Welcome to the epicenter. I'm Sebastian Cuccio and I'm
here today with. Michael AKA Crypticito.
And Magnus, AKA Magmar, one of the things that I really want to
make sure happens is that Adam feels connected to the road map
that we have. It's challenging, right?
And I think what we have done is emotionally processed to some
degree the difficult position that we were put in and make
sure that we were building the bedrock of a new kind of
innovative cosmos that could expand beyond what we had been
holding on to for the past five years.
All the people that have been in Cosmos for years, I've been
building on Cosmos and maybe don't feel included in this new
vision. Like why should they care?
The industry is evolving, Cosmos needs to evolve, which is
happening along the way. Maybe some people will leave,
some new people will join, but I think finally we have leadership
that is also adaptive to where the market is going.
Welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about the
technologies, projects, and people driving decentralization
and the global blockchain revolution.
I'm Sebastian Coutio and I'm here today with.
Michael AKA Crypticito. And Magnus AKA Magmar I guess.
I always call you Magmar and people find it funny that I call
you Magmar, like not in text form.
So yeah, I'll keep calling you Magmar.
Before you said the show, here's a little bit of our responses
this week. This episode is brought to you
by Nosis building the open Internet one block at a time.
Nosis was founded in 2015, and it's grown from 1 of Ethereum's
earliest projects into a powerful ecosystem for open user
owned finance. Nosis is also the team behind
products that had become core to my business and that of so many
others like Safe and Cow Swap. At the center is Nosis Chain.
It's a low fee layer one with 0 downtime in seven years and
secured by over 300,000 validators.
It's the foundation for real world financial applications
like Nosis Pay and Circles. All of this is governed by Nosis
Dow, a community run organization where anyone with a
GNO token can vote on updates, fund new projects, and even run
a validator from home. So if you're building a Web 3 or
you're just curious about what financial freedom can look like,
start exploring at nosis dot IO. All right, guys, so we're here
at Cosmoverse, Cosmoverse 5 in Split, Croatia.
How's it been for you guys in the last few days?
I mean, I feel after goods. For me it's always months of
stress and anxiety and getting into it.
But seeing all of you guys here, seeing the crowd, the turn out,
you know, it's always nice. So now I'm actually chill.
I'm enjoying it and yeah. It's like pressures come down,
but like first pressure. Yeah, yeah, I feel, I feel good.
Yeah, I'm good. I'm good now.
You have a right to feel good. I think that you really put on
great events here. As always, thank you SO.
It's a little hard to get to, I will say no, but it's been
really nice. I think it's definitely a
different vibe than previous Cosmo versus that I've been to.
It's a little bit more, I would say put together corporate,
institutional, which I really like and I think is also
reflecting sort of where Cosmos is going, where the ecosystem is
going. Yeah, I think that's one of the
things that's perhaps the most striking at this year's Cosmos
versus just how different it is from every other Cosmos reverse
that I've been do, which isn't all of them.
And, and just how many, like how much of the focus has been on
institutions, on bringing institutions and sort of
corporates on chain? And there's a, there's a real
kind of feels like a vibe shift in Cosmos and it's being
reflected here. It's reflected also in Cosmos
Labs strategy for Cosmos and the hub moving forward, which we can
talk about. But I think like one of the
things I was thinking about is like Cosmo Verse to me feels
always like a way to come and check in on the ecosystem.
It's like an annual, like take the pulse.
And I wonder, like for you guys, what's this?
What's the main take away at this year's Cosmo Verse?
Like if you can plot the five cosmovers in your mind and you
know what what each of those events kind of represented as a
moment in time, what is this moment in time?
Yeah, I just want to shout out, you know, you've done an
incredible job putting this on year after year.
So very grateful also that this conference exists and that it's
a great way for the entire ecosystem to come together and,
you know, get a sense of what's going on.
I think so. My first Cosmoverse was
Medelline and then we went to Dubai.
I actually wasn't in Dubai. And then our team, some of our
team went to Turkey too. But comparing this to Medigene,
I think Cosmos has changed, right?
And I think whenever there's big change, there are good parts to
that and there are tough parts to that, right?
And I think one of the things that I really try to keep in
mind is, is the change that we're going through, the right
change, right, and the change that we need.
And I think what I really believe and I think this is
reflected to some degree by Cosmo versus an ecosystem is
that we have to grow up right as an ecosystem.
We need to become a lot more forward facing.
We need to become a lot more dressed up to attract people who
actually have businesses, right and have economies and bring
those into Cosmos because the original, you know, ecosystem
that was built up sort of organically around individual
projects that you know, where it was kind of a very self
referential ecosystem. I see that evolving as into
something that looks a lot more integrated into society, into
finance, into government, etcetera.
And I feel that a lot here. Yeah.
I think that's also been how we thought about this, right.
If you, I mean you have your five on five, you've been to
Lisbon, you know how. I almost, I almost didn't make
it, but I'm very cool. OK.
And how it started off as a very grassroots, you know, developer
conference, developer ecosystem event after the COVID time.
I just got into Cosmos. I learned about it from Jack
Sample and big shout out who on boarded me and you know, taught
me everything and connected me with people.
And then I got really hoped about it.
And I think back then it was definitely a different
ecosystem. It was definitely a different
vibe at the conference. Now, four years later, you see
revolutists here, the European National Bank is here or central
bank is here. I mean, it's it's a whole new
paradigm, I think for us as well.
And while I still want to maintain this community focused,
right? I've said this repeatedly, like
I want customers to always be the home for cosmonauts.
