**A** (0:00):
You know, my hot take in Cosmos is I think staking APRs actually just need to go down across the board. I wrote that module like 5 years ago so fast, and it's like, this is not a good module. And I didn't really understand what they were talking about. But then a few months later, I was like, oh, I get it.
**B** (0:18):
All righty. Hello, Sunny. Hello.
**A** (0:22):
Hello.
**B** (0:22):
You're part of the mesh security team and. And you also started that right at the hackathon at Cosmoverse last year, is that correct?
**A** (0:32):
Yeah, that was the first time we started the first prototype of building it. Before that, it was just an idea.
**B** (0:38):
And I saw you guys doing that. And so where does the idea for mesh security come from? Was it your idea or like Ethan's or Jake's?
**A** (0:45):
I think it was. It's hard to say whose idea it was. It was just like, idea that's been in development for a long time. Like, really, the base premise is actually very similar to what, like this idea we've had for the Cosmos Hub for a long time about this idea of like interchange security. But what's currently there today is ICS v1. But if you take it down the steps, ICS v3 was this idea that, oh, one chain will be able, like subsets of validators will be able to provide security, opt in to other chains. And the real mesh security is just like the obvious next step, which is, oh, why is it one directional? Why isn't it going both ways? Just because one is providing security to the other, you can also have the other provide security to that one as well. If I had to say who the. The earliest I think I've heard it mentioned was probably my co founder, Dave. He was like, do you remember, like about a year and a half ago, Vitalik had this Reddit post about like, why rollups are like the right security model and we have to be like against multi chain because of all these security issues. Dave had a tweet thread replying to Vitalik about, oh no, actually, multichain is going to be secure because of these reasons. And I'll admit I didn't fully understand what he meant when he had that tweet thread, but Vitalik got it. So I remember I was actually with Dave and Vitalik one day in person and they were debating about it and I didn't really understand what they were talking about. But then a few months later, I was like, oh, I get it. And I think what Dave was saying was basically, mesh security, okay.
**B** (2:24):
And then you guys thought, okay, that needs to be pushed forward.
**A** (2:27):
Yes.
**B** (2:29):
And so the hackathon wasn't the beginning. You had the talk before that, talking about mesh, like with your outfit and stuff. Yes, that said. Okay, and so the ideas I had. So you said ics, that's the interchange security thing the Atom Hub does. Right. So did you go forward with that idea because you think that the Cosmos Hub wouldn't go forward with that mesh security because they don't benefit from them from that or it was because you said it's the next logical step.
**A** (3:00):
So I guess part of it was I saw that there wasn't enough. Yeah. So I think the Cosmos Hub, like dev team, informal and stuff, they seem to have actually stopped working on the next versions of ICS and all the focus was on just the replicated security because they had some concerns with how to do V2 and V3 and I had to come up with some solutions for how to fix those. And that's kind of. Now informal is pretty on board with mesh security as well, because we were able to show that. But yeah, I think, like I said, I think mesh security, once you realize the idea, it's like obvious. It's like there's no other way that Cosmos should work. This is the clear way that you have a multi chain network. Why would you, of course you'd want to get security from as many places as possible.
**B** (3:52):
Okay. And like for me, as a non technical person, so why should users care about Mesh security at all? Some people seem excited about it, but I always ask myself, okay, do they understand what it means and what does it actually mean for the users? It works right now, right? Why should we touch it?
**A** (4:07):
There's different reasons. One is today as a user, you're supposed to be reasoning about what chain you're using and what level of security it has. Let's say you have a chain like gravity bridge or something where it actually has quite a bit of value on it. But the economic stake backing the system is not that high. And that's actually been a reason why people are concerned to use it. Because point of proof of stake is that's the security system. And this is what makes ethereum and these L2s so attractive, is that they all have, regardless of what.
**B** (4:43):
They're so big.
**A** (4:44):
They're big. But it's also that whatever L2 that you're using, you're still getting the same security as Ethereum. And I think that makes it so you don't have to think about, oh, should I move on to Arbitrum or Optimism or ZK sync. You don't have to worry about it. It's all the same security. And I think the point of mesh security is it gives you that same experience where it's like, you. You don't have to worry about, oh, I'm going from this chain to this chain. They have different security levels. It's like all of Cosmos will have roughly the same level of security if.
