Episode 207: Journey Through the Cosmos Ecosystem with Billy Rennekamp

Transcript

[Music] welcome to xero knowledge i'm your host anna rose in this podcast we will be exploring the latest in zero knowledge research and the decentralized web as well as new paradigms that promise to change the way we interact and transact online this week i chat with billy renikamp who works as the cosmos hub lead at interchain foundation we catch up about his early work on the clover's network nft project and how that framed the directions he took within the space we talk about his work at the icf and within the cosmos ecosystem interchange

security and other emerging paradigms in this network before we start in i want to tell you about three things happening in the zk space this month first off the zk hack is happening right now if you haven't yet checked it out please head over it's a seven week long event and there's still a few sessions to go also if you're looking to get into the space professionally we are hosting our fifth zk job fair happening on december 2nd there we will be featuring some top hiring talent it's hosted on gather.town which is a virtual space it's quite casual it's quite fun it's a great way to meet potential hiring teams as you're applying for the job you may also in the meantime want to check out the zk jobs board where you

can find ads from top teams looking to hire the last thing i want to tell you about is an upcoming git coin side grant focused on zk tools this is happening during the next clr matching round on git coin this starts at the beginning of december and this matching round is designed to support emerging zk projects tools and contributors like all git coin grants it uses quadratic voting to determine which grants receive which proportion of the matching funds this matching round was funded by the zk validator aztec alio dusk and diversify and possibly some additional contributors by the time this airs if you have a zk project or want to start one this would be a great way to get some early funding you can already launch a grant over on git coin and if

you meet the criteria you can add your grant to the zk focused side round if you want to support zktec this would also be a great way for you to do so i've added the link to all of these things in the show notes be sure to check them out sign up and look for the git coin grant now i want to say thank you to this week's sponsor c-labs c-labs works on building cello cello is a mobile-first platform that makes financial dapps and crypto payments accessible to anyone with a phone this mobile-first approach with a snark-based light client with full node incentives and gas payable in erc20 tokens will allow crypto payments and d5 tools to reach the six billion smartphones on earth cello's interoperability and full evm compatibility makes it easy to start building dapps that reach global users

across devices carriers and countries if you're interested in jumping in join sello's vibrant ecosystem that is attracting thousands of developers and projects from around the world visit cello.org to learn more so thanks again sealabs now here's my conversation with billy renikamp so today i'm here with billy renikamp cosmos hub lead at the interchain foundation welcome to the show billy thank you very much for having me billy let's first learn about your general areas of focus what do you work on care about think about yeah i'm kind of like a kid in a candy shop in the crypto space so i've touched on a lot of different topics over the years right now my focus is on the cosmos hub cosmos ecosystem ibc

the different technologies that especially improve the ux of using blockchains within that space but over the years i've been especially excited about nfts and different automatic market makers i was really involved in early bonding curve work um so it's brought me all over the space cool what were you doing early on that early like bonding curve where was that which project it came out of project called clover's network which got me into the space i have a background in art and actually i was building clover's network as an artwork uh beginning like in 2012 even and sort of like oh i i this is a crazy idea like maybe i could incentivize people to do these sorts of things at one point i was like oh my god that's what a blockchain is and so i sort of looked into trying to build it on top of bitcoin back in like

2014-15 i was like this sucks so i kind of played around with the centralized version of it over a couple years and then when i saw an ethereum smart contract i was like oh i can finally put this on a blockchain clovers you just mentioned clovers is an nft project is it still around today it is um on the immutable blockchain ethereum got it uh i did like the first mvp 2017 but didn't go to mainnet until 2019 and yeah it became this vehicle for all of the most exciting shiny objects across the space for me that's wild so your entry point was an nft like a proto nft art project that made you kind of discover blockchain generally were you were you aware of ethereum as it was launching or

had you sort of like tested the water with bitcoin and then bounced out tested well with bitcoin i ran a dogecoin miner for a little bit okay kind of sold all of that at the bottom of a market bought like a couple ether you know when it was like brand new but it honestly didn't understand what it was at that time it wasn't until i like saw a smart contract and i was able to be like oh that it all clicked in 2017 or so okay but by 2017 were you thinking uh this could exist like clovers could exist in ethereum uh no no i mean i was going through the logic of colored coins for the first version of it you know where you basically embed logic into a bitcoin transaction and you process it off the chain and i was like this sucks

and i didn't understand what ethereum was at that point uh and how it you know really fixed that problem um i thought that you know that problem wasn't solved i didn't give it nearly enough time i guess and then sort of pissed off to have fun in berlin for a few years partying okay so you were not working blockchain when you first moved to berlin i mean i you know was uh had an art practice had a studio practice was exhibiting and selling work in galleries across europe and america and was always using technology as uh input to that work and so i was dabbling here and there and software literate you know a bit of a hacker sometimes doing some like web dev work on the side um but mostly just living the good life in berlin nice okay tell me about your your role like your road into the space

actually like that sounds like some pre interest curiosity playing around but like what really sucked you in so i mean 2017 we're we're building up into like a new hype cycle and i finally like realized what's possible i actually get a knee injury and so i'm stuck in my kitchen for that summer and i decided to like learn solidity by trying to reprogram clover's network in solidity with like the most gas and efficient system in the world you're basically doing proof-of-work validation on-chain in a smart contract which is bad time um oh yeah because clover this nft it's different right it's not just the erc721 it was before that i called it a unique digital asset a uda and um in the middle of me making it cryptopunx launched and

i was like see this is real like people want unique digital assets and then there was a cosmos hackathon coming up and i looked at the first cosmos heck adam there was this huge prize pool and like four participants what and i was like all right this is easy pickings um i had some friends that i'd done a couple hackathons before just kind of fun stuff so i used that to convince them to build the first version of clover's out with me the front end and uh the reason we were able to justify it as part of cosmos network is because the validation took so much gas it just would never be possible on maintenance ethereum gas costs were still low then but just the uh the block limit was like 7 million gas and at that point it was like 19 million gas to validate a clover i

mean we went through crazy efficiencies that was a big part of the learning experience and solidity was just like how do you write efficient code what are the mechanisms to move validation off chain what are the schemes and things like that which was a real fun part of building clovers but we actually all went to toronto into the woods and spent like two weeks building out clovers network and then launched it and won that cosmos hack atom and that set me on a journey of going to i guess i won six hackathons in six months whoa and then did a hacker in residence with l4 in toronto where cosmos was sharing an office they were just opening up full note in berlin and so i was like i want to be in full node so i took a front-end job uh part-time with uh tendermint inc okay and then

