I'll be like, oh, but then he's not a true Scotsman then, you know, and it's like you. Where, like, you just define the definition in order to, like, make your fit. And so, like, you know what the problem is? Like, what will happen often is people will say like, oh, bitcoin maximalists are so toxic. And then I'll be like, all right, what do you think about Jeremy Rubin? I really like Jeremy Rubin. And he's like, yeah, but no, but he's not a bitcoin maximalist. I'm like, yes, he is. You just don't like. You just define. You're defining a Bitcoin maximalist as someone that is toxic. So then you're playing a no true Scotchman fallacy. Oh, he's not a real bitcoin maxi if he's not toxic.
[36:17] A: Yeah, that makes sense. But I think it's also kind of like this word like shitcoins. Everybody calls altcoins shitcoins, but it's also the same thing. Right. You're kind of like throwing all in one basket. But not all altcoins just because they're illiquid or small or new, are shitcoins. Right. I think it's a very similar concept. I think on crypto Twitter, that's kind of like the language, the slang that people just adopt and then run with it and then stop thinking about it. But I like the idea to reclaim the maximalist term, especially in the bitcoin community. I think that's a good idea. And eventually bitcoin is also going to benefit from kind of like getting connectivity and establishing bridges to trustless bridges to something like Cosmos or Polkadot or Cardano or Ethereum or all these other projects out there.
[37:04] B: Yep.
[37:04] A: Yeah, that's really cool to hear your thoughts about these, these things. But I think now let's dive deeper into osmosis. First of all, thank you so much for building it and for, you know, being pioneer in the AMM Cross chain, AMM space. I love it. I'm a big active, daily active user. And also thank you for this generous airdrop. I mean it's not that you gave out free money, but that you guys have have done this and done it in a way that also benefited for a lot of people. I know a lot of cosmonauts have really received a lot of money that helped them also in their personal financial situation. So that's always great to see. Can you talk about a little bit the origin story, how osmosis came together? You said last June, last year, in 2020 you left Tendermint. Was that already works while you're there or did you come up with the idea later? And how did you guys decide to start Osmosis?
[37:58] B: Yeah, no, so I left Tendermint. I was just a little bit burnt out at the time just from like, you know, I was working non stop grind for like three years at that point. And there's also just like the drama at Tendermint stuff. I was a little bit burnt out. So I took a break for like a month or two. Just like didn't do much then, you know, but you know, Defi summer was happening on Ethereum. And I was, you know, watching that, playing with that. And then so I had a validator company called sika, which I, you know, still had. And, and Dave and I were like, okay, let's do something with this now. Right? But we didn't want to run validators, you know, like it's not. Dave and I are builders. You know, running validators was fun because it's a way of helping us. You know, we were dog fooding stuff where like at the time we were like building proof of stake. And so being a validator let us be the user of our own software. But we want, so we wanted to go back to building stuff. And so we were trying to figure out what do we build or what's our thesis first of all. And so, you know, proof of stake was one of, you know, we. But we already solved that, right? We solved that at Tendermint. Okay, what else? Scalability. You know, I think that's already work being worked on. A lot of people are doing it and I think we solved, we helped a lot on the cause aside and it's happening and then sort of like privacy, you know, we really want to like, I think privacy is like the next shoe to drop. Like, you know, there's a little bit of privacy stuff being done but like, you know, it's going to. Privacy is going to be the next thing to go mainstream once like once scalability is solved. And so we started like. And so, so Dave, he like does, he did like research with Alessandro Chiesa on like zero knowledge proofs and stuff. So I don't know shit about cryptography. Like he knows cryptography inside out. So you know, always, which is really good. So we started designing like on chain privacy stuff like shielded pools on the Cosmos SDK, but then from talking to people. So at the same time one of my, you know, I was friends with the flashbots team. Like I was in the room when flashbots was created and that's his flashbots is this like protocol for like MEV democratization. Ethereum, they do like auctions and I, so I got really into this MEV problem and so Dave and I were like, hey, what if we, I think we can solve that by using this like threshold encryption idea. We came up with something called Mempool privacy which is like how do we make sure everything in the mempool is encrypted? And that way you can't front run anyone because you can't read anyone's transactions. So we started designing that and we spent most of fall basically designing it. Because sounds simple at first, but once you dive into the thing, it's like, all right, there's edge cases. How do you deal with gas? We need to invent some cryptography to make it work. And. And it was a whole thing. And so we, you know, we spent fall doing that, then in. And then we. But we had this thing. We were like, okay, what is. This is a feature, right? This is a really cool feature. What's the product in parallel? The Chain Appsys team. So Tony. So the chain Appsys is the company that made Kepler. And so Tony from that team, he was at a hackathon last November at one of the hack atoms, and he created basically the MVP of Osmosis. And he basically helped reimplement a lot of the balancer white paper and put it on the Cosmos SDK. And so. And they. I think they won that hackathon or something. And then they reached out to us in December. They're like, hey, do you want to help us, like, make this into a. Into a thing? And so, you know, we started helping them out a little bit, and then over time, basically our teams have basically just merged at this point. So now, you know, it's just one company, one team now. Osmosis Labs. And we still maintain the Kepler and everything, and we still maintain the SECA Validator, but all of us are focused on Osmosis now. And basically in January, we started working on this Osmosis thing and worked on it for the next four or five months and launched it in June.
