How Cosmos Enables the Internet of Blockchains - Brian Fabian Crain, Co-Founder & CEO Chorus One

Transcript

hello and welcome to the blockchain and thus we're pioneers and thought leaders talked about their journey in blockchain technology crypto assets and a token economy and I'm your host manuel staggers boxing's really are are ways to enable people to collaborate on like a totally different scale so today what are some forms of collaboration you can have a course accompanied of course that's quite limited you know it's not that anyone can join in contribute when I think of goals like space exploration or all of those kind of things then how you gonna accomplish those goals I think it's an issue creating structures you

know probably based on blockchain so something very similar that enable millions of people to you know do something together and accomplish just amazing things irrespective of where they are in the world that who they are exactly anybody that could be anywhere and that's that's what I'm most excited about this episode has support from eighth grade story driven media eighth grade is a media production company with a focus on telling engaging stories about new technologies and the future with films interviews podcasts and other media that make an impact to learn more about story driven media visit eight gr8 calm

my guest today is brian fabian crane brian is a berlin-based economist and entrepreneur and he is the founder and co-host of the blockchain podcast epicenter and the co-founder and CEO of Korus one which is the leading validator on cosmos and loom Brian has degrees in economics philosophy and cognitive science from the University of Chicago London School of Economics and University College London and he has been involved in blockchain projects since 2013 including moan axe tender mint and cosmos and now to the conversation with Brian Fabian crane hi Brian

and many thanks for taking time today well thanks so much for having me it's it's a real pleasure for wants to be you know a guest on our podcast you've been doing many different things in the blockchain and crypto space in the past and I'd like to focus on two of them mainly today one is epicenter your podcast and the other one is chorus one which builds a validator on the cosmos network so when you started with the podcast what was your vision initially what did you want to achieve and so I learned about Bitcoin in the summer of 2013 and I was immediately you know obsessed and felt okay this is what I wanted to spend my time on but I didn't

at the time you know there weren't a lot of jobs in the space and I didn't feel particularly qualified for you know maybe very few that there were and so I wanted to somehow you know become involved and then one thing I did was I started in need of group and then a second fitting I did was to start the podcast because I I felt there was just a great need for somebody to you know educate Grady for education and I thought it was a great opportunity for me also to learn about lots of different projects to meet people and to kind of you know build a network and you just become involved so it was partly also a research project for you yeah absolutely

I think just just learning about the parking space has been a huge part of do epicentre mm-hmm okay cool and you know for those who don't know the podcast yet I mean it's I think it's very impressive what what you built there I think you have something like 200,000 plays a month and over 30,000 subscribers and these are fantastic numbers in the podcast space yeah I mean it's you know we started at the time there was one other podcast in about Bitcoin and let's of Bitcoin and then when we started there was a few other started but you know all of them stopped at some point so I think we you know by the oldest podcast at this point that has a little bit of a wider horizon and doesn't just

look at Bitcoin so just being around and doing it every week for such a long time left wing outs a lot and then we had lots of great guests on so uh mm-hmm so I mean obviously the the format has changed the reach has changed you know over time but how has your vision and mission changed with the podcast over these five years I wouldn't say it has changed at all you know for us it was just about really having conversations about what we saw as the most interesting and important topics in the blockchain space so you can understand where things are going you know in the beginning is called absent a Bitcoin but even even in the very beginning I mean we did the first episode sony theorem

and like maybe february 2014 we had barely started so we never had particularly myopic view on on a particular blockchain of technology but always very interested in exploring new things that's kind of the same way today okay I've been doing my podcast now for a year roughly and I mean obviously I learned a lot you know how to do it how to make it better how to make things work with the interviews how to ask better questions for you what what do you think are the main learnings you know that you learned whether what a good podcast needs about you know a complex topic like technology well you know a good podcast really needs to have

