#citizencosmos

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

• Episode name: Federico Kunze Küllmer, bridges, tokenomics & Berkley

Transcript of the Episode:

[00:00:00] Anna: Hey, it's Citizen Cosmos, we are Serge and Anna, and we discover Cosmos by chatting with awesome people from various teams within the Cosmos ecosystem and the community. Join us if you are curious about how dreams and ambitions become code!

[00:01:03] Citizen Cosmos: Welcome to the new episode of Citizen Cosmos, everybody! Today we have Federico Kunze Kullmer with us, the co-founder of Evmos. We’re excited to have you!

[00:01:15] Federico: Hi, everyone! Thanks for having me today. I’m excited to talk with you about Evmos and the rest of the Cosmos ecosystem.

[00:01:30] Citizen Cosmos: There recently was a Cosmoverse in Lisbon. How was it? Did you guys get the attention at those conferences and hackathons? I mean development and user attention.

[00:01:52] Federico: Yeah. Many people were excited about the project, especially with the recent announcement of the recent partnership we've been publishing weekly with different infrastructure providers. So people realize the potential of the project. During the hackathon and the Cosmoverse conference, we got a lot of interest from developers. We got a few outstanding projects, the two winners. First was a wallet that directly integrates AVM smart contract and metamask so you can see your erc20s and also Cosmos on IBC tokens. In the second place was a balancer fork, it's going to be one of the first natively built AMM directly built up on Evmos. So we’re excited about all the support from the entire community and developers.

[00:02:42] Anna: Let's start with the very basics. Could you explain a bit from scratch what Evmos is because it’s not super easy to understand? What’s it all about?

[00:03:08] Federico: Evmos is an application-specific blockchain that allows you to run smart contracts the same way as Ethereum. It supports AVM. You can use your erc20s directly on Evmos. Still, on top of that, it runs on Cosmos, which allows you to have interoperability functionalities, especially in building interoperability between the more minor contracts on other blockchains. The main goal is to make intelligent contracts scalable and scale the entire ecosystem by connecting chains that might not run innovative contract platforms directly interrupted with smart contracts. This brings a lot of different use cases and the whole ecosystem. For example, Somalia or another region could interact directly with the smart contracts deployed on top of Evmos through the composability functionalities we’re enabling. It’s all about smart contract interoperability, our main selling point. We will be working with developers, infrastructure providers, and the entire community to make the economics of Evmos appealing for developers to start migrating and deploying their projects into Evmos.

[00:04:25] Citizen Cosmos: What would you classify Evmos - as a smart contract interoperability platform? Layer 1 is Cosmos and Ethereum. Is it infrastructure or a bridge?

[00:04:42] Federico: I'll consider Evmos as layer 1. It has its own validator security set. It doesn’t depend on Ethereum, so we don’t need to roll up to Ethereum or any other EVM-based chain like Cosmos Hub. It’s a fully sovereign chain and a platform because it allows you to support and deploy the smart contract and interact with contracts directly deployed to the Evmos AVM. We also build the bridge on top of Evmos. For example, all the AVM bridges connecting Ethereum with EVM chains like Mpolygon, Moon Beam, Moon River, etc., and the other l2s can also be deployed using our EVM. That also comes with the IBC components that allow developers to interact with all these different other blockchains and thus get more access to liquidity from various sources like Osmosis or the Cosmos Hub. It's genuinely like a fully interoperable sovereign smart contract platform with its own validator set, and the stakeholder of the platform entirely governs it.

[00:06:00] Citizen Cosmos: At the time, it was like a protocol for other bridges, which makes it a bit different. It’s interesting to see how it's going to develop. I would love to hear how many layers we can handle inside of the blockchain. For example, let’s say Evmos is AVM on top of Cosmos but you can build something on Evmos, which will be another layer. Can you make another layer? Or is there a limit?

[00:06:45] Federico: Well, that's not the project's scope. It's more like enabling full smart contract functionality with fast finality as well, so all the smart contacts for all the transactions that are involved in smart contacts are executed after the block is committed so it's faster than Etherium in terms of finality because it's running BFD also the securities guarantees are different from Etherium - one third versus 51% to perform an attack so that's more like the trade-off between BFD and consensus. The topic of building on top of different layers is something that we are going to work with Celestia to support an optimized EVM for roll-ups as well. That's something that will be working closely with the Celestia team next year and we recently announced something on our blog post. It's going to end up being the most team-working project where we’re going to do what we’re best at which is EVM and smart contract interoperability components and the Celestia team is working on the data availability solution which is what they were building before - an optimistic tendermint fro consensus.

[00:08:07] Citizen Cosmos: It's good that you mentioned it because I had a question about it, and it sounds like what you guys are basically doing - a collaboration with them, it sounds like the Web3 OSI model and equivalent to that where you have a data availability layer, smart contract layer, and communication layer. So is it an OSI kind of thing?

[00:08:32] Federico: I think in the future, once Celestia is out, we won't see many other l1s. Celestia will effectively be the last layer one solution, providing data availability for all these blockchains and the data availability layers. So instead of the blockchains checking if the blocks are valid, it will result in the bltheming if the blocks are available or not on the Celestia data availability. The chains themselves, instead of being l1, will be the settlement layer. So that's how I see the ecosystem evolving. What needs to be figured out as well is a migration path for the existing blockchains.

[00:09:35] Citizen Cosmos: Do you think this will cause problems? We see now some Web3 projects that are trying to move data from Web2 to Web3 and a lot of ipfs or crawlers, and you know there are many different ways to take data from web2 and upload it to web3, but we're seeing that people are not incentivized to do that. Is it still a problem to transfer all the data from the existing blockchains and get developers to share existing blockchains to Celestia?

[00:10:15] Federico: That's a great question. I think, in general, the migration path is still not clear. I’m not an expert in terms of data availability, so this is a topic the Celestia team is working on the migration pass for existing blockchains but what we're building with them is sort of like this collaboration for optimized EVM that access layer in terms of cost this new chain that will act as a settlement layer and will be connected directly connected with Evmos and use Evmos for security as well. I think that’s the first step in terms of using the same token for a potential migration but we’ll have to see how the technology evolves. Celestia just announced their initial developer net which is earlier than just a public net, so once we see that technology publicly available will be able to see how other projects are reacting or how the challenges of migrating the existing solutions to Celestia would be.

