**A** (0:00):
Hey, my name is Sunny Aggarwal. I'm the founder of SIKA and builder of Cosmos, and I'm happy to be here at Reimagine 2020.
**B** (0:19):
Hello, everybody. Welcome to the second edition of Reimagine 2020. I'm going to be one of your hosts today, Adam, alongside my co founder and CTO of Mousefeld, Galen Danziger. How are you doing, Galen?
**C** (0:31):
Oh, hey, Adam.
**A** (0:32):
Happy to be here.
**B** (0:33):
All right, all right. So glad to have all of you join us for another exciting discussion. Super excited to have our guest today. I feel like he's a pillar of the community and one of the bright minds in the space. So without further ado, let me go ahead and introduce you to Sunny Agrawal. How are you doing, Sonny?
**A** (0:51):
Hey, thank you so much for having me on.
**B** (0:53):
Cool, man. Cool man. So for the audience here that may have missed the first conference back in May, please visit ri2020io or you can visit the Reimagine 2020 YouTube channel for all 70 plus interviews with industry leaders speaking on blockchain, crypto, market insights and trends. So feel free to check that out if you missed anything else. But without that, you know, let's go ahead and kick this thing off. First of all, again, Sunny, thank you for taking the time out of your day. Thank you for joining us. This is Reimagine 2020. Appreciate you coming down today.
**A** (1:32):
Thank you. Yeah, it's been great. I mean, I love chatting and, you know, sharing my love of blockchain, and, you know, it's hard to do that with the lack of physical conferences these days. So happy to, you know, know, use the Internet as we should be, to communicate that with people.
**B** (1:46):
And that's our goal. Right. I'm a big fan of a show that year on Epicenter, which we'll talk about later down the road. You know, we posted you and the Cosmos community at our office here in San Francisco to do presentations a couple years ago.
**A** (1:59):
So I'm a big fan.
**B** (2:00):
Glad, you know, I was able to connect with you and have you join us. But let's go ahead and kick this thing off. We have a lot of students and developers, entrepreneurs, founders, you know, tuning into this conference right now and, you know, tell us about your journey prior, not, you know, up until UC Berkeley, and we'll get into that shortly after. But tell us your journey prior to blockchain and how do you get in? How did you stumble into it?
**A** (2:25):
Yeah, sure. So, you know, I've always been really interested in politics, but at the same time, was always really interested in computers. And so back in high school, I used to do a lot of robotics, but when I got to Berkeley, I started studying computer science, but I was also doing a minor in political economy. And so when I was, you know, first week of school, like, you know, you're all these clubs are like, trying to get you to join and stuff. And, you know, you join like 20 of them and you like, end up sticking with like two of them. Right? But one of them that. One of the ones that I joined was this Bitcoin association of Berkeley. And it was basically like a group of six guys. And they would just like get around, like hang out, get dinner and like, just talk about, like, what crazy shit is Roger Ver up to this week? Or like, you know, have you checked out the latest BIP that's happening on bitcoin? And like, it was something I was like, it was way over my head. Like, I remember I walked into my first meeting. I think I joined the club like maybe like couple weeks after it, actually after the beginning of the school year. And so the first meeting I walked into, they were explaining like, Kevin Bricks, he's so involved with the space. He was explaining how Monero ring signatures work. And I was like, what is going on? I have no idea what's happening. But, you know, afterwards of chatting around with some of the other folks who were there. So Max Fang, Andrew two, Philip Hayes, a bunch of other guys, they were just like telling me about bitcoin and why it's so exciting. And you know, for me it was like, oh, wow, this is so cool. Because it's a combination of computer science and political economy. And you know, I had a little bit of a libertarian bet as well. And so it's like, wow, this is perfect. Let me get involved. And so, yeah, the club at that time was basically, for the first year, it just started it. It just kept being this like daily, like, you know, weekly hangout session where we talk about stuff. And basically for the first year, I was like, very in over my head.
**B** (4:34):
Didn't know what year. What year is this?
**A** (4:37):
Yeah, this is 2015.
**B** (4:38):
2015. Okay, so you hadn't heard of bitcoin prior to that?
**A** (4:42):
I think I may have, like, heard about it. Like, I think, like, you know, I heard about it in passing. I think maybe the first time I heard about crypto was when Dogecoin sent the Jamaican bobsled team to like the Olympics. I think that was like the first time some I like, heard about cryptocurrency. Yeah, Then you Know I would hear in passing was never, I never really dove into it until I got to college though.
**B** (5:06):
Yeah. And what was the sentiment there like during these weekly meetups? Because you know, bitcoin. I came across bitcoin, I was working at the bank in 2013 and I sent a wire, somebody was buying Bitcoin for $100,000. And I was like, what are you buying? Like what is this? And he's like, I don't know. My, my brother in law's a broker. Like he just, yeah, this is a feature. And he dropped a hundred thousand at that point. I think it made the price might have been like 2, 300 bucks. Anyway, point being is that you know, bitcoin had already been, you know, gaining some traction and some minimum around that time. So what was it to mean around when you came across it? Like, like your friends and stuff, did they own any bitcoin? Like were they talking about like blockchain and like a theory or maybe a theorem hadn't launched it, but maybe it was going to like what was kind of the sentiment and understanding of what it was.
**A** (5:55):
Yeah. So when I joined so like I said it was in like 2015. So this was in the like lull in that bear post 2014 bear market. And so this club was really small, not. And people were like not so much talking about price as much. It was mostly a bunch of like computer science nerds and like libertarians. And so you know, I like talk to people about like, you know, why did this thing happen? Like, you know the two boxing clubs at the time were sort of Berkeley and mit and like, you know, other schools didn't really have it. And one of the reasons I think it so show popped up at Berkeley early on is just because of how political of a school Berkeley is. Like, you know, there's always like political undertones on everything you do in Berkeley. And so yeah, I guess like a bunch of the people who are very libertarian there, like a lot of us were politically motivated. We're like, oh yeah, we're gonna fuck the banks and fuck the government and.
**B** (6:53):
Yeah.
**A** (6:56):
That kind of. Yeah. And then you know also this is also like when altcoins were like so Ethereum was created. But I would say actually most of us, most of in that original group of like five or six in that first year, no, we weren't talking about Ethereum at all. We were sort of talking about bitcoin primarily. We talked about Monero. We were excited about Zcash because you know, Zcash launched I think you know, 2016.
**B** (7:22):
Right.
**A** (7:22):
And so that's one thing. We were like, all we were. Actually a lot of us were very into, like, the cryptography and privacy side. And so we were left into, like, the scalability and smart contracting. We were like, oh, how do we design? How do we design new mixers and, like, new privacy preserving system. MimbleWimble was also like that text bio was dropped right around that. And so we were all like, oh, my God, mimblewimble was so cool.
**B** (7:51):
Were you guys on bitcoin talk and all that too as well, or what was it? Yeah. Was it bitcoin stock?
**A** (7:57):
Yeah, some of the guys were. I mean, to be honest, I never actually got too much into bitcoin talk. I was not hanging around the Reddit and stuff sometimes, but not too much on bitcoin talk.
**B** (8:05):
And how long have this club, like, you get there? Did you just start or had it already been in motion for a couple years or a year?
