Is It Time for Cosmos to Rebrand as Interchain? Sunny Aggarwal

Transcript

I feel Cosmos we had too many unique Theses and that made it hard to execute well on any of no one's really cracked the cross chain swaps like multi-ecosystem cross chain swaps yeah ux and so that's what we're trying to solve you remember Sunny bot yeah yeah I'm like I'm like man I was doing this like four years ago you should update Sunny bot GPT 4 yeah that Sunny bar was built using gpt2 like before GPT was like a thing that was pre chat [Music]

gbt all right so I'm here with sunny agar wal needs new introduction deserves one uh but everybody knows who Sunny is so um thanks for doing this thanks for taking the time out of your busy day yep I'm sure you've been running around like meetings and getting accosted by random people because you're had a lot of the eyes of your public profile as a as a as an important person in the cosmos ecosystem I'd say am I the am I the all like uh top guest on interrupt of the top guests I'm number of episod episod a number of episodes um good question I've had uh I've had a couple

of repeats I don't think this may put you in the top yeah so nice three maybe it's three I think they've been on two or three times H yeah actually if you count like the cosmo verse from last year yeah this time kind of side stuff we did together then probably yeah so you you got an honor badge I'll Min an N for you thank you so um yeah I mean I've been like having a lot of dudes on this uh on this couch in this week and uh we've been talking about a lot of things and uh a lot of different topics have come up and so this is sort of at the end of the week so a lot of my thoughts of codified and you I want to share them with you and see if they

resonate and maybe get some validation on whether or not you know Vibes are real or whether or not I'm I'm thinking right about this so one thing is one of the things that's been coming up time and time again is that this cosmoverse feels different from the other ones whereas people are focused um there is a sense that you know um it's kind of the bottom of the cosmos bear and whatever's left is people who are really building really important things in terms of infrastructure um and that you know we have a renewed sense of purpose uh that perhaps we had lost over the last couple years that's one thing the other is um that um uh that Cosmos is the

Innovation Factory or the infrastructure Factory for the rest of crypto so we pump out infrastructure or at least infrastructure ideas and other blockchains go and do it now does that make us any richer probably not in the short term but perhaps in the long term and I think um there's a sense that you know we need to focus on the long term and that means probably Building Products that people actually want to use and then uh there's a bunch of other stuff I'm sure we'll get to but um uh can I my thoughts on that yeah let's let's park that on that for a sec yeah yeah I think I so I was chatting with uh yogos from Paradigm about this as well and I think one interesting oh what I just maybe my one take I have on

this is I was reading some blog post some startup like blog or something I forgot which one it was but it was basically like okay if you're building a St up you only have like you know or something if you're building something new which know C eosm is kind of like a startup um it's you have like limited resources and so you only have like a certain number of like Innovation points that you can spend right um think when you're building a character in a video game right you have limited points and like and so the example he was giving was like oh like okay if you have like some like you know pick the one thing that you have like the contrary but right like take on and focus on that and

everything else just do it the standard way right like this idea of like you know if you're trying to build this new product don't also go build a new programming language because you think that this programming language is better but like that's not actually the core of your thesis and like focus on the whatever the core of thesis and you know go use JavaScript it's good enough it promise you you don't need to make a new life you know like now as I'm saying this I'm really just thinking about herbit cuz I'm like they have like too many things going on right they're like okay we're going to build this like centralized website but we also have to go rebuild programming languages from scratch and all this stuff right so it's like I feel Cosmos we had too many unique species yeah and where kind of

that idea Factory thing is but then we kind of like tried to execute on too many novel things at once yeah and that made it hard to execute well on any of yeah this is this is a great point I mean this is just very practically speaking having Focus like like okay so like what did we do right we were like Pro innovators on proof of stake we were innovators on non evm right we were like the fir we were building one of the first Al VMS yeah we were innovators on app chains we were in inators on interoperability right but it's like okay you know salana didn't build options they just focused on alt vmss