[00:11:15] Citizen Cosmos: Obviously the goal of l1 is to get developers to build projects and users to use those projects but do you have any specific targets at Evmos in terms of numbers? If you want ten developers and $100 market projects in 1 month, who are you going to attract?

[00:11:50] Federico: We’re trying to track projects and we want to leverage the interoperability functionality from Evmos and also the token economics and get a new user base. The Cosmos ecosystem, even though it has IVC interoperability between different blockchains in the ecosystem, has generally been very isolated from the rest of the Ethereum in general EVM ecosystem. So we wanted different projects trying to get a new user base from the Cosmos community. Terra has a few bridges: third chain and a few others, and now with the gravity bridge as well, but we want to be the point of entry for all these different projects that want to expand and have a different cover and access to the entire ecosystem. So our token economy is being built with the thought of how can we create the right incentives for developers to migrate on to the smart contracts on Evmos and thus expand their user base onto the entire ecosystem.

[00:12:58] Citizen Cosmos: Talking about tokenomics, do you want to share about direct airdrops?

[00:13:15] Federico: When trying to design the urge the first thing that we were discussing was how do we get up a broad token distribution and how we incentivize Ethereum users to start working on deploying their contracts to Evmos and for retail users in the Evmos ecosystem to interact with contracts directly? We decided to have different categories. The first is the Cosmos ecosystem which involves Cosmos Hub and Osmosis. We're going to reward and stake a few different pools on Osmosis. We want to bring and incentivize all these different uses to start migrating but we didn't want to take the token holders and have a not fair distribution, but we want to make sure that users that we care about from Ethereum are the ones that are actually using Ethereum and that's why we roll up with the concept of the gas drop. The gas drop is when you filter some of the most used applications. We created a list of the applications with high TDL or a high volume. Then, we’re rewarding users based on the amount of gas they spent. The whole narrative behind the direct drop is that all these users are getting wrecked in terms of like how much fees are they expending. So, the more gas you spend based on the number of tokens, the more gas you spend because the gas price for Ethereum is really high right now if you're getting some tokens back because of all the gas you spent on Ethereum. That's kind of like the concept of the drag-drop for the users and also because we wanted to follow this narrative and create a lot of discussion in the ecosystem we wanted to reward victims for different projects that have been hacked in the ecosystem, so we collected the addresses from several hacks on vulnerabilities in the Ethereum ecosystem. We were rewarding the victims of those projects. If you’ve been a victim of an attack of the product that we mentioned in the direct drop announcement, you will be eligible for tokens as well. So that's kind of the whole concept of the narrative behind the direct drop. The token price has decreased significantly over there past few months as well.

[00:16:17] Citizen Cosmos: Could you share any more details about the economics apart from the drop?

[00:16:28] Federico: We thought about Evmos being a two-way marketplace where users and developers meet together. For example, developers deploy their decentralized applications and users interact with these apps. For token economics in general we're discussing different ways of incentivizing both sides of the marketplace so that users and developers are incentivized to use the applications. The other thing that I could mention is we’re another column of the token economics. We’re adding fee rebates for IBC relayers and transferring all these packets between two connecting chains, in this case, Evmos and Cosmos Hub. Once a new fee model for IBC transfers will be out, they’ll also be gaining fees and rebates for the transactions.

[00:18:07] Citizen Cosmos: That’s really great that you guys are thinking about relayers because there’s been a lot of problems and people who started to talk about it, say it costs a lot of money. It’s not incentivized at all, and it’s strange how people expect it to hold on to that infrastructure. As an infrastructure provider, we’re not a relayer but we’d like to be. Is there any project out there in the blockchain space where the tokenomics design is something you think is a good example?

[00:19:02] Federico: I think one of those tokenomics designs is definitely Osmosis. We took this a basis for our airdrop but we wanted to expand it. We didn't really like the quadratic boating mechanism that they had because it wasn’t fairly distributed. We went instead for a pro-rata approach in which you have different things that you need to comply with. Some of them give you points that have different weights. For example, if you stake versus if you lp one pool, they might have different weights and those points assigned to each of these tasks will be pro-rata to the number of tokens that each category will have. For example, the more points you gain, the pro-rata to the total number of points of all the users. In that way, you're basically incentivizing for usage and not for large token holders or large aflp providers and that's the main difference, it's fairer for users that may be not have a large number of shares or tokens, so we’re distributing everything pro-rata based on these options.

[00:20:25] Citizen Cosmos: I have another strange tokenomics question. I don't know if you've followed the bribery war with Terra and Etherium and bridges giving incentivized and stablecoins. Is Evmos going to be a place where DeFi is going to enter Cosmos?

[00:21:20] Federico: I have two thoughts about this. One is that these different bridges have different layers of various degrees of security. Hence, it's not the same as talking about a single multi-secured bridge, and another bridge also has an optimistic mechanism that you can like clean back in case things happen. The user can choose the different bridges based on their security and risk profile. Incentivizing other users will come out come down to the end-user to preferences that they have. The bridges need some liquidity to be operational. I don't think that's necessarily bad because otherwise, if you don't have the liquidity, there’s not enough bridging mechanism. If on one side of the bridge there is not enough liquidity, then you want to be able to transfer. In terms of the incentives, I would say it's not necessarily bad for the ecosystem, and in the end, it will be resolved. There are a lot of attack scenarios that also can happen through incentives. If you’re incentivizing enough one bridge with a security vulnerability, you can get a lot of tokens through bridge farming. All the exchanges should be aware before incentivizing the different bridges, so that's my thought in terms of user security and risk profiles on incentive being another attack surface for the smart contract platforms and, in general, for the bridges.

[00:23:42] Anna: I’m excited about how Evmos was born as a project. How did you get to the idea of creating it?

