Cosmos Hub ICS Security Marketplace with Jehan Tremback of Informal Systems

Transcript

welcome to the interop today my guest is Jan trach he's Cosmos Hub lead at informal systems informal is Building verifiable Systems and organizations and they're also the steart for several Technologies core to Cosmos including com bft IBC rust and of course the cosmos Hub in today's conversation we'll discuss informals role in stewarding The Hub what is interchange security and the newest version of interchange security part partial set security we'll discuss changes and sort of how the IC vision is evolving we'll talk about bringing Bitcoin security to the hub and how the Hub can compete in the broader security

landscape I'm also dying to find out why he thinks the Hub should become a security aggregator so I've been away for a couple weeks traveling to East Denver and so I apologize for not having an episode last week but we'll try to get episodes out on a reg basis again it's just so hard recording with all this traveling but I'm glad that I was able to record this episode with Jan on the day of the fifth anniversary of the Hub if you were in Denver if you didn't come to our convergence event definitely check out the video from that panel uh it'll be down in the show notes was really interesting panel about how ethereum and Cosmos are coming together and I hope uh you'll check that out so

before we get started make sure to hit the like button and subscribe to get notified when new episodes drop remember none what we discussed here on the interop is investment advice and if you enjoy this content please consider sticking with us we're live on OS Quicksilver and osmosis just look for interop in the active set my guest Jan trach is coming up next right here on the interrupt [Music] hey Jan thanks for joining me on the podcast today yeah thanks for having me so there's lots to talk about today

particularly surrounding the Hub uh but it's actually interesting that we're recording this on the fifth anniversary of the Hub so uh Happy Hub AV versary I guess uh as people as I like to call it um what what does this day mean to you and like uh you know reflecting back on 5 years what uh you know has the Hub achieved uh its Vision like are we have we achieved success um yeah I mean you know I've I've only really been involved for like maybe two or three years I guess um so I wasn't you know I wasn't around when the cosmos you know Cosmos Hub launched or Cosmos launched um but um you know I think I did get involved pretty soon after IBC launched so

obviously before IBC existed uh you know that was very very different very different time because Cosmos was doing what we supposed to do um I think that the Hub has um you know the The Hub has like at this point I think we've we've sort of started dialing in on a very like uh cohesive use case for the cosmos Hub and um and I think in the past throughout the evolution of Cosmos that maybe you know have been missing um where Cosmos is kind of like this this very useful technology IBC Cosmos SDK is very useful way very good way to build chains um and then also have really good connectivity between chains out of the box um but there wasn't necessarily

really a good um sort of uh idea for you know how the how the Hub fit in there um and um I think in the past the Hub a lot of times was I'm talking maybe like two you know two three years ago the cosmos Hub was kind of a test net for Cosmos SDK so there' be new features in the SDK would get launched on the Hub and um kind of uh but it wasn't necessarily really interacting with other chains um and so now we we have a much clearer um a much clearer Mission um for how the Hub fits into this ecosystem this really successful ecosystem that the cosmos Hub you know has created so yeah yeah I think I think the Hub The Hub showcased the cosmos SDK and

everything that was possible with it and then you know when IBC came um came online it also s showcased like the power of IBC and know osmosis would play a big role there as well but it's been like I think you know the flagship product of the cosmos SDK as far as I see it and you demonstrated what's possible there of course like a lot of things are changing now and like the cosmos SDK I think you know the vision for the cosmos SDK is Shifting uh it's obviously like very important to the the modular vision and being able to deploy applications um and that's what we're going to talk about

here you know using renting security from other sources you know in in terms of where the Hub and particularly the cosmos SDK started right as this framework for building application specific blockchains that where there was an implied there an implication of owning your own security and now the cosmos SD I think moving more towards this idea of being able to rent security building an application right like with the best framework possible but being able to rent security from some where else um does this shift signify like um a shift also in the vision for the cosmos SDK or or was this always kind of the the end game in your view well let me let me just uh be clear

the cosmos SDK is the is the is the framework that's used to build Cosmos blockchains and that's that's different from the cosmos Hub just for your listeners um but the um yeah the cosmos SDK I I know I can't speak too much to a separate team but uh they they are doing a lot of stuff to basically make it ZK approvable uh to make it suitable for rollups um and that's really exciting but even without that the cosmos SDK as a toolkit to let you build your own you know your own app chain and that's always what kind of Cosmos has been about um in the past and I think also going into the future and with app chains you know app chains are kind of the most flexible and most powerful way to build a blockchain project um because you can just you can control every you

know every aspect of its operation um and you can you know you can have like for example you can have stuff that runs off to the side of the uh like you know like um skip has a slinky Oracle framework um that runs off to the side um there's there's stuff like dydx built the cosmos chain and they um a big reason why they did that was to uh to to have this offchain order book system um and uh so and you can kind of customize every single thing so I think that's always going to be um it's that's always going to be a big factor so like let's say Celestia for example you can build a roll up on Celestia you can't build Celestia on Celestia um you know you can build Celestia on the cosmos SDK which is which is what they did so it gives

you the the power you need to to really do kind of you know l1s um I like the way in a podcast I heard recently he was talking about how like the cosmos SDK is built to for uh is is made to build Frontier chains and Frontier applications and and a lot of the sort of chains that are at the frontier are using the cosmos SDK so like dydx Celestia injective say you know be chain and list goes on yeah I mean there are a lot of projects where a smart contract is is the best way to do it I mean if you're doing let's say you know it's it's a DEX or something or something that's not too um it doesn't require a huge amount of control over how it executes or tweaking of the performance or block speed and smart contracts make a lot of sense and and

