What's going on with Canto?

Transcript

bankless Nation we are super excited to talk about Kanto today specifically what is going on with Kanto David this is a layer one chain I know that I know it's been up about 500 percent in price over the last 30 days I know crypto Twitter is talking about it angry about it yelling about it I'm not really sure but I don't know precisely what it is what are we going to unpack today why is Kanto important yeah Kanto is a brand new layer one blockchain on the scene which has caused a bunch of hype the as as you mentioned because the price has done a 500 in 30 days uh which is insane even in crypto standards uh how did that come to be why especially because it's a bear Market especially because it's a

bear market right okay uh and uh and so how did the what has a what stars have aligned to allow for a 500 price appreciation in the Canto L1 asset where did the Kanto Community come from what's so unique about Kanto that is generating this amount of excitement and hubbub is it just a bunch of Traders rotating uh what's real about Kanto what is perhaps uh just just a trait uh there's a bunch of conversations to have here uh Kanto is experimenting with what's called CSR which I believe is called contract secured Revenue uh we will ask Zach about that and make sure I got that acronym right uh and this all kind of started when variant put out a blog post detailing their philosophy behind uh

Kanto and why they think it is exciting uh Kanto is not the first L1 blockchain to experiment with CSR I believe near and others have worked on this as well but Kanto and the way that it was designed in the way that it was bootstrapped has captured the attention in ways that other layer 1 blockchains have not so we are bringing on Zach Culp it was a Kanto core contributor uh so say that three times fast Kanto core contributor CCC um and uh while this is Kent uh jack's first appearance on Bank list uh I've actually done three podcasts with Zach way back in my POV crypto days so long time bankless listeners my my remember some very old episodes I I did with a very long time ago uh funny guy been around in the ethereum ecosystem for a

very long time and that's also another conversation I like to have a lot of Kanto developers are ethereum community members but they have now turned their attention to Kanto so why has Kanto captured their attention uh so many questions to ask I hope we can get all of these answers today on the show including what to call these guys cantonians cantonites uh there's some working ideas that I have but I want to hear what Zach has to say about that and guys before we get in I want to tell you about our friends and sponsors at metamask learn so not just metamask the wallet there's actually a way you can level up on crypto by going through courses going through lessons on metamask learn so David what have I got in on screen what are we looking at here metamask learn is a engaging and

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speaking what's going on yeah I kind of lost my voice uh it's actually come back uh the day before yesterday my day is better my days are better now there was at the last day while I was at starkware sessions in Tel Aviv Friday afternoon I hopped on a plane landed in Tel Aviv Saturday morning uh went straight over to the hacker house and see what they were hacking on attended the conference did nine interviews which is perhaps why you can tell like my voice was spent so it's hoarse uh yeah the the last day of the conference I was like literally like in my brain was breaking without like pushing air out of my lungs and there was just nothing coming out man it was just a guy um so it starts it's starting to come back but it's partly because I did nine

goddamn interviews over at Star Wars sessions those are currently being put through the pod squad uh which are podcast stream at team at bankless the the podcast Mill and those are coming out on the RSS feed I'm also writing an article which is almost done coming out on Thursday which is what I learned over at the software sessions uh so a bunch of starkware content coming your way uh but but that is why my voice is spent uh you know put put my voice on the line for the bankless nation yeah it's like uh David's sacrificing his his voice in order to give bring you uh content and we only have like three more podcasts to record this weekend so uh light workload for the rest of the week um all right guys we'll be right back with this episode talking all about Kanto what it

is what's going on with Zach Cole but before we do we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible including our friends over at Kraken they are our recommended exchange for 2023 fantastic proof of reserves go check them out Kraken has been a leader in the crypto industry for the last 12 years dedicated to accelerating the global adoption of crypto Kraken puts an emphasis on security transparency and client support which is why over 9 million clients have come to love kraken's products whether you're a beginner or a pro the Kraken ux is simple intuitive and frictionless making the kraken app a great place for all to get involved and learn about crypto for those with experience the redesigned Kraken Pro app and web experience is completely customizable to your trading

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you if you have any unclaimed air drops that you can get and it also does poapps and mintable nfts any kind of money that your wallet can claim earnify will tell you about it and you should probably do it now because some airdrops expire and if you sign up for earnify they'll email you anytime one of your wallets has a new airdrop for it to make sure that you never lose an airdrop ever again you can also upgrade to earn five premium to unlock access to airdrops that are beyond the basics and are able to set reminders for more wallets and for just under 21 a month it probably pays for itself with just one airdrop so plug in your wallets at earnify and see what you get that's e-a-r-n-i dot f i and make sure you never lose another airdrop banglades Nation we are back doing our

show with Kanto this is Zach Cole I want to introduce you to it's that close at protocol engineer co-founder and CTO of slingshot which is a decentralized exchange but also more relevantly a core contributor to Kanto and new layer one on the scene dominating headlines lately in no small part to its crazy price performance of his native asset and so we are going to dive into all things Kanto with the guidance of Zach cult Zach welcome to bankless hey hey hey what's up thank you for having me on it's your boy Zach Cole coming at you live from Nashville Tennessee beautiful day how y'all doing what's up what's up man is this the kind of the uh the Kanto energy are you guys

always like this I mean we bring it you know we've been known to bring it okay so the name all right we're talking about uh cantonites um uh what else um cantaloupes I think maybe some on the YouTube chat said what's referred to it as that yeah what what what does the Kanto tribe call itself because you know I don't know I think cantaloupes is pretty cool cantonites is good too it sounds a little Old Testament but uh yeah I think I think uh I think that's a good one too I don't know I mean I guess it's whatever people choose to identify as you know can we uh ask can I ask what this Kanto thing is at the highest level so I feel like um you know people are talking about Kanto mostly because of price

lately and so people are like well Kanto is coming on bankless must be a top signal I can't say that you're wrong I don't know have no idea um but also Kanto is doing uh something pretty pretty unique it's sort of a unique experiment and um it was a unique experiment even before the last 30 days of sort of a 500 percent increase in price explosion so how would you explain this I know Zach you're a long time member of the ethereum community so explain it to you uh the average bankless listener what is Kanto yeah so Kanto is kind of like a novel L1 uh where we kind of like experiment as a network with different economic Primitives

um the primary one being CSR which is contract secured revenue and that's kind of like a fee sharing mechanism so um things like this haven't really existed in the way that we present them and what we do essentially is uh like uh similar to 1559 where all of the fees for a block are burned and sent to the zero address what we're doing is uh taking 20 percent of those fees that would otherwise be burned and we're Distributing them to the people that launch or deploy those contracts on the network um so that kind of provides a subsidy essentially for developers and incentivizes people to kind of build without having to be concerned so much about how are we going to generate