[00:24:02] Federico: Evmos was born from the concept of this old project called Ethermint. The RnD project started in late 2016, even before Cosmos SDK was built. The whole concept was proving that you can build the EVM on top of tendermint you can run smart contracts using fast finality and then this project was migrated to Cosmos and there were a few teams working on it but no one even gave it new resources or support from a community point. Once these multiple parties have decided to de-prioritize the project, we saw the opportunity of not only having just an EVM on Cosmos but also expanding the scope of the project to be a fully interoperable smart contract platform in which you can build all these interesting economic models for smart contracts to be deployed. The initial scope of Ethermint was expanded in a way that wasn't there before, and that's ultimately what we want to do - to create a platform in which we support interoperability and interchange composability so that other smart contract platforms can also interact with smart contract deployed on Evmos. It doesn't have a smart contract environment. You can still interact with the smart concept that is deployed on Evmos. It’s all about interchange composability and scalability for smart contracts. The product initially started when I stopped my consulting for Chainsafe after they decided not to continue with a project. I reached out to my two co-founders Akash and Nick with whom I was friends since Blockchain Berkley. It was a blockchain community student organization from Berkley where a lot of projects in the Cosmos ecosystem were founded. Sunny was also part of Blockchain Berkley as well as co-founders of Osmosis and the whole IBC team. My co-founders were active in the Cosmos ecosystem and in the blockchain system. They were really excited to start this journey together.

[00:26:40] Citizen Cosmos: We had an episode with Chainsafe in 2020. Is it involved in Evmos?

[00:27:15] [federico_kunze_k_llmer]: No they're not involved they have other priorities with different ecosystems. They started working on other projects so they haven't supported the project since they left in early 2021. After Aragon chain pulled the plug on the project and they decided to rely on other solutions like xDai. They didn’t have enough resources to continue with Aragon chain.

[00:27:52] Citizen Cosmos: Now it’s Osmosis chain, right? They just rebranded.

[00:27:56] Federico: Yeah.

[00:28:00] Anna: I'm really interested in the Berkeley alumni group. Could you tell us a little bit about it? I guess it wasn’t that mainstream back then, why did you decide to join the group?

[00:28:24] Federico: I was in Berkeley for only use a semester, I was an exchange student. I studied computer science and industrial engineering in Chile. So when I went to Berkley, I was working on different machine learning projects and I realized like everyone was working on machine learning and AI. There was a lot of demand and a lot of general offers from computer scientists and engineers. I wanted to join and learn a new technology that wasn’t so mainstream. I chose blockchain Berkeley because they had a consulting arm. You could work with real companies that were interested in doing projects with blockchain, so I was involved early on with Qualcom that they wanted to build a network of a private blocking solution with different providers and suppliers. The other thing I found really interesting about Blockchain Berkeley is they also have RnD research and also an education arm which is really useful to get started with all blockchain lingo and everything technical about blockchain, so I started my career by learning everything about blockchain with Blockchain Berkeley. My co-founder Akash was actually the one who taught me to write smart contracts early on. It was nice to reunite and create this project. I think Blockchain Berkeley has been foundational for Cosmos ecosystem. Essential projects like Tendermint had offices in Berkeley, and Berkeley alumni created a lot more.

[00:30:44] Citizen Cosmos: I have a slightly controversial question. Do you think it's an issue for decentralization when a large group of people near the foundation of the projects know each other and could potentially communicate with each other or found the vector of attack?

[00:31:40] Federico: When we were just students, I think none of us participated in the ICO that was involved in the ecosystem. I joined as an intern so I didn't have access to any of the token sales or any of the projects. I remember while still with Blockchain Berkeley, I used to read the IBC on Cosmos as well. On the whole governance procedures, we used to have different white paper sessions and really what motivated us was building these technologies in terms of decentralization. I guess not many developers were available for other projects so I think for Cosmos and tendermint having this pool of young motivated students that we're able to also contribute a lot back to the project was really beneficial for the early stage of the project because literally, all us knew what blockchain meant on both at a high level and also from a technical perspective. We were doing all these white paper circles every week where we would read a new paper that came and also analyze it from a technical perspective. Back in 2017, there were a lot of white papers coming out and most of them were not really relevant but I guess it was very beneficial in terms of having this pool of two engineers early on for the ecosystem.

[00:33:05] Citizen Cosmos: I guess it is a great thing. I think it was AZ16 who was the first to talk publicly about the specter of centralization/decentralization and that it's a really good thing where the project evolves and decentralizes. It is a perfect example of how this is evolved.

[00:33:35] Anna: I want to ask, do you still spend some time on RnD? Or you’re so involved in the project building and development that you don't have time for that?

[00:33:45] Federico: I would definitely need more time to do more RnD. I’m usually up to date with everything that's going on in the Cosmos ecosystem, but it's tough to catch up with all these different blockchains that are being developed right now. I don't have much context about what's going on. I try to focus my attention mainly on the Ethereum/EVM ecosystem. It is where we can provide value. My co-founders have been involved in different blockchains and different communities so they know a lot about all these other blockchains as long each can provide value from different perspectives. I think that's relevant for the project in terms of RnD.

[00:34:33] Citizen Cosmos: Do you think you guys will connect to other l1s to build the connection between the two most significant ecosystems in blockchain?

[00:34:45] Federico: In the future, we'll see the two leading smart contract platforms - EVM and WASM. I would expect every primary l1 to have a blockchain or a run time that supports Most l1s widely support EVM and WASM. We'll be indirectly connecting to these ecosystems through the EVM bridges. Evmos will be the point of entry to the different EVM bridges. Next year we’ll focus on shared security and make Evmos on the EVM chain.

[00:36:05] Citizen Cosmos: Nice description! The last question. What motivates you in your daily life? Books, activities, music, whatever.

[00:36:42] Federico: What motivates me is building the base infrastructure layer for all these different products to be built. Right now, blockchain is mainly focusing on finance, and we're seeing a recent NFT ecosystem. In the future, NFT will be huge in adopting and connecting the real world with the blockchain. My motivation, in general, is to build this infrastructure layer. No one has yet built any fully interoperable smart contract, so that was my central core when I decided to make Evmos. Use cases that we don't even know that will exist right now will be possible through this infrastructure that will be set in place through Evmos and the entire blockchain ecosystem.

[00:37:48]Citizen Cosmos: But what helps you in your daily life not to set off your goal?