rollups as well rollups are a little bit kind of like between a smart contract in the chain um but if you really want the maximum power you you got to reach for uh for an app chain the best way to build those is with Cosmos s cool so I just want to focus on you a little bit so you you're you're the cosmos Hub lead at uh informal systems what what does the cosmos Hub lead do you know for people out there you know wondering they sort of discovering that there's a person who's leading The Hub uh I leading the Hub at informal and actually technically I'm product owner so I don't actually lead the development team um that's my my colleague Marius uh Mars poke who does that but basically uh you know like you know you know as

people know the cosmos's very decentral so it's not like there's um I have you know I certainly have like influence in the community but uh there's no official like leadership but what I do day-to-day is um kind of our Focus that formal is is interchange security um has been in the past we're also now moving into um doing more liquidity uh and interchain capital related things so Adam Wars which I can which I can speak about as well um but basically I I sort of I sort of think about where what we want to do with the products uh where we want to take them and what we want like the experience for someone using them to be like and then also I come from a a technical background as a developer um so my focus is is kind of Technical and um I'll also spend time kind of specking

specking them out working with developers to figure out how exactly it's going to work you know publishing uh you know uh specs and and adrs and uh sometimes even uh writing some code so I've been writing code for for Adam Wars running cosm contract for that so yeah um that's you know and a lot of a lot of meeting kind of get everyone on the same page but yeah yeah it's it's a PE peculiar position to be in because like you're a product owner for a product that like you don't actually own in the in the actual sense governance owns the product product that nobody owns yeah exactly and so yeah uh you know I'm curious like you know a product owner I think typically you know takes feedback

from customers and then integrates those feedback into you know product features or improvements to the product and pushes those features out uh to the product and you know it's sort of like this feedback loop now it's sort of similar with the Hub right like you have the community you have users you have developers now there there are different say like customers right there there different people that are using the Hub or interested in the hub success and then your role is to you know sort of transform those into adrs and you know governance proposals that then yeah make it into code and and gets getting deployed on the face of it it seems like a very sort of similar Circ particular uh process but like where do the hiccups come I imagine there's more hiccups and

and more uh sort of barriers in the decentralized sort of you know um Paradigm in which you operate I mean I think it's interesting yeah there's there's users of the Hub and then there's also like you know there's also stakeholders um so obviously and anyone who you know anyone who has adoms is a stakeholder really and then also people who participate in governance are stakeholders one of the challenges is we want to be very open to feedback from um from the community and uh you know the main venue for that is well to try try to centralize it we use the the cosmos Hub forum and so we publish stuff we have a process called the chips process so we publish stuff and try to get get feedback on it there and we do get we get valuable feedback

which we which we take very seriously but a lot of times there's it's hard for you know it's hard for community members to have the time to sort of read deeply into how something works and provide like a lot of feedback um so so we can't what we do can't just be only based on community feedback because um in general if you say hey here's these 10 options for how to design this which one you guys like I mean it's it's not really their job so so a lot of what we do is is kind of try to come up with maybe two directions and put those out there and see what the response to them is to to distill it and make it simpler and I mean I you know I um I'm also I hold you I hold tokens of of protocols that I

have very little involvement or knowledge of like let's say graph protocol or something um you know it's it's I think it's a cool protocol but I'm not like you know just being some kind of small token holder it's you know it's not even Cosmos EO system and I'm not also not like necessarily influencing every decision right and I think it's the same thing with with with Adam hold there's also a lot of people who are very deeply involved and have a lot of opinion so we try to take this seriously um yeah but yeah a lot of also is is going to the customers that's that does tend to be clear so going to Consumer existing consumer chains stride and and um and neutron and then also so uh a project we're talking to to join and and getting their uh opinions on how they want things to work um that tends

to be more focused so so you guys also have this business development role uh that you know maybe maybe this is a good segue also into the role of the ICF like I think historically the ICF had a bigger role in uh kind of you know doing this product ownership for the Hub now that's shifting outwards into organizations in the ecosystem uh does the business development aspect also fall under the responsibility of informal systems and you know how is that being accelerated because I think a lot of people in the space have been a little bit disheartened by the lack of Business Development the lack of funding to projects like the lack of uh just just

having just sort of like an entry point right or like a desk where people coming to the ecosystem can say hey like I want to build a cosmos chain you know how should I do that and I think a lot of folks were expecting or thought the ICF was doing this but wasn't so yeah so that's a lot of context but how how is informal you know sort of uh advancing business development in this front our our mandated role at informal based on the our funding proposal from last year doesn't include a huge amount of funding for business development and you know we that proposal is mostly for software development um and that's kind of where the headcount is going to but we also realized uh we realized early this year that that was probably the main a major

you know major place we need more activi as business development and so we're rep prioritizing we're now actually hiring for um an ecosystem growth leag um and we already do myself uh and then also other members of our team already do a lot of Business Development we do have in terms of the official funding right now in that in that proposal it's um it's basically half a half a full-time employee for business development so that uh that covers uh thyborg activities he's some a lot of people know does BD informal but uh then my my you know myself and other members of our team also um do do a lot of BD just on onboarding projects and telling them about and stuff so the aaou also um is um ramping up uh ramping up Ed efforts