Revenue how are we going to monetize what are we going to do uh because I think a big problem with people that build is that they're passionate about building we like to build stuff put things out there I like to do that with my friends but all but it's not always entirely clear like how are we going to support ourselves how am I going to keep the lights on how am I going to pay rent what am I going to do like I build this cool stuff I'm not really getting paid to do it like what am I going to do so this network kind of allows you to just like focus on your passion build what you want to build and we provide a subsidy so if you build a like if you deploy a contract and you build a product that a lot of people use you're

going to be rewarded that's baked into the core the core protocol of Kanto and I think that's important of like what we're going for primarily granted this is an experiment completely experimental uh like you know here today gone tomorrow could go to zero it could go to a billion I have no idea we're one two we're one tweet away yeah from either as uh as we always say on Bank list uh crypto's risky you could lose what you put in that is multiply that by 10 and apply that to Canton guys as you're listing this but but let me ask you about this experiment a little bit more details so um back so this is a layer one so this is not a layer two right I believe it uses some of the cosmos Statler tenderment stack I should say for kind of consensus

um but it is evm is a smart contract chain is that right yeah so there's evm functionality on top of the cosmos SDK that was used to like build the underlying protocol itself um we chose that because uh well first of all uh Kanto is like a fork of evmos and then we built on top of that evmos uses the cosmos SDK and implements evm functionality the reason we did all of that is because the cosmos SDK is pretty easy to kind of just uh Define your uh blockchain not have to worry about building all that stuff necessarily and then just get it going and then of course we have BBM functionality because I'm an evm maxi myself so okay so um full evm capability then and that's

that's pretty conducive to the Builder community that you're hoping to attract now the big point of of difference aside from sort of you know people recognize uh you know uh evmos and you know other Cosmos chains that have evm support like that's sort of been done before but what Canto is doing is this kind of unique public goods funding mechanism right and so whenever we've in the past described uh even like things like gas fees for example or EIP 1559 these sorts of things our mental model for it and when I say ours I mean banklesses basically like it's kind of a tax to pay for public goods and the public good that ethereum provides is

settlement assurances and so all of this this public good goes into like National Defense the uh defense fund for the chain right and so um that is the only public good that ethereum provides right it's just chain defense maximum security all of the transaction fees all of the the burn earning goes into the value of eth and ultimately that ends up increasing the economic value of the chain and the cost to attack the chain so it all goes into the military and security budget what you're saying is with Kanto um that's part of it because you're obviously compensating validators right so you have a military budget but then you also have a budget for Bridges and

schools and hospitals and of course I'm not talking about these things literally I'm talking about other chain infrastructure types of things and I believe the chain infrastructure from what I've I see in cryptos like um a DEX and what what else uh lending Market okay so a decentralized exchange and a lending market and what you're saying is um the the the protocol fees that Kanto generates goes towards the taxes go towards funding these applications and so like these are private applications almost on the ethereum network but for Kanto they're kind of like government provided they're like part of the public good and um recipients of of the taxes

and that's the unique flavor of the model um I think what I'm curious about are you sure you don't know anything about cancer well I just it just seems like look it just seems like a logical thing that you go try to do what I'm curious about if that if that articulation was was like in the in the in the ballpark how so here's the problem with doing that with ethereum is how do you determine which projects to distribute uh the the tax revenue to and the public goods and by how much yeah and and how much how does Kanto solve that problem yeah that's a really good question so anybody that takes part in that Network anybody that deploys an application is contributing to the overall growth of the network

um so they receive a portion of that subsidy and 20 of what would be burned using an EIP 1559 type of pattern right so uh 20 of the burn fee or the base fee goes to the person that has deployed that contract so uh we're not really deciding it's more like the market is deciding if you have an application that's getting a lot of traction and seeing a lot of traffic um then you are going to receive a portion of that base fee so you get 20 of what would be per otherwise so one critique of CSR which again like I said in the intro CSR is a model that uh Kanto is applying not creating but we have talked about CSR as an industry in many different respects and like I said other other blockchains are also working

on this uh I believe uh for a moment time ethereum was also interested in this but the one of the reasons why um this the CSR model has been critiqued is that when you take 20 of the gas fees for a specific contract and give that to the contract devs you add in a new a new game theory uh and that is involved about with well now a contract Dev isn't actually incentivized to make the best contract possible they're actually incentivized to make perhaps an overly complicated overly inefficient contract because then they get a higher subsidy uh what's kanto's philosophy on this yeah so I totally agree with you it seems like that at face value but would

you use an overly complicated and over you an overly expensive contract yourself David well only if it's the only game in town I don't really have a choice okay but as soon as somebody else deploys something that does it more efficiently you're going to start using that one right sure okay so you're relying on on just Market competition to produce efficiencies yeah yeah so if you if you don't do something well the person that does it better is going to come along and they're going to eat your lunch so you should be the best you can be you should deploy the best contracts you can because that's going to ensure that you have a place at the table for as long as possible woman does it better is it because you're saving gas fees in a more efficient smart contract or is it you just better yeah the users are going

to users are going to default to whatever provides the better user experience whatever is cheaper whatever is the you know more convenient to use and that's true in any Market you can look at like complicated smart contracts on ethereum uh like most people are going to do things that are like cheaper they're going to do things that are more efficient they're going to use things that provide a better experience for them and that's just that's just how it works you know so so Kanto has this pool of public goods but it doesn't select the winners it more it more kind of like uh creates a mechanism for this this uh pool of money to be distributed and the market forces uh are the ones that are selecting the winners so it's almost

