CELESTIA LIQUID STAKING with Fabo & Jay B of Milky Way

Transcript

welcome to the interrupt today my guests are JB and Fabo they are respectively the CEO and CTO at Milky Way it's a liquid staking protocol tailored for Celestia's modular blockchain ecosystem in today's conversation we'll discuss the growing Celestia ecosystem and why they decided to focus on this space we'll take a look at the liquid staking Market as a whole and how Milky Way differentiates themselves from the competition we'll discuss their design and Technical architecture how validators are selected and the road map and how they plan to move to a sovereign rollup I'm also dying to find out why they think liquid stakers should get airdrops before we get started make sure

to subscribe to get notified when new episodes drop every week remember none of what we discuss here on the interupt is investment advice and if you enjoy this content please consider sticking with us we're validating on evos Quicksilver and osmosis and please note that we've decided to shut down our Juno validator that will happen on February 28th so if you're staking with us thank you for having staked your Juno tokens with us but please restake to another validator my guests FAO and JB are coming up next right here on the [Music] interop hey guys thanks for coming on

really glad we could uh do this podcast together hey hey nice to be here hey it's great to be here yeah so uh you know we've been we've been talking quite a bit over the last uh couple of weeks and I've been getting to understand more about Milky Way your vision the uh the product you're building and some of the you know technical uh challenges you've had in implementing Milky Way but before we get into all that um first I'd love to ask you guys you know to introduce yourselves and also understand like how you became interested in Celestia and building yet another liquid staking

protocol yeah sure I can start um hi everyone um this is JB founder and CEO of Milky Way it's so great to be here and I personally got into crypto back in 2017 as a doain engineer and ever since then I fell in love with crypto and I still can't escape from this Rabbit Hole uh my first job in crypto was to build this centralized Exchange in Korea and I was assigned to set up the whole infrastructure and build custom apis thinking back it was a great opportunity for me to learn about crypto and it taught me a lot about the landscape community and various Technologies in the industry but unfortunately Central

ized exchange business didn't really end up well and the company pivoted to operating validator node operation Services um at that time I became CTO um at the end of 2017 and the company is now known as Cosmo station and I led the development team establishing validator node infrastructure building a block Explorer now known as a mint scan um crypto wallet services and various utilities that could contribute to support the ecosystem systems and after living Cosmo station I had an opportunity to work at several other blockchain companies like B harvest the company behind Crescent Network and tenderman for a bit that are

heavily focused on Cosmos the founding company uh behind Cosmos so uh that's a brief background about myself and in terms of how I become interested in Celestia is that to Simply put I naturally heard about it and research a bit from time to time as Celestia is using a lot of Cosmos tax Stacks H yeah hey I'm Fabo yeah uh Fabo um I stumbled into blockchain at some point um I wanted to work for startup and back then Ethan fry who's now running um the cosom development hired me as a front lead for the tenderman

corporation back then uh so I built the first uh C wallet and we split out later and build a crossplatform staking Stak platform on poodot and Cosmos uh which we canceled at some point and worked in this space for a long time met a lot of friends um so I met a bunch of you guys uh around the world in many places already which is fantastic I always like to go to covers and like these events because like the community is nice and like you always have crazy adventures and crazy ideas and um uh like this project but Celestia for example um is so the CTO of

Celestia is isma and was an old colleague of mine and um he told me over like a lunch many times yeah we have this this project and I was like really doesn't sound like anything you're sure and he's like yeah yeah yeah I will do this I will do this and look where we are um and um someone like three months ago JB was like hey um I'm building this project um on Celestia liquid s and I'm like sounds amazing I know the guy I like I like the tag I'm in and we started hustling right away and there we

are and it's amazing team I'm very very happy to be part of this yeah that's cool and uh yeah definitely remember also um is telling me about you know early Celestia and lazy Ledger and and also not really getting it until uh everybody had already made up their minds that this was the future but um but yeah fortunate to uh have been able to you know join as an investor later on but yeah it's uh it's it's great to to see you guys working together and building this product so when did the protocol launch and how much tvl does it currently have yeah so we started our project together in the

