#citizenweb3

Episode link:
https://www.citizenweb3.com/sunny-tenderminte

Episode name: 
Money as a religion and validating with Sunny Aggarwal

Anna 
Hey, it's Citizen Cosmos. So we are Serja 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 how dreams and ambitions become code.
 
Citizen Web3 
Hi, today we have Sunny. Sunny is a Core Developer and a Researcher at Tendermint. He runs the Sikka Validator, he's the co-founder of Blockchain at Berkeley, and a co-host at the Epicenter podcast. Am I right, Sunny? Is that everything? Did I miss something?
 
Sunny Aggarwal 
No, that's most of the important things. 
 
Citizen Web3 
Do you want to add anything about yourself? Say a little bit about yourself? Describe yourself in a different way, anything you like?

Sunny Aggarwal 
Yeah, I'm just really passionate about blockchain because I was interested in combining computer science and political economy, and so I just got really interested in blockchain. I've been working on Cosmos for about I started in summer of 2017. So it's been almost three years now. It's been a long time working on this project and I'm excited to see how it's grown and developed since then.

Citizen Web3 
Right. First question, it says on the Tendermint website, you're a research scientist. Describe your role as you see it. What does it mean and in your own words, what is it you do?

Sunny Aggarwal 
Yeah, it is sort of a little bit of a vague role, which in a way, I kind of like, because it allows me to have a lot of freedom to work on a bunch of different things. I would say, I describe my role in a couple of main things. One of them is I do a lot of sort of development: a lot of the Cosmos SDK development and design of the governance module and staking module and a lot of that stuff. I've done a lot of development and I help out the development team there when it makes sense. But then what I do prefer to do is, lately I've been doing less on the development side and more on the specs kind of side. And so I'll go ahead and come up with designs and ideas for new specs, things like you know some of the things I have on the plate right now or things like proportional slashing, staking derivatives. I want to get out a spec for how to do crash interchain security and stuff. So kind of just coming up with these ideas and also sort of keeping in touch with researchers from other communities. I spent a lot of time talking to a lot of Ethereum researchers. I talked to Tezos researchers a lot. So keeping up with all the other communities as well. So that way, good ideas that come in from them can get applied to us and things, ideas that we have can get applied to their stuff. So that's one of the things. And then the third thing that I would say I do a lot of is sort of community evangelism. I guess this kind of started from my time at Blockchain at Berkeley, where I really just like teaching. Blockchain at Berkeley started because me and two of my friends we decided to teach a class at Berkeley, teaching students about blockchain and so I just really like teaching and explaining things to people. And so I kind of did a lot of that over the past couple of years. I did a lot of events and talks and conferences, and I like to go explain how Cosmos work. I really like doing that or giving analogies and metaphors to make that all work.

Citizen Web3 
It sounds like you said communicating is your favorite part of your job? What drives you on the inside to communicate with people? I mean, is it a passion? Is it something you wanted to do from since you're a child? What is it?

Sunny Aggarwal 
Yeah, I don't know. I really like the communicating part of it. I think what excites me the most about it is I really like to think about metaphors. And when I can think when I come up with a metaphor that helps explain things to someone, it just gets me super excited. Like the metaphor I often use for Cosmos is this sovereign nation-states and like how development of blockchain is sort of similar to the development of societies of going from kingdoms to empires to nation states. I thought that's very similar to how blockchains developed as well. And I don't know for me, when a metaphor just clicks in place, I just go "Wow, that was so much fun. I just want to go share this with everyone". So I think that kind of what it is and teaching people is fun. At Berkeley I, along with the blockchain class, I just really wanted to teach something. I taught the blockchain class for two semesters, and that was a very big class with like hundreds of students, we had multiple teachers, and we had a very intense class. This one semester after that, I decided I wanted something much chiller, just by myself, I want to teach a small group of people. So, I just decided to teach a class in Switzerland for some reason. Yeah, I had 20 students come take the class. It was a fun class. I just really like taking something I'm passionate about and just explaining it and teaching it to people.

Citizen Web3 
One question here, you said, you obviously teach a lot of students. Did any of your students create something that you were proud of in terms of blockchain?

