This is how you out ultimately get composability of distinct
distributed systems as you have more expressive systems for
interpreting querying and you just generally using the states
of another chain. The Cosmos ecosystem I think
gets it better than anybody, but it's just a really hard problem.
When you're building a cross chain transaction in Cosmos,
you're you're most likely using skip.
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And that causes a massive amount of pain.
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journey today at gnosis dot IO. Hi, Sam, it's a pleasure to have
you on. Yeah, great to be here.
Long time listener. Very, very, very, very cool.
You have been in this space for a super long time.
Tell us about yourself. Yeah, I'll give a kind of a
bridged version, I guess I started my crypto journey I
guess very close to when Epicenter started.
I started listening to Epicenter like quite quite early.
And I was living in New York City right around the time of
Occupy Wall Street. So there is kind of like a
milieu of, you know, activated political consciousness.
And I was just kind of bathed in that.
And a lot of my friends ended up participating in Occupy or I'm
kind of analyzing it from a more academic or like critical
perspective that got me just very interested in alternative
infrastructures for, you know, new institutions effectively.
And I, I've been involved in the arts for my whole life and ended
up doing a lot of kind of critical art projects or like
interventionist projects around met a bunch of people that were
involved in Occupy and like doing both of these things.
And eventually I, I have a technical background.
I worked as a research scientist for, for 10 years doing protein
folding and bioinformatics work. So I was able to kind of like
bridge the gap. And some of these folks who were
interested in kind of rebuilding institutions ended up getting
into crypto unknowingly and, and I could kind of provide like a
technical basis for some of that and just got really fascinated
by the industry made kind of got pulled into it accidentally.
And it's been, you know, a very interesting journey ever since I
did. I've done a whole bunch of
consulting projects with Ethereum protocols and Cosmos
protocols kind of all over the place.
A lot of kind of product strategy, brand strategy,
mechanism design, kind of ghost written or helped write a whole
bunch of white papers. And then that ended up bringing
me to Berlin at one point to work with the project here now
called Radical so that I can open source or like
decentralized GitHub alternative.
So finished contract with them, worked on EIP 1559 a little bit
as a kind of one of the many members who were played a small
role. And eventually the pandemic
started the I didn't want to be living abroad doing freelance
work. So one of my closest friends,
Billy Reinecamp, was working in Cosmos at the at All in Bits,
kind of a defunct organization. Now it it kind of liquidated at
the time and most of the engineers move to the
Interchange Foundation, kind of primary foundation associated
with Cosmos. He asked me if I wanted to join
and kind of rebuild the Cosmos ecosystem.
So I spent about two years there and you know, made a lot of
progress in reforming the the kind of meta organization that
built off technology did kind of wore all hats there.
So I did kind of product strategy and a bunch of like
deeper product work with like the whole stack.
And then that yeah, a whole bunch of kind of BD yeah, lots
of back end work. And then last thing I did there
was work on the Atom 2, Atom 2 point O paper, which was kind of
a, a beautiful failure. And at that point I just kind of
like touched every part of the part of the ecosystem.
I was like, OK, I need to need to take a break, need to do
something else. I completely failed at taking a
break. I ended up joining Skip
immediately afterwards as well as Co founding this other
project Time Wave, which builds this protocol, protocol lending
product, product which is kind of a something that merged and
an idea that emerged out of the Atom 2 initiative.
And yeah, I'm happy to talk about either of those those
things today. I guess that was a little bit of
a longer insurer than I anticipated.
Yeah, Sam, it sounds like you're one, one person start up.
I mean, you've, you've basically touched on all the different
aspects kind of like from white paper to kind of tech stack to
company structuring and governance and BD and branding.
Did they meet any other people at IBC at all?
Yeah, I mean, there were a lot of other people that, but there
there were not as many people who had that kind of like broad
context. And I mean, I'm sure you know,
Gnosis has a similar just kind of latitude and like the number
of things that you're doing right, like how deep you have to
go. And there, there are, I think
there are these specific people that like have that full view
and like that super, super valuable to just like kind of
understand how the pieces that are locked with one another.
Absolutely. You have a fairly eclectic
background, right? Kind of.
You talked about kind of like arts and biochemistry and
protein folding and so on. How do you, how do you decide
what to work on? I mean, what, what what What
does a project actually have to have in order to appear to you?
Yeah, wow, that's a that's a great question.