like the the government protocol of Kanto crates like this bidding process in this healthy game of competition they're like we've got this pot of money and uh all of the the private smart contract developers are the ones competing for that pot for my pot of money but but really it's kind of Market forces in that it's users that are determining the outcomes of uh which which uh smart contracts end up winning is that correct yeah so when we talk about the market like the market it's not like this ominous like figure that we can't really understand the market or people like me there are people like you they're participants within the network they're all of those uh those uh users everybody that takes part within this

community has a say in what is going to succeed and what is going to fail and uh the projects that they deem worthy of success are going to be the ones that uh that uh do better than the others I mean that's just and so just getting in the details of Zach of how the funds are distributed so is it based on how much I guess um like I don't know if the right word is compute but but how much of the evm resources or how much block space every smart contract is using and if you're using more block space then you get partitioned more of the of the subsidy for this yeah essentially that makes sense yeah and you would receive 20 of that and David you call this thing CSR right

and I'm a little wary of like you know crypto loves his dachronism uh acronyms and so here's another one CSR but all that means all CSR is is just what we we just described it's it's kind of that public goods funding to almost like the application layer of the ecosystem is that what we mean by CSR yeah that's and it was one of the acronyms that we could definitely have picked a better one for a better name for and and this philosophy it has been embedded in crypto I'd say pretty damn close to it's very very coarse Roots about like how do we provide a business model to open source that's really like goes to the heart of crypto like open source how do we fund it how do we fund open source developers uh and um optimism has their

retroactive public goods funding they initially had some sort of philosophy about that was highly synonymous with CSR which is why actually how the show came to be is I tweeted out oh CS uh Kanto is just doing the optimism thing um and then Zach was like actually wait there's nuances yes and no and then boom this is how we have a show today uh but but Zach I want to ask like um like like I mentioned excuse me uh other layer ones also have CSR in them I I like I said I think I think near has has this and other trains have also experimented with this uh how would you say Kanto CSR is different in any particular way what's unique about it I think it's just the Simplicity like uh the con like the amount of Base fee that your contract consumes you receive a

dividend from that most of the other ones have like retroactive type methodologies uh they're like a little bit different um not like a I don't know I don't know how much different they are I haven't partake I haven't really taken part in the near ecosystem enough to like be able to say that all I know is like what we're doing is different because we're uh we're sharing 20 of the Block Base fee what's nice about this is there's no like subjective human governance of like let's all vote to see who receives the the 20 pot it's right based on yeah so this is in real time uh like you can you're like as it's being burnt that's going toward this uh into a pot that you can then claim and that's just for tax

purposes but it's essentially streamed hmm so one question I have Zach and and just to really just um plant this plant this in the ground this is the thing about Kanto it's it's CSR it's not like CSR and another thing it's like CSR is kind of the the big Flagship of the Kanto chain yeah I think so for now I mean uh of course like everyone's gonna be like our community is great and we have a lot of fun but like from a technical perspective like that's like that's what we have right now and that's what we're experimenting with when I um when I read the uh the Varian blog posts they talked about nationalizing infrastructure and then there was like a DEX that is maybe enshrines not the right word but um uh

perhaps it also is uh can you talk about this angle like what what is what are these things that are like enshrined into uh into Kanto yeah so it's the lending market and it's the decks and by providing these uh protocols as Primitives that are like baked into the protocol itself as opposed to application layer uh we can kind of like have like what would be equivalent of like a Post Office right or a fire department or what you need for like a community to function uh like in its bare like it's Bare Essence right so with ethereum with Bitcoin with a lot of that other stuff all you're providing is like you said security whereas we're providing some additional things that are more economically focused and financially aligned so whereas like

ethereum you know it's pretty much just security uh we're also making sure that you know trying to make sure that people get fed and I'm not saying that ethereum doesn't do that like I am an etherean I helped build ethereum like but right now we can't really experiment in the same way that we could like five years ago uh just because ethereum has become an institution so how are we going to test these economic Primitives in a way that actually makes sense and drives like good valuable data uh we can't really do that on ethereum anymore it's it's changed it's an institution if you tried to do that on ethereum honestly Zach I'd say we try to drive you out honestly it's like too big to run these sorts of experience exactly like exactly we can't

just say yeah let's experimentally take a huge like a huge portion of uh gas transaction fees and distribute it somewhere like that that doesn't work at the scale we're in we want to leave ethereum more credibly neutral so you're running this nationalization experiment here is there there has been talk about nationalizing other things uh across the like chains different chains like even in ethereum it um I know Justin Drake has brought up the idea of like having an oracle that is interesting yeah enshrined in the in in the chain um are there other things that Kanto might add like some sort of um price Oracle um so a price Oracle would be really really useful but designing a price Oracle in an efficient way that can

actually be kind of baked into a protocol means that we need something that's kind of tried and tested and they're just like a lot of different versions of a prize Oracle um one thing that uh like so when you ask like what kind of things are going to be baked into the protocol as like we create this like infrastructure like think about the things that you need in a in a city right you're building like this city uh you need a bank you need a lending Market what else do we do uh well uh nft trading is pretty good so maybe we'll include an nft Market you know uh all of these like basic Goods that people like to have within a protocol we should figure out how we can subsidize all of them um so I'm not saying that we're going to build an nft Market into it or like an

oracle for example those are things that are really great and that we should build and I have different plans myself as to what I would like to build into the protocol but I'm also just a participant in this community I'm not really like anyone special anybody can do what I'm doing so I'm not like dictating the road map of Kanto I'm just like a guy who likes to build stuff you know how the team formed and how that uh I definitely want to get into that conversation but first I want to still tie off this like nationalization of contracts what what So like um just to reiterate there's a DEX there is an on-chain lending market and there's a stable coin and those are the three main bits of nationalized infrastructure what does that mean for that uh at a

technical level like so how are those systems treated differently than applications on top of Kanto and are there plans for those no the number of like nationalized bits of of uh infrastructure to grow like what would be the fourth or fifth thing they're not necessarily treated different it's just like their use is contingent on the Kanto token itself They Don't Really the governance is uh dictated through Kanto itself so it kind of like Crews all of that value to Kanto and the community rather than like these rent seeking or value extractive governance tokens right like for every single protocol uh if it's something that's actually needed on like a network-wide level let's just build it

