Skip Protocol: The API for Seamless Cross-Chain Experiences on Cosmos & Beyond - Sam Hart. Ep. #565

Transcript

this is how you ultimately get composability of distinct distributed systems is you have more expressive systems for interpreting wearing and just generally using the state of another chain the cosmos ecosystem I think gets it better than anybody but it's just a really hard problem uh when you're building a cross chain transaction in Cosmos you're you're most likely using skip Bitcoin signing is not the same as ethereum signing it's not the same as salana signing it's not the same as cosmos signing and that causes a massive amount of pain and that's one of the reasons that ecosystems are so segmented right now welcome to epicenter the show which talks about the Technologies projects and people driving

decentralization and the blockchain revolution I'm freder an and today I'll be speaking with Sam hot who is the head of product and strategy at skip which is a cosmos based anti-me protocol we'll get into that in just a bit before let me tell you about our sponsors this week though if you're looking to stake your crypto with confidence look no further than course one more than 150,000 delegators including institutions like Bido Penta capital and Ledger trust corus one with their assets they support over 50 blockchains and are leaders in governance or networks like Cosmos ensuring your stake is responsibly managed thanks to their Advanced me research you can also enjoy the highest

staking rewards you can stake directly from your preferred wallet set up a white label note restake your assets on iena or symbiotic or use the SDK for multi-chain saking in your app learn more at chorus. one and start sing today this episode is proudly brought to you by nosis a collective dedicated to advancing and decentralized future nosis leads Innovation with circles nosis pay and metry reshaping open Banking and money with hashy and nosis VPN they're building a more resilient privacy focused internet if you're looking for an one to launch your project nosis chain offers the same development environment as ethereum with lower

transaction fees it's supported by over 200,000 validators making nosis chain a reliable and Incredibly neutral foundation for your applications nosis da drives nosis governance where every voice matters join the nosis community in the nosis da Forum today Deploy on the evm compatible nosis chain or secure the network with just one gno and affordable Hardware start your decentralization journey today at nosis doio Hi Sam it's a pleasure to have you on yeah great to be here longtime listener cool you have been in this space for a super long time um tell us

about yourself yeah um I'll give a kind of a bridged version I guess um I started uh my crypto journey I guess very close to when epicenter started I started listening to enter like quite quite early um and I was living in New York City um right around the time of Occupy Wall Street so there was kind of like a millu of you know activated political Consciousness and um uh I was just kind of B in that and a lot of my friends ended up um

participating in occupy or kind of analyzing it from a a a more academic or like critical perspective that got me just very interested in alternative infrastructures for you know new institutions effectively and um I I've been involved in the arts for my whole life um and ended up a lot of kind of critical art projects or like interventionist projects around that or met a bunch of people that were involved in occupy and like doing both of these things um and uh eventually um I I have a technical background I worked as a um

research scientist for for 10 years um doing protein folding and bioinformatics work uh so I was able to kind of like bridge the gap and um some of these folks who were interested in kind of rebuilding institutions ended up getting into crypto unknowingly and um and I could kind of provide like a technical basis for some of that and just got really fascinated by the the industry um made kind of got pulled into it um accidentally and uh it's been you know a very interesting Journey ever since um I did I've done a whole bunch of

Consulting projects with ethereum protocols and Cosmos protocols kind of all over the place uh a lot of kind of product strategy brand strategy mechanism design um kind of ghost written or or helped write a whole bunch of white papers um and then that ended up bringing me to Berlin at one point to work with a uh project here now called radical um so it's like an open source um or like decentralized GitHub alternative um so finished contract with them worked on EIP 1559 a little bit um as a kind

of uh you one of the many members who were played a small role and eventually the pandemic started um the I didn't want to be living abroad doing freelance work so um one of my closest friends Billy Ren Camp uh was working in Cosmos at the at Allen bits um kind of a defunct organization now it kind of liquidated um at the time and most of the engineers moved to the interchain foundation kind of primary Foundation associated with Cosmos um he asked me if I wanted to join and kind of rebuild the

