Securing Cosmos Chains with Celestia DA - Jack Zampolin of Rollchains & Strangelove

Transcript

I think one thing I would say about alignment is I don't like it in a community as crypto as a whole that needs to grow or die I don't think this alignment narrative is particularly healthy in the long term for any projects pushing it when you use weak security models attackers will exploit them a huge Delta of brackish water at the Estuary between the river of of Cosmos in the sea of ethereum yeah [Music] welcome to the interupt today my guest

is Jack samplin he's the founder at Strange Love they are an engineering team and validator in the cosmos ecosystem and have contributed to many projects you all know in love um I'm not going to try to list them off here but there are plenty uh so today we're going to be talking about a new um a new project that has come out of the Strange Love team it's called roll chains you might have seen it on Twitter and we're going to be discussing that understanding what it is and how it fits within this uh it seems like growing number of ways that people can build applications and secure them using Celestia and other forms of security uh before we get started though make sure to subscribe and hit the like button to get notified

when new episodes drop every week and remember none of what we discuss here on the interrupt is investment advice or financial advice and if you enjoy this content you should stti with us we're validating on OS Quicks solar osmosis and now on passage check out our passage Valor if you're if you're a passage holder just look for interupt in the active set Jack thanks for coming back on strange strange L of R passage too yop yop let's get it yeah yeah yeah we uh we just um just put a ticket in passage and uh set up a valador so we're excited about that actually we're thinking about doing in pass we need to figure out work technically but yeah I love that I I think you know Lex is a fantastic

founder he's been working on this for years and really cool to see them getting a little closer to Market developing that game world and like you know building that building that business so so excited for passage yeah I feel like it's kind of it's a bit of an underrated project right now like uh a lot of people in Cosmos are talking about it but not a lot of folks that think outside of Cosmos are are familiar with it U but I feel like it's going to have its moment soon and um we're going to see like a lot of activity there and projects building on it and like you know influencers um doing content in passage I think there's like a huge opportunity here yeah I strongly agree I think that the blockchain gaming space in general like you know if you want to

monetize attention or monetize people's time I think crypto's kind of a natural way to do that and Gamers also Al want we certain rewards there's already all of these mechanisms within games why not put it on chain and make it tradeable and I think that this is a you know an obvious growth area many people have said this and I think that it's up to the builders to make compelling games for people a lot of the other blockchain games I've tried so far you know I tried out star Atlas the other day and like you know the promise for Star Atlas is like build and modify a huge spaceship and put lasers on it and go fly around the world and Conquer things with your friends and like that sounds super cool and the state of the game right now is like a really janky 2D model with nft

ships that you can pay like $10,000 for and like that's just not it's not compelling and I think that you know what you need is immersive virtual worlds like the stuff that passage is building like what the Argus team is building with their world engine and you know there's a couple of other kind of stealthier startups The Saga folks also have a lot of gaming interest on their platform as well yeah I I'm so not a gamer I mean like I I have these moments where I will play games for maybe like a month and then totally get out of it actually I just bought a Nintendo switch like oh ni this week what you playing on Tetris I'm such a boo playing Tetris on

the Nintendo switch tet is classic it's pretty amazing it's I mean as far as the game goes it's it's like I mean but like this is a a really good platform I mean like you know just the hardware like the fact that you can plug this on your TV and there's two remote controls like on the thing that you can I mean it's not super comfortable right the little kind of the little controllers right and then you can have up to eight people it's such like a fun uh thing to just have in your living room and like if people come over oh let's play Mario Kart right like it's just um it's such a different gaming experience from like say A PS5 or something like that but again like I'm not I'm so not a gamer so U I'm just discovering well uh you can play my

favorite game on Nintendo switch which is what factorio check it out I just sent you a link yeah okay it's uh a fa you build a factory and a launch rocket it's super okay cool yeah I used so I I I sometimes played Sim City uh when I was younger oh yeah I was a big sinity fan yeah yeah that's a that's a really fun one yeah this is kind of similar but better um anyway um not to make this all about gaming blockchain gaming yeah no but I mean what are you excited about these days I mean other than other than Ro chains obviously like

what kind of tickles your interest in the cosmos space and and Beyond of course yeah you know I think that what I am excited about is this growth in mod in this modularity narrative and I think that this has always been the design philosophy that Cosmos has preached you know the Unix design philosophy is simple single-use components that expose an easy to use API and can be endlessly remixed and composed together to form higher level systems and I think that in the original software ABCI sort of embodies this as far as a an interface that allows for new things and what