around energy and security and they they I think it was I I I don't want to I don't want to misquote them but um they're they're putting like 25% of their funding I think towards towards that towards you know business development around around ICS and granting consumer chains and they're also doing uh a venture grants program which is uh kind of an ecosystem investment program um and that will also I think uh you know a lot of that will go towards towards consumer chains at all so we're as well so I think we're we're we're definitely ramping it up and we've definitely noticed that this is uh a major need and so then there's kind of two angles to that so first of all there's like the question like who's doing BD for Cosmos just building a cosmos chain and then there's question

of who's doing BD for the cosmos Hub um and so for us and also a um we want that to be kind of unified so basically we we want to we want to go out we want to talk to projects that are new Cosmos and say hey here's this great technology you can build this great stuff with and the best place to launch this type of chain is the cosmos Hub and kind of have that be like a unified effort and I think for and a lot of times like if you are doing you know someone's doing a startup uh the kind of which is kind of our Target you know Target customers uh as people want to launch chains um you know time is at a premium and so being able to educate somebody and then bring them in to use the technology to launch in a

default place it saves them a lot of time and it gets them in and then once they're in they're they're Sicky because they don't really have a reason you know to want to leave um and so we hope that strategy is going to be good for kind of accelerating a lot of early stage projects to get them on to IC and um it's not a new thing I think every you know every every blockchain platform you know since like ethereum let's say has kind of put this Playbook into action um and that's something that we're trying to do more and more um along with with AA and so on the icf's role um the ICF is uh this goes back into some ancient you know Cosmos history Cosmos drama history but um the ICF uh is a nonprofit you know that kind of um you know did

did a lot of the original stuff you know with the Ico and stuff back in like 2017 or I think they're called a fundraiser and they kind of you know so that's a nonprofit and um their mission has always been though to to uh to sort of develop the cosmos stack uh so the open source Cosmos SDK IBC go and that stuff's all very valuable to us but um they they have never necessarily they they had the responsibility for the hub for for several years um in 2019 there was like you know some drama and the company that was kind of maintaining the Hub is not anymore for various reasons we don't have to get into um and it's kind of landed on the ICF um and the ICF did a very good job of keeping it going

and everything but they they're never really oriented towards sort of a really you know kind of hard-driving like role to like promote this blockchain um and so that's something with like the A out and the community pool getting more cohesive and and more assertive in in in you know passing proposals to fund teams like ours um that's something where the Hub is now starting to do that you know by itself in a decentralized way which is pretty cool um but of course the ICF the icf's funding and efforts on Cosmos SDK and IBC are are extremely important as a Bas layer to everything yeah and and just maybe to clarify here that uh I don't want to spend too much time on this here but that the cosmos SDK and IBC are maintained by other teams or I guess you guys are doing IBC the rust

version of IBC uh yeah that's right informal so informal does yeah also just to be clear like I'm the informal has a cosmos sub team which is funded directly by the community pool um which is the team that that that that I'm on um but uh also informal does do a lot of work for the ICF as well um so I am not super involved in in that work for the ICF although I know all the people very well because they work at informal but it's not really my my wheelhouse um so stuff like that like icrs I would still consider that to be under the umbrella of the ICF although um some of that work is done by by teams out in formal okay very cool yeah thanks for all that contact I think that's super

helpful and I think for for people listening it will help them really understand the role of of of informal and other teams in the space and I'm I'm actually really happy to hear that you guys are taking on more of a business development role and working with uh a to uh centralize I guess the the business development efforts I think that's very much needed and something that other chains have done very well including like salana and polygon and even ethereum absolutely but but kind of like yeah yeah uh cool so let's let's move on to uh IC replicated security partial security actually yeah I mean this this

was sort of the main reason why I wanted to get you on here is to talk about partial set security uh the this this idea of share Security on the Hub has been around for a while uh it was launched some time ago now I think over over a year and a half ago maybe even two years ago um time time seems to escape me these days but well it's been about it's been about a year that it's been live but yeah right okay and and so there's there's there's these three different terms right so there's interchange security IC and there's replicated security and partial SE security and I'm still confused as to what these things mean and how they relate to each other so maybe just sort of clearing up the confusion here yeah um so I I yeah I do apologize

for the confusion um I'm I'm also like I think it's uh generally we should just call them all IC interchange security um and replicated security and partial site security are just two different uh two different variations of it I would actually say partial set security is kind of like icv2 um and um so we're going to be doing some marketing work to kind of clear up those terms um but in general it's interchange security that's the hub's reaking product so the um the original version of it which is in production now uh which uh kind of went live about about a year ago is replicated security and replicated security every um every validator on the cosmos Hub runs every consumer chain so if a consumer chain joins every

validator has to run it um it's actually not quite every validator 5% of those smallest ones don't um but in you know effect that is actually a large number of validators because there's many many small ones but effectively you know it's like every validator has to run it so um that is the highest level of security and there's actually there's actually an interesting I'll get into this a little bit later but there's there's this there's something called the subset problem there's a lot of thinking we've done around the security properties these different variations so I'd love to cover in more detail but just to keep a high level for now um the if the entire validator says running it you have the full security of the cosmos Hub you have full like economic alignment basically um and it is the highest level of security however you know along with

