**A** (0:03):
Hi, it's Citizen Cosmos. We are Sergeant Anna and we discover Cosmos by chatting with awesome people from various teams within the Cosmos ecosystem and the community. Join us if you are curious how dreams and ambitions become code.
**B** (0:20):
Hi. Today we have Sunny. Sunny is a core developer and a researcher at Tendermint. He runs the Sika Validator. He's the co founder of Blockchain at Berkeley and a co host at the Epicenter podcast. Am I right, Sonny? Is that everything? Did I miss something?
**C** (0:39):
No, that's. That's most of the important things.
**B** (0:42):
Do you want to add anything about yourself? Say a little bit about yourself, describe yourself in a different way? Anything you like?
**C** (0:50):
Yeah, I mean, I just am really passionate about blockchain because, you know, I was interested in like combining computer science and political economy and so I just got really interested in Blockchain. I've been working on Cosmos for about. I started in summer of 2017, so it's been almost three years now and it's just been a long time working on this project and I'm excited to see how it's grown and developed since then.
**B** (1:14):
Right, first question. It says on the Tendermate website you're a research scientist. Describe your role as you see it. What does it mean and in your own words, what it is you do.
**C** (1:25):
Yeah, it is sort of, I don't know, it's sort of a little bit of a vague role, which in a way I kind of like that because it allows me to kind of have a lot of freedom to work on a bunch of different things. I would say I describe my role in a couple of main things. One of them is I do a lot of sort of development, a lot of Cosmos SDK development and design of like the governance module and staking module and a lot of that stuff. I've done a lot of development and I help out the development team there when it makes sense. But then what I do prefer to do is lately I've been doing less on the development side and more on the specs kind of side. And so I'll go ahead and sort of come up with designs and ideas for new specs, things like, you know, some of the things I have on the plate right now are things like proportional slashing, staking derivatives. I want to get out a spec for how to do like cross interchange security and stuff. So kind of just like coming up with these ideas and like also sort of keeping in touch with researchers from other communities. I spent a lot of time talking to a lot of the Ethereum, like researchers. I Talked to, like, Tezos researchers a lot, so keeping up with all the other communities as well. So that way good ideas that come in from them can get applied to us and things. Ideas that we have can get applied to their stuff. So that's one of the things. And then the third thing that I would say I do a lot of is sort of community evangelism. I guess this had started from my time at blockchain at Berkeley, where I really just like, teaching. Blockchain at Berkeley started because me and two of my friends, we decided teach a class at Berkeley teaching students about blockchain. And so I just really like teaching and explaining things to people. And so I kind of did a lot of that over the past couple of years. A lot of. I did spend a lot of, like, events and talks and conferences. And I like to go explain how cosmos work. I really like doing that and, like, giving analogies and metaphors to make that all work.
**B** (3:11):
It sounds like you said it. Communicating is your favorite part of your job. What drives you on the inside to communicate with people? I mean, is it a passion? Is it something you wanted to do from since you were a child? What is it?
**C** (3:25):
Yeah, I don't know. I really like the communicating part of it. I. I think what excites me the most about it is I really like to think about metaphors. And when I can think, when I can come up with a metaphor that helps explain things to someone, it just gets me super excited. Like, the metaphor I often use for cosmos is this, you know, sovereign nation states and, like, how development of blockchains is sort of similar to the development of societies, of going from, like, like kingdoms to empires to nation states. And I thought that's very similar to how blockchains developed as well. And I don't know, for me, when I just, like, in a metaphor just like, clicks in place, I just get like, wow, that was so much fun. I just want to go, like, share this with everyone. And so I think that's kind of what it is. And teaching people is fun at Berkeley. I, along with the blockchain class, I just really wanted to teach something. Like after I taught the blockchain class for two semesters, and that was a very big class with, like, hundreds of students. And we had, like, multiple teachers, and we had, like, you know, very intense class. And the one semester after that, I decided, you know what? I wanted something much chiller, just by myself. I want to teach a small group of people. So I just decided to teach a class on Switzerland for some Reason? Yeah, I had like 20 students come take the class. It was a fun class and I don't know, I just really like taking something I'm passionate about and just explaining it and teaching it to people.
**B** (4:41):
One question here. You said you obviously teach loads of students. Did any of your students create something that you were proud of in terms of blockchain?
**C** (4:51):
Yeah. So I mean a lot of the one of them, for example, a lot of the students from Blockchain at Berkeley have like sort of gone on and done like a lot of really cool things. One that I'd probably like to highlight a lot and is a couple of my students. Aparna, she was like in the first batch of Blockchain at Berkeley students. Zubin Koticha, he was my little in blockchain at Berkeley. So you know I so does his mentor but you know he was smart enough that I didn't really mentor him. We just became like really close friends instead and you know we actually ended up living together last year and Alexis and so they actually co founded a startup called Open and so it's actually a pretty popular product on Defi, product on Ethereum. In the past couple of months they do sort of put options for insurance and so I'd say they're probably one of the coolest like look at this cool thing that they did.
**B** (5:35):
Are you proud of it though?
**C** (5:37):
Oh yeah, totally. I mean I think it's really cool. Like you know, I think they've definitely found a really good like product market fit there.