Whether you're a validator, whether you are holding $10
worth of Atom, but you just want to meet Mag, you want to meet
Seb, you want to meet Ethan, or you want to meet Sunny, who
unfortunately are not here this time, but hopefully next year
they will be there. You just want to meet your
Cosmos heroes. I want Cosmos to be a place for
them because I'm one of them, right?
I'm also an independent community member who just saw
this opportunity and took it in 2021.
And I think here we are. At the same time, we also see
that cryptos maturing. We have had a lot of panel
discussions and topics on stage where what you just said also
is, is true, right? And we are also a crypto
business with customers. We also need to evolve, adapt
and, and see where's the market going, right?
What does the market care about. So, yeah, I think we're, we're
trying to evolve as well as an organization, as a brand, as a
company, but also as a platform to yeah, to, to, to be relevant
for both the institutional side and and banking sector, which
you saw so on, on the line up this year, but at the same time
also for, for the cosmonauts worldwide.
Yeah, I think what what you said Mag really struck me is like
Cosmos is going through a change and what that change represents.
I think, you know, I, I have been sort of, you know,
internally and also in conversations saying this for
years that like, hey, the IC, the ICF should have a more
structured business development arm.
There should be more work going out there talking with
consulting firms to try to get them to put Cosmos into, you
know, different kind of enterprise settings.
Cosmos is the Linux of block chains, which means that, you
know, you know, the anecdote here is that none of the people
who were building Slackware Linux in the 90s got rich
because we all have Linux in our pockets now, you know, and, and
now that it's actually like the rubber is hitting the road, like
it's a little bit, it's a bit scary, right, that that change
is happening. But I think that ultimately it's
like a right direction. The you know what, what I think
the, the reluctance or the fear is that Cosmos loses some of its
essence as this very grassroots, kind of like movement ecosystem.
One of the things I thought, you know, I wrote down here is like,
I think two or three years ago there was this mean that Cosmos
was respected by all the other ecosystems that like people in
Ethereum really kind of respected Cosmos builders and
the the app chain thesis. And that a lot of the innovation
in Cosmos made its way into Ethereum and it kind of like
built its respect around that. And, you know, I don't think
we've lost that. But you know, it's, it's
important to me. I think that Cosmos kind of
keeps that that space in the ecosystem as a place of
innovation, as a place where people can try new things, build
new ideas. And yeah, I wonder if that makes
sense to you. That's something that you feel
is important to maintain. Yeah, I mean it, it, it totally
does. I think, you know, we were I I
grew up in that Cosmos, right, graduating college.
I started a company skip almost directly afterwards, which was,
you know, very shortly like our first crypto conference ever was
Cosmos right. And I think, and that was at
Medellin and we had a really strong sense of the time of what
Cosmos was. And throughout the next three
years, we were its biggest advocates, right, or or some of
its biggest advocates and we were loyal to the ecosystem.
I think what really has happened though is it's become very clear
to us that the former version of Cosmos was not headed in good
direction, right? There was not a really strong
through line in terms of how we got from, you know, basically
where we were into something that looked a lot more unified
and a lot more cohesive for people could feel like they had
a place. And I think, you know, there
were, there were, there were pros and cons to the fact that
Cosmos was really decentralized, right, at least on the community
side and on the on the contributor side.
And so I think what we felt coming into the acquisition was
there was a mandate for change, right?
That someone that, that the community needed some kind of
shift, that the ecosystem needed some kind of shift.
And so our, our vision for that. And you know, there was a reason
I think we were acquired, especially since we had a like a
strong background in B to B sales and, and things like that
is to find a new market for Cosmos that could bring in the
liquidity, the users, the capital, the direction and the
impact that I've always thought Cosmos could have, right.
And I think over the last nine months, we've, we've thought
about different places where that could happen.
But one thing that always felt really true was we could go
directly to institutions and get Cosmos to become something that
they used. And you know, I just came from
money 2020 before this, which if anyone here hasn't or anyone
watching hasn't been to, it's a it's a completely mind changing
conference about what we could be like, right?
Just in terms of it as an ecosystem, right?
There's all the Fortune 500 companies there.
There's, you know, parades, there's massive booths, there's
ball pits, there's it's it's like the best crypto conference
times 20. And of course, it's super high
budget, but the difference between that and Cosmos is just
the fact that we haven't really found a real business use case,
right? And so from my perspective, if
we can, you know, if we can change to actually go in that
direction, it may hurt for one to two years, but after that the
rewards would be a lot greater. Anything that yeah, I mean, I
think if you look at other crypto ecosystems, I think a lot
of them actually in a very similar boat, right.
Like everyone is trying to also compete for, for institutional
clients to, to get to get them on boarded to, to build on
their, on their network. So I think we as cosmonauts,
we're fundamentally committed and convinced that, you know,
the app chain thesis, sovereignty, interoperability,
those values that Cosmos pioneered dating back over a
decade ago. At this point, I think we're all
fundamentally aligned that those values are going to be the
standard for the web three economy from from here on over
the decades to come. So I think with that in mind,
what we try to do with cost movers, what I tried to do with
with media content, everything that I'm doing is to just build
the rails and platforms for those conversations to happen,
right. Same like you mentioned earlier,
you came to Medellin, which for me was the the goats customers
in a conference. So it will be hard to top in the
future. But I think there was an amazing
event that got a lot of people, you know, into the spotlight for
the first time, all sustained network had they're coming out
at customers Saga Babylon, right?
I remember we didn't they didn't have a logo at that time.
Like we we had to cook something up on the spot to put in their
booth because they hadn't didn't even have a proper logo.
