#citizencosmos

  • Episode link: https://www.citizencosmos.space/neutron

  • Episode name: Spaydh, sustainability, value & Interchain security

Transcript of the Episode:

[00:01:40] Citizen Cosmos: Hi, everybody! Welcome to a new episode of Citizen Cosmos, today I have Spaydh with me from Neutron. I don't know if you guys heard about it or not, but if you haven't, it means you're going to hear all about it today, and if you have - even better because you're going to find out more stuff about it. Spaydh, man, hi, and welcome to the show!

[00:02:00] Spaydh: Hey! Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

[00:02:03] Citizen Cosmos: I am thrilled actually because Neutron is on the tip of the tongue of a lot of people, so I would like to talk about that, of course, but also I would like to talk a little bit more about you and about what you do, and what you're planning. So the first thing is first to introduce yourself in your own words. What do you do, and what is Neutron?

[00:02:26] Spaydh: Sure. So I am deputy general manager at Neutron, which means I get to do everything that is not development related. The way our team works is that we have 11 devs right now, plus me, so I do everything else. In a few words, Neutron is a small contract platform that is interchain secured by the Cosmos Hub, which means it shares its benefits from the security of the Cosmos Hub in exchange for which it provides revenue to the Cosmos Hub. That small contract platform has a few features which allow you to easily create cross-chain protocols that act as if they were just one protocol. In a unit matter, essentially through interesting accounts, through interesting queries which allow you to control accounts on other blockchains, execute transactions, track execution stages, and also receive data about that blockchain in a trust-minimized manner over IBC.

[00:03:20] Citizen Cosmos: That's cool, man! You guys have incorporated all the rewards to do with interest, and we’ll talk about all those things in a little bit. I know you guys are incubated by P2P, and I have a lot of connections to that, Constantine particularly, of course, was a guest on our podcast, and we've worked together for years and years before. So what's your story, man? How did you get Neutron? How did you get into blockchain?