**A** (5:44):
So you know a lot of people ask you how you start your blockchain journey. But I'm going to ask you another question. What could you do if you didn't start work with blockchain? So let's imagine that in some words you just not involved into blockchain sphere. What could you do?
**C** (6:05):
Yeah, that's a good question. I've been actually thinking about that to myself lately a little bit as well. It's like man, what if blockchain doesn't exist? What would I be doing right now? I would say probably before I got into blockchain I was in high school, My like passion was robotics. I was just doing like robotics non stop. But when I got to college, like I said, I kind of started wanting to do something more in the interaction between computer science and political economy. And so freshman year I was like starting, I was doing some blockchain work. That's when I started getting involved with that. But actually what I was kind of really focused on freshman year was data visualization and so my internship in college after freshman year, it was actually at a company where I did some data visualization stuff. And so my belief was that when it comes to like political decision making, there's a lot of data out there, people to make decisions off of. But at the end of the day, it's still humans that are making the decisions. And so if the humans can't comprehend the data in a way that's actually human understandable, then all that data is kind of useless. So I was really interested in data visualization as a way of how do we explain data insights to humans so that they can make better political decisions. So that's probably what I'd be doing if Blockchain wasn't there around.
**A** (7:22):
Yeah, it's cool. A lot of people in our team are really excited about robots and it's cool to let people know how it should work. That it's not something that we imagine usually.
**B** (7:34):
I was gonna ask you that later, but you kind of brought the question a little bit ahead mentioning politics, governance and so on and so on. Obviously somebody who follows the cosmos ecosystem or just an average user or a very active user doesn't matter. I can see that you're quite involved in the governance process. Is that because of what you just explained or is there something else behind it as well?
**C** (8:01):
No, I think it's, I mean, similar to what I explained where I don't. I just really find governance and like politics very fascinating and like how to. I mean that's, you know, that's kind of why I got into blockchain was I thought, I see it, I see blockchain as a way of helping solve coordination problems. So I think governance is actually better on chain governance systems is the best way. You know, it is one method of solving coordination problems. And so that's. I like to be very actively involved in that process.
**B** (8:30):
Would you say that the design that Tendermit has created so far succeeded in governance or failed or in the middle?
**C** (8:39):
I think it's very, very like it is an absolute MVP of governance. Like it was just like we need. Here's some voting on chain and by tokens it's extremely primitive. I think there's a lot more sort of exploration that has to be done in the governance space. What we have right now is just one of the first, earliest blockchains that has an on chain governance. Like, you know, there are earlier ones as well, like of course, like Decred and Tezos and whatnot. At least the social. The norm is in Cosmos that we do have some sort of governance system and now it's a matter of figuring out iterating on it and improving it. You know, I'm really interested in exploring things like futarky and you know, I'd like to see more liquid democracy style stuff in cosmos where like, you know, you shouldn't always have to be delegating your vote to your validator. I think that's a little bit silly. Like eventually you should be able to delegate to anyone on and you should be able to delegate to different people on different topics.
**B** (9:36):
Definitely I agree with you. It was a very interesting experiment and. Well, not was, is and I'm interested to hear your thoughts about it. I wasn't gonna bring it up but now you bring a lot of governance up. Anyways, long story short, I can't remember the name of the consensus what they called it but it was definitely on ether and what they did in order to increase the participation in governance is they introduced a second layer token for the governance which wasn't like it didn't have a lot of money monetary value but the idea was that you could bet on the outcome of a governance proposal and it didn't affect the governance proposal. You staked it. But you could still kind of create like a second layer market on top of that. I can't remember what it was called. Really forgot. But what do you think about something like this? Is that too silly, too speculative or interesting?
**C** (10:31):
I think that is interesting. I mean one thing is in a sense it is sort of turns it a little bit into a bribery market. I mean the general rule is any sort of betting market on chain is by nature usually also a bribery market. I think this is interesting where let's say things like the Fed today, right like people are like you know, currently criticizing the Fed for like oh money printer go brrr. Besides that specifically. But I think like, I think something like more futarchic does make sense for influencing the Fed's actions. Where I think the Fed is not gonna, is not gonna anytime soon give up all control over like oh, you know, we're just gonna let this like futurchy system like run everything. But it's valuable, it could be valuable for as like sort of an advisory system for the Fed where and if they decide to go against the market they have to have like a really good justification of why they that why they want to enact a policy that's different than what the futarchy market suggests. I think futarchy as an advisory system does sort of make a lot of.
**B** (11:37):
Sense, what do you think in terms of like, if we move from, maybe not move from futarky, but let's stay in the same context. But I mean, I've been following Blockchain for about probably nearly 10 years now and we've been working different projects and so on and so forth. And one thing I have realized is that, and actually we spoke about it yesterday with Anna. The more decentralized the project is, the more difficult it becomes to have what I would call good governance. Not good, but the word good is not good here. You know what I mean? Like, it's more difficult it becomes to govern the project because you have more opinions, you have more stakes. What are your thoughts about that?
**A** (12:15):
Can I add that it's some costs of governance. We spent a lot of time to come to some arrangement.