[00:38:14] Federico: I try to set some time for myself in the morning. I try to meditate or do sports. I like balancing my life especially when I’m in a high-stress job. If you're not taking care of yourself, then you're not taking care of your company, employees, and the entire community. So it's essential to be humble, aware, and mindful of the things you're doing. at times like being present.

[00:39:05] Citizen Cosmos: Nice. Isn't that the essence of blockchain?

[00:39:09] Federico: Blockchain is a perfect technology for making money in the ecosystem because it’s technology + finance. At the same time, we're building foundational infrastructure. The base layer infrastructure is usually what I care the most about and what it would enable to create all these exciting applications for users that need it the most.

[00:39:48] Citizen Cosmos: You're right. I was invited to a round table to speak about some things, and there were people there: a couple of guys from YouTube, Holochain, etc. Unfortunately, after forty-five minutes, I had to log off because the conversation was about price and NFTs. It was kind of boring. People only talk about money rather than data availability layers, IBC, and the future foundation for infrastructure. So I agree with you.

[00:40:40] Federico: A lot of investors in general, when they join your community channels, are usually asking when the token is going to be available or how they can buy the token instead of learning more about the project or asking the right questions, but I think it's okay. We will be slowly transitioning and it's our job to both educate and give more resources to people. There are different products and all these other exciting applications being built and they are not money-making applications, they are benefiting and serving coordination problems or giving access to finance to people they didn’t have before.

[00:41:25] Citizen Cosmos: I think this is a great note to finish up! Thank you very much! Bye!

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#citizencosmos

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

• Episode name: Kadena, SEC, multichain & scaling

Transcript of the Episode:

[00:00:19] Citizen Cosmos: Hi everyone! Welcome to a new episode of Citizen Cosmos podcast! We have today two guests with us from Kadena, and it's Will Martino, the founder and president of Kadena and Randy Daal, the head of developer experience at Kadena. They will hopefully tell us all about Kadena, all about themselves, and everything else we want to know. Welcome to the show!

[00:00:39] Will Martino: Thanks so much for having us, Serge.

[00:00:42] Citizen Cosmos: So, there are two of you so we'll do a turn by turn. I usually present the guests, but I think it's much cooler when the guests present themselves and say whatever they want people to know about them. So please, Will, I'll let you go first. Present yourself, tell us all what you do.

[00:00:57] Will Martino: I'm the president and co-founder of Kadena. I met my co-founder Stuart Popejoy at JP Morgan. He had opened up a research desk working at high school there, It was in Brooklyn and I was living in Brooklyn at the time, and one of my friends from college was working there so I got a gig working there because it was a couple stops away from my apartment. We ended up starting to work on crypto because it was back before Etherium had launched and everyone under the sun was coming through JP Morgan trying to sell them on enterprise blockchain, and we needed to do diligence on behalf of the bank in this research group on blockchain. We ended up building JP Morgan coin version zero and open source to publish hyper ledger. The process like that informs a lot of how and why we built Kadena because we were doing this work on behalf of the bank and we knew that we would need certain answers to certain questions that we wouldn't be able to get industrial adoption without. That turned into us leaving and starting Kadena. Back before that I was at an Securities and Exchange Commission back before they had a crypto group because I was there when bellary formed it. I was the tech, I was back doing high frequency data analytics, building their super computing close to things, and then got tired of the government, went to hacker school for three months and to go learn Haskell and after that went to JP Morgan, and the rest of the history been doing Kadena for I think six and a half years now.

[00:02:24] Citizen Cosmos: That is the story! I would drop the mic at this point but to be honest I know your story of course, I just wanted you to share it. I have a lot a lot of questions about your story to you, we will get back to them for sure. Please, Randy, introduce yourself.

[00:02:38] Randy Daal: I'm leader of developer experience at Kadena, I started in April so I don’t have a long history that Will has. I started out as a job for developer at the airline company. I’m based in Netherlands. After that I soon made the transition after four years to front-end because that was really my passion and I always have a saying that you want to work on something where you find passion. I started switching my career towards front-end development work there for my in the fifteen years created all kinds of front-end application for large companies in the Netherlands. At one point in my career I founded my own company where I started out my own front-end company and basically from there on I started doing a lot with the community. I started a foundation called Frontmania where we created all kinds of fun stuff with friend community, educating people with conferences and meetups. I think somewhere in November I got into contact with Will and he told me all about Kadena, it wasn’t the first time I heard the name but I didn't know that it was that awesome. We got into a conversation and I could really help Kadena to grow on the front-end side. Will got me really enthusiastic basically and that's why I started in April working on the developer experience and until now it's a nice experience for me to talk to the community, see what they need. We got so many ideas and I will tell you about that later but it's going to be a real fun road for me and the community.

[00:04:23] Citizen Cosmos: Before I'm going to move back to Will, I have a question for you. Were you not terrified of starting working for Kadena? It’s a big project. Was it not terrifying to start at something that big?

[00:04:53] Randy Daal: I'm not really terrified of challenges. Challenges are something I like. It was something I would like to do. Also my background is I'm a big sports fan. I play sports on high level, so challenges is a way of life for me and that's what I like here as well. Starting your own company it's big challenge as well, the only difference which you have now is there's everything is exposed, everything is open source but everything you do should be spot on and I'm a perfectionist. It is fun for me working with a lot of smart people and Kadena is filled with amazing talents and a lot of smart people to learn a lot from. So no not really scared, more enthusiastic to work with such bright minds.

[00:05:41] Citizen Cosmos: Will, let's get back to you. I follow Kadena for a while and for everybody who's listening out there I'm also a token holder, so I'm going to put my cards on the table straight away just in case people do ask. But let's talk about JP Morgan first. I remember when JP Morgan coin came around, it was 2016 or 2017. How did you end up working for them and how did you suddenly realize that you wanted to go into something your own?