that high level of security and the high level power you get from an app chain the expenses for validators are somewhat high as well so validators running another chain they they kind of to run another server um and you multiply that by 180 it's a lot of money and so that's something where I think we we we didn't necessarily last year we didn't do a good job anticipating how and people were saying this um and I think we always knew there were going to be scaling limits to it but basically that's the major downside of of replicated security is is this is the scaling limits um so to get every validator run a consumer chain they all have to or you know at least majority of them have to agree to it and pass the proposal and so we have two very high-profile very high quality consumer

chains running I'm Neutron and stride I'm very happy about that but it has been kind of a a high barrier entry to the the new chains just you know starting out and so that's a partial set security which is really just the next version of interchain security is addressing so with that you don't have to have every validator run every chain you can have uh a chain start basically permissionless Le and as soon as validators start opting in it starts running and so uh W with that it allows chains to sort of start up in a very lightweight way um have the cosmos Hub be a place to find a validator set and get started get launched and scale their security as they need to and what that allows us to do is really ramp up to like open the flood the floodgates to basically let everybody who wanted to

run a consumer chain run a consumer chain and that's also you know our ramp up of the BD and growth efforts are you know enabled by that because then we can bring a lot of people in get them started get them going and there's not this big hurdle of the government's proposal so that's what that's what that that distinction is all about there there is a feature in partial head security that's called top end so there it will there will be an option for chains to have guaranteed security so for Neutron and stride for example they're going to move to that um and what that does is you can have a setting that says for this consumer chain we want to mandate that the top %c for Neutron inside the top 95% of validators have to continue running these chains and that's good for chains that do need

to continue with that high level security um or if we get other sort of higher profile chains coming in they might also use that um so chains that can clear that governance hurdle um they want to do use that for the majority of chains though I think it's going to be they can just launch permissionless le validators start opting in and it's a lot smoother so that's kind of the uh yeah that that's to clear that up it's all just interchange security um and partial security makes it easier to launch so so this top end uh thing you mentioned so that that would mandate that validators run or at least that the the top 95% of validators Run Security for these chains is that a governance is that subject to governance yes yeah it has to be yeah so you know regular opt-in consumer chains

uh they can um you know that's where there's no top end permissionless they they can launch permissionless Le I think in the first version there will be a governance proposal for every consumer chain um but that's kind of an implementation detail but uh that's you know it will be soon it will be completely permissionless and um but but yeah for for top end if you're mandating that a certain top percentage validators run it that there does need to be a governance proposal so top 95% is kind of basically equivalent to replicated security the the old version um but you can also do something like top 66% 66% of the validators actually is only 24 nodes so um that's pretty interesting because you get like the majority of the of the same security um but it is only 24 nodes that have to run it reducing

the costs by a lot but yeah I think it's going to be less important than opt-in security it's more just there if you need it the vision here seems to be kind of different from the original vision of of interchange security at least how I remember it I I I remember interchange security being this idea that the cosmos Hub would secure a handful of chains maybe 10 20 chains these would be very high quality projects like you know new the neutrons the strides the Nobles uh aligned and complimentary with amongst each other you no competing plat chains on the Hub and I kind of like that I I I felt that this would would create sort of an EOS system of of applications that

would create a lot of value for the Hub and that this curation was really an important aspect of of interchange security it's it seems now that that shifting to a more permissionless model where the Hub becomes kind of a security Marketplace and validators can opt in or opt out of securing certain chains yeah why is there a shift or an apparent shift in vision and um H how will this you know is is is this Marketplace sort of the right way to to see interchange security moving forward yes yeah um I um there there has been a shift in vision and you're right

that you described the uh the sort of strategy um you know from last year pretty well and I think the the reason we're shifting is because you know I think that the uh the the overhead of of governance ended up being you know more than we expected and the overhead of making every every validator get on board um and I think that one of the one of the points of friction that that happened was was that you'd have chains where you know you you let's say let's say Neutron for example Neutron is there's a little bit of a split between atom token holders I felt and and validators so where for a token holder if you have Neutron on board that's very good because Neutron is a leading smart contract platform in in Cosmos and that's having having them on board is

only good for for a token for an atom token holder it's like that that's that's great to have them in for validators token holders don't really necessarily face any costs for every new consumer chain for validators they they do um and so that was a point where if you have this curated model in this decentralized context it becomes pretty tough to sort of like it's hard to do that sort of curation with a very decentralized you know community ecosystem because like you can't necessarily nobody can go and say look this is how it's going to be done these are going to be the chains we're going to have nobody has that Authority actually in in the in the cosmos Hub I certainly I certainly don't and and not even people who are you know very well

like Ethan or something or zucky or jquan or whatever people who founded it don't even have that Authority so it's I think we kind of realize that we need to go since it is such a decentralized community and ecosystem we need to go for more of a free market model and and kind of let let things evolve uh versus versus having a model that depends on uh kind of curation so I think that's that's why we shifted strategies another thing I will say though is there there's another Improvement coming in the new version of ICS which is something um I wrote about on the Forum but is not really um I don't think a lot of people have paid attention to it but I think it is pretty important which is that validators will be able to set their own commission rates um for each consumer

chain so um right now how it is is the validators charge of commission a lot of them charge 5% um that commission applies to their atom validation and it also applies to any rewards that come from um the the consumer trains um and so validators generally don't want to change that because they don't want to raise their commission you know makes them less competitive with the new version of IC uh they're going to be able to say per consumer chain they're going to be able to say hey this consumer chain it's a little expensive to run I'm going to be charging 20% on this one and yeah so it's going to let them it's going to let them really dial it in a lot more and kind of you know kind of do better uh do better for you know being able to to get the economic