mid or beginning of October last year and we put our heads down and you know focus on building for like two months literally and then we launch on 18th of December and it's a little more than a month now and it's running smoothly and it's current capturing about 42 million at this time I mean that's huge like considering that I think there's something like 60 million St in staked atom on stride now it's difficult to compare here because like I think with Celestia there's certainly a lot of tokens that are still locked um although yeah I guess those

tokens you can't really um use them on Milky Way like investor tokens Etc but uh I think with regards to Celestia the the kind of main use case right now is staking and so being able to liquate those assets and potentially use them in in defi so we'll talk also about like where milk Tia is currently uh where you can use milk Tia in dii but yeah it's impressive it's impressive to have gotten to over 40 million in just over a month um how do you feel about that we are super excited about the you know growth and overwhelming support from the community yeah super super happy and but at the same time we

know it's uh only the beginning there are a lot of things we can do down the road we have a lot of things that we are cooking up internally so um super excited 2024 and um we will continue to uh put our heads down and focus on building and delivering the needs of the community I'd like to take a little bit of a step back and talk about liquid staking you know broadly I think that there's been you know two stages for liquid staking um ethereum liquid staking was the the sort of use case that the environment that proved the use case where you have this

layer one with one uh asset uh with like the major asset that is being liquid Stak and people use that asset in defi that has grown to like billions of dollars worth of activity and it's it's pretty St straightforward and then when liquid staking in Cosmos kind of popped up with stride going to Market I mean there were liquid staking protocols before it but stride I think really accelerated liquid staking uh it became obvious that Cosmos was going to be different not only because there were multiple chains but because governance for instance was a part of Cosmos and you know we want um token holders to be able to participate in governance so that was like part of the considerations that people had to have in Cosmos also

things like air drops there's like a number of um complexities or other considerations that we've had to have in in Cosmos that we didn't really have in ethereum and now we're sort of entering like a third era where you know I think we think that there's going to be thousands of rollups of applications that are being secured by uh underlying security layers like ethereum via reaking through igen lay um through data availability on celest yeah and so the landscape is once again changing again so I wonder if if you know this characterization sort of resonates with you and you where do you see liquid staking evolving in the next

5 to 10 years as this space grows into this you know massive ecosystem of thousands of applications um liquid staking comes from Cosmos right so the first paper on this was done by Felix from Chorus um done in like one of the first um Cosmos meetups so we just bringing it home yeah and I want I want to add some context around like how liquid staking Market is different in Cosmos um comparing to like ethereum or salana ecosystems so from a liquid staking providers perspective Cosmos is certainly an interesting ecosystem in a

way that they have opportunities to support multiple liquid staking tokens but if you see the market is relatively small comparing to ethereum and salana ecosystems so they really have to choose wise wisely in terms of like which chain they want to support because if you see the implementation level it requires much more efforts and dedication to build and operate and to provide liquid staking solution basically and when catering for airdrops especially it becomes orders of magnitude more complicated due to liquidity being spread among multiple

chains so this is one of the hosle you know that you know Cosmos liquid staking providers uh are going through and I'm sure it will be pretty much the same on modular stack as well because rollups um at the end of of a day it's um sborn chain and um and we also believe that it's inevitable that there will be thousands of rollups coming into the Celestia Market the modular market and um although it's complicated we are super excited to imagine that you know milk Tia will be widely used in the modular ecosystem so let's talk about

the product a little bit so what is the current Milky Way product and what does it offer to Celestia token holders so Milky Way is a liquid staking protocol for Celestia ecosystem I guess um I can explain from a layman's terms but it requires no explanation for those who are in the space for a while but I but I assume some listeners may be unfamiliar with the concept of liquid staking protocol itself so basically staking is a way to help secure proof of Stak based blockchain networks like ethereum salana Cosmos and many other blockchains out there nowadays so users stake their assets and their assets are locked up in

a smart contract or protocol and when they want to withdraw their assets it takes a few days on ethereum and it takes generally 21 days on Cosmos Hub this is where a liquid staking solution comes in to solve the liquid Problem by having users to lick liid stake their assets and they receive this representative token of their stake position known as liquid staking derivative or liquid staking token um users can use this liquid staking token um to participate across various defi protocols to earn additional rewards so this is liquid staking token uh liquid