**A** (8:11):
The club had been in motion for about maybe a year or two. So this was like sort of bitcoin association. And basically. So what happened then was by the end of my freshman year, this club was so small that it kind of just. It disappeared. It kind of poofed away. And then that summer after my freshman year, Max Fang, who was the president of that club, he basically said, hey, let's like, try this again. Let's try it. Take two. But I think the problem is that this stuff is so niche and difficult for people to understand that. That's why, you know, you know, a lot more people showed up to that first meeting. We were talking about ring signatures, but, like, people didn't. A lot of people didn't show up again. And, you know, I was one of the few people who, like, stuck with it. But so we decided to start teaching a class at Berkeley. So Berkeley has this really cool program called Decals, which allows any students to go ahead and teach a class on a topic as long as you go get the backing of a professional. And so, yeah, so Max Fang, Philip Hayes and I, we basically went. We got Dawn Song, so she works on Oasis now. So we got her to back it, and we basically started teaching a class. And like I said, at this point, bitcoin, I understood the very basics. But that summer, I basically, like, deep dove into it. My strategy for when I want to learn something is you sign up to teach it. Because if you got to teach something next week, you better learn it this week. For sure.
**B** (9:46):
That's kind of the best way. And I think For a lot of viewers right now watching, you know, whether they're, you know, I mean, all of us still like deep dive into these things, right? Like, even prepping for all these interviews, like, helps me kind of relive and like, you know, understand, you know, a lot of these speakers that I'm dealing with. So just even researching who I'm talking to lately, it's just great. You know, I'm like, yeah, I'll do it. Because then you start going into the protocol, then you start, you know, breaking it down. And that's one of the best ways to kind of chat. So kicks off and then, you know, you are a co founder of Blockchain at Berkeley, so maybe you want to touch on that as well.
**A** (10:22):
Yeah, sure. So, yeah, so like I said, Bitcoin association as a club basically died out. And then we got these new set of people from this class that we started teaching and basically started a brand new club called Blockchain at Berkeley. You know, the idea was, okay, we're not going to be as bitcoin focused anymore and we're going to kind of focus on not just like talking about, you know, crypto over dinner, but we're going to actually try to make this a more structured thing. And so we kind of created this new organization. We had a education department, an R and D department and a consulting department. And so the education department, they kind of, we kind of focused on doing a lot of the, you know, teaching those courses. And you know, those courses are still taught up to this day at Berkeley. So, you know, they've been taught for, it's been at least like eight semesters now. So it's like, you know, what we do is we take students from the previous time the class was taught, make them into the TAs, and then the next semester make them into the instructor. So there's this like rolling thing where it keeps going. So that's sort of the education department of it. Then there's the R D department where we'd sort of be working on sort of new projects and really focusing. It's almost, I would call it R and D almost like advanced education, where that's where we'd be doing these like white paper circles and sort of, you know, going into much more advanced stuff. And then we have consulting department. And that was really great because it got, gave a lot of students an opportunity to like work with like some really great companies on talking about and like helping them integrate Blockchain and being able to explain the stuff to industry.
**B** (11:58):
Which is how was the support of the school. Cause I know it's kind of separate. Obviously they support you to teach and all that. So there was support. But I think Galen and myself have visited tons of schools and talked with professors and faculty and some schools are further along, some are just getting their wheels going. What was that as the support like from you, from Berkeley? Obviously they were fully supportive. Was that pretty easy?
**A** (12:28):
They were sort of passive. I mean, so one thing about Berkeley is that Berkeley is a big school. Like it is a huge school. And you know, I would say to Berkeley it was, oh, it's just like another club, you know, they're doing their own thing. We would get most of our funding sort of from the consultancy projects that we did.
**B** (12:48):
And I bring this up because, you know, there might be students in one of these range of, you know, of answering of these schools where like they have a program or they don't or they're in the middle. So my. It might just be insightful for them to see like kind of the nitty gritty of your. Right. Funding. Right. And I know you guys will get into it right now, like, you know, you're working with clients and stuff, driving revenue anyway, so go ahead.
**A** (13:09):
Yeah, yeah, so exactly. Yeah, we're able to find clients and basically so I would say, you know, the people who originally start the thing, you, there needs to be like some level of altruism. Like the early guys who started this club, myself, Max Fang, Ronan, John Allen, like we were all like, you know, let's make this into like the best educational platform for blockchain. And so that was our original motivation. And then as we grow, we need more funding and that's when we started doing these consulting projects and that gave in revenue and that helped subsidize some of the other departments like Education and R and D. And it's great to have at least find one professor who can sort of be your conduit when talking to the university. Because when you're a club it's hard to talk to the administration. But you have a. So, you know, luckily we had sort of two professors who were really helpful for us. One was Dawn Song, so she works on Oasis as I mentioned.
**B** (14:05):
And I want to touch on that too after you get through this. Yeah, because that's pretty cool. She has a big time project as well.
**A** (14:10):
Yeah. And then the other was Alessandro Chiesa. So he's like, you know, he wrote like the ZK Snarks paper and he's one of the co authors of zcash and so he so those two professors like, you know, basically gave us a good way to talk to administration.
**B** (14:27):
So like someone on the inside, you know, someone on the inside, an ally.
**A** (14:31):
Yeah, yeah. So that I think that's really important and yeah, and so that's sort of how the club started. And so basically what we were able to do was get the people from the class. So I think the first semester we had about 80 people in the class. We were able to take about the top 25% who were like interested and like make them into the initial club members. So having the class, so having this like pipeline of like education towards like to get the classes to get people interested and like basic level of knowledge. And then after that it's like if you. People who are interested, then you funnel them into the club.
**B** (15:06):
Yeah, A little vetting process, you know, kind of gauge their interest and then you know, see who really wants to take it further or not. And that's great. And it seems like obviously you got a solid team, like they've been rocking for a little while. Tell me a little bit about how you started engaging clients. I mean you took on some big names, right? Some big corporate clients. And that's pretty, I mean to go into this student ran organization, right. And leverage them and pay them like on a monthly retainer is pretty cool. So like tell me that process of experience and were you in all those meetings?
**A** (15:42):
So to be quite honest, I. That was actually the part of the club that I wasn't too involved with. So I, I ran a lot of the education stuff at the beginning and then I read R and D. The people who ran consulting were Ronan and John Allen. So they were kind of really focused more on bringing in those clients. But you know what, but they leveraged.
**B** (16:04):
You right in your research. Exactly.
**A** (16:06):
So what we were able to do is. Yeah, so we took the material that we created for the student course and adapted it to be sort of what we call it edcon, like education consulting. So you know, we have to modify that material quite a bit where like, you know, when we're talking to students, we're explaining to them, okay, this is how the hash functions work. The consulting clients, they don't want to hear that, they don't want to know how hash functions work or like the cryptography behind ecdsa. But you know, we took sort of this one semester worth of lectures, like you know, weekly one hour lectures and condensed it into like two three hour sessions where we basically be able to go to a new client and basically say like, you know, they They, a lot of these clients, they wanted to learn about blockchain because this is, you know, now this is like we're pushing into like early 2017 and blockchain is now like into this buzzword. And everyone, all these companies have this like mandate, like, oh, go learn what blockchain is and figure out what we're supposed to do with it. And so, you know, a bunch of students show up and we're like, hey, we'll give you a free like two hour session explaining to you what blockchain is. And they're like, okay. And you know, it's always nice to have a good name like UC Berkeley behind you. She's like, yeah, sure, sure, we'll do that. And you know, we do that two hour session, get them interested. Now they get the basics and then they're like, okay, schedule a follow up with us. And now we can figure out how do we start, what can we start doing with you? Like what your company's needs and then how can we start building a POC with you guys?
**B** (17:37):
And were you guys building that out too? So you design it, architect, you know, the specs and then also integrated implemented.
**A** (17:45):
Yeah, it would usually be sort of more at the POC level, not at like the production level.
**B** (17:53):
That's cool. And so, and you've also worked under with a Professor Song, so Don Song, who runs Oasis. I wouldn't spend too much time but like, how was that working with her? Because she has a major project.