cosmos ecosystem um so I spent about two years there um and you know made a lot of progress in reforming the the kind of meta organization that built off technology did kind of wore all hats there so I did kind of product strategy and a a bunch of like deeper product work with for like the whole stack um and then yeah a whole bunch of kind of BD yeah lots of backend work and then um last thing I did there was work on the atom 2 atom 2.0 Paper which was kind of a a beautiful failure um and uh at that

point I just kind of like touched every part of the part of the ecosystem I was like okay I need to need to take a break need to do something else um I uh completely failed at taking a break I ended up joining skip immediately afterwards as well as uh co-founding this other project um time wave which builds this protal protocol lending product product which is kind of a something that merged an idea that emerged out of the atom 2 initiative um and yeah I'm happy to talk about either of those those things today um I guess that was a bit of a longer

intro than I anticipated yeah Sam it sounds like one one person startup I mean you've you've basically touched on all the different aspects kind of like from white paper to kind of uh uh Tech St to um company structuring and governance and uh BD and branding did they need any other people at IBC at all um yeah I mean there were a lot of other people ATF um but there there were not as many people who had that kind of like broad context and I mean I'm sure you know nosis has a

similar just kind of latitude in like the number of things that you're doing right like how deep you have to go and there there are I think there these specific people that like have that full View and like that's super super valuable to just like kind of understand how the pieces interlock with one another absolutely you have a fairly eclectic background right kind of you talked about kind of like arts and biochemistry and protein folding and so on how do you how do you decide what to work on I mean what what what does a project actually have to have in order to appear to you yeah wow that's a that's a great question I I'm not sure I do decide it

it's like decided for me like they come to you well no I just like kind of follow my interest like that that's really been like my Guiding Light is like I kind of can't not work on this thing it's I'm just kind of drawn to it um which has just brought me into some very circuitous paths and and a whole bunch of different things but I'm yeah I'm just like a very curious person and kind of Follow that follow that line um it it is kind of funny because I do play like a strategy role in a lot of these instances which is like very much a kind of structur or it has this kind of structured unstructured aspect to it where you know given your position in the market and like what you're trying

to achieve what do you what are you trying to do but like for my personal life I'm just very like okay I'm G to float wherever is just kind of most attractive yeah super nice um you're also um you're also part of the other internet um which is a super interesting research um Collective um whose uh outputs I consume uh with uh some frequency they they they're usually very insightful can can you talk about that and kind of we'll also link to that in the show notes because I think it's it's underappreciated in the ecosystem yeah absolutely um it's a very special group of people and

organization you know pretty pretty unique in in the space um and uh it it I mean it is a research organization kind of cultural research um we do a variety of things um some of it is kind of these long form kind of cultural analysis or kind of contemporary anthropologies of what's happening in crypto um some of it is Consulting work so worked with Unis Swap and Aragon and optimism and whole bunch of other folks um mostly on kind of governance and I don't know kind of Community

Development um projects and then um there's uh there's kind of an internal side of the organization which most most people don't know about which is uh really about um kind of personal development and and learning so there's like a reading group and and we we've done seminars like brought in lectures to like just speak to the group about topics that we're interested in um a lot of like political philosophy young uh I don't know practitioners they were doing uh you know work with Municipal governments and things like that so it's a it it's also you know houses

a uh a bunch of folks that have pretty eclectic interests and you know has a a multitude of different projects that kind of reflect their skill sets and and where they're drawn to as well yeah no it's it's a it's a great resource uh go check it out people so let's talk about Skip protocol so um you are the head of product and strategy um there how how would you describe skip in a few sentences yeah um and it's maybe a little bit different than how you kind of introduced introduced skip in in the intro um which which is totally

understandable the organizations evolved a lot um and it it definitely started out as like me infrastructure company um had product very similar to the like the flash Bots Meed relay um but uh today like basically what we realized is that like me is not really a product it's it's more of a phenomenon or you know maybe a business model if you're a problem uh kind of structuring it or problem totally um it's a it's a force to be reckoned with it's also kind of a a lens that you can bring to product

development so that that's kind of how we approach things today um the first thing that we realized was okay if we're going to be like a cross-chain meev organization or if that's something that that we're interested in we need to have more cross chain economic activity happening so like we just started working on that problem like it's actually really hard to do um and it's completely it's unsolved today like there are you know domains or like coverage areas where you can get a decent experience but it's really uh if you kind of deviate from from that path it's an absolute