[41:59] A: Yeah, it is so cool, man. And, yeah, see what happened with it, I mean, it really took IBC mainstream, at least from 0 to 1, so to speak. So. So what are your thoughts now that it's live for on the day, two months? Are you happy with the success or did you underestimate it? Overestimate. What is your kind of, like, recap of the past two months with Osmosis? And what are. What are some things that you're mostly excited about that happened already in the past?
[42:31] B: Yeah, I mean, I think so. I think getting that IBC stuff, like, I think it was just really fun to see IBC come alive. Like, I think what happened, like, there was a moment there where I'll say I was. I was a little bit skeptical about ibc where I was like. Because I saw all these other bridge solutions coming up and just iterating faster than ibc, and I'm like, where is ibc? This is taking so long. And it's like, maybe this IBC thing is too Much and we should just go with like bespoke bridges. But then once, once IBC was enabled and just like that process of turning on the chain and just make up like seven transactions that we were connected to seven different blockchains and, you know, things were starting to flow over. It was like, whoa, that was like simple and fast. That was cool. And then like, you know, one of my friends, Zubin, he's like the co founder of Open. You know, I've been trying to shill him on Cosmos for, you know, we live together in San Francisco. One of my best friends, I'm trying to tell him on Cosmos, like years now, and he just never got it. And then he used osmosis and made an IBC transaction and he's like, oh, I get it now. This is why you need safety over liveness. Because he was like, in that bridge process, he was like, wait, what happens if that other chain forked? What happens to the tokens? And he's like, oh, wait, but the safety property and the IBC transfer just happened so quickly. And he's like, all right, this is like, this is the future. And so we were at the UNISWAP office the other day and Zubin is like shilling Hayden on Cosmos, which is really funny to watch. So, yeah, I think that osmosis has really helped show that, okay, IBC is a real thing and sort of like, this is how it's going to work and all the benefits of it on top of that. What else? I think just the. I think it showed like, a lot. It helped a lot with the demand for like, you know, there are so many tokens that like, only exist on, like, kazos, and it's hard for them to get onto centralized exchanges because it's a lot of work for centralized exchanges to like, sort of add a lot of these tokens and. And so run new chains. It's a lot more work than adding ERC20. Right. And so just getting osmosis was like the first time a lot of these tokens had real liquidity, right? And I think that was like a really big deal for a lot of these tokens. And we're trying to make it as user, eventually. Our goal is DEXs are supposed to replace centralized exchanges. And the trading functionality is one thing that centralized exchanges do. Right. But centralized exchanges are really this packaged platform that do a lot of things right. So they provide fiat on ramps and off ramp. So we're figuring out, we're working with some teams on making a nice fiat on ramp, off ramp. To everyone. If you notice that when you want to list a token on CoinGecko, you need to be a. You need to have a supported exchange that you can say, oh, here's what the price is, but what is the exchange for Osmosis, for Osmo or any of these tokens? So we worked with the Coingecko team to actually integrate Osmosis as a supported exchange. So now once you have a token on Osmosis, you can automatically be listed on CoinGecko. What else do centralized exchanges do? Right, you have custody solutions. So we're figuring out how do we make it so, you know, osmosis can provide easy custody solutions for the users of Cosmos ecosystem. Yeah, basically we're iterating on like, just like. And we're getting to the point where it's like, okay, how do we start providing more and more services to these Cosmos chains? That makes it more of a no brainer to start building on Cosmos.
[46:31] A: Yeah, and Osmosis had also been. I was really surprised to see that so fast. I think that was in the second or third week, the bootstrapping event for region. Right. So that was also the first kind of like IDO curve on Osmosis, which went pretty successful, I think I also took part in it and it was really, really smooth and amazing. So is that also something that you guys are planning to do more and more? Is there also interest from new projects that want to bootstrap liquidity through Osmosis?
[47:01] B: Definitely, yeah. So there's already a couple of projects that are like lined up. I mean, I think some I can say like, you know, Desmos, for example, and Stargaze, and you know, they've already like expressed interest and there's a couple others that have expressed interest. The, the design that we did for the idea, we used the lbps, which are designed by Balancer team and they use like weight changes of the pools. I'm not convinced that the LVPs are the best way to do IDOs, to be honest. But so we're working on designing, you know, LBPS 2.0. Like, how do we create like a better version of this that will make the IDO process even better for a lot of these protocols. So yeah, that's definitely, that's, you know, that's another thing that extension exchanges do. Right. They provide initial bootstrapping. And so how do we, how can Osmosis provide that too?