That's where we had our coming out, too.
Yeah. And I think that's, you know,
that is very true. It is also, I want to state that
very, very capital intensive to to run events, to do events,
physical events to feeds a couple 100 people's for 3-4 days
in a row that costs a lot of money.
So yeah, and I think overall the sentiments right now after a lot
of the things that Cosmos went through that crypto went through
as an industry, right, which probably started somewhere in
like May 2022 with a with a terror collapse.
I think we're still that is still in our bones, you know,
and now with this major shift that we're in from building this
vibrant on chain ecosystem to say, hey, we, we are, are
targeting institutional clients and there's actually appetite
because we all agree. Like for them, it makes the most
sense to build on Cosmos, right? Why would they depend on another
network? Why would they depend on another
ecosystem instead of building their own rails?
So, yeah, I think we're all fundamentally aligned.
But yeah, it's, it's been a a change transformative year or
transition year for Cosmos that I don't know how long we'll
still still take to, to kind of complete or where we see the
fruits of. But yeah, it's, it's been
interesting for the past six months particularly.
And yeah, we'll see where we stand a year from now.
Something that served me and both of your answers is that you
said that, you know, there would be some time until you start
seeing the rewards and the fruits of our labor.
And, and, and that brings me to Adam, because I think that's a
very important part of the story here.
And like, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I'm,
I'm going to paraphrase here what I, I recall you saying to
me when, when we first talked after the acquisition.
And was that one of your kind of main focuses aside from getting
Cosmos and stuff like the SDK in institutions would be for Adam
to benefit from all of this value that was created?
And you know, I talked to some people here over the last two
days and you know, I talked to a lot of people in Cosmos kind of
generally. And I think one of the main
things that I'm hearing is that there's, there's like Cosmos
Labs is work that they're doing and it's kind of the things that
Cosmos Labs is putting out there in terms of the institutions
that bring on board, etcetera. And then it feels like some
black box, right, of like something's going to happen and
an Adam Price will go up. And people feel like my my sense
and myself as well as like, what is in this black box, Like
what's what's meant to happen for those two to kind of
correlate and for Adam to benefit from the work that
you're doing. And yeah, so I wonder if you can
share some thoughts there, like at least directionally, because
I know that there's still some things that need to be figured
out. But yeah, you're thinking about
that. No, I think it's a really good
question and I think it's important also for everyone,
especially a Cosmovers, to ask these questions and to help us
stay accountable and think through the solutions, because
then the day I'm not a token guru, right I, I, if I knew
exactly what would make Adam go up, you know, life might be a
little bit different. I think from my perspective,
this is how I think about it, right?
Adam is one of thousands and thousands and thousands of
crypto currencies. And that bar for something to be
valuable is a lot higher than it used to be when Adam was first
launched, when it was, you know, genuinely the only way to invest
in a multi chain thesis, right? Which is a very exciting thesis.
The Internet of blockchains. A lot of people who are here
today came from that time when they heard Jay or they heard
Ethan speak about, OK, this is what the world's going to look
like. And they believe that.
The truth is that is no longer only our vision, right?
That is the vision of Etherium with their L2 thesis.
That is the vision of, you know, optimism.
That is the vision of Arbitrum. That's the vision of Avalanche
with their L1 thesis. That's the vision of Corda
Hyperledger, right? That that has become not just a
way that Cosmos has become basically a bet on that future,
but it's no longer alone in there.
And so I think the question that we have to ask ourself is where
do we fit, right? What are we of bet on and how do
we be as innovative as we were six years ago today, right?
Because we need to be that innovative, we need to be that
ambitious. Otherwise, you know, there's
plenty of players out there that are, you know, innovative and
ambitious on different things. And we need to have our own
track. And so the way that I viewed it
is there's a lot of debt to pay off in Cosmos.
When we came in, there was a lot of debt.
That's how it felt. There's a lot of community debt.
There were people who were hurt by specific things in the past.
There was a lot of like, you know, missing goodwill there.
And you need to have that foundation to move forward,
right? You need to have the foundation
of people who are committed for the long term of good projects,
of good community members, of a cohesive community, of good
conferences, of developers. That is your bedrock that you
can build a new vision on top of.
And part of that is also letting what is not good go away, right?
Or accelerating the process of removing the dead weight on the
ecosystem. And dead weight is a real thing,
right? That weight is a real overhang
that can prevent you from innovating.
And so it's challenging, right? And I think what what we have
done is emotionally process to some degree the difficult
position that we were put in and make sure that we were building
the bedrock of a new kind of innovative Cosmos that could
expand beyond what we've been holding on to for the past five
years, right, as an ecosystem, which was this initial vision of
what this could be. And a lot of that, a lot of that
comes down to questioning assumptions, right?
So the assumption was that the Cosmos Hub would be the center
of Cosmos, right? And that it would have the sort
of. It's in the name.
What's that? It's in the name actually,
exactly. It was a very, it was, it was a
very commonly held assumption. And the truth is that assumption
never came to pass, right. And so when we we do care about
Adam and that is the token that we want to drive value to the
way that we think about it is, OK, maybe that actually wasn't
the right vision for Adam. Right.
Maybe the right vision for Adam is actually for it to be the
currency that underpins the world coming on chain in a much
more tangible way, right? In a, in a way where people are
actually paying an Adam or using Adam to get services for their
companies and they're using it as the connecting currency to
pay in Web 3, right? Dollar is the currency of Web 2.
What could we do to make Adam the currency of Web 3, right?
And have those interact together.