nightmare um so uh we started in just kind of solving that for Cosmos um have done a whole bunch of kind of full stack modifications of the the meol the fee Market the um IBC the interoperability protocol like just basically every layer of the stack to kind of try to smooth out that experience a lot of that work kind of focused on transaction building or or it was in order to deliver an experience that was that was kind of close to the user um we also uh in order to kind of make this experience seamless we we also

needed to to work on the the kind of node architecture itself um Cosmos is a a network of sovereign app app chains so um we built a a fee Market we we built a kind of transaction Builder that's internal to the to deployed nodes and and um what we realized there is that um a lot of that work um looked a lot like an oracle of some kind so we kind of evolved that product Suite into um an enshrined oracle um that uh many app chains in in the ecosystem are using

including DX and um Neutron and others um and we're kind of syndicating that and and deploying it more widely now so the the kind of unifying umbrella there is we're basically building tools for Sovereign chains and um trying to kind of pick off the the problems that are you know most important to to builders um and there's a whole bunch of things that we we want to do in the future to to improve that experience and make it really easy to to deploy your own out chain just in case that hasn't become abundantly clear here you guys are on Cosmos so um why was interoperability a problem before kind of like because

Cosmos is very much devised with kind of like this interoperability um mindset um you know top front and center so I mean kind of like IBC is kind of like the the cool thing um for Cosmos right totally I mean IBC the cosmos ecosystem I think gets it better than anybody but it's just a really hard problem um first of all like what does interoperability even mean like what is and who is who or what is interoperable with you know with what um you're working in a a kind of network of networks you know it's a distributed system that has heterogeneous

architecture um the what IBC gives you is a standard message passing system and way of a of kind of creating like an assurance around the um the who your counterparty is by like having the chain itself authenticate messages and that's kind of it actually like that's that's the core of what IBC is it's actually just kind of like a natural solution like oh you don't want to introduce a third party when chains are talking to each other that's kind of the core thesis and then there's you can build other things on top of that um so you can build a fundable to token protocol an nft protocol kind of remote access or remote Authentication Protocol so even

just in the the fungible token case um because IBC is a point-to-point messaging system its security uh kind of relies on or or it assumes that you don't want to introduce third party like you want to direct communicate directly basically means that um you can't just send a token directly to any chain at any time um and have it uh produce the the correct representation um so uh you typically need to unwind tokens through their their issuer their issuing chain um so we're we're now getting like you know if I want to uh send my Atom from Neutron to osmosis I

actually need to send it back to the cosmos Hub and then I need to send it um to osmosis and there's three different chains three different distributed systems like involved here you're actually creating a workflow between between these things that's completely asynchronous um so the there ends up being these kind of middle Wares that you uh that you Deploy on a chain in order to interpret messages in order to like forward them on to the next um to the next n domain that's just for fungible tokens which is like very kind of structured process if you wanted do anything more complicated than that like you want to compose the application behavior of three different

protocols um this is going to get way more complicated and this is one of the reasons that we kind of went in this Oracle direction as well is okay you want to dynamically read state from a different chain and then you know be able to you like this is how you ultimately get composability of distinct distributed systems is you have more expressive systems for interpreting querying um and just generally using the the state of another chain yeah long story short it's just a really hard problem um and we've thought really deeply about it but it it's about the most challenging thing that you

could possibly uh approach and in order to get like really good composability um at that like application Level but Cosmos was kind of devised in this application chain um architecture um so so how how did things work before skip or what were the things that very concretely you added to kind of help devs um cross that bridge yeah I think it's just a the difference is kind of like the theoretical versus the Practical um we were really the first team that was um kind of serving multiple

customers with that specific agenda of like oh we we want to make these flows better um osmosis was you know was kind of a power user of IBC but their their workflow is just kind of like drawing Assets in right like it's kind of one-way flow and they can kind of simplifies what they need to do uh we're kind of serving all chains at once and so we need these you know much more intricate like Dynamic flows to be available the problem that we ended up solving first was um just how do you build a transaction like yes it's technically possible to build a transaction that's

