My name
is Sonny other wall and I'm a one of the researchers here at tenement. And I've been working on the cosmos project for about the last
two years. So
cosmos is this very new design for how the blockchain ecosystem should work, we essentially looked at the construction of the blockchain ecosystem and how it changed over time, kind of from this generation one a Bitcoin to generation to have a theory I'm and no systems like a theory like us has those whatnot. And, you know, I think both of these two generations had very interesting ideas, and they kind of had some drawbacks of each other. And so, this Cosmos idea is trying to take some of the good aspects from generation one, and some of the things of generation two and kind of combine them to make a even better generation three, that maintains a lot of the, you know, sovereignty that we had in general one, while some of the much more customized ability that we had in generation two. In that generation one, we had all of these independent blockchains that kind of all had their own use cases. So you know, Bitcoin was there for money payments, cya was there for storage name coin was there for DNS. But, you know, there was no compose ability or connectivity between these, I couldn't use my Bitcoin to buy a name coin DNS, and store and have it point to a saya storage like file. And this word, Nerium came along at Nerium came along and basically said, hey, what you can do is put everything on this one blockchain and then have all these applications be able to interoperate with each other, you know, on a theorem, I can go take my maker die, and traded for crypto kitty on zero x, that is something that just wasn't you know, this company ability of creating larger user stories using these different applications. This wasn't possible in generation one. But generation to came at some drawbacks as well, you know, the theory on blockchain by putting everything in this like single threaded pipe, you know, it led into lot of scalability concerns, both from the technical side, and the social side, technical scalability through like, you know, all these applications are trying to shove their throughput down this small pipe, and you know, you might have a very important financial application, and then the next crypto kiddies comes along, and it's just like, you know, it just floods the entire blockchain. And then from the social scalability side of things, you know, I think that, you know, I have this terminology that I use, like to use it, I call it the Ethereum Empire, where, you know, if the world of Bitcoin, you know, the Bitcoin sovereign chain, like generation one was a small kingdoms theory and said, okay, you know, let's create an empire, let's try to put all these things under control, and, you know, empires from with some benefits, you know, it's much more economic integration, which is what that compose ability of a theorem gives you. But the high level of political integration leads of empires leads to, you know, issues, right, like, it is such a so in empires is so many groups with divergent interest, and you can't really, you know, you at the end of the day, almost every Empire, you have an emperor or some aristocracy, or, you know, some controlling group, and you see, you know, you see this happen in the governance debates and a 30 am today, and I think a lot of them come down to the fact that, you know, there's too many groups with divergent interests all trying to agree on one thing, you look at the theory of improvement proposal repo on GitHub, and there's like, hundreds of improvement proposals that are often contradictory with each other, right, like, some people want state rent, some people don't, some people want x, some people don't like, you know, and it's almost impossible for the entire Ethereum community, which is so big and diverse to agree on, you know, a common pattern. Now, this is where the sovereign blockchain so you know, if if a theorem is an empire, cosmos is a world of nation states, where essentially what we're trying to do is maintain that economic connectivity that we have, you know, in today's world, we essentially have wide scale economic integration, while still hiring smaller political entities. And that's kind of what cosmos is trying to do the different communities for different applications and, you know, different projects and communities, like even if it's a geographical base, like we want to give them the sovereignty and the ability to control their own governance, and like, you know, iterate faster than they could while being part of this larger Empire. So hubs are sort of, you know, there's nothing really inherently special about hubs in the cosmos ecosystem. They're all just chains. And they use IPC to sort of connector each other.
