COSMOVERSE continues at full speed in Istanbul! COINOTAG and YAP Global team have prepared WRAP-UP content for you, including the 1st and 2nd day of COSMOVERSE.
COSMOVERSE DAY 1 WRAP-UP
CEO of Informal Systems, Ethan Buchman, kicked off this year’s Cosmoverse with a talk on the development of the Cosmos Hub. Taking the audience on a walk through the building areas like interchain security and their impact on chain sovereignty, Ethan explained, “We are not taking away sovereignty… we are filling in this spectrum of sovereignty.”
Youssef Amrani, Co-Founder of AADAO, took the stage to give us an insight into the genesis of AADAO following the rejection of the ATOM 2.0 proposal. 👀 Youssef expanded on the role of AADAO for the Cosmos Hub, noting that “our mandate is built on two specific things: make the hub friendly for builders and fix ATOM tokenomics. We learnt our lesson from ATOM 2.0 and we tried to do it completely differently, almost the opposite through a bottom-up approach.”
Sunny Aggarwal, Co-Founder of Osmosis, followed up with a talk on The Interchain Account Hub and challenges of current DEXs in terms of UX and security. “Our goal is we want to build the best account abstraction framework, make it safer than anything that’s come before, better than anything that’s on Ethereum, but also better than anything in TradFi systems.”
Valentin Pletnev, Co-Founder of Quasar Finance, dived deep into how Quasar sees itself as the interchain yield hub of Cosmos. Discussing Quasar’s onboarding of the first professional DeFi data science team into Cosmos, Valentin also spoke on how “we feel like there is a strong signal from reputable investors that DeFi and especially IBC DeFi has a future that is worth investing into”.
Jack Zampolin, CEO of Strangelove, took us on a journey of the project’s IBC roadmap. Posing on the importance of IBC and the question of “how do we drive IBC adoption?” Jack outlined that “we need to target developers and give them the tools they need to make it easy for them to deploy on IBC and utilise the full features of the protocol.”
Dean Tribble, CEO of Agoric, spoke on the programmability of the Agoric platform. Speaking on Agoric’s benefit to Web2 javascript developers, Dean said that “what Agoric uniquely provides is the programmability where they can use their existing tools, their existing environments and their existing expertise to solve their problems and provide web3 solutions to everyday problems to billions of users.”
The panel on the rise of the AEZ then took centre stage featuring Jelena Djuric, Co-Founder of Noble; Riley Edmunds, Co-Founder of Stride Labs; Avril (Spaydh) Dutheil, Core Contributor of Neutron; and Shi Khai Wei, Partner of LongHash Ventures, with Sebastien Couture, Co-Host of Epicenter and Founder of Interop Ventures, as moderator. “I see the AEZ as a bit like the EU where you have states together. Each chain is like a state, and these states can have very deep relations with other countries. That doesn’t necessarily mean they have to be part of the union itself, you can have very layered relationships between the various entities”, said Avril.
Shi Khai added, “the reason the AEZ will continue to grow is because there is alignment. Credible neutrality is great, but it means it’s impartial, it’s inhumane, it’s cold, it’s just business. With the AEZ and how the alignment is done with the consumer chains, it’s more like we want each other to win. We’re cheering each other on, we’re providing liquidity, we’re helping with distribution. It really forms a coalition that is inspired for mutual success, and that is the difference.”
Théo Pelliet, Head of Ecosystem at OKP4, discussed unlocking off-chain coordination. “The digital world is very siloed, a lot of people have managed to build protocols or build systems that can share infrastructure or computation or storage — but still the data and the algorithms themselves are not shared. The companies mostly keep them for themselves.
And this is a huge issue, it’s very sad. As the data and algorithms are not shared, the
knowledge is not created,” said Théo. Charles d’Haussy, CEO of dYdX Foundation, shared dYdX’s vision of a decentralised economy, market and systems to represent Astropolis, an idealised future of civilisation. A future where shareholder capitalism is replaced by stakeholder capitalism; algorithms and robots don’t compete for technology but for ethos and tangible use cases, for instance.
“Astropolism represents the parting shift in how the world is organising itself, providing old toolings and platforms for an autonomous yet interconnected economy”, said Charles. Kaan Uzdogan, Software Engineer at the Ethereum Foundation, explained the strategic position Türkiye has as a nation to become a developer hub with popular interest amongst many young people to have global careers. “In general why this is important, crypto is important not only in first world countries but in developing countries where there are incentives to look for alternatives.”