[00:06:13] Will Martino: That's a long story. There's this tradition inside of banks in New York and I believe London and Paris, where sometimes you'll get new CTOs, new management at the very high levels of these investment banks and they'll put together kind of like a pet RnD group to do some critical RnD they we’ve been wanting to do for long period of time. That group got forked and the way that you normally formed these is you go and you grab some very experienced higher level manager and then some extremely experienced engineers to run the various desks that you're going to fork. So I think this one had three desks. So, Stuart Popejoy, my co-founder was rewrote their agency equity trading platform which actually is a really important part of a Kadena story. So the business case for this thing was that in the agency desk they had these institutional clients and they would call up their clients and say “Hey, how do you want to trade?” and the clients would describe to them basically an algorithm of how they would want to execute their portfolios and balance things. They used to call them up and then they spend and then the traders would spend two months with the engineers getting these things implemented, getting them rolled in a production. So Stuart rewrote the trading engine and a bunch of other stuff but the main thing that's relevant for the Kadena story is that he wrote a domain specific language that traders could actually code on the phone. Basically it is like taking notes except that you could execute these notes while they're talking with their clients. This took the turn around time from call to production from two months to about two days. It would be like one day to get it into queue and the one day to get it actually shipped. So these are technical non-programmers who are now writing this domain specific language for algorithmic trade and the experience of that how to write a safe like domain specific language for technical non-programmers informs a lot of how we design PACT or smart contract language because we see them as very similar things. Blockchains are the databases with store procedures decentralized with coins. It has the notion of money built into it but at their core they're these databases and smart contracts with the store procedures on top and you can do tons of stuff with that so when we started working on Kadena, Stuart headed the RnD for PACT and all of that experience of years writing a language for technical programmers informed how we wrote PACT. That's why we kept PACT simple and that ended up having a lot of benefits later on being able to do formal verification and that is as easy to code in as the actual language itself being able to show contracts to lawyers who are domain experts but aren't programmers. So he finished that up and then he didn't retire out of JP morgan but took some time off and they came back to him six months later and asked if he wanted to run this RnD desk down the street from your apartment and how does he feel. He agreed and his first hire was one of my good friends out of Yele University. He was a big haskell guy, Stuart wanted to do the desk in haskell just kind of to try to see how this would go. We all like the language and so Carter pulled me in. I went and interviewed and everyone was expecting me. Then I joined up and within about a year we started enterprise blockchain. Our desk ended up capturing that as like the thing that we could focus on first before any of the other desks was that in doing some of the background research. Back in the school I had written the scheme implementation, like a little domain specific language that looks like PACT and when we were doing some research at JP we found this hardened BFT raft variant from Stanford research project that was written in haskell. So over the course of a weekend I had a fully functioning private blockchain that was executing around five hundred transactions a second and was able to run EVM and scheme side by side. That was how we just we kic dropped that.

[00:10:45] Citizen Cosmos: That's impressive! I have my first controversial question. You come from the world of enterprise blockchain and not just enterprise blockchain, you come from the enterprise world. Let's talk stigmas here a little bit, most people who use blockchain they automatically tie up blockchain technology and decentralization philosophy together and when people from the enterprise world come they say that enterprise blockchain will destroy them. What would you say to those things? Are those just crazy talks or does that have anything to it?

[00:11:23] Will Martino: It’s a good question. I think that enterprise adoption of blockchain technology will matter in the long term. I don't think you can have full adoption of crypto currency and blockchain technology without that happening but as we’ve seen, it's going to take a long time. This isn't like the internet which has started quickly taking over a bunch of different domains, this is much more like advent and money which maybe even like up to a generation that actually convert over. Those aren't the chains that I'm worried about. I'm more worried about the VC chains and the the more exchange focus chains because enterprise really doesn't understand blockchain and I would be surprised if we see any major industrial adoption enterprises before 2030. Since we started Kadena that was our target. We asked ourselves, what do we need to build so that by 2030 when enterprise catches up, we're ready to go and that's why we built Kadena the way we did. It's the VC chains that I worry about more because you just end up with these, you end with the proof of stake networks or you have a few whales who are these major VC funds that do not have a good track record in doing things for the common good and they have this massively outside voting control but it's also basically hidden because it's anonymous enough and everyone knows about these chains and knows who controls it but you can't really track it. It's one of things that I've always loved about Cosmos from the beginning, was they burnt one of these chains, they did a very decentralized launch, they have a great community and they stuck to their guns on that since the beginning and didn't try to take the short cut as some other chains have. So those are the ones that I worry about the most because those ones do not have their community's interests at heart and they're really just kind of waiting to mature and get people stuck. They're waiting for people to not be able to migrate off because so many things get integrated and then I suspect that you're going to see a mate voting changes that are of course decentralized and they're going to change things like the gas model to do some rent extraction. I’m not going to name names that's not our style but it's like general themes like those are the ones that i worry about the most. IBM poisoned that well so hard from 2018 to 2019. We were still focused on enterprise back then, we were doing enterprise alongside public and IBM’s ability to force all of their clients to try to do an enterprise change when their technology wasn't even a blockchain and couldn't even run. We sent people to some of their workshops and in the workshops the IBM guy couldn't even get people's computers to run their blockchain. The well is so poisoned that it's going to take at least five more years. You need almost like a cycling of the upper management in companies before you're going to be able to really do enterprise blockchain again.

[00:14:31] Citizen Cosmos: Yeah it makes sense. There are a lot of VCs out there, some of them could own up to like certain percent and I'm not talking about just a network, I’m talking about the whole market cup. I think they do some good things especially with RnD, they do have a lot of Rnd that they bring forward and hopefully that RnD can be used to get better and to improve what we are doing in general. Last question about your your history. You worked at SEC and you worked for the committee. What was it?

[00:15:16] Will Martino: It was the crypto currency working group back then, now it's the digital ledger technology group. It was back when it was Valery who formed the group. She still runs that now. It was me and one person that were basically brought on by her to be the first people in it and then we grew it from there. It all started because they just had some cases. They needed to look at someone who was in the ASSC who didn't own any coin and who understood the tech. Bitcoin was at sixty and I decided between buying Bitcoin at sixty and going into this. Based on how Kadena started and my career since then, I maintained that was the right decision but it's been close for years. It was fun, I can't talk too much about it because I am still a domain expert at the intersection of regulation and technology in the space so there's just not a ton of details I can go into. We should all be happy that the ASSC didn't go the path that New York did with the bitcoin license because that would have messed up a lot more stuff. At least they've been slow and diligent about it as opposed to coming in and just crashing on the grade.