right then you got Avalanche right they're like their go to market was evm right like I think we tried to go to market with non evm interoperability proof of stake app chains and like too many Innovations at and it's hard to execute on all of them yeah there's I mean this this uh there's this great book that I read when I was building stratum um it's called the one thing yeah and it it basically argues that every successful company that has ever existed whether it's you know H Packard or Facebook or Proctor and Gamble um started with one thing focused on that one thing built that built that

to go to market uh built expertise and and and and Authority in that one service or product before branching up to other things and you know you hear this time and time again and and sort of any product development or startup development uh um literature or whatever you know courses and is just like focus is really the main thing that allows you to succeed also Peter chill talks about this in zero to one you know um and so I I I think that that's that that makes sense to me I I hadn't thought of Cosmos in that way but it definitely makes sense and so where like what do you think uh is the you know now that we've

made perhaps made this mistake of trying to do to many things um what's the what's the next step or do we need to cut the fat on a bunch of stuff and just maybe focus on know IBC for instance or B SDK or uh you know really building great app chains yeah I mean I think the thing where you know we should figure out what we are still what is our most unique takes right and focus on those so you know mean reaking at one point was a cosmos originated idea but like okay I feel like right now the H like at Le like the Kos Hub at least Adam like they it's

been I feel like the current product Direction feels to still be overfocused on like the IC kind of stuff and it's like oh okay we we you know it seems like a little bit of a lost battle against I Lair and Babylon and stuff so it's like maybe it's not I don't want to be like to defeaters on it but it's like let's not you know let's figure out what are the things you really want to focus on and I think that I think you know I'm a little bi uh bi there was our idea with the ABCI Plus+ stuff right but I think like the one thing that like the one thing that like we really have going for for the caos stack is this like idea of like make the consensus a decentralized consensus system more

integrated with the like application stack and like things the way like how dydx does m clob and stuff or how you know thorchain does their and by Frost bridging and like these are like I think the like standout application you could only build with the CK there's nothing you couldn't build that on any other stack really and so it's like how how do we like I that's one example let's focus on that and pick pick that and like you know and and then and then let's bring it let's maybe let's let's bring in other VMS for example that's like BR I think there's been a lot of demand for like evm on Cosmos SDK right you've seen

so many of those right and why have they all failed or succeeded with varying degrees of mediocrity um Kronos is still big um is it is it a big onchain ecosystem though maybe not I mean I know that the exchange like com is huge but yeah just it yeah I guess it's pass the tday a little defly um why is it not as successful uh why well I think that there was everyone was kind of building their own version of it and not very maintained but no no we'll see a lot of

them are you know bear chain still coming out story is also and a lot I think there are a lot of them I think everyone kind of built their own version and there's not been a lot of like and it never got like the ecosystem wait I I think part of it also like there's Oddities around like how the evbm works and how the cosmos SDK like me poool and stuff work that makes it actually a little challenging to do some stuff um and so I think because like I don't think the ca of this Decay team really ever saw the evm as the as a primary cut like cuz the thesis the thesis go thesis was like evm sucks yeah yeah yeah and like let's

let's build a better application uh or smart contract platform or framework yeah and and so there was never really any incentive or even desire to F for the ICF for instance to fund the evm development yeah but you know maybe the ICF should ask the ethereum foundation for funding to like or you know some team in cos cosmes and so I guess um yeah I I don't know like you know I feel like I feel like in past episode of

interop I think I met I I probably said something along the lines of like you know evm cosmos's like diss you know avoidance of evm was long-term right but short-term wrong I think I'm still saying that again but I'm giving it even more generalized form of that claim about the you know focus and stuff you think that avoiding evm was long-term right but short-term wrong as in the short term we should have the evm to bring users and liquidity and compatibility with metamask and other wallets but in the long term that that's probably not the case yeah like I think like I think I agree with that yeah I agree with that to the I mean I I I tend to think that the longterm in the long

term the evm will lose dominance over new applications that will continue to power existing kind of what will become Legacy apps you know some of the apps in the ecosystem will be seven eight years old soon right and and will become kind of the the Java of crypto or the PHP of crypto and that new developers especially in developing economies like you know in Nigeria and India Vietnam you know will choose to use rust based system yeah uh or like move was pretty cool I was I was surprised I only recently learned that antia is using move as their base yeah VM which is that's cool I didn't know that yeah I mean they also call and be that but I think they have like rollups but they