[47:52] A: Yeah, that's really amazing stuff. And I think like you're saying there's so many small elements that make an exchange a Whole where it's centralized to decentralized. But yeah, I think decentralized exchanges AMMS is one of the most important things in crypto as a whole. Right? Because most people still to date, if you look up the validators setups, validator nodes on Cosmos, for example on the hub for Atom, the largest one is still Binance, right? So nobody gives a shit about self custody. Everybody just holds them on Binance and clicks on Binance earn and they don't really care. But I think if there's also the proper incentives to hold your funds in self custody on osmosis, it's an absolute no brainer because the APYs are so high which you don't get on any centralized exchange. But yeah, that's I think very, very important for the entire crypto space as a whole that everybody takes full accountability and full control over their own funds. So when you guys launch osmosis, you launch it on your own chain. I think the original initial idea was, I read this early post, blog post that some, some of you guys wrote. We said hey, as soon as the shared security goes live on the Cosmos hub, we want to pack osmosis to the hub. But obviously it's not live yet. We still have to wait a couple of months, maybe too early next year for shared security to ship. So you launched your own chain and now that the gravity decks went live and was fogged into the Cosmos Hub, you also expressed some kind of like, I don't know if concerns is the right word but like, yeah, I don't know how to explain it, but maybe you can explain it in your own words because you expressed that. What are your thoughts about the Cosmos hub having now forked in the gravity decks and osmosis kind of like doing its own thing on its own chain?
[49:48] B: Yeah, I think so. I think it mostly has to come down to the credible neutrality of the Cosmos hub where I think the Cosmos hub was meant to be this layer one chain that's similar to the Polkadot relay chain or the Ethereum to Beacon chain. And you want to be this neutral thing that anyone wants to plug into, right like, and so like you know, I, I think competitors is great, right? Like, I think, you know, I, I love the fact, you know, I love Thorchain. I like Thorchain is one of my favorite projects. And so you know, and I think we're, we're, I think like they're doing some really cool stuff and we're taking a slightly different strategy than them and I'm really interested to see how they work out and you know, I, more competitors, you know, SIP chain and all these like things. The problem is that I'm not going to have, I can't have it. And Gravity Decks is the competitor, right? To Osmosis. Like, you know, I know people are like, oh no, we're friends, they're Dexes. They're competing for liquidity and they're competing for volume and they basically have the same pairs right now, right? So it's like, okay, they're clearly competing for, on multiple dimensions right now. And that's fine, I welcome that. Right. That's what we want, that's how we make better. But the problem is I can't rely on my competitor for our core infrastructure, right? Like our security, right. Like, I don't see how it would be. Like I, maybe I'm just too paranoid about it. I don't know. But I don't see how I could do shared security with the Cosmos Hub when the Cosmos Hub is Gravity Decks and that's our competitor. Right? You're going to rely on your competitor for your security. That seems weird. Or like, let's say on like roadmap stuff like the Ethereum Bridge, right? Like I wish like I could have used the, the Gravity Bridge from the Cosmos Hub, but it's like, I don't know, like how, how do I know? Like you look at the branding, right? Gravity Bridge, Gravity Dex. Like the branding is obviously they're going to try to funnel users into Gravity Decks, not into Osmosis. And it's like, or you know, what kind of roadmap? You know, maybe there's a feature that we want, we need on Osmosis and but gravity, it hurts. You know, it gives us an advantage over Gravity Decks. And like gravity, it's like how we interact with Ethereum maybe. How do we know that the Cosmos Hub will be like, oh no, we don't want to add that feature because you know it'll help Osmosis over Gravity Decks. And so we can't rely on our competitor for core infrastructure, which is fine, you know, we can go and start building our own core infrastructure, right? Like I would have liked to use shared security with of a couple Cosmos Hub. Cosmos Hub is this know what $4 billion? I don't know Mark Cap, anywhere but like $4 billion network. Osmosis is a 400 million dollar network, right? There's a, there's a, there's a security difference here and it'll be nice if we could have tapped into that security and like, you know, Paid for that, leasing that security. That's the model of shared security. But I. It just really hard, you know, that's okay. If the Cosmos Hub wants to go down this route where they want to. Essentially, I think what's happening right now is the Cosmos Hub is trying to stop being this like, hub. It's going to stop being this credibly neutral center of Cosmos and instead just start becoming a defi app, which is fine, you know, it's great. We'll compete with it as just another Defi app. But it's like, I think it's losing that once you lose that credible neutrality, you lose that centrality to the ecosystem. Imagine Ethereum had this native Ethereum foundation built, Dex, right? And would Uniswap have built on it? Would balancer? Would 0x? Would people have built Ethereum, all these Dex protocols if Ethereum's like, no, this is the Ethereum Foundation, Dex.
[53:46] A: Yeah, I see your point. But I think also I talked with Jack Zepolin yesterday and he also said that. Yeah, I think, you know, we just have different opinions here, Sunny and I, because he thinks that building a kind of like a trading, a swap protocol, which isn't necessarily kind of like a defi. I mean, it is defi, but it's kind of like very open, right? It's kind of very neutral. Everybody can get listed there and it's just a central kind of like.