**B** (5:15):
All of the chains would participate in that.
**A** (5:17):
Correct.
**B** (5:18):
And is there a technical maximum to that? How many chains could technically. Like in the current plan, there's not a technical maximum.
**A** (5:27):
There'll probably be like social maximum, because governance still has to. We still want to give the sovereignty up to a chain to the decide where it gets security. Right. And is it going to be 100 chains? Is it going to be 20 chains? Like, we don't know. It's up to. And different chains are going to choose different things. Some chains are going to only do it with a couple handful of chains that like, they really like I said, the argument I've always made is you have to look at where economic flows are. So, like, the example I gave in my talk was about the eu. Most EU countries are part of NATO. And it's like there's this overlap between economic dependencies and security dependencies. And so if you look at chains like Osmosis and Axelar, very high economic relationships, those are gonna have a lot of dependencies. But let's say you have a chain that is off doing its own thing, not super involved with the rest of the ecosystem, which is fine. Maybe they don't need to have, like, doing this same level of economic, like, mesh security with everyone else.
**B** (6:32):
Okay, so maybe I didn't understand that correctly in your talk, because I thought, or at least I understood that, oh, there's messages here is just NATO. But the point you're making is there is like that big thing and there are like, little things. Yeah, like little economic zones in between.
**A** (6:49):
Exactly.
**B** (6:50):
They're not economic.
**A** (6:50):
But that's the one thing that I feel doesn't come across correctly in the talk. Someone actually pointed this out on Twitter recently where it's like, the NATO analogy isn't correct. And that's true because the thing with NATO is it's so in my talk, I also have those, like, quadrants. And like the economics, NATO is actually more of the green system. It is a mesh, but it's a fully connected mesh because NATO is like, all members of NATO are in alliance with every other member of NATO. The idea of the worldview that I believe in and that Mesh security is more this yellow system where it's a set of bilateral treaties, where every chain makes bilateral treaties. And most for the large part, there will be large overlap. But like, not everyone is connected to everyone. If you want to have the real political analogy, it's probably more something like.
**B** (7:39):
The Concert of Europe in between NATO or like just Europe. How it is.
**A** (7:46):
The Concert of Europe was this like. It's like in the 1800s, this idea of Europe was filled with like bilateral treaties and stuff.
**B** (7:53):
Obviously it didn't end so well.
**A** (7:55):
Didn't end so well. It didn't end so well. But actually, arguably, you could say it actually was very successful for a while. It lasted like the period from Napoleonic wars to World War I. It was actually a pretty unprecedented time of peace in Europe. Relatively no major conflict wars.
**B** (8:13):
And I mean, with Mesh security, we don't talk about wars.
**A** (8:16):
Yeah, exactly. The other thing is like these political analogies, it's always important to remember they're analogies. They're not direct. One for one. Perfect. And we're talking about countries. It's usually about countries attacking each other, which is not what we're really talking about here in blockchain building bridges.
**B** (8:33):
Right.
**A** (8:34):
Yeah, it's more like external actors might be trying to attack the system. Yeah. It's not really the exact analogy, but it's a good mental model.
**B** (8:41):
Yeah. I think for outside people it's easier to understand that way.
**A** (8:44):
Yeah.
**B** (8:45):
And so how does benefit Cosmos then for Mesh Security from your perspective? Like, why should other or like all the people care about mesh security?
**A** (8:56):
Yeah, I mean, like I said, I think it'll make the UX much more seamless around Cosmos. Right now, so much of the UX in Cosmos, we have to tell people what chain they're on because it's like almost we're not. Let's say as a wallet creator, you're not doing your job if you're not telling people what chain they're on, because that has like real security impact to them. But as we make the security level across Cosmos more similar, then you can.
**B** (9:25):
Like, forget about it. Okay, I never thought about that. That makes a lot of sense because everything is connected, the security is shared and it's leveled out. Okay.
**A** (9:35):
This is how. I mean, once again, with the political analogies. But in the U.S. right, like you can. Everything's under one common set of laws and security and governance system, which is why you can move between states very easily. Right. And there is some nice UX benefits.
**B** (9:52):
That you get Then like the US dollar.