**A** (18:05):
Yeah, that was pretty good. We, I did, you know, I kind of wanted to do a little bit more on the research side and so there I did a project with Dawn Song, it was called Lucky Chain. So it was sort of this, I don't know if you've heard of the Intel's Proof of Time. It was sort of like an early version of that where it was using SGX to Intel sgx, which is like their trusted hardware platform to replace a lot of the functions of proof of work mining. To be honest, in retrospect, it is sort of a silly project. But what it did was it gave me sort of my first interaction with building a blockchain. And, and what's funny was, you know, I was like, I don't know how to write P2P networking and yada yada. And so what we did was we actually just used IPFs as sort of the base layer of our blockchain, which is actually an interesting architecture that I haven't seen anyone do. But it's actually kind of cool to just use IPFS as your, like, base layer of blockchain and then build a consensus system on top of it. So I guess I got really involved with. So to be honest, SGX stuff was like, kind of a bit over my head as well at the time. But I got, I got involved with ipfs then I got really interested in that. Then from there, got interested in a lot of different storage solutions. I gave a white paper presentation on StoreJ at the time, posted that online, and that got a lot of, like, traction and stuff. And so from there I'm like, wow, okay, people. You know, so far I'd mostly been presenting blockchain stuff to people within Berkeley, but after I posted that presentation online, I'm like, oh, wow, a lot of other people are watching this. And so I'm like, oh, let me go ahead and actually sort of do more of these. We started posting more stuff online, got getting a lot of more and more eyes on it.
**B** (20:06):
Nice. I know some, we could probably talk for like, days on some of this stuff, you know, and, you know, so you. So this is Blockchain at Berkeley for all of you that are following. You know, this is Sunny's experience here on kicking off this, co founding this club, working with clients, teaching courses, blockchains, you know, on the move here in like, 20, like you said 2016.
**A** (20:30):
Yeah, this is like late 2016, early 2017.
**B** (20:32):
Exactly. And then. Is that when you leave school? Yeah.
**A** (20:38):
So, okay. So, yeah, like I mentioned early on, a lot of, A lot of the block, especially the Bitcoin association guys. And then, you know, because Blockchain Berkeley was kind of founded by like, a lot of the same people. It was, we were very bitcoin maximalist. It's funny, the first time I learned about Ethereum was during the summer of 2016. I was at a hackathon. I was telling a friend, like, you know, I was into bitcoin at the time, and I was like, hey, I heard this is like, serum thing. We can like build applications on it or something. Let's check it out. And then so at this hackathon, we open up Reddit.com r ethereum and entire front pages. The Dow just got hacked. The world is burning. I've got a hard fork, the chain. So I found out about Ethereum the day of the Dow attack. And so I open and so I'm like, okay, I don't know, these guys are crazy. Like, they're talking about hard forking chains and yada. I'm like, I closed it. Didn't look at a Theorem again for like another eight months. That. So when I looked, finally got into it again, was at Boston, at Berkeley, we used to have. We used to do these meetups where we get people, you know, guest speakers to come in and teach as well. And so we had. What's his name? Anthony from Digix now. So Digix was like one of the earliest Ethereum projects. And so he came in and basically explained, okay, this is what a theorem is. This is what smart contracting is. And he gave me sort of my first like, okay, wow, this is actually kind of interesting. And so that summer. So this. So this is now summer of 2017. I'm like, okay, this Ethereum thing seems interesting. I want to kind of learn more about it. And so I started interning at consensys. While I was at Consensus, I was. I met this guy, Nate Rush, and he and I just really hit it off and we sort of became super close friends. And we both basically both spent the entire summer just like, deep diving into Proof of Stake. And just like, we were. We had this thing where, like, every day we'd read a right white paper and then go, like, discuss it the next day. And it got to the point where, like, I was more interested in that than, like, actually doing my work at Consensus. And so basically midway through the summer, I basically, like, left my internship at Consensus, so I can just keep learning more, like, reading more white papers. And it had to do because, like, you know, I want to work more at the protocol layer stack because that was. That's what I was super fascinated with. While Consensus was mostly working more at the application layer, like, building dapps. And I was just like. So me and Nate, like, you know, we were just both obsessed with Proof of Stake. We, like, fangirled over Vlad Zambia. And so he. So Nate was like, oh, Vlad's CBC Casper. That is just the most elegant thing ever. And I was like, no, no, but I hear you. But Tendermint man, this thing is so simple. We can probably launch this thing by.
**B** (23:53):
The end of the year.
**A** (23:53):
It works. And so, you know, Nate ended up working with Vlad for like, two years on cbc. Casper and I reached out to the Tendermint team and I'm like, hey, Tenderman, sounds so cool. How can I help you guys build this? Then they, you know, they. They were nice enough to reach back to me, and they also mentioned this whole Cosmos thing that they were building as well. So I didn't. When I reached out to them, I did not realize that, like, the tent. I knew Tenderman as Just like proof of state consensus protocol. I didn't realize that they were like the same team as this Cosmos Network idea. Yeah. And then they explained the Cosmos Network to me. I'm like, oh, my God, this just makes sense. This, like, I. This fits all the issues like I saw with Ethereum during my time at Consensus. I'm like, oh, this actually solves a lot of them. And so I started working with them for the summer. Come August, I was, I, you know, I was planning on sort of working with them over the summer, over the school year, part time, while in school. The day before classes started, one of my, you know, the syllabi for a bunch of classes came out for one of them, just computer security class that was taught by Nicholas Weaver. So I don't know if anyone knows. He's like this. Like, you can follow him on Twitter. He's just like, Berkeley professor who, like, hates blockchain. Like, you know, he'll go on these like, long Twitter rants. Why Blockchain is just like, so dumb. But yeah, so what if his class.
**B** (25:23):
The.
**A** (25:26):
One of the midterms conflicted with devcon? And I'm like, I emailed him, okay, can I like, move this around? Because I really want to go to DEFCON 3? And he's like, no. And I don't know, maybe it had to do because it was a blockchain conference or not, but probably, yeah, never know, but probably. But I'm like, fine, okay, then I just have to drop your class. I want to go. I want to go to defcon. I'm like, you know what? This is just going to keep happening, like school and the stuff I want to do is keep coming into conflict. So screw it, I'm going to drop all my classes. And so I dropped out for the semester. You know, I convinced my parents, being like, hey, I'll go back at the end of the year.
**B** (26:06):
But were you learning more of computer science? I meant to ask you at the beginning, but it's kind of too late. Yeah, yeah. Relearning words. Obviously, during this, you taught it. You're reading every day. And for all of you those watching, like, even to this day, most all of us in this space, like, continue reading blogs, articles, you know, research papers, like, it's just like never ending, right?
**A** (26:29):
Mm, yeah, I was learning a lot more and it was like a sort of a different type of learning. I like, you know, working with the Tenderman team, I started learning a lot more, like the software engineering stuff and just like deep diving these consensus protocols, right? You know, if you. At the now, like, there's been this whole new, like so many consensus protocols, but at the time, like, you know, you can spend like two months and like read like the corpus of like consensus protocol literature. And if you spend some time doing that, you can, you can pretty quickly become an expert in consensus protocols. Really?
**B** (27:08):
No, that's cool. And I think, I think GAM is chomping at the bit here, but we're kind of getting up to the nitty gritty. Before I get into kind of. We'll get into the technical side of, of Cosmos and your project coming up. You know, I want to touch on projects that what excites you right now, you know, whether it's in. On Ethereum, whether it's in the Cosmos ecosystem or just other projects in the defi space. Before we get to that, you have like an interesting kind of quick human history, Right. That kind of probably applies to this blockchain ecosystem as well. Starting from like small villages and like economic freedom, you know, with constraints, from political, political restraints as well. And those kind of diminish and you can have one or the other or both, whatever. So, yeah, if you want to get some insight into that kind of little spiel, it's great.