exactly right so that that'll help as well but I mean that yeah that that's sort of the the reason we we've shifted shifted it okay now that makes sense I mean like it look like taking a step back and and looking at I think what has really uh been a prevailing advantage of Cosmos uh maybe over you know I I like sort of a a tangent here but I like to compare Cosmos and polka dot as the cathedral and and the bazaar where Cosmos always took this very Market based approach approach and and polka dot had a more Central decision-making approach and I think that that's that has been in you very important to the success of Cosmos and the flourishing of ideas in Cosmos

now that makes things very messy and and that's normal and like governance is messy and decision- making is messy but in the end I think you get something that's much stronger much more resilient much better and uh yeah for for the long term this this idea of having a more market-based approach for uh interchange security feels more in lined with the cosmos Vision um but I think that because I I wonder if the the reason for wanting to you know at first at least have a more curated approach wasn't a sort of reaction to the you know over um to the drama and sort of all of the messiness within Cosmos and at least

for the Hub you know wanted to sort of uh curate and and narrow down the project so that we wouldn't end up in this in this very um disorganized uh messy dramatic uh situation but I don't know I mean in the end I think it's I think it's better and probably in the long term we'll end up being better for the Hub to have a market-based approach to to governance or sorry to to ins security that yeah yeah somebody who asked on I don't know if we want to cover this now but somebody asked about the subset problem on Twitter um let's talk about the subset problem let's let's go through it yeah okay cool we're going to get really technical here a lot of interchange Securities design was driven off of that um and so um that that's uh yeah so I'll

get into it so basically the subset problem was something that I sort of noticed uh a long time ago um when we were first you know first working on interchange security and um basically I was I was I was thinking cuz we actually originally were going to have a b opt in like what we're about to release was supposed to be the original version or maybe the the replicated security was just supposed to be you know a prototype or something where it's the whole validator set but I realized at some point hey what happens if you have 10 small validators let's just say really small ones at the bottom of the set they might have you know point I don't know they might have like a tenth of a percent each right and they total up to only 1% of the power and they're opted

in a consumer chain and then you have a validator with 2% of the power opt in they're from you know higher up maybe in the middle of the set around 2% I it's pretty high actually but so larger validator that comes in immediately that large validator has two-thirds of the power on the chain and the validators on any any chain any Cosmos chain or any really any any blockchain at all any proof of stake chain at least uh if you have two-thirds of the power you control the chain so I was like man what's how what what about that what do we do there and the uh the thing is what you you know some of the original earlier you know some of the suggestions actually stuff we're putting into play now though actually but like some of the suggestions were like you know from people I was working with were

like well let's just uh you know make it so that you limit the power so no validator can have more than 25% on a consumer chain or you know different things like that or you can't have them join too quickly if they if they join their power ramps up over time so it doesn't immediately take over stuff like that and so that stuff I think practically does work does probably work pretty well um but it's also kind of the it's the kind of thing where it's always possible to kind of um for validators to break up their state so for one large validator to appear as several small ones you can see the extreme example of this in ethereum where they decided to not have things be centralized they wanted to limit it so you can only have 32 e staked so like every validator

needs to be very very small and they thought it was going to result in like everybody running validators in their bedroom or whatever um what really happened was that everybody used liquid staking Services who each run thousands and thousands and thousands of separate validators on ethereum and so um yeah that is yeah so so that kind of makes it so that um you know uh even if you try to limit the power of validators you you can't really do it because um because they can always break it up so anyway um digging deeper into that the sub that that's what I call the subset problem is like well if you have the subset then they open themselves up to kind of being being taken over and to put a finer point on that we've kind of Evol as we've evolved our understanding and

stuff what they the understanding like my understanding of that is now is actually more that the issue at play there is the fact that there are some things you can slash for and some things you can't slash for so you can slash for double signing that's what interchange security slashes for um and a native Cosmos you know regular proof of stake chain independent Standalone proof St chain also slashes for double signing you can you'll soon be able to slash for or at least completely prohibit like what I call incor execution which is uh where you like make money out of thin air or something like that to break the rules of the protocol Lely um that will be something with ZK proofs and fraud proofs that can be prevented um but then there's still stuff like for instance

you can't it's very hard to slash for like downtime actually uh for liveness the downtime slashing we have is actually more of just to keep honest people honest it's not if you if you really want to stop a chain you can do it with without being slashed and there's actually doesn't seem to be any cryptographic way to even prove it um to to a protocol so basically the issue out play is that if you are um is that Standalone chains are kept secure a lot through basically their through economic alignment so if you're an osmosis validator you don't even if you could attack osmosis and not be slashed for by the protocol you would still lose a bunch of money um if you were successful because you got a bunch of token staked

so it's like it's almost like you're being slashed by the market right and so with reaking you lose that because it's a different token being stake now there's a lot of other benefits that come with it of course but you it's not necessar it's not the same same exact token right and then also um the other thing is if you have so if you have a replicated security where you have the entire validator set validating every consumer chain if they do something wrong in that consumer chain it still is like they're still G to be slashed by the market you know so if like the entire validator set of the cosmos Hub you know screws up Neutron and makes money out of thin a on Neutron like the atom is gonna tank and those validators are going to lose a lot of money because they're economically aligned with atom