sticking protocol and Milky Way is um tailor made for Celestia ecosystem so in terms of how it works from a user's perspective they liquid state their Tia which is the base coin of Celestia blockchain through our front end application they can hold you know their Tia on Celestia chain or osmosis chain just by holding their you know liquid staking token our liquid staking token is called miltia just by holding miltia they earn staking rewards and it's very simple and you utilize that uh to many defi protocols uh within the cosmos ecosystem at this point cool

so where can people currently use their their milk Tia so you know they they've they've deposited some Celestia got some milk Tia liquid Stak Assets Now They're earning staking rewards as well as holding this liquid asset um what can they do with it currently and you know what's in the plan in terms of building out the ecosystem of applications that support milk diaa and presumably like other um Milky Way liquid stake assets so our liquid staking totia is already listed on osmosis Dex when we launch our product last December

18 and it's now listed across many other D5 protocols within the cosmos ecosystem so DX is another Dex uh users can lend you know milk Tia there and it's also listed on quizar uh the project that's working on the Vault strategy and two perp trading protocols um lebana protocol lebana finance and the margin protocol and there's a governance proposal on Umi and um Mars protocol as well and also so uh in terms of a cross-chain ecosystem um oxel is uh listing our milk Tia in their

next batch so once they support our milk Tia then we will be able to tap into other ecosystems as well so there will be many more in the coming weeks and months cool and so what motivated the choice to launch Milk Tia on osmosis basically you know we did our own due in the beginning but prior to launch um osmosis Foundation has been super helpful and supportive in Milky Way's vision and we knew we were aware that Oso osmoses was gearing up for Celestia mayet launch

so it when Celestia mayet launch it really you know attracted a significant amount of tvl and it really did so it's the highest um it has the highest tvl in terms of um TI volume so that's it made sense for us to choose osmosis osmosis rather than other um Cosmos um blockchains that support cosmism also our current design is a cosmism smart contract so um osmosis supports cosmism environment so so I'd like to talk about the design and maybe let's let's um Define how other liquid staking

protocols have worked in Cosmos so far and I think the one that stands out that most people would be familiar with is stride Quicksilver also works this way and that is to use interchain accounts so basically there's a chain that chain controls accounts on other chains let's say you know atom um there are some assets that are held on an account there that are staked and the the chain the the the The Stride or the Quicksilver chain uh controls those accounts via interchain accounts now this has been um the prevailing design in Cosmos and it scales because as soon as you have a chain that goes on online and that chain has internet chain accounts

it's fairly easy to utilize this existing stack to to to implement liquid Stak assets for that chain and so you know there's like I think something like 10 chains on stride that use this model now Celestia is different and mainly because Celestia currently doesn't um have interchain accounts enabled and so that led you guys to have a different approach in terms of um the design what is the what is the thought process and what is the the kind of process of um designing the technical architecture for a new uh type of liquid Stak asset on Celestia so we need to work around this

right like we wanted to offer this because there was a need in the market we wanted to offer this to users um the current approach um IA was not available so we needed to rethink uh what we do we uh didn't have a chain we wanted to two sorry I've been saying IC since a while ago but it's you're right it's actually IA yeah interchain accounts uh so we thought through how can we deal how can we stake on Celestia so there's a there's a simple approach you could do um an offchain account that is trusted and that kind of Acts uh in the interest interest of the corporation of the in the interest of the protocol

but it's it's quite unsafe uh because you kind of trust um a whole whole entity outside of the chain so we need to bring that um that on chain so um we we you you still need to like in the end you always need to uh secure the tokens on chain so this is a fundamental there's someone needs to own the account that does the staking in the IC model right this like this interchain account is handled by the protocol and a remote account they can access it if you don't you need to control this account so someone needs to secure this account um so we we are securing it by a multis

we'll probably discuss this in a moment um of high profile operators in the space I think secured by um business value of 70 billion or something like that so they have a lot to lose with this um and then we were thinking a lot so in the end like we need to now interact with this account and who does that so other people have a chain um we didn't want to launch a chain um um we opted in a very faster approach Cosmos approach is like go step by step you can use I or something IC and then Lun you chain we went with first smart contract right you can put your business logic in