[00:04:10] Spaydh: I guess what got me into crypto was that since 2013 with Snowden’s revelations about various government programs that were doing a large-scale collection of data across the world, not just in the US but in various countries with my conviction that computers and code would take a more and more important place in our lives, I’ve been very interested in computing systems but also privacy as a question of how do you know what balance do you need. I was interested in all of this, and during my long nights on the internet, I found out about Bitcoin. It was 2016 or 2017. I was pretty young at the time. Then I ended up finding out about Etherium, and then I realized I can make a wall computer and put tons of stuff on it. I was sold on the idea, but I had just 30$ in my pocket per month, so I didn’t become a millionaire in the next bull market. But that’s what’s got me hooked. I like the idea of Bitcoin removing the intermediaries between financial transactions. I'm not a big fan of the banks like a lot of people here in this system, so to me, the idea that you could make a shared computer that was fully decentralized across the world was also really cool. All of these things got me into crypto, but then I was still doing my studies, I was traveling, I was working as a journalist across the world, and I was following from a distance what was going on until DeFi summer and twenty 2021, mostly when I started hearing about it a bit more, so that piqued my interest. I came back and found my old wallet in which there was 200$ of Ethereum, and I had a reason to go back hard on this, and then suddenly, Ethereum had completely changed. There were dozens of apps on top of Ethereum that you could use to do various DeFi stuff, and so suddenly, you could have a full-time job just researching what was going on. So that's basically what I did. At the time, I was living in Thailand already but working as a teacher, so I would teach English during the day and then research crypto basically as a full-time job at night, so I became a very involved community member in Ethereum and also in Terra at the time and ripped my portfolio. But the whole thing about that is that because Terra was much smaller in terms of how many people were interacting, there any people who have established it allowed me to very quickly meet a lot of the people who were actively engaged in the ecosystem. I started participating, helping produce the briefs of what was said, giving them to the community so that people who had missed the calls could still have that information, and participating on the forums. So the way I got professionally into crypto was that one day there was this proposal on the anchor for about updating SD Luna with a new version of the liquid staking derivative to SD Luna and at the end of this post, there was this small mention that of you think you have skills that we could use, just send us a message and let's chat. And so I thought perhaps there's something that could be done, so I did message them, and we chatted for a while, and that's how I started as a community manager later at Terra. The confusing thing here is that actually, my employer has been PGP from the start because the way it works is that Lido as a DAO is a pretty big organization that coordinates everything that happens across all of Lido. Still, in terms of development and active management, it's mostly focused on Ethereum Ecosystem, including l1s and l2s as well and so to be able to expand to have that bandwidth with a limited amount of devs. What Lido does is often enter contractual relationships with other teams through governance, and so teams like this include P2P and Chorus 1 but also others who have done the deployment on Polkadot polygon, Salona, Terra, and so the way it works is that we'll give you some Lido tokens to create imitation and then if you can reach some degree of market cap you will get a bonus to motivate you to maintain and grow the protocol. P2P had this kind of agreement with Lido for later on Terra, and so that's why I joined PHP as a community team manager. So the rest is history, but basically, the team that was making Lido on Terra was also researching how to make proper liquid staking in Cosmos, and in the course of their research, they found a lot of ideas. Their thesis was that we would like to do it as a smart contract, and we need some technical prerequisites for this to be possible and so which platform allows us to do this? There are many platforms in Cosmos, but none of them allows you to meet these requirements right now and so we shared a lot within P2P, and so all of these criteria and these things that were blocking Lido spread through the org and the realization. If one protocol like Lido is blocked on this lack of security, lack of ability to interact with the blockchains via inquiries and retrieve data from other blockchains. It’s very likely there are other protocols that could deploy on Cosmos that can't because they don't have access to these premises that they would be interested in having to deploy in Cosmos. And so from there, we can't have started thinking if we could technically build a blockchain that does this for one protocol. We could build. This was just the light of the team, but how about we take this and we make it a product that everybody can deploy? so that's how the idea of a Neutron was born, and then we started working on it for months until prop 72 hit the forums, and it aligned with what we wanted for a Neutron. We wanted to be intersecured because we saw it as one way of having much higher security from the get-go but also as a way to have a very close alignment with the rest of the ecosystem. We’re aligned by default. That means if the Neutron goes rogue or becomes hurtful to the rest of the ecosystem, it's very easy for the hub to pull the plug at the same time. The Hub should not be incentivized to pull the plug off the Neutron because if the Neutron is successful it should be driving a ton of revenue to add to Atom takers and you have this very nice property here that is that we have to cooperate. It's all about corporation essentially, so that's my story and Neutron’s in a nutshell.

[00:10:48] Citizen Cosmos: That's pretty cool that the role of Neutron is cooperation because blockchains are a lot about reaching consensus. Whether it's a cooperation of nodes, a cooperation of governance, or the cooperation of actors in whatever ecosystem is in question. Another question. You said that you were quite young when you got into the whole Bitcoin topic, and the question is: was that still school-age or after? The reason I’m asking is that I’ve been going through this topic with a lot of guests about how the adoption level of crypto turns around the world. I think one cool measurement for that is to see whether people got into it in school already or when they already had jobs.

[00:12:08] Spaydh: I remember buying my first Bitcoin on Coinbase in the queue to my high school cafeteria.

[00:12:16] Citizen Cosmos: That to me means that adoption is happening and happening, especially among the generation that, in my opinion, can do something with it. I'm sorry to everybody and including my generation here, but I think it’s more important that this happens like that and not only by your employer or something like that. Let's go back to the topic, but that was a very curious kind of thing to see how it evolved.

[00:12:41] Spaydh: I agree. The age of people when they discover crypto is an interesting metric.

[00:12:46] Citizen Cosmos: It’s for developers as well. The first time I saw this was in Cyber house. It was a place in Minsk, Belarussia, in 2015 or 2016 where Constantine and other people used to meet. I remember there was a developer, a kid essentially. He was 14 and was already into smart contracts. And that’s when I thought: “Yeah, it’s working!”

[00:13:24] Spaydh: What do you think about 12 y/o kid from the USA, I think, who made millions selling NFTs? I think his name is Pixel Whales.

