The squad is *so* back. In our latest
@otherinternet__
essay
@tobyshorin
@lottiland
and I challenge the possibilities and limits of crypto as an institutional technology. We ask what a protocol can do, and finally answer "what is a DAO?" (sort of)
My personal criticisms of crypto:
- record of individual behavior permits authoritarian surveillance apparatus
- rich get richer via info/access asymmetry & immutable generational wealth
- everything becomes a money game rather than enriching public life
The gender gap in Cosmos is really disheartening and needs to be addressed.
If you’re a woman, trans, or non-binary person at any stage of your career and want to find work in crypto, DM me and I’ll connect you to a team that’s hiring, or a woman in leadership where possible.
Excited to share I've joined
@SkipProtocol
as Head of Product & Strategy. The Skip team is world-class and in our discussions over the last months we become increasingly excited about how MEV solutions could make the Cosmos application experience 100x better.
Though prop 82 failed, ATOM 2.0 fundamentally changed the Cosmos Hub narrative & I’m proud of that. If nothing else, I hope this kernel of 2.0 is carried forward: that the purpose of the Hub is to help other sovereign chains thrive.
I've really enjoyed helping the EigenLayer team navigate all things Cosmos. Here's a short piece we co-wrote on how to connect the pieces and bring Cosmos + Ethereum closer together.
s/o to the realest
@0xkydo
@MylesOneil
@mark0baricevic
Was asked today what I think the biggest impediments to Cosmos’ success were. My answer:
- Liquidity - liquid staking + USDC will help but we need to grow net new markets
- DevRel - Cosmos SDK has ok docs, CosmWasm is sparse, onboarding new devs is painful, knowledge is isolated
Secret’s out, we’re building an in-protocol oracle. There’s nothing like this on the market today. Only an app-chain can marry the consensus process with proper oracle behavior and guarantee block-by-block updates.
The oracle Skip is building for app chains (Slinky) doesn’t have this vulnerability.
It guarantees the delivery of FRESH prices in EVERY block using ABCI++.
Coming to Neutron, Osmosis, Initia, Berachain, and elsewhere very soon.
our entire concept of money is changing. a money is a medium of expression, a degree of belief, something you wear to enact social relations. we are nowhere near understanding the full extent of what digital monies can do
I’m honestly a little confused by the Cosmos panic. Yes the Hub is figuring itself out, but on every other dimension things seem to be going quite well?
Not picking on
@hxrts
, but I routinely see this type of question as a kind of gotcha, and I'm always confused.
"Who will build the roads then, huh techbro?!?"
As if roads are built by anyone other than the techbros, aka the engineers!
As if roads are some difficult new
For Cosmos newbies coming from Ethereum here’s a cheat sheet for starting to play around.
First get either:
- Browser wallet -
- Mobile wallet -
Then use to onboard + hop between different app chains/tokens
I'd like to talk to more early-stage crypto teams about decentralized governance, business strategy, and imminent liquid staking / MEV markets. After taking Cosmos zero to one, feel like I have a lot of learnings to share that would be valuable. DMs open.
today's sidequest: writing a longform 'state of the Cosmos eco' on the MakerDAO forum
tried to keep it relatively impartial. coincidentally, I had a series of roadmap convos recently, so cosmos folks may find it useful as well.
Cosmos needs the equivalent of EthGlobal. Professional team focused on high quality hackathons, connecting winners to resources in their network for continuation.
Telegram etiquette for intros:
- create group, make sure everyone arrives, send join links to those with restricted settings
- make invitees admins + chat history visible in case they add anyone
- write an intro message
- wait for both sides to say hi
- say something nice + exit
Though imperfect, I believe I delivered what I set out to do. Now it’s time to step back from the Hub & the ICF, & to let others write the next chapter. I’ll be taking time to gather strength but plan to sick around Cosmos & look forward to the next adventure. ⚛️
instead of compelling people to pay in ATOM (which never made sense to me) the community should simply encourage applications to let them display ATOM as a unit of account and settle in any currency. this has real utility because ATOM is the primary exchange pair
cosmos got a bunch of things right.
• what we got wrong: the importance of time to market
• what I hope is right but still unproven: the plurality of monies
• what’s critical but missing entirely: user privacy by default
astonishing how little monetary policy innovation there is in crypto given that’s kind of the whole point. everyone nerd-sniped by mechanism design before they get to rebuilding money
While it’s not flashy, having excellent customer service is one of Skip’s superpowers. We’re in the war room debugging Comet when your chain halts, and the first to alert you when IBC channels expire. The team takes a lot of pride in making sure all the interchain plumbing works.
who cares what chain you’re using for DA or settlement when there are no users? speculation and stablecoins are the only applications that have traction. if we don’t figure out how to improve real people’s lives it’s over.
It’s a bull market and cosmos UX still leaves a lot to be desired. Point to the number one thing we need to fix for new entrants and I’ll do my best to help.
so we decided to run a little working group for celestia’s zk account model and now it’s turning a full-blown interop protocol. the possibilities here are kind of mind blowing.