we've seen is folks breaking apart the stack in new and novel ways with data availability and shared sequencing and things like that and um building these modular tools and you know part of that for me who's been building modules in the cosmos SDK and thinking about black Jades from a modular perspective for a very long time it's exciting to see interest around this and I think when you think about the two major paths to scale one is vertical scalability which is sort of embodied by uh salana and one is horizontal scalability which is embodied by Cosmos you know more and more folks jumping into that world I think is really

exciting and role chains the the initial product that we're working with is sort of an effort to offer a different set of trade-offs in the modular ecosystem one where you still have a validator set you have that ability to decentralize and potentially scale out to a full POS set different sorts of Poa different forms of security whether it's adding Celestia to existing chains or using celesti to add additional security to POA chains using things like ethos and restake e um I think that there's a lot of options there with ro chains we wanted to add another option to that and I think the other thing that we're trying to do with

rooll chains is make it as easy as possible for folks who are coming into the ecosystem to be able to launch a new chain whether it's on Roll kit or shared security with the Hub or Celestia or one of the many excellent options but I think right now there's no easy way for beginners to approach the stack there's you know you look there's many different Forks at the SDK there's Forks of tender it's very confusing when folks want to come in and try to build and if you want to integrate all of the latest features you end up spending a lot of time learning about go dependency hell and um how where all these different repos are and there's a ton of them so we're trying to make that as easy as possible for developers and help build a way to

sell services and software through that stack and that's kind of what we're working on with ro chains yeah I want to unpack that but I just want to say like this Linux analogy I think is really on point and you I I use this analogy a lot to describe um how uh Cosmos like is uh is building this stack that Ena modularity and um that you know but but I I think for people that look at Cosmos from the outside like there's there's a few things that are confusing one is the this this kind of dependency on the cosmos Hub or at least this perceived dependency on the cosmos Hub which you know for people inside Cosmos I think we understand that that's not the case but for people outside of Cosmos I think they they associate Cosmos with the Hub

and that somehow like the Hub manages all of this or somehow like orchestrating all the cosmos chains and then the other thing is the the app chain thesis that Cosmos pushed like pretty aggressively for uh for a long time that was kind of a precursor to to to modularity and was necessary in order to achieve modularity but I think people still associate Cosmos to sort of you know these highly vertically integrated app chains with a validator set and like the cosmos SDK and perhaps cosmism and like IBC and so breaking apart those misconceptions outside of the space right when talking with you know typically when we talk to investors or when we talk to people in ethereum that are not familiar with Cosmos is a

challenge how do you how do you uh navigate that when speaking with people outside the space that might say like oh yeah Adam's not doing very well so then like you know Adam hasn't pumped recently so maybe like Cosmos is not doing very well yeah you know it's I think that now with the launch of Celestia and DTX and many of the other exciting projects coming this year also with the rise and say an objective within the ecosystem I think it's now much more of a multi-polar ecosystem than in the past and the cosmos thesis has never been about the cosmos Hub as a single instantiation of this idea and that was going to be the end of History it it's always been about this world in which

there's hundreds if not thousands if not tens of thousands if not millions of chains and I think you know we saw Pang talk about millions of chains back in 2019 so like this idea has been around like I see Nick white talking about millions of rollups and I tend to agree you know I think that there's going to be many of these verified State machines that have all kinds of different properties and the key there is the interoperability and I think you know there's an increasing realization throughout the crypto ecosystem broadly that IBC has effectively solved this bridging problem and that there's you know the a lot of the things that people would knock about the protocol like the call and response

nature or some of the things that people think are overly complex has actually led to something that is very strong and extensible and able to provide first class user experiences and cross-chain composability in a way that other protocols have just been unable to bring and you know we see this over and over again and you know I think that when I think about the cosmos I think about the broader IBC ecosystem and in that broader IBC ecosystem there's been things that have pumped that are pumping there's active communities there and there's a lot of excitement especially from the Builder community and you know that that is what has me excited yeah I I agree um I think um I think Cosmos is

is kind of having a moment and we're we're starting to see you know so that that the interest for Cosmos really I mean look you were at eth Denver we we had a brief bump in there but like eth Denver was all about modularity and you know nearly every event that I went to whether a cosmos event or not was talking about modularity and there were these sort of subtones around like Cosmos and Celestia at nearly every event so it really feels different from last year where you know most of the conversations were around like e eth rollups and evm rollups there's really this kind of shift and convergence and actually we hosted an event um on one of conver love the name yeah I don't think you were there but um