whereas if you have like one validator that's running one consumer chain do something bad it's not as clear of a it's not as clear of a boundary and so in the in the in the in the past year past year and a half or so U one thing that's happened is that a lot of other reaking protocols have come out and they've largely ignored this and so to to stay competitive I mean we kind of have to give we kind of have to give the people what they want and we have to make it up to you know up to Consumer chains to decide you know to decide what what they want their guarantees to be and and allow them to launch in the way that they want um without necessarily having everything be like where we know it's like the maximum security the other

thing that we're going to be bringing in with partial set security is fraud votes um so this is going to be something that consumer chains can choose to activate and that basically makes it so that validators validating on one of these chains can be slashed by governance proposal and so that is able to slash things where it's hard to slash in protocol so stuff like liveness attacks or incorrect execution will be slash by a vote which which is kind of replicates the mechanism of being slashed by the market in the Standalone chain where you're just economically aligned except for the fact that now you don't have to have every you know every validator having some of that token you can leave it up to governance to to slash uh to slash validator so I think it's still an ongoing um an ongoing area of research

this kind of stuff and it's it's a it's an issue that faces pretty much all reaking um it's something I you know I'm continuing to research and write about and also talk with you know people at Ian L and stuff about and Babylon and and we're all figuring out together but I think the fraud votes are pretty good are pretty good uh way to remedy it and then also just you know um partial set security is kind of about opening it up and giving consumer chains the choice to launch how they want and and make the you know make the security choices that they want that's kind of the philosophy okay I'm beginning get to get a picture of what this looks like and I think you you mentioned earlier that uh validators who are not in the active set of the Hub are also going to be able to participate

in in partial set security that's right yeah not in the first version so the code we're doing now it is only in the active set that's a lot easier um there's a lot of details around bonding and unbonding but that's definitely something we we we should be able to put in with with some effort depending how we prioritize it um okay so then if you're so so if you're an app chain I'm I'm just trying to sort of like understand the calculus here like if you're a new app chain let's say like dydx or some other you know big Vision chain a a frontier chain you know as we put it earlier that wants to build an a cosmos K chain and like be secured by by validators like there's now like two ways that they can do that they can go out and do a validator road show like

call up all their all their VCS and all their VC's friends and all the valers in the space and like run uh incentivized test net and sort of do that work themselves to get valid to come on board or they can go to the cosmos Hub which presumably now that there's partial set security and that there is this Marketplace like validators will be incentivized to also participate in uh Cosmos sub staking even if they're not in the active set because they're going to have access to like a pipeline of chains that are uh are choosing to to be stake there so so basically the old way to do it which is just to do this validated Road Show and try to incentivize people to come on your chain doesn't really make sense anymore if the

cosmos Hub is able to attract you know the majority of Val in the space because it'll be like sort of this direct pipeline essentially you know this Marketplace that we we talked about ear uh where you have this direct pipeline to validators and and a sort of streamline way to onboard those valers onto your chain like it is is that right or is there still an argument for doing it kind of the old way um I you know I think that there's there's always going to be people who want to take the cosmos technology and customize it to a huge extent and build their own validator sets and and that's not something um I I don't think I think there's always going to be something people want to do but I think that for the majority of chains for smaller

projects uh leaner teams I think that they that you know will become very big you know someday I think that there's a lot of utility in having a place to launch and like a one a way a way to do it basically like just like the best way to launch um and I remember when I was um you know I remember when I was uh you know in it was like maybe 2018 or 19 I wasn't really involved in in Cosmos to a big extent but I I went to a cosmos hackathon and I built a hackathon project and then it was almost a little bit like anticlimactic you know because like you you go to an ethereum hackathon and you know they're like oh yeah now just hit the deploy button and now it's live on ethereum you know and you know it's like pretty exciting with Cosmos

it's like you know they they were like uh I I think it was like you know jquan and like Ethan there and stuff and they're like okay guys now you can just you know run this one validator on your own computer and you can see how your chain Works um but yeah of course if you don't have a real chain you have to find these other validators and I was like what what where it's just on my computer now where is when's it going to go live you know it is live so I think that's something that on your computer yeah it's live on one one computer yeah um so so I think that's something that's that's been a little bit of a puzzle for for projects especially projects coming from other ecosystems um for a long time with Cosmos is is you know like what

what now um and so with with interchain security what we want to do is give these projects like the best way to launch their Cosmos chain so like sure you go out find your own validators that might be a good fit for some uh very large prominent projects um but for most projects um it's going to be easiest to just permissionless put a transaction on the Hub validators start coming in the chain starts running um that's kind of what we're going for to make it the best place to launch a c a chain no that's cool and and I think I want to now take a little bit of a zoom out a little bit because I I I read in one of your posts on the Hub Forum uh about uh Babylon you said something I'm paraphrasing here to the effect of that you you hope that the