Sunny Aggarwal
Yeah, so I mean a lot of the one of them foe example one of the students from Blockchain at Berkeley have gone on and done a lot of really cool things. One I probably like to highlight a lot is a couple of my students Aparna, she was in the first batch of Blockchain at Berkeley students. Zubin Koticha, he was my little in Blockchain at Berkeley. So I was sort of his mentor, but he was smart enough that I didn't really mentor him. We just became really close friends instead. We actually ended up living together last year. And Alexis, and so they actually co-founded a startup called Open. And so It's actually a pretty popular product on DeFi product on Ethereum in the past couple of months. They do sort of put options for insurance and so. I'd say they're probably one of the coolest like, it's a cool thing that they did.

Citizen Web3
Are you proud of it though?

Sunny Aggarwal 
Oh, yeah, totally. I mean, I think it's really cool, you know. I think they've definitely found a really good like product market fit there.

Anna
So you know, a lot of people ask you how you start your blockchain journey, but I'm going to ask you another question. What could you do if you didn't start work with blockchain? So let's imagine that in some words, you're just not involved into blockchain sphere. What could you do?

Sunny Aggarwal 
Yeah, that's a good question. I've been actually thinking about that to myself lately a little bit as well. It's like man, what if blockchain doesn't exist? What would I be doing right now? I would say, probably before I got into blockchain I was in high school, my passion was robotics. I was just doing robotics non-stop. But when I got to college, like I said, I kind of started wanting to do something more in the interaction between computer science and political economy. And so freshman year, I was like starting I was doing some blockchain work after I started getting involved with that. But actually, what I was kind of really focused on freshman year was data visualization. And so my internship in college after freshman year, it was actually at a company where I did some data visualization stuff. And so my belief was that when it comes to like political decision making, there's a lot of data out there for people to make decisions off of, but at the end of the day, it's still humans that are making the decisions. And so if humans can't comprehend the data in a way that's actually human understandable, then all that data is kind of useless. So I was really interested in like data visualization as a way of "how do we explain data insights to humans so that they can make better political decisions?" So, that's probably what I'd be doing if blockchain wasn't around.

Anna 
Yeah, it's cool. A lot of people in our team are really excited about robots. And It's cool to let people know how it should work, that it's not something that we imagined, usually.

Citizen Web3
I was gonna ask you that later, but you kind of brought the question a little bit ahead, mentioning politics, governance, and so on and so on. Obviously, somebody who follows the Cosmos ecosystem or just an average user or a very active user doesn't matter can see that you're quite involved in the governance process. Is that because of what you just explained, or is there something else behind it as well?

Sunny Aggarwal 
Amm no I think its kind of I mean similar to what I explained where I don't know I just really find governance and like politics very fascinating. And like how to I mean That's kind of why I got into blockchain was. I see blockchain as a way of helping solve coordination problems. So I think governance is actually better on chain governance systems is the best way. You know, it is one method of solving coordination problems. And so that I like to be very actively involved in that process.

Citizen Web3 
Would you say that the design that Tendermint has created so far succeeded in governance, or failed, or in the middle?

Sunny Aggarwal 
I think it's very very like It's an absolute MVP of governance, like it was just like oh year we need here's some voting on chain and by tokens. It's extremely primitive. I think there's a lot more sort of exploration that has to be done in the governance space. What we have right now is just one of the first earliest blockchains that has an on chain governance. Like You know, there are earlier ones as well of course, Decred and Tezos and whatnot, at least the social the norm is in Cosmos that we do have some sort of governance system and now it's a matter of figuring out iterating on and improving it. You know, I'm really interested in exploring things like futarchy, and I'd like to see more of liquid democracy kind of style stuff in Cosmos where like you shouldn't always have to be delegating your vote to your validator. I think that's a little bit silly. Eventually you should be able to delegate to anyone on and you should be able to delegate to different people on different topics.