yeah I I missed I I was out of town by that time but yeah yeah no worries but but basically you know we we we wanted to address this idea of convergence and this is something I want to run by you too so there was this um you know people can watch the panel it's it's up on the on the neb Summit um YouTube channel there you know there was this idea around um uh this this question of convergence and also alignment so when when people say things are are ethaline or Bitcoin aligned but specifically I think when people talk about eth alignment there's this um this assumption that you know it e alignment is whatever acrs value to to The Ether token right to to to Ether the token whereas with Cosmos alignment it's not

so clear like Cosmos alignment doesn't necessarily I think mean alignment with atom or AC crewing value to the hub that that might be Hub alignment but you know yena had a really good take on it and and her take was that Cosmos alignment is technological alignment it's specifically IBC alignment and I thought that was that that really rang true to me and I wonder you know if you sort of see it in a similar way or if there's some other Nuance here that we're missing yeah and well I mean I think one thing I would say about alignment is I don't like it you know I think yeah I guess what I would say about alignment is that each of the major ecosystems kind of have a dominant philosophy and the way that I

view alignment is how closely different projects Hue to a dominant philosophy as shown by their actions as well as through the connections that those folks have with older community members frankly is really what it is and you know I think that a lot of people like I have a venture fund I've been working on Cosmos for a very long time I I see a lot of people seek me out and say like hey like can you talk say nice things about my project or whatever it is and they're like looking for Cosmos alignment and they look to get you know the the sort of like Cosmos ogs to all say the same thing you know this is like in in ethereum it's the same thing you know you're looking for Justin Drake and

vitalic and and that whole crew to you know push your push your project and this is an inherently unincluded to grow or die I don't think this alignment narrative is particularly healthy in the long term for any projects pushing it and I think that the only way that we find product Market fit as an industry is by questioning all of our sacred cows all the time and you know this is a very Cosmos thing to say but I do feel it strongly and I think that you know the best thing that you can do to be modular

aligned is to go build your own modular system and you know folks will see that so yeah I I have this overall meta around alignment I think is it risk of shutting out a lot of good ideas and being very unwelcoming to newcomers into the ecosystem yeah I I think it's a good take uh caric from ethos had a a different take which was that alignment uh was relevant in the bare Market but in the bull market like alignment just gets thrown out the window because you know there are incentives everywhere and like people move their Capital wherever their Capital can be better best utilized uh

for for the best returns so like the way I put it was that alignment is a bare Market coping a bare Market coping mechanism um yeah I think I I mostly aligned with like yena's uh point of view here which is that you know being aligned with Cosmos is being aligned with tech I I like that because it it implies it doesn't imply there are implications of the Sacred cows right like I think the sacred cows are really the tokens or your bags and and um if you don't necessarily some of them are also religious ideas about how blockchains work too yeah that's true and I think that that is like those are the more dangerous ones you know toen but those are understandable those are

often underpinned by token values right yeah often yeah the ethereum blockchain is always the the example that I go to here but um this idea that there will be one state machine that everything rolls down into and that we must imbue that state machine with certain properties and that those ideas are embodied by certain pieces of software or certain standards efforts like that's really deeply entrenched in that ecosystem and has led to frankly I think a lot of like questionable technical decisions yeah yeah perhaps um okay okay cool well let's let's talk about rooll

chains what the heck is a rooll chain um a rooll chain is a chain that post data to Celestia but it's yeah so that's you know at the core of it I think that's like this this idea that we've been working on and it's a cosmos SDK chain and all it does is posts the block data to Celestia so uh there's a number of reasons chains might want to do this uh Celestia there's a lot of sort of shared analytics services and other sort of indexing pieces that will index Celestia data and that is a shared service that's offered there's interoperability benefits once the Celestia data availability sampling is incorporated

into the IBC like clients it will add quite a bit of additional security to cross chain transfers um so making already the most secure system taking it and future proofing it um it moves from an honest majority assumption to a one ofin U honesty assumption which is like a huge step up in the security of of IVC so those pieces as well as any other future advancements that allow for better interoperability between projects using that data availability sampling layer okay there's a lot to unpack there so let's maybe take a take a broad view here and think about okay so why would a chain let's say you're you're a new uh you're building a new application you're

a developer or perhaps even an existing application and you're considering a rooll chain what what are the the the the considerations that one would have to make in order to pick a roll chain over the vanilla way of launching a chain which is like go out like get get some validators to want to run your your client and validate your chain and like pay them a bunch of money to do that by inflation um how would you sort of make that that choice I think you know the way we launched Noble is instructive you know Noble was not we're not paying validators with inflation there's a POA set and we've got a different model for paying validators and I think that this is a big motivation behind Ro chains is