Hub will become an aggregator of security and that this really this really um kind of stuck out at me as like a New Concept that I hadn't heard before now of course like this was in the context of talking about bringing Bitcoin to SEC Bitcoin security to the hub uh can you expand on what the what's the kind of end game here in terms of bringing other sources of security to the hub and augmenting the existing validator set yeah I think um so we don't want to augment the valid well yes I guess it's augmenting the validator we don't want to bring more validators valid obvious more Val can join the Hub anytime but it's like augmenting the security yeah yeah augmenting the security yeah so so you know like I was

saying like the the the goal here the Northstar is to provide the best place you know or the best way to launch a chain right and so everything else is in service of that um and you know chains don't necessarily care about like what's the most security or whatever um you know they certainly do care about it to some extent but it's like a lot of times it's like how do we get launched um how do we get launched with with enough security um and then also there's also you know alignment so sometimes like there's a lot of a lot of people building what are effectively you know Cosmos chains but they're calling them Bitcoin l2s um because you know they want to be aligned with with Bitcoin and do things for the Bitcoin community so

um I think in service to that goal of like it being the best the best way to launch a chain that means that we don't want to limit it and say it can only be secured by atom you know we want it we want we want you to be able to launch a chain secured by anything on the cosmos Hub so that's what the you know that's what the Babylon um partnership uh is is about um is kind of bringing additional sources of security in and we're also working on bringing other assets in it's actually going to be kind of pretty much the same code to bring the Bitcoin Security in as it is going to be for for any other asset as well so that's kind of uh will definitely Bitcoin will be first but we're going to open you know we're going to we're going to be adding

more security sources uh you know as quickly as we can so what's what's interesting about it the way it interplays with the validator set is basically the validator who is secured by so so people staking on these different platforms so let's say Adam you know so with with staking out of natively on the Hub and then also let's say with staking Bitcoin on on bitcoin which Babylon allows a validator power is going to be made up of the security from everybody who delegates that validator no matter where they're delegating from so if uh I don't know let's say uh what's a good example let's say um you know sg1 sg1 has some number of atom delegations and they have some number of Bitcoin delegations um they're going to take that power and that

security to any consumer chain that they choose to to validate on what's a bitcoin delegation oh okay that's just well okay I want to get off on the tangent too much but we we can talk more about Babylon basically Babylon yeah yeah here it Bears sort of unpacking what a Bitcoin delegation is because I've never heard that term in my life um yeah so Balon allows um people to basically stake uh on on bitcoin um so they they've they've come up with some novel cryptography uh to basically let you lock your Bitcoins up directly on the Bitcoin blockchain and have that um Power good towards validators on proof of stake chains um on on the cosmos Hub and um the the Bitcoins also

they get slashed if there's double signing so it's it's kind of they they put together the package of Delegation and slashing um and rewards so it's basically like you could you could be delegating adom on the cosmos Hub or you could be delegating Bitcoin on on the Bitcoin Network um and that those are those are the you know the source of security I'm talking about aggregating here although we want to add other ones but yeah just to clear that up okay but what I was going to say about the validators yeah is that validators who we can do more of a deep dive on that too if you want but I was just to finish the thought validators let's say sg-1's power will come from the atom delegations and the Bitcoin delegations and so there's kind of a that's where the security aggregation comes in it's like you're

kind of creating almost like this effect where the more that people are trying to stake on like any chain that's running on the cosmos Hub the more security also goes towards other chains at the same time too um and so there's this flywheel effect and that's what you know talking about for for for security aggregation um so you you know you might have let's say sg1 is is is you know validating on the cosmos Hub on stride on Neutron and also on uh you know let's say some some kind of Bitcoin L2 Bitcoin people from Bitcoin are delegating because they want to earn rewards in that Bitcoin L2 from sg1 sg-1's power now is actually going to be increased everywhere it's

validating uh you know within the within the cosmos Hub system so that's the security concept okay and yeah I regarding security I I think it's becoming clear that security is is on the way to becoming commoditized um you we we hor we hosted this this event in uh in Denver uh called we called it convergence and it was sort of a panel about the convergence of Cosmos and ethereum and really to me the the the takeaway there is that what that means is that security ethereum security is becoming commoditized application uh the the the cosmos SDK framework and IBC are going to be leveraging commoditized security

to build applications and that interoperate with each other H and that the so the end game is the swarm of validators that's that's proving lots of different applications across this you know massive kind of state machine how does the Hop compete in in this you know commoditized security landscape and how does it uh differentiate itself from I mean at least in the short term with uh with the likes of Igan Lair and uh polygon V2 and some of the other reaking projects out there yeah I think the key is in in this landscape is that you don't want to just be a middleman um you don't want to be a

middleman between an asset and the thing it's securing um because middle are going to get cut out and so you know you need to be providing value I think uh you you know the the the real so the real thing like like even with Igan layer let's say the real thing is the the ethereum that's being used to secure that that's where the value is going is to people who are actually staking their assets and anything that's kind of going between you know is is is in the is in the pipeline between the staked asset and then the system is securing ultimately needs to be providing value um and so the way we want to do that with a cosmos Hub is by having this by focusing on this thing about where it's the best the best way to launch a chain um and I think ultimately that's more

important that you have that you bring all these chains together versus kind of offering any one particular kind of security and like I said there's the flywheel effects with where the validator set getting more security from other sources makes it even stronger so that's kind of what we're focusing on is is is adding value by making things easier for chains versus just saying like hey we have this source of security that we're bringing and that's definitely a shift too I mean I think when we started on interchain security we were in the mindset of just you know let's let's bring atom's security to other chains but as as it's becoming more and more commoditized you know we're figuring out how to how to act as as a point within that ecosystem where people can um you know kind of come