What would make this REALLY powerful is if the inputs to the ZK circuit included the apphashes of any/all of the IBC clients on the host chain.
Why? Because then the ZK account can read state from anywhere else in the Interchain!
all these tryhard onchain culture plays are completely soulless. like ad agency pitches looking for corporate sign-off. Base probably the worst offender. cultural wasteland tbh.
cosmos needs more block explorer competition. there are easy 100x UX improvements.
no one has made a truly IBC-centric explorer, where IBC paths are first-class objects, not chains.
As there seems to be some confusion:
Thorchain ⇒ cross-chain swaps between the native tokens of 2 chains
Nomic ⇒ exports fully redeemable representation of BTC over IBC
Babylon ⇒ economic security market via BTC staking + POW timestamping for long-range attack prevention
Bitcoin staking is coming to Cosmos Hub. Together with
@informalinc
, we are bringing our Bitcoin staking protocol to
@Cosmos
, turning Cosmos Hub into a multi-asset security aggregator powered by $ATOM, $BTC, and ecosystem tokens.
All Cosmos SDK chains 0.46 and above can now use the DAODAO interface to build complex transactions that will be proposed to governance and executed by the chain’s gov module. Fully expect DAODAO will become the primary gov interface for Cosmos.
oh and i almost forgot..
if your chain supports the new governance proposals, the action library applies to those too:
as well as our wallet transaction builder:
so to summarize, crypto-com, binance, okex build cosmos chains. optimism pivots to application-specific rollups and lands coinbase, which bag holders tout as fundamental invalidation of what we’re building. cool, appreciate your valuable contribution to the discourse.
For those trying to figure out what's going on with
@lootproject
, our essay from last year tries to capture this precise social mechanic.
imply existence of a new world →
immediately distribute ownership →
community builds that world from the ground up
update, people looking for the following roles:
- ops
- biz dev
- research
- marcomm
- product management
dm if you're hiring and would like me to send folks your way
also the number of toxic comments is off the charts. hiding what I can but sorry in advance. it's a cesspool.
The gender gap in Cosmos is really disheartening and needs to be addressed.
If you’re a woman, trans, or non-binary person at any stage of your career and want to find work in crypto, DM me and I’ll connect you to a team that’s hiring, or a woman in leadership where possible.
wild how much this industry is driven by niche technical narratives
you're working on the secular transformation of society. the opportunity is reimagining the entire concept of money. your goals are enabling new forms of human agency+holding power to account
don't fuck this up
We did a team exercise when I first joined Skip where everyone was given a little bit of ETH on Ethereum and asked to use a different Cosmos app. Complete nightmare, maybe two of us made it to the end. Now it's one click with the Skip API.
The promised Cosmos Hub paper revision! Including a few adjustments requested by the community: ATOM gov has additional controls to 1) direct tail emissions 2) authorize each of 12 equal tranches minted to the treasury.
what the discourse misses today is that crypto is a tool for the expression of counter-power. the idea is to instantiate irrevocable technology that changes the rules of the game. success is the subversion of entrenched institutions that are “legal” but unjust.
instead of “DAO,” which foregrounds an entity, we could have used “decentralized free assembly,” which emphasizes upholding a right, similar to how people understand censorship resistance upholding freedom of expression
ATOM 2024 playbook:
1. INDUCE DEMAND - deploy ATOM LST protocol-owned liquidity until deepest market on all interchain DEXs
2. FILL COMMUNITY POOL - in any way possible, eg.
@EffortCapital
LST tax
3. ATOM WARS - start charging an interest rate for more rented POL a la
@zmanian
After the AIB meltdown
@billyrennekamp
& I were literally tasked with saving Cosmos, bringing the IBC network to life. Then this year we were asked to revive the Cosmos Hub. Interchain Security would enable new functionality, while the ATOM 2.0 project gave the Port City purpose.
Chains with Slinky and the Block SDK automatically recapture oracle MEV out of the box.
We didn’t mention in the announcement because it seems obvious once you’ve internalized the appchain model, but why pay Chainlink, Flashbots AND Oval for something you can easily do yourself?
We’re truly lucky to have
@sachayve
. Beautiful communicator who perfectly exemplifies Cosmos’ ethos of play, truth-seeking, and appreciation of difference. The baddest of the Bad Kids.
Do I know anyone who works for
@MakerDAO
,
@AaveAave
or
@iearnfinance
DAOs?
@otherinternet__
is starting a horizontal initiative to improve the conditions + effectiveness of web3 labor. We’d like to interview people working for DAOs to better understand successes + challenges.
cosmos is the only system where new protocols can transcend the originating ecosystem. that’s important because the very best projects want to be an ecosystem unto themselves, not live in someone else’s shadow.
Just posted a proposal to add Skip's Block SDK to the Cosmos Hub! Seeking feedback. Will also give a short presentation on this in the Cosmoverse AEZ room tomorrow at 12:30.
I’m a long-time user, supporter, and friend of Arena. I participated in the equity crowdfunding campaign in 2018, and despite working in crypto, I believe this still was the most successful experiment in user ownership of an internet platform I’ve seen to date.