COSMOVERSE DAY 2 WRAP-UP
We kicked off Day 2 with a Validator panel with Josh Heller, Product Specialist at Allnodes; Dan Bryan, DevOps Engineer at Strangelove; John Park, Founder of A41; and Steve Ngok, Core Contributor of Dora Factory. The panel, moderated by Thalita Franklin, discussed all things transaction validation. “You can see that all the OGs and the builder centric validators have the technical capacity to sustain mainnet networks whereas all the newbies tend to see it as more of a private banking and wealth management point of view and we poach clients in a different way….I guess we are all fighting with different weapons and we all have different colours,” said John.
Syed Rahman and Alpin Yukseloglu, contributors for Osmosis took the stage to unveil Osmosis 2.0 and the team’s journey ahead of this exciting development. Assessing the pain points, Syed noted, “fundamentally, we’re finally tackling some of the issues we’ve had for so long. Everything from onboarding to signing in to navigating your experience along the way, those aren’t things we should be over fixated upon as the next big innovation, those are the things we are finally solving.”
Nikilesh Jagan, Head of Growth and Partnerships at Quicksilver, discussed some of the problems with liquid staking in Cosmos and how Quicksilver is finding new solutions. “It’s really ironic that in liquid staking the rewards are not liquid – you can’t easily access these rewards and it’s completely dependent on how the market is to be able to get your liquid staking rewards,” said Nikilesh.
Radha Dasari, the Technical Education Lead at Polkadot, spoke in detail on the inner workings of Polkadot and Cosmos. Drawing parallels and the subsequent divergence between the two ecosystems, Radha noted that “both of these whitepapers came almost at the same time, yet both ecosystems took different approaches to solving the same problem.
Although the approaches were different, the underlying theme was the same thing. Both Cosmos and Polkadot believed that Web3 is not going to be about blockchain maximalism, it’s going to be about multiple blockchains working together in cohesion — it’s about openness and interoperability.”
Jonathan Lim, Principal Product Manager of Circle and Jelena Djuric, Co-Founder of Noble, gave a special announcement on the development of USDC on Cosmos. Jonathan outlined the cross-chain transfer protocol (CCTP) which will be instrumental in bringing USDC to Cosmos through Noble. Jelena explained how simple it will make this process, “these are simple transfers in one click.”
Nathan Cha, Marketing Lead at dYdX, announced the expected release of the project on Cosmos for October 2023, pending governance approval. “dYdX will no longer run any of the infrastructure…This will all be run by third party validators and nodes and be decentralised from end to end. It’s all non-custodial, it’s all transparent, you don’t have to worry about where your funds are because you can see it second by second.”
Samantha Yap, Founder & CEO of YAP Global, then took the stage to moderate a panel discussion on stablecoins and their use cases. The panellists consisted of Zaki Manian, Co-Founder of Sommelier Finance; Shamus Noonan, Senior BD Manager of Circle; Greg Osuri, CEO of Overclock Labs and Co-Founder of Akash Network; and David Gogel, VP of Strategy & Operations at dYdX Foundation. When asked about how we can fill the liquidity void in Cosmos, Zaki said “converting volatile Cosmos assets and yield-bearing Cosmos assets into stablecoins are the key ingredients to reviving liquidity in this ecosystem.” When asked about what characteristics panellists recommend other native stablecoins to adopt, Boz said “I would like to see Proof of Reserves backing those stablecoins.”
Macauley Peterson, Senior Editor of Blockworks, moderated a panel on cross-chain interoperability with Jack Zampolin, CEO of of Strangelove; Usman Asim, Senior Developer Relations Engineer of Ava Labs; Brainjar, Founder & CEO of Composable Finance; and Adrian Brink, Co-Founder of Anoma and Namada. Usman spoke on the adoption path of IBC as a more efficient, fast, secure communication protocol.“I would be excited to see IBC be battle-tested using different consensus mechanisms and make it easier to access IBC on different chains.”
Co-Founder of Binary Builders, Marko Baricevic spoke about crypto’s modular future and how software toolkits such as Cosmos SDK are unlocking new opportunities for users. “We’re seeing new use cases. The Cosmos SDK abstracts everything for 95% of users, but for those 5% of users, their development speed is fast, their requirements are evolving,” said Marko.
We then welcomed a panel discussion on community building in the Web3 era and why its essential role in decentralisation. 👫 Moderated by Adam Wozney, Head of Community at Akash Network, panellists consisted of Avril (Spaydh) Dutheil, Core Contributor of Neutron; Daria Chernozub, Co-Founder of ICP.Hub Turkey; and Dr. Danny Lim, Core Contributor at MarginX.
Avril explained, “giving people the resources to self-organise is an underlooked point [in community-building.]” Adam responded by breaking down the different levels of involvement in a general community, “90% of a community are flies on the wall that aren’t involved to much. 9% are fairly involved in organisational processes. 1% of the community are heavily involved with coding, content creation, and more.