started doing freelance work for different ethereum projects like gnosis and aragon i didn't know you worked for all of those teams i have seen you at node for many years but i didn't know what you were doing there um who's we you kind of mentioned this we was there a team that you'd that it's like originally formed around clover yeah we called ourselves uh ben studio um we're pretty loosely affiliated we don't actually have like a legal entity or something like that we're friends we shared a studio for many years alan wu nick's court and everett williams uh everett williams is actually my roommate cool are they still building clovers it's like what happened to that group basically yeah um so everybody had sort of freelance gigs uh doing full stack web development and everybody was getting excited about crypto the same time but freelance web dev life you

actually just have tons of work all the time and it's kind of hard to say no so we were never able to like fully get organized into like a company but we certainly overlapped on a lot of projects together and clovers was the biggest one and so we really banded together especially through 2019 up to the launch and you know continue to have a studio do other projects together everett i still work together with on folio.app which is a nft gallery like a very tightly curated gallery so i mean most of this episode is actually going to be focused on your work in the cosmos ecosystem but i don't want to skip into that yet because i'm kind of curious about like let's talk about folio let's also talk about like what is clovers now like you know you launched this you're thinking about building it 2017

it went on mainnet in 2019 you said is it still a thing or is it too expensive to use or like what's the what's the kind of a thing i mean it's not ethereum so it's not stopped to any degree ever and i spent a lot of 2018 and 2019 working with cad cad the simulation framework for token engineering and actually this goes back to your very first question about like bonding curves you know i got into bonding curves because i wanted to launch this project but i didn't want to give a bunch of people a token that they couldn't trade anywhere and when i heard that you could launch kind of a decentralized exchange that gave liquidity to a brand new token i was like hell yeah i need this so i went through all of the early sort of stuff that simon dale ruvier was writing about

and sort of starting to tweak those and work on my own versions of it bancor was kind of the go-to implementation to sort of use i got really really familiar with that protocol how to adjust it for different needs you know bankroll was using it in a pretty square way and it turns out that there's a lot of different ways to modify it and use it for really exciting stuff slava belazanova was a big part of working together with that he's actually an old old friend from new york it's like a dj and we know each other from the art music scene what's his role now he runs relevant network and does a few different d5 projects and uh some engineering inside the cosmos space as well um okay and then clover today yeah so sorry uh was working with cad cad to to do these simulations like all right i

built this extremely complicated token economic system with multiple participants that have multiple desires there's like actions for incentives here and there how do i know that this is going to work to any degree and that gave me the ability to sort of build it out in a simulation model create different like actors with their own sort of incentives and then run massive massive simulations over to see how it works and that included you know different pricing mechanisms different like rarity metrics as well as gas costs but i never incorporated gas costs getting as high as they immediately did when we launched in summer 2019 during the east berlin hackathon and it was great we were the number one gas guzzler on ethereum for a couple weeks in a row um i think there's something like 40 000 clovers which have been minted you know

it's this massive number which is also totally antagonistic to the degen mentality of nfts where it's like wait a minute there's like potentially unlimited number of these like hell no but they still have rarity right there's a way that there's value yeah yeah yeah it's it's a i mean it's it's an art project you know you get into it it gets esoteric and things like that and i rethought it a couple times like do i want to make this like a product market fit project or like do i want to make this an artwork and i was like it's an artwork i need to like stay true to that so it's going to be a little bit obtuse it's not going to be easy to swallow but after the gas costs went really really crazy uh it invalidated tons of the simulations i'd done and so that's when

i was actually like oh this is a fundamental problem with ethereum and uh if i were to like really build this in the way it needs to be built i would use cosmos technology and cosmos hadn't launched ibc at that point you know there's a lot of sort of core work that needed to be done and i've been working closer and closer with the organization over the years since i began as a front-end engineer started doing developer relations just because i had such good connections to the ethereum community and i was like all right the best use of my time is to make cosmos tech work so that it can be at a point that i would choose this tech to launch clovers if i were to do it again and you know whatever time period and i've kind of put clovers in that box you know wait

until i'm ready to rebuild it and relaunch it in a successful way very cool let's now move a little bit into cosmos because cosmos would need then a smart contract platform within it and when you were doing it like it was just the base chain the atom chain well there was a cosmos hub okay there was already ethernet then when i did that hackathon i justified it by using ethernet because you can adjust all the parameters you can launch your own proof of stake chain with an evm module so it's like cool i'll have an evm chain and i can have 19 million gas per block for clover's network to work but yeah in general it's about building custom modules rather than uh shared state virtual machines okay but yeah like what i what i was going to say though is like now and i realized yes ether mint

was around but it was like test net form right it wasn't like went through many iterations and now we're seeing a lot of these zones come online with ibc making it i mean i know some of the zones have already been here but like now it's the cosmos vision is being realized what would that mean like do you still plan on running clovers on ether mint and then bridging to other things like what would that mean for that project like the new kind of cosmos that exists and almost exist today because it does exist today but it's still growing up it's one of the product stories that we we like to talk about with ether mint um you know when attracting projects which originally built in ethereum like rather than having to re-implement everything and golang you know why don't you just drop it into an evm on a cosmos chain you get

all the benefits of cosmos and you don't have to rewrite everything there are limitations to the evm beyond being run on like ethereum let's say yeah so i think the long term path is to you know redeploy rewrite it and go but if you want to like hit the ground running then you can just drop everything inside the evm and start like that and then work out a timeline to when you would transition okay so i might do that i also just like the experience of working in go so it might be like a like i said this project clovers has been a vehicle for me to like onboard new skills so many times so cool so you want to do would you need to learn go because you built it in solidity i guess i did a bit of go development uh inside of tenement

inc when i was being a developer relations engineer there and so i'm i'm legible and i'm familiar with how the cosmos sdq works pretty intimately but i haven't had to do too much actual you know production code engineering so it would be nice to spend some time back in the ide that way very cool so we're actually speaking here at the cosmo verse conference community conference um here in lisbon so it's it's really cool by the way i think this is one of the first in-person interviews i've gotten to do in a really long time i love it so you know we're here we're actually learning i mean for me it's been fantastic to see a lot of the projects that i have known about but really in the virtual world come together and like be corporeal like having the people behind it standing in front of the

banners of that project and being like oh i've heard of that one oh i've heard of this one and this is a really exciting moment i think for cosmos the cosmo first especially because because of like ibc having been launched during quarantine right it was like we right yeah it was like we didn't actually get a chance this is the first time i think that like a lot of people who are now bridging to each other's chains actually get a chance to meet why don't you give me a quick from your perspective like what is cosmos right now how what's the vibe what's the feeling um i like to give you know people overuse this metaphor probably in the crypto space but like um the launch of the internet or something like that and uh you know before tcp and the internet you had a bunch of personal computers