into the protocol so that value accrues to Kanto and to that token to the base token as opposed to like some sort of governance token that's pretty rent seeking right it's trying to extract additional value from its user base and that kind of fragments liquidity it also like kind of breaks up uh like uh users into these kind of like sub tribes essentially like Oh I'm a uni swap guy that's how I identify when I engage with this with the uh with the network and like on chain or I'm a compound guy or whatever it doesn't matter like we're all Kanto folks right so so this is like if ethereum had its uniswap and its Ave and it's maker Dao and it's dice table coin as like

official core ethereum uh Pro applications and said like this is this is what we use and the idea is that uh all of the fees generated by these various protocols the fees generated by uniswap uh the fees generated by maker the fees generated by Ave actually would actually go to Ether rather than the Ave token the mkr token the uni token exactly yeah so think about all of that value that has accrued within each one of those protocols individually as well as ethereum itself like that's a massive amount of value if you look at coin gecko you look at the top hundred it's safe to say that 98 of that is built on ethereum right so who should be uh rewarded for that I think that everyone within that Community should be rewarded just because we're all participants

we've all made it what it is now and so the just to put myself into the like the Mind philosophy of a of a the Canto blockchain the Kanto chain it's just like okay we are going to make the most used most primitive applications and we're going to claim this for the Kanto layer one and let the rest of the Whatever Gets built on Kanto to be up to the free market and so like there's like a capitalism versus socialism versus communism conversation here where like the Kanto blockchain is like the the authority over the land and they're saying hey the free market is is free except for we make the stable coin the you know the government makes the stable

coin the government makes the The Lending Market the government makes the the money market and but the rest is up to the free market and so you know putting this into uh into ethereum words ethereum is like free market absolutely everywhere there's literally nothing that's enshrined in ethereum everything is the free market and Kanto is like um three applications that are our Public Utilities provided by the government for the government with this you say this is a fair articulation yeah I suppose so although I'm not like a huge political type guy so I'm not like really right like I'm an engineer so I'm not going to have like any hot spicy takes in regard to that but what you said you said it with confidence and it sounds right

what is that that's the key Zach is as long as you say it with with confidence uh it's it's it's definitely the right answer but so um this is the idea of like chain nationalism which is it's like chain Central planning yeah only three things three things are centrally planned Kanto is like Sweden or something like this we're gonna like um have more public goods but but it's also in some ways it's not compare the people that take care of us everybody is building on top of on top of a network they I think that they should receive some sort of subsidy for uh that participation yeah but in some ways it's also not like so what you just said is kind of David this conversation of uh socialism versus capitalism too it's um

there are uh strong elements of the free market so you even though there is public goods funding Kanto also distributes this in a way that lets sort of the free market decide right it's as if like um there's a whole bunch of contractors bidding for the government's pot of money yeah it's almost like if you think if you think of like well I know this is congealed we have a military-industrial contact uh you know industry in the US but you could imagine a more like free market in the US where you would Outsource and contract a whole bunch of private companies to do your defense it's not actually the government doing all of the work it's kind of these private companies that that are getting

better and and fulfilling the obligations of the government that's what we're doing here one question uh Zach though about the stable coin so is this like uh you said it was like die almost um dyes of course can be backed by eth but also some other collateral assets um is it like that or is or is this stable coin is it all backed by uh yeah it's over collateralized so it like enters circulation when users borrow it from The Lending market so it's not like a Terra Luna type setup is it no because that was like I hope no one ever says yes to that question that was like no that was interesting right one thing about Tara Luna is they did nationalize

the the um the stable coin didn't they um well they need to control its value so they had to yeah and then it kind of like there's an element of um uh nationalizing the algo stablecoin and making the value of the base chain uh and uh you know UST and and Luna kind of interlocked um that's not what that's not what Kanto is doing though it's a different the whole reason that tarot like the whole thing collapsed was because it wasn't it wasn't over collateralized it was they were trying to do something that would be kind of under collateralized right and people were taking uh taking advantage of that system and kind of abusing it because the governance wasn't actually decentralized right so so if it's uh if if we're working on

an over collateralized system and we don't have access to any of those assets like no one individual has actual access to those assets then there's no real threat of it being under collateralized we didn't and Kanto launched without any BC backing there was like no uh like the initial distribution was like really really fair there were over 40 people that helped launch uh Kanto I was one of those people I just contributed and um we received like a small amount for like uh uh compensation for our participation but it wasn't crazy um it was it was uh and and that's it that's all there's going to be for the rest of the history of the chain and there's no real like force that has more uh control over this asset than anyone else anybody can come in and Market by

and do whatever they want to do or they could take part in any of the CSR uh like initiatives and they can earn Kanto that way but there's no Foundation there aren't any VCS there's no like private interest here yeah so I think that brings us to the question about how Kanto got bootstrapped uh so Zach if you can just walk us back through history and and give us a rundown about how Kanto went from zero to one and I think also embedded into this question will be uh open up the conversation about why Kanto is on Cosmos rather than it being an ethereum layer too um so but let's let's we'll end there and let's start with like how did how did Cosmos or excuse me how did Kanto get started uh and how did it get bootstrapped yeah for sure so uh like to take it way

way way back uh I was working on eth2 I mean you remember when I was working uh at white block and we're doing a lot of East 2 research and development and I was like sitting at a bar with the guy that I was working with at the time and we're kind of like you know bitching about like oh this is kind of inefficient this is what this is uh they should do this they should do that this is blah blah and it's like well rather than like bitching about it let's kind of like draw out our own diagram of what we think ethereum would look like at scale and we came up with this sort of protocol based um uh system uh that essentially looks a lot like what kind of polygon and Avalanche are doing with their subnets and is what also kind of what ethereum

looks like with a lot of l2s but this was back in 2017 or 18. and uh we called it Kanto and I came up with the name Kanto because uh Kanto is like a small subsect of a larger poem I thought that was pretty and uh that's uh that's what we came up with um we started building it and you know a lot of other stuff came about because I was working on white block and all this other crap but that was my idea for how we would scale ethereum by the time I got back around to revisiting Kanto people were already launching ltus all this stuff was already coming out so the idea that we had in 2018 was no longer applicable to help scale ethereum because ethereum was already scaling it was scaling technologically I think that