[00:13:46] Citizen Cosmos: Yeah, it was cool. I also recently saw on Twitter it was Josh Lee’s post about a 12 y/o kid called Badkidsart who draws Cosmos now, as far as I know. Back to cooperation. You're welcome to talk about Lido and Neutron in this case. What are your thoughts in general on the decentralization of stake? There is a lot of talk about Lido and a lot of talk about Ethereum. What are your thoughts in general? Because you guys have been somehow involved in all those stories. What can be done about that?

[00:15:40] Spaydh: That's a million-dollar question! First, before we talk about it, I want to clarify that the Neutron itself does not deal with stage validators. It’s interchain secured. The Cosmos Hub does that. Neutron doesn’t separate products, it’s a smart contract platform. Lido is a liquid staking protocol. There’s a smart contract that will most likely launch on top of Neutron. What I'm going to say now is my personal belief. I've been in touch with validators and Lido’s node operator group. My take on this is that the way the staking mechanisms work and most blockchains do tend to centralize take, and that's for multiple reasons. Some of them are fairly trivial. But there are more profound centralizing forces when it comes to state distribution, and that's the fact that not all validators have access to the same communication channels, PR, but also not all of them have access to the same order flow, and I think that's the most significant point here is that if you're Coinbase, Binance, or Kraken, you already have a user base and that user base is pretty huge. If they're going to be holding those tokens because they're speculating on them or they're taking a long position on them they're going to be holding these tokens in your platform, they might as well just yield on them, and so you can make this very easy for them and even make it more comfortable than delegating directly at the blockchain’s level because what you can do is you can have a one-click process, or you choose your token you stake amount that you want, and then if you want to withdraw you can do it instantly because instead of staking everything though their validator they can keep a small part of it as a soothing pool kind of so that you can withdraw at any time. So you don't even have to care about the bonding period unless everybody is leaving on drugs and so the house streamlined the process is how comfortable it is for you as a staker: you don't have to care about the morning period, you don't have to care about government, you don't have to care about anything really. You can just be speculating and earning a yield on stuff that gives a tremendous advantage to this kind of entity who is able to have a vertically integrated business model when it comes to staking. And so what we see is that centralizing changes have grown pretty fat on most of the blockchains they operate on, and that's even without liquid staking. So you stake and get the yield, but you don't actually even get a token that you can use in other platforms. Coinbase was the first one to recently enable this for Coinbase Eth, and the success of it now is pretty tremendous. It's the fastest-growing liquid-taking derivative in Ethereum, and so obviously some of it is probably just people who were already staking with Coinbase but now are also getting the derivative, but some of it is most likely new growth as well. So the idea is that you need decentralized alternatives to centralize staking offers, and you need that alternative to be competitive enough to actually meet that demand so that the absolute share of centralized actors represented in state distribution doesn't grow at least is crucial. So how do you make it competitive? Well, I guess there are two things about this. The first one is that it needs to be able to scale with a demand for taking and not be limited by kind its internal way of dealing with a stake. That's mostly relevant to Ethereum, but it's also relevant to Cosmos. You want your product to be able to scale, that might include you being able to onboard new zones quickly although that's probably not where you'll find the most competition from the most centralized actors because they take a while before they list new chains, but anyway you need the protocol to scale, you need to have a perfect token, a good derivative that is well integrated so that people want to have this token, use it, hold it, and you need the validator set underneath to be robust, and that's for multiple reasons. The first one is that if your validator set management is really bad, you're going to hurt the network and so either you are going to destroy the network, you're participating in thereby also destroying your value or the network itself in its community will react before that happens hopefully and will either fork you out or find a way to stop you from hurting the network. So the first thing and the second thing is that your token is only as good as your validator set because if you have a shitty validator set with tons of validators who get jailed and others who get slashed, the APR of your liquid second derivative is not going to be competitive and it might even go negative if you're really bad. So to sustain a good token you need a good validator set and have all of these things that can contribute to improving the concentration of the state. So that's on the liquid staking. In terms of the way we do blockchains in general I think having lower requirements to become a validator is a good thing. We see on Etherium that the 32 Eth requirement has been a tremendous barrier to smaller validators which have been Ethereum. His vision of Ethereum should be evaluated eventually. It should run on your phone. We're going to make it as lightweight as possible. I think this vision has tremendous value though Ethereum is very far from that state right now, and I think in Cosmos we have to deal with the limitations of tendermint which is now as you increase the size of the set you increase latency and it stops working so efficiently. So that's one of the main hiccups there, and so in the meantime, before we figure out a way that we can have no larger sets, which would be nice, there are interesting initiatives like cyborg a couple of months back led this initiative where they were trying to make some ranking of various interfaces so that people would have access to differentiated tools and differentiated lists of validators with different profiles so that people can select validators based on their priorities without having three years of research. I think that's really the key point, you need the information to be available, and you need people to have access to it as easily as possible because the barrier the difference between staking with a liquid it a centralized provider and staking on your own is already massive and so we need to do everything that we can to make it as easy as possible whilst providing as much information as possible but also recognizing that it will most probably never be possible to actually give all of the relevant information publicly because some of the information that is relevant to actually making rational decisions about who to stake with is information that is really critical to the validators business for example which direct jurisdiction are they under, which country are they in, which server they use, what's their set up. That might be the best practice that should be shared, but you also might see it as a competitive advantage. If you have a better setup that is more efficient then you don't really want to share that information necessarily and so for various reasons like their personal safety, the safety of their business or their competitive advantage, or even the security of their infrastructure because for all these reasons validator will most probably not be fully comfortable sharing all of the information that is required to make a dedicated decision. Even if they did, most people would not have the time to actually go that in-depth, make charts about where the validators are distributed in the world, and then aggregate stake based on this. This is not something that is available to just anyone. I guess I'm somewhat deep in the context, I would still not be able to do that, so it's unrealistic to expect people to go that deep.