**A** (9:54):
Yeah. The other thing that, like, maybe something that users may care about is like, you also get these, like, staking more staking opportunities. Now, right? Where let's say Osmosis is doing mesh security with all these other chains, like, or other chains are coming to Osmosis to get security from it. Like, by staking Cosmo, you'll be able to earn rewards of a lot of other chains at the same time. So I actually think it'll. Like, there's often this whole thing about this tribalism within Cosmos. I actually think it will reduce that significantly.
**B** (10:25):
Yeah. Now since you. That never came to mind. But now since you're saying it, it's like a natural airdrop, right. It's like I stake my osmo. Yeah, my OSMO on the chain I never used, and then I get their tokens and sudden, like, suddenly I have to do something with them.
**A** (10:41):
There's no reason to airdrop to OSMO anymore. What a new chain should just do is do mesh security with OSMO and give staking rewards to osmo. The chain gets something out of it as well. Right. It gets security from it. And then imagine something like there have been people who are like, oh, why doesn't Osmosis build its own bridge? Right? Isn't that revenue that Osmosis could be getting? Or why doesn't Osmosis build its own lending protocol? But it's like instead of us trying to dominate and do everything, we can work with these other projects, Axelar, Mars, et cetera. But then we also, what's nice is mesh security actually gives this, like, revenue share where the economics actually, we don't have to go build it ourself. We can actually, through these alliances, we're getting some revenue from Mars, like features also.
**B** (11:30):
You can expand features and focus on your main thing. Yeah, that's cool. And that's what the whole interchange thing is about, right? Like app chains and all that.
**A** (11:40):
I really think Mesh security is going to shift Cosmos from a culture of competition that it feels like we're in today into a culture of collaboration.
**B** (11:48):
That would be awesome. Yeah. And that would lead to my next question, like, staking rewards. Because when we talked about it here for us, it felt like right now I get, I don't know, let's say 20% APR on my Osmo and I stack them. But then for Mesh Security, you need to split that up, Right. From a rewards perspective, at least, when I look at three chains or something, all three tokens I have in my wallet, like the main Ones, nothing changed because all the staking rewards.
**A** (12:19):
They get diluted slightly. Right. Because a portion of them will get given to the other chain that we're getting security from. But the same, we'll be getting the security from that chain as well.
**B** (12:28):
So.
**A** (12:28):
Yeah, you're right, it will. The actual APRs, I don't imagine significantly changing that.
**B** (12:34):
Okay.
**A** (12:35):
In general, I actually, you know my hot take in Cosmos is I think apron staking aprs actually just need to go down across the board. Like, I think they're, they're like just way too high right now.
**B** (12:44):
And to make like prices more stable.
**A** (12:46):
Or what's to make prices more stable to make. I've been thinking a lot about like liquid staking, like liquidity recently because there's some proposals from Stride to put incentives and I've just been thinking about how these. Yeah, like I was looking at how the economics of liquid staking mechanisms work in Ethereum. But like they, they seem to work out okay because eth staking aprs are much lower than what we have in Cosmos and I think the staking APRs were good while we're in this growth phase. But really real revenues from chain should be driven by revenues not from FEES or from MEV capture, not from this diluted staking APRs.
**B** (13:23):
Yeah, definitely attracted me because I don't know what you had back then like 400, I don't know, 300% on Akash and Osmosis Osmo and what I found really impressing and that I think that would be also cool for mesh is I like that habit forming thing osmosis did to people and also to me like for me it was like every day at 6pm I was like, I knew okay, the epoch is like ending and I need to put my stuff back into liquidity pools which created that I think for. I think that's also the success of Osmosis is also partly based on that because people actually like you saw people on Twitter like posting their laptop on the beach and said yeah, we refueling my liquidity pools here. And I think for Mesh security something like that would also be awesome. Of course there are not epochs or something like that daily thing. But what. Yeah, what do you think was that planned from your perspective to that 24 hour window thing to keep people engaged.