[54:12] B: I mean, same with Osmosis, right?
[54:14] A: Trading terminal. Yeah.
[54:15] B: So, but that's the same way Osmosis is building as well, right? Like, I think Osmosis and gravitydex are both trying to capture that same market.
[54:25] A: But I think the question here is really like, does it really taunt the credible neutrality here, or can you still have the Hub as kind of like the heart or the center of the interchange, which is, I think, what it is branded to be or kind of like described. That's what the Cosmos Hub is. And I think what you're basically saying is that the core kind of like value accrual for the Hub or unique selling point for the Hub and value accrual for Atom is to have this shared security model, like Polkadot's relay chain. Right. And obviously it worked perfectly for Dot. Right. It's pumping like crazy now with the parachain auctions coming up. KSM as well. I think in the first five auctions on Kusama, more than $200 million worth of KSM have been. Yeah, locked. So that's pretty impressive. So what are your thoughts here? Like, what would you how would you have done it if you would were the. Had the head of, you know, decision making here in that process, would you just only focus on the shared security aspect or what would you have done in that case if you were the only guy to decide?
[55:36] B: Yeah, I think maybe focus more on yeah, the shared. Just put all the resources behind shared security right now. Like shared security should have been delivered like make it prime imperative number one to like deliver shared security by end of year, right? Like, and I think there's a lot of teams doing a lot of really good work behind it, right. Like, I think informal is like doing a lot, lot of stuff on the, on the like IBC side of things, but there's a lot of moving parts to make shared security work. You need like IBC side. There's like changes that need to be made to the Staking Proto Staking module. There's like changes that need to be like, you know, all this like auto self deployment. But speaking of which, I don't. I still do not understand why Starport Network is a separate chain. Like isn't Starport Network just like a piece of shared security? And I don't understand why Tendermint is trying to launch this as a separate chain. It feels like kind of a little bit silly to me. But like, anyways, so yeah, so I think that like shared security should be like prime directive. Like that should be number one. And just like even on the communications, right? If you go out there, no one knows that Cosmos is working on shared security, right? Like I, you know, part of my role at Tenderband, but just in general, I used to go to conferences. I was the spokesperson for Cosmos, right? And like you know, when I was at ETC this year, still no one knows that. No one associates Cosmos with shared security and the Cosmos Hub. Everyone still says, oh, what is. If you ask people what is the point of atoms right now, they're like, oh, it's going to be the Gravity Dex token, right? It's like no, no, no, it's. It's shared security. This is like the vision of the Cosmos Hub. This is, this is why I started working on the Cosmos Hub, right? Because it was like I thought that, okay, this shared security vision at least was in my mind back in 2017 when we started working on it. Like, all right, this is what the Cosmos Hub is going to do. And yeah, so yeah, that's number one. But what else? I think you could do things like Ethereum bridge, right? I think that is something that should have been on the Cosmos, that should Be on the Cosmos Hub and should have been prioritized like getting that bridge up and running, getting Ethereum assets on like that. That I think that should be. That would have been. That should have been prioritized over Gravity Decks probably. So, yeah, I would say those are like sort of the two main things I would prioritize right now. I think Emerus is great, by the way. I think Emerus is like a great use of like having a really good multi chain wallet. That sounds great. I wish it was more open source and plugin. So instead of being. This is an example, right? Where it's like, okay, here's the official wallet of Cosmos called Emirates. Oh, only thing implemented is Gravity Decks right now, right? Okay. If you gave me a open plugin where or even open sources and be like, hey, I would have my team go add osmosis to it, right? But it's like, well, it's not open source. It's like clearly favoritism towards Gravity Decks. And so like that's like kind of what I see is that I can see this playing out. It's going to keep happening.
[58:56] A: Yeah, yeah, I see your point. Yeah, I mean that's what it is, I think. And hopefully we'll see also more kind of like applications connected through Emirates. I think that's also the grand vision here and I would also love to see Osmosis and other apps. I think liquid staking is also another thing that will come natively in the Hub. But also projects like Persistence are working on this. So I think hopefully we're going to see more of this on Emirates. But so now that kind of like Gravity Dex is on the hub. Emirates launched shared security, I think now gets more and more of a topic to be shipped in Q4 or early next year. What are your thoughts on the future of the Hub now as it is, I don't know if you looked at the 2.0 roadmap, but what are your thoughts in the future? And also maybe talk a little bit about the value accrual of the atom coin.