**C** (12:24):
Yeah. As the number of stakeholders increases and voices, it definitely does become harder. I don't know, I guess one interesting thing, I never considered that until you just asked this question, but I feel governance got easier on the Cosmos Hub after launch. I felt like there was a lot more disputes over certain design decisions and stuff within the Tendermint team while we were launching the Hub. We'd get into this. So, and in retrospect, some of the arguments were sort of like, so silly. Like I remember we got into an argument about like, oh, how big should the memo field size be? And that became like a, it's like dumb things like that. And then I feel like after launch we, you know, somehow all of those arguments like stopped happening. And it was just like, I guess when you scale up the size, I don't know, maybe there's like rule where like as you scale up the size of the governance system, you naturally end up just sort of pruning away some of the less important stuff. And so you really only start, you kind of become aware that look, there's no, I'm not going to go make a governance proposal to go change the size of the memo field. You know, am I really going to be the person who's going to like, like make all these thousands and thousands of like Cosmos participants, like vote on this thing? Yeah. So I think what ends up happening is when you have these larger governance systems, some of these more minute details, you sort of end up having to delegate them to more specialized sort of sub team people, sort of whoever the Cosmos core develop. So what we did was how I like to see Cosmos Hub upgrades happen is we'll, for any sort of major feature change, we, we should have a specialized governance proposal for It. But then there's all these like sort of minor changes that happen as well. I think whenever it's time to upgrade the chain. Before that, we should make one governance proposal and just be like, here's a list of all the minor changes that have been made. And so, you know, if you approve this, like, it doesn't make sense to sort of vote on every single small one of those. And so changing the memo field size, maybe we'll just get put into that one. And if people have disputes on like any sort of specific minor thing, then they could go ahead and raise it, but like not. Yeah, you just have to be more selective when your governance system becomes larger.
**B** (14:48):
I see what I mean, by the way, the consensus, I just suddenly remember it's called holographic consensus, if you're interested to check it out. But this is just something to get in mind. Back to governance. One more question before we move ahead. What do you think? I mean, the first episode we recorded was actually with Gavin from Figment Network and it's actually been released. We spoke and I think I've seen you on the government working groups governance, sorry, working groups calls as well. What are your thoughts about that idea? Is it going to work? Does it need improvement?
**C** (15:18):
I think it's a good sort of system for. I mean, I think probably the most useful thing that I hope to get out of it is the documentation that Gavin mentioned where I think just like having documentation on how the governance process works and all what all the parameters do, I think that's probably like one of the most valuable things that will come off of it. And then I also do want to see. It's good to be able to delegate governance, upgrade how to upgrade the governance system itself to a specialized working group. And I'm not quite sure if that's really what they've been doing up until now or not, but I think that sort of was meant to come later in their sort of roadmap. I think the earlier stuff was getting the documentation and stuff working. What I would like to see that working group sort of start to do is sort of come up with designs for how to do that liquid democracy stuff and really, really sort of take ownership of improving that specific module and that part.
**B** (16:20):
Let's talk about Sika for a minute here. I mean, Sika is, if not one of the most popular validators, is definitely one of the most powerful in terms of stake. Did you plan for it to be successful? Was it just an experiment? Tell us the story.
**C** (16:34):
Yeah, so I guess it was a Little bit of a surprise. I started working on Sika because I remember the bitcoin scaling debates and what I saw from that was it turned into this very miners on one side versus the core developers on the other side. And I started sick because I wanted to be able to wear both hats. And I just saw that, okay, one point down the road there might become a situation where the core developers and the validators are standoffed against each other, let's say, I don't know what it will be caused by maybe proportional slashing, I don't know. And so I wanted to be able to have the experience of being not only core developer, also being a validator. So one, I can sort of understand what the process of being a validator is. And like, so I know like, okay, this is the kind of things that validators are thinking and what they're worried about. So that way I have that understanding and also, so I have some more like influence on that side as well. So that way I can, by being a validator I can also sort of be able to sort of represent the validators opinions as well and be able to influence them better than I could if I was only a core developer. That's why our sticker originally started and it was meant to be just sort of be that. And then over time I think we just sort of kept gaining more and more delegation partially because of our like original zero fee plan, partially because we were just, you know, I was well known in the space. And so we kind of got a lot of delegation from that, a combination of things. And so it just kind of grew bigger and bigger. And then at some point Dave and I, Dave, he was, he was also worked at Tendermint for a little bit. He and I were running it together. And so yeah, at some point we were just like, wow, this is bigger than any of us, either of us expected. And so we're kind of trying to figure out now what's the next steps for it and how to continue growing Sitka or what's the best way to. It's hard to tell what's going to happen with the validation space, especially as you get these like larger and larger entities that are like, you know, especially exchanges and stuff entering. And so we're still figuring out what the next steps for Sika are.
**B** (18:51):
While we are on the matter of Sika, I've seen in your project list is a bit unusual. Usually you know, the validators, they're like a little bit, I don't want to say the word boring, but Usually most of them are. And. And in terms of, you know, the list of projects, and it's all, like, projects from the same space. You have two interesting things. So let's go one by one. First is Grin. What do you think about mimblewimble? What's your thoughts with Grin?