Where the differentiation between in Cosmos we really believe in this idea of application specific blockchains. Like, you know, like I said, we want in that world of nation states, we want blockchains to be specialized. And hubs are sort of blockchains that are specialized in connectivity, where, if you look at any large system that requires connectivity, you It always kind of falls into a hub and sport hub and spoke architecture, you look at airports, right? There's hub airports that handle most of the traffic, you look at the Internet, you know, any router can connect to any router, but in reality, you have some ISP is that provide you with that connectivity, that our hubs really do that, you know, your your application specific chain, instead of having to have like thousands of IPC connections to every other train, and also run your application, what is the hub will take on the task of like, oh, will maintain thousands of IBC connections to all these different chains. And then, you know, you're watching only African back to this one hub that will provide you with that connectivity. And then hubs will also over time provide additional features such as you know, I know ISP is they provide Internet connectivity, but at the same time, they often thrive off like hosting or DNS and like security stuff. And so I think that the hubs will do as well, like, the one that we're I'm, you know, I spend most of my time right now thinking about is this concept of shared security, how, you know, let's say you have a chain that doesn't want to secure itself, so you don't want to go find your own miners or your own validators or something, you can basically ask the hub like, Hey, can you secure my train for me, and, and that way, you know, I like to over analyze, knowledge drives everything to like history. And so in this world, and not in that model, the hub kind of acts as like, you know, NATO or something, right? It's a bunch of, like, sovereign nation states that are pooling their security together, in order to provide higher security to any individual zone. So there's a lot of ways you can think about the role of the hardest in the ecosystem. You know, in the cosmos ecosystem, we have two hubs are at the beginning, we have one called the cosmos hub. And there's one called the Irish hub, the Irish hub is you know, that we, we expect some level of specialization between Harvard and so, for example, the Irish pub is really taking, you know, a little bit more maybe of an enterprise e focus, and definitely much more focused on the Chinese market. While the casual hot constants habits, you know, maybe we can call it a little bit more cyberpunk, if you want. And so the cosmos hub is, you know, the chain that, you know, the company I work with tenement, that's the one that we're both actively involved with. And we, you know, we vote a lot of the software for this chain, and then it was launched by the interchange Foundation, which is, you know, why we're at this event today called the interchange on conversations. And the cause hub is basically a distributed chain that, you know, it's sort of a testing ground for a lot of these ideas that we believe in, like, we're using it to test proof of stake, tenement BFT consensus, we're going to be adding IDC very soon. And then there's a number of zones in the cosmos ecosystem that are being developed using the tooling that we've created are called the cosmos SDK. And they're building zones that will intent connect to the hub very soon. And once I BC is available and ready. And so you know, some of these zones include things you know, that the binance decks, that which is like, you know, a decentralized exchange, we have the line no network, which is sort of a decentralized video streaming system, we have true story, which is sort of a, you know, it's a, it's a kind of a cross, I'll call it a cross between a T car and a prediction market. We have stuff like the region network, which is trying to like, you know, in centralization, for maintainance of land resources. So there's a, you know, one of the nice things that the cause that we did was
provided that compose ability between applications, but you actually get one other very important thing, which is, it made it easy to develop applications. So you know, if you ever want in generation one, if you wanted to make your own application, really, what you would do is you'd go take the Bitcoin Core code base, and fork it and kind of modify it. And that was this like very spaghetti code c++ thing, especially back then. And that's why I like, you know, look at applications like name coin, but not very well designed, because they're trying to use a code base that wasn't designed for it. When it came up with solidity made it easy for these applications to be built, and why we saw a widespread of many new applications. What we've done is we've made it, we've created this tool called the cosmos SDK, which also made it all written in go, and you can write your own application specific blockchain in go. And, you know, it'll have an IDC module that you can use, if you're using the cosmos SDK, you can easily connect to the entire cosmos ecosystem, because it already has a built in IDC module in the cosmos, ecosystem, atoms are the staking token of the cosmos hub. So you know, the current hub is just a single hub in the ecosystem. And it is the staking token, we, you know, we really believe that, like, you know, in this world of many blockchains, you're going to have, most of them be proof of stake blockchains, like, you know, it's just, it's fundamentally insecure to have multiple proof of work chains, at least, you know, ones that, you know, share the same similar hashing algorithms. And so for this reason, you know, we kind of really believe in this idea that, you know, there's some debate within the team