I I'm not sure I do decide it. It's like decided for me.
They. Come to you.
No, I just like kind of follow my interests like that.
That's really been like my guiding light is like I kind of
can't not work on this thing. It's I'm just kind of drawn to
it, which is just brought me into some very circuitous paths
and and a whole bunch of different things.
But I'm, yeah, I'm just like a very curious person and kind of
follow that, follow that line. It it is kind of funny because I
do play like a strategy role in a lot of these instances, which
is like very much a kind of structure or it has this kind of
structured unstructured aspect to it where, you know, given
your position in the market and like what you're trying to
achieve, what do you we trying to do?
But like for my personal life, I'm just very like, OK, I'm
going to float wherever is just kind of most attractive.
Yeah, super nice. You're also you're also part of
the other Internet, which is a super interesting research
collective whose outputs I consume with some frequency.
They're they're they're usually very insightful.
Can you talk about that? And kind of we'll also link to
that in the show notes because I think it's it's under
appreciated the ecosystem. Yeah, absolutely.
It's a very special group of people and organization, you
know, pretty, pretty unique in in the space.
And it it it I mean it is a research organization, kind of
cultural research. We do a variety of things.
Some of it is kind of these long form kind of cultural analysis
or kind of contemporary anthropologies of what's
happening in crypto. Some of it is consulting work.
So worked with Uniswap and Aragon and Optimism and whole
bunch of other folks mostly on kind of governance and I don't
know kind of community development projects.
And then there's, there's kind of an internal side of the
organization, which much most people don't know about, which
is really about kind of personal development and, and learning.
So there's like a reading group and, and we, we've done
seminars, like brought in lectures to like just speak to
the group about topics that we're interested in.
A lot of like political philosophy and I don't know,
practitioners, they were doing, you know, work with municipal
governments and things like that.
So it's a it, it's also, you know, houses of a bunch of folks
that have pretty eclectic interests and, you know, has a a
multitude of different projects that kind of reflect their skill
sets and, and where they're drawn to as well.
Yeah, no, it's, it's a it's a great resource.
Go check it out people. So let's talk about Skip
protocol. So you are the head of Product
and strategy? How?
How would you describe Skip in a few sentences?
Yeah. And it, it's maybe a little bit
different than how you kind of introduced, introduced Skip in
in the intro, which is totally understandable with the
organization's evolved a lot. And it, it definitely started
out as like MEV infrastructure company had product very similar
to the like the flashbots MEV relay.
But today basically what we realized is that like MEV is not
really a product. It's, it's more of a phenomenon
or you know, maybe a business model if you're.
Probably. Kind of structuring it or
problem totally. It's a, it's a force to be
reckoned with. It's also kind of a, a lens that
you can bring to product development.
So that, that's kind of how we approach things today.
The first thing that we realized was, OK, if we're going to be
like a cross chain MEV organization or if that's
something that that we're interested in, we need to have
more cross chain economic activity happening.
So like we, we just started working on that problem.
Like it's actually really hard to do and it's completely, it's
unsolved today. Like there are, you know,
domains or like coverage areas where you can get a decent
experience, but it's really, if you kind of deviate from from
that path, it's an absolute nightmare.
So we started in just kind of solving that for Cosmos have
done a whole bunch of kind of full stack modifications of the
the mem pool, the fee market, the IBC, the interoperability
protocol, like just basically every layer of the stack to kind
of try to smooth out that experience.
A lot of that work kind of focused on transaction building
or, or it is in order to deliver an experience that was those
kind of close to the user. We also in, in order to kind of
make this experience seamless, we we also needed to to work on
the, the kind of node architecture itself.
Cosmos is a, a network of sovereign options.
So we built a fee market. We, we built a kind of
transaction builder that's internal to the to deployed
nodes. And what we realized there is
that a lot of that work looked a lot like an Oracle of some kind.
So we kind of evolved that product suite into an enshrined
Oracle that many options and in the ecosystem are using
including two IDX and Neutron and others.
We're kind of syndicating that and, and deploying it more
widely now so that the kind of unifying umbrella there is,
we're basically building tools for sovereign chains and trying
to kind of pick off the, the problems that are, you know,
most important to, to builders. And there's a whole bunch of
things that we we want to do in the future to, to improve that
experience and make it really easy to, to deploy your own app
chain. Just in case that hasn't become
abundantly clear, you guys are on Cosmos.