[00:23:40] Citizen Cosmos: It's interesting that we came to that from that question because in Citizen Cosmos one of the targets and goals that we have is to try, and we have the biggest databases. I'm talking about interviews with the top founders of validators and asking about their motivation. Not just what's their setting and setup, because these are private questions that lead to security issues but looking at those blockchains as digital nations and looking at those validators as businesses who build on those nations, then I want to know as the citizen of that nation what is this business building in my nation. I want to know whether this business is building an atomic bomb in there or whether they're putting that money back into work, for example building an IMM Zone which would benefit me more and that's what we try to go into, and especially when we have validators, we have now a separate thing. We do streams with validators where we try to get their profile but you're right that people have no time to listen to an hour-long interview. It's a big balance of weights, it is hard to understand which way it goes. Let's get back in a slightly different angle and talk a little bit more about Neutron and a little bit more about the major topics out there. I’m going to quote Neutron’s Twitter. It says “permissionless CosmWasm gateway. Could you explain what it is?

[00:26:05] Spaydh: That's a good question. So CosmWasm is a virtual machine, it's basically a way that your blockchain can take pieces of code that have been written by other people that are not directly in the blockchain itself and run them to produce products and services or make a pretty pictures or whatever you want. The interesting thing about Cosmos is that it's a module that you can put into your blockchain and so that module you can choose for it to be permissioned or permissionless. If you’re permissioned, that means that for somebody to deploy a piece of code that can get executed in that virtual machine, they have to go through governance first. That is usually seen as a way to either improve the security of the zone by having some people review the code before it's deployed or a way to only select the protocols that complement your zone the best, which makes a lot of sense especially for app chains. Osmosis is doing it and makes perfect sense, it doesn't need to have a very complex DeFi protocol that has nothing to do with their trading engine and so what they want is to have other programs that come and complement very closely and make symbiosis with their main product. Essentially the permissionless version of it is that anyone can come and work on your small contract, you're ready to deploy it while you can deploy it on your own you make a few transactions, and then your contract starts existing on the blockchain. The point here is that we're building a whole ecosystem, not just one product that we want to complement with plugins. We want to give anybody access to the IBC technologies that allow you to interact with other blockchains very closely. So because of it, there is very little sense for us in asking people to go through the loops of governance, presenting the whole thing. They can release a smart contract, if they found vulnerabilities in them, they can migrate them to a new version where they patch it. They don't have to wait two weeks or whatever governance delay in between. And so if they improve their product or if they fix issues can just iterate and get better. Essentially, over time and the overhead in terms of the developer experience is much lower. Now, the gateway to IBC part means that there are a few ideas but one of them is that building an app chain today is much easier than ever, but it's still not a trivial amount of work. You need to learn how the Cosmos works and the rest down the line if you want to have small contracts and bootstrap your validator set and the market cap of your token so that your zone is secure, etc. There are a ton of considerations, and if you don't need an app chain or don't have the means to have an app chain, then you can still enter Cosmos by just releasing a smart contract on Neutron. So it's a gateway because it is an easier way to enter a Cosmos than spending up your whole blockchain. However, it's also a gateway because once you're on Neutron, you still get access to all the technologies that app chains enjoy. Also, to all of the other zones that IBC connects, not only can you transfer tokens, you can also execute transactions on every ICA blockchain, but can also retrieve data from any IBC blockchain. So you can come to Cosmos on Neutron and enjoy the full ecosystem.