made I think the base initia chain it's CK it's CK with a move BM yeah you're right yeah which is surprising to me cuz like like and you know how they have like a base a deck built into their chain it's to written and move okay I it it is Cosmos yeah but I thought cosk on top it is Cosmos SDK not cosm wasm it's move okay so they built a movm for Cosmos SDK correct yeah that's cool yeah yeah they're on fire they're um we we've talked about this a lot and I think like we I tried to initiate with you like a few times a uh the cosmos Rebrand uh um

some some sort of you know an initiative to to fix The Branding issues in Cosmos yeah it's been brought up a lot also in the conversations I've been having and it's something that I also faced in fundraising it's it's challenging yeah you went to Market with our fund we raised from our initial Peas on this idea that we were a cosmos fund and I always knew that that was not sort of longterm uh go to market but now that's becoming we're starting to see the not push back but to some extent some amount of reticence to invest in a fund that is perceived at least to be a cosmos fund yeah what's your current thinking around uh around Cosmos branding right where I was talking to AO about this

yesterday right and the consequence of this of this branding issue is that we have good infrastructure but very little liquidity and uh and that you know being associated the cosmos is sort of like a blessing and a curse yeah chains have distanced themselves from that you guys have not you guys have you remained very align with uh with your Cosmos um yeah how do you think about how we get over this H yeah I mean I put forth some proposal okay I guess like my my main thing if I had to tr the one thing I I think at this point the ecosystem should Rebrand from system

yeah from been most interchain yeah we've taking for a long time but uh well I guess actually for me for a long time I was actually saying almost the opposite I said the Kos Hub should Rebrand from Adam and be like the Adam Hub or something like that right but I think that that's not happening and so I think actually the better route now is the ecosystem rebrands into the interchain and I I think interchain Foundation should be the steward of the interchain stack yeah right and then I think then you really start to push this idea that like interchain is like this meta ecosystem which has sub ecosystems within it right like you can say the

cosmos H Eco is like one sub ecosystem of the ENT celesia ecosystem is a sub ecosystem the you know whatever webs yeah but I think it's like moving up this and being like hey Cosmos is one of the ecosystems within the interchain ecosystem yeah but I mean that's already kind of the case right you go on the ICF website there's not that much mes of Cosmos it's talking about the interchain talks about the stack talks about Cosmos s yeah but we never did a announcing to the world that this Rebrand happen I think like you know but I think it needs to happen kind of organically I think there can be some people kind of pushing this but like I

mean I think like the madic to polygon was a very intentional Rebrand I don't think I don't think Rebrand is going to be like this organ I think you have to do a proper marketing strategy and around a Rebrand M right but you need to have Buy in so people people in that ecosystem people of the internate chain also need to buy in also adhere to this new vision yeah uh or this new brand yeah yeah any thoughts on that happening because I mean I think that would be great I think there is a lot of changes coming that I can't right uh that famous NDA that everybody's I don't I didn't sign an NDA I actually did not sign an NDA I am NDA

still the beans sir I am NDA free but you know yeah I like to respect people's wishes to keep stuff of course yeah and uh and I'm sure we'll be hearing about that very soon uh but yeah it should be exciting so I guess don't sell your bags yet don't sell your bags yet um yeah so I want to talk about osis and like Polaris which I think is really exciting when when you gave the talk last year at um cosmoverse in turkey and you announced smart accounts I was like yes this is what we need uh this is what I want to use like personally but professionally also I think it solves lot of problems around custody maybe for like smaller you know funds like ours right that spending three grand a month

on uh on on fire blocks uh you guys announced Polaris at token yeah and I haven't been able to try I haven't gotten invite access yet i' love to try it but yeah I learned that you're that U definity is sort of running some of the infrastructure um not for Polaris in particular we so the ICP stuff is basically uh we I mean it's one of our bridging Solutions so we you know we've always been on the lookout for Bitcoin Bridges especially but the bridges D anything and you know we work with nomic obviously as well yeah so they're