around this point and and um you know create a flywheel effect and aggregate security so maybe just taking the other side here I want to talk a little bit about ethos now of course ethos is not live yet it it's still sort of in stealth there's been some information about like what ethos is building and Ethos is this this Igan L vs that will enable Cosmos s g chains to leverage ethereum security and I think like ethos positions itself at least not explicitly but implicitly as as a competitor to the hub where applications can leverage you know all of the restake eth in igen Lair for for security you know if you're an app chain like all right you have different

options for securing your chain you might build your inv valid a set but if that's out of your out of bound like sort of Out Of Reach for you you might go to ad you might go to Cosmos you might say hey like I'm fully I I want to be aligned with ethereum because that's where there is the most security uh and that's where there's the most economic value in terms of Defi and you know liquidity maybe you borrowing Bitcoin like May Bitcoin sort of Falls outside of that at least for now why would it change pick the cosmos Hub over uh ethereum and the entire sort of ecosystem the evm ecosystem and all of the rollups and all the liquidity and applications being built there yeah I think well like I said I think you know um launching an launching a an app chain

launching a cosmos chain is the most powerful way to build a blockchain application um it's not necessarily right for every project I mean some project will be better on rollup or or a smart contract directly on ethereum so as far as like you know the cosmos Hub versus anyone else um we are we're going to be adding an IG AVS as well um it's actually pretty much the same at least on the cosmos side it's kind of the same thing you need to do to bring Bitcoin security and bring m security in so I think we we don't want to just be like a middleman we don't want to just be like an IG middleman and just saying hey you know here's how you uh you know here here we're offering you this IG security we we want to we want to aggregate multiple source of security uh you know

obviously the atom which already is you know very very large source security but then also Bitcoin and ethereum and kind of um let people benefit from a validator set that's secured by all these things um versus just kind of acting as a middleman uh for for one of them um another thing we want to do is actually when we do this IG layer AVS you kind of need an AVS it's I it's a ethereum contract on the ethereum side and then you need like an oracle to be able to read it to get the security in when we do that work we actually even want to open source it um because I think that if if a chain just wants ethereum security should just go direct to ethereum they should set up their own IG layer ABS um so I think just kind of just kind of sticking on one one source

of security and putting ourselves in as a middleman is not what we're really shooting for we're trying to aggregate a lot of different security and bring it together with a battle test of validator set Innovative streaming consumer chains and be the best the best way to launch a chain so that's kind of uh our our Focus I can't speak for anybody else but yeah yeah no I think it makes sense um one of the topics uh on the Chanel in Denver was uh alignment so we talked a lot about what what ethereum alignment means and what Cosmos alignment means and the question was like is there such a thing as cosmos alignment I think the the prevailing takeaway was that Cosmos alignment is not so much about aligning with an asset as it is maybe in ethereum

but uh aligning with a technology and and specifically with IBC right so like Cosmos alignment means means uh being part of the IBC network does that resonate with you or do you see Cosmos alignment as something different no I think that resonates with me I think that you know I think that a lot of stuff around alignment in the crypto ecosystem is kind of BS and I actually find it refreshing in Cosmos that is like about like hey what can we build what technologies can we use um a lot of times being aligned with with an asset it means that you want to be like we want to support that we certainly want to support that with a cosmos Hub don't get me wrong but I think it's like a lot of times there's a lot of stuff

that's that's that's done where it's kind of you you want to you want to kind of like make people like you based on you know what what you know what community you choose to align with versus like trying to build the the most useful thing I think in Cosmos it's great that we have we have a lot of teams that are you know just trying to use the technology to to build the most useful thing they can without it being like about trying to choose a particular tribe or or whatever um and so with the cosmos Hub with interchange security we want to always what what we do we want to facilitate that we want to build something useful where you can use the security you want get it from where you want uh and kind of have it set up in the way you want versus uh trying to say

hey I'm I'm part of this this tribe or or whatever yeah the I think what what we had concluded in the panel was that alignment is a bare Market coping me mechanism and that whenever whenever the bull market comes around like alignment just gets thrown out the window because you know there's so so many opportunities and uh incentives to you know put your liquidity towards like things that might not be aligned with your initial thesis and uh so I thought that's was kind of funny anyway I'll put the link in the show notes for people who are interested in uh reading the recap of the panel and re and rewatching the panel because it's also on on on YouTube so yeah what's the end game here like you know looking now the Hub is 5 years old uh and you know I wish the Hub

many more years and I you I hope that we're still all holding Adam in five years from now what's the the endgame for the Hub in your view uh yeah I think the Hub does more like you said those uh you know also you know atom wars and and also you know Atomic IBC and and rollup related stuff which we'll have to cover later and maybe we'll have to get you back on we'll have to come you'll have to come back with that yeah but I will say as far as interchange security goes the end game is like it's I want to create you know what's been what's been missing which is like hey I've built this I've used is powerful technology I've built this powerful blockchain uh but it's only running on my computer I want to I want to provide people a way

where it's just like the best way to launch it like there's other ways to launch it sure you can't you can't put together your own validator set and that's always something that some people will choose but I want this to be just kind of the best way if you're just trying to get your project out get it launched get it secured by a lot of security and you know get moving so that's kind of uh that's kind of what we're shooting for great Johan thanks so much for coming on today it's been really really fun chatting and uh looking forward to getting you back on to to cover all the things that I have here in my in my rundown that we didn't get to cover yeah cool good talking cheers