[00:29:36] Citizen Cosmos: It's interesting that you mentioned several things while explaining the interesting accounts and queries. I think Neutron is mentioned in the white paper 2.0 of Atom. Was that deliberate? Were you guys waiting to build those things? Were you trying to align the release of the protocol and the tesnet’s active nets with the release of the white paper? Or were you just piling the good technologies and putting them all together?

[00:26:05] Spaydh: No, actually, we had zero visibility into the progress of Atom 2.0 to point itself just like any other cosmonauts we were looking forward to it because exciting ways that aligned with Cosmos vision to drive value to Atom is kind of an interesting topic, but at the same time we weren't actively involved in it, we didn't have an idea of the timeline, so we didn't build our road map with that in mind. The main thing for us was interchain security because we didn't want to launch on our own value set and then fire that validator set and then go to the validator set of the Cosmos Hub we wanted to be intersecured from the start. So if we built our roadmap around anything, it's most probably intersecurity. Now, in terms of Atom 2.0, I think that there's a lot of potentials. Obviously, there are a lot of risks as well. That amount of money if it's misappropriated or if the government system is that control it is poorly designed, there are a lot of bad things that could happen. At the same time, if we get it right, implement the right systems, and come to a consensus about how this will work, then I think there's tremendous potential. The allocator, for example, is something that synergizes tremendously well with Neutron because, essentially, you can have the Hub that has an enormous treasury, and that treasury can be deployed to bootstrap the best projects and products or even create different systems that would not be possible in other circumstances because the actors that would benefit from these systems would not have access to that amount of capital. For example, you can allow a money market to re-hypothecate the collateral by liquid staking that collateral. The problem is when the collateral needs to be recalled, then you have a 21 day, you need to unstake and then that takes 21 or you need to sell to the market but you might not get price parity so you might actually take losses on your rehabilitation that's something that you want to avoid, and so what can be done here is that potentially that protocle could take a loan from the allocator for some capita, keep it as not staked tokens into price stability module and then when they need to unwind the positions they basically swap through this at price parity and then what the module does is just that it unstakes and then waits to 21 days and then it gets essentially all the tokens back but the protocole is able to generate more revenue without increasing the risk and the price parity is not taking on risk either because it's just unstaking stuff and waiting and the Cosmos Hub itself is getting an interest rate on that capital that has been deployed and so as long as the money market is able to generate more than the interest rate charged by the locator then that's a benefit for everybody, the Hub gets money, the product gets money, Neutron gets transaction fees so everybody is happy basically.

[00:33:10] Citizen Cosmos: Do you think the interchange allocator will help make chains more community pools rather than chains more sustainable in the long run? What I mean is that a few years ago, there were a lot of examples where we saw DAOs buying DAOs with one project swapping with another project, tokens inside a community pool and that, in my opinion, makes the community pool a bit more sustainable because it's a bit more diversified then now instead of having just IBC or just Atom in the community pool and be open to the risks of a bear market. Let's say, in five years when the chain is much bigger in terms of decentralization, and the community will only sustain a certain amount of money. That money is only an Atom, and a bear market happens. Of course, we're going to have trouble because the price of Atom is fallen. It's not diversified enough. A good example is what is happening now. If the Atom community was to diversify the community pool during the bull market when Atom was at a higher price, the community pool currently could have a lot more money in it to develop the chain to feed more developers to feed more projects. So the question is: what features like the interchange allocator could it help to achieve with the abilities it has theoretically in an easier manner?