**A** (14:23):
It was definitely a. It was primarily driven by a technical requirement of honestly, I mean, well, not really. It was driven by a how do we ship this the fastest and launch osmosis? Like we could have gotten rid of epochs that would have Taken probably an extra month of development time. So we're like, okay, let's keep like that. But then once we were launching we were like, we definitely noticed this where it's like this was definitely this very common feedback cycle of oh, people are coming back to Osmosis conscious every day for this. And uh, we are figuring out, we are think one of the things we're working on on our sources right now is like notifications. I think that is like an important thing to keep people engaged and coming back to the project onto the website on a daily basis. Whether it's notifications for new asset listings, new features that are launching new apr, like yield opportunities. And then we also have this app store that we're building on Osmosis right now. Because Osmosis is no longer just the Osmosis Dex anymore. Now there's all this stuff built on top. Right. You have Mars, you have Qu, Quasar, you have Calc, you have all these new projects launching. And so we wanna through the App Store 1 provide a way of people discovering new project but then also at the same time being able to like act as a notification hub for all of them. So whether you have notifications coming from Quasar or from IDCX or whatever, they're all aggregated in one place. So that should hopefully be able to keep people coming back.
**B** (15:52):
Yeah. And what's the technical background for those notifications? Because it's like always been like an issue. We discussed it here a lot that you get, I don't know, like for Lois has a bad kit and he got I don't know, 10 biddings on his bad kit but he never noticed because he didn't check his profile. He didn't even know about the feature.
**A** (16:09):
Yeah.
**B** (16:10):
Is that something other chains can adapt to? Are you developing on something officially?
**A** (16:14):
So we're working with a team called Notify. They built like they built basically build notifications for Web3 like a service provider. So any application built on top of Osmosis directly will be able to like get notification integrations quickly based off of any on chain data. Basically we can do that and then Notify, they can work with projects built on other chains like Stargaze. They can also. They would have to do their own relationship there. But yeah, I'm really playing around with the Notify product. I been really happy with it.
**B** (16:46):
And is it like where what's the receiver of those pings?
**A** (16:50):
You have different options. Right. So one is. So what we're launching with is just in app right within the Osmosis website. We want all these notifications with notify. You can also set it so you get notifications via either sms, telegram or email.
**B** (17:05):
So you don't plan to integrate that or like to work with wallets to integrate that into the.
**A** (17:10):
We will. They're like, that's up to wallets to decide to. But there are definitely wallet.
**B** (17:16):
It could be possible.
**A** (17:16):
Yeah, I know. I've been talking to Leap about it as well. They're interested in. They actually built their own notifications thing but I'm discussing with them that, hey, actually let's give you guys a web socket to plug into these notifications here.
**B** (17:29):
Nice. Yeah. Because then I think that was the biggest ux. Not the biggest, but one of the major ux flaws of Web3 that it's just you interact with something like a protocol and then you forget about it or something. And even like when I first used Osmosis, like a while ago when it launched or shortly after, I didn't even. There was the countdown. The countdown was the good thing. Like I knew there's something coming in 20 hours or something, but then I forget about it and I didn't know where is it? What am I actually getting? What is it? And all that stuff that would be like a huge game changer because people are used to that, to notifications. Like something happens, okay, ping me. And then there's no. I guess there's almost no difference to the Web2 stuff anymore, right?
**A** (18:10):
Yeah, yeah. And for me, like, I know, like I actually check the. Weirdly I check the crypto.com app a lot. Mostly because it gives me notification on like price movements.
**B** (18:20):
Yeah, for me too.
**A** (18:20):
Yeah. And so that makes it, I don't know, it is sticky where even if I. It'll be like, oh, bitcoin is up 5%. And I'd be like, oh, really? Even if I'm like, I don't. Why am I checking this? But it's like instinctively makes me want.
**B** (18:30):
To check it because 5% up or down or 10%, it's like it's a daily thing if something happens.
**A** (18:35):
But it still makes me open it, gets me to open it.
**B** (18:38):
But then for me at least it's like I see Akash, I don't know, 12% up and I tap on it and then it just shows me. Not even the token, not Akash, but just my dashboard. So I don't know, I think they have such a great opportunity, but they don't, I don't know, use it, I think. But yeah, coming back to Mesh, what does it mean for governance and like proposals and proposal votings? Can I vote with my OSMO on our cash proposals?