were like, Okay,
is there going to be zero proof of work? blockchains? Or is it gonna be one proof of work? blockchain, but, you know, we had general consensus that there's not going to be more than one proof of work blockchain. And so these proof of stake blockchains are kind of, you know, how we create the security system for the cosmos hub. And, you know, you know, we generally believe that proof of stake has way more security and like done proof of work, because you have the in the protocol has access to much more fine grained control over incentives and punishments. And so we can, you know, in our opinion, this actually helps increase the security of these blockchains. And so, the atoms, right, are as the sticking token for the cosmos. And we actually wrote this interesting paper, you know, we have this philosophy called the atoms are not money, there is this new type of asset in the ecosystem called the staking token, was taking token is, you know, it's not money because we purposefully made it pretty hyperinflationary. What we want is people to take their atoms and make they stake them. And what they what that does is earned them the transaction fees that are being paid on the cosmos hub, as well as all the other trades that are doing shared security with the cosmos hub. And these transaction fees can kind of be paid in any other token you want, whether it's Bitcoin, or ether or die. And so really, you know, we we're not like trying to make a pitch for money here, right? Like, we the atoms are sort of a way for people to, you know, it can look in a sec, that's, that's the best analogy, in our opinion, it's a piece of capital that you need, there's like a six or a piece of capital you need in order to be able to mine on Bitcoin atoms are a piece of capital that you need, in order to be able to stay on the cosmos hub and earn those transaction fees. You know, there's definitely going to be way more cryptocurrencies within the cosmos ecosystem. You know, for one, there'll be many more staking tokens, a lot of the chains that are launching, they're using like, their token as a staking token. So, you know, the region network has a token that they're using Kaaba lie, no true story, they're all using these tokens as tokens, as well as some sort of, you know, work tokens as well. And so we're going to see definitely a, you know, an explosion of staking tokens. And we'll also hopefully see, you know, many more types of tokens, we have a lot of stable coins in the cosmos ecosystem, there's a project called Terra, which is, you know, building a stable coin, using a new mechanism that they've created. There's a project called Cobra, which is creating it, they've actually taken the multi collateral di, construction that the maker team came up with, and they're basically implemented it on a Cosmos SDK chain. And so you know, we're definitely going to see a lot of stable coins arising, we might see more, you know, just because the atoms aren't money, that doesn't mean that the cosmos community might not decide to launch a token that tries to be money. And so there's been a lot of talk around that this concept called photons idea, where it's I can't, you know, maybe just because atoms aren't money, the cosmos community might say, Okay, let's launch a new token, and they go this token, is to make a play at money. And so it's kind of, you know, it's really up to the community, how they want to play this. And like, you know, really what the goal here was cosmos, it's meant to like, facilitate experimentation, we want to reduce the barrier of experimentation as possible. A lot of the cosmos team really got into it, because we're really fascinated with the idea of local currencies, like currencies that are designed more for smaller communities and stuff. So we're honestly Yeah, we're looking forward to see this new explosion
in experimentation.
cosmos is this larger vision of you know, everything I've talked about this many applications, specific blockchains that all interoperate with each other. The tendering team, we basically kind of saw that in order to make this vision and reality, we first need three tools, three primary tools, and there's other tools, I think Mike will come later. But you know, the first three pillars are kind of the cosmos ecosystem is built on is Kellerman, BFT, the cosmos SDK and IDC. And so I BC is that a side chain protocol that we talked about, that allows you to move assets between different chains and move data and whatnot. Because SDK, like we mentioned, is the tooling in order to make, you know, your own applications within the blockchain. And then tenement is a, you know, proof of stake has been a lot around for a while, it was, you know, proposed, I think,
about as far back as 2012. But,