a smart contract uh which we launched on osmosis and now this contract kind of needs to interact with the um with the account on on Celestia so uh Celestia has no IA but it has IBC enable to transfer the ti everywhere logically we use this to interact with the account so we can now like send the token there from the from the staking contract for example but now who handles the staking we could do like a bridge based approach where the multisig is um uh uh in hot wallets and they kind of sign these

staking intents and they agree on it like an a validator model but um considering a lot of other like Bridge hacks um they happen mostly because these are hard ones right like the they are constantly on the chain and there's no really secur nobody actually checks anything right this is just it's just secure because they're kind of distributed and like kind of like verify each other so we didn't want to go this way um so we our is actually like it's a vault multi so like the validators can take the multi keys and like go into Fort KNX put them in a

safe all good because the the the actor on top of the multi um that acts in the interest of the of the staking contract is a different entity and that's has only limited rights um we use the Oz module from from from Cosmo and so you can give an account you can give it special rights you can say you can send tokens somewhere but only to me so only to this address so we designed this um authorization structure in a way that um it's completely secure like it can only send tokens to the staking contract it can only stake to a certain

set of validators um it can only unstake from certain validators and so on and so on so on um so the the hot wallet in question could be hacked I will never say never but there is almost zero impact on our our um assets under management because it can't go anywhere so this is a very beautiful approach that we found and um yeah it works so this this this operator account is like a programmatic account there a program that's run by us but the multis validator need to Grant the rights for this offchain program and this offchain

program interacts with with the account and the and the uh smart contract on osmosis the smart contract on osmosis acts as the state machine it has all the accounting all the tokens need to go once through this through this account to have like complete accountability of all the asset C management that we have the smart contract is only allowed to Min tokens and distribute them to the users okay so just to summarize here there's a multisig account that multisig account is sitting on on Celestia this is a cosmos SDK multisig and we'll talk about who the multisig um participants

are but this was created once and it um it is made up of the keys of high-profile validators in the space the validators I think it Bears just repeating here the uh operators of that multisig are not executing transactions with that multi on a regular basis for staking for unstaking those keys are not used in a production context they're they're in a vault multisig configuration which means that the multisig is there uh to be seated essentially I mean it sort of exists just for the purpose of being seated

and then authorizing um a contract via Oz on osmosis uh to or sorry no actually authorizing another account that is uh uh operated by well that that I think probably just need to re come back to that but there's another account that has auy access over the multisig and that account can do a a limited number of things stake unstake and send tokens back to the contract and so the security model sort of limits the scope of what someone could potentially do with the multi- account I.E unstake the assets and be on their merry way with them yes um and that's protected by the protoc

level right so I just want to come back to this uh this agent I think Faba you once described it to me so this this agent is a piece of software that anyone can run right okay can you uh can you explain what what this agent does and how it interacts with uh the multisig and the contract so it's very simple so um it detects has an indexer of of Celestia and it detects balance changes in one of two accounts um the Staker account and the rewards collector account so rewards when claimed go to a different account this is like a a

cosmos SDK feature so if it sees stake have receiving in the Staker account then it will stake this to the validators that it can stake to and if it sees rewards appearing in the in the rewards account then it sends those rewards back if it sees an unstaking badge happening uh then it will claim this unstaking badge and would start an unstaking process if it sees and is uh unstaking process to have finished then we'll take these assets and sends them back to the mul okay and

so this account is it is essentially the contract is the account and and or or is there another account somewhere that is operating uh that is that is executing those transactions so this is the granny account Grant account funnily granny account um is like a different key that has has these rights there's a different key that is used in a programmatic system that executes these transactions okay independent from the contract the contract is on osis right and so this key sits inside like a binary that anyone can run I mean is this key like is the private key for

this thing public or what's cuz it I mean yes uh it's running by the foundation um with the coord program uh but important to note that as Fabo gave a comprehensive explanation about how it works it only has a limited authorization so it can only transfers you know IBC transfers back to the osis staking contract that are deployed on osmosis later on blockchain and it can only stake two Milky Way validators so basically they're in in case of compromise there wouldn't be any