somebody who's able to communicate the ideas well and they would also have to be interesting adhere so I mean we my favor you know kind of big ideas that are interesting and have this big disruptive potential and that they can change the course of this industry so I think that's a good criteria to use it's just this thing so big that if it works out it could really change the trajectory of the industry side that's a that's a good thing in otherwise we you know we do when you try to prepare pretty thoroughly and you know spend a few hours be eating through white papers blog posts maybe listening the previous interviews I mean that helps a lot in having an idea beforehand where we would

like to take your conversation and then being able to ask you know appropriate questions okay and I mean in general I think podcast is a very interesting phenomenon how it evolves you know in recent years I mean from being very niche to today where many of the bigger brands and even you know entertainment media TV stations have podcasts or considering podcasts but it's still the individual podcast I think that get the most attention you know in fan base yeah I mean such an amazing medium in a way that you know you can just go there and you know you can speak record this is such an easy way to do in a way and then you can reach you know tens of thousands of people who listen to this you know

every it's it's very powerful hmm okay is it for you guys is it profitable to do the podcast I mean we never really I mean we do have some sponsors now right so we have like Microsoft who is a sponsor and you know pays and then we have some other sponsors cosmesis a sponsor now so it's it's certainly enough to I mean we have a team of maybe five people who do a bunch of different stuff you know David not now full time but working on it so we can certainly pay those all fine but overall get made not I mean it's not really the sort of thing that it would make a lot of sense to do as a business that being said I think you could turn

it into a corporate business if if one really put in there further treated it more as a for-profit venture thank you you could actually make at this point a substantial amount of money but it's just all it's not our primary focus yeah of course otherwise you're like a salesperson for for ads I mean oh my nads I I think the things we advertise for feel a bit about advertising for so I don't have an issue with us in that context you know of course if you have this kind of intrusive ads that have surveillance and acknowledge it's something different but it's just very time consuming to find sponsors and work with them

mmm okay let's let's speak a little bit about one of your other projects chorus one and maybe we can start with what chorus one is and how you got there yeah so actually let me maybe take a step back here and and talk about so in 2015 I joined a company called called eros industries it later renamed Timon acts when so eras industries it was it was founded by a bunch of lawyers who were very interested in blockchain and smart contracts and they felt like okay the C serum thing is interesting but the problem is if you as a business you want to use it here and there's so much legal

uncertainty and it kind of doesn't really fit into the existing legal paradigm so they had this idea okay let's create smart contracts but in a legally compliant way and that was kind of the beginning of your permission blockchains or at least on this mission smart contracts and so when they did this they fork to hear him and that was before theorem at launch so that was back in 2014 and they started working on kind of an enterprise deuterium version and in the process they also wanted to replace proof-of-work of course the question was okay what do you replace proof of work with and then what they found was this

this white paper and this is like a super small software project called Panamint and that was just one person Jay Cohen back then he was based in San Francisco and he had written this white paper and basically tournament with an old classical consensus algorithm of you know which there are many and this whole academic literature on it and it was implementing it in his clock chain world and so that was the idea of tournament and then the the era's industries team for like oh this is great we can use this and we can get rid of the proof for work and then this is

much better suited to have you know kind of a consortium blockchain mm-hm and they they started becoming the first user of the element and and then I joined the era's industries team or it later renamed to Mona so the monad scheme and and as I was doing kind of working business development so it's been around a year and a half speaking of lots of banks and consultants about blockchain and rebuilding on tournament and there's one in two thousand two thousand fifteen and sixteen okay and the first engineer at Monarchs was this guy eaten Bachman and

he was basically paid by the Monash team to help Jay fix tournament and then the tenement guys at the time they had the idea to create a public network but this was kind of before they were I mean there was only cerium token sale that'll happened and it wasn't really clear that this was a viable way of fundraising or that this could be repeated and so they also looked at enterprise applications but then at one point they started working on this idea a you know cosmos and Ethan ended up leaving Burnett's and she joined AJ full-time and he became

the CEO of the cosmos project and then in the end I also left Monash and I and I also joined the cosmos team and became the the CEO of cosmos back in January 2017 the tournament team and so they were work and we we had a fundraiser I said there's a foundation in Switzerland just like any other state we did this token sale in April 2017 which was also an intense time it was just sort of on the cusp of the ICO bubble it was you know even three weeks before we started to