Today is our 13th birthday.
For 13 years, we’ve built and maintained independently with no institutional investors and sustained only by our members.
We’re grateful for your unwavering support.
We (quite literally) would not be celebrating our 13 years
Looking forward to the Columbia Cryptoeconomics Workshop next week! I’ll be presenting on fee markets for app chains and novel design patterns we’re starting to experiment with in Cosmos.
the obvious meta of this trust-minimization convo is eth people want to fence the valid solution space to something eth-specific, and cosmos people want territorial recognition. meanwhile users could care less as long as there's wallet support lol
At first glance Slinky looks like a better oracle, and it is; categorically superior. Look closer and you’ll see a novel platform for executing off-chain actions with consensus-grade performance and integrity. Slinky is a whole new way to make your application do more.
🥁 We're extremely excited to announce what we've been working on for the past year...
Introducing ⚡️ Slinky ⚡️ - the first restaked oracle aggregator, built for perps markets & DeFi that need maximal performance & minimal trust ⬇️
biggest missing piece in cosmos is liquidity. a few potential sources:
- price increases
- new projects launching
- fiat-backed stablecoins
- lending/debt
- liquid staking
- market defragmentation via MEV/margin
- more capital efficient DEXs
anything substantial I’m missing?
the guiding light for Skip is to make Cosmos UX so good it feels like one chain. this means collaborating with teams to improve every layer of the stack: new fee markets, better cross-chain observability, faster relaying, full account abstraction. lots of work ahead 😅
Cosmos isn’t a technology or an ecosystem, it’s the choice to build a sovereign application that seeks to interoperate with others. The more sovereign your L2 the more you’ve embodied that choice to become a Cosmos app.
as someone deeply lost in the sauce with an article on the political philosophy of sovereignty I can report both Sreeram & Mustafa are sort of right, sort of wrong. it’s a profound subject that takes you to unexpected places. will publish soon since inquiring minds want to know.
1. Cosmos Ibc requires assuming the other sides validators are honest - let’s keep that aside. What happens when the other chain rolls back because of “sovereignty”?
2. When
@musalbas
says each bridge can *decide* which side to follow, where / who is the agent behind the bridge?
How I imagine Cosmos transactions could happen in the the future:
Setup: I want to buy a Bad Kid over the counter from my friend. I have a hot wallet with ATOM. My friend has a hot wallet with OSMO.
Listing: My friend puts up the Bad Kid with an asking price of 5000 Euros.
cosmos is the frontier of experimentation for a new generation of sovereign institutions. it's wild and chaotic and messy, but also beautiful and true to its aims. it has problems, but we face them honestly and every single person knows there's no one to solve them but us.
update 2, had about 30 applicants + 30 employers reach out. collated everything to make 2-3 intros each. waiting on info before matching a few people but currently ~half-way done. will make my way through the remainder this wk but pausing new additions since the weekend is over.
update, people looking for the following roles:
- ops
- biz dev
- research
- marcomm
- product management
dm if you're hiring and would like me to send folks your way
also the number of toxic comments is off the charts. hiding what I can but sorry in advance. it's a cesspool.
Everyone is networking downstairs at the Circle event. I’m the sole person one floor above, completely entranced by this Joseph + Annie Albers’ exhibition. I literally cannot pull myself away. I’ve never seen this much of their work together.
The good folks from Empire invited me and Bucky on to jam about Cosmos and the app-chain thesis. We talk about key design decisions of the Cosmos architecture, localist ideology and its implied view of liquidity.
I still get a little nervous on podcasts but trying to practice!
New pod on Cosmos ⚛️
Join
@santiagoroel
@buchmanster
and
@hxrts
to learn about:
1) Ideal product for an appchain
2) Cosmos tech vs BD strategy
3) Why
@cosmos
4) Bootstrapping validator sets
5) How appchains unlock better aps
6) Cosmos governance takeaways
Now live →
It's totally fine if Thorchain doesn't want to add the IBC module, that's their choice. Right now UX is just a pain for Cosmos users. Fix is allowing Bifrost to construct IBC messages on the target Cosmos chain + pass memos. I've been working with
@Orion_9R
to make this happen.
Timewave’s v2 Covenant system is the most complex IBC application I’ve seen to date. It can orchestrate two chains negotiating a trustless deal, then autonomously execute control flow including liquid staking, LPing, share splitting, cross-chain distribution, and deal unwinding.
The Skip API is now popular to the point where we literally can’t keep track of everyone who has integrated (good problem). If you’re working with the API or want to use it to plug x-chain liquidity/users into your app drop me a line.
After working with Stride on everything from delegation methodology, LSM upgrades, protocol-owned liquidity, to UX, it's a pleasure to be able to support them. One of the most diligent, curious, and humble teams in Cosmos.
On the heels of launching stTIA, we're pleased to announce the Stride Association has completed a strategic fundraise.
$4M has been raised from Celestia-aligned funds and angels, to support Stride's modular expansion.
For the full story 👉