and garages and like maybe if you were lucky you know they started rolling out ethernet cables between them you know i mean you'd have land parties basically you could do that but it wasn't feasible between say houses and we're at the moment where we're just getting like internet access and so it's small you know it's like darpanet almost there's just like you can count the number of computers that are on the internet at this point um and it's really exciting because that number is growing like faster and faster every day new networks are joining they're enabling ibc they're starting to participate in this internet of blockchain so it's like so validating too to like finally see this happen and like feel like you're hitting product market fit you know we have this thesis of application specific blockchains make sense for scalability sovereignty they require some more work

but people are going to want it and to be able to see like all these people who put in work over the years finally like flip things on and just start sort of having compounding value is really exciting that's cool what do you think if there was some like update or something really significantly different in the ecosystem today maybe versus a year and a half ago what is it like maybe some projects that have really emerged as like important or some concepts that are much more talked about today um i think relayers are probably something that is is recognized as being so important today that you know even a year ago was is not an afterthought but just not a priority compared to just like implementing core ibc uh at the state machine level maybe

we should actually define what a relayer is and maybe even very quickly what ibc does because i think my audience might know this but if they don't we often talk about ibc as the internet of blockchain equivalent of tcpip which is the packet protocol that moves data between computers and really makes up what the internet is and so if you think of a blockchain as a computer then ibc will gather outgoing information put it in a standardized packet like a shipping container and then it gets moved over to the destination chain and so the relay is who actually moves it over so you can think of them as a bit like the internet service providers they're the ones who are actually connecting the tcp packets and making sure that they get sent to the proper destination and then on the other side of that you know they're able

to unwrap that packet they speak tcp they parse the data inside and they do something useful with it and inside of those you've got other protocols like http you've got smtp for emails and that's what the ibc protocol level application logic is like the only one that's live right now is token transfers but you can write as many of these as you want and sort of enables uh massive aspects of like uh processing communication between these applications what other things could it be like i guess it's information so could it be kind of an action on one chain and some some part of that is communicated through but it isn't necessarily a token transfer yeah what other kind of stuff i mean arbitrary data is usually you know the term that people talk about so that means anything that you want but um if we're getting

concrete the the next packet type that we'll see go live is called interchain accounts and without interchange accounts you would probably start iterating through all the different types of messages that one blockchain can process so a transfer message you know many blockchains can process and that's what the first ibc is it's an ibc transfer you could imagine oh i want to vote between blockchains so maybe i'll put a vote uh ibc packet so then you send it through one blockchain and then it's able to hit the destination they unwrap it like oh this is a vote and it's from this person and then it's yes on proposal whatever but if you were going to do that you'd have to write a new ibc standard for each message type that you want to communicate across blockchains so entertain accounts really accelerates

this capability entertain accounts is essentially a standard packet that accepts an arbitrary message so that means that ibc doesn't need to know what kind of message it is it means that it assumes the destination chain will be able to parse whatever message so it's it's sort of a layer of abstraction above the message itself for ibc so you could put a vote message inside of it this is a vote exactly and then on the other chain it's recognized like some some indicator says this is a vote but the actual ibc it doesn't really care what's in it exactly ibc says is it a message you know it's able to just confirm that it's a message whereas it has no idea what type of message what the information inside of it is whereas at the transfer version you know ibc itself says hey tell me who it's from

tell me who it's two tell me how many and tell me what the type of token it is and in this it's just like hey give me the message and tell me the destination i don't need to know what's inside of it how would those standards actually be decided upon though like is that something that just two two networks two zones will have to agree on every time they want to send these things back and forth this is a vote when i say number four i mean vote something like or is this something that you'd see as like an ecosystem-wide standard it's an ecosystem-wide standard the token transfer i think is ics-20 okay and entertain accounts i believe is ics 21 there's one for nfts which is going to be i think ics 30. the numbering system is a little strange but yeah it follows a similar sort of eip

process interesting but nfts would have their own yeah i mean you could have an nft transfer inside of entertain accounts but i think there's there's some justification for having it as a standard itself will that affect the way that these things have to be built on the chains themselves like will they have to follow a standard like use the nft example i mean in ethereum there is there are standards but early versions of nfts were built differently but they still did the same thing roughly so yeah like would each zone need to adhere to an nft standard in order to use this nft like i'm just curious does this make for like inevitable standardization maybe for efficiency reasons yeah i mean it's the same with computers so if i sent you know an smtp packet over tcp to a

computer and you know they didn't have proper like mail software to understand or read what smtp is then it would break yeah so it's in their interest to you know get on board with the uh application level standards is this something that would go through the governance of the hub or like how do the standards get fixed um they're essentially modules so ibc is a module but it doesn't have any messages which can be sent directly to it one way to think about the cosm sdk module system at least comparing it to ethereum is like a method or a smart contract let's say is a module and that smart contract can have multiple methods that can be executed and cosmos those methods don't all go into the same message type which is i think eth call

each one gets its own message type and so the ibc core module doesn't have any messages that are submitted directly to it it's more like a helper module so there's a transfer ibc module which imports ibc uses that module to sort of confirm hey this packet really came from where i said it is once that's been checked off then it's handed over to the actual like logic and then it says you know hey i'm going to use the bank module to make a new token that's a representation of the one that came from the other one so each of these are modules that get shipped inside of the ibc go repository and so if you don't want to have to implement it yourself for instance you would be able to do it there but if you're building somewhere outside the cosmos sdk and you want to interact with

an ibc packet that came from anywhere else you just need to make sure that your implementation deciphers it correctly it says okay this ibc packet's coming in it's been encoded like this i should expect here from here too and here at a mount and then it's up to me to like record that inside of my accounting system you know if i'm on ethereum at that point i would update the balance of this user inside of my smart contract rather than using the bank module could you almost do something creative where you like misinterpret something on purpose like you decide to like read an nft as a vote or something i would love to do that i mean this is the kind of stuff that gets me going but i don't have nearly enough time to spend on it interesting okay let's talk a little bit about your

role and i'm curious how i i mean i know you from this role of working at the icf the interchange foundation how long have you actually been have you been there since february of 2020. okay and this was was this when that was founded when it was formed it's founded in 2017 okay performed the fundraising event for uh cosmos network they raised 17 million in like 30 minutes um for a fundraising event and then they also received the bitcoin and ether from that and 10 of the atom of course everybody loves swiss foundations due to their uh fundraising events so that was the justification 10 percent of the token went to uh tendermint inc in order to do engineering and typically the