**A** (19:04):
That is up to each chain to decide. I think that by default I assume most chains will probably want to keep governance focused on just their native token, right? That is you still want some value on your native token. That's where you get the full governance rights from. But then I also think chains might start to give some governance rights to others and it makes sense. One of the things we're working on this isn't the full mesh related mesh, but this thing called pass through voting where like the osmosis community pool owns pretty significant amount of axle tokens. The Mars team is probably interested in doing like a token swap at some point. And so in that world it'll probably own a osmosis community will own a significant amount of Mars tokens. And what you should be able to do is let's say someone has 1% of Osmo stake, they should be able to vote in Mars, but using the osmosis community pool, 1% of osmosis community pools as Mars tokens. And so that's like a, that we've been starting this process of doing token swaps like DAO to DAO token swaps in the ecosystem. But those tokens have just sort of been sitting there in the community pools. It'll be interesting that now you can actually start to use them in governance. But then also, yeah, I think it makes sense where it's like projects that are highly correlated with each other. Maybe Mars will just say, yeah, we want osmosis to have governance power in osmosis. I think Lido is doing something similar in Ethereum where it's letting ETH participate, staked ETH participate in LIDO governance, not just the LDO token.
**B** (20:40):
Okay, yeah, that's cool. But that also means that the whole thing gets more complex. Where do you tell the user how much, where they can vote with what? Right now I know, okay, I delegated my OSMO to couple validators and if I do my own vote, I overwrite their voting for my token amount. But now it changes. You need to tell them, oh yeah, you have like your crosstake those tokens and you can vote a bit here but not so much there. So how do you envision that? Like how does it work?
**A** (21:15):
I mean I actually think that for the most part average users probably don't need a vote on everything. I think mostly it's about giving them one of the things I don't like in Cosmos Right now is like that you auto delegate to your validator, your governance power. I think what we should be focused on is hey, you should be able to choose different governance delegates on different chains. And yeah, so what exactly was like the concern that users like the voting power might be different on different chains?
**B** (21:40):
Yeah. That suddenly you have, let's say you have 20 chains on mesh security and they all have different voting like different methods, how to vote with their tokens and you need to tell them somewhere. Where do you think they need to know? Or is it like more hardcore things just for power users that are deep?
**A** (21:59):
I do think it's more of a power user thing, but also I think it's okay to. I'm not saying why it will be too difficult to explain to users that hey, look, on this vote you have this much voting power, you have this much voting power on different chains. One of the even more challenging things with governance I feel is not just that like voting powers are different. I think what's going to happen is governance processes on different chains is going to start to diverge. One of the things that I'm a little bit surprised at is how sticky the current governance module is. Where almost every causal chain is using this one governance module with yes, no, no, with veto. I wrote that module five years ago so fast and less than two months and it's like, this is not a good module. It's very simple, it's very basic. It's following a process that I didn't even was part of. It was something Jay came up with. And it's like part of the whole beauty of app chains is that we should be having unique governance processes for different chains depending on what they're doing. Right. And so we're starting that process in osmosis. Like we've already started making some changes to governance module. Like we have this expedited proposals that no other chains has.
**B** (23:09):
What's that?
**A** (23:10):
It's the ability to push a governance proposal through in 24 hours if two thirds of all stake votes on it.
**B** (23:17):
So for emergencies.
**A** (23:18):
For emergencies, yeah. After Terra basically is when we had to start doing that, we were like, we need this. But yeah, so like I think that's actually, I think gonna be a bigger challenge. Not just the voting powers, but how do we show different governance processes in different chains altogether? Cause like not everything will be a yes or no vote. There might be multiple choice votes, there might be ranking based votes, there might be like, yeah, there's all sorts of things here.
**B** (23:43):
And then the question I then have Is like where are people actually voting? Because like right now like most people are used to min scan I guess at least to look at proposals. But you can also vote in Kepler I guess also in leap. Do you think there should be like a better solutions for or a dedicated solution for governance stuff or is it okay how it is right now? To me it feels like yeah, I think it'll.
**A** (24:08):
I think it's. I think there'll need to be more dedicated solutions. I do think that like for prod chains and like projects that need to modify their governance process, maybe there needs to like one of the things I really like Daodao a lot. I think like the Dao Dao is much more flexible of frameworks that gives you some more space for innovation on the processes. I don't know if you saw this tweet a couple of days ago from. I forgot who it was from but it's like app clips in the wallet where it's like there's like a Cosmos wallet. But it had.
**B** (24:42):
Oh yeah, I saw that.
**A** (24:43):
Yeah, yeah. And I actually like that concept. Why don't like why aren't we making it so other project like even like for the osmosis ui. Can we make some sandboxed way for other. Where other projects can build like UI components. Yeah. That we can embed into our ui. So you can imagine a governance dashboard that gives external projects the ability to make specific UI components for their unique governance processes.