we can say we we did it right like we can say E2 shipped like the vision that we set off with a few years ago is kind of come to fruition so what's the the next thing that we need to scale and when I was here in Nashville I was I started working with Scott Lewis and uh yeah he came up with a lot of these ideas for like economic mechanisms and financial mechanisms and it made a lot of sense to me it was like all right so it seems like we can't really like there's not really much need to scale things technically now but there's a lot of need to scale things from an economic perspective and what he presented and thought about made a whole lot of like a whole lot of sense to me so that's kind of what we focused on and we just used

the name Kanto because I have the domain name still oh my God that's hilarious okay so that was the Inception moment but how did Kanto go from the brainchild of you and Scott and a few others to an actual like Community to whatever extent the community's been generated yeah so we were just uh you know we'd like to talk about all of these problems and what the solutions are I mean I think we're kind of solutions Architects really and uh like um put together a team of like really great people like Plex which is about eight people they like did a lot of the building on the initial protocol for Kanto and we kind of like had it all in a lot of like other work we were doing

so it was like all right well let's do something like fun as a side project and like let's see what happens and uh one thing led to another and it just like picked up More Steam and now we have like people participating in Kanto Community the people that launched it like we have Johnny Ray Joseph Delong Preston Van Loon uh those are a lot of the people that I brought in were a lot of OG kind of protocol developers that helped chip E2 as well and um and uh yeah now we're just gonna see see where it goes um I mean we do have like kind of a road map like you know but it's not really like up to me to decide so I'm just a participant within a larger collaborative ecosystem but uh yeah so with this like oh there's a it seems

to be like there's a bunch of ungovernance Vibes about Kanto that's kind of like the main point and so I think that's why you're saying like I'm I don't have any control over the road map it is what it is right and I think that's why Kanto chose Cosmos because in kind of in the same way that dydx move from Stark X onto Cosmos yeah uh the whole sort of permissionless network building doesn't really isn't ready on the ethereum land because there's additional complexity yes that's exactly what it is so like the thing is is like the reason we chose Cosmos I think is because Cosmos was available and it worked um I would have loved I don't think anybody would have thought twice about launching an L2 on ethereum had uh like if there existed an SDK similar to what

Cosmos has that allows me to quickly and efficiently launch in all two so I'm sure there are people out there thinking about this problem and thinking about the solutions to that problem and if there are please reach out to me because I'd like to talk to you I think think that that's something that the ethereum ecosystem desperately needs in order to scale so um but I think that we're on the way and we're really figuring all that stuff out and that's why projects like arbitrum and optimism are so important for us as a community um because then that will allow us to experiment in a way that doesn't have an effect or uh kind of like uh I guess just doesn't have an effect on the L1 on eth like I said we can't really experiment on it on ethyl one we can't do it so the reason that we

launched on Cosmos was because that provided us with the tools we needed to quickly build something out without without having to think about it too much uh to kind of like provide ourselves with the playground we need for these Financial experiments so Zach I mean there could be in the future you guys maybe move to uh an L2 or something like that or change up the architecture as a possibility potentially I mean nothing's out of the question um is that possible how would governance uh move in a Cosmos app train to an ethereum what would be a layer three I believe how is that even technically feasible I mean I'm it it is feasible I have no idea exactly how it would work but it's some it's that's a problem that I would love to come up with the solution for but uh so Zach David mentioned this term

ungovernance but I'm actually not sure that there is that is ungovernance I think there's elements of it that are ungovernance but I'm seeing here like um like uh there is a particip way to participate in government governance and this looks like a a Cosmos app chain people are familiar with it kind of govern governance mechanisms which is sort of token weighted voting is that what's in play here is that that's not really ungovernance it's like Dow style token weighted governance is that right definitely yeah yeah so there is I mean you can participate in governance as a token holder anybody can and they are welcome to come in and vote on different initiatives because it's a community I think that rather than what we're trying to stress as much as possible is decentralization there is no one entity that's in control I am but a participant

in a much broader Community um everybody else who wants to participate within this community is welcome to do do so you just need to like you just need some tokens and there's plenty of ways to do it and there are plenty of ways to do it in a way that doesn't require you to like buy it like you can participate in this community by building stuff and that allows you to like participate that allows you to be a participant essentially but presumably like I I think of like Bitcoins governance layers as more ungovernance right I mean yeah squishy governance ethereums as well yeah whoever's loud it's kind of like this layer one social thing squishy governance with Kanto it's more similar to like a a uniswap where it's more similar to a Cosmos app chain in that it is token weighted voting or tezos

basically and so somebody with the majority of all of the tokens can actually push the uh decisions in One Direction or another and I guess if the community this is what tezos has always argued the community doesn't like it they can Fork off but uh there is this token weighted governance that's in play and so you could accrue power in this network by just getting a lot of uh tokens delegated to you or or buying them yourself yeah if it's a liquid market and you can afford it but then why would you want to disproportionate amount of something that's going to kind of ruin the game for everyone else Zach there's a bunch of questions that I have I want to ask about the details of the the yield farming boot trapping mechanism I want to talk about uh the

the culture around Kanto uh there's a very very specific sometimes kind of um uh grungy perhaps meme culture around the cosmo uh Kanto Founders and a few other topics as well but we first have to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible uniswap is the largest I'm gonna go to the doctor hey we're all doing it has volume levels great uh David when we get back I still want

to ask a question about the elephant in the room of like um token like economic disalignment from ethereum all right yeah this is what I sound like at the end of permissionless well I sound I sounded like you though uh yeah my voice was like was you know what killed me is like that one night

when we did the bankless party um it's just like talking really loud over people and so you just like it wasn't even the conversation so aside from that I can lead in I have been messing up this stream so bad so they have been listening to us not the audio for the ad well uh okay uh right you want to take it away wow David uh welcome back man if he's a little rusty there um