relationship was that tenement inc would do engineering work and build the icf and basically pay for the uh the work to happen over the years the scope of the project i mean didn't expand but i think people realized how large the scope of the project was and we started getting contributors from all different directions and the icf is basically the funding mechanism to work on all this open source tech and so it also at one point started building out its own research and development team headed by ethan buckman co-founder of the project he spun that out into a co-op called informal systems and around february 2020 right at the same time that there was a large group of engineers who left tenement inc moved directly into the foundation to start to continue core development especially on tendermint core and ibc um that's when i moved over there's also

interchain berlin which is different so it was was part of the engineering to the foundation and then to interchange berlin or was it split so interchained berlin uh is is entertaining gmbh which is a fully on subsidiary of the foundation um so for all intents and purposes it's it's part of the same you know organization the foundation has board of management and foundation council but but really there's not many people directly employed by the foundation so it's really just unemployment vehicle got it okay so your cosmos hub lead at the interchain foundation let's find out a little bit more about what that means you mentioned funding do you do you do development as well do you do research what kind of stuff are

you working on yeah so the last year i was primarily working as a grants manager so um making sure that all the different core organizations were able to you know get paid to work in the core tech but also help prioritize what was getting worked on by who what wasn't getting worked on was actually the biggest sort of piece of uh attention uh and that was a two-person team worked hand in hand with sam hart who's fantastic human being um absolute salute and uh it it ended up looking more and more almost like a product role for the cosmos hub you know because we're sort of like taking this extremely high level view across the entire ecosystem we're like all right what is cosmos what is the cosmos network you know it's it's way more than just the cosmos hub but certainly the cost must have in the

middle of it there's this organizing factor what are the directions what are the things that need to happen and um you know we we sort of built out a team that we called crud um which is you know the acronym from development create read update and delete and also sounds like the word crud which is great um but our whole thing was like all right we're scaffolding solutions right now and maybe a solution is that we can hire a new person or build a new team internally or maybe it's a grant or maybe it's you know funding an entire new organization what do we do to be able to like fill all the gaps that we can identify from this vantage point and so uh recently i'm transitioning sam is is leading that that effort directly i'm taking sort of the momentum that is much

more you know product focused in that capacity and focusing it on the cosmos hub especially interesting i'm kind of curious about this relationship icf cosmos hub because icf i understand is an organization that's there to sort of support and fund the larger cosmos network and that's different from the cosmos hub which is where adam lives the atom the token tell me a little bit about like your vision on that like do you see a cosmos ecosystem or do you feel like the mandate of the icf is to focus on that hub actually when i first joined i think there was this real sort of attitude of focusing on the tech for the success of the larger vision you know i mean that larger vision i think is really really

especially exciting and why we've had such talented people involved in the projects and so early you know we're focusing on building the cosmos sdk first instead of building the cosmos hub first you know that was a much more curious path to launching a blockchain but the point was so that other people would be able to block launch their blockchains much more easily but then the hub was the example like you were you were actually building the tech for the hub absolutely absolutely um but just thinking you know like we could have just built a golang implementation of a blockchain that wasn't you know reusable or modular for other people and you know i think that was is part of the exciting vision of the whole project is you know like we want there to be many many blockchains and so that was that was prioritized

and i think especially through the the duration of the beginning there was this real emphasis on the larger vision of the network and all the other projects and i think that we actually you know we can call that a success like we have this massive ecosystem with an accumulative market cap in the hundreds of billions and you know we hit product market fit with that that aspect um that doesn't mean though that the cosmos hub uh was completely left out of the scene or anything like that but i do think that if you're looking at this as sort of a pendulum that there is a re-emphasis on the cosmos of itself like it served a extremely important purpose by just being a proof of concept for you know cutting edge technology proof of stake the cosmos sdk and ibc but there's this really amazing opportunity for the

cosmos hub itself who's in the middle of this vibrant ecosystem to provide value across that ecosystem and so over the last year there's certainly been a re-emphasis on making the cosmos hub itself more valuable and participatory in the larger cosmos network so the foundation you know it has a pretty broad mandate about basically supporting the development of new technologies especially decentralized technologies especially around the cosmos network and so it also sort of depends on what your definition of cosmos network is you know i think we've gotten a lot of confusion around this maybe for better or worse but is the cosmos network the cosmos hub or is it the greater ibc ecosystem or is it the entire world of blockchains you know that is the internet of blockchains

or is it the cause anyone who's used the cosmos sdk because i know that's a big question it's like does binance which uses it count if they're not playing within it totally count them i mean again i like to think that everyone is a part of the cosmos network whether they realize it or not tell me what could the hub actually do to kind of add that value you just described yeah um i mean again i i would like to always reiterate that like the cosmos hub has served one of the most important purposes i think in any blockchain in the history just by being you know the first place to deploy this this extremely important technology that i think will change the paradigms and the success of blockchains in the long run so you know if it ends right there i will feel like satisfied and

accomplished but again like i said i think there's a huge opportunity to weigh more at its core the cosmos hub is a staking blockchain the atom is a staking token and i feel like that is one of the sort of strongest feature sets which is why recently i've gotten really excited about interchange security which we can dive into a little bit but that really opens up a lot of options in general though i like to think of the cosmos hub as almost like this vc in the middle of this new ecosystem with like you know how can i be helpful um and so do you think of that because of the like the community fund do you think of it because of like is it the funding part well it is the starting point at a technical level at a social level it's hey i'm interested in this

paradigm i'm interested in this ecosystem like how do i get started what do i do i looked at the cosmos hub for an example i looked at cosmos hub for validators i looked for cosmos hub for for validation of the different like economic models that i'm considering but i think there's a lot more that it can do and uh there's a vertical that we're building out right now uh that we call discoverability essentially if the cosmos hub is the starting point for the access to the internet of blockchains there's this real question especially at an infrastructure level for like how do you navigate that um you know it's actually a problem with every decentralized peer-to-peer network system is you know what is the node that i originally talked to to join this network to verify that i'm actually part of the right network you know there's

this uh chicken and egg problem with trust assumptions whenever joining peer-to-peer networks and the cosmos hub if it's the best known if it's the largest if it has the most access then it can be you know that starting point that point of trust that sort of allows you to explore from there and that's you know like i said no discovery but it's also things like chain ids so even verifying the blockchain you're talking to is the one that you think you're talking to really important when it comes to ibc packet routing is this similar to like indexing it's like this would be the library index in a way like the the place you start what do they used to call the thing the paper the rolodex or the rolodex yeah absolutely but even like asset registries you know when you're sort of like okay there's there's tons of these