So why was interoperability a problem before kind of like,
because Cosmos is very much devised with kind of like this
interoperability mindset, you know, front and centre.
So I mean kind of like IBC is kind of like the the causing for
Cosmos, right? Totally.
I mean, obviously the Cosmos ecosystem I think gets it better
than anybody, but it's just a really hard problem.
First of all, like what does interoperability mean?
Like what is and who is who or what is interoperable with, you
know, with what you're working in a, a kind of network of
networks. You know, it's a distributed
system that has heterogeneous architecture.
The what IBC gives you is a standard message passing system
and way of, of kind of creating like an assurance around the,
The Who your counterparty is by like having the chain itself
authenticate messages. And that's kind of it actually.
Like that's, that's the core of what IBC is.
It's actually just kind of like a natural solution like, oh, you
don't want to introduce a third party when chains are talking to
each other. That's kind of the core thesis.
And then there's you can build other things on top of that.
So you can build a fungible token protocol, an NFT protocol,
kind of remote access or remote authentication protocol.
So even just in the the fungible token case, because IVC is a
point to point messaging system, if it's security kind of relies
on or, or it assumes that you don't want to introduce third
party like you want to direct communicate directly basically
means that you can't just send a token directly to any chain at
any time and have it produce the, the correct representation.
So you typically need to unwind tokens through their, their
issuer, their issuing chain. So we're, we're now getting
like, you know, if I want to send my ATOM from Neutron to
Osmosis, I actually need to send it back to the Cosmos Hub and
then I need to send it to Osmosis.
And there's three different chains, three different
distributed systems like involved here.
You're actually creating a workflow between between these
things that's completely asynchronous so that there ends
up being these kind of middlewares that you that you
deploy on a chain in order to interpret messages in order to
like forward them on to the next to the next domain.
That's just for fungible tokens, which is like very kind of
structured process. If you want to do anything more
complicated than that, like you want to compose the application
behavior of three different protocols, this is going to get
way more complicated. And this is one of the reasons
that we kind of went in this Oracle direction as well as, OK,
you want to dynamically read state from a different chain and
then you know, be able to, you know, like this.
This is how you out ultimately get composability of distinct
distributed systems as you have more expressive systems for
interpreting querying and you just generally using the the
states of another chain. Yeah, Long story short, it's
just a really hard problem. And we thought really deeply
about it, but it it's about the most challenging thing that you
could possibly approach and in order to get like really good
composability at that like application level.
But Cosmos was kind of devised in this application chain
architecture. So, So how, how did things work
before Skip or what were the things that very concretely you
added to kind of help devs cross that bridge?
Yeah. I think it's just a, the
difference is kind of like the theoretical versus the
practical. We were really the first team
that was kind of serving multiple customers with that
specific agenda of like, oh, we, we want to make these flows
better. Osmosis was, you know, it's kind
of a power user of IBC, but their their workflow is just
kind of like drawing assets in, right?
Like it's kind of one way flow and they can kind of simplifies
what they need to do. We're kind of serving all chains
at once. And so we need these, you know,
much more intricate dynamic flows to be available.
The problem that we ended up solving first was just how do
you build a transaction? Like yes, it's technically
possible to build a transaction that's going to have this
behavior. But the the practical reality of
that is like, OK, well you need to understand what the fee token
of this, of the counterparty chain or all the intermediate
chains are. You need to understand what kind
of fee market they have. They might have different fee
markets. You need to understand what the
fall back behavior is if something doesn't get executed.
There's just like all this information and contact, like
what the token denominations are, what are the signature
schemes that each of these chains have is actually, even
though something's technically possible, just performing the
right sequence of actions is, is immensely difficult.
So that was kind of the first thing we solved is just you have
an API that does transaction building and delivers that to a,
a wallet or a front end. So we power a lot of the the
transaction building in in the ecosystem cross chain.
And what Who are your users for this API service?
Most of the major front ends in Cosmos and and a bunch of the OR
main wallets. So Kepler Leap, there's a a
Metamask extension that uses uses Skip and then Osmosis
Neutron DIDX. Yeah, I mean, it's the main way
that you get around. It's, it's a little bit hidden
in the background, but when you're building a cross chain
transaction in Cosmos, you're, you're most likely using Skip.
I shall just mention we're not Cosmos specific per SE.
Like we kind of extended into, so Cosmos technologies extended
into a whole bunch of different domains.