[60:03] B: Okay. I guess the question is do you see there being a world where Gravity Dex moves onto its own chain? If so then my answer is different, right? Like I think if the if while the Gravity decks remains on the Cosmos hub, I think that it's very hard for me to see how the Cosmos Hub maintains its centrality in Cosmos where it's like, okay, yeah, I think Gravity Decks will be a great application and it'll be like, okay, atoms will accrue value by. I don't know, taking a swap fee from the Gravity Decks and all these kinds of things. And, you know, maybe it can offer shared security as well. Right. But I just don't think it'll be like the same thing. I don't think it'll be this, like, I think the narrative will change and it won't be this like neutral shared security. And like, maybe other applications will use it. Right? I. I can. And, you know, maybe I'm completely wrong. Maybe, like I said, I, I don't see Osmosis using it because Gravity Decks is a competitor to Osmosis, but maybe Region Network is okay with using it. Right? Because maybe it's, you know, it's not a competitor to Region, and so maybe Region Network would be open to using shared security or, you know, so maybe. Yeah, that's what I see happening. I still think that what I'd like to see is the Value Crew for Atoms will be that the chains that want to do shared security with it basically pay for that security leasing. Right. They'll be like, okay, here's a portion of our fees that go to the causes and. But then by being an atom holder, and most of you an atom staker, you'll be earning the fees from all these different chains at the same time. And that's sort of the value accrual. It's similar to eth, Right. Like, you know, the more stuff that's being built on top of Ethereum, the more people are using fees, there's more demand for eth, and that's how it accrues value same. I think, I think it'll be a similar situation for atoms.
[61:54] A: And I think that's also, I think Bucky and also Federico talked about this, that there is a potential kind of like, fee burn mechanism that can be implemented maybe in Gravity Decks where a portion of the base fee gets burned and then you have a little bit more scarcity with increased traffic on something like Gravity Decks. Yeah. So I think, I mean, I don't know if you have any more, more thoughts to share about the Cosmos Hub, otherwise we can talk about some.
[62:29] B: Yeah, I will say that, you know, at the moment, atoms are still the gateway to Cosmos, right? Like how, you know, I have family members who are like, oh, how do I buy osmo? Right? And it's like, oh, well, you know, you first go buy atoms from Coinbase, then you transfer them to Osmosis, and then you buy Osmo. Like, the atoms are still just. They're on every single exchange you can imagine, right? They are the Gateway to Cosmos at the moment. And so I think that I think is one of the biggest moats that Adam has right now. And you know, Adam has gone. It has like a little bit of lindy to it right now, like regulatory lindy where it's like, you know, it's been around for four years now, many years now. And like it's probably not going to be deemed a security and like have to be shut down and everything. We don't know. I mean, you know, and so I think that, I think that's a big value prop to Adams.
[63:21] A: So you're still bullish on Atom.
[63:24] B: We'll see how it goes, right? I mean, I think there's a lot of risks right now where like, or for example, once I think once Terra activates IBC in like three weeks, I think the entire Cosmos ecosystem is going to change. Right? Yeah, like, I think we're, it's. Terra is like almost in the top 10 right now by market cap. I'm like, whoa, like this is insane. Yeah. And it's like that stablecoin is going to flow as soon as that gate opens, that stable coin is just going to flow into Cosmos. I can imagine like Terra will probably become one of the most popular base pair of osmosis. Right. And I think maybe that turns into the gateway to Cosmos. Right. Like as Terra is becoming more and more popular, it's being integrated onto more remote chains and maybe it becomes the fiat on ramp intercosmos. We'll see what ends up happening there.
[64:18] A: Yeah. And I think the fork date is September 9th, right. With the Columbus 5 upgrade on Terra. And what I think most people don't, I mean first off, I think most people, like the majority of the people don't really know what Terra is and what value it brings to the Cosmos ecosystem with the implementation of IBC. Because Terra has a very, very successful and large 4 or 5 billion dollar stablecoin called UST, right?
[64:46] B: Yep.
[64:46] A: And it's going to be also compatible and also I guess going to be listed on osmosis and also gravity decks. There will be pools for it. And I think that's a huge, huge value add for the entire ecosystem. So I think it's going to be really interesting. And yeah, as we talk about other projects in Cosmos and implementing ibc, what are some other kind of like implementations and bridges that you see are being built to other chains. I think the Solana guys have also shown interest or more from the Cosmos side to Solana, that you can bridge those ecosystems. Jack told me yesterday that there's a bridge coming this year to build over to substrate based chains like based on Polkadot or Kusama. So what are your most exciting bridges and connections to other ecosystems that are in the works?
[65:39] B: Yeah, so I mean I think one is that gravity bridge I think will be generalized where actually technically is generalized already, where you can point it to any EVM chain. The problem is you can only point it to one EVM chain at a time. But I think, you know, once you, once you've just modified that software a little bit, you'll be able to point to many at the same time. So now I can take the same gravity bridge and have it connect to Ethereum and BSC and Avalanche and Celo and anything that's EVM compatible basically. So I think that will be a big deal. Then we're in touch with the Axelar team which they're building a really good bitcoin bridge and dogecoin and things like that. So I think that'll be a great source. I'm in touch with the Wormhole team right now to get so, so we can get that connection into Solana then.
[66:33] A: Is there any bridge with Cardano in the works? Is anybody working on that or.