those sorts of small POA sets to help launch your project to get out there and to look for product Market fit are vastly cheaper don't require projects to launch a token are much more Nimble from an upgradeability perspective and it also doesn't Forstall you from moving to full proof of stake and in fact that's an easy Network upgrade with a very trotten path that's kind of what we're seeing is the reason Pro projects want rollups is because of that lowered barrier to entry and I think that we can offer that same low barrier to entry with a standard Cosmos chain and also offer the ability to scale and decentralize more baked into the software rather than rather

than having to build that out all right so let's take Noble as an example there was an announcement made recently that Noble will uh use roll chains um yeah now it's like just going back to to Noble so Noble as you said is a proof of authority chain So currently there are something like 50 uh validators that are essentially have been chosen to validate the chain they're they're not being paid um staking rewards for doing that and and they're like a sort of chosen set now when Noble onboards roll chain what's that going to look like and how will that augment the security of the chain yeah so when you're approve of authority set what you worry about is those proof of authority validators

being malicious and one thing you can do to help guard against that is to post that data to a data availability layer to provide a thirdparty audit log as well as the ability for Network participants to restart the chain from a certain checkpoint in the event that those validators do decide to steal the money so this adds additional security to the system and helps provide an independent audit log and I think that's like that's a really nice feature for folks and I I think that that's a huge reason another reason is uh as we mentioned that data availability layer offers a lot of potential for inop and being on there and posting your data enables you to take advantage of those interop features

as soon as they come live so as there's all this profusion of rollups obviously Noble wants Noble usdc on all of those those rollups and posting to the same data availability layer is a great way to help ensure that Noble will be top of mind when it comes to uh liquidity expansion on those rollups okay I want to unpack this uh inability aspect but just one one more um part on the security um so would Ro chains be useful for a chain that um has an open validator set like I don't know like osmosis for example or uh or stargaze where it's not a proof of authority chain or is this primarily like a benefit for proof of author for proof of

authority chains where you have a small validator set with no real say economic incentive like slashing incentive uh and you want to augment that security by adding a third party auditing yes yeah that that's basically it and and I think you know what if you go look at spawn which is our tool to help make launching these things really easy you'll see that the pro of authority module comes standard in there and we think that this is the right way to go launch Cosmos chains today um the last Market cycle showed the downsides of this really inflation heavy model that was predominant in Cosmos for a long time and proof of authority is a way to get started get a lot of the benefits of having bft consensus whether

it's secure cross-chain communication using a light client whether it is uh fault tolerance like in a rollup you've only got one node that effectively sort of like runs the whole network and if that node goes goes down you have downtime on the network and we've seen this over and over again in l2s with a full consensus cluster you can tolerate downtime for Min nodes and the network is much more stable and likely to sort of continue making progress so um there's a number of benefits to having a small consensus set and the cost is relatively low and especially the cost is low if you strip out that inflationary token benefit um the validators get and just pay validators

for running this software or you know a lot of validators will run chains in the hopes of being a part of that chain in the future and depending on what your project is attracting validators is like one of the easiest ways one of the easiest parts of launching a chain and I think that this is a huge misunderstanding for folks outside the ecosystem because people are like oh why would you launch a cosmos chain it's really hard to find validators it's like no the hardest parts of launching a project are making sure your front end and your user experience is like topnotch making sure you have users doing an airdrop doing incentivized test Nets getting your token distribution right raising money like all of those parts are way harder than finding

validators and they still exist in that rollup ecosystem as well and you know what we have built in Cosmos is this fantastic stable of really great independent validator operators and all of those folks are always looking for new chain yeah there's no shortage of validators in Cosmos and um and certainly no shs of like real professional ones I think there's like hundreds of of companies that are you know we could consider professional validators or like semi-professional validators uh let's let's zoom in in um to this IBC um and introp ability aspect uh can you unpack how this will improve the uh security of

IBC yeah the right now the cosm the the tender like client Rel I on an honest majority assumption and basically what that means is it relies on 2ir of the validators on your counterparty chain to be interested in moving the chain forward and onethird of validators in the other chain can actually halt progress and make it so that IBC packets can't move forward and in practice we don't really see this happen but it is a theoretical attack against the system and with larger Stakes at stake we're more likely to see these types of attacks adding the data availability sampling into that tender

like client takes that trust assumption from an honest majority to what's called one ofin so as long as a single one of the validators does the right thing then the packets will continue to flow and that like client can continue to make progress and these are the types of things that are really really important as these systems scale to continue to increase the security with these advanced in cryptography and system design and that's what Celestia is it's a fundamental advance in cryptography and system design and this modular thing that we're all working on right now is people trying to figure out how to incorporate that fundamental Advance into the systems that we built and

designed and this interoperability property is like one of the key benefits that it that it seems able to provide now will this benefit only chains that incorporate the rchain module and um or or other chains as well like that are part of that are like connected to IBC to those chains like what is the the distance from a rooll chain app um in order to benefit from the security if that makes sense yeah yeah so it's I mean the IBC go team is working on adding data availability sampling to the tender B light client right now I think they're shipping that feature in Q3 I think was the current estimate last time