[00:16:26] Citizen Cosmos: Did that experience give you more understanding of how to go with Kadena?

[00:16:36] Will Martino: I think it's intuition because this stuff isn't set down in case law. The way that Kadena structure will be by twenty thirty be kind of set in stone or at least the guidance that we provided. But until that guidance comes out you can't be sure so that we all have to be super careful. Now we've been essentialized for years, we've been in production for years, we're in a very good place now, it's always the launching period that's hard but based in the way that we did it we're pretty confident that if we're not good then most of the entire industry has major problems. We'll see where it goes. I'm hopeful that we get some clear guidance. I'm very thankful that they didn't come and really screw things up.

[00:17:20] Citizen Cosmos: First question about Kadena. It's going to sound silly to both of you but i like to break things down. So a multichain network, let's talk about this. You have proof of work, proof of stake, multichain network. What on earth does it mean for the regular user out there who is just browsing the Cosmos ecosystem or Coingecko looking for gems or for anything else but from gems you know he's looking for l1s. Can you guys whoever wants to answer this explain how it works and what does it mean?

[00:17:51] Will Martino: It is technical to describe. It's difficult for me to even coverwith people who aren't you know like serious consensus researchers just in like a two minute thing. In Cosmos you have the Cosmos Hub, then you have folks off of it those folks may have their own coins you can lock up coins and put them on the other chains through IBC but at the end of the day they aren't one network. It's a series of networks that can interoperate and talk to each other. So that's like the hub model. People are also familiar with dags, they directed a cycle graph which basically means that you have a ledger that you can run transactions and parallel in that is another approach to scaling, Solon's famous for this one. What we do that is different as we have like real horizontal scaling so we have one coin that you can transfer from one chain to another chain. All of these chains are peers with each other and they are all in the same network and it's proof of work that actually allows us to do this so if you've heard of webt2 scaling with companies like Google where they do horizontal scaling, where you can just throw more servers at something to scale it up, we do something very similar but with us it's more chains now you can't just throw more chains at our network. We launched with ten chains we hard for up to twenty chains. Theoretically, you can hard work up to a billion chains. I don't think we ever going get there. I think a hundred thousand chains which would represent fifteen million transactions a second or something like that is the highest that we would ever see and I suspect that would take two decades to get to because ours is much more demand driven as our network grows and we need more scale than we hard work to bigger and bigger networks and of course things all decentralized, we do a lot of the core RnD but we take APRs from outside the community and if we misbehave as a foundation then we fully expect people to do what they've done with the proof of work network. So the way that works is that you you have each of these chains running, just a single chain like Ethereum or Bitcoin but they're all in the same network so you can run transactions on gen 1 or gen 19, and you can also do cross-chain messaging through simple payment verification and that's pretty much it. The secret sauce is proof of work is this weird thing where you can actually split up the work that's being done in every chain and make the overall system more efficient because right now we have twenty chains. When we go up to say forty chains, what we do is we drop the difficulty of each chains the new block in half keep the overall rate throughput. From an energy used point of view we increase our overall energy used by maybe one percent and in return get double the proof. It’s because proof of work is weird and because the amount of mining that goes into a network isn't related to the overall transaction throughput and you can just split it up and things actually getting more secure as your scale which is this weird kind of shunk probability theory that proof of work captures but it works and it's really simple. So, proof of work works, it's just not efficient and we set out to solve that and then of course we threw on PACT or smart contract language and that just allows you to now have this a multithreaded list machine in the sky that you can really do whatever you want with.

[00:21:04] Citizen Cosmos: Randy, quick question to you from a perspective of developer experience. Working with both proof of work and proof of stake, how does it work for you?

[00:21:26] Randy Daal: So, all our chains are based on proof of work. We can maybe in the future go through a hybrid state but that's not necessary because our chain solves all the problems with proof of work. The only thing we need to improve at Kadena, I mean our primary focus for the last few years has been the greatest state of the first layer blockchain development solution and in my opinion, Kadena completely revolutionized the blockchain world in that part but one thing it doesn't matter how good your technology might be, nothing can replace a good user experience that really is essential. So that's why Will basically came up to me and asked me to help them out on that part and currently we're busy creating a whole new developer experience that would be truly game changing. At the moment building an application or a platform can be tough, you have a pretty high learning curve as well as the documentation written in a more traditional manner. So that's why we're focusing on creating new documentation side, we're also engaging a lot more with the community of what they need from us. We're going to build it developer academy where people can have certifications and badges so when a developer comes into Kadena and gets certified so people will know who get trained in how to do things properly and with that we also kind of developed user friendly tooling, creating robust APIs and SDKS. So it really doesn't matter if you use proof of work, it's the layer on top of that brings developer experience. That should be transparent for developers and users.

[00:23:20] Citizen Cosmos: What's your number one thing to go out and attract developers? Today the competition in l1s is enormous and obviously without developers it's a bit hard to build an open source chain.

[00:23:39] Randy Daal: So the main thing where we need to focus on it should be easy to develop something on Kadena. So if you look at our APIs at the moment, they're very low level, so if you want to to mint an NFT, you have to do a lot of stuf. The thing is, we should focus on instead of explaining developers of how to built something. The main thing I always go back to is when a couple of years ago you had that battle between Internet Explorer and FireFox, and they were battling each other who has is the best browser, and then very lately Chrome came into play and if you look nowadays, they are the main browsers people are using and it's not because they were better browsers, they focused on technology, they focused on the good developer experience because it was really easy to build applications by using Chrome and that's what we need to focus on as well. It should be easy for developers to build something on Kadena and that's where you’ll get a better and greater adoption,and for that we also need the community to help us out on what they're missing, and that's why you need to interact with community as well.

[00:24:57] Citizen Cosmos: Will, do you want to add something?