**C** (19:12):
The part that excited me was not so much, actually, the mimblewimble part. I think mimblewimble is, like, it's a cool idea, but it's, you know, kind of not that much. I think coda stuff and, like, zero knowledge proofs are much more promising, or not promising, but much more powerful. But what excited me about Grin was at least like, a year ago, was movement behind it. I felt like the story was right. Like, it was the most bitcoin, like, story that had come out in the crypto space, where it was like, oh, like this anonymous, like, text file that was just dropped on the bitcoin IRC with this idea. And then some other anonymous person came up and built up a team and to develop it. And then, like, a lot of the core developers at that time were still anonymous as well, and they were sort of, like, developing it and starting from zero and everything. And what. And what I liked about it was the monetary policy. They do 60 grin per minute till the end of time. And I think that's much, much more reasonable than bitcoin's, like, deflationary thing. This is still technically deflationary, but it's a sort of different type of deflationary.
**B** (20:23):
You're stealing our questions, Sonny. Stop it.
**C** (20:26):
Sorry.
**B** (20:27):
You're always answering the question ahead. He knows that I have the question list here. And, like, oh, my God, he keeps doing it again and again.
**A** (20:34):
Do you feel that storytelling and story behind the project is one of the most powerful part or one of the most important part for the project?
**C** (20:44):
Yeah, I think so. I think at least cryptocurrencies are sort of heavily a meme and, like, they're like a religion. I mean, all currency is a religion, right?
**B** (20:54):
Like 100%.
**C** (20:55):
Yeah. One of my favorite speeches from, like, American history, it's called the Cross of Gold speech. And it's very much like he's sort of equating, like, it was a speech by William Jennings Bryan, and I don't know, I think 1896 or something, he was kind of equating the sort of undying devotion to the gold standard that people had back then to, like, Christianity. And so even, you know, the belief in gold is also a religion as well. And all currencies are Religion. And so I think the narrative is very important.
**B** (21:28):
That's really cool that you say that because a lot of what we do is got a lot to do with it. I'm not gonna like pour over the quilt on myself, but it's really interesting that you say that. Back to economics a little bit and back to your projects in Sika, I have a little bit of a strange question. The second interesting project, well, which is doesn't fit into the box is Straightedge. And I'm sure I've heard one of one of the episodes of Epicenter you talk about criticized the distribution of Edgeware and you did rightfully so in my opinion. But what do you think is would be the perfect distribution process in terms of obviously the centralized crypto project?
**C** (22:04):
So I mean, I don't know what the perfect distribution is because I give you an interesting distribution. I don't know if it's the perfect distribution. But here's an interesting one. I'm kind of helping out with productionizing Ethermint right now, which is our EVM on the Cosmos SDK. And for this chain, we want to have a distribution for it and we want to distribute it to Ethereum stakeholders in some way. Who are those stakeholders? Maybe holders, maybe some other people. But one of the things that edgerare so the thing that I kind of got into an argument with edgerare was about was like the way they kind of did some stuff in a very sneaky way in order to give the Web3 Foundation a lot of one of the things that they claimed was they want to distribute to developers. And I'm like, okay, that's interesting. How do we distribute to Ethereum developers? So what I did was I actually I wrote up a blog post on this and it's called the Gas Drop. What you would do there is you distribute. So the question is we want to distribute to Ethereum smart contract developers and we want to distribute more tokens to people whose contracts were more useful. And so how do we do this? I think what we could do is look how much gas was spent interacting with each contract. And so you could say that look, the most useful contracts, you know, how do you. You let the market decide what's useful and if it's useful, people are willing to spend money gas to interact with it. And so you could say something like uniswap, like look how much gas was spent interacting with this contract. It is means it's providing value. And you can also sort of like benefit composability here as well where you could say like, you know, let's say the Gnosis Multisig contract. Right. It's probably people don't spend a lot of gas interacting with it because you know, it's a pretty lightweight thing. You kind of just use it and then you go do it, make a transaction doing something else. But you know, it's probably one of the most useful contracts on Ethereum. So maybe what you want to do is also take into account like look in a transaction this much gas was spent. The Gnosis multisig was in that contract, in that execution. Let's take, give it some value for like look how much other interaction with Ethereum that this contract enabled. If that makes sense.
**B** (24:26):
Yeah, it doesn't make sense. I've read your post actually we, we thought it was interesting. We did our drop a little bit before that and we did it to the user specter rather than to a specific target group. But it's really interesting and I would love to see somebody implementing that and trying it out.
**C** (24:40):
Yeah, it's definitely not the perfect distribution, but I think it's an interesting distribution.
**B** (24:45):
Oh definitely, definitely going a bit provocative here. Do you think Game of Stakes was successful in distribution?
**C** (24:51):
On distribution, yes. I think that Game of Stakes had a couple of goals and I think it accomplished some of them and it did not accomplish. It failed at some of them. The ones that I think it accomplished well were one it. There were a lot of validators who wanted to. The Cosmos fundraiser happened all the way back in like April 2017 and after that there was a lot of entities that came up and wanted to become validators but they didn't have any Atom. I think Game Mistakes was pretty successful in distributing atoms to these want to be validators. I think it was successful at that. I think it was successful at helping us test our software. Like throughout the Game of Stakes process we found so many bugs and were able to rapidly fix them and that was a good process. I think the thing that it was unsuccessful at was getting validators to improve their security because I think there was like certain design choices that we made. So for example this like hyper rapid inflation of Game of Stakes, whatever, it was like 2000% a day or something. I don't remember what it was. It forced everyone to have a hot script that would automatically withdraw their rewards and redelegate them. But the problem is that's not what you want to be happening in. That's not helping you practice your operational security at all. And so I think that's one thing where Game of Stakes Sort of fell short in my opinion. I don't think anyone was running in their actual production environments or anything that like, like that.