I checked the roll kit team is pushing this strongly as well because right now roll kit rollups only have uh very weak security with using IBC um so there's a strong push to get this out there we'll see that live sometime this year hopefully okay and so and so the idea here is that in the future any Cosmo chain whether it's using roll chains or not like could post data availability to like the tournament like client would post data availability to Celestia in order to augment the security of IBC but also um of the validator set like more generally yeah I mean there's there's nothing stopping anyone from doing that you know if if

this is the case if all Cosmos chain let's say like you know vast majority of Cosmos chains are posting data to Celestia what what role does celestia then play in improving like the general sort of fungibility and interruptibility of tokens within like this ecosystem does that does that come into play at all or are we still just using IBC then uh to move tokens around I think you know this is IBC is able to structurally incorporate all of these system design and cryptography advances underneath this client abstraction that we have and IBC is really just a protocol for the communication it doesn't say anything

about what authentication mechanisms people use and it doesn't say anything about what applications are traveling on top of it and I think this is one of the most broadly misunderstood parts of IBC the protocol is the strength of it is the transport layer it's not necessarily the application layer but the application layer can and will improve and there's already a rich application ecosystem it's not necessarily the verification layer even though it's still the best verification layer in the world and it is improving through folks like Union and polymer and composable and all of the different folks pushing Avalanche uh the Avalanche project Landslide um through all of the folks pushing forward the state-of-the-art in terms of IBC verification it's that standard transport layer that serves all

of the use cases out there that is the string and the more and more chains and state machines and smart contracts that are addressable through that transport layer the stronger stronger the protocol becomes and I think that this is the key to understanding the network effects of IPC so role chains is essentially a cosmos SDK module right so any any Cosmos SDK chain can incorporate this module and choose to post data to Celestia um and and perhaps even you know consider uh rethinking its entire economic model by uh reducing the inflation of the token reducing the

number of validators I mean do you think this this is something chains will do like do you know in a year from now are we going to see like most Cosmos chains have something like 10 20 validators instead of 120 and like drastically reducing their inflation and potentially like even being profitable I think that this is this is the world I'd like to move into and we're in talks of the number of Cosmos chains to like help them do this but I I think that this is obviously where we need to move spending as much as we are on inflation right now is completely unsustainable and this is at least one path to help lower that in the very very short term right that's that's super interesting I mean to think about sort of structure profitability is a huge piece of it too yeah like we all got to

make money that's right yeah yeah and I think like for Cosmos chains in the bull market it was sorry yeah I was gonna say that's a that's a dangerous bare Market thought that that people actually need to make money so I'm sorry for introducing the bare Market thoughts here but yeah yeah no I think like in in um in a bull market you know you can inflate your token as as much as you want and as long as as long as the the everything is pumping that's going to work but as soon as um everything comes back down again then becomes a lot harder I think a lot of chains uh in Cosmos specifically you know experience this pain and and are struggling to recover um so yeah I mean if if this I

think I think there needs to be like a clear path and a um a clear kind of model for maybe restructuring tokenomics and and restructuring the validator set in a way that makes sense and that um doesn't like also doesn't uh leave the community and token holders um out on the street yeah but I mean I think that you know broadly like you look at eth2 and there's quite a bit of validator concentration in terms of stake weight and voting power and the Practical number of entity like the Nakamoto coefficient there's many discussions around this but it's not super high and I mean even for salana it's on the order

of like 30 I think so this idea that we need hundreds of thousands of validators I think is farsal on its face and the key is stake decentralization and that's a distribution problem that has a number of different solutions none of which include running more nodes so the benefits to large validator sets are very diminishing and I think for 99% of projects that aren't looking to have Global nation state censorship resistance which frankly is like a very very high bar that I think even most large chains struggle to meet to have that property

like if you just want resilience against North Korea for example you probably need a Nakamoto coefficient of like five if you only need a Nakamoto coefficient of five you need like 15 validators which is way fewer than folks are running now and I I think that that is that's an inefficiency that the market can and will correct yeah I wonder about that right because I think there is a meme of decentralization that is more important than the actual practical um the actual practical benefits of decentralization and it it is a I think the meme of decentralization helps also to justify why we need