[00:24:59] Will Martino: I do actually, I want to amplify some parts. Some other parts that we have are a very large grant program that we do for going to helping people to be able to kick start helping be able to kick start actually going out and building. It was very easy to apply for and I think we're gonna have our first major announcement some time in July. On top of that there's some other parts that I think are more at the infrastructure level because Randy has more actual development experience and part of the experience is not attracting developers but being able to keep them. If you want to go and have your own NFT platform, you need to roll out your own network and then run it, and that's a bigger lift to do. In Cosmos they built their core community and by moving on to their own spot makes sense but for DID launch itself on Cosmos as the first step I feel I would have a lot of adoption problems so it's one of the reasons that we wanted to scale layer one itself so that you don't have to run your own infrastructure, just deploy your application just like you could with Etherium which then gets to the second problem that we avoid by being able to scale and actually having a scalable platform is low gas fees. That said, it's really the core focus of what gas is for, it limits the amount of computation so you don't solve a network and really that it means we don't want people to do it outside of that, we want the piece to be as low as possible for everyone. So if all of a sudden you know you don't run into the Etherium problem where launching a new project is now super expensive, so this is one of the other reasons that we get scaling is so important as it applies to developer experience because you just don't have to worry about that with Kadena because the gas fees are just so much lower. So the part that Randy focuses on is how do you integrate, how do you build, how you get the front-end working there. These other parts that we found have been very attractive to developers because we have this story of launching crypto kitties on our platform and let’s say our platform is going to have massive massive adoption and you've just deployed it to chain zero. You can now deploy to change one through ten in addition to that, and now you have ten times the through put for your application and it takes a little bit of tooling but you deploy it out, there's no one that can stop you and now you have ten times a through put and it costs basically the same if you will be able to scale up your app. Then, we get to the point where you're on every chain and you're saturating all the chains. That's what we talk about when we say adoption drives the scale of the layer one itself because as the time approaches we're going to notice it. The community is going to notice and all of us are going to start to get ready for hard work to changes so that network always grows to meet the capacity of the demand. This is one of my core theses for crypto in general. Now we have straight decentralized work and we don't have the problem that all the other l1s have.

[00:29:07] Citizen Cosmos: This is a really great answer because a lot of founders unfortunately don't pay attention to attracting developers from the beginning to the scelability of the net and what we get is somebody building a cool application which breaks the network and then you have problems. I’m going to ask a question that's going to sound really stupid to you both of you but I need to ask it because Kadena is always listed as a Cosmos ecosystem project everywhere. What's the reason for this?

[00:29:45] Will Martino: I think it's because we've known them forever. I think they first presented Tenderment when we were presenting our private blockchain. We were presenting PACT formal verification of our smart contract language, it was still in development in that time. That was a really funny conference because you had a bunch of the people who now have a bunch of top projects. So I think it's because we've known them for so long we don't see ourselves as being competitive to Cosmos. It serves different needs, we don't have vast finality, because proof of work, our finality, is still in the order of like thirty seconds to a minute. There are certain apps that really do need that and there're certain apps that you want to run of your system on a proof of work network and then you want to run other networks that are more running on a proof of stake because you if want to do settlement on a proof of work network because you want that decentralization but you want the fast finality of a proof of stake system. So we've always seen it as complimentary and because of that we've just been working with Cosmos for a long time, before we working on IBC for a while, we were working with Terra before. The next place that will be looking at with Cosmos is definitely IBC but I’ve been recently getting a lot into zero now proofs and certain knowledge bridges from the point of view bridging and I suspect that will probably be the first time that we have true bridging between our two networks is getting an IBC system that has some knowledge component so that we can solve who owns the key for the bridges problem.

[00:31:29] Citizen Cosmos: Because right now I think if I go into the ecosystem part of the Kadena website and if I go click on the bridges section, IBC does come up but it doesn't have a link to it so I guess it's all kind of planted.

[00:31:44] Will Martino: Yeah, something has been worked on for a fair bit of time but definitely Terra’s implosion got in the way of us focusing on rolling it out this summer so we're still figuring out the business case for it, figuring out what we're going to do with it because bridges are important for Kadena. We had some bridges that were sort of ready to go this time last year that i didn't pull the plug on. But I basically stalled them because I was looking at them and they were so unsafe, they're going to get hacked. This approach in general is just not okay and over the preceding year I feel very vindicated in that decision because we've seen so many bridge hacks that I don't really feel bad about it. Wormhole for example, they hadn't gotten saved by FTX I don't know what would have happened to that ecosystem but they managed to dodge.

[00:32:49] Citizen Cosmos: And to be honest, Wormhole was using bloc chain back in 2015. I'm not saying that's a bad thing necessarily but in 2015 using Wormhole wasn't a great user experience at all. So we talked about easiness of onboarding developers. You have PACT which is the smart count language you guys developed and I think in 2017 or 2018 I read and was quite impressed with the things I saw. There was a lot of concepts there about atomic execution, there were a lot of things which are not new to anything but against the language feels more like a blockchain developer friendly. Randy would you correct me here about that? Does Pact really make onboard developers easier or is it a stone you have to overcome?

[00:33:44] Randy Daal: I think nowadays for every smart contract you always have to learn a new language and Pact is a very easy language to learn. It's a list based language so that the only thing people have to overcome is all the parenthesis but it’s a very easy language to learn and that's what you see in the community as well once it clicks, it clicks and that's what feedback we're getting. A lot of people working but the only thing is if you're working with a cripting language you really are focused on a certain way of developing. It can be a bit harder to get acquainted with Pact, but it’s very intuitive and that's what I think Stuart wanted to accomplish as well, to create a language that is very easy to learn and very quick to create smart contract with. In my opinion he succeeded in that.

[00:34:40] Will Martino: The thing with Pact is that we could have gotten a different route and had something that looked and felt like Javascript which is the path that some other projects have taken which makes it easier to onboard the developers. First because you have a bunch of people who aren't very good at Javascript and you can go and grab them and then make be not very good at your smart contract language. But here's the problem. On the Internet you can evolve your website you can evolve it so it can be better. For smart contracts, when you deploy them, they are themselves a bug bounty and we intentionally decided not to go that route because safety matters more than everything else when it comes to smart contracts. So instead we have a safe language that is intuitive but is a little bit different in the beginning to get your head around. It's closer to the way I described, it is much closer to learning sequel for a data based for queries than it is to learning a Javascript because you can get up and run it quickly but as time goes on, you need to learn more and it's hard to do it safely. It is hard to do it at scale, in a way that you don't end up shooting your own foot off. Whereas in sequel you need to wrap your head around the idea of a table and this relational algebra that the language is expressing. After that everything clicks and it's very easy. Writing Uber in Pact would be very difficult if not impossible but then again, Uber would never run on top of a blockchain. It was that mantra that really draw us to do Pact the way that it is and then students’ experience with writing this language for non-programmers who were technical informed a lot of how we design things so that it would be very easy to learn. So yes there's a little bit of initial onboarding that's more difficult because but then it's usually about two or three days and I usually just help people look at the coin contracts, download it and get it running.