**B** (26:21):
This is really funny, but the first question that one of the validators on our test nets asks us, give us a script to exactly that. It was exactly that. And we were like, what guys? Serious? Anyways, what do you think about multi signature validation? Like, what do you think about. Let's say. Well, there is obviously two ways of doing this. Let's say there is one way of having an operator which would be multi signature and having one single machine to do the computing. And then there is the more complicated way which I would love to see like a real multi signature validator. We have three different machines going for it and I think that would be something a big level up in secure in terms of security. I'm not sure about the costs obviously, because I think the costs here would be crazy, but.
**C** (27:04):
So do you mean like, let's say I split my validation key across multiple and they have like some sort of consensus between them. What is your attack model here? Are you worried about byzantine failure of one of the validator nodes or crash failure of one of the nodes?
**B** (27:21):
Well, I think both really, because obviously in terms of byzantine failure, I think that might actually add to the attack because one of the operators or two of the operators might be Byzantine. So. And then I kind of ruined the whole story. But let's imagine that they're not Byzantine. Let's just imagine for the sake of it, you know, for the sake of the theory. Is it something that would be possible at all in terms of. It's good to hear feedback.
**C** (27:44):
Yeah. So here's actually I have a design for how to do this. I haven't implemented it yet, but I'd like to eventually. So I mean one thing is some of the validators already do Certus one. I believe they actually use raft. They have a couple of validator nodes and they use RAFT between their nodes before they sign the validator. And I think that's, I mean that's pretty interesting. But I think I have a solution that's even simpler or better than using RAFT between the validators because RAFT has a lot of, you know, you have this like high communication overhead within your system before you can make nodes assign every single block. And you also need to have at least three nodes in order to do raft. So here's my solution. This problem would be let's. Let's say I had two validator nodes, let's say I had a primary and A backup, right? And I want the primary to basically always be signing. And if it falls, you know it fails, you want the secondary, the backup, to sort of take its position. This would be simple to do if you had a perfect communication link, like a perfectly synchronous communication line between your two validators. But then the problem is, you know that we don't. Because what if some. Something happens between that wire that connects your two validators? But here's the thing, we actually do have a perfectly synchronous communication link between the two nodes, and it's the blockchain itself. So what you could do is you can make a simple rule in Tendermint Cosmos SDK staking module, we kind of say like, you can miss like hundreds of blocks without getting in trouble, right? We can just make a simple rule that says, look, the primary is signing blocks always, but. And the secondary is watching the blockchain. If the primary, if it ever sees 10 tendermint blocks in which our signature is not on, the primary signature is not on, will start signing. But. And what the primary will say is, if I ever see 10 Tendermint blocks in a row in which my signature is not there, I will shut off and never turn on again. Like, I will not sign after that. And this guarantees that there's no situation in which there's any block in which both the primary and the secondary tried to sign it.
**B** (30:13):
That's interesting. That's interesting. Have you seen any similar implementations to what you say?
**C** (30:18):
No, I don't think I've seen any similar implementation implementations. I think Young from Bee Harvest might have proposed something a little bit similar. But yeah, his was a little bit more complex because he was suggesting actually making transactions on the chain, letting the thing know. I mean, he had. He had a similar insight of using the blockchain as a synchronous communication mechanism. But I think he. It was a little bit more complex than I thought it should be because you don't actually have to make transactions on the chain. You can just look at the signatures on the tender block, which is what you're supposed to be doing anyways.
**B** (30:52):
Yeah, we'll definitely ask him. I think we'll record him actually in a couple of days. Anyway, sorry to interrupt you go on.
**C** (30:58):
Yeah, and I mean, I've worked on designing this protocol and like improving the design with the Chorus 1 team. And so, yeah, you can even design it in such a way where like, you have it so your. When your primary falls off and instead of shutting off, you can actually make it so he becomes the secondary. And so you can always use these two nodes sort of as this like tag team thing.
**B** (31:19):
Makes sense. Makes sense. Validator. Things is quite complicated and interesting and I think it's good to see that in the Cosmos ecosystem. A lot of users who are not validators get very curious about the work of the validators and get interested, they ask questions. And I think it's really good because I've seen a lot of other systems. Well, for example, Bitcoin, right, Where. I mean, I love bitcoin and. But I don't really hear Bitcoin user asking questions about what is the security of the bitcoin nodes. And I've never seen that on there. Well, sometimes you do, but I think in that system it works better anyways. This is just like thinking out loud, going back to the economics and Cosmos. Do you think that in general Cosmos has a good distribution?