[00:34:46] Spaydh: I think it makes sense. It depends on diversifying. Selling some of the tokens of a zone during the peak of the bull market, ideally to stablecoins makes sense because these are not going to decrease in value when the bear market comes but diversifying to other tokens from other projects, I don't think is very efficient in terms of protecting the value of the community pool in terms of a bear market for the simple reasons that most assets in crypto are very correlated. Most assets in Cosmos are even more correlated, so the same tide raises or lowers all ships. It is especially true since Atom is the most liquid, established token, so it might not suffer from the bear market as much as other least established project tokens. So, diversifying can be useful, but you need to do it carefully because you don't want to buy stable coins at the bottom of the bear market. So getting tokens from other projects into your community pool is a great thing to do, but not for protecting the value of your token and rather for establishing diplomatic relationships between projects. What you want to do is you want to have close alignment with the projects that you can energize with, and so one way you can do this is by making sure that they benefit from you, increasing in value, and you benefit from them increasing in value. So that’s the way I see it, not like a portfolio management thing.

[00:36:20] Citizen Cosmos: Although it wouldn't be that bad buying Atom or Ethereum at 10 cents. That would be a good purchase if you could do it. The next question is, what would be, in your opinion, a good way to help community pools to cure value in the long run? Neutron is, as you mentioned, all about bringing value to not just its holders but to Atom and the Cosmos. So in your opinion, what could be those ways, or what are you guys planning to do in Neutron to cure that value and attract that value that will benefit everybody else?

[00:37:06] Spaydh: So I think right now we're in the phase where we're bootstrapping the ecosystem, and so that's the phase of a project where essentially your network doesn't have that many users and projects yet, and so the appeal of joining the network is fairly low. In traditional start-ups, we refer to this as the cold start problem when you need to start the engine, but you know it's not already running by itself, so it's much more difficult than just keeping it running so in this specific phase of the project most likely what we're going to do is we're going to give grants to projects that we think are promising to incentivize the first adopters, to start and build the foundations of the system. It's likely that you will have some very fundamental primitives. One of the models that makes sense for bootstrapping a zone is choosing a team that you can trust, that has demonstrated their abilities already built interesting products or even preferably built that kind of product, a team that, by doing your due diligence, you have a fairly high confidence that they will deliver something incredible. Then you give them a significant amount of the zone tokens. These tokens would be locked for investing for a long period but they get this incentive. So if you build these cool premises, other people develop and build on top of it. Then, not only am I generating a business that hopefully makes sense and is profitable, but I'm also creating value for the zone. Because I have a large stake in the zone, that will also be profitable. But those strategic protocols should be removable by governments, and that should be something that should be known and well said from the beginning. So the incentive you're creating here is that if you do a great job and build this zone up and build the protocol up, then you’re going to get rich, and if you fuck up or underdeliver, then I'm going to lose all of the things that haven't been paid back to you. So it's not like we're not going to take back what you've already been paid because it's gradually investing. We can demonstrably show that you're not doing what you are supposed to do, which was building an incredible product then we can stop the relationship and then try to find somebody else who will do a better job by using those tokens again or just remove them and take them back to the community pool so that they can be used there. There are four ecosystems. In particular, there are a few fundamental premises that you need. You need a good dex, you need a good money market, you need a stablecoin, you need bridges to other interesting ecosystems, you need an NFT marketplace, and you need some way for DAOs to organize themselves. You probably need liquid staking because they make good collateral for many of these other use cases once you have this. You have a lot of Legos that people can build on top of and create more interesting, complex, or innovative products. So that's the way I see it in a nutshell. The first phases of Neutron will most probably be as a zone, as a project. We will probably need to incentivize a few incredible teams to build these foundations so that other people can come and experiment and make new innovative stuff. The other idea here is that Neutron as a protocol should reward people actively contributing value to it. We do this by proposing an incentives model where you know there are incentives in a pool. They can get distributed by governance to various protocols registered for a gauge. Once they receive these incentives, they have to be distributed in their entirety to the users, so they're not getting paid directly. The developers are only getting paid directly from there. They can get grants and stuff, but they're not getting paid with incentives. What we're doing is that we helping them bootstrap the adoption of their product which generates fees for them because they're monetizing their app. But we're also giving back value to the users, and that value will probably be using the ecosystem. That's what happens with incentives, and it's fine as long as the ecosystem itself is growing and we're building an infrastructure that will make it competitive in the long run. There are very interesting mechanisms here. The gauge system itself is a mind funk, but that's what I'm working on right now, so all that I've said and a lot more that we haven't discussed yet apply to this phase of your bootstrapping zone. That doesn't apply, for example, to the Cosmos Hub and Osmosis because they already have well-established positions in the market. They should be protecting their tokens and only allocating the tokens where they're getting a large return on deployment. So they're not leaking out value everywhere; they should only be focused on growing the parts of the protocol that makes the most sense and that produces a better user experience, more revenue for the state holders, etc.