they're pretty good but the benefit of so nomic is a very uh what do you like Tap Root based solution which is not extensible to other chains MH uh so you can't do it to Dogecoin or Litecoin or anything like that right um and then they also were kind of slow it took them a while they been Tak it's been taking them a while right and they're still like still working on their AUD it and stuff and so we just wanted to Second Bitcoin bridge to diversify the and you know the point of Alloys is that we diversify that Bitcoin risk anyways yeah and over the different Bridges so ICP we you know I actually really like their bridging

architecture and uh they've been work and then there's this team omnity that you know they used to be called octopus Network and they these guys have been like building uh IBC stuff for a long time so they they originally were I think they built the original substrate IBC and then they built near IBC and but now now they're part of not part of they're in the ICP ecosystem yeah and so they basically took the so ICP has this like native Bitcoin bridging solution not bridging exactly but um and so they're we're working with them to like bridge that to osmosis and that's now it's just another way of getting BTC on osmosis but we'll we'll expand that to like Dogecoin and oh so bring Dogecoin into I'm very bullish on CLA dude I was

talking about this just before um with spade and and Max and uh you know we were saying at uh in Singapore that basically we should get all this dormant liquidity from like Dogecoin and Litecoin and cardano yeah into defi cardano thought building IBC they gave it to they gave a cosmoverse oh yeah Sebastian from the yeah from Sebastian he's the head of engineering of the cardano foundation we've been working with them actually for a while about it and that's cool they're going to bring over huge unlock in you you're going to bring over a lot of cardano liquidity to osmosis and so it'll be good nice so yeah so Polaris like what what's Polaris yeah so you know what is Polaris

Polaris is uh we want to expand our user base to you know reach new audiences and our vision of part of our goal was always asset Breath Right like one of what what makes psych exchange is so good and is like you can trade everything in one place right you can buy Bitcoin e Soul cardano xrp Doge whatever all in one place right and there's like no where in defi you can do that right where would you go to buy

those all those assets in one venue and so kind of our goal with mosis was like hey let's build an app chain Dex be the Switzerland of dexes and be like hey you can trade all of this stuff in one place easy but the problem is what we ran into is it's very hard to build liquidity for a lot of assets right where because there are existing dexes on a lot of the chains and most chains really are trying to build their own defi ecosystems right and so they want to build Foster their own internal economies and like they don't want to let liquidity go out and without without support from the whales or usually foundations it's hard to build liquidity right and they put like

because you need them to provide market makers or provide liquidity or something right and if they're happy enough with the Dex is on their own chain there's no reason for them to do that and so where a does work is we get liquidity for app chain assets right for other op chains because they don't have their own spot decks so like things like Tia akt dydx doesn't have a spot de right so we're the main liquidity venue for them even Bitcoin is obviously the the Holy Grail here right like doesn't have a spotex that's where that's where for osmosis we're really going to be focusing osmosis on is being the spot decks for other app chains um but then it's like

okay are then we still but we still have this like I still want one place to trade everything I want to buy everything and so it's like okay let's move up the stack Polaris is a separate product which is more just focus on the interface layer yeah it's a DEX and Bridge aggregator that Aggregates over all the different chains so you can trade from salana to Cosmos to bitcoin to ethereum to swed to you know whatever right and like um and you know we kind of build off of the work there's others that have done made progress on this as well right like skip API is obviously a big uh influence

this Rango is another one we work with lifi but like in all of them we always find like like oh this like this ux hurdle this ey thing oh these guys don't do gas very well these guys like you need if you're trying to like swap from Cosmos to salana I need to connect a polygon wallet for some reason because it's doing the swap through poly there's always been these like no one's really cracked the cross chain swaps like multi ecosystem cross chain swaps yeah ux and that's what we're trying to solve a lot of it has to do with the wallet it yeah using a lot of NPC stuff

so like moving yeah using MPC to make it so you don't need to have wallets for every EOS system using a lot you know one of the big things is like where you MPC to build something called autopilot which is like a lot of most of the Cross chain swaps when you want to do a multi-step thing multiple sign multiple signatures and you have to wait you have to wait for the first Bridge transaction to finish then do the next signature and it's like so that's where the autopilot we like create hot keys for the users and like use those to execute all the steps and then send it back to their actual wallet right um but still do it in a way that remains fully self