Citizen Web3 
Definitely I agree with you. It was a very interesting experiment. And well, not was is. And I'm interested to hear your thoughts about it. I wasn't gonna bring it up. But now you bring a lot of governance up anyways, long story short, I can't remember the name of the consensus what they called it, but it was definitely on the ether and what they did in order to increase the participation in governance is they introduced a second layer token for the governance, which wasn't like it didn't have a lot of money, monetary value, but the idea was that you could bet on the outcome of a governance proposal and it didn't affect the governance proposal. You staked it, but you could still kind of create a second layer market on top of that. I don't know what it was called really forgotten, but what do you think about an assumption like this? Is that too silly, too speculative or interesting?

Sunny Aggarwal 
I think that is interesting. I mean, one thing is, in a sense, it sort of turns a little bit into a bribery market. I mean, the general rule is any sort of betting market on chain is by nature usually also a bribery market. Umm I think this is interesting where let's say things like the Fed today right, like people are like currently criticizing the Fed for, oh money printer goes BRRR. Besides that specifically, but I think like I think something like more futarchic does make sense for influencing the Feds actions where I think the Fed is not going is not going to anytime soon give up all control over like, "Oh, you know, we're just gonna let this, futarchy system run everything", but it's valuable. It could be valuable as sort of an advisory system for the Fed and if they decide to go against the market, they have to have like a really good justification of why they why they want to enact a policy that's different than what the futarchy market suggests. I think your futarchy as an advisory system does sort of make a lot of sense.

Citizen Web3 
What do you think in terms of like, if we move from futarchy, but let's stay in the same context. But I mean, I've been following blockchain for about probably nearly 10 years now. And we've been working on different projects and so on and so forth. And one thing I have realized is that actually was completed yesterday with Anna, the more decentralized the project is, the more difficult it becomes to have what I would call good governance not good but the word good is not here. You know what I mean? Like it's more difficult it becomes to govern the project because you have more opinions, you have more stakes, what are your thoughts about that?

Anna 
Can I add that it's some costs of governance, with who spent a lot of time to come to some arrangement.

Sunny Aggarwal 
Yeah, as the number of stakeholders increases and voices, you know, it definitely does become harder. I don't know. I guess one interesting thing. I never considered that until you just asked this question. But I feel governance got easier on the Cosmos hub after launch. I felt like there was a lot more disputes over like certain design decisions and stuff within the Tendermint team when before while we were launching the hub, right? we'd get into like In retrospect, some of the arguments were sort of so silly.like I remember we've gotten into an argument about, "oh, how big should the memo field size be" and that became and it's like dumb things like that. And then I feel like after launch, we you know somehow all those arguments stopped happening. I guess when you scale up I don't know, maybe there's a rule where, as you scale up the size of the governance system, you naturally end up just sort of pruning away some of the less important stuff. And so, you kind of become aware that look, there's no I'm not going to go make a governance proposal to go change the size of the memo field, you know. Am I really going to be the person who's gonna like make all these thousands and thousands of Cosmos participants vote on this thing? Yeah. So I think what what ends up happening is like when you have these larger governance systems, some of these more minute details, you sort of end up having to delegate them to more specialized sort of sub team people. Sort of whoever the cosmos core developer so like what we did how I like to see Cosmos Hub upgrades happen is we'll for any sort of major feature change, we should have a specialized governance proposal for it. But then there's all these sort of minor changes that happen as well. I think whenever it's time to upgrade the chain before that we should make one governance proposal and, "here's a list of all the minor changes that have been made, and so, if you approve this, it doesn't make sense to sort of vote on every single small one of those." And so changing the memo field size, maybe we'll just get put into that one. And if people have disputes on like any sort of specific minor thing, then they could go ahead and raise it but you just have to be more selective when your governance system becomes larger.

Citizen Web3 
I see what you mean. By the way, the consensus is just suddenly remembered. It's called holographic consensus if you're interested to check it out. But this is just something to keep in mind. Back to governance. One more question before we move ahead. What do you think I mean the first episode we recorded was actually with Gavin from Figma Network, and it's actually been released. and we spoke I think I've seen you on the governance working groups sorry governance working groups calls as well. What are your thoughts about that idea, is it gonna work? Does it need improvement?