blockchains and like why blockchains are important and I think you know when you were talking earlier about sort of technological architecture design choices and and sort of religious ideas behind that I think I think there is value in this idea of decentralization I mean this is why Bitcoin exists this is why like the entire space is here and I think we shouldn't forget that right like as as as long as we keep abstracting away decentralization you know systems get more fragile also and are more prone perhaps to you know to attack and in in ways that like can't necessarily foresee or um weren't intended on so I I I'm I'm always cautious to you know say okay

like you know decent we only need like a nakota consensus coefficient of this much right like you know these systems exist for a reason if and if we're going to be powering and perhaps like secur ing trillions and trillions of like tens of trillions of dollars in assets and U it all comes down to like a few noes then I think that that sort of puts into question the the utility of all this you know I think that what happened with blast is a great real world example of this that's happened in the last few days you know Cosmos folks looked at blast and they were like and a bunch of DJ looked at blast like let's go a this and and you know it's sad but predictable watching things

like this happen and when you use weak security models attackers will exploit them and I think that this is why things like future proofing IBC by adding D data availability sampling and ensuring that there's these much more secure variants of what we have now that's already incredibly secure you know if you look at the amount of bridge hacks of bridge hacks zero dollars of it or IBC hacks and we are still the largest by volume and have been for years and like you know this just points to the difference in the cosmos Community versus other communities and I think that what we're building we're building for the future we're building for you know truly adversarial environments

and whereas I think that there's a lot of people who are shipping these centralized systems that are just building for right now and building for what users want immediately and we're seeing that reflected in the amount of EXP in those systems yeah I mean I think there is value in building things in a sort of Progressive Way also you know and and I think Noble's a good example of this and and chains that are considering proof of authority and then like further decentralization in the future I think uh is is a right approach uh but that the goal should always be you know sort of f future proofing and and building in this adversarial model like that should always be top of mind does roll chains

also or will it also support other da layers like aale or you know igen da or is is there any utility adding additional da layers as well in the future you know our business model is going to revolve around selling software and services to folks running the cosmo stack and providing utility to those users so if those users find utility in other da layers like will try to offer that I think you you know will probably offer outputs to build a Cosmos app that works with partial set security or things like Saga or things like ethos so we're agnostic to the underlying layers and very interested in helping enable

architectures that people want and enable the best apps to be built and you know this is if you look at every era of software value is accured to the applications and I think that there's been a lot of effort investing and building in protocols but not enough effort building applications and I think this is one of the big you were talking about eth Denver earlier this is one of the big topics throughout e Denver people like where's the apps man it's like everyone's got their own shared sequence or based rollup thing and like we the apps and people might say that about role chains too but what we're doing is we're making the longest lived most successful application platform easier

to use for developers and abstracting a lot of the complexity from this excellent infrastructure that's being built through this like huge investment in that infrastructure and trying to surface that to app Builders and we think that's incredibly valuable so one slightly unrelated question here but just to you know dispel any confusion here what is the what is the difference between rooll chains and roll apps like the dimension roll apps uh so Dimension roll apps like we'll we'll work to add a spawn output for Dimension roll apps um Dimension roll apps are a lot like uh roll kit they break apart the the different pieces of consensus and it's

just an execution environment that posts data to Celestia and relies on the dimension hub for IBC settlement um so yeah it's just a a different set of trade-offs in that modular architecture and what are the what the trade-offs like as a developer you know picking either roll apps or roll chain I think you know personally and you know what we're we're endeavoring to build tooling that does not encode these values like I don't care like I have my own values about crypto I build software that tries to help people Express those but we also build software that helps people build whatever they want and like you know build whatever is this motto for

Celestia I firmly believe in that people should be able to build whatever and I think with a lot of these rollup Frameworks and this is not just di mention but you know every rollup framework out there you're building this execution environment and what we've seen over and over again and I think dydx is the poster child for this but there's a number of other examples of this when an application reaches a certain scale they inherently want their own State machine for a wide variety of reasons and the transition from that rollup world to running your own State machine ie chain that's a very untrodden path no applications have really done that yet whereas building from a small validator set first and then being able

to expand it people have done that over and over again and there's a great set of tooling to do that so there's this very tro and very uh easy path to decentralize your application it's not like a progressive decentralization we'll figure it out later it's like hey there's a very easy path to do this it's a quick software upgrade and then we're good to go um people who have built and maintained systems understand the benefits of easy migrations and this is what we offer in a lot of ways okay cool and we mentioned ethos a couple times um yeah ethos is is a lot of people are talking about

ethos right now it's still kind of stealth there's been little said about it I think generally there's an understanding of um what what ethos enables but yeah could you describe like your your work with the ethos project and how it fits into you know this role chain architecture yeah so strange love um started working with ethos last fall we helped build up initial versions of their mesh Security application this idea of using restate e to secure rollups or other application systems like we think that's a great benefit and there's a lot of people in ethereum who want to invest more and work more with