tokens out here how do i like actually differentiate where they are in each space you've seen a lot of various degrees of centralized decentralized asset registries you know i think perry at one point tried to make like a smart contract which you know kept track of metadata for tokens that metamask was using for a while but couldn't keep up with even like uh method names with their ids was with some sort of attempt and and this also has to do with ibc packet routing multi-hop packets um asset lists chain ids it could even be name resolution for things like um ens which i recently realized you can register names on ethereum and delegate the registry to other blockchains so the cosmos hub could be an ethereum named service registry for a series of cosmos domains would there be a cosmos name service itself

or would you do you think that's not necessary there is one actually already it's called star name okay um and they use a different naming scheme but but that's very much the goal i think it's much closer to the address resolution system that you'd see in an ethereum name service as well but certainly this this sort of like aspect of discoverability i think faucet was especially well positioned to serve and there was a really great essay written earlier this year from co-founder of the project ethan buckman and sam hart who i mentioned working closely with the interchange foundation called cosmos hub as a port city and uh you know being a port city there's there's aspects that are really useful for you know all of the infrastructure and economics that come through them you know even you know if you if you compare it to like uh port airports you know you

don't have or sorry hub airports it's not that every airport connects to every airport you know it's much more convenient to to route through these hubs that are well connected and inside of them you know there's certainly there's conveniences you know there's restaurants and uh you can exchange money you may not get the best deal on that money because the convenience is sort of the trade-off you know whereas if you go to a banking town you know you have the most efficient sort of defy sorts of systems but there's different things that you can add to make it useful in the process of moving between this this interconnected sort of blockchain ecosystem and that's sort of the perspective that we've taken for the ways that the cosmos hub can be provided useful i remember like the first interview i ever did on the cosmos ecosystem was sunny and he totally

painted that picture of the airplane hubs and at the time it was like cosmos hub and iris but now what you kind of are starting to see is there there's like in in that time these hubs were quite similar like they were kind of doing the exact same purpose acting as these like hubs but now you're seeing things like osmosis also a project from sunny that is quite different in its use like it's not i don't i don't see it as like realizing the same role as the hub and yet it's becoming a hub of its own but kind of for different reasons so is that something that you're expecting to also see more of totally and i mean these sorts of paths they grow organically you know you can't like uh it's not like when the wright brothers

made an airplane they decided that there's going to be hubs and spokes and airports you know it happened pretty organically over the years and um it's way finding paths and it's its purposes but um it comes up like a dex hub basically and uh and for that capacity you know it makes a lot of sense and we've always sort of been a fan of multiple hubs as part of this interconnected system you mentioned iris earlier but even like you know game hubs things like that so you know inside of pockets you'd have a lot more sense to have a hub that connects to a bunch of smaller chains and then from that hub it could connect to other hubs for other different purposes i expect to see it grow organically in directions that you know we never expected you can look at iris for example again um you know they

work really closely with the chinese government making uh regulated blockchains uh a thing over there where it's it's you know much more conservative towards consumer protection and and tokens that is real demand for um regulated systems and that that hub is able to sort of serve that purpose and that jurisdiction in a way that you know the cosmos hub isn't necessarily uh conditioned to do so but i guess the next question then is like there is actually a dex on the hub gravity decks does that make sense for the hub to have a dex or could it actually be a problem like you mentioned osmosis as this dex hub should it be used for discoverability and security but also for like token trades or do you think that becomes kind of convoluted i think there actually is pretty good

justification for dexes on every chain i mean that's maybe a contentious question it actually has uh depends a lot on how liquidity sharing ends up shaking out but there's there's certain aspects of having direct access to trades and price feeds via via dexes that becomes really useful across context so i mean it's a bit of an aside i do think that dexes can be justified in places that you wouldn't expect them i think that the team behind the gravity decks is really talented be harvest they have a lot of really great ideas around how to build exciting d5 projects and i think that what we see though is we start getting into the territory that violates hub minimalism the ethos of hub minimalism which is

when you might start rethinking some of it and hub minimalism is the idea that you know the hub is too critical to add every bell and whistle that you want to because every time you do it increases the attack surface the error the possibility of mistakes errors bugs whatever and um you know you don't want your blockchain going down for any reason um and it's actually one of the reasons why i'm especially excited about interchange security uh the v1 is really actually more of a scaling solution and a sovereignty solution for a single blockchain like the cosmos hub you basically have the ability to take specific modules put them on their own blockchain but use the exact same validator set with the exact same staking token to run them as independent blockchains then they're able to have their own governance token which can be

you know even more keyed into exactly the purpose of that blockchain have a more succinct development cycle have a more reflective voter turnout for its purpose and it means that the cosmos hub can start actually having all of these wild and crazy features and the security of the atom is is backing them while the uh critical running of the cosmos itself is not threatened in the same way because if they go down it doesn't stop the block production on the core cosmos hub let's use the decks as an example for what you just described so like how would it actually work this is this interchange security v1 where is that where does that come from first off is that that's like from coming from the icf is this research there's actually talks from 2017 with jaquan talking about um ways that ipc could be used for

replicated validator sets okay entertain security and that's when you say interchange security v1 though you're talking about like this is an idea of how you could maybe already today use the hub and the validator set there as the security but have these like subset chains zones logged into that locked into that but not they're not necessarily doing their own consensus they're just they're using the cosmos hub validator set for the consensus but they're doing something else well from a validated perspective it actually looks like you're just running a validator on two separate blockchains okay you know you've got two nodes running on two different servers you know it's a lot of validators operate on multiple networks they're used to this idea like cool i'm going to start operating on

this one and i've also heard that one of the benefits of the cosm sdk is that it makes it easy for validators to run new nodes on new networks it's just the same setup the difference being when you launch this new node on this new network you don't need to own tokens for that new network you know you're already considered part of that validator set because you're considered part of the cosmos hub validator set and so what's happening at the ibc level is the cosmos hub is running like normal and then it starts grabbing the set of validators and their voting power and they stick that into an ibc packet they send it to this new blockchain and that's the source of inclusion of the validator set that this new blockchain uses wow it doesn't use its own token to check who's a validator and who's not it uses this