**C** (32:10):
No. I mean, I think it could have been way better. I think the original fundraiser was. I didn't like the design. I mean, I wasn't really part of the project at that time. I joined about two or three months after the fundraiser. I didn't actually participate in the fundraiser myself because I thought someone showed it to me and I looked at it. They're like, oh, check out this Cosmos thing. And I opened it up and I'm like, at that time I was a complete Bitcoin maximalist. And so I opened it up and I looked at it and I'm like, oh, proof of stake. That thing doesn't work. And so I turned it off and I didn't look at it. I think that the fundraiser could have been a little bit, you know, the fact that it, like ran out in 17 minutes, you know, no one really had a chance to. I think that could have been done better. But, you know, that being said, I mean, it's. It is what it is. And, you know, I think the distribution has only been increasing since then. Right. Like, once it goes on the market and a lot of the early participants that, you know, they took their whatever increase in value that they could get and yeah, you know, it's been increasing since then. And, you know, anyone who wants to be part of the system, there's enough liquidity of atoms on the market that you can buy into it.
**B** (33:25):
Do you think that the way to improve that is just going organic?
**C** (33:29):
Yeah, I think so. Unless you can. Like, the other option is you could use governance to sort of find if you want to inflate the supply and. Or like use the community pool. And distribute it. But it has to be like a very targeted, like this is who we want to distribute it to for this reason. And I'm not sure who that would be for the Cosmos Hub. I do have a proposal for Kava for I made a proposal that they should increase the supply a little bit and distribute it to DAI holders because I think it's a very, you know, it's sort of a competent cava, sort of a competitor. It's a competitor bank to maker. And going back to like the whole narrative thing, I think it's this like interesting narrative where you could say that like, look, I don't want to distribute to MKR holders, I want to go to die holders because the DAI holders are sort of this like customer of the maker bank. And so by airdropping to the DAI holders, you're kind of being like, hey, you guys are customers of that bank, Come be partial owners of this bank. And I think that's an interesting narrative pitch there that you could really sell. So I think it makes sense for Kava in that case. I'm not sure who would be like the target. If we're going to increase the distribution of Atom, we need to have a good articulated like this is who we're going to do it to and why.
**A** (34:53):
Yeah, it's interesting. How do you think if we are just attract early adopters then or we have more than enough early adopters and we came to like more typical users speaking about segmentation and all that kind of things.
**C** (35:10):
I mean right now I feel that we've been kind of mostly focused not on like increasing the distribution, but really building out IBC and stuff and something that actually makes that distribution even useful in the first place. It seems a bit weird to like go, you know, I mean, staking is not a product in and of itself. Like, you know, there's so many validator companies and just like companies who are like, oh come stake and look, you're gonna get this like 20% yield or whatever. It's like not really. So it's for that reason, you know, staking itself isn't a product and currently the Cosmos Hub doesn't have a real product yet. It's just like sort of the bearable. And so I think the first step before we try to like tell people to buy into this thing, it's first let's build a product that's actually worth having, which is will come through IBC and shared security and things like that.
**A** (36:04):
If I understand you right, we are just at the beginning of the Long, long way.
**C** (36:11):
Yeah, yeah. I think the Cosmos Hub has a lot of, there's still a lot to go and this IBC that's like, you know, sort of going to be launched very soon with Game, it's just sort of like the first step. Like you know, IBC is just this bare bones communication layer. And on top of that now, I mean I hope we're going to start to see a lot of. There's a lot of development that has to come on top of IBC and it's great to see that people like Agoric just had proposal for like how to improve IBC and like I think we're going to see a lot more protocols being built on top of IBC and so yeah, there's a lot more to come.
**B** (36:42):
What is the most excited market that you can imagine with IBC usage right now? Like something crazy, not token transfer. Tell me something weird and something that excites you that is obviously we talk about ibc, we're not talking about token transfer or data transfer, which token is just data. So obviously two chain can exchange whatever they want unless they agree on the rules. So what is something that excites you? What kind of markets?
**C** (37:09):
Okay, here's a interesting cool design I came up with which I like. So let's imagine we have shared security. Obviously shared security is probably one of the most important IBC protocols that has to be built. So allowing the validator set of one chain to also validate another chain and allowing them to any validator set changes that happen here, you need copy that validator set. There any byzantine faults that happen there, you send that data over IBC to this chain so they can be slashed. So that's obviously one of the things. But once you have that, let's say you have the Cosmos hub that's co validating a bunch of these other chains, right? Let's say one of the chains that they have is a cryptokitties chain. You don't want to move your monetary assets like your Bitcoin or your DAI or whatever to that chain. You want to store your money on the secure Cosmos Hub. But how do you pay fees on that other chain? How do you pay fees on the cryptokitties chain? So this is a fun idea, cool design. I came up with how to pay fees for one of these chains on the Cosmos Hub. How you do it is the validator set of the Cosmos Hub. It's sort of like you can have an, it can kind of be represented as an account and what you can do is you can open a one way payment channel to that validator set on the Cosmos Hub. And what you can do is when you want to make a fee payment, to make a transaction on that chain, you sign a payment channel update, like sort of increasing your payment there. And you take that signed payment channel update and put it normally in a transaction. In the fee field you just say you just put in an amount of money, right? And when it gets executed, it pulls that money from your account. But here instead what you're going to do is you're just going to put a signed payment channel update in the transaction. And the validators, when they get that transaction, they can see, oh yep, this is a valid payment channel update to our thing over there. Let's add it to the, let's run that transaction. But now what's to stop them from taking that signed channel update and just executing that, closing the payment channel? Why do they actually have to include the transaction? So what you can do is use IBC for this where you could say, look, if you have the latest signed channel update, you also have to prove that the transaction that that's related to actually did make it into the other chain. I call this like conditional payment channels where like it's a payment channel payment that's conditional on something happening. And so in this case it's conditional on an IBC proof of a transaction actually being included.