okay so uh we all just went and got drinks so you see the behind the scenes and took a quick break we are back with Zach we're talking about Kanto the why of Canto and as you probably heard I was saying uh to David during break that where I'd like to start Zach is with the elephant in the room I still feel like there is some economic disalignment between uh what I would say is the ethereum community which I know you're a part of as Scott Lewis is a part of and many others are a part of and um the rest of the ethereum community and I'm wondering if this represents a friction point or if you think like the ethereum community just needs to get over it or like what your take is here but uh let me sort of um throw throw the

take from maybe an eth maxi type of position this is not a position that I hold I'm just taking it I'm not sure I'm not familiar with this you don't know these people no no I met them on Twitter we'll see you bring it okay I don't know a single leaf Maxie okay so uh the the position is this basically um a lot of l1s have screwed us over and like it just go through that the like the history of like pump and dumps of um exit scams either the fast exit or the slow exit or like downright um frauds I'm like whatever Joe Quan was doing like that was pretty messed up wasn't it um I know that this isn't VC raised but right like there are a lot of people that will get wealthy as a result of uh

Canto price go up I mean that's undeniable when you go up 500 in a month we all know how crypto works and so the question is with this economic disalignment from the rest of the ethereum community um like why is it necessary to produce kind of a net new token on this and do you think that this will further drive a wedge and drive tribalism between the Kanto community and ethereum community and are we already seeing evidence of this we also know um you remember 2022 um even if it's not the intent of the founders oftentimes it is but even if it's not the intent of the founders uh communities that rally around token

price end up getting very loud and tribal and um they go on attack campaigns as well and this can be like almost like a token populism that is Unleashed we've seen this with many communities in the past whenever you have big token price run-ups it's like there's this corrosive corrupting force of price appreciation so I'm wondering what you see in that is this going to cause an increasing fracture between decanto Community who's just saying hey we're just running this experiment we love ethereum we're just writing this experiment and the rest of the ethereum community who's just like well you're not you're not helping our eat bags uh and you're pumping your token and uh you get in fights on Twitter and then it

escalates and then you know there's tribalism and I call it like process yeah yeah yeah that makes sense well what's your interpretation of all of this yeah I mean I would hope that it doesn't create a wedge between the eth community which I identify as being a part of and Kanto Community which I also obviously identify as being a part of um I think that the work that we do on blockchain in general should present a net positive to everybody within the within the blockchain community right uh because any of the experiments that we run can be easily applied to ethereum should it work or any L2 model or any other blockchain that launches in the

future like we're all building on the back of off the back of giants so I would hope that our experiments would just be calm standards so are you just basically is is your posture I'm just going to ignore the noise and keep building uh that's mine that's what I do I mean I've been doing this I've been in blockchain since 2012. I've been full time on ethereum since 2015 and that's always been my stance and I feel like I've always produced pretty good products for the space so I don't see I'm 35 years old man I'm like not gonna change my tune anytime soon I'm 35 a super old in crypto too isn't

it I know I this is like I've been doing this since like I got out of college like I can't imagine like doing anything differently and um I'm sure a lot of people think I'm just a complete psychopath but like you know it's this is what I love to do and I'm going to keep doing it with people that enjoy doing it with me and that's kind of my my place in life so what what would you say to those who are like uh take the skeptical approach and are like you know all that aside right so you're gonna keep building but like is this just a pump type of project are people doing this in order to just get rich on their bags would you just say like yeah and and shouldn't they I mean we're protocol devs working real hard I think we should get wealthy from from

um this type of thing or like what would be your response to the cynic who's just like anyone launches in layer one is to get yeah real quick no I don't think so I think my response would be you should be cynical and you should be you should question everything around you and you should also especially question the people who kind of put themselves in positions as like Founders or kind of being figureheads within a community those are the people that we should those are the people that should fall under the greatest scrutiny so I welcome any type of like critique uh just because I think that's what we need in order to kind of self-regulate um that's so I guess my answer is like yeah

good good for you keep doing that keep asking those questions like the tough questions like those are what's necessary and as far as like getting rich quick I don't subscribe to those beliefs because I identify as a crypto Anarchist um I believe in taking care of the people around me and taking care of my community and doing just being a good person to the people that I love and those are the people that support me and the people that are around me in my community so so the Kanto Founders aren't going to become like uh you know layer one demagogues and the archetypes that we've seen so many times in the past well there are no Kanto I mean there are I guess there are Canto Founders but there's like 50 of them like a hundred of them right right so

like there can't I think I think that's a large enough population that we can say that there aren't really any Founders uh like anybody that wants to participate in the early days is essentially I mean and this is kind of what happened with ethereum too like there were like how many ethereum Founders are there it's like a Jillian texture is an ethereum founder there's eight and seven seven of them are Sub sub okay so there's there's eight there's eight Founders but that's like what consensus has dictated to be eight Founders after like six years or something like that at the beginning there were literally like 40 Founders there's a lot of claimants for the title that's for sure everybody that was in the orbit of the launch is a Founder you

see what I'm saying but this is this is also in some sort of in sort of way like decentralization theater in a way and this is just human ascribed titles there are people who started this thing and when the idea was accepted by like you and Scott and I'm assuming at least a few others is is kind of where it started and now there's also the details of okay that's the idea was incepted in a few central people does the code actually reflect that and I think my uh hey well I don't know how to interpret code I'm gonna guess that the actual way that the Kanto blockchain was instead did on a technical level is perhaps more decentralized than the way that the ideas were accepted in the brains of like you and and Scott and I I don't think we've totally parse out those

details how how did the blockchain start like how did blocks start propagating and how did Kanto token start proliferating yeah so we had there was like a Genesis block within that Genesis block it was distributed to between everybody that contributed and that includes like a lot of people that's like Preston Van Loon uh Johnny Ray Joseph Delong myself uh there were at least there are at least 30 other people uh like KB from Plex now well he's from Headwater then there's the Plex team which is about five or six different people uh Robin Whitney uh there's like a lot of people there was like I can't even list all of them and I'm sorry if I forgot anybody I love all of you I'm just like these are these are