incoming ibc packet to say who's a validator and who's not fascinating but would each validator then run each of these instances or would it be like some subset of the validators on the main cosmos hub also run these other kinds of validator nodes like yeah would you picture like all validators running all nodes on all of these sub chains so um you know i mentioned that that this idea isn't completely new it's been talked about for a while but it's mostly been talked about under this concept of horizontal scaling and because you know cosmos hub isn't running into scaling issues it traditionally hasn't been prioritized uh but recently you know more thinking about the other benefits from it i think has brought it back into the conversation and really re-emphasized things over the last year but horizontal scaling is you know this concept that

well vertical scaling is this concept you're trying to shove as many packets as possible into a single block you know increase the transactions per second by any means necessary but no matter how many sort of improvements and developments you're eventually going to run into like a physical limit of what's possible there and so the idea of horizontal security is that you would just launch a brand new blockchain that has the same functionality or has complementary functionality so it's sort of using ibc to communicate between them but otherwise distinct blockchains problem with that of course is that you need a brand new token to do that and it might not be as secure as the original blockchain so if you're able to replicate the original validator set across these then you're able to have the same security as a single blockchain but spiritually it's still just one

blockchain it's now been broken up into constituent parts scaled horizontally to accommodate way more transactions per second but going back to that question do the validators have to run nodes on each side right is it like so when you think about messages or just sent over via a couple nodes like i'm just curious if yeah if you have to run all of them sure i i mentioned that part first because when you when you're talking about like horizontal scaling you're saying spiritually this is part of the same blockchain yeah so it should have 100 of the same validator set it should be the same token there's no real differentiation however that's not the only option and v2 of interchange security is this opt-in validator set and that's basically where every validator on the what we call the provider chain gets to decide hey is it

worthwhile for me to produce blocks on this new chain is it worthwhile for me to risk my atoms in order to receive rewards that this this consumer chain is willing to pay me you know because each of these new chains could have their own economic system their own reward system the ivc sending those rewards back up to the provider chain and distributing it to you know those validators who produce blocks but with opt-in it becomes sort of this free market mechanic of like what are you willing to do for it and you know if you look at say the shared security model and polka dot these pair chains it's sort of a one size fits all we have an auction model you know if it doesn't fit that uh too bad whereas there's really this very large design space inside of the opt-in shared security model instead of cosmos where

it's you know it could be a completely off-chain agreement you know i've got legal agreements with these 10 validators and i pay them monthly to validate on my blockchain and i don't send them any tokens or fees on chain but they're still willing to risk their atoms because you know i'm paying them out of band um so it's it's really a pretty large design space for for saying you know what's going to make it worthwhile uh for you to risk your atoms i definitely i mean as you're describing this i definitely see echoes of the polka dot model of like running the main chain node relay chain node plus the collator nodes or but in that case it's like totally optional a lot of validators don't run both they can but they don't have to and then i also hear echoes of like rollups a little bit because they're

also often running like the relayer between those two things and it's not i don't know what it's going to be like actually now once there's validators i actually don't know this i'm just realizing i won't i don't actually know what happens when there's validators on ethereum and then these other validators on the l2s but i know like right now you do have to like basically the the re-layer between these two things is going to have to be running to clients at least so yeah i'm hearing echoes of this in the case of the ethereum roll-up space i guess that's also very very free but do you see this as in any way similar to rollups or do you see it as like significantly different no i mean they definitely exist inside of you know the same space or are solving the same

problem with different benefits and drawbacks so they're complementary in that way but actually i think what's what's kind of exciting is is the v3 of energy and security uh that's where you actually have a project a blockchain that already has its own staking token and you do this sort of like insurance between them so um you still receive either the full validator set from the provider chain or partial validator set from the divider chain once it's been received though you mix it together with your internal accounting of your current staking tokens validator set on the hub uh on the consumer chain oh on the consumer so the provider chain has sent their validators who are willing to risk atoms or um you know to help produce blocks the consumer chain receives that

and then it compiles those internally with its own records so it might be like oh every two atoms is worth x voting power and every six of my local things are worth whatever you know it's sort of a design for the consumer chain to decide at the end of that you have a new list of validators with voting powers you might have a validator who exists on both records you know i own tokens locally and i also own them atoms so that gives me like double the placement on the list or i just have so many items i get to make a spot even i don't have any of the child tokens and celestia has been vocal about being interested in that configuration a lot of projects have been especially excited about that and i don't know if you caught sonny's talk yesterday talking about super fluid

staking and this real vision for this kind of like cross mutual shared risk reward system like a mesh net of security across the cosmos space and the v3 really makes that possible where you could even imagine celestia paying some token fees in order to receive security from adam and the cosmos hub potentially doing the exact same thing the back way so you have this sort of mutually assured distraction and shared validator sets so you just use this term provider chain and consumer chain what are those because like i remember i actually saw your talk on this yesterday and also wasn't clear then like is the provider chain the atom hub the cosmos hub yes okay so that's a provider chain why is it is the provider of validators yeah so we used to use the term parent

chain and child chain okay um parent chain has the the staking token child chain consumes the the validator set from the parent chain but especially when we get into this v3 where it's more this like potential mutual back and forth we didn't like using such a diminutive term for the child chain so there's a child selling the food back to the parent yeah they're they're a legitimate part of the system so they're consuming the validator set from the parent and the parent is providing the validator set to the consumer got it okay so then the let's use going back to that original idea this idea of using like a let's use a dex as an example and walk through what that would look like so if you wanted would

like could you imagine a dex living on the consumer side and then but not having its own validator set and like yeah maybe can you paint a picture for what that would look like yeah um i think for something like the dex which is maybe a little bit more spiritually identified as part of the cosmos hub already since it's literally on the cosmos hub it makes sense to have the full validator set you know this kind of horizontal scaling version of it however i'm a big fan of the idea that on this other chain there should still be a governance token which is keyed specifically for the purpose of that module i've gotten feedback from validators before who are like you know we're node infrastructure operators you know we don't know how to vote on

proposals that come up that have to do with d5 parameters you know why should i feel qualified to participate in this and the idea that you would have a governance token which is you know suited to the purpose of the application rather than the operation of the infrastructure i think makes a lot of sense it's certainly easier to imagine well in terms of migration it's a little bit more difficult to say move a module off of a blockchain onto its own blockchain likely you'd want to have the new blockchain running and the deck still being on the the cosmos hub maybe doing some sort of a liquidity migration incentivization or something like that to make sure that it moves over and a timeline or a cutoff would probably be the sort of cleanest thing but you could also imagine it working the other way around for instance uh if the gravity