[00:37:18] Randy Daal: I also want to add something. I think the adoption of Pact will also help when we bring out the academy. I think that will help a lot. It’ll help onborning of new developers way more than what it is nowadays because now if people want to learn Pact, they really have to dive in and there's a lot of content on the Internet to find but it's not centralized and if we centralize all the content, give them a learning part we'll be adopted way more.

[00:37:41] Citizen Cosmos: i don't know if you guys heard about Urbit and Hoon. They have their own language which a runic language. I’m just talking about like easiness of onboarding developers because that language is completely made up from scratch and it's got different concept to most things and I don't think that especially you developed language that is concentrated on security. It’s the opposite, it should be easier to adopt and that's that's a great thing. One more thing that I did notice. Considering we think of ourselves as ecosystem developers we go out and help networks. It's hard not to notice how much attention Kadena is paying to ecosystem development. You have the accelerator programs, you have the academy you mentioned, you have a big ecosystem, the community is growing all the time, you have a lot of channels. Is that intentional, the focus ecosystem development on the community or that happened because you have the experience and you understand what you're doing and you understand that that's important or was that a natural evolvemental thing?

[00:39:08] Will Martino: It's a generic yes. I think the first trunk of Kadena's time was designing how we scale and figuring out what the protocol is like and then I was building a protocol, and then we launched Rnd and it became much more focused on adoption. We know it's stable, we demonstrate that. At the same time we have this community that was clamoring for support and hiring a bunch of people. But Kadena itself is a longer play and it's a longer project. Our entire tokeneconomic system is designed around a hundred and twenty year mission which is just weird for crypto. No one plans at that span of time. We figured out so much and also that means that crypto is now fully adopted in the global standard, so we'll cross that bridge when we come to it, it will be fine. We don't move super fast because it’s not web2, it’s web3, you can't move fast and break things because when you do you get hacked and that’s a huge problem. We have a different approach and it's a slower one where we just keep building and building. I think we hit that stage where it made sense for us to build the foundation for the ecosystems, build the academy. Also, we found Randy. I have been literally looking for someone who fits Randy's position for three years.

[00:41:33] Citizen Cosmos: I've been professionally working blocking for seven years now and the amount of chains I've seen come and go because of the lack of attention to system and developer experience. People just close their eyes to it as if it doesn't exist and it's great that you pay attention to it! I'm going to take into the last block of questions. Will, what was the goal and the motivation in deciding to build an l1 blockchain? I mean nobody just wakes up and thinks “I'm going to go and build the most scalable product!” There must have been something that led you here internally to this point. What was it?

[00:42:27] Will Martino: I mean part of it is the context and the timing at JP Morgan, just like having that experience having that in our background, having Stuart as a co-founder without whom I’d never would have done it. That was definitely part of it and part of it was that doing that due diligence at JP Morgan, we ended up with this one page of core questions we now needed to get answered if there was ever going to be industrial adoption blockchain and we knew that no one like we knew. We looked at every single project that was either coming up or that was being launched or had already launched and we knew that nothing answered even a quarter of these things very basic things. We had this core belief that crypto is going to be a thing and that it's going to have widespread global adoption within our lifetimes and we desisded someone needs to do it. So I left and did it. I don’t think without JP Morgan we would have had the motivation because we wouldn't have seen both the potentia, the shortcomings that we saw because there were so few projects that were coming out of anyone who had major financial experts even if most of the projects don't even have founders who have major industrial experts usually they're coming out of either other startups or the coming out of open source or coming out of research and cryptography. We came at it from a very different angle. We had an industrial background and leverage that because we knew what's going to be needed if this thing is ever going to be industrial adoption and no one else is going to do this and no one has those backgrounds.

[00:44:12] Citizen Cosmos: Randy i didn't ask you for your blockchain story but what motivated you? What led you to decide to go into blockchain in the first place?

[00:44:25] Randy Daal: I was always interested in crypto, I think since 2017. But I think the talk I had with Will in November really got me enthusiastic and really drove into my blockchain technology and that's what basically got me into Kadena.

[00:44:45] Citizen Cosmos: What did he tell you?

[00:44:51] Randy Daal: Basically, the people work in blockchain, especially at Kadena are extremely smart and I like to work with the best of the best because if you work with great people you will get a great product and that's what they have done at Kadena and that's currently what I'm doing at the moment as well for the developer experience. I'm trying to create a dream team and so we're basiclly building the best team out there and we focus on building, for us not good enough is not great on the strife of perfection.

[00:45:31] Citizen Cosmos: My last question to both of you. What motivates both of you to get out of bed every day and to keep on doing whatever it is you're doing? What would you like to advise to others?

[00:46:13] Randy Daal: For me it's like being an entrepreneur within the company itself so Kadena motivates me by telling me “do what you think is best.” I can create my own team do, what I think is best for the community, creating a whole new developer experience and even if it means throwing away old stuff in creating new stuff that gives me the motivation to build awesome things and that's why I want to get out of the bed every morning and start working.

[00:46:54] Citizen Cosmos: Will?

[00:46:55] Will Martino: I think it starts with the team and I've been doing this forever so it definitely starts with the team. We have is amazing the people we get to work with are brilliant. I don't know what else to say. We are strategically tied together, we’re going in : the right direction and we all find that it's meaningful. We all believe that crypto is going to be a thing and that solving the efficiency problems and the scaling problems do matter in the long term. At the same time we get to work on this really cool thing that we've built. It's just a really well built organization.

[00:48:14] Citizen Cosmos: Guys it's been a huge huge pleasure! Thank you for finding the time, I know it wasn't easy. Looking forwards to IBC working with Kadena! Join the Kadena social networks!

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