Cosmos we should make an easy we should make it as easy as possible for them to do that and that's what ethos does so um you know I think that it's a good mix and match with things like data availability that help offer additional security and when you're thinking about small POA chains having numerous different sources of security is hugely beneficial and can help provide a very strong system for end users and Ethos is going to be a big part of that this is one point that I think U I'm not super clear on yet and is like how does ethos enable application developers or projects in ethereum get closer to Cosmos I mean what is the Practical how

how does that practically work and um from the perspective of like having restate e securing a cosmos chain yeah so there's a an igen layer AVS which are additionally validated services these are services that ethereum validators run that are a part of IG layer and that AVS can then provide those tokens that ABS is effectively a cosmos chain so like that's where the interoperability layer is there's a cosmos chain there that ABS is the ethos chain and any eth that's restak in that APS then becomes available to the application within that abs and then that application which is ethos can kind of do with it what it

wants and what it wants to do is sell it to Cosmos chains in return for yield and that's how that works okay got it and how does IBC come into play here I mean as a cosmos chain it just supports IBC out of the box and does you know does ethos also then facilitate inability with um ethereum chains or evm chains uh or do you need something like Union or polymer um orbe you'll need you'll need something like Union or polymer to do that yeah okay cool yeah so so we're we're separating here the security from the introp ability those are two those are remain two separate things and running ethos on Igan Lair with restake

e doesn't in doesn't in any way improve you know the prospects of inability with evm chains not really no but it does improve social interoperability with the holder set in that long discussion around alignment earlier I think that you know despite my feelings about it um I think that there's many people who will want align and that's not necessarily a bad thing and we can and should provide that to them if they want it right do do you think that ethos users or like ethos developers will come mostly from the cosmos side or do you think from the ethereum side trying to you s integrate or get closer to Cosmos or do you think it will come from both ethereum has this large token in this huge Capital base to

drive alignment Cosmos does not have that so we don't really have people showing up in cos like looking to be more Cosmos aligned the reason people show up in Cosmos is because they have an application that they want to build and they can't do it any other way so with that framing I think we're likely to see a lot more ethereum folks and this is what i' you know the ethos team is when I first chatted with them they're like we're ethereum Maxis like we don't really understand a lot of the cosmos stuff can you help us understand it can you help us learn to work with it and I think that you know The Duality team is another team that way that's that way the neutron team there are many teams in Cosmos from the sort of last set of cycles that have moved from

ethereum over into this world and then you know what we're seeing is like some of that's flowing back into ethereum and I think that that sort of estuary if you can call it that where there's like the Sea and the the river meeting like and that it's this mix of salt and brackish water almost like that space will increase and there's going to be more and more interchange between the two ecosystems but what ethereum has is capital and what Cosmos has is technology and better system design and I think that many folks we talked a lot about sort of religious ideas behind blockchains and like how some people want hundreds of thousands of validators and the ethereum system has been

designed to do that there's a lot of people from ethereum who come over to Cosmos and they say man this consensus system we designed for main in ethereum is massive Overkill and like this consensus system that you guys have is Battle tested and proven and there's a lot of great uses for that and they end up building systems and I think that that's that's what we're going to see more and more so I just did an episode with um with garvett of electron labs and they're building oh powerful garbett how's he doing he's good so I think we kind of touched on this idea that ethereum will uh in the future like ethereum will just be this massive chain that is just kind of like proving uh or validating ZK proofs right the like no

transactions will happen on chain it will just be like validating ZK proofs and sort of the super proofs um thanks to its like large Economic Security set and that applications will be built you know using things like like the cosmos or like the move VM or other form other VMS um do you see that as like a long-term future for ethereum as well or or there like other nuances here that you think might come into play yeah I mean I think that the best technology that serves Developers application developers the best is likely to win and you know you're talking about all these virtual machine environments what we have in the cosmos SDK is a framework where you kind of plug in Virtual machines on the top and you plug in consensus or you know data availability on the bottom and this

provides a shim that allows application developers to really build whatever and I see that as the dominant structure like for building applications moving forward and if it's not the cosmos SDK something else that offers something very similar is likely to win so um yeah that is that is kind of what I see moving forward very cool A continuing Fusion of the two stacks basically yeah a huge Delta of brackish water at the Estuary between the river of of Cosmos and and the Sea of ethereum yeah yeah the convergence Delta um cool well I've got like lots of other kind of Rapid Fire questions here um

