**A** (0:00):
And now we are going to the panel session and welcome all of our thought leaders to join us. So as of the first panel, we are going to welcome Charles from dydx, Nick from Celestria, as well as Georgia from Axela and Sunny from Osmosis to share their perspective on interoperability and modular blockchains. Welcome. And for all the guests in the back, let's respect the panelists on the session and try to keep the overall volume down while you are discussing. Thank you everyone.
**B** (0:48):
Hello everybody, my name is Charles. I'm from the DYDX Foundation. I'm super pleased to be here on stage with you guys today having a conversation with the giga brains from the Cosmos ecosystem. Maybe we'll start with a very quick round of introduction so everyone gets to know a little bit your project very briefly so we can jump into the questions after that.
**C** (1:10):
Yeah, happy to go first. I'm Yoros Vlahos, co founder of Axelar. We're building decentralized interoperability infrastructure to connect all ecosystems.
**D** (1:27):
That was a relief. We're getting bombarded by the projector. I'm Nick White, I'm the COO at Celestial Labs and we're building the first modular blockchain network. So we're a layer one that's optimized for rollup centric future. So we provide data availability and consensus for people to build their own rollups on top of us.
**E** (1:48):
Hey everyone, my name is Sunny. I'm one of the co founders of Osmosis, which is a Dex app chain built using the Cosmos SDK. And I've been working on Cosmos and the Interchange stack for close to six years now and just excited to keep bringing interoperability and app chains to blockchain.
**B** (2:14):
Excellent. Let me reintroduce myself very briefly. Charles, CEO from the DYDX Foundation. DYDX is a leading derivative exchange. We celebrated earlier this summer one trillion dollar community volumes and we are very excited about dydx version 4 which is coming up built on the top of the Cosmos SDK stack. We are in a church, we're not celebrating a wedding, but we're going to share security. For example, does anyone want to give us an update on mesh security on Cosmos? Is it coming and what can we expect and what kind of timeline? What are the potential there?
**E** (2:54):
Yeah, sure. So maybe a little bit of background on what mesh security is first. So in, you know, in blockchains, you know, part of the whole goal here is we're trying to build like high security systems for high value applications. And there's many different ways of the types of secure ways that like security systems can work, right? On one hand there's things like roll up architectures which allow you to get safety properties. You can prove aspects of one chain to another and basically rely on the other chain's consensus for validity of the other chain. So this is one model that works and people are going to continue to use. But mesh security approaches the problem from a slightly orthogonal standpoint, which is how do we maximize the economic security of these systems? So while roll up architectures are useful for giving you safety properties, there's a lot of other properties of blockchains you usually also want beyond just safety things like life liveness, censorship, resistance, and just things that are generally not provable via traditional proof systems. Right. Like things like oracles and stuff. Right. And so this is where you still want to maximize the economic security of these systems. And mesh security is basically saying like, hey, for those who are familiar with things like eigen layer like E3 staking, it was very heavily inspired by the stuff that we like started with in Cosmos of this idea of like, hey, you can take one chains token and have it be restaked in order to secure more than just that one chain. And then mesh security is sort of the end state of this where it's saying, hey, you know, so in Eigen layer you basically have one token eth that is securing many things. Mesh security is saying, hey, why don't we actually have many tokens securing all of these things at the same time. So as an example, let's say you had an Oracle network. Would you rather have an Oracle network that's only secured by the economic value of link, or would you rather have an Oracle network that's secured by the economic value of AAVE and maker and compound and SNX and all the whole network of defi applications that are depending on that Oracle network. And the idea here of mesh security is saying, hey, let's take everything that has these economic dependencies and use all of their economic value to provide a greater security than any one thing could on its own. So that's what mesh security is. This idea was introduced almost exactly a year ago today. We actually have some MVPs live now. We, we demoed it last month at Osmocon and where the goal is that we should have something live on like, you know, between some main nets by the end of the year.
**C** (6:06):
Yeah, thanks Annie, for laying out the very long term vision for mesh security. It's something we're very excited about. From the acceler side, and really in the near term with what's live today, we can very easily increase the economic security of every single cosmos chain to 5 or 10 billion. We could get chains like DYDX included, Osmosis, the Cosmos hub, even Celestia. And by aggregating all their market caps, just significantly increase the economic security of the whole ecosystem. But what really excites me in the long run is what Sunny mentioned. You know, we can also bring security from me or even from btc. Right. And then we can really sort of secure the ecosystem not by $10 billion, but like $500 billion. And as the whole market cap grows of the space, we can really increase exponentially the amount of security. Right. So that's something that's coming. It's gonna take some time, but eventually we're gonna have all tokens securing every important protocol in the space.
**B** (7:01):
Thank you, Nick. We have also this concept of modular and modularity within Cosmos. How Celestia is contributing to this, to this thesis.
**D** (7:10):
So Cosmos sort of originated the idea of modularizing blockchains insofar as the Cosmos builds their blockchains using tendermint or cometbft, which is a module that specializes in consensus, and the Cosmos SDK, which is a module that specializes in execution. And so Celestia kind of took that as inspiration and extended it to the protocols themselves. So you can think of Celestia as sort of a consensus and data availability layer that anyone can plug into rather than having to spin up their own. And I think this is really important for the future of Cosmos because it reduces the overhead to launching a new chain because you don't have to bootstrap an entirely new consensus network from scratch every time you want to deploy a new chain. And you can inherit some security from Celestia in addition to like mesh security. And so they're kind of. There are different solutions that are actually complementary, I'd say.