And so that's the exploration process that Nico chatted
through during his talk. I'd also like to add like
historically over the years, you know, thinking back from also
where we first met in 2021, those times, I think Cosmos has
always been a very open ecosystem that was very
welcoming to anybody, right? If you're a developer, if you're
just any, any, any type of person, right?
You, you could find your, your people, right?
Yeah, I think over the years and I'm not sure what what the
reasons are for that, but I at least started to notice also
that there was no like you were saying, no cohesive, you know,
road map. There was no, I feel like a lot
of people were not swimming in the same direction, but they
were rather like swimming, you know, against each other.
And and that caused a lot of drama, a lot of things, a lot of
missed opportunities as well, a lot of timelines that were, you
know, that other ecosystems picked up and, and put into that
road maps and ecosystems. But yeah, I think there's many
ways on how there's a future in which atom could become what
you're describing. I think a lot of it is also
around just driving that awareness chase like chasing
that dialogue with relevant players and institutions, which
we're doing what you're doing, which I think we're we're
aligned on that because, yeah, I mean, if you if you look at the
ripples and extra piece of the world, right, they don't really
have a vibrant Unchained ecosystem in that sense.
But it's $200 billion token and they do something wrong.
And what do you what do you think of if you're here XRP, you
think it's the the banking corn of of the US, right.
Yeah. So a lot of it also has to do
with branding perception storyline, really bringing this
front and center over and over again.
And I think for Atom, like you're saying, there's probably
a lot of lot of depth there. But now also what we've been
talking over the years, there is finally a proactive vision from
the leadership from the foundation Cosmos Labs that is
now taking more accountability as you were describing, right?
And things were a bit shaky with certain things, but that's you
know, that's what it was. I think now it sounds like and
and feels like there's at least some game plan and like a lot of
very smart people that are actually thinking about the long
term vision here, right. So pretty to you to bury to the
skip team now Cosmos Labs team to really put brain juice into
this and to really evaluate and think and assess what could make
sense, right. And I guess we'll see.
I mean, crypto is also the thing Roger just said it on stage,
like if you're there for for a couple of years, it's basically
hundreds of years in in normal time.
So, yeah, it's very fast moving and but I think finally we have
leadership that is also adaptive to where the market is going.
Yeah, I think that's true. That feels to me like, I mean,
at least directionally, I think that Cosmos Lab is is taking
Cosmos in the right direction. And I think there's like still
lots of headwinds that yeah, that will be faced and that, you
know, assumptions that need to be validated.
And I think, you know, the app chain thesis, while it has been
validated in, in many of the kind of like Cosmos circles.
And you know, maybe you can talk a little bit about some of the
partners that are launching Cosmos app chains, you know, in
the broader crypto ecosystem chase like Solana, like Ethereum
there there's still some there's definite sort of like evidence
that there's also other ways to build blockchain applications
like if you look at base or any of the other kind of successful
L twos. So, yeah, I want to give you
also an opportunity to talk about some of the announcements
you guys made here, some of the chains that are.
Yeah, what's the AA? Yeah, this is always the annual
Alpha podcast. Yeah, this so give.
It a name I will try to do and by.
The way I'm getting, I'm also expecting.
Some alpha from you because this will definitely come out after
any announcement you made here so.
So I, I think I mean, to your point, there are many ways to
build a successful blockchain ecosystem.
And the truth is actually, at at least in my opinion, there was
really only one way that basically everyone bought into.
And Cosmos try was the first to try something else, right?
And the one way was basically you build an L1, you get a bunch
of developers to build on the L1.
Everyone gets access to the same token with the same gas fees,
and all the incentives are aligned because everyone wants
that token to go up, right? This is the Etherium model.
This is the Solana model, right? Everyone says, OK, I'm on
Solana, right? I'm on Etherium.
So we're all building to make Etherium better.
If they go out and they show Etherium to their other
developer friends, right, and to investors.
And then you get investors who have a thesis on Etherium,
right? Or on Solana.
And Cosmos took a huge risk in saying, well, what if we didn't
do any of that? Yeah, you're still unsafe.
Cosmos is different. Cosmos is different.
Right, Cosmos. Cosmos is.
And we all find ourselves sort of explaining this to people all
the time, yeah. Exactly.
And and it's it's, but, but still a lot of people don't
understand that, right. A lot of people don't understand
that Cosmos was built to be a different kind of experiment
where it wasn't about, you know, everyone being on the same L1,
all pushing towards the same thing.
It wasn't even like the Avalanche model where they have
separate L ones, but they're all connected to the same core
blockchain. You have to pay an AVAX to to
actually be there. And I think the big question
that we had to ask ourselves this year, and honestly, you
know, this was a really hard decision, is do we still try to
make that model work, right? The model of where we have
different chains and we have complete sovereignty and
independence and interoperability?
Or do we try to revert to a Etherium or Solana type model,
right? And so when we were thinking
about launching the EVM on the hub, that was us thinking, OK,
maybe actually we have to go to the other kind of model, right?
We have to go to the unified. Everyone builds the one thing
it's all about, Adam, And you know, screw the rest of the
ecosystem or not screw them, but just, you know, it's not as
important. It's not aligned, that kind of
thing. I think what we realize is
actually the bigger fish that we can go after is making the
original model work right and making taking what I think
traditionally is viewed as a weakness of cosmos and trying to
turn into a strength. Leaning into the action exactly
leading into sovereignty. Leaning and even harder, yeah,
right. And so I do have a lot of pro
points that we can point to, one of which we try to announce on
stage. I hope, hopefully it came
across. But we have won the official
contracts to build the CBDC's for two major governments, both
in Latin America right now. Another one is right under is
underway and is at the ending stages in Spain.