issue it's protected by the protocol that's what you know we we call it offz delegated multisig it's a novel concept that we came up with it and we wrote a comprehensive article on our blog as well yeah I'll link to that article I think what you wanted to ask was um so is this is this piece of software can anybody run this currently not so uh this needs to be authorized by the high-profile validators to act um and the the Stak in contract as well needs to um have this written as a as a potential receiver of any assets by this

entity um so we if you want to decentralize more depends on future architecture like we could create like there could be more accounts allowed to do so but then we need to have like Collision control like what happens if um we unstake and then like people unstake twice or something like that so we would need something like a hor cro system between the between the different entities but it's all possible okay and so just to come back to the multisig the um the the potential sort of attack here is kind of limited to the validators colluding right I mean that that's that's the extent of the actions that

that multis multis can take under the assumption that those validators have very high security and opsc um processes around their keys which as validators they probably do yes y we call operators but yes we differentiate operators and validators but operators are the trusted and reputable entities that are holding the keys of our multisig account accounts and validators are Celestia validators okay who who are these operators I thought the operators and the validators were this I mean I thought that the they happen to be Celestia validators right and we um we purposefully um chose them

in the beginning when we start the the initial set of operators and validators are uh pretty much overlap uh because obviously it's a liquid staking protocol for a Celesta ecosystem it's better for Celestia validators to become our operators yeah I think that's a very beautiful like um economic system here right like so the validators secure this in their interest as well like they want to be part of the system because it allows them to receive um these liquid St assets to them um and I personally really like this um they're very helpful for us building the system they're very

very good partners so why is everyone futing this multisig I mean not everyone but like people have been futing this multisig and you guys wrote this post kind of explaining the technical architecture and so yeah yeah um actually we don't hear like fding the multi from retail investors we only hear it from the crypto expertise uh because fundamentally is there's a trust assumptions and as you know like multi design is widely used in the crypto industry and it is secure as long as it's properly configured and manage but unfortunately due to the hacks involving projects like runin and

axi infinity which utilize multi design have created a perception that this multi design is simply risky and dangerous that's a public P perception I would say but in fact if you dig it in they use a five of nine multi6 setup with four Keys managed by a centralized entity and store all private keys on their centralized server which is super dangerous and risky and on top of that one of the Dow validators lent out their private key for them to use because they have to you know execute transactions for their day-to-day

operation this is entirely due to their Miss management of multis and this is not how they should use it but in Milky Way multis design like Fabo has explain you know tldr as a you know core contributor to Milky Way protocol we do not hold any keys of multi-c accounts operators are the ones holding the keys of multi-c account and they do not need to expose their private keys to the internet on a day-to-day operation because of a novel concept that we are using called the you know Au Z delegated multi I think some play players in the space Also use that

um to uh discredit us as competition I had the feeling that's entirely possible um so yeah let's come back to the to the contract so now that we have an understanding of the multisig this this grantee granny account um what is the what is the purpose of the contract so I guess like the contract uh issues issues the stake Tia but can we go in detail about the interactions that the contract has with the multisig and this grantee account so it's a very simple um I can explain like very simply and then you can add more

context on it Fabo if you need to um basically user from the user's perspective they liquid stake through our staking contract and it calculates based on this exchange rate in the contract and provides our liquid staking token milk Tia and a contract immediately transfers the deposited Tia back to the Staker multi account on Celestia chain and the multis account Stakes on behalf of our mcky way users this is pretty much it um and there's more more a lot into it I'm sure like

the you know the reward uh the exchange rate update process and all that but yeah feel free to explain uh if you want to add more context on this Fabo um so I think most of the interactions are already described the um exchange rate is just um uh based on minted milk Tia and uh accounted for Tia in the system there a relationship between the two um the rate doesn't really change um only when there comes new um new tier into the system um like new rewards into the system so when the