**B** (8:15):
So in this industry, which is moving very quickly, we've got the Ethereum ecosystem expanding from layer one to layer two, layer threes. Cosmos is catching up on offering for entrepreneurs and for builders new solutions. How do you feel the market eventually will make choice? And what are the chances for Cosmos to catch up and get a very solid sell position in the space of crypto after Bitcoin, Ethereum. And how do you feel today's developers are kind of shopping for the best solutions? And how does Cosmos offers a better solution than different stacks on the top of Ethereum Mainnet?
**E** (8:57):
Yeah, I think the best, like Just looking at how DYDX is shifting from building a roll up to an app chain is I think the best like argument for why these app chains are necessary. Like today, if you, at the end of the day, you know, I think the killer app right now for blockchains is trading infrastructure. And perps trading is probably the most lucrative and valuable of these markets. And if you want to build a truly decentralized perps trading platform, the causes SDK is sort of the only stack that lets you do that today. Like you could look at the amount of all the applications that are building decentralized perps order books. They're basically all building on the Cosmos SDK, whether it's DYDX injective, Nibiru hyperliquid is not Cosmos SDK, but it is tendermint based. And so basically if you want, you know, none of the roll up stacks today give you the customizability and performance that you would need in order to build a real order book based system. And so for that reason I think that like you could just look at the metrics of who, where are the real valuable applications being built and you can see that it is usually the Cosmos SDK stack.
**C** (10:24):
Absolutely. And yeah, I guess from the axelar side when we're looking to launch our network, we also decided to launch on the Cosmos SDK. And the reason was it was already even at the time like two, three years ago, the most mature SDK for app chains. But also it gives us unlimited possibilities to customize. Right. Which is something we needed for the network. So yeah, completely agree with Sunny here. I don't know Nick, if you have any other thoughts.
**D** (10:50):
Well, I think it's important that Cosmos also offers the rollup option. And so I think that's kind of where Celestia comes in, is a, you know, a chain that can enable that for the Cosmos ecosystem. And specifically one of the things that the Celestia team has been putting effort towards building is a toolkit called rollkit. And essentially it is a way for people to build Cosmos SDK apps on top of a DA layer, so as a rollup rather than just an app chain. So I think like that will be a big win for the Cosmos ecosystem.
**B** (11:24):
Sunny, one last one.
**E** (11:26):
The other thing as well is like the Cosmos SDK gives you like, you know, on the customization, right. You can choose, oh, do you want to have it as like a standalone chain? Do you want it as a Rollup or using RollKit, it also gives you a lot of customizability on like the the development stack that you can use. So if you want to write go code, you can write in Cosmos SDK. If you want to write Rust, we have a cosmwasm, we have a VM called cosmwasm. If you want to write in solidity, some of the biggest Cosmos chains are actually EVM chains. Like if you look at things like Kronos or Kava and Barachain, like you also get these opportunities to build you can write solidity based applications. So it gives you like this super customizable stack that you can choose what is the framework and language you want to write in.
**B** (12:14):
Guys, we've got a very busy schedule here at the Edge. Key event. One last question for each of you. What brings you to Singapore besides the Ashkey event, of course. What do you expect from your week here in Singapore?
**C** (12:29):
Yeah, for me it's the first time in Asia. So just putting an ear on the ground and trying to understand, you know, how what actually happens here because you hear a lot of things over calls, but I think you never know what's real and what's not. So I guess my one takeaway is like it's very friendly. Like from a regulatory perspective here everyone's very open and also I think the one vertical that's, you know, growing super well here is like gaming, right where I haven't seen much in the U.S. so yeah, I'm personally like looking forward to spending more time here and getting to know the key stakeholders and you know, working with all of you.
**D** (13:06):
I used to live in Hong Kong and so I spent some time in Asia and it's really good to be back. I haven't been back since COVID and what I think is unique about the Asian ecosystem is there just seems to be more, it seems to be more welcoming not only from a regulatory perspective, but there seems to be more sort of grassroots adoption of end users. And so I'm really excited for applications. I think this is like a really rich place for them to like go to market and attract actual user bases. So that's. And I think like it's important that the east and west sort of like mix more because I think in the west we're so focused on like protocol and infrastructure and it seems like the east is more application oriented.
**E** (13:53):
The food, of course, of course. But on top of that I. Beyond that, I think also just, you know, a couple of things I'm really interested in understanding and learning more is like how people throughout the world on ramp into crypto. I do think like understanding on Ramping is the, you know, us coming at it from a Dex perspective I see it as like you know, the two things we need to solve in order for Dexs to be competitive with centralized exchanges is the custody and UX and making it the onboarding flow really easy. Like you know, goal is to kill the browser wallet and like you don't need a browser wallet to get onto Web2 apps, you shouldn't need one for Web3. But then on top of that is the on ramping, right? How do people get their first Bitcoin or USDC or you know actually or tether. Right. Like you know one thing I feel like in the US and the west we have the a very different stack of things like very focused around like USDC and stuff but if you come here it's like no, actually everything is very oriented around tether. Right. How do you make it easy for people to onboard into tether? I also feel like in the, in the US a lot of the attention is like very focused on like Ethereum. But and to me as I'm, I'm a self proclaimed little bit of a bitcoin maxi, it's very refreshing to come to Asia and see that there's still you know, there was an ordinals event earlier today and it's just like very refreshing to see that there's still excitement and interest in bitcoin bitcoin here.
**B** (15:32):
So yeah, on my side we, we are very excited to be here with the team of DYDX. Many people are co building the DYDX version 4. So DYDX is migrating to Cosmos. The DYDX chain is about to be launched in a few weeks. So we've got a lot of validators partners, there is a lot of market makers, institutional trader Custodian partners which are in town this week. So extremely busy but still making time for some great food here guys. Thank you very much. I hope we can get just one more minute to take a selfie together because I think this home is just very unique. So let's take a selfie. Thank you everyone.