going to have this Behavior but the the Practical reality of that is like okay well you need to uh understand what the fee token of this of the counterparty chain or all the intermediate chains are um you need to understand uh what kind of fee Market they have they might have different fee markets um you need to understand uh what the fallback behavior is if something doesn't get executed um there's just like all this information and cont like what the token denominations are what are the signature schemes that each of these chains have um there's actually a even though something's technically possible

just performing the right sequence of actions is is immensely difficult so that was kind of the first thing we solved is just um we have an API that does transaction building and delivers that to a a wallet or a front end um so we power a lot of the um the transaction building in in the ecosystem cross chain and uh what who are you uses for this API s most of the major front ends in Cosmos and and uh a bunch of the or main wallets so um Kepler leap uh there's a a metamask extension that uses uh uses skip uh and then um osmosis Neutron um

DDX uh yeah I mean it's the main way that you get around it's it's a little bit hidden in the background but uh when you're building a cross chain transaction in Cosmos you're you're most likely using skip I should also mention we're not Cosmos uh specific per se like we kind of extended into so Cosmos technology is extended into a whole bunch of different domains and then we've also kind of adopted some other Bridges so we we're actually the we do the most volume or like we're one of the only providers that's able to do uh cctp transactions between uh different chains we actually there are routes that are non- Cosmos that we we

serve um we one of the best ways to to do any kind of hyperlane transaction um we're working with a bunch of Bitcoin l2s and and things like this so we're uh we're just kind of going where I guess the the kind of territory that we're or our coverage areas are continuing to increase uh as we see demand for these things so so cctb being the circle uh protocol right okay for for devs or projects that kind of use your service um H how do they how do they pay so is it kind of like on a transaction basis or how do they pay for

your service service yeah so our two main products right now are this Oracle um service and um we have a the API and the there's uh there's kind of a structure like a semi-structured model for um for payment on both sides um it's a little bit dependent on the nature of what you want to do so there's there's a number of like special cases and and we do a bunch of like kind of custom work for for folks like you know DX we did like a ton of custom work to get exactly where they wanted to go uh on the Oracle side we have a um like service contracts year yearly service contracts which is a

kind of standard um work hole model uh and then on um on the the API side um uh skip Go is is the name of the API we take a percentage of the fees taken by the um by the affiliate so um if you're not charging then uh we won't take a cut um but if you are charging then um then we'll take a per of that okay and the oracles um that you are offering to kind of enable this interoperability or the seamless interoperability um what kind of oracles are they are they kind of decentralized or are they kind of just

feeds that you pull from somewhere and uh put on chain maybe just worth backing up for a second like what what is a cosmos chain so um it's a delegated proof of stake chain uh that is run by you know typically anywhere from 20 to 100 validators and uh the Oracle system that we develop um is integrated into the binary and and the validator setup so all of the all the validators are running the Oracle there is a a note a module in the um in the binary that does some interpretation of of incoming

messages and um and then there's a side card C process that's run by each validator that will query um uh a variety of providers uh and those providers are can be programmed by the the application chain so um DX for instance uses primarily price feeds um but from a number of different providers uh so for any asset it will want multiple providers um some of those might be it might be Unis swap um so it could just query chain state directly um it could include proofs of of that chain state if it wanted to um or it could be binance um coinbase it can aggregate um locally

on the validator um and then uh the validator as part of its uh kind of consensus voting process uh submits its aggregated um aggregated price or aggregated data uh and then the uh the chain then does a second aggregation to um find a consensus value for whatever state you're trying to uh to include in in the application so it's an oracle aggregator protocol in a way is that fair to say yeah I I think that's fair um kind

of all oracles are Oracle aggregators to some extent they don't it's a little bit of like a backend detail but any decentralized feed is is some kind of aggregation um that's fair yeah yeah the main differentiator is it's there's there's no middleman like even skip is not a middleman in this process it's just it is run by the validators and the chain they are fetching the data and then it is like you come to consensus on the data so skip develops a a module that you can you can run and then we you know we're we're kind of on hand for maintenance and and things of that that nature but um we're not running an intermediary