Those two countries combined have a $600 million budget for
building their CBDC's with us. That's also partnership with
Piercest. I should point out separately,
we have also closed two major Fortune 500 companies on
building Cosmos Chase. I can't speak to their specific
names. They will come out.
I think hopefully in the next two to three months we'll we'll
see exactly sort of where their marketing teams are at that
time. But in my opinion, those two
chains combined represent a larger market opportunity for
Cosmos and everyone inside of it, the validators, the
infrastructure providers, the block explorers, the wallets,
the community members, the developers, bigger opportunities
than anything else we've seen so far, right?
But it is on Cosmos. And you didn't pay any of these
people? No, in fact, I hope they are.
I know it's, it's a crazy, it's a crazy shift, right?
And I do think it is on the people in Cosmos to be open to
that, right, to say, OK, what do I need to do to appeal to
institutions, right? Because we can only do so much.
We're trying our best for ourself, but we can't change
everyone else, right. And so, for example, for
validators, getting their SoC 2 compliance, basic things you
have to do to work with in enterprise, right?
If you're a block explorer, making sure you have, you know,
private, private dashboards that you can offer a white label
dashboards, right? If you're, if you're in media,
making sure that you have the right relationships and you
know, you know how to present properly to look professional,
right? I'm not saying this is you guys.
Hey, we got a like proper backdrop.
You know, what I'm saying is you got you guys were doing really
good at this. Bloomberg, Adrian, Andrew
Bloomberg's back here. Exactly.
But I think these are the kinds of things that people really
need to consider if they want to come for this ride.
Yeah. Now my, you know, I did the my
intro and my videos. Buenos Dias, buenas Dias not
make sense. Latin American central banks,
we're coming full circle. I like that.
Excellent. We'll be back to media next
year. Maybe I mean, there there will
definitely be a Part 2 of a chapter 2 of customers median
guaranteed at some point have to do it.
But yeah, I think to your point also, I think I'm personally
like very aligned with that with that focus on, you know,
starting to also think how can how can you make money as an
organization? I think for many, many years
Cosmos has especially ATOM right has always given his paid a lot
and given a lot. But I think, yeah, this is
definitely the right direction and and something of sub of
substance, right, not just like, hey, this is what we want to do
about it, but actually something that is that is happening.
I think also to your question on alpha from our side, we are also
looking at, you know, always interesting regions for where we
can do customers. You mentioned really was a bit
hard to get to split, I agree for, you know, people from
outside Europe, but actually for, you know, people from
Vienna, from Germany, like it's super easy to get to.
So this year was really the theme around Mika, around
policy. There was also the theme of this
year's conference policy, its protocol regulators from the
Serbian Securities Commission, Bosnia, right.
For them it's just a quick hop or a quick drive.
That said, for next year, very proud to announce.
Hope this is coming out only after the announcement.
Very proud to announce that Customers 2026 is coming to Hong
Kong. That will be the first time
we're properly in Asia, I should say.
I mean, we've been to Dubai, but yeah, we're very excited for
that. I just spent a week there
scouting venues, scouting places, meeting people, very
vibrant ecosystem, especially also in the fintech space, which
I think fits very well also into what you're doing and also what
entire crypto space is headed right.
We also have very, very interesting talks with the likes
of Hash Key and Tether, right, and other organizations that
are, you know, long term, kind of, you know, enthusiasts and
and organizations that are actually cosmonauts underneath
many of them, right? They have other investments in
the ecosystem and atom or run infrastructure or those kind of
things. So very excited for that.
And I mean, like, yeah, there's like a huge Cosmos community in
Korea that's just, you know, a few hours away.
And I think this is great. Very.
I think it's great. Taking.
It's also a direct flight from New York, which is.
But it will be hard for people from splits to come to Hong
Kong. OK, so they had their chance.
You know they had a chance of investor.
I want to bring it back to the, the community a little bit
because like it, I think it's, it's great for Cosmos, the stack
and it's great for Cosmos. The thesis that institutions
that major Fortune 500 companies that governments are using the
Cosmos stack. But the, all the people that
I've been in Cosmos for years, I've been building on Cosmos and
that maybe don't feel included in this new vision.
Like why should they care like Adam holders?
Why should they care people who have been bullish on Cosmos, the
ecosystem for years, why should they care?
And and I think the bigger question is what can they do to
participate in this new direction?
Like what's the what's the action point that Colin kind of
call to action for for people. Yeah.
And I align. I think this immediately gets
back to the question of who is the community, right?
So for example, you know, I don't want to name specific
names, but if a chain adopted the open source Cosmos stack and
then attracted a bunch of retail investors who bought the token,
are they the community that we feel accountable to, right?
So, so it under that model, every, you know, member of the
200 ish chains or more chains that is launched would be a
member of the community that we would feel responsible for,
right? And I think from our
perspective, it is really hard to do something that will
appease all of those individuals, right?
Because a lot of these chains are fully sovereign, right?
It would be like if we were the UN and we tried to appeal the
citizens of every single country, right?
Well, the truth is, they're all totally different.
They all want totally different things.
And so the UN often times gets caught up doing nothing, right,
because they can't agree on anything.
And so I think what our job is to do is to present a future, to
go after that future, to help that future succeed and then
bring along whoever wants to come with, right?
And so I think the, the core thing that I'm looking at right
now is, OK, who are the people who are positively engaging with
this vision, right? If they're, you know, if they're
sort of caught up in the past or they want they, they were super
excited about, you know, some other version of Cosmos that
they got excited about previously.