And then we've also kind of adopted some other bridges.
So we, we're actually the, we do the most volume.
We're like we're one of the only providers that's able to do CCTP
transactions between different chains.
We actually there are routes that are non cosmos that we we
serve. We're one of the best ways to to
do any kind of hyperlane transaction.
We're working with a bunch of Bitcoin L twos and and things
like this. So we're, we're just kind of
going where I guess the, the kind of territory that we're or
our coverage areas continuing to increase as we see demand for
these things. So CCTV being the sucker
protocol, right? OK for for devs or projects that
kind of use your service, how do they how do they pay?
So is it kind of like on a transaction basis or how do they
pay for your surface service? Yeah.
So our two main products right now are this Oracle service and
we have a, the API and there's, there's kind of a structure or
like a semi structured model for for payment.
And on both sides, it's a little bit dependent on the nature of
what you want to do. So there's, there's a number of
like special cases and, and we do a bunch of like kind of
custom work for, for folks like, you know, DYDX, we do like a ton
of custom work to get exactly where they wanted to go.
On the Oracle side, we have a like service contracts, yearly
service contracts, which is a kind of standard or coal model.
And then on, on the the API side, skip go is, is the name of
the API. We take a percentage of the fees
taken by the by the affiliate. So if you're not charging, then
we won't take a cut, but if you are charging then then we'll
take a percentage of that. OK.
And the oracles that you are offering to kind of enable this
interoperability or the seamless interoperability, what kind of
oracles are they? Are they kind of decentralized
or are they kind of just feeds that you pull from somewhere and
put on chain? Maybe just worth backing up for
a second. Like what?
What is it? Cosmos chain.
So it's a delegated proof stake chain that is run by typically
anywhere from 20 to 100 validators.
And the Oracle system that we develop is integrated into the
binary and and the validator setup.
So all of that, all the validators are running the
Oracle. There is a a note, a module in
the in the binary that does some interpretation of of incoming
messages and and then there's a sidecar process that's run by
each validator that will query a variety of providers and those
providers are can be programmed by the the application chain.
So DYDX for instance uses primarily price feeds, but from
a number of different providers. So for any asset it will want
multiple providers. Some of those might be, it might
be unit swap. So it could just query chain
state directly. It could include proofs of of
that chain state if it wanted to.
Or it could be finance Coinbase. It can aggregate locally on the
validator, and then the validator, as part of its kind
of consensus voting process, submits its aggregated aggregate
price or aggregated data, and then the the chain then does a
second aggregation to find a consensus value for whatever
state you're trying to to include in in the application.
So it's an Oracle aggregator protocol in a way.
Is that fair to say? Yeah, I, I think that's fair.
Kind of all oracles are Oracle aggregators to some extent.
They don't. It's a little bit of like a back
end detail, but any decentralized feed is is some
kind of aggregation. That's fair, yeah.
Yeah. The, the main differentiator is
it's, there's, there's no middle man.
Like even Skip is not a middle man in this process.
It's just, it is run by the validators and the chain.
They are fetching the data and then it is like you come to
consensus on the data. So skip develops a, a module
that you can, you can run and then we, you know, we're we're
kind of on hand for maintenance and, and things of that, that
nature, but we're not running an intermediary service.
Why did I think that you guys primarily do MEV like cross
chain MEV? I mean we did at one point
because there's a question of like what what do you is MEV?
But I guess we're more on the MEV generation than MEV
extraction side. Now we we have developed a
number of products that that had this character.
We've open sourced all of them and they are in production.
So the first one that we developed was a product for
osmosis, which was a. Again, there's a module that
lives inside the binary of of the osmosis chain.
It's Live Today and it's automatically back runs
transactions it in order to it does cyclic arbitrage before a a
searcher is able to to extract that revenue.
This is something before we did this like people didn't think
was possible. So this is kind of cool to to
demonstrate that it's viable to actually do solving like in
protocol. It's been really interesting to
see this is kind of like rebranded as the application
specific sequencing now. Yeah, if you want to see an
example of that, it's live on osmosis.
It was a little bit osmosis specific.
So we it was kind of one off. We also developed another
product called the Block SDK which is also deployed in a
number of chains in Cosmos. What Block SDK does is it allows
you to create programmable lanes for your block space.