**B** (25:11):
Actually I was hoping that Kepler would do that because like Kepler apps or something. At least that's how I thought about it that I can install a little like a pocket osmosis into my Kepler and then the basic functionality is in there and yeah, maybe at some point something like that will happen and I don't know where wallets will go if you always stay at the browser thing. I guess the couplet thesis is a bit like that it moves more and more to mobile, which is true I think. But then yeah, the question is what happens with all that stuff. But I think notifications is a good thing. Like you get a notification, oh there's a new proposal and oh, you need to vote now and then running out. I think for some like somehow it already like you could technically already do that. But I hope that it gets more social whole experience. So I think we are almost through here. What role do you think the validators play in all of this?
**A** (26:06):
Like what do you think will happen there?
**B** (26:09):
Yeah, should I even pick a validator? Why should I even care about that?
**A** (26:13):
Yeah, so we're Actually we're thinking about this a lot as well because we're building a staking UI into the Osmosis website and yeah, this is something we're trying to think about. Like how do we make the validator selection process as easy as possible? I don't actually, I don't like one of my biggest issues with like how the current validator selection process goes on Kepler Dashboard. But also like every, like almost every staking UI is you have this thing where you have to go select val individual validates, you have to click delegate. And then especially how it hurts decentralization is when you first do it like I, I usually do my best. Like when I'm on a new chain I'll like go tick pick like 10 validators and make sure I stake to all of them. Annoying. Takes 10 transactions, right? But then it's like after that, okay, I'm going to go compound and I'm going to go like restake and say I get lazy. I don't go do it to all 10 of them, I'll go do it to three, I'll do it. And then by the end I'm just like doing it to the one again and again. And it's like that leads to centralization and so we're trying to think, take a approach where it's like how do we actually make validators a little less important? Important. I think there's been this world. One of the things I've been thinking about is like in awesome, like in Cosmos, historically we've always taken this view that like oh, the validators with the highest trust and like that. But I think we actually maybe went a little bit too far in that direction where now if you look at Osmosis, the biggest validators are like chorus one and Figment and these like validators that have like really high trust and like they've built up this amazing reputation which is great but it actually accidentally pushed the system a little bit too centralized. So how do we make it so like improve discovery of smaller validators but or even remove the focus from them. So like one, we're thinking about different models but one of the things we're thinking about is this like staking concierge almost where you come on, you come on the UI and it asks you like five questions of like do you want to delegate more to. So, so before I get into that, sorry, we have the. So one thing we changed in Osmosis chain is we have this thing called validator set preferences where what you can do is you can Choose a set of validators and including, you can do percentages as well. And then every time you delegate, it'll just automatically do it to all of those validators at the same time in a single transaction. And so with that on our ui, we're building these things called staking squads, where it's like, oh, this is your squad of validators. It could be 10 validators, 20.
**B** (28:36):
And you just always keep restaking with it.
**A** (28:38):
But the question is, how do we choose the staking squad? You could go the manual way and that will be an option on our UI where you can go select all the validators one by one. But we're also going to do it like, oh, this like, concierge method where it's. Do you. What is the max commission rate you're allowed to. You're willing to pay? Do you want to weight your delegation towards smaller validators? Do you want like validators that are running relayers or, I don't know, something. We actually have to come up with what the questions exactly are. Yeah, but, yeah, well, and then the concierge will like suggest you a validator set.
**B** (29:13):
We, we thought about that a lot because with Mesh it gets like, even more crazy. Because we also thought about, okay, then you need to select for each chain stuff. And then when you want to feed all your tokens back into the. You want to restake them or compound them, then it gets even more complex. And we also thought about that, that you, like, that's interesting that you guys came up with a similar solution that we thought, yes, you select the first set and then for each token you select one validator. And then it always says to you, yeah, let's do it like last time. But there's always, yeah, but yeah, I think like normal users shouldn't. We should make it so super easy that it also helps decentralization. So we thought about having a random thing like you have some metrics.
**A** (29:59):
Yeah, we also thought about random mechanisms.
**B** (30:02):
As well, specific metrics. You don't want to be somebody who has not a lot of uptime is missing blocks and stuff. But the question here is, should the user care or should you be the authority? And there it gets difficult. Should you be the authority that says, oh, yeah, those validators are bad and those are good.