service why did I think that you guys primarily do me like cross chain me I mean we did at one point um I guess there's a question of like what what even is me but um I guess we're more on the me generation than me uh extraction side now we we have developed a number of products that that had this character um uh We've open sourced all of them um and they are in production so uh the first one that we developed was a product for osmosis which was a um again it was a module that lives inside the

binary of of the osmosis chain it's live today and uh it automatically back runs um transactions in order to it does cyclic Arbitrage uh kind of before a um a Searchers is able to um to extract that Revenue this is something before we did this like people didn't think was possible so it was It was kind of cool to to demonstrate that it's viable to actually do solving like in protocol um it's been really interesting to see this is kind of like rebranded as the application specific sequencing now um but yeah if you want

to see an example of that it's live on osmosis uh it was a little bit osmosis specific so we it was kind of a one-off um we also developed another product called The Block SDK um which is uh also deployed in a number of chains and Cosmos um what block SDK does is it allows you to create programmable lanes for your block space uh so you can say basically you create different kind of me subm pools um and then different block building rules uh for each of those M Pools um and so you can have different kind of basically transactions come into the main men poool they're uh there's kind

of a hierarchical um filter in which they get sorted into different these different mols uh and then you can program program them to do whatever they want so uh some you could have a free Lane for instance just transactions of this type are are free uh or they're free up to a certain number per hour or something like that transactions that are from this user or from a user that has this nft you know have a reduced rate you know you can you can kind of do whatever you want here um so uh we've seen you know a bunch of creativity kind of applied to to that system um again

we had to kind of build that system to realize like me is maybe not like a business model um so much as like a uh a tool and um so we just open source that product and and you know I've helped a bunch of people to to integrate it deploy it give them some advice on how to use it but um it's it's just kind of freely available for the ecosystem MB has caused a large amount of controversy um in in the eorum ecosystem um how um how has it gone down in the cosmos ecosystem was it equally um contentious no

um I mean for a couple reasons like one there's just way less uh economic activity in Cosmos ecosystem um so me is going to occur when there's a high degree of you know when there is value to be extracted and when there's a lot of contentious State and Cosmos kind of has its General like architecture is one of less contentious State you know you're separating applications into their own domains and there's less economic value um currently so um that both of those together mean that the cost severity of

um me and some it's just something that's like way less of a dire issue um it's still there and it's still something you want to address and and kind of give give attention to but it it's more of a a background thing and again more of like a lens or toolkit to to to bring to a problem yeah Ju Just as a background kind of like on ethereum um there were times when you know 1% or so of total value transacted was um extracted do you have an idea of what the equivalent percentag is on Cosmos I don't I mean it's so small that

it like wasn't worth tracking like that that's kind of what we're talking about here um it also a little bit depends on what you're talking about with meev so the cyclic Arbitrage that we're now doing in protocol for osmosis that was the largest source of me in the eem back running right back running back running on osmosis back running on okay that's super interesting that made up like 90% of of me that is now being captured by the protocol is that MV I like the protocol is capturing it yeah that doesn't matter so basically to me Meb is is everything that kind of um where

where kind of you can extract value or something can extract value um by changing the context of the transaction um and you're do you're very much minor extractable value the protocol is extracting it it doesn't matter this is what I'm saying the the the definition here is uh is relevant I mean it's are you familiar with me blocker uh yeah yeah yeah so kind of like it's it's a protocol that we built on on ethereum and uh uh basically it also it does the same so kind of like it it prevents front running and sandwiching and it uh it kind of gives back 90% of the fees that are acred through back running I should say and I

mean back running to to kind of to to give a very simple explanation here for back running it's kind of like um for instance if you change the price of something on Chain by your own transaction and then kind of there's there's a value in kind of bringing that back to where it should be and that's kind of back running so kind of in a way it's kind of b n Ian and that kind of like nothing is being extracted from you you're just not a very sophisticated Trader and that kind of like someone would have would have Abed that anyway and kind of like uh yeah um and we actually on etherum we see that uh that um uh back running is a a fairly minor percentage of of uh uh me what why do