There's not much I can do for them, right?
Or there's not much that the, the Cosmos can do for them.
I think it's, it's really important to me right now to
know sort of who is interested in this and who's not, right?
I, there's, there's a number of ways to get involved.
The first thing is there are going to be new trains coming,
right? And so when we talk about people
are bullish on the Cosmos ecosystem, I would invite them
to have a slightly more expanded viewpoint of what that means,
right? It doesn't have to mean exactly
what you thought it meant two years ago.
It could mean enterprise is coming on chain, right?
It could mean major gaming companies or IP companies coming
and launching, you know, their anime anime, their anime IP on
chain, engaging with that, right?
There's going to be many options for individual community members
to get involved, whether it's on the fintech side and they're
interested in making money, whether it's on the, you know,
entertainment side. And we're going to make that
very open and available to these people.
But I think it is on them to sort of say, hey, I'm willing to
expand my viewpoint of the new things that are coming and I
want to be engaged in those versus, OK, I remember these 10
chains from three years ago, they're not doing so well.
So I'm upset. Yeah, I think there's definitely
no black and whites on that's answering that.
I, I think, you know, the institutions that are coming in
are, are probably as much valuable as, you know, to the
regular atom holder that has $100.00 of atom.
But it's just very passionate about it.
It's coming to all the events. It's active on telegrams, active
on Twitter and socials. And I think a lot of the times,
and I'm noticing that as well and getting some of that
feedback is, you know, those retail community people feel
that now that the institutions are coming, they're a little bit
scared that like, OK, that means we're cut off from everything,
right? And this is, I mean, they feel,
I, I believe that the feeling is that, you know, they're not as
valuable or not as respected or important.
And I think there's maybe something to that as well.
But generally speaking, I personally at least feel that's
why I said in the beginning to make it very clear, I want
customers to always be a home for every customer.
Not whereas a solo validator that is, you know, running an
utter node since couple years or whether it's, you know, I don't
know, revolutes or, or some large institution that is just
interested in in joining and and being here.
So, yeah, for me, that's why I said like it's, it's not a black
and white. I think the the industry is
evolving. Cosmos needs to evolve, which is
happening. And yeah, I think along the way,
maybe some people will leave, some new people will join.
But yeah, I think in the end of the day, it's, it's really
important to also still make sure that those that have been
around, which still is the case, right?
There's many automotive that probably bought the top at $40.
But they truly believe in, in the vision.
They like the, the, the sense of belonging to this community that
they also feel that there is space for them in the future.
And I think that is very important and also challenging
for you, I guess to figure out how can we, how can we solve
that? How can we make that clear?
And I, I guess maybe there's also where we can come in as
customers, right? Because the way I always see it,
and I said this to a couple months or around a year ago, I
think when we had a call, I said like the way I see how Cosmos is
structured organizationally is like like a network of L ones,
right? So you have Cosmovers, which is
an independent server, an organization.
You have Cosmos Labs and there's other organizations, some of
them are more active or less than they were a couple years
ago. But I feel like there's
definitely a lot of like independent contributors that
are still there, They're still passionate, and they are trying
to also adapt to these new environments in the same way how
you are adapting to the broader environment, right?
And I think that's going to be interesting to see how that will
play out. Yeah.
Yeah, I, I mean, on your point about making sure that the
people who have been in Cosmos stay involved, I do think that's
important. I think one of the ways that
I've tried to do this, you know, and I think Cosmos has tried to
do this is, is just be very active, right.
So I'm a participant in the, in the that's called the atom
trenches, you know, in a, in a sort of ridiculous way.
I mean, I've done things sort of as crazy as give out $40,000
during the most recent flash crash to like individuals who
were suffering. I think one of the things that I
really want to make sure happens is that Adam feels connected to
the road map that we have, right?
Because when it's disconnected or Atom is, is something that's
just like a side project or that's how it's viewed.
It's very hard for all those people, including myself as
someone who's a huge atom holder that, you know, I purchased at
much higher than today's prices to feel connected to our
enterprise side. And I don't think that has to be
the case, right? And so a lot of what Nico
chatted about on stage was, you know, three things that we're
doing. The first one is a massively
expanded delegation program. You know, it's a 2X ING in size
to $40 million where we're going to be giving out a lot more
delegations to individual validators that do things like
media, do things like outreach, do things like, you know,
building dashboards, building communities, all those different
things. The second thing that we're
doing is we're commissioning a huge tokenomics revamp.
So basically what that looks like is participating in a
research process where we have a bunch of experts talking to
professors at Columbia, etcetera, to think about how
does Adam tokenomics best fit our updated road map.
Because the truth is all of this doesn't matter if Adam goes down
just consistently, right? And so we feel like there's a
lot of pressure right now to make Adam look like something
that's investable. And I think right now it's if we
struggle to sell it as an investable asset to
institutions, but that can change, right?
That can change, and that's what we're hoping to change.
Right. And and Adam, Adam has a lot of
foundations that I think work in its favor.
The fact that it's broadly distributed that just like a
broad distribution set of holders that it's integrated on
the centralized exchanges. It has like wallets, it has, you
know, like a good RPC infrastructure and all those
things. So like that we need we need to
kind of capitalize I think on that as we make it more
investable. I think also it started to, but
like that's actually the biggest strength of ATOM is that it's
been around for five years on the market like and it's listed
everywhere and you know, every year there's a new ATOM killer.
Like we're going to be the new, we're the new customers now.