bridge were to be on its own chain with its own token it could actually launch with a validator set um and once interchange security v1 is live that validator set that that staking token can be converted purely to a governance token and then the validator set comes directly from the cosmos hub instead and so in some ways it's easier to convert a pre-existing blockchain to using interchange security than the other way around and that's the way we might actually see you know interchange security start to roll out on the cosmos hub itself you know launch with sort of a temporary validator set that gets converted to a governance token could you ever imagine something like like osmosis has a pretty vibrant validator set although a lot of the validators are similar to those on the

hub would it ever make sense to like merge and i hope the osmosis team isn't annoyed by even the suggestion but like would it ever make sense to take two existing zones or one one zone in the hub and actually like merge it in like say they maybe their validator set starts to like dwindle or something um yeah by the way not saying that that's gonna happen on those misses so if if what you're asking about is is sort of ignoring the idea of entertaining security at all just the idea that hey there's these two blockchains why aren't they one blockchain i mean this is why why don't they take advantage of this just like save save people sort of the trouble i mean it gets gets me thinking about this this concept of like blockchain murders and acquisitions which i really love um i

think sunny was suggesting that the cosmos hub acquire star name you know which is this name service we talked about earlier yeah um you know and you start thinking like at a technical level what does that even look like like how do you kill a chain like how do you do you buy the tokens does the cosmos have community pull by them well there are mergers happening there's keep and new cipher which is like quite far along in their merger and those are i believe like kind of equal mergers and then there's hermes and polygon which is like a purchase of a network and it's gonna be very interesting to watch those go i think so far what it looks like is i mean basically exchanging the tokens for new tokens and incorporating the teams so one of the one of the two or both will like

you know trade in their tokens for a new token and that just sort of solves the problem i always wonder though is there going to be like a contingency who refuses or some left over it's actually really hard to kill a chain yeah you know somebody's willing to validate on the old one you know it becomes a fork or it becomes contentious or not but like not even just a chain i think of like die and sigh like i remember when they switched to multi-collateral dye and you could switch your tokens over and i did and now look at psy and apparently a bunch of people didn't it's worth like way more than a dollar crazy amounts yeah i was so glad to realize that i forgot some stuff you're very lucky i did not um but that's interesting though like yeah that that question of

the merge and in in this case like if if this chain became this consumer chain though and so it wasn't that it was completely like you know consumed by this buying chain but rather became like it was purchased or acquired somehow and then became this uh consumer chain like there still would be potentially use for their token as a governance token absolutely you could do that yeah um it actually is from a technical level rather convenient too we did um some research into what's the easiest way to separate the governance module from the staki module because they're quite intertwined and in order to like you know basically replace the sticky module with the

inner chain security version of it you know where you just receive the validator directly and then you hand that up to the tendermint consensus and it was funny because we realized there's two lines inside of the staking module in which they send the validator set up to tendermint and it's in a knit chain and end blocker so it happens at the end of every block and also when the blockchain launches if you remove those two lines so the staking module is no longer telling tendermint who the validators are then you just have basically elected officials who represent you for governance but don't have the responsibility of operating validator nodes anymore interesting and so you have the entire governance system except for you're representing people who are like their sole job is to vote for you you delegate to them they receive a commission on the block rewards for like

being a well subscribed you know it's this this kind of bizarre version of a few different governance systems and i mean it is the government system we have today but because they're serving multiple roles you never really think about them what if they were purely this governmental representation and i was really taking a step back i was like oh my god like we built this governance system so that it would report it would support staking and validation but like there's actually really interesting features for it purely at a governance level wow it's kind of replicating the meat space or something you you don't get paid directly for how many people are constituents in your jurisdiction and then you also have the like anybody can basically sign up as one of these representatives so you don't have to be limited to 150 validators you can have thousands of

people who want to be self-representing and they're lobbing people to delegate to them because they're going to have great votes and then they're changing what their commission rate is because you know i'm i don't know i'm so successful for the network i'm going to drive the token value up and and that deserves you know a larger cut of the block rewards for representation it just is a whole new design space that's kind of interesting it's fascinating i want to take a slightly different direction now and talk a little bit about bridges we just mentioned ibc and i don't know if the creators of ibc call ivc a bridge technology but i i can't help but kind of think it's at least falls in a similar category um but i do wonder about like other kinds of bridges in the cosmos ecosystem

like do you imagine or is there writing around this where it's like there is the ibc bridge between two networks but could there also be other bridges would they serve any purpose or when you talk about like other networks that are not built on the cosmos sdk that do not have ibc enabled like will they be like i i think that's kind of inevitable that some bridging will come from outside so yeah what's the thought process around bridging ibc and cosmos totally i mean i often describe ibc as a bridge in a box you know bridges are messy they're they're hard to do they have all these security vulnerabilities and trust assumptions and like ibc tries to simplify maximize the integrity to the max and then make it deployable like a just a pop-up

bridge anybody can do it you don't have to have these trust assumptions so very much it's in the conversation for bridges it's bridge in a box but you know uh while ibc is being implemented in the cosmos sdk it's being implemented in rust to be able to work in rest based environments it's been implemented in solidity the goal is to have ibc accessible and usable in as many diverse settings as possible by no means restricted to just the cosmos sdk but certainly there's conditions that make that easier or harder ibc asks for proof when you send over a packet and the highest integrity of proof is like client proofs um especially efficient like clients so this means like clients living on other networks if they want to interact with ibc exactly but that's

where you know we want to see ibcus with the utmost highest degree of trust assumptions um however you could have uh the proof be i'm the boss and here's a signature that says this happened over here don't ask questions ibc doesn't necessarily care you know it's it's bringing over some proof that maybe you should question but at a protocol level obviously he's like cool this is the proof i was given like do what is it what you will and so there is a very large design space strictly using ibc for a pretty diverse set of endpoints but it's going to take a lot of work from especially the projects who have diverse endpoints to really understand what's capable there and the short-term solutions are basically multi-sig bridges which is what we have today and so you know while i'd like to see

the most complete version of it impacting everywhere possible we certainly have a long way to go to that and there's going to be many stepping stones that require different bridge implementations like for example though why do you need the gravity bridge if you have ibc maybe this is kind of speaks to this a little like so one of the reasons would be because ethereum is not going to make a precompile to validate like client signatures from tendermint so if you wanted to have a tenement based chain like cosmos hub send ibc packets directly to ethereum it'd be very gas and efficient uh one of the other problems is that ibc wants to assume finality you would have to make some pretty bizarre modifications to accommodate a