them let's do it movm movement yeah what are your thoughts I think rushi is fantastic I think there's a lot of confusion around move and you know I think there's a number of reasons for that and at the core of it is the sort of like spat between s and Aptos and people are like this isn't the true move you're not using the true move but I think that you know look it is a religions and and it is a virtual machine designed with Crypton native Concepts around tokens and accounts that is built with safety in mind and this again this blast hack underlies how important smart contract

safety is and like you know that was due to a hiring pipeline thing but there's numerous other examples of this and the evm is just not very secure so I do think that there's a strong likelihood that the evm is not the instate and that we end up seeing the growth of other ecosystems it may be kmom it may be move so love what rousi is doing and pushing a sort of more agnostic version of move that works across a number of different architectures I think smart contract like verifiability is extremely important and they have uh sort of like built in formal verification systems within moo these are the types of forward-looking features I I see as

really important to application developers how complimentary do you think the mve VM is or particularly like movement to the cosmos SDK and kmm I mean I guess like it kind of competes with kmm on the uh application side but you know conceivably you could build an application that's IBC compatible that uses move um this is what initi is doing yeah yeah and yeah I think think that you know the movement movement I think is a slightly different architecture I don't think they're building on top of the cosmos SDK but when we're talking about the SDK is this sort of like uh circuit board layer

where you're like plugging in Hardware on the bottom and you're you've got peripherals coming on the top in the VMS like the move VM is just another VM you plug in and it can and should be interoperable with the other VMS um and IBC this is exactly what Anisha says they're going to offer we we'll see when that comes out but you know what we should do is is like infrastructure Builders is be agnostic to developer choices on top and what we see in web 2 is that the developer tools that meet developers where they are and speak to the largest number of developers in terms of language communities and tooling communities and whatever it is those are the those are the open source

applications that end up winning and like this is what we need to do in Cosmos and the move Community is growing we can and should have a move environment that enables people to program in our world all right other question fos will it recover I think I think last time you were on here were also talking about OS but uh oh yeah um I I don't have a viewpoint on that I do know fed is a fantastic founder I know that team is stuck through a rough be Market I think that the new evm that they've been working on is extremely interesting uh the Ripple folks have adopted that and there's I think more adoption on the horizon for the The Ether stack that theyve built I see more and one note on that is it's

closed Source right now or not closed Source it's uh business source licensed um and open source uh and I see more and more application teams kind of going down that route like skip is doing and one of the things that we're hoping to enable at rooll chains is to enable folks like that to sell much more easily to us and to help build out that model around selling open source software and help normalize that because you know the method that we have of paying for development right now is this Ico in 2017 has paid for a lot of the cosmos development like that's not sustainable we need a different model and like I think the E most folks are pointing towards that right now yeah interop

ability polymer and Union um what do you what do you what do you make of what they're building and uh when when do you think we'll see some some actual utility come out of these projects yeah I mean unions live on testet you can go transfer stuff between EVMS and Cosmos environments today um they have followed up all of their announcements with concrete Integrations with various test Nets I think that they're currently planning on an early Q3 maybe late Q2 launch um I think that that's likely to hold polymer release released some more marketing around their white paper today I think they've done a fantastic job of growing

awareness for IBC within the eum community and the brother crypto Community it's been kind of short on details so far so we'll see what they come out with I'm an investor and adviser on both of those teams yeah um and yeah skip we had Magmar on the podcast a couple weeks ago mags fantastic they're crushing it yeah yeah I love this skip team you know the the philosophy that I'm on here talking about um around being agnostic to some of these religious decisions and shipping what people need and are demanding um I think that there's few teams that embody that more than the

skip team they are they are the heroes we we need they're doing great they're doing very unsung and un un uh uncelebrated Heroes um yeah like yeah and I mean mostly I think because they don't have a token but you know they're building such important Tech yeah they're quiet they keep their heads down and they ship and you know what else can you ask from people yeah absolutely cool uh well yeah I guess before we wrap up like what are you most excited about right now like what keeps you uh what keeps you excited about Cosmos right now you know I think that what I have always tried to do is solve what I view as the hardest problem s

facing the ecosystem whether it was shipping The Hub growing SDK uh usage shipping IBC growing IBC usage I think the biggest problem facing the ecosystem right now is fragmentation especially from a developer user experience standpoint and growth and application development and I think that that's what we're trying to tackle at Ro chains and what we Endeavor to do is cut through the noise and provide the easiest and quickest way to get started and that is exciting for me I love it excellent Jack thanks for coming on the podcast once again actually I was looking the last time you were on was was just two years ago like next week

will be two years so you've got to come on more often