So you can say basically you create different kind of sub mem
pools and then different block building rules for each of those
mem pools. And so you can have different
kind of basically transactions come into the main men pool
there there's kind of a hierarchical filter in which
they get sorted into different, these different men pools and
then you can program program them to do whatever they want.
So some you have a free lane, for instance, just transactions
of this type are, are free or they're free up to a certain
number per hour or something like that.
Transactions that are from this user or from a user that has
this NFT, you know, have a reduced rate.
You know, you can, you can kind of do whatever you want here.
So we've seen, you know, a bunch of creativity kind of applied to
to that system. Again, we had to kind of build
that system to realize like, I mean, these maybe not like a
business model so much as like a, a tool.
And so we just open source that product and, and you know, have
helped a bunch of people to, to integrate it, deploy it, give
them some advice on how to use it, but it's, it's just kind of
freely available for the ecosystem.
MEB has caused a large amount of controversy in in the Etherium
ecosystem. How?
How's it gone down in the Cosmos ecosystem?
Was it equally contentious? No, I mean for a couple of
reasons, like one, there's just way less economic activity in
Cosmos ecosystem. So MEV is going to occur when
there's a high degree of, you know, when there is value to be
extracted and when there's a lot of contentious state and Cosmos
kind of has its general like architecture is one of less
contentious state. You know, you're separating
applications into their own domains and there's less
economic value currently. So that both of those together
mean that the cost severity of MEP and some it, it's just
something that's like way less of a dire issue.
It's still there and it's still something you want to address
and, and kind of give, give attention to.
But it it's more of a a background thing and again more
of like a lens or toolkit to to to bring to a a problem.
Yeah. Just just as a background, kind
of like on Ethereum, there were times when you know, 1% or so of
total value transacted was extracted.
Do you have an idea of what the equivalent percentage is on
Cosmos? I don't, I mean it's so small
that it like wasn't worth tracking like that.
That's kind of what we're talking about here.
It also a little bit depends on what you're talking about with
MEV. So the cyclic arbitrage that
we're now doing in protocol for osmosis, that was the largest
source of MEV in the. System.
Right back running back running on osmosis.
Back running on. OK.
That's super interesting that. Made-up like 90% of of MEV that
is now being captured by the protocol.
Is that mevi like the protocols capturing it?
Yeah, that that doesn't matter. So basically to MEV is is
everything that kind of where where kind of you can extract
value or something can extract value by changing the context of
the transaction and you're doing you're very much.
It's some minor extractable value the protocol is
extracting. It doesn't matter.
This is what I'm saying the the definition here is is relevant.
I mean it's are you familiar with MEV blocker?
Yeah. Yeah.
So kind of like it's, it's a protocol that we built on, on
Ethereum and basically it, it also it does the same.
So kind of like it, it prevents front running and sandwiching
and it it kind of gives back 90% of the fees that accrued through
back running, I should say. And I mean back running to to
kind of to, to give a very simple explanation here for back
running. It's kind of like for instance,
if you change the price of something on chain by your own
transaction and then kind of there's there's a value in kind
of bringing that back to where it should be and that's kind of
back running. So kind of in a way it's kind of
benign mev and that kind of like nothing is being extracted from
you. You're just not a very
sophisticated trader and that kind of like someone would have
would have upped that anyway. And kind of like, yeah.
And we actually on Ethereum we see that that back running is a
fairly minor percentage of of MEV.
Why? Why do you think it's different
on on Cosmos? Why is back running specifically
a a smaller percentage? Yeah.
So why, why, why is it a much bigger, so comparatively a much
bigger issue on Osmosis than on on Ethereum?
Oh, well, you're just saying the distribution between top of
block or or stat ARB and back running.
I mean the reason is like really stupid, which is that like
Etherium, Etherium has more tokens that are listed on
Binance. So the you can do stat ARB
between Binance and Etherium and there's just like less tokens
that are listed on centralized exchanges.
Yeah, there is stat art and and I think it's like increasing
over time, but yeah, it's a really trivial answer.
OK. Yeah, that's, that's fair.
What do you think of protocols that kind of like prevent MEV
completely? So for instance, there's
chatter, right? Kind of that kind of that
encrypts your your transactions before they send to the mem pool
and then it kind of decrypts them only once they've been
included in a block. Do do you think that would be a
good technical solution to kind of just completely do away with
the problem? Yeah, So completely is a strong
word. So we, we worked with Osmosis on
like an early version of of their threshold decryption
thing, which is, which is not been deployed yet.