token the the fundraiser we were unsure whether how well it would go and if there would be demand and and then it started feeling more and more like that stays momentum and then in the end we raced around 17 million in like 25 minutes which which was a record back then nobody had like done that and then within a week it was surpassed and surpassed in surpassed so that that was just just before the entire madness kind of started mmm maybe not everybody knows what what cosmos is exactly so can you maybe just explain some of the main characteristics

and and things that cosmos wants to solve yeah so cosmos is pretty complex project and there's a bunch of different things going on so first of all there's tournament now tournament is is developed by the same team as cosmos and ten is you know today it's the most advanced implementation of the proof of stake so that means you're gonna have you have these entities called validators and the validators they vote on every single block that gets produced so let's say a particular block gets proposed so there's some composer then all of the validators vote on its a spot

ballot and if 2/3 of the voting power say yes then the block is kind of finalized so there's a lot of benefits to this right so you can produce blocks pretty quickly so in cosmos is roughly like every three seconds or four seconds like all of the blocks are final so you don't have Forks and stuff like that and then you can also just have big throughput in terms of transaction so you know you will be able to have throughput of maybe ten thousand transactions per second or something like that and so that's been in development for a long time and that's one of the key projects that that cosmos

is based on now another project that's important to think about is the idea or as this project called cosmos SDK and the cosmos SDK what it does is it separates the consensus layer from the application layer so the idea is basically that the consensus layer worries about ordering all of the transactions so it just basic it just provides the application a here's a list of transactions they've been validated this is the order and then the the application layer can sort of do it with everyone's you know it's an EVM would be kind of one way of dealing with is transactions and creating a state out of it but there could be very different models as well so the the high level

vision and a year of Cosmos is that it makes sense to have lots of different block chains and it makes sense to have lots of different blocks for a bunch of reasons so first of all um if you have this kind of model where you have to consent this layer and afterwards you can build your application on top where you blocked in and it makes sense to adjust a blockchain to know whatever you're doing so maybe it's a social media application and it wants to have maximum throughput and maybe there's another thing that wants to have nope anybody can write contracts and something else that has a very limited set of transactions that accepts so you can do lots of different optimization if you can a kind of design your block

chain around your application so that's one thing another thing is around sovereignty and I think this is has been a big issue in aetherium that you have the application that runs on e theorem that has one community of users and the underlying blockchain has a different community of users and that can be to conflicts and you know some examples are of course the DAO are Forge where you have the problem is the underlying network out to do a hard for to deal with this and then you have two different constituencies of different interests so the nice thing about having you know a particular blockchain where the community that runs the applications also the community controls of

blockchain is that you know they have much more autonomy and sovereignty and then of course the scalability as well if you have a different blockchain for a particular application you can just eat Eve much much higher scale right any theory of the issue is really that all of these people were using you know on the same resource and you know when the I SEOs were really going through the roof it means these other applications they couldn't even get into a block so that's that's kind of on a high level the cosmos vision is that we're gonna have a lot of these different block chains they're all independent they're all sovereign control patron community but if you have that these of course the

question how can they interoperate how can they communicate with each other mm-hmm in his theorem you just have small contracts and they can talk with each other and that's that's the great benefit of aetherium so if they're on their own blockchain how does that and that's where that's where also caused us really comes in and in cosmos is on the one hand is this framework for building block chains but on the other hand it's also a communication protocol between block chains so that the block chain can kind of assign a message and transmit it to another block chain and the idea then is if you have all of these different block chains and they want to

communicate with each other it makes a lot of sense to have almost I have like a central hub that routes all of these communications between the different block chains and that's the that's the cosmos hub the hub on its own is is you know not that useful yet this communication protocol between the different block chains is going to launch in a few months maybe three four months and then there are already many many that are building you know they're independent blockchains on you know on either tenement or the cosmos sdk but some of them include you know finance is building its tax so they're building in the centralized