**A** (30:20):
Yeah, that's the problem. We're trying to make it as off of objective data as possible because I think our job as the so weird because we have a lot of hats, right? We are building the defi product, but we're also building the chain itself. And so as the chain developers, our job is to be neutral when it comes to validators and we shouldn't actually be making value judgments on the validators. We should be letting just giving the options to you, giving the power to the users, but then giving them questions to guide them. But we shouldn't be making value judgments of oh, these are good validators, these are bad validators.
**B** (30:53):
But I guess there are some. There's something, I think, I hope so that all people agree on or most people agree on. Like those are good and those are bad metrics for.
**A** (31:02):
One of the biggest challenges is how to deal with validators who are not in the active set. Because should we allow some delegation to validators who aren't in the active set? Because if not, then those validators will basically never be able to break into the active set.
**B** (31:17):
Makes sense.
**A** (31:17):
And so that's one of the challenges. I actually had this idea long time ago and like before launch of Cosmos Hub even it was called Ghost delegations, I think something like that. I gave a talk on it. But it was this idea that you can delegate to this valid, like a validator who's not in the. I think it was called delegation commitments. So the idea was you could commit to delegating to a validator who's not in the active set, but in the meanwhile you're going to be delegating to someone who is in the active set. But as soon as this person gets enough commitments to enter the active set, yeah, I will auto redelegate to them.
**B** (31:58):
That sounds crazy. It sounds like there would be then suddenly a lot of movement in the validator set. That's interesting. Yeah, but that would be a solution to my problem. I always had because I also thought, oh, but that guy is not in the active set, so I'm missing out on all the tokens. Basically makes the whole staking point pointless, at least for me as a user. And when we like talk about Mesh, what is your role in the Mesh team? Is there any, are you focusing on anything there?
**A** (32:25):
I'm mostly focused on just like the architecture right now and like reviewing of the architecture basically like I haven't been too involved with the actual development process recently. That's mostly been. I helped a little bit with mvp, but that's mostly been like confio and stuff leading, leading the chainside development right now. And then we're also thinking about the UX side of it. Like obviously like I know we have you guys and cosmology are working on a front end, but we are Also building a front end, a staking front end in the osmosis website as well. And I imagine that will eventually transform into a mesh dashboard, but it's a different. It'll obviously be a bit more of a osmosis centric version of a mesh dashboard, which is why we wanted to make sure there's also a neutral version of a mesh security dashboard as well.
**B** (33:17):
Nice. Yeah, we should talk to them. Is there who's leading that, like the staking thing? Because. Makes sense that we talk to our product.
**A** (33:26):
His name is Saeed. I'm also happy to show you some of.
**B** (33:31):
Yeah, that would be awesome. I think it helps a lot.
**A** (33:33):
Yeah.
**B** (33:34):
Oh, yeah. Do you think that mesh security could be extended above just Cosmos?
**A** (33:40):
Yeah, absolutely. I think that, like, one of the things we definitely need to do is get Eigenlayer as a plugin for mesh security so we can start using Ethereum security as well. And then I'm working with the Babylon team as well to be able to bring Bitcoin like staking to Cosmos.
**B** (33:54):
And so what do you think mesh security could be in the future? Is there anything crazy that could happen at some point if it gets very big or something?
**A** (34:04):
You mean a bad situation or.
**B** (34:06):
No, like a vision more. Is it like, could there be, like, if it's omnipresent always in all crypto, is there something possible that's not possible right now?
**A** (34:16):
I think one of the things it'll definitely do is it'll make everything way more resilient. Like, I think a lot of the projects interested on it are a lot of Xterra projects. And the whole thing with Terra was a lot of projects got burnt because they learned the hard way what happens when you put all your trust in a single security mechanism and the security of that system just spirals to zero. Right. And it's like everyone else in the entire crypto ecosystem is focused on like a single security mechanism. Okay. We're going to rely on one token to do this in Cosmos. We've all been burnt by that and we don't want to do that again. And that's part of why it's like, I, I really. That was definitely like, you know, earlier on you were asking, like, oh, why did this mesh. Why this mesh security model instead of this hub and spoke ICS model? And that's definitely a part of it. I just don't want to be putting our eggs in one basket again.