[66:39] B: Not that I know of. But maybe, I mean maybe someone will build it. I, I don't know if it's the top of my priority. I, I, I think one underrated bridge right now is flow, right? I think flow is like that. I was surprised to see that there's no, no bridges off of flow right now even to like Ethereum. And I was like, what? Seriously? There's so much value being built on flow right now with like all these NFT stuff and we'll see how much of it flow captures relative to like other platforms. But like I've, I've talked to nft. I, you know, I, I had, a couple months ago I was helping out on this like side project with like NFTs and you know, just talking to people, people are interested in building on flow and like how do we capture that, get those, you know, things can be minted on flow for the user experience. But then if you want to financialize those NFTs, how do you bring them onto like other chains like Use and Defi? I think that, I think that's a, that's something I kind of have my eye on right now a little bit. It's not something we're going to build in near future, but it's just something like that's a, I think that's a cool Opportunity to get towards.
[67:43] A: Yeah, I mean, to be honest. Yeah, sorry, go ahead.
[67:46] B: I was just saying we need NFTs on Cosmos, like ASAP. Right. We need a good NFT platform on Cosmos.
[67:53] A: There's a project, is it Pylon or what's it called, that is working on NFT platform.
[67:59] B: Yeah, I think Tendermint funded them. I haven't seen a demo or anything yet, so I mean, we'll see how it goes. But yeah. What's the open sea of Cosmos?
[68:11] A: I think there's one built on Iris uptick. Did you see that one uptick? I think they're getting more and more. There's also this guy in the community, in the Cosmos community. He created NFTs of you and a lot of OG Cosmos people.
[68:29] B: Seriously?
[68:31] A: Yeah, he put them on uptake projects. So it's really cool. He's like, yeah, maybe one day when it blows up, he wants to make sure that the Cosmos crypto punks or how he called it, are there and represented. So that's cool. Yeah. But I wanted to add one thought to Cardano because it's one of the most hyped things right now, obviously top three in market cap. Absolutely nuts. I already thought at $1, like man, this thing has to cool off. And now they had like 70, 80 billion dollar evaluations. But I think they have kind of like shut themselves a little bit outside of that because of also this kind of like ideology that they're representing that they say like, man, we're the east killer. And you know, like a lot of people in the community are very tribal about this as well, so. But anyways, I think today it's an ecosystem that might come to Life on the September 12th as well with the Alonzo Hard fork. Let's see what comes out of it and if there's a bridge to it, I think it's still a net positive for the crypto industry as a whole. Same as things like hashgraph. I think I saw once J. Kwon was actually in a thread somewhere and he's like, yeah, sounds interesting. Maybe we can explore to build bridges to hashgraph. I think that would be something really exciting as well. But yeah, I think we can go to some of the community questions because I shut out a tweet and asked people like, hey, what questions do you have for Sunny if I were to interview him? So, so a little bit of teasing here. Let's start with. Well, this is a question everybody wants to know. What do you know about Ion? Right? Ion Coin, I think I saw you in One of the podcasts where you said like, this was a kind of last minute decision by yourself actually to have a second token on or coin on osmosis. Can you talk about what's the purpose of ion? What's the goal, where and what will be the use case of it?
[70:31] B: Maybe it's easier to start with how it came about. So I want it. I just like the name ions. I thought it's a cool name. It's like, I think it fits with the atom theme but also with the osmosis and stuff. So I wanted the smallest token of osmo to be called ions. So similar how Bitcoin has sat and ether has whey it to be ions. But Josh is like, dogemos is like, no, like, you know, just stick with the Cosmo standard, like the U osmo, U atom, that kind of thing. So I'm like, okay, fine, because it'll make the wallet's life easier. But then I was like, well, when it was time for test nets, right? Like when we, you know, we had our internal test nets and it's an amm, right? Right. We need two tokens to test an AMM with. So on the test nets we are just create a second token. So I had osmo and then I'd have like ions so I can test around the amms. And then like two days before launch, I was like, wouldn't it be funny if I just added this in the main net Genesis file as well, not just on the testnet ones? And so I'm like, and then we were just like. We were just working nonstop for like that week was crazy. The amount of work we did. And so we were just like, all right, we just need to like, do something to relax. And I guess the thing we did to relax was do more coding work, which is kind of weird. But like, we were like, all right, let's like launch this ion thing and like add this into the thing. We don't know what the purpose is. We're just like, let's just do it. It'll be funny. What if people get open their accounts when they. When we launch and they're like, what is this ion thing? We don't know what it's for, we don't know why we got it. So that's kind of how it came about.
[72:12] A: How was the distribution actually? Because some people got it, some people didn't.