granny account sends received rewards from the rewards collector account back to the contract um then the then the relationship changes between the two values and then the the um rate goes down um that's mostly it there's like there's a couple of other features like there's a security feature in there uh to Hal the contract for example if we would see anything we have like systems in place that checks if there's any outliers in our data uh we we we already pulled this once nothing actually happened but we were like better safe than sorry um and we we just hold everything and we could check the data and then we could migrate from there like we don't believe that anybody anything could

happen and as our current assumption but we have this in in place if anything happens okay so so you're talking the exchange rate you're talking about the Redemption rate here which is the rate at which you CL you redeem um back your tia your liquid Tia uh with some additional staking awards for the period during which you were MH staking uh or liquid staking those TOA yes so they're interchangeably used uh within different ecosystems Redemption rate and exchange rate and to talk a little bit more about like how the Redemption rate

calculated um we use reward bearing token model similar to other liquid staking protocols um in different ecosystems so basically what it is is the Val value of our liquid staking token milk Tia against underlying asset Tia is track through on exchange rate in the contract so users earn rewards based on this exchange rate when they withdraw their Tia so that's basically um how the exchange rate is calculated in the contract Okay cool so I'd like to talk about the the

validators that you stake to so you know I think I mentioned this earlier in the podcast that you know Quicksilver had this approach of allowing users to choose their own validator they were always like very pH Phil philosophically aligned with this idea of allowing delegators to choose which validators they would stake to even through uh a liquid staking protocol allowing delegators to also participate in governance I think you guys are are using a different approach at least currently that is not possible but I'd like you to maybe expound your thinking around U validator selection and the distance that liquid staking puts

between a delegator and or a token holder in this case and and a you know chains governance um and you know the choice of validator which you know in Cosmos has always been a very um like something that people I think like a right that people hold very dearly like the ability to choose who you validate with and who you stti with yeah absolutely so um currently our initial set of operators and validators are chosen in a permission way with the help of our partners and advisers and we also did proper due diligence to select the most secure and reliable ones to

make sure our users can safely use Milky Way protocol the reason for that is because bootstrapping a truly decentralized protocol from the beginning takes a long time and that's why we are currently refining the details in terms of like what criteria do we look for When selecting a validator and how many validators do we want to include in each batch um yes and all of this uh will be um announced soon uh and we're going to make it decentralize in the end to have the community to select the Milky Way validators want to like um n a little bit but I find it difficult to um

because liquid staking tokens is a fungible asset that's not Soul bound right so um I choose now a validator that I want to stake to my stake and then I receive a voucher token that is not bound to this validator so now I go and like go transfer this to another account whatever I unstake uh this thing buy new tokens and stake to this validator again like there's a bunch of loop things that I can do um which it doesn't really reflect the stake that I put into the system like you could now Sim similar as the same same with governance we we

definitely need to find find a way to to uh bring milk te holders into governance but it's it's not an easy system because um because of tability of the asset and with the state assets is easy right like you have this bound and you can't run away um it's bound to you um but with a with a liquid asset is really really comp uh complicated I'm I'm happy to to uh uh to work with Quicks server um on this and and see what what what they're doing is very interesting but I I find find it very difficult to to to model a system like mat I mean look the the market speaks for itself right even though I think like Quicksilver really wanted to differentiate themselves with

this feature and I think it was part of their uh their philosophy their design philosophy and their ethos since since day one um for you know for what I mean probably not for this reason but but the market has ended up uh choosing stride as you know the the leader I think with over 90% of liquid Stak d and Cosmos so whatever were the whatever the reasons are for Quicksilver not having captured the market whether it was like not being first to Market or or any other um reason um this this was not like a thing that that the market um I think you know felt was was that valuable that they

would switch so yeah I think like it sort of speaks for itself yeah I mean there are multiple options out there like the copy staking and and LST holders choose like Quicksilver approach and use or use governance to elect the validators and delegation amounts even so like if you think about it there are always tradeoffs of taking one option over the other um and we are also exploring those options to see if any of the option makes sense for our community and we will actively discuss internally first and outline the options that we have