exchange they're doing that on the cost okay there's a variety of you know we Syrian projects are looking at it we also working on a project called loom which is doing a kind of gaming and they're building on tournament so there's a lot of other projects and once the cosmos harbors life in this communication protocol is life they will all be able to you know connect with the cosmos hub and then the idea is we're really creating this and Internet of blockchains but you have lot different changes they can all interoperate and scale and communicate with each other while at the same time you know if it's a highly decentralized system right each block chain is completely autonomous can

control its own destiny has its own staking token can have its own economics it's responsible for its own security I think maybe that's the big question right of this year and the next year how can we build an Internet of blockchains yeah I mean I would say the cosmos is the most clear and vision for what that could look like but you know we'll see if it plays out like that but I think that I think over the next year as we'll start seeing beta on this okay yeah interesting but but then at some point I think you you left cosmos and you started chorus one yeah exactly so at the end of 2017 I so I was working on cosmos and then yeah it was the antenna

meter in cosmos is that you will have this live network and then you have these validators and others have this really key role in that the validators have to put up a security bond so they put up staking tokens and then other token holders and and so the validates and run a full nodes and they're connected with the other validators and they get the blocks and they verify them and they say okay this is a valid block they also have to you know coordinate software upgrades and to basically responsible for the security of the network so this is very analogous to a minor in Bitcoin but at the time this was in the white paper and

not just in the cosmos white paper but many modern block chains and you go change there based on some idea of proof of stake they have this notion ballad later and I just didn't see anybody working on this novella like okay this is a gap but somebody needs to go in and really work on this and build built this infrastructure understand how this works for business model perspective and if these networks are to be really decentralized it's important that this validators you know they're not just on machines but they really think through all of the software upgrades they have opinions they help steer to develop in the course of the networks so that's why because I started speaking with my

co-host of Epson I made her about this and in the end we decided to start a company course one and we started working on this problem and it we're also interested in other networks so we are doing a lot of research and speaking with different teams and we do plan to run such services or more networks but and yeah maybe we can speak a little bit about the in the approach we're taking here we've correspond and I think that really ties into this question sure what we see as a key role for validator and especially a role that b1u really focus on is its nth restaurant governance and

normally when a blockchain launches the blockchain is created by a particular team and of course it's a small team in the beginning and they have you know loss of control they can decide what features to build they can decide on the economics and the toe-in distribution and the different holes in the network and you know often they might go the seam I go and read up some foundation to a token sale so you you starting off with this you know center of power but if network is to really succeed I mean in my view it means that that needs to change and the power needs become much more distributed

and you need to start having you know a variety of parties that work on the code and then improving it and that also share together decision-making about where blockchain should go what kind of trade off make um so if you think about that you know if you agree of that then the question is hot but how does that actually happen in reality and I think that the role of the validator is really really key here and cosmos the way governance works is as follows let's say you and Adam holder that means that you have these atoms and you can stake them so you have the ability to earn some rewards you can earn some block rewards and you can earn some transaction fees

from the network but what you can also do is you could vote on any protocol change that comes up and if you if you don't vote then your vote gets inherited by the validator so you work the same let's say use delegate be fast you work this you vote the same ways as course one but if you don't want to you know if you don't agree first you can also cast your own book in a different way and basically sort of override whatever we may be voting and so so we see our role in this is very crucial and the thing we are focusing on is your education so we're doing a lot of content about these networks to help people understand the

different decisions that can be made and then we're also building tools around governance to help people you know know when a vote is coming up how to participate what the different choices and trade-offs are and and so that's that's that's what we are focusing on a lot of course one yeah interesting and I mean that debt alone I think would be a good topic to spend many hours discussing because it's a huge topic I think you know the whole generalized mining you know staking services debate I think it's a super interesting field yeah absolutely so it's it's it's taken all I mean that's the amazing thing you know