[72:16] B: Yeah. So, I mean, I was kind of secretive about the distribution for a long time, but the community has basically reverse engineered it. So I think it's Fair to share now. So how it worked was you got one ION for every single governance vote that you did on the Cosmos Hub prior to Stargate, and then you got one ION for every hub upgrade, during which you were delegated to cika. So part of it was like, you know, to launch Osmosis, we never raised any money. We completely self bootstrapped it. And we were able to do that because we took all the Sikka Validator profits and rolled them into development. And this was really nice that we weren't, you know, we didn't have VCs or anything like that, but. And this was sort of our thank you to the SIKA delegators, which was like, oh, you know, osmosis wouldn't exist if you weren't, you know, if it wasn't for these delegations that like, that Validator income funded osmosis. So that was sort of the thank you gift to them. And so, yeah, so, yeah, basically those are the two conditions. One for every vote and then one for roughly every year you were delegated to sika. Yeah, so that was the distribution of ions. And then what's cool is now it's just this community that like, is brainstorming ideas and they're like trying to hire. I think they're trying to raise funding for a dev team and they're like, I think they're trying to build some sort of stablecoin or something. Right now I'm not fully sure, but we'll see what it ends up being. But I think what's cool, one of my friends, Dylan from Commonwealth, so they built the forum for Cosmos, they've had this thesis for a while called Token Curated Registries, Token Curated communities. And they're like, oh, you can have a token and then a community will form around it and figure out what to do. And I'm like, all right, maybe. And then it's like, oh, wait, that's actually what happened with ion. It's like, that's what's happening in front of our eyes. And I think it's just this really cool thing to witness and like, if it, you know, we'll see what ends up happening.
[74:18] A: Yeah, it's very interesting.
[74:19] B: Yeah.
[74:20] A: And it's definitely raised a lot of kind of awareness and curiosity also from a lot of people what it, what it is. And also the logo, it's so cool, so funny, so playful. So, yeah, really, really cool thing. And also in that context, another myth in the Osmosis community is Wasmonton. Right. So nobody knows who he is. And I Respect his privacy. I have chatted with him on Twitter a little bit. We're trying to set something up here, but that will be with an avatar or something like that. So we'll, we'll figure, figure things out here. But why is he. So this is a community question, actually literally on Twitter. Why has he convinced me to stake with him? Do you know anything?
[75:09] B: I assume was someone I know, I don't know who it is, but they just know so much that it's probably someone I know and I don't know. They're funny. I mean, you know, I, I have like Twitter messages and stuff with them. I, I chat with them and just like, you know, they've been. It's funny if you go on the Messari main, like, you know, Messari has this like research on like every project. If you go on the Osmosis one, it literally lists the co founders of Osmosis as like, you know, me, Dave, Josh, Tony and Wasmington. I'm like, what? This guy is not. I don't even know who this guy is, but it's really funny. I just love that like, you know, here's this community figure that's just like, you know, become an active, kind of, kind of like what you did, right? You know, I love how you've just become like very active in the causes community and just build up this brand and like. And I think Washington has just done a cool job around that too and just like building up, you know, a bunch of followers.
[76:08] A: But yeah, it seems that he's at least very deep, deeply knowledgeable about a lot of things in Cosmos. And I think he's also a big fan of Ethermint, so probably somebody that. And yeah, yeah, whatever. I'm not going to talk more about this, but there might be something brilliant. Unfortunately for me, because I'm also running a node on Osmosis, so I also delegated some to him, but that's kind of like a little conflict of interest. But I think in the end of day it also always makes sense to delegate to different nodes also to just like dilute and decentralize and also support others because there's also work and time and energy that goes into those things. Another thing that caught people by surprise was that the project called Sunny Aggregator, which shares the same name as you, they announced an airdrop for Osmosis Holder, Osmo Holders and also Osmosis liquidity providers with the US dollar value that they have locked in osmosis pools. And I think the snapshot is being taken between August 11th and 28th. So either it has already been taken or it's still going to be taken. But you came out two days ago, three days ago, and said, guys, I'm not affiliated with them. I don't know what it is, but it has to do something with Solana. So what do you know about them? Have they reached out to you? And why? What have they. To do with Osmosis?
[77:32] B: Yeah, it's. So this is someone. I do know who it is, but they will. They want to remain anonymous. There's just someone, you know, a friend of mine, and they found it. They just thought it would be. So, I mean, Solana is like Sol Sun. And they're like, oh, they just thought it'd be funny to name it Sunny Aggregator. And because it sounded like my name, they kind of just did it a joke at me. Like, I didn't even know about it. They, like, they published their blog post and then they sent it to me and. And I'm like, wait, I'm like reading it. Like, wait, wait, what? This is like. And they're like, URL is Sunny Ag. So I didn't know about it. But then, yeah, then they did like a. Then they thought like, hey, wouldn't it be funny if we did an airdrop to OSMO holders? Just like a tiny one. And I'm like, I don't know, I'm not going to complain. If you want to airdrop OSMO holders, I'm not going to stop you. And so, yeah, they just like, all right. And I think it's cool because to them, they saw it as like, hey, well, we want to airdrop to defi users that will come on and start using our thing. And so I think it's a really good sign that they see Osmosis users as this. I think it might be one of the most active non Ethereum defi user sets. Right? And it's like, if you're trying to airdrop, like, try to get non Ethereum defi users. Well, awesome. It's probably a great actually community to airdrop to. Very. And so I think, yeah, that that was sort of what they thought what their goal was. And I just made that tweet. I wasn't like, it was more just like, you know, everyone kept messaging me about it, like, how do I claim my sonny airdrop? Or are you. Or people were like, oh, buy Sunny airdrop because Sunny's involved with it. I'm like, I'm not involved with this. You know, like, I'm not saying I'm not saying like the negative thing that it's a bad project. I'm just saying like, no, I'm not involved with it. Just don't use me as a reason to like participate in it.