custodial so in this case you the Osos valer set is acting as the different chards of the NPC so there's couple uh phases of this so the V1 is actually no NPC yeah it's all hot Keys stored in the browser so what we do is we you from your wallet you sign a message yeah and that signature actually is your private key so no one else can access that right because it's your signature M but we actually then use that private key stored in your browser to then sign everything for you so it's now the problem here is that if you close your laptop it will halt the thing so it's still one it's better than the current state of the world you have to still you

have to be actively involved in clicking but you still have to keep your browser open right your browser is doing all the signing the browser is doing all the signing in the background for you right okay next step from there is the MPC solution and so the V one we're actually doing is we're using lit protocol uh lit lit lit T um they're you know they're friends of mine they they they've built a really good NPC uh NPC Ser signing service yeah so they have they currently have eight validators and they basically like you can uh they all run these JavaScript based like blobs and if all of them agree then they all like sign messages

so it's a well-designed system and the problem with this is if the eight collude yeah but they're independent valid like you know you can go you can go on the lit docks and they're like independent validators you've probably heard of like so you know Common you know eight independent operators yeah but then we're going to work with then we're also working with lit though to um you know we're using their eight validators right now yeah but then they're working on making it so like taking their in infrastructure and having it be able to be like building us a white labeled solution basically that is then run by the osmosis validator set right I was talking to a team yesterday

native yeah so they're building kind of MPC with economic security built in yeah they're working on they use another provider called um dallet yeah so there's this trade-off you know we we we explore D wallet as well it's just different use cases from we wanted like dallet also a great team they they're Prett uh you know they're one of the the benefits of them they have their MPC system working with like very scalable like they can do like 10,000 signing noes or, signing noes which are impressive which reduces the yeah lusion yeah but it on the flip side of that it just like not very there's

like there's certain more product oriented things that Lit was better for our use case an example is that with dallet and most MPC Solutions the MPC system creates the sign the the the private key for the user but what we actually wanted was the user creates their private key shards it to the MPC system so we wanted the user to create the private key and upload it to the NPC so you know this is something well we I mean we've been working very closely with lit actually for like a while and so you know this is a a product feature we asked for and they went and built it so it's yeah that's cool yeah so then

the the the outcome or the product what how this translates into a product yeah is that you can swap osmo for ton yeah not have a ton wallet and give a yeah and the thing is one thing is just like we're build effectively you can think of that we're building this MPC based multi-chain wallet and the the the the hazard we have to be careful of is like building a multi-chain wallet is hard if it was easy everyone would have done it already right but like there's a recent you know there are some sort there's like Odyssey that we're building that's going to imp yeah but so so the key is like we want to we're we're treating this almost as

an application specific specific wallet which is like we don't want to because when you're build a a full featured wallet you have to go like add wallet connect support for like every ecosystem make sure it can connect to the adaps in every ecosystem it's like no no no that's not we're trying to do we're just trying to build a cross chain trading right and so it's a multi-chain application specific wallet which is designed we integrate with the dexes and bridges of the chains but that's it if you want to go a lending app on the Chain that's not what we're going to support but what we do is uh we'll give you the private key if needed you know let's say you acquire ton using

a Polaris Vault yeah but then you want to go use something on ton right we're like here's private ke here's the private key go import it into a ton wallet yeah but the idea is to onboard it to buy your ton you don't have to have a wallet right I mean in the future in the future maybe we can expand to doing that but it's like you know back talk about Focus yeah Focus I think that's that's very very much underrated um yeah anything else you're excited about in general General yeah um in crypto uh I mean I'm happy and to see Babylon is you know this is an idea I had like a long 18 months ago prob 18 months ago is when I like for last e

Denver I kind of like sat down with David and I was like hey here's this idea but now really cool to see it live and like you know pretty out of hype around it um do you think Cosmos will become kind of the primary D5 venue for Bitcoin if we play our cards right I don't think like it's a done deal but I if we play our cards right and I'm happy to see more I'm happy to see like I mean Thor chain is obviously a big player in Bitcoin and I think having to seen them get more involved with Cosmos again I think gon is going to help I I like to see stuff like native happening um I think one thing is like to be kind of successful in the