**A** (27:53):
Yeah, sure. And it kind of also plugs into why I got into Cosmos. Like I mentioned, I thought it solved a lot of problems. So, you know, the story I like to tell, you know, this is, I have not, I'm clearly not a professional, what's the word for like anthropologist. Right. But this is my, my toy history of human, history of civilization, which is, you know, we started off in these like villages and kingdoms, you know, relatively isolated tribes and you know, sort of off on their own thing. Then what we realized was the mass, like larger economic integration leads to economic growth. And the way that we've learned how to figured how do we get economic integration was through empires. So you had, you know, by, by forcing an empire, you get all these things like, you know, standardized measures. You get, you know, basically within an empire is sort of like a free trade zone. Essentially you get a. And you know, fundamentally it gets to the point where it's like, all right, you don't want to trade with us. All right, well, I'll march an army on you and make you trade with us. And so like mercantilist system was essentially that. And you know, this empire world lasted for like, you know, 3,000 years then. But you know, it comes with all these cons of empires. You know, they're very hard to maintain. They're very like, they're in state unstable. It's not great for the people living in them because you're basically subjugated and you have to like pay taxes to the capital. And basically, you know, all this reached ahead in like the 1800s, 1900s, as weaponry became so powerful that like the empire model of civilization became so disastrous. And so basically the great invention of the 20th century from like a socio political standpoint was this idea, hey, can we do large scale economic integration without large scale political integration? So allow people to have like politically distinct cultures, like this whole concept of nation states, but still have economic integration. And we did this and that's what we have today. We have this world of nation states, but we still have a large global economic system. And we did this through a couple of different technologies.
**B** (30:30):
So.
**A** (30:32):
Free trade zones where and like institutions like, you know, the World bank and IMF that basically helped make free trade be a norm globally rather than the exception or you know, at least free your trade. Not a mercantilist system. The other is like governance systems like the UN that like, you know, it's not governance, global governance, but it's like a system where people can meet and discuss. The other one is, which I'll come back to, which is important is containerization. So I don't know, people probably don't think about this too much, but probably the, one of the most important, important inventions in like human history was in like the 1970s when they created shipping containers. So if you ever go to like a shipping dock, like, you know, if you're near the coast, you go there, you see everything's in these like metal containers, the ones with little ridges. And this was basically this standardization process that happened in the 70s where they said, okay, all, you know, it's really annoying to like load, let's say you're loading barrels of gas oil into onto a ship. It's like, oh my God, this is so annoying. But we decided, okay, we're gonna put everything into this one standard container. And every ship in the world will be designed to carry this container. Every port in the world will have equipment to unload and load this type of container. And so this stamp and now what this did was any port in the world can easily ship goods to any other port in the world. And this is massive. This like made it so you can trade with anyone. And then finally obviously is the Internet. You know, I, you know, there's probably no explanation needed where, you know, Internet obviously like, you know, I can do, I can Engage in commerce with someone in Mongolia as easily as I can with someone across the street from me. And I hope that blockchain is going to be yet another step in this process of basically allowing for more economic integration without the political integration, especially when you can sort of now create binding agreements without needing any one country's legal system to enforce them. So great. That's the story of human civilization and why it's important. How does this have to do with blockchain other than, you know, the part that blockchain might enable? Part three. But the other sort of analogy I see here is it's very similar to the development from Bitcoin to Ethereum to Cosmos. So Bitcoin is this v1 of civilization where you get all these different villages, like, who all are doing their own things. You had Bitcoin, like sort of the big one. Then you have all these other chains like Blockchain. So you have like saya, Coin, which is focused on storage. You have Name Coin, which is focused on name spacing. You know, all these like different applications on their own blockchain. But the problem is, how do I. I want to buy some. I want to buy a DNS name on namecoin with my Bitcoin and point my SIA storage to like have it point to some. Something I have stored on Sia that composability integration just isn't there. So along comes Ethereum or like the IT and builds this empire where it says, okay, here's this chain that you can do everything on this chain. And so all these applications are built on this chain. And when you're in the Ethereum empire, you have really great levels of composability, which is leading to a lot of the boom we see in the Ethereum ecosystem. Because it's so great to be able to like in all we're having all these interactions between projects that no one could have ever imagined that is happening on Ethereum today. But what you lose is the political, like, separation where, you know, you get all, you know, like I said, empires are unstable. They don't scale because, you know, human coordination doesn't scale. That's what we see with Ethereum. No, it's not scaling. It both from like one, from a technical standpoint, it's not scaling. But it also just doesn't scale from like a political standpoint either.
**B** (35:10):
Where and what you mean by that are. And Gavin, you've touched on this too. Like how Bitcoin, I forget, like the core development, you know, they focus on one thing. Ethereum has like various proposals and like you know, trying to decide what the next, you know, feature should be added in. And that's kind of what you know, for people watching like the political aspect, the governance will kind of maybe get bottlenecked a little bit. Right. Galen, you brought that up before.
**C** (35:39):
Ethereum has a really massive amount of developers all working on their own thing and sometimes it does combine into new features and some pretty cool stuff but it's, it's many people all working on independent things that seem to come eventually combine together and make some cool features but it seems less like singularly directed as some other blockchains.
**B** (36:07):
And going back to your point, sunny on like some of these unstable things and like the human capital that's required to move things, move things forward or not decisions.
**A** (36:18):
Yeah upgrades are much harder on Ethereum because of the large scale integration. And what happens is when you do upgrade some things might, you might break something. So this sort of happened on the last most recent upgrade of Ethereum where they changed the gas pricing for some of the opcodes on Ethereum but it broke the Aragon Smart contract because Aragon sort of expected the contract, a certain gas pricing to happen but it changed from under them. And it's really hard in this like large empire like one chain to rule them all kind of model to have changes that as the stakeholders and users of the system grow it's hard to make changes that can adapt and take into account the needs of the entire system as a whole. And like also what I mean also comes to things like you know the parity multi sig bug right like there's the parity wallets got stuck. It'll be nice to be have been able to hard fork to solve it really. I know I'm generally of the opinion that look if we hard fork to undo the Dow attack doesn't seem unreasonable to also hard fork to do this but as you get these like more and more complex system it basically I think Ethereum is unhard forkable today because it'll just break so much stuff that and like you know who. Okay, the question is today who? Let's say there's a contentious fork of Ethereum who gets to decide which fork is the right one. I'd say it's like probably like circle like you know they control, they get to decide which side of USDC is correct, right. Which one is redeemable. And so whichever side they say for USDC is correct that's sort of going to be the Ethereum that matters because like so much of defi is dependent on usdc. So it'll be kind of like. So that's sort of what I mean by political unscalability, which kind of leads into Cosmos.
**B** (38:21):
Right, and kind of what you guys have been working on.
**A** (38:24):
Yes, exactly. So Cosmos, our vision is how could we take the world of Cosmo v1, whereby every application sort of has its own little blockchain and each community has their own blockchain that they can upgrade at the scale that they needed. They can specialize. You know, that's another important thing that happened in V3 of the world is specialization. Different countries specialize on different things. That's what wealth of nations is about. Right. And so what we with Cosmos allows is each application on its own chain can specialize to its own application, but then still have a way to interact and be composable with each other. Which is what we call the IBC protocol stands for Inter Blockchain Communication. But it's essentially designed. And what it is is it's designed to be that containerization we talked about. So how containerization solve like interoperability for like physical shipping ports. Our vision for IBC is that it should be the standardization for how different blockchains talk to each other. So, okay, my blockchain supports ibc, your blockchain supports ibc. Great. We can start to send data and tokens and whatnot across, across our chain. And so we can kind of build this composable world economic integration between blockchains without needing to be all on a single blockchain. Absolutely.