you think it's different on on Cosmos um why is back running specifically a smaller percentage um yeah so why why why is it a much bigger so comparatively a much bigger issue on osmosis then on on uh ethereum oh well you're just saying the distribution between um top of block or or Stat ARB and back running I mean the reason is like really stupid which is that like ethereum ethereum has more tokens that are listed on binance so the you can do statar between binance and ethereum and there's just like less tokens that are

listed on centralized exchanges yeah there is statar and and I think it's like increasing over time but um yeah it's a really trivial answer okay yeah that's that's fair what do you think of protocols that kind of like prevent me completely so for instance there's shutter right kind of that kind of um that encrypts your your transactions before they send um to the mol and then it kind of decrypts them only once they've been included in a block um do do you think that would be a good technical solution to kind of uh just completely do away with the problem yeah so completely is a strong

word um so we we worked with osmosis on like an early version of of their threshold decryption thing which which has not been deployed yet it's been um but they you know helped to kind of initiate that idea um so we've done quite a bit of like research on this topic um one of the reasons it hasn't been deployed is it kind of only becomes an issue at a certain level of of me that you might be concerned about okay I this is a it's a tool it really depends on what you're trying to do um so in the ethereum context

like as far as I understand shudder is like trying to do something for main chain right like yeah it's live on nois chain right now um uh but kind of like yeah obviously kind of like uh there are discussions whether to also deploy it on Main net yeah but it's like the the beacon you know that's kind of where it's targeting which is uh you know has like this High degree of composability there's lots of contention this is a so like that is a different environment than one in which you're just doing like a ticketing app or whatever and like there's maybe not a lot of me and like so the way that it's going to behave the incentives for kind of

like you know the way that you break this thing is you uh you go into the like collocation and um you try to to deliver transactions or or get information as as quickly as possible from like a a third party exchange um I think that all the more economic activity you have like the more you're going to be pushed in that direction it's a little bit of a cat and mouse game on how to how to ameliorate that but deployed in an environment like like ticketing app for instance like maybe it's just not even worth like doing that whole thing and you're just never going to have that kind of behavior and so it could just be

fine like it could be a nice thing that's like out of the box for a system like that and just eliminate some behaviors that were like kind of easy to do previously and that just like that class of whatever Searcher is just like never going to exist because they're not you know getting the $10 on the the like Advanced ticket is like not worth you know Co collocating a in a data center in Japan like yeah that's fair um can we talk can we zoom out a little bit bit and kind of like talk about the ethereum versus Cosmos debate because kind of like you've you've been kind of like in this ecosystem a super long time and as you say there's way less economic activity

on Cosmos but Cosmos does have this kind of like um inbuild interoperability which now thanks to skip um maybe is also usable and kind of like why why do you think um ethereum sees so much more economic activity where kind of interop ability is much more um is much more an afterthought um for us and I mean we've we've seen this over the past two and a half years or so right kind of like we've had four and a half billion in Bridge hacks so why I mean from kind of like a first principles approach the cosmos ecosystem yeah makes a lot of sense

right why is a why is Cosmos less successful um there's there's a bunch of reasons some of them are um are very like circumstantial and path dependent I mean the main development organization completely melted down and fragmented into now like 10 different or entities which is very interesting super decentralized ecosystem like maybe there's not a consensus opinion but I think this was actually really good for the cosmos ecosystem because kind of like the the I mean uh Allin bits and kind of like the leadership

everything was a little bit dysfunctional I was kind of like I think kind of like having that fall apart um I think that was a really good thing for the ecosystem would would you would you see this otherwise I mean I don't I don't think it's black or white like it was good for some things it was bad for others like if you want Adam token number to go up probably bad for that like but uh it did allow for just a a lot of kind of all of these fragmented entities like started their own thing and so there was just like a you know there was a lot of creativity that was

kind of brought into into other projects um this is one of this is one of the reasons it's really fun to work in Cosmos is like it really is kind of a Bastion of like new ideas and you get to try stuff out I mean I've worked on like very beginning of proof of a stake very beginning of liquid staking the very beginning of reaking the very beginning of like uh you know just this a lot of this meev stuff that we're now talking about um and it's cool to talk to ethereum people and be like oh yeah like I did that and like we we explored all these different ideas and like it's actually a really nice dialogue to be able to have have some of that experience but yeah I mean it impacted the go to market for the primary asset