**B** (39:52):
That's interesting. I mean I hear a lot of people describe it as TCP ip. To me it resembles HTTP more because what do we use HTTP for? To communicate between databases. What is ibc? The same, but it's centralized in a more secure way to communicate and an incentive between databases. This is a perfect example, I think, of something that would work. I mean, I can't imagine the implementation as good as you do. But a question on a different note, I follow Solana a little bit as well. And Solana obviously because they use GPUs like we do, which is probably the two. Only two projects in POS that use GPUs. We are weird. And I've heard your talk on the Solana podcast with Lana Tolle. What are your thoughts about validators and GPUs? Is that big? No, no. Is that something that can be useful if the computations.
**C** (40:39):
I don't have an issue with validators and GPUs. My concern is when it comes to normal full nodes and light node and especially light client. If you have a system that has intense hardware requirements for running a validator or even if it's for running a full node, you want to make sure you have really good, solid light clients. And that's one thing that I'm kind of worried about with Solana is at least I haven't seen any sort of light client specification on how to do that properly. So completely it makes a lot of sense to for blockchain operators to have sort of sophisticated hardware, but as long as you know whether it's using sort of zero knowledge proofs or if it's using sort of just really good light client system or something, to make sure that the average user shouldn't be required to have that sort of hardware or they shouldn't be just reliant on like trusting a phone, though they should be able to verify themselves somewhat.
**B** (41:37):
Yeah, definitely 100%. Before I ask the next question, which I did have, but now you gave me another question. What do you think about something like iota for example, then, where a user verifies, not IOTA as the team behind IOTA and all that product that they have with it, but as the verifying part of iota. What do you think about that then, where each user verifies two random transactions and then it goes on and goes on.
**C** (42:01):
I think it makes sense. I mean, IOTA idea was very interesting. I think there was like some things of it. By the way, the IOTA team kind of like hates me. We got into a lot of arguments early on. I actually have, like, if you go on YouTube and look up, I probably have like the most viewed technical presentation on Iota on YouTube and because I thought it was an interesting idea. But the part that I took the most offense to is like their whole thing of saying like, oh, it's zero fee. And I kind of like showed that like, no, inevitably in this system there will be fees. Like it's going to come as out of band payments for fees, but it's going to happen. That being said, so I think Avalanche, it's sort of like IOTA done, right? And when Groon first told me about Avalanche Protocol, he was describing it to me and I'm like, wait, this sounds extremely similar to iota. And I'm like, he's like, oh, yeah, yeah, it is. Actually, you know, this probably what it's most similar to. I think IOTA had some interesting ideas and I think that's really cool when it comes to Avalanche. You know, I'm actually very excited about Avalanche for a sort of weird reason, which is I think I mentioned it in the Solana podcast, but I think you can do web of Trust as a civil resistance mechanism using Avalanche. I don't think you need to use proof of stake or proof of work or proof of storage or anything like that. I think you can actually do a web of trust based consensus protocol.
**B** (43:24):
It's really interesting. I actually before I heard this speech in 2018 or 17 or early 18, like it was more of like ideological fantasy article. How will consensuses evolve? And then suddenly after I write this article I just see his pitch on YouTube and I'm like what? How did I get that? I mean there was exactly spot on. And it's interesting that you talk about the same thing. What else apart from Avalanche surprises you right now? Nothing Cosmos related. Blockchain space, no big projects. Forget about Iota, Ethereum, Bitcoin, whatever. What surprised you lately? What project or what technology?
**C** (44:06):
Good question. This is not new but it's like something I'm personally trying to get more involved with. I really love Intelligger. Intelligger is just like such an elegantly designed protocol and I wish it had more sort of adoption and like usage and I'd like to, Sika would like to sort of get more involved with that project and like kind of working on that. I think that's sort of one that like if people who don't know what it is like definitely check it out and it's like wow, this is super well designed.
**B** (44:41):
I've never heard about it. What did they do? In two words. This is some strange for me because usually I know all the projects. I'm like, what the hell, I don't know this project, what is this?
**C** (44:49):
Interledger is sort of fixes all the problems with Lightning where Lightning uses the hashtag lock contracts and Lightning has like so many issues with it. The fact that you can sort of DOS the network for free. And like I think Lightning doesn't actually work because of that reason. Like if I can just lock up liquidity and not pay anything for it, it breaks sort of the protocol. What Inter Ledger does is it uses something called streaming payments where what it will say is let's say I wanted to send payment to Anna and we're using you going through you. What we could do is instead of using hash time lock contract, we can use use Streaming payments which means I'll send you five cents and then you send Anna five cents, I send you five cents, you send Anna five cents, I send you five cents, you send Anna five cents. And so if any point you go malicious and disappear, oh no, you stole, you got away with 5 cents. You know no one's gonna appear with you anymore after this. It's like just by using a little bit of trust in the system, you can actually make it like a much more well designed protocol. And so the reason it's called Interledger is because you can imagine this being used for one payment, like a second layer network on top of one currency, but you can also actually use this for streaming between currencies. So let's say I wanted to send BTC and you wanted to receive eth. You could use that same streaming payment because I could be one of the nodes in the middle and I will send me a couple cents of btc, I'll send a couple cents worth of eth, you send me a couple cents of btc. Intellectual is designed is it's sort of this clearing network layer for payments and then you can settle to any sort of settlement system you want. Whether you could settle to a layer one blockchain, you could settle to a payment channel, you could settle to Venmo if you wanted to. And so you can settle to sort of all these different things. I think it's sort of like the best designed payments network possible.