**C** (40:00):
It makes sense. So in terms of how exactly does Cosmos accomplish this? Like, how does it, how does it implement this interchange between blockchains?
**A** (40:15):
So what we do is we use, you know, it's not that new of an idea. It's an old idea from crypto of side chains where each blockchain sort of has an on chain light client of the other blockchain. So a light client is like a client that basically does the minimum amount of verification needed to be like somewhat reasonably secure. So, you know, in the example of proof of work, it's like verify all the headers and then provide a Merkle proof to whatever you're trying to prove. So if you're trying to prove a, hey, this UTXO exists, you know, here's our Merkle proof to a block header and then here's proof that it's in this, the highest proof of work chain. So the same thing. So IBC would be, let's say, Cosmos Cosmos, a chain that, that supports ibc. If you want to talk to another chain we base in the state machine of chain A, would it be a light client of chain B? And if you, you know, you basically, if you want to prove to it that hey, I want to send tokens from chain B to chain A, you'll go ahead and lock them on chain B into like a special escrow contract, send a proof, a light client proof to chain A saying, hey, look, here's proof that we locked it here and then it will mint you a token on chain A. And then if you want to go back, you can do just the reverse where you burn the token on chain A, you prove it to chain B, it's saying like, hey, there's the light client proof that I burned it and then it'll unlock that token out of escrow back for you again.
**C** (41:57):
Oh, very cool. So you can essentially interact just sort of using Cosmos as a bridge and call in Ethereum, you could call in a smart contract, a locked asset from Bitcoin or any other chain that you support, then.
**A** (42:13):
Yeah, so, yeah, exactly. So and one of the things is that IBC is sort of, it does make the assumption that both, it works when both chains support ibc. So if you, so you know, chain A has to natively support IBC and chain B has to support ibc, it becomes a little bit more complicated when you're trying to have a chain that supports ibc, talk to a chain that doesn't support IDC and that's, you know, let's say Bitcoin. You know, Bitcoin doesn't really support IBC and I don't know if it ever will like if it will ever natively support ibc. So for that you, you need to do like sort of these hacky workarounds. Meanwhile with Ethereum, like you know, at the base layer, it does not support IBC right now, but you can implement IBC at the, into a smart contract. So eventually we can have Ethereum sort of semi natively support IBC through smart contract talking to a chain that natively supports it.
**C** (43:15):
Yeah, very cool. So in terms of Cosmos, where is it at right now? Is it live and doing these cross chain transactions? So what change or here, go ahead.
**A** (43:29):
Yeah, so where Cosmos is at right now is. So I guess so I mentioned the IBC portion of Cosmos. I'd say Cosmos sort of has three, you know, when we set out there was three tools that we decided that we needed to make in order. So Cosmos is our vision of this whole many chains interoperating. And so we're like, okay, to make this work, what are the tools we need? We decided on three of them. One was Tendermint Core, which is this consensus protocol because we really believe that proof of stake is the future. And we wanted a BFT consensus protocol that has efficient light client proofs. And so that's what Tendermint was for. Then the second we did was the Cosmos SDK. So if you wanted. So, you know, we had this vision of many blockchains, each with their own application. The problem is, back in three years ago, if you wanted to write a blockchain application, you should have had two options. Either three options. Either you write something from scratch, which is really hard to. You write it on Ethereum, which is what we're trying to get away from, or three, you fork the Bitcoin code base and try to hack your. Hack your solution onto there. That was very messy. So you know this sort of what like Namecoin did, right? Like they forked the Bitcoin code base and like added the name service onto there. But it's so hacky and doesn't make sense because it's not a code base that was designed for that. So Cosmos SDK was basically, we said, okay, we need to build a toolkit that makes it easy for anyone to build their own blockchain. And so that's what the Cosmos SDK was it. If you want to, you want to write your new application, we make it super simple for you to write your own brand new blockchain. And third was ibc, which is this interconnection protocol. So where we are today is we are done with like 2.75%. So Tenement Core and Cosmos SDK have been sort of. We started, we finished Tenement Core first. That was step one. Then we did the Cosmos SDK. That was done about year and a half ago. And now there are many chains that are launched with the Cosmos SDK. So the Cosmos Hub is one, but then there's the Binance chain, Kava Terra, a bunch more. I can't even keep track anymore. Now the third step is ibc. So we are. That's what basically what we've been working on for the past year and a half is building ibc, building integration for the Cosmos SDK, but then also for other frameworks as well. So now people are building it for frameworks like substrate and whatnot. But yeah, so the goal is IBC should be ready for production level in the next. I don't like to give timelines, but definitely by this year like, by the end of the year, for sure. Oh, cool. Cool.
**C** (46:38):
And in terms of those other parts, like Tendermint, I mean, you talked about Binance chain being built around it. This is probably one of the more interesting projects that I've seen come out of, like, come out of a blockchain. I see it on Jesper actually getting validated as a distributed system and is working pretty well where I've seen other projects fail. What went into building Tendermint and getting it validated in this whole process?
**A** (47:09):
Yeah, so Tendermint was sort of very early. It was one of the first. So one of. Jay Kwon, who is sort of the founder of Tendermint, he. One of his insights was, you know, there was all these, like, BFT consensus protocols calls from, like, a lot of research was done on this stuff back in, like, the 80s and 90s, but they didn't. They kind of required a permissioned validator set, and they didn't really scale that well. And so people kind of, you know, didn't bother with it and kind of put it off to the side. And then, you know, fast forward 20 years and Bitcoin comes out, and it uses a completely brand new consensus model of, like, I call it Nakamoto consensus of this whole longest chain, like, system. It's, like, probabilistic. It's not. It's very different class of protocol than the BFP protocols. What Jay realized was, hey, you can combine this. And then, you know, after Bitcoin came out, there are people who kind of came up with, like, proof of stake, which, you know. Yes. Some of the early ones was like, Sunny King came up with this protocol project called peercoin, and it kind of basically tried to do this proof of stake system with Nakamoto consensus. Jay realized, hey, wait a second. We can use proof of stake to make the BFT protocols from the 80s and 90s permissionless. Which is really interesting because, like, no, it's not this.
**B** (48:53):
Because I was.
**A** (48:54):
One of the big problems with them is, you know, for building permissionless networks. So great. We can use proof of stake to make it permissionless. Now how about the scalability thing? So it turns out, what. So what? Jay and Ethan Buckman, who is the CTO of Tendermint back then, they basically spent like two years building Tendermint as a production implementation, documentation. It turns out most of the consensus protocols, like BFD protocols written in the 80s and 90s were like, written by, like, some PhD student for their thesis or something. And it was just written as, like, prototype, maybe. In like Python or something. And it's like, you know, they weren't meant to scale there. Meanwhile, Jay and Bucky, Ethan Buckman, they basically decided to write it in this like production grade golang multi threaded architecture. All that, you know, just put adding some modern software engineering, like, yeah. And it turns out, hey, this thing actually can scale reasonably well. Like we can scale through thousands of validators across like the world and whatnot. And so that's sort of what they did. And then they like modified the consensus protocol to like, you know, make it better for a blockchain standpoint. So like you know, pbft, like, which is sort of that precursor to Tendermint from the 90s, it like assumes like point to point connection that every, every node has a direct connection to every other node. Tendermint is designed to work better in like a P2P peer to peer gossip network, which is what blockchain systems use. So yeah, it basically like did a lot of like modifications to make it work well for a blockchain environment and sort of was just the first production grade implementation of this. And then following that, after Tendermin, sort of laid that groundwork for BFT consensus protocols for blockchains and it opened the floodgates that way more consensus protocols started being built. And I would say like almost every new consensus protocol that comes today is usually some sort of variant. You know, it's heavily inspired by Tendermint, whether it's like Casper or like Polka Dots Babe or no, I feel like maybe the only truly novel consensus protocol that's happened in the last 10 years other than Tendermint is probably Avalanche. But that's a whole story for another time.