you know, in a world of proof of stake, you really don't want to be using the NA Komodo consensus that was kind of, you know, recently proposed by Satoshi for for Bitcoin, in professor, you know, what we want to do is we want to go to UJ con basically looked at some of the old consensus papers from like, you know, the 90s, and stuff like PBFT, and whatnot. And he basically realized that we can adapt them and modify them to make them more usable for a blockchain context. And that's where tenement came along. It's basically, you know, an upgrade of Pb FT. But that's designed, you know, for working over a peer to peer gossip network, it allows you to change the proposer, every single block, it has, you know, Byzantine fault accountability that if someone does something malicious, you know exactly who did it, and you can punish them, which is what we want to do in proof of stake. And so all these ideas are kind of like the benefit to give you over Naka model consensus is these things like fast finale, right? intelligent, tender making, there's no more thinking about, oh, how many confirmations does this block have? Is it going to get reverted or not? It allows you to run your train at much faster speeds. And so, you know, it just, it just sort of one of these three pillars that is required to make this Cosmos ecosystem really work. And so that, and this past finality is actually really important, because when we're doing this entertain communication in cosmos, we want we need before we can send assets and you know, to IDC packets between chains, we need to make sure they're finalized on their each individual chain. And so if you're trying to do IPC from like, you know, Bitcoin, something else, you know, we have to wait for the finality or pseudo finality of Bitcoin, which will take an hour right. And so imagine that, like, you know, we already have a pretty poor user experience, when like, dealing with Naka motor consensus, you make a payment, you have to wait an hour for it to be like, you know, confirmed, now you have to, like, you know, make a payment, and then they every time you want to move it to a different chain, you got it, you always gotta wait for these, like, you know, x and everything, and it just heavily degrades the user experience and will become pretty much unusable if we didn't have these fast finality chains, like, based on tenement and other BFD protocols. And so that's why we really see tenement as like one of the three pillars of the cosmos ecosystem. When when a new zone is created on cosmos, it has the option of, you know, basically zones are can come up with their security mechanism, however, they'd like. Some chains might choose to do proof of stake, and stuff that they might want to launch their own token or distribute their own token somehow, and use that as a proof of stake mechanism. Alternatively, they can also be, you know, kind of stuff I was talking about, Cosmos hub, shared security is that like, they can come ask the cosmos hub and say, Oh, can you validate our chain for us, and like, you know, we'll provide you these incentives to do so. Or you can even have some sort hybrids. In fact, you know, you don't even if you want to have your own sovereign security, you could even do a proof of work like system, and have your train be secured with that, but still be part of the via Cosmos zone, I have actually written a module that allows you to use proof of work with tenement BFT for the fast finality. And so, you know, if a chain wants to do that, they're completely able to do that. And so really, what cosmos, the best part about cosmos is it really just allows this experimentation and zones and communities and figure out what design is best for their use case. And so whether that involves launching their own token or not, that's kind of up to their projects, to integrate into the cosmos, our ecosystem there, you do not need to be built using the Cognos SDK, we're currently designing I BC to be a very well abstracted protocol at that can be implemented really, hopefully, in almost any block framework. So you know, like I said, it's nice to use the current SDK, because there will be a ready built IPC module that's easy to plug into. But you know, we want to make sure I BC is available on for example, parody substrate, or, you know, I always be we've or, you know, some theorem based chains. And so we want these different chains to all, you know, kind of be able to integrate IDC. And now, so the question for chains that are, you know, already launched, how do they integrate with IPC? Yeah, so most of these chains are going to essentially have to
upgrade their code and natively support this IDC protocol. And so, you know, we're working with a lot of the team, for example, we're working with some of the East two point O implemented to kind of work to see how we can get a theorem two point O to maybe natively integrate IDC, and then, you know, when it comes to some change that, you know, that will never ever change, like Bitcoin, right? Like, there's no chance in the world that we're going to get them to implement IDC, I'm pleased for the next like, 50 years, right? So for them what we have to do, we have to create these things called tech zones, which sort of like we gotta, like retroactively hack IDC interest, where, you know, it's not quite the IDC protocol, but the the validated set of one chain, for example, the customers have basically set, you know, kind of maintains a multi SIG on on Bitcoin, and they kind of act as a distributed decentralized custodian. And so that's kind of how we ensure you know, we plan to build pegs zones for like, high value chains that like, you know, it would the cosmos ecosystem would just be suboptimal if it we didn't integrate with them. And so, you know, our team is, you know, we work heavily