not uh things that I really prepared for necessarily uh but uh yeah and then uh it was just a general Genesis ceremony with all of the initial validators and uh that was like a population of like 30 to 40. so this actually starts to feel more or less like a Dell of sorts this is like a Dao that's starting a chain with also no um walls up about who yeah I consider what I consider it more of like a collective as opposed to like a dow strictly just because Dao carries certain connotations with it and certain like you know stipulations but I consider it more of like a loose based kind of collective okay understood um Zach uh I'll I'll take your point

that calling people Founders might not be right um I I I'll take I'll take that point especially when it's incepted at the technical level of of the chain uh at the same time I want to take the inverse perspective the opposite opposite perspective and say that okay people that really kicked our kick start this whole movement do set in the culture of what is going to be created around this blockchain the the culture the memes The Vibes and that makes them maybe not capital F Founders but you know you know they're when you're instilling The Vibes you are have an outsized role and one concern I have I'm going to put on my youth Maxi hat here I've been doing my Canto curious hat all throughout this

podcast I'm going to put on my eth maxi hat I'm gonna pull up and I'm going to ask Ryan sorry are you ready for David's eat Maxi hat yeah you never connect that off David you know people people assume I have it on all the time but I don't I mean I think I think I would consider myself an youth Maxi uh and so I'm gonna pull up a tweet that I'm going to charge you with Zach as that cold tweet uh and Ryan's going to put it up on the screen here and this is an Oregon Trail meme uh Canto fornia Trail and uh this is when like I think Kanto the Kanto price like skyrocketed from like 40 cents to like 60 cents and the meme here is you have died of shorting uh the the reference here being like you've died of dissentry uh and

this is you Tweeting this and you're just saying rip Anon uh and something that I've kept in my brain is that I don't enjoy Founders who tweet about price I consider that inappropriate as in you've created a decentralized system that is supposed to be an internet native protocol don't talk about the price of your asset I think that that imbue certain negative cultures uh and I don't think you are the only person doing doing this I actually see this uh by a number of people who have started the Kanto movement uh yeah can I can I ask before Zach answers that David so I just want to make sure that you're applying the rule fairly so would you say that to like the layer two Founders too or like all the defy app founders with with the token as well is like

don't talk about the price of uni don't talk about the price of Matic I don't know I would apply that yes founder founders of all things I think it's Pro inappropriate for them to promote the price of their assets so you're not cutting out specifically a layer one yes I guess that's right I guess that's right yeah okay all right no but but I understand what you're saying and it makes sense I don't I think that like it's less about like talking about the price of an asset necessarily and uh more about kind of being like uh pompous or like uh having too much pride I suppose maybe that's a thing I don't know that's the way that I would interpret it um but I don't really think that tweet is necessarily about price I use the term the the term shorting is in

that but that's because a lot of us are Traders and when I think of like shorting I think of like kind of like making a bet against a community and if you make a bet against my community you're likely going to lose because I'm a winner and my friends are winners we're all winners I think that's actually a fair response is like when you short something you're actually shorting against what you believe in so there you go and I believe but I believe and I'm proud of what I believe and I'm proud of my friends I'm proud of you guys like look man David I've known you for like forever look at you now you got like a fancy ass camera dude [Laughter] it all came up dude we came up we got older we became more professional we understand what we're doing now and like

if you're gonna make a bet against me that's probably a bad thing for you to do just as a just as a rule of thumb because I'm gonna keep doing what I'm doing regardless of what's in my path and if you want to bet against that tenacity you have a 35 year old man then go for it I can't say that I I I I don't like the disposition i i i i people should believe in themselves and yeah price aside whether it's one cent whether it's zero and like 18 like whether it's 17 zeros and a one it doesn't matter let me ask you Zach so this uh this this confidence right this this kind of vibe that you're imbuing right um it's pretty cool that's right don't don't bet against the Kanto Community because don't bet against the

devs is another way to sort of Express this right um can I ask you like uh back to sort of David's point though um would you be one to sort of shut down too much emphasis in cantaloupe culture uh cantonite culture on like price um there are times where we've seen sort of leaders in other ecosystems do this few and far between I remember the famous uh 2017 tweet you remember this as like vitalik being like yeah have we earned it um yeah yeah yeah I'm just wondering your approach to kind of like the early stages of a community and setting the culture and the only thing I'm just asking about is because um you know we've all seen so many uh token

communities go off the rails and like get kind of toxic around price and I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on best practices on you're not letting the Kanto Community fall prey to that and to stick to the confidence but it's like the confidence in what we're building yeah so it's not so when you think of when you talk about a community and what you're talking about people and when you think about like people working as a group you can talk about people acting as individuals as well once when people make a lot of money sometimes they just [ __ ] lose their minds I've I've seen it yes you've seen it we've all seen it yes like people just lose it like they become who they actually are right uh because they don't have to like keep up appearances anymore they don't have to

give a [ __ ] about anybody but themselves yeah so that's when you see people for who they really are so uh let me say that uh price uh is is a function of Economics economics uh are the way uh are a measure of a community to work together uh to coordinate and to collaborate in a way that results in a net success so there's nothing wrong with being proud and excited of the the price of an asset uh what's wrong is saying I'm I've made this you're worthless your community sucks compared to mine that's stupid that's like a bad way to look so just be real and like we all like make money we all do whatever we do just be nice and cool to the people around you I

think that's what people what turns people off about price talk it's not saying like my token's doing well and that means that your token will never do well it's like that's that's just dumb like don't don't be like that be like a cool dude be like be somebody that people like to be around like you know like nobody wants to be around somebody that's like constantly bragging about what they have like it's not if you're coming from a place of like that then then then that sucks and you suck I'm sorry but like you know just like be cool like that's it I don't know I don't know how else to explain it I'm not like a big brain guy I just like put numbers on the screen now I I the the bluntness is something I've always uh appreciated about you Zach um you and there's a

certain cohort like you and Amin and a few other people could just like call it for what it is and I don't think enough people in crypto do that and so I definitely appreciate that I'm not here to like if all like I'm not here to like I don't know I don't know what you expect from me I'm just like I'm doing what I enjoy with the people I like I like you guys I like everybody like you know I work with anybody I like you know and if you're a dick I don't want to work with you I'm sorry I am so we've made a community that's it like in in the economics of that Community or like how well we can all work together yeah are these The Vibes of the community right now how would you describe the The Vibes the culture I