**B** (51:27):
And what, what was your involvement with, with a lot of this development and design stuff?
**A** (51:33):
Yeah, so I joined, yeah, like I said, Summer 2017. So I. So Tendermint was sort of already been in being built by Jay and Bucky for a couple like two years before that point. And so we have like something there. But you know, I got involved with a lot of sort of improving Tendermint, coming up with new ideas of how to just make it better for blockchain, blockchain environment, how to add things like, you know, time, like, you know, BFT time and things like that. But then what I was really mostly involved with was the Cosmos SDK. So, you know, it's when I joined that we started kind of coming up with this idea of like, hey, let's build an SDK to make it really easy for people to build blockchain. So we Started doing that. I helped architect a lot of Cosmos SDK as well as a lot of the modules of the Cosmos SDK like staking and governance and just a lot of the core modules that sort of anyone who's building on the Cosmos SDK will want to use. And so did a lot of work on that.
**B** (52:51):
Oh yeah, absolutely.
**C** (52:57):
So in terms of, I guess in terms of all of these Cosmos offerings, what do you think is going to be the most like revolutionary or impactful on the whole blockchain ecosystem?
**A** (53:11):
Mm, I mean, I would say it's made. It's a bit hard to tell, but I mean I would say that each of these, you know, okay, I would say probably Tendermint because I think Tendermint basically just Tendermint and Proof of Stake. So I'd say like, you know, we basically launched the first VFT Proof of Stake system and now every blockchain that is launching today is launching with like Proof of Stake and with bft. And so I would say that like Tendermint just fundamentally changed the entire like ecosystem and like how consensus protocols are done today. So I'd say probably that's going to be the most long term, like revolutionary. And then.
**B** (54:03):
I guess what I'm saying.
**A** (54:04):
Is that so far that is the one that has been like, yes, this is true, that DFT Proof of Stake was the way. Now we're basically still in the process of seeing the Cosmos SDK has traction. You know, like we have a lot of projects using IT Finance, you know, and we have some projects shifting away from Ethereum to using the Cosmos SDK. So like, you know, Aragon or Enigma. So but that's still a thesis that is yet to be fully validated. And then the ibc, you know, that that's when that comes out, we'll see if our thesis there is also correct or not.
**C** (54:44):
Yeah, absolutely, I'd agree with that. Tendermint has been huge, completely like projects for like building based off of this. Like the whole Binance chain has really proven it out.
**A** (54:56):
So by the way, Binance uses the Cosmos SDK, not just Tendermint. So Finance Chain is also a good example of like helping prove the thesis that the Cosmos SDK is a better development environment than the evm. But we'll see how, you know, even today, I guess like still more projects obviously build on the EVM than do the Cosmos SDK. And so we're trying to see, okay, what's what, how to improve the developer experience. And then we also think IDC will be a big part of It a lot. The reason a lot of projects continue to build on Ethereum is the composability. You really want that composability with other applications. And so maybe when IBC comes along, that will be the trick. Absolutely.
**C** (55:43):
And then I got one final question for you before I hop back to Adam. So you're currently working on another project right now, sort of in the Cosmos ecosystem. What exactly is this new project that you're working on and what are you doing exactly there?
**A** (56:03):
Yeah, sure. So I wouldn't say it's a project, it's more, it's a company. So it's called. Yeah, so it's called Sika. So Sika is basically. It's a company I started basically a year and a half ago while I was still working full time at Tendermint, the company working on Cosmos. And what we started doing there was running a validator for different Cosmos based blockchains because, you know, and I started it as this sort of way of being like, okay, well I'm designing all this proof of stake stuff. I should probably run a validator so I can be like a user of my own software and architecture and stuff so I can understand it better. And so that's why I started Sitka and started validating on a number of proof of stake chains, especially within the Cosmos ecosystem.
**B** (56:59):
And.
**A** (57:02):
Yeah, and so basically was doing that on the side for about a year. And then last month I left Tendermint, the company because I've been working on protocol layered development for almost three years at that point. And I kind of wanted to shift to working more now on application layer stuff. And so that's why I left. And the idea was Sitka is we're still working on the validators but at the same time we are starting to explore some new projects on the application layer, which is kind of what we're really excited about next.
**C** (57:42):
Oh, very cool. Are there any types of applications that you're planning on building out?
**A** (57:49):
Yeah, so there's a couple. One of the things that we're really interested in especially is reputation systems. Like we're just obsessed with like reputation networks and web of Trust and things like that. So we're interested in building, exploring a couple of different projects that involve ideas that involve reputation systems. And Dave, my partner, Etsika, he is like a zero knowledge expert, like probably one of the best zero knowledge people in the world. And so really trying to design some identity reputation systems that are privacy preserving and things like that. And meanwhile on the side, like I mentioned, still working on Our validators. So, you know, as eth 2.0 is coming, you know, we're working on building staking services, staking pools for Eth 2.0 because, you know, we highly encourage people to run validators themselves. But you know, obviously I think a lot of people maybe don't want to run their own validator. It's a lot of hard work, to be honest. And so us being able to delegate. So one of the things I spent a lot of time doing on Cosmos is basically like designing delegation. Like in the Cosmos SDK, the staking protocol, the default staking module in Cosmos SDK has inbuilt delegation. But for some reason the Ethereum 2.0 developers decided against in protocol delegation. They don't want delegation. But I think they're a little bit misguided because I think delegation is inevitable. But because it's not in protocol now we have to do all these sort of more hacky and ways of building delegation out of protocol. So that's. We're also spending some time developing those right now. Okay, yeah, very cool here.
**C** (59:49):
I think this is all the questions I've got. I think I'll pass it back to Adam now if you have any additional questions.
**B** (59:57):
Yeah. Do you have a hard cut off? I don't want to run over. I mean, we're going over, but I'm having a good time. Are you cool?
**A** (1:00:02):
Yeah, I'm good.
**B** (1:00:03):
Awesome. Yeah. Yeah, no interesting stuff. I think, you know, as you mentioned, you know, that standardization, the interoperability, you know, you're working on, you know, you're starting to. This validator, you know, proof of stake validation is pretty big right in the space. So what are you following now? Like, you know, we just talked about protocol stuff, which you love. You just switched over to, you know, proof of stake, you know, valid validator as a service, validation as a service. What's exciting you like, what else are you watching in this space? You know, DEFI is kind of coming up. You know, blockchain or dlc. Right. Touches a lot of aspects, you know, in the bitcoin application, whether it's at the corporate level, which is a little bit different. We don't have time to get in all that. But yeah. What are you following right now? What excites you outside of, you know, what we just discussed?