I mean, most of these tokens are either not live yet or they're
just, you know, they just launched and they all go through
their little honeymoon phase and then they come down to earth.
And then you'll see, you know, after three, six, nine months,
is the leadership still aligned after they did their TGE, many
of them usually like cash out and just say bye bye.
That's it. So that's the biggest strength
in Cosmos or Atoms specifically that it already went through
that multiple times, multiple leadership.
Changes were survivors. Multiple insane events that went
down in in Cosmos history and it's still there and it's still
in the top 100. I wish it was in the top 20, of
course, but it's still there even though it has crazy
inflation, even though, you know, Terra went down all these
things and liquidity drained entirely in in Cosmos 2 1/2 two
years ago. So in spite all of that, it's
still there. And I think that alone is a big
achievement. I think surviving in crypto is
the single most underrated achievement as an organization,
as an investor, as a token, right?
So, and it's not just the token like when we go to companies and
we tell them we started in 2019, they're like, wait a second,
you've been around for six years.
You know, most of our competitors have not, you know,
they were they were in in in diapers.
So sort of as a project when we started.
And I think that is made it a lot easier for us to execute
this new road map too, right, because we have the battle
sparks, we have the trust, we've had major chains launch on our
platform and that gives us the the opportunity to sort of
expand on that. Can you talk about the technical
and what's what, what should people be excited about in terms
of customers of CK evolving from here?
Yeah. So I think when you talk about
the technical road map, there's the parks that are perhaps
exciting to devs and the parks that are exciting to like a more
retail audience for developers. I think they can look forward to
a lot when it comes to us trying to production Alize, the Cosmos
SDK and Comet BFT and IBC for institutions.
So on the one hand, we are building out a lot more tooling
to make it easier to launch Cosmos chains.
We're making it easier to manage validator sets.
We're making it easier to connect your chain to other
block chains over IBC Eureka and, and we're also making it
way faster. And what I mean by that is it's
easier to set up a chain, but then also the chain itself is
going to be a lot more performance.
So we've done a lot of research recently into expanding the TPS
of Cosmos chains at a base level.
And the way that we've done that is, you know, definitely watch
Barry's talk if you want more detail on this.
But we've been implementing some new innovations that have come
out of consensus research like Block STM and Block STM, Block
SDM is essentially A paralyzation framework.
It makes it a lot easier for Cosmos chains to paralyze
actions that were normally serial.
So in particular, block production versus voting on a
block. These things can now happen at
the same time versus having to be step one, then Step 2, then
Step 3. So they can do a lot more at
once basically. And what we're hoping to get to
our TPS numbers that take advantage of the fact that you
can just get a lot more out of a specific app chain then you can
a massive shared L1, right? So we're hoping to overtake the
TPS Solana within like a 12 month time frame.
So that means getting above, you know, basically 50,000 TPS at
least at least in terms of our measurements.
And then also being able to implement a lot of the new
modules and features that a lot of these institutions are asking
for that make it easier for them to adopt Cosmos into their
existing stack. I was talking to Barry this
morning about privacy and that's been one of the privacy is big
main things that, you know, institutional clients want.
What's your vision for bringing privacy into with Cosmos Stack?
I'd say there's a couple things we're exploring.
So the, the, so right now one of the biggest block chain success
stories is Canton, which maybe you're familiar with, you're
not. But it's a private
institutionally focused block chain that a bunch of
institutions are investing in and deploying on, right.
And the only thing that I think makes it special is that it has
some degree of privacy or confidentiality.
From our perspective. There are, you know, obviously
there's always multiple approaches to go about privacy,
that the most traditional approach is actually very
simple, which is just to have a private chain, right?
Don't expose your chain to anyone who you don't want to
see, right? So you just have sort of inside
the company, no one else can see it.
You know, it runs in the background.
That's the most common way. And that actually works a lot
for specific use cases. The second question is, well,
what if you want some kind of public presence, but also to
keep some of that privacy. So what we call this is more
like differential privacy or basically maybe you have a
private chain for some transactions and a public chain
for others and maybe they connect over.
Ibci think that the place where it gets really tricky is if you
want full privacy like like full ZK or threshold encrypted
environments or trusted encryption environments with
threshold encryption. All of those are much bigger
technical lifts that honestly even and the most privacy
forward chains haven't fully figured out.
Is there anything you can take away from some of the open
source things like Penumbra, Ferguson, or any of the kind of
attempts and cosmos to build private chains?
Are there any kind of interesting technical takeaways
that we can utilize from these? Yes, DEX, I mean, Penumbra is
incredible technology, truly groundbreaking in terms of how
they how they brought out such a degree of anonymization around
sort of their wallet creation process and other things.
I think all of that tech is very interesting.
It's just very heavy, right? Very heavy tech, meaning it's
expensive, it's slow, it takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of
specific kind of knowledge to operate.
And so institutions are generally a little bit afraid of
signing up for that kind of commitment from our experience.
I also want to add like I think if you look at any vertical
within crypto tokenization, privacy defy, whatever, you
always end up seeing one of the top contenders being actually
built on Cosmos technology. So I think a lot of the
innovation has already happened within Cosmos customized for
those fields, right, which is also why we established this
track system while underneath we are a Cosmos conference, but we
are also tailoring it to those verticals, right to appeal also
to those other institutions and and participants in those areas.
And if you take as a tokenization alone or
tokenization, I think there's a lot of innovation that happened.
I think if the Cosmos Hub or Cosmos Labs and the general
stack road map I have to re listen to to various talks.
I was just like running along back and forth.