discussed to the community and then I guess we will hear from the community actively listen to it and if if they want this option then we are more than happy to proceed it and because at the end of the day we are here for the community and we are building for the community and we want to provide values um to the ecosystem yeah another aspect that we haven't touched on here is air drops and until now I think in all of the liquid s products that exist I I don't think that users get airdrops through those like they're not redistributed what's your stance on this mhm um our stance is

simple we will be Distributing any air drop amounts that we receive on behalf of our users and we are currently taking two different approaches to make sure you know that we're doing our best to have our you know have our Milky Way users get what they deserve basically so we are syncing up with projects that are air dropping to T sters directly and provide a snapshot data to them to include Milky Way users and this is our first approach and if it goes well then our Milky Way users get what they deserve to get if they were to stake in

traditional staking and second option is we our multisig account Stakes on behalf of our users right so our multisig account will receive whatever the amount that are eligible from the projects so we are planning to distribute those error drob amounts to um our Milky Way users that's difficult because that's really exciting usually uh those are capped so they will not never capture the whole airdrop for users um we have some models in mind to technically make this more feasible U with our next upgrade uh but for now and probably

forever uh true Partnerships with the with the air droppers is the way to go and um we're really working hard on this like we're like every day hustling and speaking to so many people that want to do airdrops and provide them with a lot of data and assistance to to to bring this in for our users because yeah I hadn't considered that the the airdrops are capped on the amount of assets so like say you have like I don't know $100 million of stake Tia um that you're not going to get an airdrop you equating that amount you have to provide the snapshot with

individual accounts that are staking okay yeah there's more complexity to just like a technical implementation here you have to work with the projects to do it because from a user perspective they want to prevent from uh whales to receive huge amount I guess yeah yeah this is why we all need milk's support uh we want to you know um have your voices out uh let the projects know um and um so that we can you know work things out more smoothly cool so taking a step back here and and looking at the landscape so you we've talked about some of the competing liquid staking uh Services out here and I think amongst

some people in the space there is this there is a conversation happening about well a few things at least this is things that I've heard in in chatting with folks the one is this idea that liquid staking is a win or take all or win or take most uh Market and that it is very difficult to dislodge existing um Market participants uh once they're well established and then the other is the is the scalability of the design and so having an interchain accounts based design allows you to scale really easily to include other chains and include other protocols I

let's maybe focus on the first question first um you know given that stride has such uh a large Market cop in Cosmos you do you see milky way as because I know that you we know that stride will propose uh stake Tia you know is Celestia a new market where you essentially have First mve Advantage and have establish yourselves there as the dominant player or are you acting the cosmos Market at which point you're competing with stride you know how do you think of your position in the space and how it relates to other liquid

staking providers right now we're laser focus on Celestia ecosystem and um people have different interpretation and views on this but Celestia doesn't Market themselves as cosmos chain even though they use Cosmos SDK framework to um run their chain right so and they're focusing on ethereum L2 ecosystem so fostering Sovereign rollups to um you know grow the ecosystem they want more rollups in the in their

ecosystem to utilize their data availability layer I think it's all because the market is huge like a predominantly huge comparing to Cosmos and other ecosystems so we are the reason why we are heavily focusing on Celestia ecosystem is simply there's a market opportunity and once we support other you know cos bones chains we can techn technically do that we can also scale it's much more easier than using interchain account probably um but we don't do that the reason for that is uh first of all we are a small team

we want to focus on one thing at a time so we think that there's a long way to go and Celestia ecosystem itself is huge and it's getting bigger and bigger and if we have other if we support liquid staking tokens for other ecosystems that means our development resources you know will be spread out and we lose concentration whatever the upgrades happen then we will also have to pay attention to uh their community so so that's why we want to focus on celes ecosystem yeah I think like we're also like we're very open to to to cooperation with um all the other

players in the space like we're all dogs in the space we know most of the people and we love them and we love to work with them um this is just our Niche for now we really like we we want wanted to avoid competition uh not competition uh like muddying the waters um we just picked our Niche we even like so milk Tia where does the name come from and in theory to be Stak Tia so St Tia and we actually we decided okay like we don't want to fight like you take this name right like stay stride claimed the name so we were like we don't want to fight this is fine like we take a different token name like we don't we don't want to fight this is fine um yeah not