when we started so we started working on this in some way in November 2017 and at the time there was there was like one company that had maybe there's two company service company called West Monroe couple that was doing something in this form and then recently we had on cosmos there was this thing called a mistakes where you had all of these validated companies all over the world participate in this test net and kind of compete with each other and you know in the end to us like prices given out in in the actual coking in the main net and there was you know I think 130 or something around that different teams

that were working on this you know from all over the world and it was just such an incredible community effort so the way this is developed in the last year and a half is just astonishing let's take a quick break for a message from our sponsors eighth grade is a media production company with a special focus on telling engaging stories about new technologies and the future companies work with eighth grade to turn relatively dry content such as scientific articles business white papers or corporate narrative into engaging stories with films interviews podcasts and other media that reach people on social channels and offline to contact eighth grade and learn more

about making an impact with storage driven media visit eight eight calm the way this is developed in the last year and a half is just astonishing yeah brave new world definitely a brave new world out there and speaking of that on the chorus one website you write a lot about changing the status quo in the world with crypto economics and decentralized networks so in in your view how exactly can these technologies change the world yeah and I think that totally ties into what we're doing it at cause one in the way I think about blockchain is that what boxing's really

are are waster they enable people to collaborate on like a totally different scale so today what are some forms of collaboration you can have a of course a company now as shareholders and as employees and then it can kind of act in some sort of unison to accomplish a particular goal of course that's quite limited you know it's not that anyone can join and contribute it's not global off and it's restricted by all kinds of rules and regulations and laws and and so also in terms of scale is quite limited you know okay companies do get

pretty large but you know it takes them a long time to grow that big and they're not so agile so when I think of blockchains what really excites me is the ability to enable you know hundreds thousands few tens of thousands of millions of people to you know do something together and almost and accomplish just amazing things and I think that's you're often it's mentioned that you know Bitcoin is kind of the first doll and I think that's very true so what is Bitcoin right so put out the white paper and some code and the code already had a dis Locker award so every

block you know some big con would be paid to the miners friend so so beacon already had this mechanism in which it would pay for its own network and security and then all of these people would buy Bitcoin and they would be their incentives to be aligned in making this thing succeed and then we had this amazing community emerged from this but the mechanism in Bitcoin is is kind of primitive but it's just these rewards and you know some other economic parameters but I see and then they also the big issue was the decision-making there was no good process for the decision-making so when you had that says controversy about how to scale Bitcoin and what to do with the block

size well it was very difficult it was difficult to know what people would even want but I like I mean I still don't know what a majority of Bitcoin users would have wanted or not and there was you know of course both sides claimed that a big one users wanted a want but there's no way of measuring it and even if there was a way there was no way of translating that insight into actual change on the network and so I think we're starting to be able to do this and then we'll start to be able to just act and as this massive massive communities and accomplish and amazing things and when I think of goals like you may be solving a global warming or space

exploration or all of those kind of things then how are you gonna accomplish those goals and I think it's that issue creating structures you know probably based on block chains or something very similar that allow you know vast numbers of people to coordinate and collaborate that incentivize people appropriately and that's that's what I'm most excited about mm-hmm cool and also incentivize people and connect them irrespective of where they are in the world and who they are exactly yeah anybody they could be anywhere you know I think this this aspect of having permissionless your

permission lessness that anybody can come in and take action and kind of the block she doesn't care I think that superpower if if you look at what you learned you know in your research and and your work with cosmos and correspond and these other blockchain projects what approaches do you think make sense to blockchain technology in the long run yeah well of course most a few things stand out to me I mean one thing that there's really there's a vision that's been worked on for very long time so that's just this kind of persistence and and long work on it and you know some sometimes they're not easy and I think you know detainment

can create lists struggle with finding money in that 2015 and 16 and surviving but just kind of persisting through all of that and having this long time horizon I think it's a very valuable thing another thing is just creating actually doing everything an open source so that's surprisingly rare right if you look at you know like well-known blockchain projects then many have significant haven't launched it but might be like very highly expected you know something like defending the Knorr file coin then they will develop majestic oh but in close source and then sort of at some later point meant if

you're ready they would open source it but so cosmos as always building open source and I think that's a very powerful thing you can send in the meantime as people building you know ask cosmos being developed other people also start building on it and there's already community air and then I think decentralization is just a key thing and and you know if it's a question of values it's question of economics so for example you may be certainly could have like raise more money back then in 2017 or more tokens could have been kept by the team or the foundation but you know instead the you know finishes 10% and the team is 10% - so it's similar to