for sure I I think the the architecture you know doing a doing one chain it's easier it's just it's just easier to to do and like um to bring that to Market to create a unified experience around it in order to kind of get initial traction um um Kus never had that so he was like always dealing with the the problems that were anticipated for you know a market that was several years down the line and now it's nice to have them um but yeah it was a little bit like cart before the horse maybe I I

do think ethereum would have done well to have more of an emphasis on inter interoperability from the beginning it's like very hard to back into that because they're competing Solutions nobody's incentivized to use something that's invented today or or kind of like forced in by you know ethereum Foundation leadership yeah I mean a lot of it is just kind of like a cultural or like normative thing where you think about the ecosystem as one that has interoperability or like that's that's kind of a core as like everybody's just yeah I use that that's my default and that helps a lot yeah so I totally I totally agree that it's kind of like it's to do with

kind of like standard setting so kind of like on E theum we kind of we know what the fee Market is like and uh um and yeah this is by by by the flip side interoperability is kind of like was underspecified and kind of like uh the the protocol um ex an um we do see a lot of interesting Solutions though do you think they will reach um the same level of security as IBC eventually uh I gu I guess I just see them a little bit as like apples and oranges like the whole security model is just different um it's different yeah there is a an assumption that

you're using ethereum for quote unquote settlement you know the market maker is taking on the risk of settlement often times in these like Fast transfer systems IBC is just like more of a standard standardized process um yeah it's a little bit hard to to answer that question cuz they're they're kind of different animals so in ethereum you can like reason about ethereum security but you every single Bridge has a different is different it's like its own snowflake which is kind of messed up to be honest um and then there's all these different fast transfer or uh kind of slow

transfer settlement processes that you can you can take and there's heterogeneous messaging and heterogeneous like uh authentication and in Cosmos there's heterogeneous security there's heterogeneous domains but like standardized messaging which is kind of inverse yeah it's it's a to totally different uh system do you do you do you see applications working cross etherium and Cosmos in due time so kind of like when I talk about kind of like um actually use adoption kind of like having numis use things that are powered by blockchain infrastructure um I usually posit that kind of no one will have to know um

what's kind of powering the application that they're using do you envision there kind of being um this cross ecosystem um operability where kind of like I can send things from uh ethereum to Cosmos or messages or kind of like have kind of flit between the two of them without knowing that I'm currently doing that without with that kind of being totally abstracted away from me yeah absolutely um I mean it's already happening in certain in many cases so first of all depends on what you call Cosmos um to some extent not sure we want to get into this but like Cosmos is

both a um you know an ecosystem there's the cosmos Hub which has an asset um which is like pretty distinct in a lot of ways from the ecosystem there's a stack of components uh that many of these um that many of these projects are building with um and then I I also like to say that there's kind of a the stack you can even kind of decompose into like a set of specific components you know Cosmos SDK Comet IBC and then just like a general pattern of like okay there's a state machine framework there's a consensus algorithm and there's a message passing system and like that that kind of looks like you know the jam stack or something

like that it's just like that's a pattern that's like adopted everywhere um but those specific components are actually all over the place even in a lot of ethereum projects you just kind of don't hear about them it's just they're useful tools so is that like Cosmos interoperability like maybe I you know I talk to a lot of ethereum projects that are like they want to use Cosmos CK for this random thing like y happy to talk to you like it can do XYZ user never knows you know it's like the same signing algorithm um it it just does what you want it to do Under the Hood um Comet

similarly is used all over the place um in a bunch of ethereum projects and elsewhere um one thing that's been very interesting is that um reaking projects are use using the cosmos the cosmos stack um in in a number of different places I think it might be the most popular reaking architecture um it's kind of that and the op stack seem seem to be uh used most frequently um but it's not branded as such you know it's oh yeah like deploy an ABS but you're like using the cosmos 6K and Comet and maybe even in IBC in some instances so um that interop is already kind of happening we