on an aquarium peg zone. And that's what we've been focusing on. On there's a team in the ecosystem called nomics, they even have heavily focused on building a Bitcoin peg zone. And then there's a team called Kaaba, who is, like I mentioned, they were working on a stable coin. And they've also been working heavily on building a peg zone to XRP. And so, you know, these are just like, you know, for now, we have peg zones to like, you know, the top three crypto assets by market cap. And I think over time, like, you know, we hopefully will meet, you know, maybe start to write pegs zones to, you know, other really high value stuff. But, you know, for the most part, we really do want people to try to implement IDC whenever possible. I honestly, I can't even remember all the projects that are building on it at this point. You know, some of the, I guess, probably the most well known one is the binance decks. And that's kind of the one that, you know, everyone knows, I mean, the BNV token is, you know, in the top 10 by market cap, but then there's also like, number of many great projects being built, we have a true story, which is like a TCR, prediction market combo kind of thing. We have Sentinel who's building this very interesting, decentralized VPN, lie no network, which is building a sort of video streaming Kip system, region network, which is creating like, you know, incentives for proper containment of land resources. Uh, you know, all the stable coin projects that I've mentioned, like Kaaba and Tara and whatnot. Yeah, I mean, honestly, I kind of honey honestly lost track, like, you know, if you go on the cosmos, network slash ecosystem, we have, there's a list of some of, you know, a list of a couple of projects who are building on it, and, you know, are pretty far along and have like, you know, you know, maybe are like closer to launch. And then there's, there's also community managed list that contains like, hundreds of projects that are experimenting with the conference SDK, and building stuff. One of the main premises of Cosmo, all of the blockchain ecosystem is I really think it, you know, it's built around the concept of exit. And so you want to be able to exit you know, Bitcoin, or cement a way of exiting the existing financial ecosystem. And so we want to make sure that people and more zones more so have options when they're choosing which hubs to connect to an ISP is right, you don't only have one ISP, there's many ISP that you can choose from, and that, you know, the competition is good, because it helps them, you know, not go, you know, they can price cows are in the same way, you know, the classrooms hub, you know, they know that they can't do something malicious, in order to negatively affects the zones, because the zones will probably just like, you know, stop using the cosmos hub, and they'll try to switch to using a different hub. And so this is kind of what, you know, the purpose of these different hubs is, and like the specialization, also helped as well, because like, you know, at some point, a single heart is also going to hit some scalability bottlenecks as well. And so, this is why the iris hub is really cool, because, you know, it's a hub that's really focused on the China market. And so, you know, because,
you know, you know, there's this notion of locality, right, we're like, an any system, you know, even in today, you know, we're here in Berlin right now, that I bet majority of financial transactions done by people in Berlin, or two other people in Berlin. And so if we can, in any interchange system, whether it's Cosmos or theorem charting, the bottleneck is always the amount of cross chain communication. And so if we could try to localize, say, like, Oh, look, all of these zones are talking to each other, but really focused on like, Chinese businesses and stuff, they're going to the Irish hub, instead of trying to push it through the Congress hub, this will help scalability of both the ecosystems. And so, you know, I think, you know, if you look at any, like, competitive ecosystem, we want these different systems that can do like, you know, competition that helps the consumers and specialization to provide interesting features to these users. I mean, I think the main takeaway to look at cosmos is I really think it's like, a revolution in the are, you know, revolution in the governance of how blockchain systems in the Bitcoin Genesis block. Satoshi put the, the headline from the times of that day, which was, you know, Chancellor on, on on brink of bailout, second bailout for banks. And, you know, one of the things I did was a timestamp, the launch, but it also kind of like, kind of push this like thing like, Oh, look, this is the state of the financial system in the world. And this is like, except that it's set the tone for the Oh, this is what Bitcoin is trying to do. In the Genesis block of the call hub, my validator in our in our Genesis transaction, we put the headline from the Times of London of that day, which was must delay Brexit vote MPs one may. And
so to me, like,
I was so happy when I saw the headline that I'm like, Oh, this is so perfect, because it's like, what what Bitcoin did for finance I really think cosmos is trying to do for governance. It's like a revolution in how governance and communities and, you know, incentives form in the Boston ecosystem and will hopefully lead to a much more larger explosion of new experimentation, especially around governance. Hopefully