Experian I think that's actually the upper bound or a project like that that should be with those entities because otherwise if you have like this huge token Treasuries you just have this entity that's basically that's gonna be super powerful on these networks and it will stay like that for you know potentially decades so that's also another thing and then what's turned out quite fortunate too is that you know when we did the the fundraiser back then the token sale there was didn't do any marketing and so not that many people knew about the project but the people

who knew about it we really do people who were kind of at the cutting edge and had a deeper understanding of the space in the technology so as a result I think the people who participate in a fundraiser are just incredibly it's an incredibly strong community and incredibly like educated and smart community and I think that's also it just turned out very fortunately whereas you know I think some other fun token sales they targeted more of a mainstream audience to try to get on to Forbes and whatnot and you know they've succeeded off nothing and getting when the people

come onion but then I think that I share end up being a detriment to these projects hmm yeah yeah I mean there's many of these big lumbering huge hedge fund like foundations right and many of them you know with permission approaches or even federated approaches so what's your view on you know on permissioned or even federated blockchain yeah it's a good question I mean I think in principle it's it's it's a sound I dear so it made sense to me and you know when I joined in 2015 so Ramona I said I I thought that was compelling it's still thinking some compelling on some level but the big issue is that if you have

kind of a consortium blockchain then you need to have these different you know companies that they kind of need to agree upfront about what are the rules of the blockchain and if you go with banks or insurance companies or just traditional companies then there are kind of bureaucratic and slow organizations each on their own and then if they all try to do something together it's just a total nightmare and there takes forever and so I think you know people who working on these Commission box and stuff for five years now and you know I'm not that much has come out of it when everything is

largely it's just a question of politics the big benefit in the public auction is oh just somebody goes to launches the blockchain and then you know if you want to use it you can use it if you don't want to use it you don't use it but you don't have to you know step first very everyone has to come to agreement about what the blush it looks like how it works roll who as well power I mean that's a massive massive benefit in terms of you know speed of innovation so today I'm much more bullish on public blockchains and I think a lot of the controls that people want to have in private blockchains

you can probably add them to public blockchains too as a sort of you know layer on top mm-hmm yeah that's kind of my crack on this yeah okay cool interesting where where do you see blockchain sign cryptocurrencies in the wider context you know of other technologies in this whole digital transformation wave like AI data science automation I see blocks in almost as a counter trend to those things I think if you look at AI and automation and Big Data then they've really tended to lead to a tremendous concentration of power and wealth in a few entities like Google

and Facebook and Amazon and it's it there's something deeply if you look at AI it's almost natural that it goes in this direction now I think blockchain is we going in the exact opposite direction where you try to decentralize power you're trying to have more power with the individual more sovereignty and I think that's super exciting I hope it will succeed but I think it's also it's almost important to kind of note that you know you have these other strong technologies and I think naturally they are driving the opposite direction right

then they're kind of undermining the work of blockchain and I don't know you know what's what we'll end up prevailing here mm-hmm yeah well just a little side note I mean you mentioned decentralization and more of a flatter of you you know maybe that block chains enable as opposed to AI or you know those centralizing technologies but then you know if we look at the reality that you know many of these blockchain networks also are very centralized and have also huge concentrations of wealth so I think the idea is compelling and in in theory I'm totally with you but I think the reality in some events in the blockchain space looks quite the same right like a very centralized AI sort of