It's been, but they've, you know, helped to kind of initiate
that idea. So we've, we've done quite a bit
of like research on this topic. One of the reasons it hasn't
been deployed is it kind of only becomes an issue at a certain
level of of Med that you might be concerned about.
OK, this is a, it's a tool. It really depends on what you're
trying to do. So in the Etherium context, like
as far as I understand, shudder is like trying to do something
for main chain, right? Like.
Yeah, it's live on Nose's chain right now.
But kind of like, yeah, obviously kind of like there are
discussions whether to also deploy it on mainnet.
Yeah, but it's like the the beacon, you know, that's kind of
where it's targeting, which is, you know, has like this high
degree of composability. There's lots of contention.
This is a so like that is a different environment than one
in which you're just doing like a ticketing app or whatever.
And like there's maybe not a lot of Med and like, so the way that
it's going to behave, the incentives for kind of like, you
know, the way that you break this thing is you, you go into
the like collocation and you try to, to deliver transactions or,
or get information as as quickly as possible from like a third
party exchange. I think that all the more
economic activity you have, like the more you're going to be
pushed in that direction. It's a little bit of a cat and
mouse game on how to how to ameliorate that.
But deployed an environment like like ticketing app, for
instance, like maybe it's just not even worth like doing that
whole thing and you're just never going to have that kind of
behavior. And so it could just be fine.
Like it could be a nice thing that's like out-of-the-box for
the system like that and just eliminate some behaviors that
were like kind of easy to do previously.
And that's just like that class of whatever searcher is just
like never going to exist because they're not.
You know, getting the $10 on the the like advance ticket is like
not worth you know, Co locating, you know, data center in Japan
like. Yeah, that's fair.
Can we talk, can we zoom out a little bit and kind of like talk
about the Ethereum versus Cosmos debate?
Because kind of like you've, you've been kind of like in this
ecosystem a super long time. And as you say, there's way less
economic activity on Cosmos, but Cosmos does have this kind of
like inbuilt interoperability, which now thanks to Skip, maybe
it's also usable. And kind of like what, why, why
do you think Ethereum sees so much more economic activity
where kind of interoperability is much more, is much more an
afterthought for us? And I mean, we've, we've seen
this over the past 2 1/2 years or so, right?
Kind of like we've had 4 1/2 billion in bridge tax.
So why? Why?
I mean, from kind of like a first principles approach, the
Cosmos ecosystem, yeah, makes a lot of sense, right?
Why is why is Cosmos less successful?
There's there's a bunch of reasons, some of them are are
very like circumstantial and path dependent.
I mean the main development organization completely melted
down and fragmented into now like 10 different entities,
which is very interesting. Super decentralized ecosystem
like. Maybe there's not a consensus
opinion, but I think this was actually really good for the
Cosmos ecosystem because kind of like the, the, I mean all in
bits and kind of like the leadership and everything was a
little bit dysfunctional. I was kind of like, I think kind
of like having that fall apart. I think there was a really good
thing for the ecosystem. Would would you?
Would you see this otherwise? I mean, I don't, I don't think
it's black or white. Like it was good for some
things, it was bad for others. Like if you want Adam token
number to go up, probably bad for that, like, but it did allow
for just a a lot of kind of all of these fragmented entities
like started their own thing. And so there was just like a,
you know, there's a lot of creativity that was kind of
brought into into other projects.
This is one. This is one of the reasons it's
really fun to work in Cosmos is like it really is kind of a
bastion of like new ideas and you get to try stuff out.
I mean, I've worked on like the very beginning of proof of
stake, the very beginning of liquid stake in the very
beginning of pre staking, the very beginning of like, you
know, just this a lot of this MEV stuff that we're now talking
about. And it's cool to talk to
Ethereum people and be like, Oh yeah, like I did that.
And like we we've explored all these different ideas and it's
actually a really nice dialogue to be able to have have some of
that experience. But yeah, I mean, it impacted
the go to market for the primary asset for sure.
I, I think the, the architecture, you know, doing a,
doing 1 chain, it's easier. It's just, it's just easier to,
to do and like to bring that to market to create a unified
experience around it in order to kind of get initial traction
cause it's never had that. So it was like always dealing
with the the problems that were anticipated for, you know, a
market that was several years down the line.