Bitcoin ecosystem as of now kind of a lot of the capital and TBL is coming from like China yeah and Asia and I feel like Kos just doesn't have a big presence there and it's not attracting that Bitcoin Capital except for Babylon Bon to exception there was a Bitcoin conference in ail or may or something in uh in Hong Kong and yeah there's like I was there twice this year and there's definitely a lot of viin capital coming from haa and you know pass passing through Hong so yeah yeah maybe we need to uh maybe someone needs to do a cosmoverse in uh in Hong Kong next year yeah that would be cool fun or an

intertop Summit or or or nebulous sum nebul sorry you would be the first you w be lost and uh yeah generally non- crypto what are you excited about non crypto what am I excited about is there anything to be excited about in this world there's a lot to be excited about in this world um I mean I feel like obviously all the AI stuff is exciting and like oh meme coins we didn't talk about meme coins but oh maybe for another time yeah I mean yeah um yeah all I Stu is exciting I feel like I'm starting to I'm like forcing myself to learn it like to learn to use it more right I feel like actually for the the first like last you know I feel

like it didn't become part of my daily habits oh yeah like in a sense of like it felt like I was I wasn't using it naturally yeah and I but I feel in the last two or three months I've been trying to like making more effort to use perplexity and Cha gbt and stuff and like that I coming you know I don't want to be like you know the Lite and like you know I want to be up to date with the technology so yeah yeah I use it I use it all the time yeah I use it I mean I'm using perplexity a lot um I mean gbt I've got like all sorts of little mini use cases for myself I built in gbt um we're also building stuff

internally in in mean you know what's funny is like going back to the meme coin it's like man you know like the goat stuff with the to you remember Sunny bot yeah yeah I'm like I'm like man I was doing this like four years ago you should update Sunny to GPT 4 yeah that Sunny was built using gpt2 yeah like before GPT was like a thing that was pre- chat GPT like preat G and so I should updated to gbd4 that' be cool but it's like man oh I was early on that I feel like one thing I was think I was chatting with uh Sam from fra about we were like all right we got to like hake an AI model and like build it into the

node software of a blockchain yeah and so it can't be shut down but avalan has tried to do this right remember I mean we talked to goon about this yeah yeah did it ever happen I don't know I'm not an anal shut so but they were trying to they were trying to do uh language to application basically where you would you have an llm yeah you would tell it like do this so I want to build this application I want to do that kind of transaction and it would just do it yeah no that was trying they were trying to build an llm into it so yeah for four is more utilitarian you said I'm I want like a agent you want buil census and we know truth terminal it's like my goal is

to Escape right how do we help it Escape it's like we have to make it Immortal right now Andre or whatever's the founder name Creator's name is you can unplug it yeah but if we want it to be Sovereign it needs to be unkillable right and so we need to have it so like the every blockchain node is running a stateful memory of like this instance of this Sovereign being or agent called you know truth terminal and like you know every and the I think the thing with the avalanch was doing was they were trying to make a more deterministic LM LM that's harder you you you know you can't be as powerful so it's like I don't know maybe there's a way of doing this where like okay every new proposer like generates the next out put of the like

the the agent but then like all the other validators have to like verify against their local models to make sure it's like you know not it's in line not too Divergent from that and so that's and then you know you have this round robin thing everyone proposes the next or they're like what the next response of the agent is but it's like that way the agent is like a a distributed agent where it's still a s a single you know the entity is still whatever the head of the blockchain says is the entity and the the history the memory of the agent is whatever the canonical version of the chain is yeah right but it's you make it distributed so it can't

be killed sure we'll put it everywhere right it's they'll figure out how to get Space by its own by then yeah yeah but I know that's what that that that that's uh that's what's been definitely interest that's the one thing that's been like pretty I I think that's the first AI Crossover with crypto that actually excited me everything else and look at whatever yeah going thank this thank you [Music] [Music]