power structure yeah that's a that's a fair point I think man it comes to concentration of wealth it's certainly the case that blocks and hasn't necessarily reduced that in any way I think you could one of the things that I've been in I've been excited about for a long time is the idea of having a sort of you know basic income coin and the way I would see that working would be that everyone can kind of register on this network and then they would just receive let's say 2000 coins per month and you know let's you you learn about it later you sign up a year from now then you can also sign up

and you could also get your two thousand coins per month now of course the issue is how do you know a person's a person and you know civil attacks and fake identities and so that's the challenge for how to deal with that but but if you created something like that then I think maybe that would be some where you could have it would actually lead to increased distribution of wealth but I think it's too early to tell you know whether what boxing it's gonna do in this news forum but you'll be able to do if you look at something I hear him

or you know let's say something I cosmos let me do a really powerful thing is that you can do hard Forks right you can basically it's open-source code the distributions of so you can take and network and you can say okay we're gonna change something fundamentally then we're gonna relaunch it and of course you could say okay and you know this happened a few times that people have said okay I think you have to move Z cash for example so Z cash was launched and then you have I think around 20% maybe Spain reduced or maybe it was less than twenty ten percent there's some percentage of you know every block reward would go to the foundation and then it's finished with to development there's some people like no that's you know that's not right B is this kind of

pre mind for the foundation and so I think he totally feasible to say or we take this big box in networks but we get rid of the existing token we create a new token maybe we have a totally different distribution of that hmm yeah cool of speaking of experiments what are you currently learning you know both in your work or in your life at the moment so definitely on the course one side a huge learning for us has been just how to get how to be productive as an organization what one tool that has been very powerful in that is is okay ours so you know basically we have every tweet

every three months where you get the entire team together we work for one week in one place and then we have it's like quarterly objectives and then can kind of see how we're doing on that and we didn't do this at the beginning when we started correspond and we started doing it in the fall and then you know the last quarter last year we just did pretty terrible on this so I thought it's not good and I think if he had money earlier it would be the same right done pretty terrible but it was you know he could also analyze why and okay one one thing was we were trying to do too many things you have to be more focused mm-hmm and so these okay are basically it's not a regular

check-in okay well well did I predict we were going to do and what to be actually new and having this contrast is super powerful and kind of instituting that as an organizational culture let's think great mm-hmm okay cool how about personally you know in your personal life what are you improving there yeah sorry first life one of the thing that I spend a decent amount of time on is meditation although interesting cuz I spoke yesterday I think with my meditation teacher and then this kind of question and you know this having is one of the fundamental tensions about you know meditation is that you're wanting to accomplish

something is is at the same time undermining actually calm and so the practicing for its own sake so that's something I'm grappling a lot with but it's also been extremely interesting to I mean I've been I've been meditating for many years for then in the glass kind of year two years have really given a lot and that's been super rewarding mm-hmm what's on the horizon for you you know with your projects epicenter course one in the coming years so epicenter you know for the most part we we keep doing what we're doing we are we have been thinking about doing a sort

of a membership thing where you small monthly or some monthly fee and we we try to do some you know extra kind of a build more of a community so that's something we have any exploring so that may come of course of course there is launching I mean cosmos is a very big thing and so I think we will I could cause I was being you know we had like we'd call me how to hear him I could see cosmos being kind of next paradigm on a similar scale but you know who knows it's too early to tell but I see them and so I think I would like we would like to spend or play a key role in that in helping many of these new block

chains launch and bootstrap and get connected and get started and then on the course one side the other thing we really care about is actually building a community of course on users so community that's aligned in that they deeply care about the networks - tokens off that day you know what to stake them and of course earn rewards but they also want to be involved in decision making in the governance and so building this community is a big it's gonna be a big focus for us cool Brian this was really great really enjoyed it and many thanks for taking time know some of my pleasure thanks so much your questions are great thanks so much for joining us today

more info on our guests and our sponsors is in the show notes of this episode and on the podcast website the blockchain and ask.com to help people find this podcast it's important that you download subscribe and give it a top rating and review on iTunes or on the podcast platform of your choice I'm Manuel staggers and I thank you very much for listening you [Music]