And now it's nice to have them. But yeah, it was a little bit
like cart before the horse. Maybe I I do think Etherium
would have done well to have more of an emphasis on
interoperability from the beginning.
It's like very hard to back into that because they're competing
solutions. Nobody's incentivized to use
something that's invented today or, or kind of like forced in
by, you know, but theorem foundation leadership.
Yeah. I mean, a lot of it is just kind
of like a cultural or like normative thing where you think
about the ecosystem as one that has interoperability or like
that's that's kind of a core asset.
Like everybody's just like, yeah, I use that.
That's my default and that helps a lot.
Yeah. So I totally, I totally agree
that it's kind of like it's to do with kind of like standard
settings. So kind of like on Ethereum we
kind of we know what the flea market is like and and yeah,
it's it's by by by the flip side interoperability is kind of like
was underspecified and kind of like the the protocol ex ante.
We do see a lot of interesting solutions though.
Do you think they will reach the same level of security as IBC
eventually? I I guess I just see them a
little bit as like apples and oranges, like the whole security
model is just different. It's different, yeah.
There is a an assumption that you're using Ethereum for quote
UN quote settlement. You know, the market maker is
taking on the risk of settlement often times in these like fast
transfer systems, IB, CS, just like more of a standard
standardized process. Yeah, it's a little bit hard to
to answer that question because they're they're kind of
different animals. So in Etherium you can like
reason about Etherium security, but you every single bridge has
a different is a different. It's like its own snowflake,
which is kind of messed up to be honest.
And then there's all these different fast transfer or the
kind of slow transfer settlement processes that you can you can
take and there's heterogeneous messaging and heterogeneous like
authentication. And in Cosmos, there's
heterogeneous security, there's heterogeneous domains, but like
standardized messaging, just kind of inverse.
Yeah, it's, it's a totally different system.
Do you, do you, do you see applications working cross
Ethereum and Cosmos in due time? So kind of like when I talk
about kind of like actually use adoption, kind of like having
numies use things that are powered by blockchain
infrastructure, I usually posit that kind of no one would have
to know what's kind of powering the application that they're
using. Do you envision there kind of
being this cross ecosystem operability where kind of like I
can send things from Ethereum to Cosmos or messages or kind of
like have kind of flipped between the two of them without
knowing that I'm currently doing that without, with that kind of
being totally abstracted away from me?
Yeah, absolutely. I mean it's already happening in
certain in many cases. So first of all, it depends on
what you call Cosmos to some extent.
Not sure we want to get into this, but like Cosmos is both,
you know, an ecosystem. There's the Cosmos Hub, which
has an asset, which is like pretty distinct in a lot of ways
from the ecosystem. There's a stack of components
that many of these that many of these projects are building
with. And then I, I also like to say
that there's kind of a, the stack you can even kind of
decompose into like a set of specific components, you know,
the cause of SDK, comet, IBC. And then just like a general
pattern of like, OK, there's a state machine framework, there's
a consensus algorithm and there's a message passing
system. And like that, that kind of
looks like, you know, the jam stack or something like that.
It's just like that's a pattern that's like adopted everywhere,
but those specific components are actually all over the place.
Even in a lot of Etherium projects, you just kind of don't
hear about them. It's just they're useful tools.
So is that like Cosmos interoperability?
Like maybe I, you know, I talked to a lot of Etherium projects
that are like they want to use Cosmos 50K for this random thing
like, Yep, happy to talk to you. Like it can do XYZ, user never
knows. You know, it's like the same
signing algorithm it it just does what you want it to do
under the hood. Comet similarly is used all over
the place in a bunch of Etherium projects and elsewhere.
One thing that's been very interesting is that restaking
projects are using the cosmos. The Cosmos stack in in a number
of different places. I think it might be the most
popular re staking architecture. It's kind of that and the OP
stacks seem to be used most frequently, but it's not branded
as such. You know, it's slow, yeah.
It's like deploying ABS, but you're like using the Cosmos 50K
and Comet and maybe even IBC in some instances.
So that interop is already kind of happening.
We just, it's a little bit more under the hood.
The things that are most annoying are signing and this is
this is a just a general issue like Bitcoin signing is not the
same as Ethereum signing is not the same as Solana signing is
not the same as Cosmos signing. And that causes a massive amount
of pain. And that's one of the reasons
that the ecosystems are so segmented right now, in my
opinion, is means you have different wallet ecosystems, you
have different the, the, the kind of front door for users
ends up being different. So signing abstractions like MPC
style protocols, I think are going to be, you know, important
for like solving, solving things at that layer, But that's going
to take a long time to, to transition beyond that.