**A** (1:00:56):
Yeah, yeah. So I've been pretty heavily closely following all the sort of developments within DeFi, especially within, like the Ethereum ecosystem. And I am, I'm like me, my opinion on it is kind of a little bit Medium ish. Like there's some things that I really like. Like I'm a big fan of a lot of the developments on exchanges and stuff like that. Uniswap different automated market makers. Really interested in following a lot of the developments that are happening there. My general view on a lot of like Defi is I think we need more reputation based systems. So I think currently in Defi there's a lot of focus on trustlessness as like one of the main selling points or like points of like defi and blockchains. When I would say trustlessness is not the main goal to me I think the two main like sort of north stars would be openness and transparency. And that's what I think like DEFI should be focusing on and those. And if you have really good on chain reputation systems and networks you can create systems that give you know, you the less trustlessness because you're building trust systems on chain but they're open and transparent trust systems. And that's where I think this defi space really does need to go.
**B** (1:02:35):
Galen, I don't know if you caught any of that but he was talking about reputation like we're talking about defi, what excites him, what he's following and he brought up reputation. I know you have some thoughts. I know we worked on some things in the past and kind of you know, not giving it priority but you know, leveraging this type of concept in the blockchain. What were you just saying though Sonny about including that into Defi as far as. Yeah, how it would, how it would help.
**A** (1:03:06):
So for example like you know there's all these like lending protocols on blockchains right now on like you know, this compound and maker and AAVE and stuff. But the problem is all these currently require over collateralization which is you know it's okay for some use cases but like you know when if I want to go get a loan to like start my business, it doesn't make sense for me to over collateralize with like this liquid asset. So it's a little bit silly. So but to get to an under collateralized world we need like things like credit. Credit scores. Credit scores are basically a form of reputation system but they're like a centralized one where it's like okay, there's like these like few three companies that basically control like the entire credit scoring system and you know it's very hard. They don't have any competition. They're not very like privacy preserving that. So how can we build you know a competitor to credit scoring but in a decentralized, in a like open and transparent way. What do you think it's almost like transparency and privacy preserving sound like almost opposites, but I think like there's ways you can design systems you want both where you want transparency on some attributes of a system, but you want privacy on certain attributes of a system. So finding the right balance between and just also just technically constructing systems that are this like almost weird sounding transparent but private.
**B** (1:04:55):
You're muted.
**C** (1:05:00):
Oh yeah, I think there's definitely a huge value there. I mean we for sure you can't give out a over collateralized loan like you were saying before. And I think there's many places where right now we can only make assumptions of users based on the assets they have right now. And bringing in like a history would add huge value to the DEFI ecosystem. So I definitely agree with you there. And you're saying there's a compromise between privacy and transparency. How do you think this would get implemented? If you were to build one out yourself or to guess at how this might work, how would you do it?
**A** (1:05:51):
Yeah, mostly through like cutting edge cryptography, like zero knowledge proofs and like MPC and stuff. So CCASH is an example. Right. It's like it's transparent in the sense that like you know, you, you, you're able to verify the attributes of the system you care about, such as all transfers were valid and you know, the total supply didn't change, et cetera, et cetera. But at the same time, you know, specific attributes such as okay, who transferred coins to who or what amount, those remain private. And so zero knowledge proofs are sort of this very powerful tool that can like help us out a lot with some of this stuff and then you know, MPC computation. So if you wanted to do computation over some data set where the data itself is private, but the result, you can compute over private data but create some like public result that that's really valid, valuable. So let's say, I don't know, let's say you had a bunch of people you wanted to get the average of whatever they're, you know, they all have some number credit score. You have this group of people, you don't want to find out their individual credit scores but you wanted to like get the average of this group. So you know, a lot of some of this new cryptography can allow you to do computation over private data. Oh, very cool. Sorry, sorry, go ahead.
**C** (1:07:26):
Yeah, yeah, that's a very cool concept. I think definitely there will be probably a Equifax or Like a. Maybe a blockchain version of a credit scoring or credit application eventually. I don't know what it would look like if there would be one, if there would be many, but I think nobody is very pleased with how they work right now.
**A** (1:07:51):
Exactly.
**B** (1:07:52):
Let's build it, Galen.
**A** (1:07:56):
Absolutely.
**B** (1:07:57):
No, no. Thanks for answering that. And that's kind of what I've been asking a lot of our speakers and, you know, interviewers is like, you know, we've gone through the last few years, and here we are, we have staple companies and custody solutions and wallet exchanges. And, you know, the grounding. The groundwork has been. Is being laid and. Has been laid. And so just curious to know, you know, what you mentioned. I was talking to Galen yesterday, and I don't know if it's possible to. And I was just asking him, just picking his brain, you know, that's a good one there. Like a decentralized kind of credit score. Right. So you don't have to over collateralize and. Because if you, I mean, if you're going to over collateralize, like, you can just, you can find it, use it outright, which you don't want to use your capital or you have a bad reputation and, you know, you got to, like, stake it. Right. In a way. Another one I thought, too, was like, insurance, like decentralized insurance, which I don't know if that's possible, you know, just to provide a peace of mind, like, which I know Quad Stamp is doing.
**A** (1:08:51):
Like, some smart contract stuff, but it's.
**B** (1:08:53):
Just here, it's just good to know for all of our viewers. Right. We just kind of went through this whole spectrum of cosmos and, like, products, and, and I've been lit, you know, we've all been listening to Defi, the aave, which we had on, and, you know, the Makers, which we had on, and all the Uniswaps, which is really cool. So I also kind of want to pivot a little bit to, you know, you doing these interviews with a lot of these projects. And I'm assuming, you know, you've been on Epicenter for quite some time. And for all of you that don't know, epicenter is a OG podcast from, like, 2014. Everybody that you can think of in this space has been on how, you know, how's that experience been for you? I think you joined in 2018, a couple years now.
**A** (1:09:37):
Yep, yep. Yeah, it's been pretty great. It's, you know, I do it because, like I mentioned near the beginning, like, if I want to learn something, you know, sign up to Teach it. And you know, not exactly teaching on a podcast, but, you know, you gotta like prep for an interview and stuff. And if I didn't do Epicenter, you know, I'd be very like, you know, so focused on like cosmos or Proof of Stake and just like hands heads down on like those topics. But doing Epicenter forces me to learn a little bit about everything in the space. So, you know, one week I'll do an episode on something going on in Defi. Next I'll do it on some new consensus protocol. Next I'll do it on, you know, something going on in the Lightning Network or something like that. So just constantly keep. It's like a nice forcing function to help you keep up with just a broad swath of the space. And yeah, just really nice to be able to share my knowledge with like other people who listen to it and stuff.
**B** (1:10:44):
And I'm kind of getting a taste of that, doing all these interviews and like, just chatting with people. Especially like this kind of informal but, but, but, you know, insightful, getting perspectives. Do you have any favorite guests? Do you have any like, I don't know, any memories that you remember favorite guests or something?
**A** (1:11:00):
Yeah, so I guess maybe one of my favorite episodes with Mark Miller of Agoric. So Mark Miller, he's just like Cypher punk OG like, he did like, you worked on like Xanadu and like did a lot of stuff with optic capabilities. You ever open, if you ever opened like your finder on like a Mac and you know how you have like the window and open. Those are called Miller Miller windows because, like, you know, he created a lot of that. So he just has like some really great stories and like, very interesting view. And so he's working on this new project called Agoric. It's part of the Cosmos ecosystem actually. But. And so yeah, that, that was a really great interview. I really enjoyed doing that one with him. And yeah, there's, you know, there's so many like, you know. Yeah, like, you know, I did just. I did this because it's so recent, but I did one with Balancer and I, you know, Fernando, I love Balancer. It's such a cool protocol.
**B** (1:12:03):
And so do you get to pick the guest or do you have a team that. Or a little bit of both.
**A** (1:12:09):
So both. I mean, so we have currently we have five hosts and each episode does like two hosts. And we will, you know, basically we'll have like a call like once a month or so. We'll just shoot out guest proposals as long as like, you know. Yeah, the team has any objections, we'll go ahead and reach out to the.