[79:29] A: Interesting. Yeah, but I think so the bottom line is it's still a legit project. They just are friends of you and kind of like wanted to connect with you because a lot of people are like, hey man, there's no repositories, there's nothing to check on. It's a scam is this and that.
[79:43] B: But I believe it's a legit project.
[79:47] A: Yeah. I mean that's cool. Yeah, no, that's cool because I made a video also about Cosmos airdrop season that is coming up and there's quite a lot of things. Jquan also came out two days ago announcing no land and that there's also going to be an address stickers I think. Not sure if holders.
[80:07] B: Yeah, but yeah, it's not a scam, right? Like, I mean, I don't know if it's gonna be a good project. I just. It's not, it's not a scam at least. Yeah, got it.
[80:17] A: Okay, so I think if you have time for a couple of more questions, quick ones.
[80:23] B: Yeah.
[80:26] A: Here's one about stablecoins. When, when stablecoin will be available on osmosis.
[80:32] B: September 9th.
[80:34] A: Terror after hIBC so UST is going to be, it's going to be coming September 9th. Is there an NFT minting and trading on Osmosis? Could it technically be done on the same chain or would need a new sister chain?
[80:50] B: It could be done on Osmosis but like I think NFT is our, you know, I think Osmosis is really trying to focus on defi and particularly on like on dex functionality. And so I, what I would like to do is like have like functionality on osmosis to financialize NFTs. Right? Like, you know, we, you want to be able to like fractionalize an NFT and then trade those on an AMM or like. So I think that's kind of stuff that we'd be interested in and to do that obviously we need to support NFTs. And I think there's like a standardized NFT IBC protocol being made right now. But I, I think that the, the platform to mint NFTs needs a team that like understands NFTs inside out and like believes that like just like that's just not our team. You know, I think we are very, our heads are like filled with like how do we make D5 work and so we need someone who like spending a lot of time on making NFT markets and like building that. So I'd love to connect to one of those, have someone build a chain like that and like connect it. Ibc. Yeah.
[82:02] A: And I think Nirav Patel's question fits really well into that. He's asking about the composability of osmosis and what can be built on top and also if you guys plan to kind of create an ecosystem vibe similar to Terra.
[82:18] B: Yeah, I think what Terra has done amazingly is this like transition from application to platform. Right. And like, if you look at like some of the biggest products in Web2World, they did that too. Right. Facebook went from an application to platform and I think like, you know, I think Tara just executed that so well and I think it's something that maybe will happen in osmosis in the long run. At the moment, you know, we're just focused on getting our deck stuff together. But I think, you know, honestly, it's funny, I think Cosmos is probably maybe the second most popular smart contracting language right now after salinity. Right. Just because of Terra has just like there's a lot of people building on it and so and I think it helps make people, make it easier for people to build. And I think there's like things that like it would be helpful to have some sort of permissioned Cosmos on osmosis where I don't want it to turn into a smart contracting platform where people are just deploying contracts willy nilly. But if there's a way of making it, using Cosmos to make it easier for people to build stuff that is positive some and helpful to osmosis, I think that'd be great. For example, ions, they need to have some way of building their, whatever their product is. We don't know yet, but whatever they figured out, they need a way of building it. Right. And so maybe Cosmos is a good way of doing that. Same with like, you know, let's say someone wants to build a, you know, one of the things we need is leverage, right. On osmosis, someone needs to build a borrowing and lending protocol and it would be easy to do if that borrowing facility was on the same chain as the amm. So then you do this like fast leverage, leverage loop. So maybe if we have, and I think we should have some sort of like permission system where the governance chooses that a contract is allowed to be deployed or something so it doesn't just turn into a smart contracting platform, but really just as a way of extending the core functionality of Osmosis.
[84:22] A: Awesome. Yeah, I mean, I think we can wrap things up here. We're almost, I think, at one and a half hours. That's a record. So, yeah, thank you so much for your time and I really, really appreciate you coming on. And I think it's incredibly valuable, all the insights that you shared, updates about Osmosis, your thoughts about the Hub and all those kind of things. And yeah, thanks again. I'm an avid follower and also of yourself and also user of Osmosis, and really excited to see everything that you guys are building and keep working on. So, yeah, really cool.
[84:58] B: Awesome. Thanks for having me on because much over to you.
[85:02] A: Thanks, man.