probabilistic blockchain like ethereum you know when is the ibc packet finalized or not you know how long do you have to send the confirmation between them you know you'd have to use these really really long periods it gets kind of kind of messy so there's a couple reasons that ethereum is not an ideal solution for native ibc implementations which is why we have so much work that's gone into the gravity bridge mutation which has a lot of efficiencies around batch token transfers to make sure the gas costs are are amenable on the ethereum side and it also has the same trust assumptions on the cosmos side as the validator set itself it basically hijacks the validator set and says hey you also have a job of acting as an oracle you are now going to tell me when tokens get locked up on ethereum and

then you're going to meet them locally inside your state machine and there's a few different incentives and slashing mechanisms to make sure people don't do a bad job or don't slack off but there's no is there relayers in the gravity bridge do you know about this they call it an orchestrator okay it's essentially the same thing the orchestrators are often just the validators things get a little bit easier when it's the same party it's not necessarily a requirement you know that's one of the beauties of ipc is that anybody can be a relay they're sort of uh disinterested third parties technically that's possible with gravity bridge implementation but for convenience the way it's operated is there's an assumption that you're a validator you're also the they call the orchestrator who's relaying the information between them acting as that oracle the gravity bridge as i understood it was like ethereum mostly

to the cosmos hub but are all the other zones also implementing that yeah so there's a huge community actually who are contributing to gravity bridge there's multiple implementations that have you know extreme overlap between them just slight variations different trajectories different use cases but a lot solidifying around a roadmap that i'm especially excited about that supports what's called abci plus plus yeah so this is about it this week update inside of tendermint which makes it a little bit easier to to reuse tendermint itself in more arbitrary ways so essentially gravity bridge reproduces consensus in the state machine you know it's consensus on oracle information it says hey do you guys all agree that this thing happened over here and like i said

it has the same trust assumptions as tenement itself you've got the same validators who are voting on different things at different places at the same time whereas you could actually reuse tendermint for that process instead of just coming to consensus about block production they could also be coming consensus about the oracle activity of the bridge and so uh seeing abci uh launched will certainly be uh the direction that these sort of bridge implementations are moving in order to remove tons of the you know complicated work of rebuilding consensus in the state machine which will be a huge sort of efficiency gain simplicity reduces security attack vectors and the other direction that i especially want to see the bridge world move towards is reusing the ibc semantics at the packet level so they

don't need to do the transport or ordering which sort of requires these these you know what's the proof etc but once it's landed on a different blockchain destination style you could still reuse the application level packet style to kind of unify the the transport system so it's like a little bit like the the container shipping container you know maybe this one came through a ship and you can call ibc you know moving things through ships plus containers and the bridge is this bizarre helicopter but it still has a shipping container that's being transported cool all right i think as a last topic i want to understand what you're looking forward to what's coming up i mean you did mention interchange security v2 and v3 which aren't there yet but what else

and maybe we can work in a little bit about privacy because we've been doing this urinal validator has been doing events every quarter looking at privacy in cosmos or also defy and privacy within cosmos i know we've had a conversation offline at some point where you did describe this really interesting way where like ibc enables like some very cool privacy principles so maybe we can explore a little bit about that totally um so i told you sort of what got me into cosmos the first place you know i want to push this tech to the point that i would use it myself and i've never really let go of uh the idea that there's a lot of applications and fun concepts that i want to build you know i love building projects you know i've done all these hackathons there's a hundred projects that are all unfinished

to some degree that should probably pick back up sooner or later and it's actually one of the reasons why i'm so excited about interchange security it puts the cosmos hub in this position that actually it could be the source of security for a huge variety of applications and a lot of blockchains a lot of blockchains don't need tokens that's basically what i was going to say but in in a proof of stake world every blockchain needs a token you know it's obvious you need a staking token it's instant justification but there's certainly applications that exist that don't necessarily need them and you know i've always sort of struggled to figure out like where how do i i deploy this system that has the benefits of application specific without having to just come up with an artificial token um and so there's still a lot of work that

needs to be done to to make sure that the hub is as useful as possible inside the ecosystem and that's really going to be my focus for for you know a while uh but the long-term direction the thing that i want to see enabled is the ability to make you know a really wide variety of interesting and amazing blockchains out there because once the sort of core utility and functionality of the cosmos hub is secured i think that's going to be the best use of everybody's time is just you know expanding and making as diverse colorful valuable and interesting of an ecosystem as possible what about privacy privacy yeah so uh i love this concept of ibc and that you know this is the part that's public but on both sides can kind of be any kind of blockchain and so i think the conversation we specifically talked

about was like a zero knowledge state machine that has you know these these shielded pools or shielded logic whatever sort of capacity there while still being able to connect to the larger internet of blockchains from a from a cryptographic level that's possible but even from a permissioned private blockchain system that's possible so it's why i think cosmos ecosystem and architecture is especially attractive to enterprise players which we started to see people finally realize you know you can run all of your own validators you can have the validators not provide queries publicly you know you can control it access it however you want that state and that entire blockchain can be as private as the servers that a bank runs you know they don't give unfettered access to it it doesn't mean that they wouldn't benefit from having a

fully auditable state machine that keeps track of uh deterministic record of events but you know they still want to be able to interact with the larger financial world instead of having to do a custodial money transfer system that exists in the the tradify world they can use ibc to bring in assets externally and send assets externally you know ibc is basically the gateway into the public blockchain while you can have either artificially private or cryptographically private state machines and applications that are able to participate and there are i mean there are a few projects now that exist as zones in the cosmos ecosystem who are going to be very very private at least locally and it is going to be i think it's going to be very exciting to see like them start to interact with ibc but do you envision ever like a full private

ibc transfer too like could you do private zone to private zone fully private yeah i mean i haven't really thought through this but we were talking about interchange accounts before and at that level you know ibc is just saying hey this is the blockchain that it's coming from is the blockchain that it's going to this is the account that's supposed to execute this message but what's inside that message you know who knows and that scenario that message itself could be full of uh encrypted content or zero knowledge stuff so the ibc packets you know in that way would be unrevealing and the content that's going back and forth between them i'm sure that there's other clever ways to extend that to even the other parts of the message you know that would be its own new application layer ibc standard

uh but even with the standards you know that we have today i can imagine you could start utilizing it for privacy cool yeah i do i do get the sense from our events and having spoken with some of the folks from like the cosmos privacy intersection um that would be a really that would be like a goal to see that happen cool billy thank you so much for coming on the show yeah i'm so glad to be here thank you for having me yeah and sharing with us sort of your perspective on cosmos and giving us a little bit of an update on what's going on over there absolutely i want to say thank you to the podcast producer tanya the podcast editor henrik and to our listeners thanks for listening [Music]