mean those are my vibes and those are the Vibes of the people that I think I attract just because like I kind of like have like simple resistance mechanisms that kind of filter out the lanes like you know so yeah I suppose so I think so those are the people that I'm around I mean we're all pretty cool guys that I would hope you'd like to get a beer with sometime Zach um curious what the what the future is for Kanto this is a really early experiment still right a remind of remind listeners again when Kanto was launched and um how like how far you've come and then like I know the road map is not yours to uh determine fully but what are some directions you're seeing social consensus lead in in in terms of Kanto and what do you hope it accomplishes

yeah so I mean I think we well we launched in September so what is that five months it's been about five months so of building and working on things and uh I think in the future what we want to do is just figure out how we can scale economically in a way that like makes sense for all the participants uh kind of like building cool games I'm really interested in like gaming and like playing games with my friends kind of like MMOs like I used to play uh Elder Scrolls Online a lot but I've kind of like replaced all the time I spend playing those video games with like building out blockchain Primitives and uh kind of like economic infrastructure and um that's a lot more rewarding to me just because the XP can actually be translated to real world value for some

reason that's a world that we've that's so that's the world we built so I think like building out that regard and kind of experimenting in those ways is something that I want to do kind of like building online games and like doing stuff like that so yeah things that are entertaining uh like we're about to launch like some of my friends are about to launch the first the world's first fully on chain DMV line simulated uh that's gonna be really fun wait what what is it what do you do a DMV live simulator yeah it's dumb you're gonna have to see it to to get it it's not really that it's not really that like you're talking about DMV Department of Motor Vehicles yeah you're trying to simulate the line like the queuing

mechanism for like the most hellish place on Earth imagine that's actually relatively and you're calling this a game yeah yeah it's again I mean you play you play a truck driving simulator right yeah so those are the kinds of things that we're like playing around with Zach if uh interest if listeners have been peaked by what we've been talking about today where should they go to learn more about Kanto uh well so the entry point to the Kanto Community is on the slingshot application so you could go to slingshot.finance to get involved uh canto.io is kind of like the next place that you would go to uh kind of like Bridge stake assets lend kanto.tools is a pretty good website that kind of has a

directory of places and dapps that are that exist on chain so checking that out would be good and all of the other underbelly of the Kanto Community kind of exists within uh a bunch of uh disparate telegram groups and across uh Kanto Twitter cancel Twitter that's great the other CT Zach thank you so much um uh for joining us and helping us explain the world of uh yeah I feel like I figured it out um thank you so much Zach oh uh one thing but before I probably should ask this earlier in the episode so the way this works is uh there are validators right it's like any Cosmos yeah 100 to 150 or so validators on the team

as well yeah there's a hundred and uh anybody can join by staking the necessary amount to get into that validator set it uses tender mint consensus very cool well um thanks for explaining this uh experiment and uh for hanging with us today Zach we appreciate it yeah thanks a lot for having me on are y'all gonna be in uh Denver or what absolutely yeah yeah and there's also that that music festival in Nashville Zach that's not too far away that I'm coming for come through man you're welcome to crash here Christian's here too we should all go out yeah yeah this is uh some old POV crypto days that we're never talking about right now so we should have another POV if one for the time I wonder what Christian thinks of Kanto David yeah I'm sure it's the same old Bitcoin

Maxi tag you know all about it I go I hang out with them all the time he knows all that that's awesome for boys and sisters that don't know what we're talking about again I've said this a few times I do used to do an old uh podcast called POV crypto podcast which was me and my very bitcoiner co-host and who is now at Bitcoin media Bitcoin magazine uh and so people I'll defend myself against the ethereum Maxi uh label over and over and over again uh my Genesis was in having a podcast with a bitcoiner Zach was on there a number of times uh and so this is why I'm able to see what did you say on this podcast Zach were you arguing with uh Christian too I well it's it's funny because like I got started in blockchain through Bitcoin

and then I found ethereum in 2015 teen so I like identify with like as both a Bitcoin maximalist insane and an ethnics yeah absolutely I don't really like I'm not really extreme on either one I know where both groups are coming from and then like as people have joined like they take these different stances I I'm I tend to be kind of agnostic like I understand Bitcoin because that's what got me into blockchain I love it and ethereum just like made more sense when it came out because applying business logic to transactions is like duh like you know so I don't know yeah so I would just kind of like talk about well at white block I kind of made a name for myself on calling out a bunch of like [ __ ] yes EOS white block report made the report about eos's networking

capabilities eos's transact boosted transaction throughput is yeah is like 10 000 times it's actual 2018 you guys published this right yeah yeah it's 2018. yeah my early research and uh so like I can't like what I what I'm good at is figuring out complicated systems and reducing them to very simple things like you know it's like most things are just hit the button this is what happens and uh you know like uh a lot of people are kind of coming out during that Ico wave and promising the world to everybody it's like we can do this we can do that but it was mostly [ __ ] and it was mostly scammers you know that aren't even around anymore so like you know Ryan this is the report that like all the

ethereum people use to like show like a lot of people like kind of felt the the EOS wasn't legitimate and their claims were ridiculous and then this report came out I remember and then and then look at this guy this is what we've been telling you uh and then also led into like all the ethereum crowd being like Oh multi-coin uh had rotated out of their EOS narrative but they're gonna try it again and then they did it again with so long yeah so these people have been doing the same thing over and over and over again for the throughout the history of this industry so yeah it's nothing new you know but that's kind of like how I like broke into the East scene was kind of by saying calling people out on this [ __ ] you know it's just like way too

like we need to use our powers for good you know there you go we'll end it there need to use our powers for good uh I know that that was a fake close of the show but we just had to talk to Zach about a little bit longer so we appreciate you coming on man yeah yeah thanks a lot dudes Cheers Cheers risks and disclaimers of course I gotta let you know that uh Kanto is risky so is all of crypto so is D5 all this stuff is you could lose what you put in let me repeat you could lose what you put in we're headed west this is the frontier it's not for everyone but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey thanks a lot foreign