About conference organizer. Yeah, listen.
But I'll take the the week a week to to go through all the
talks. But I think if, if there's a
very cohesive going back to the point earlier, cohesive attempt
to unify a lot of these innovations that happened, which
I'm sure in a lot of these projects secret, like if you
take privacy alone, secret network, Penumbra and Armada,
right, all Cosmos build. There's so much innovation for
many, many years that Cosmos people, Cosmos developers have
pioneered. And I think now is the time to
to unify that and to turn it into a product offering and, and
sell it to institutions. And I think that's the plan,
right? Yeah.
I mean, that's what we did with Eva and we purchased the
underlying technology from Atmos.
We took that, you know, it wasn't fully formed and we spent
six months completely rebuilding it, but building on top of the
core ideas. And now we have it as a full
feature as part of the stack. And it's the most widely
requested feature of the stack that we've seen over the past,
you know, three to four years. So I think there's definitely
opportunity for us to do that again.
Great. Yeah.
One thing I was thinking about while talking about privacy is
recently there's been sort of increased awareness of through
the oncoming threat of quantum. We recently did a podcast with
John Lewick of Etherium fame and a quantum physicist who is
building a quantum resistant blockchain.
And I think the episode probably came out before this one.
But you know, John's thesis is that like, we're very close to
most block chains just being completely vulnerable to
quantum, quantum computers and not many block chains.
At least you know, of the majors they like, top 20 are taking
this very seriously in his opinion.
I tend to agree. As I've done more research on
this. Is this something you guys have
thought about and like our enterprise clients worried about
this at all? I don't.
Think I've ever heard an enterprise client ask me about
quantum computing? I mean, the truth is when people
say that block chains are at risk of sort of a quantum
innovation that could make them unsafe, what they're saying is
that basically RSA is going to be hacked, right?
You can essentially like a reverse engineer the prime
number creation that happens during this RSA encryption
process. And the truth is, if that
happens, the whole world is fucked, right?
Everything is encrypted via, you know, those different methods
and only recently have people started to move things to like
electrical curve encryption that, you know, is much more
quantum resistant. And so I think the question is
like, what is society going to look like after quantum
computing look comes out? Yeah.
I do think though, that most of the things that rely on
encryption from that are more of the same institution are, are
centralized to update encryption schemes and say, you know, you
know, banking bank database encryptions is a lot easier than
doing a hard like doing a hard fork on Bitcoin and having
everyone have to sign a transaction that moves their
tokens into a new address that's quantum resistant.
And so I think, I think block chains are is like a particular
problem that's not the same as, you know, military technology or
banking technology or financial markets technology.
There's a particular challenge with blockchain.
It's a coordination that's hard. And then you need to have in.
In most cases, at least as I understand it, you need to have
individual users perform an action to be shielded from any
attack. I mean, I think like, you know,
even I use like bit warden for my password protection, right?
They can't take my hopefully they can't actually see what's
in there, right, because it is encrypted by my my password.
I will have to take action. I think when it comes to Cosmos,
you know, this is one of the greatest things about Cosmos is
that individual chains can collapse and the overall is not
affected. This is not true for Ethereum,
right? Then if the chain collapses,
everything under Ethereum just completely implodes.
And so I think the risk factor that we have around this is a
lot lower because we can individually update these
chains, right? And because there is a history
and a practice of validators updating these chains
frequently, right? That's not true on Bitcoin,
right? That thing never updates pretty
much. And like Ethereum only really
updates every so often. And there's a big, there's a
huge marketing campaign around it every time it does.
And so for us, I think it's going to be a lot easier for us
to build whatever kind of security solution is necessary
to keep these block chains safe. Right.
Yeah. I think another thing to hear is
like that having quantum resistant block chains will
greatly affect their performance and that's assumed that I think
a lot of chains will have to deal with and find solutions
too. But also maybe the quantum
computers are running the chains in the first but.
I don't remember speech. Can I quantum computer run a
blockchain? I don't know.
Hey, cool. I want to take an opportunity
just to kind of plug our, our event in Argentina.
So we're we've partnered to organize a new event series
called Sovereign Sovereign Day. We did Sovereign AVM Day in in
Cannes a couple weeks ago or a couple months ago, and now we're
doing Sovereign Day in Argentina.
So yeah, the vision here is that like everything we talked about
right here, like we want to bring this vision of
sovereignty, this kind of app chain vision to the next
frontier. And Sovereign Day is kind of the
place where we do that. So really excited to be doing
this. And yeah, maybe talk a little
bit about like what you expect, what people can expect there.
Yeah, sure. I mean, also extremely excited.
I think first of all, you know, the reason we wanted to do
Sovereign Day and sort of the Sovereign series is because
sovereignty is a concept, is something that really nicely
connects what cosmos is and always has been with what the
world wants, right? And what institutions want and
what governments want, which is sovereignty, right?
They want their independence. They want the freedom to grow.
They don't want to be interfered with by others.
And I think this is going to be especially a good one because it
is also only the second one and the last one was great.
So, so hopefully another good one where basically we can
invite a number of the CBDC and central banks and, you know,
governmental leaders of the area of Latin America to come there
and talk about sovereignty, right?
Talk about their country sovereignty and talk about how
that is so close to what we can offer in Cosmos in terms of
technological sovereignty and where those things collide.
Super excited about that. Yeah, hopefully, yeah, the
second one will be as good or better than the first one.
Guys, thanks so much for taking the time.
Congratulate funds on yet another incredible Cosmo verse.
And thanks Mag for taking part. Thank you, Sir.
Thank you.