There are different message passing systems.
There are different middlewares for, for routing messages
between different domains. There are different, you know,
you have to pay with different fees.
So that kind of all these things need to be solved together in
order to get user flows that are, that are really seamless.
It's happening, though. I mean, and like I was saying at
the beginning, there are specific routes today that cross
multiple different chains, multi different ecosystems.
And they're, they're great. They they work, they work great.
It it's just going to take a while to kind of like expand
that to the point where it really feels seamless
everywhere. Can you give examples of where
you think it feels seamless now? Yeah, I'm so you can go from
Solana if you have USDC on Solana and you want to send it
to Osmosis and buy whatever Osmo, you can do that in one
click and it it's very fast. That's that's, that's cool.
So CCP opened up a lot of a lot of these routes for us.
We are working on a a fast transfer system that's going to
allow for similar interoperability between some
Etherium domains and and Cosmos. We also work with a bunch of the
like roll up ecosystem, modular ecosystem.
So we've been doing, I mean, similarly you could go from base
to to a roll up that's using hyperlane bridge in one click
today and fitting all the the pipes together to make that work
is was pretty crazy. But like and and you might end
up with a get an account that that requires a different wallet
at the end. Like that's kind of annoying,
but you can't actually send the transaction or send the tokens
and have them arrive at the at the other side.
So do you see skip kind of going the this Mikey chain route kind
of in kind of making things easier for defs because kind of
like as you stay in kind of currently this is primarily on
Cosmos only. Do you intend to kind of expand
into this cross chain world? Yeah.
I mean I would say we're already kind of expanded it.
It's just going to be incremental.
So we are working with a number of restaking projects or folks
that are using Cosmos SDK in in different demands.
We're actually even integrating with non Cosmos projects like
like our or projects that aren't using the using Cosmos
technology. So we're looking at shared
sequencers for instance, and just deploying our our side car
process in order to feed Oracle messages directly into the
sequencer. And there actually isn't Cosmos
SDK necessarily involved at all. So yeah, there's different kind
of levels of interop here. And I mean, one of the
challenges is just kind of knowing where to put your
emphasis cause things kind of go in all directions.
So there's a lot of people who are using the technology in one
way or or another. And you know, we're trying to
see which way is the winds blowing and, and how that kind
of aligns with our, with our business and and who we want to
develop relationships with. So what would you say?
How is the wind blowing right now?
So what's what's in the pipe plus Skip?
Well, a couple of things. First of all, we we're like
constantly just doing a lot of work on the core stack.
And so we're, we're doubling down on that.
Cosmos SDK has a ton of adoption and we want to be, we want to be
better, want to be easier to deploy.
We want to just be more standardized and just left less
sharp edges. So that, that's something that
we're working on. And then they're a bunch of
users of the technology that, that we're, that we want to work
with or are working with. Like I said, restaking projects
are is just a natural fit for us.
We'd also love to see more projects deployed directly into,
you know, using the technology alone.
One, one thing that's like a little bit of a contrarian take
that we have, I have, I guess is proof of authority is like
totally under leveraged when we've used it in certain
instances and worked with projects using Apoa chain.
It's actually really nice and kind of yeah, I mean it's like a
it's a great deployment loop and for a lot of use cases, I think
it's, it's absolutely secure enough.
It's absolutely like decentralized enough.
It there's just a lot of like low security or like and there's
a lot of ways to enhance Apoa system particular with restaking
and things like this. So, so that'll be a way that,
you know, that could be like a new market that that could open
up. And yeah, like I mentioned, the
shared sequencers is, is something that we're kind of
exploring at the moment integrating our our Oracle to
that these Bitcoin L TS are like really heterogeneous and what
they offer. But we're there are a few
projects that are are natural fit and and we're starting to to
work with them. Yeah, super interesting.
Looking forward to seeing that. Where can people find out more
about Skip? Yeah.
So we just did kind of a rebrand and changed our URL.
So it's skip dot build and the the Twitter handle or the X
handle is is still at skip protocol.
Perfect. Super nice.
It's been a pleasure, Sam. Thank you so much for coming on.
Thank you for having me, this was great.
Thank you for joining us on this week's episode.
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