just it's a little bit more under the hood the things that are most annoying are signing and this is this is just a general issue ACR like Bitcoin signing is not the same as ethereum signing it's not the same as salana signing it's not the same as uh Cosmos signing and um that causes a massive amount of pain and that's one of the reasons that the ecosystems are so segmented right now in my opinion is um means you have different wallet ecosystems you have different um the the the kind of front door for users ends up being different um so signing abstractions like MPC style protocols I think are going to be

um you know important for like solving solving things at that layer but that's going to take a long time to to transition beyond that uh there are different message passing systems there are different middle Wares for um for routing messages um between different domains there are different you know you have to pay with different fees uh so that kind of all these things need to be solved together in order to get uh user flows that are that are really seamless uh it's happening though I mean and like I was saying at the beginning there are specific routes today that cross multiple different chains

multip different ecosystems and they're they're great they they work they work great um it it's just going to take a while to kind of like expand that to the point where it really feels seamless everywhere can you give examples of where you think it feels seamless now yeah I'm so you can go from um salana uh if you have usdc on salana and you want to send it to osmosis and by whatever osmo you can do that in one click um and it it's very fast um that's that's that's cool um uh so cctp opened up a lot of uh a lot of these routes for us we are

working on a a fast transfer system that's going to allow for similar interoperability between um some ethereum domains and uh and Cosmos uh we also work with a bunch of the like rollup ecosystem um or modular ecosystem so um we've been doing uh I mean similarly you could go from base to um to a rollup that's using a hyperlane bridge um in one click um today and fitting all the the pipes together to make that work is was pretty

crazy but like and and you might end up with a in an account that that requires a different wallet at the end like that's kind of annoying but um you can actually send the transaction or send the tokens and have them arrive at the at the other side so do you see skip kind of going the this mul chain route kind of in kind of making things easier for defs because kind of like as you explain kind of currently this is primarily on Cosmos only do you intend to kind of expand into this cross chain world uh yeah I mean I would say we're already kind of expanded um it it's just going to be incremental um so we are

working with a number of reaking projects or folks that are using cosos 6K in in different domains we're actually even integrating with non Cosmos projects like like our um or projects that aren't using the uh using Cosmos technology so we're looking at shared sequencers for instance and just deploying our um our side car process uh in order to um feed Oracle messages directly into the sequencer and there actually isn't Cosmos SDK necessarily involved at all um so yeah there's different kind of levels of an interop here and

um I mean one of the challenges is just kind of knowing where to put your emphasis um because things kind of Go in all directions um so there's a lot of people who are using the technology in one way or or another and um you know trying to see which way is the wind's blowing and and how that kind of aligns with our with our business and and who we want to develop relationships with so what would you say h how is the wind blowing right now so what's what's uh in the pipe plus um well a couple things um first of all we we're like constantly

just doing a lot of work on the core stack and so we're we're doubling down on that um C 6K has a ton of adoption uh and we want to be um we want to be better want to be easier to deploy um we want to just be more standardized and um just Le less sharp edges so that that's some something that we're working on and then there a bunch of users uh of the technology that um that we're that we want to work with or are working with um like I said reaking projects are is just a natural fit for us um we would also love to see more projects

deployed um directly into you know using the technology Alone um one one thing that's like a little bit of the contrari in take that we have I have I guess is um proof of authority is like totally under leveraged um I when we've used it in certain instances and uh worked with projects using a POA chain it's actually really nice and kind of yeah I mean it's like a it's a great deployment Loop um and for a lot of use cases I think it's it's absolutely secure enough it's absolutely like decentralized enough it there's just a lot of like low security

or like and there's all a lot of ways to enhance a a POA system um particularly with reaking and things like this so um so that would be a way you know that could be like a new market that that could open up and yeah like I mentioned shared sequencers is is something that we're kind of exploring at the moment um integrating our our Oracle into that uh these Bitcoin l2s are like really heterogeneous and what they offer um but we're uh there are a few projects that are are natural fit and and we're starting to to work with them yeah super interesting looking forward to seeing that where can people find out more about

Skip yeah so we just uh did kind of a Rebrand and changed our URL so it's skip. build um and the uh the Twitter handle or the X handle is is still at skip protocol perfect super nice it's been a pleasure Sam thank you so much for coming on thank you for having me this was great