[00:42:21] Citizen Cosmos: It's interesting that you went into bootstrapping zones because one of the next questions I had was specifically about that. It's interesting how blockchain projects get launched from a general perspective. From your experience being a community manager and then a cringe manager, as you wrote on your Twitter.

[00:43:20] Spaydh: My title is deputy general manager, but my actual title is chief chief LARP officer.

[00:43:35] Citizen Cosmos: Yeah, that’s cool. I was a manager looking busy. So, back to the question. How was that experience? What would you suggest to somebody that just getting involved in it? What would you say not to ever do?

[00:43:20] Spaydh: This is a trillion-dollar question! The topic is very complex and very unique to every project and the context in which they are built, the type of communities and developers that they appeal to, etc. There is no size fits all recipe. In 2021 we saw that large incentives programs seem to work at bootstrapping, having protocols on the zones. We've also seen now that a lot of the activity on a lot of blockchains that had these programs like Avalanche and Venom, unfortunately for these ecosystems left so I think it's a tremendously tricky question. I think there are multiple approaches to trying to find the solution that is going to work best. I think first you need to have a good understanding of what has been tried before, you need to try and identify what worked, what didn't work, and which context these solutions were applied to. For example, the Ethereum story of the whole thing bootstrapping itself is one likely to repeat itself at scale because there is so much competition right now, why would you devote all your time with no expectation of an upside to building something on a completely new ecosystem when there are multiple good ones on the sides with whatever language you want to code in like Cosmos or Solidity? This doesn't seem likely to happen again, so I think you need to learn from what happened before and try to take it into account, and that's why for Neutron we want to have the incentive program to be inside the blockchain itself and managed by the community itself so that it can adjust over time to the circumstances that it's faced with. We're trying our best. We're trying everything possible to make sure that Neutron will be successful at the same time, you can never guarantee that these things will be, and so that’s the same problem that every founder or every person launching a new project will face. You have to evaluate the market honestly to find out if there is a need for what you're building. Usually, you only start building your thesis. Our thesis is that there is a need for smart contracts that exist across multiple blockchains and allow applications to behave cross-blockchains just as if they were one whilst being secure. You can never know, you can just try and learn from the past, try to find, and improve those systems and implement them in a way that makes sense so that perhaps you know you're building the next Ethereum.

[00:47:15] Citizen Cosmos: I'll give you a small blitz. Give me three projects outside the top twenty that you're interested in. They don't have to be blockchains.

[00:48:24] Spaydh: So I think what the Anoma team has been building is incredible. I also like what Bitcoin is doing with decentralized grants. That's a tremendous inspiration. And I really like what DAODAO is doing as well.

[00:49:39] Citizen Cosmos: Second question. Name 2 things that motivate you in your daily life.

[00:49:47] Spaydh: Learning stuff and coffee.

[00:50:00] Citizen Cosmos: Last one! Give me one person or a book that you recommend.

[00:50:21] Spaydh: Paolo Cohelo’s “The Alchemist” novel.

[00:50:28] Citizen Cosmos: Great book, I love it! That’s about it I guess, thanks a lot Spaydh!

If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here)

Join our community, to build a future where communication is decentralized. May the code be with you!