**B** (46:58):
That's interesting. I'm going to check it out. Definitely.
**C** (47:00):
Yeah.
**A** (47:00):
I have one more question. Could you tell us about Sunny AI Twitter?
**C** (47:08):
Yeah, sure, Yeah. I was reading a blog post on newsletter called Money Stuff and so you know, he was sort of making fun of VCs where he was like, oh, most of VC. Like why he was kind of making fun of VC, Twitter and all this like thought leadership and stuff that they do. And so he was saying like, well, you know, if the goal of VC is just get maximum deal flow and Twitter helps them get that, you should probably just invest in making an AI that tweets out thought leadership for them. And I just thought that was funny. And I'm like. So I just started looking into it. I found out about GPT2 which is this people have actually written bots that kind of. There's this guy, his name is Max something. Max, he works at Buzz. He's like the lead data scientist or I don't know, lead. He's a data scientist at buzzfeed. And so he put together this like blog post, super simple to run and use and how to like auto generate tweets and train them on your own, on your own Twitter history. And so I just did that and started generating tweets and I set up a bot that just like automatically tweet every couple hours. It'll just tweet out auto generated tweets, trained on my own history. I don't know, it's really fun. It's like my Twitter history is mostly crypto stuff and like geography, fun facts. It just like is generating and especially when it starts combining these things, it just gets really funny.
**A** (48:30):
Yeah, it's really a lot of fun.
**B** (48:33):
I think I've seen books on Amazon that are co written with GDP2 think yeah, GPT2.
**C** (48:41):
What's cool about GPT2 is all it's doing, it's just pattern recognition, right? It's saying like here's a bunch of words that I've learned. It scanned it on the model that we're using. They sand it on like all of Wikipedia and so many books, like all the books that they could find. And so they created this model and then it's just like saying like okay, given these series of password, what's likely to come next? But what's cool is there's this great blog called Slate Star Codex. It's like a rationalist blog. It's really great. One of the things he wrote about was like what he did was he trained GPT2 on all past professional chess games. So all chess games are like written in like standard chess notation and in a way you can consider that sort of a language. And so he trained it on every single past like professional chess game he could find. And he made it play chess against himself. And it's just like guessing what moves to do based off of pattern recognition of chess language. And it wasn't that good. He still beat it, but it made some good moves. I remember there was one, he was like, oh, it took my rook and I wasn't expecting it. It made some good moves. What's cool about this is this AI has no concept of what chess is. Chess bots have been around 1997 when they beat the human, right? This bot has no concept of the game of chess. It doesn't understand the 2D board. It doesn't understand anything. All it understands is chess notation language. And just in a weird way it's sort of like a general AI. But I wonder if that's. If you can describe anything as a language, you can train this bot to kind of understand it.
**B** (50:23):
Yeah, it's really interesting because I think technically probably you could describe anything as a language, right? I mean whether it's an emotion or an algorithm, anything at the end of the day is an algorithm, whatever it is. One last question, probably I have for you coming back to Cosmos. What is the thing that you would like to see in a year's time in Cosmos that is gonna affect everyone that's using Cosmos for the best and positive note, I don't know, like something, what's something exciting that you're expecting to happen in Cosmos within a year?
**C** (50:59):
I think the thing that would too IBC related, but I think that's most important for the Cosmos Hub is to get shared security. And like I want it to be that there's like some applications that I want to build a Cosmos chain for and I want it to be Cosmos SDK based but I don't want to like do a proof of stake token because it's the idea. Some of the ideas I have are like very simple utility chains almost and I don't want to like launch a token for that. And the beautiful thing about Ethereum is I have a contract I want to write, I just deploy it and I think we need to get to that point with the Cosmos hub as well. I think once we have that sort of shared security on the Cosmos hub, we're going to see a lot more. I think like there's a relative very high barrier to entry for launching a Cosmos chain not because of the software development. I mean it is a little bit harder than, than writing a Solidity contract, but if you're building something production ready, you probably should be writing on the Cosmos SDK instead of solidity. But I think the main hurdle is doing that sort of distribution and stuff and getting a validator set community and all that. And I think if you kind of abstract a lot of that away and then we're going to see a lot more chains starting to build.
**B** (52:11):
I would love to see more and more and more and more and more chains. I think I would love to see Aragon for finally going. I don't know, I like Aragon and Outlook. It's been really cool chatting to you Sunny, and really exciting to see that people who are involved, regardless of whether they're developers of Tendermint or not, kind of think about the broader aspect of things rather than just concentrating on their own work. And I'm really, really happy as a user at least. Right. Not just somebody who's making a project on Cosmos, that's another story. But the user I think is definitely kind of makes me happy.
**C** (52:43):
Awesome. No, thanks for having me on.
**B** (52:46):
Thanks for your time.
**A** (52:47):
Thank you.