everybody is like this um but we see see big potential for because it's a big Market um we're focusing on Celestia now there might be others coming in this is not a problem we hope we have a first move mve advantage and we will have a advantage in the long run because we were focus on this ecosystem and this technology um in comparison to others that are focusing more on app chains that are rolling out in in the cosmos so what when it comes to Celestia I'd like to understand here what you think is the endgame for mil for Milky Way in the Celestia ecosystem because I mean liquid staking uh until now we've known liquid staking as this product that allows you

to utilize your Stak assets I.E Stak securing the network in defi to have a liquid representation of the Stak uh assets that you're delegating to a validator to secure the network with a Celestia rollup uh or an application building utilizing Celestia da there is no liquid there is no staked asset in the same way that a token uh is is not a Stak asset um is not a security um layer one uh security asset so what will be the product what will be the staked assets that Milky Way

will offer its customers so there's correct me if I'm wrong JB but there's two kinds of um there's three kinds of uh rollups that will be built right like currently most prominent is one sequencer uh and then persistence to to Celestia back and there will be ZK rollups at some point let's say like in a year to two uh they probably also don't need um stacked assets to secure this but I think like the the the main path forward in the the midterm is um decentralized sequencers and they kind of still need to kind of um be secured by some kind of trust system probably

based on uh on tokens so it's it's very similar to to the to the old achain model jbb you want to follow up on that yeah so basically from a business perspective um I anticipate roller s will have to launch their own token to boost strap the liquidity or you know um partner partnering up with other ecosystems or even other rollups within this celes ecosystem so from a business perspective it's a highly I don't see that rollups without their own token will be the

majority um that's how I view it at this point but we will see how it goes but in this case I mean these tokens would be utilized for governance they may be utilized for other utility um as a as a as a rollup where you don't need to stake the asset to secure the chain um are you are you thinking here about assets that might be locked in in a dii protocol that you can then uh create a liquid representation of and we're we're we're operating sort of of like a different layer of abstraction than the you know the layer one token that we're familiar with what are the use cases for like this particular type

of um of like rollup token uh when it relates to liquid staking assets that are not locked are not our Target customer I think um we will only focus on locked assets um I think they will in the long term probably always be a staking concept somewhere because you need to like um a collateralized s uh security system uh in one way or the other um so I think there will be um many of these applications maybe stuff that we don't know yet so what's the road map and what can people expect from Milky Way in the next couple of months um as we um posted our teaser image on our official Twitter account we are

cooking up this rewards points system and um it will be announced soon um and we're looking to launch our um own token at the end of q1 but this is something that we're um discussing uh it's a bit flexible it can be Q2 our next Milestone is to uh transition from osmosis to Celestia ecosystem to become a sovereign liquid staking rollup so basically the goal is to to be maximally aligned with the Celestia ecosystem because as you know the solver rollup will take the sediment and execution layers and will

use the pluggable consensus and the da layers of Celestia chain so that's why it doesn't require uh it doesn't require to bootstrap new validator set we will just to use a validator set of celestial chain so therefore our liquid staking token is secure by Celestia chain um therefore it's more safer and more aligned with Celestia chain yeah I think that would that really I think is um one of the most exciting things about the road map is that Milky Way uh has ambition to become a sovereign roll up on Celestia that it wants to move away from you know this initial bootstrapping

model um that you know works but I think isn't like a long-term uh viable model for like full alignment with Celestia and and um and building out this ecosystem of liquid state assets yeah that's what we are going for and uh we are also exploring a utility of uh reaking Service as well um it's still in R&D phase but it has gained a lot of traction from a project called igot layer in the ethereum ecosystem and the core idea is basically utilize liquid staking token to share security to those services and infrastructures that are not secure and

inheriting security from the base uh chain itself so uh we're that's something that we are exploring uh currently the researching and R&D phase but yeah that's um that's a a utility that can use our liquid staking token when we become a sovereign ruler very exciting um guys thanks so much for coming on anybody who wants to use Milky Way how how can you do that go on app. milky way.

Zone yes okay cool guys thanks for coming on and uh we'll talk soon thank you for having us my friends thank