**B** (1:12:27):
Guest and like, yeah, that's super cool. And you know, let's see here. Like there's a lot of, you know, a lot of these students watching and stuff like where. What are some good sources of information that you may. Not to put you on the spot, but there might be some books, there might be some blogs, some people you follow. I'm sure you know, where can people kind of do. And Google's Google, you can find it anywhere. But you might have some specifics that you tap into Telegram, chat groups. I'm not sure.
**A** (1:12:57):
Yeah, definitely, like, you know, read as many white papers as possible. That's usually some of the best source of knowledge. A lot of blogs, if you want to be on, if you want to be up to date, you have to be on Twitter. Like Twitter is where discussions happen.
**B** (1:13:15):
Yeah.
**A** (1:13:16):
And if you just want to be up to date on stuff, that's where you sort of have to be. So definitely like get, I mean, so that's what I did was, you know, got on Twitter started and started interacting with people to start commenting on people stuff and getting into conversations. And then when you like, you know, as one conferences start again, you'll start going to conferences and you'll be like, oh, I know you from Twitter, we had this discussion about this or whatnot. So doing that is probably the best way to get involved. And yeah, just teach things like, you know, if you, if there's something you want to learn about, you know, read the paper, maybe do it short 30 minute presentation on it and upload it to YouTube, shoot a link to the team, like the project team and they'll probably, you know, share it or retweet it or whatever and you'll get some feedback.
**B** (1:14:05):
You get some feedback and you work better than you learn. That's totally, that's kind of one thing I wanted to touch on which we touched on the beginning of you teaching. You know, for all of those watching. Right. Like kind of one thing that I'm taking away is, and it's not even old, it's just if, if you want to learn something, teach it right. That's kind of the best way. And there's pros and cons to it. Like I think people are afraid. Well, I'm not an expert. Like I don't know. Well, that's kind of the point.
**A** (1:14:29):
Like you're going to get feedback, you're.
**B** (1:14:31):
Going to get in discussions, it's going to open your mind up a little Bit from what you learned to maybe an expert that can teach you a few things. And now it's just kind of snowballing. I'm really loving these interviews, honestly, because like you said, same thing. You know, maybe start interviewing people. It helps you or not interviewing people, but, like, you know, bringing on guests and whether it's a podcast or just reaching out to a project, asking them questions, you know, you kind of dig deeper and you go down this rabbit hole of understanding that business, which leads you into other liquidity pools. And, like, now you're in the staking and now you're in exchanges, you know, all over the place. So that's kind of one thing that I hope some people take away from here, you know, And I kind of want to start. I'm going to wrap this up right now in a couple minutes. You know, everybody's kind of last question. Everybody's sheltering in place and schools, we don't know what school's gonna look like. A little bit remote people. Founders have probably found it a little bit tough to raise some money over the last few months or getting a little deterred. A little deterred a little bit from, like, their goal. Right.
**A** (1:15:31):
And I've said this before.
**B** (1:15:34):
What's some advice for a lot of these projects? You know, you decided to go into the workforce. There might be some people contemplating that. And that's kind of been, you know, people that. That know what they want to do tend to go into the workforce, not a problem. But just to kind of name off some companies, right, That I have survived during recessions and depressions and, like, bear markets are like mailchimp, Uber, the Groupons, the Instagrams. Right. The Venmos, the list goes on Pinterest, Square, Airbnb. Like, they came out of, like, shit times, right? Everybody thinks some of these companies just, you know, everything was perfect with all these, and it wasn't right. Like, everything was down. So what are, you know, as we kind of conclude on this, what are some of your thoughts for a lot of these entrepreneurs and founders, like, either trying to go into the workforce and maybe a little bit hesitant or, you know, a little bit. A little bit down because, you know, we're in this pandemic and you can't go to meet us and all that. What do you say to. And I just mentioned companies that have been successful in major companies. What do you say to some of these people? Kind of on that borderline of like, what do I do?
**A** (1:16:38):
Yeah.
**B** (1:16:40):
So.
**A** (1:16:43):
I mean, you know, we're in this, like, semi Bull market now in crypto I feel. But I would always, you know, be hesitant. Like, you know, things are especially like just the larger geopolitical stuff but you know, so the stock market is also doing like this crazy stuff when it really doesn't make any sense. So be a little bit hesitant. But you know, especially if you're about to go back to school, it's like why, like, you know, you're going to be working, doing your schoolwork virtually like and paying full tuition for it. That's definitely not worth it. You should probably.
**B** (1:17:17):
I think half the part of going to school is meeting other like minded individuals and offices like you know, forming commodities and talking, right?
**A** (1:17:26):
Yeah, exactly. And so it's like, well if you can't do that, might as well take the risk and just like start working on something for a little bit. Start your own project or if you find a like, you know, project that you thought is really interesting, like you know, it's small team, reach out to them and like, and you know, that's what I did with Tendermint when I reached out to them. It was a small team, maybe like I think six or seven people at the time as well.
**B** (1:17:52):
Especially, especially like the development efforts and like coding and engineers and design and architecture. Like it's a hands on thing. Like you know, you can YouTube it, you can read up, there's documentation out there, there's GitHub, like open source stuff, anybody can jump into it. It's just what you do with it. Like you have all the tools out there, right? One thing that you need to do is really like you said, try something, build something, fail a few times.
**A** (1:18:17):
And what's really great is like, you know, you can come in with like very, you don't have to become, you don't have to be a crypto expert to get started. So you know, for example, Pong, who is, he was the first engineer, he was the first hire of Tendermint. So after Jay and Ethan started the company, Pong, he was a web developer, right? And so he was hired and designer. And so he was hired just to sort of build the website and stuff for Tendermint and do design work. And fast forward three years later, today he is actually the CEO of Tendervent. And so he's actually like, you know, over the last four years he's just become a, learned so much about crypto and is now leading this like Cosmos development company. And so you know, this, whatever your skill set is usually a role for you somewhere in the crypto space. Whether you're a web designer or, you know, DevOps or economist or mathematician or business development.
**B** (1:19:18):
Like some marketing roles.
**A** (1:19:19):
Which are.
**B** (1:19:19):
Which, which. Which we've learned. Like, I didn't get into the question, but, you know, Ethereum is pretty large because they have the reach of onboarding developers and like, documentation and like, education and community feeling. Anyways, going back to the role, there's a lot of these roles that are super important, especially in the cryptos, to, like, get everybody developing on your platform. A lot of communication, a lot of outreach, a lot of, you know, growth hacking and like, you know, just being involved and staying at the store, at the forefront. All right, cool, man. Well, where can people find you, Sonny?
**A** (1:19:58):
Yeah, you can find me on Twitter. It's probably the best. Sunny A97 and you can check out, you know, check out Epicenter as well. The site is Epicenter tv. Yeah, perfect.
**B** (1:20:11):
Perfect. Well, I appreciate you again joining. I know we went, like, way over, but this was a great discussion. You know, all of you tuning in to reimagine 2020. We hope you enjoyed the talk with Galen Danziger, CTO and co founder of Mousebound, along with Sunny Agrawal, which, you know, part of the Cosmos community, Tendermint, Epicenter, Blockchain, Empirically, all the above. You know, one of the pillars in the community. And I was very fortunate to get him on board here because I really wanted to talk to him. I listened to him on Epicenter. So great, great voice, great, great person. And yeah. So thank you all for joining us and we hope you had a good time. Please visit RI2020 to catch the full interview and we hope to see you again. We'll be doing this every month. Thank you, Sunny, for joining. Appreciate your time.
**A** (1:20:54):
Thank you so much.