Sunny Aggarwal 
I think its a good Ah sort of system for I mean I think probably the most useful thing that I hope to get out of it, is the documentation that Gavin mentioned where I think just like having documentation on how the governance process works, and all what all the parameters do. I think that probably, one of the most valuable things I will come off of it. And then I also do want to see, it's good to be able to delegate governance upgrade how to upgrade the governance system itself to a specialized working group. And I'm not quite sure if that's really what they've been doing up until now or not, but I think that sort of was meant to come later in their sort of road map. I think the earlier stuff was getting the documentation and stuff working. What I would like to see that working group sort of start to do is sort of come up with designs for how to do that liquid democracy stuff and really really take ownership of improving that specific module and that part.

Citizen Web3 
Let's talk about Sikka for a minute here. I mean, Sikka, is if not one of the most popular validators, it's definitely one of the most powerful in terms of stake. Did you plan for it to be successful? Was it just an experiment? Tell us the story.

Sunny Aggarwal 
Yeah, that's right I guess it was a little bit of a surprise. I started working on Sikka because, you know I remember the Bitcoin scaling debates. And What I saw from that was it turned into this very miners on one side versus the core developers on the other side. And I started Sikka because I wanted to be able to wear both hats. And I just saw that ok one point down the road, there might become a situation where the core developers and the validators are standoff against each other. Lets say I don't know what it will be caused by maybe proportional slashing I don't know. I wanted to be able to have the experience of being not only a core developer but also being a validator. So one, I can understand what the process of being a validator is, and like so I know that ok these are the kind of things that validators are thinking, or what they're worried about. So that way, I have that understanding. And Also, I have some more influence on that side as well. So that way, I can by being a validator, I can also sort of be able to sort of represent the validators' opinions as well and be able to influence them better than I could if I was only a core developer. That's why Sikka originally started. And It was meant to just be that and then over time, I think we just sort of kept gaining more and more delegation, partially because of our original zero fee plan. Partially because we were just you know I was well known in the space and so got a lot of delegation from that. A combination of things and so it just grew bigger and bigger. And at some point Dave and I, Dave he has also worked at Tendermint for a little bit. He and I were running it together. Yeah, at some point, we were just like, wow, this is bigger than any of us either of us expected and so we're trying to figure out now what's the next steps for it and how to continue growing Sikka. Or what's the best way to It's hard to tell what's gonna happen with the validation space, especially as you get these like larger and larger entities that are like you know especially exchanges and stuff entering. And So we're still figuring out what the next steps for Sikka are.

Citizen Web3 
While we're on the matter of Sikka, I've seen in your project list it's a bit unusual, usually the validators take a little bit I don't want to say boring, but usually most of them are. In terms of delays their projects and it's all like projects from the same space, you have two interesting things. So let's go one by one first is Grin. What do you think about nimble wimble, what's your thoughts?

Sunny Aggarwal 
With Grin, the part that excited me was not so much actually the nimble wimble part. I think nimble wimble is a cool idea, but it's not that much. I think coda stuff and like zero knowledge proofs are much more promising not promising but much more powerful. But What excited me about Grin was, at least a year ago was movement behind it. It was I felt the story was right. Like It was the most Bitcoin like story that had come out in the crypto space where its like oh like this this anonymous like text file that was just dropped on the Bitcoin IRC with this idea. And Then some other anonymous person came up and built up a team to develop it and then like a lot of the core developers at that time were still anonymous as well. They were sort of developing it and starting from zero and everything. What I liked about it was the monetary policy. They do 60 Grin per minute till the end of time. I think that's much more reasonable than bitcoins like deflationary thing. This is still technically deflationary, but it's a sort of different type of deflationary.

Citizen Web3 
You're stealing our questions, Sonny. Stop it.

Citizen Web3
You're always answering the question ahead. He knows I have a question, Oh, my God, he keeps doing this again and again.

Anna
Do you feel that storytelling can store behind the project is one of the most powerful parts or one of the most important parts for the project?

Sunny Aggarwal 
Yeah, I think so. I think At least cryptocurrencies are sort of heavily a meme and like they're like a religion. I mean, all currency is a religion, right? like

Citizen Web3
100%. 

Sunny Aggarwal 
Yeah, one of my favorite speeches from like American history, it's called the Cross Gold speech. And is very much like he sort of equating like It was a speech by William Jennings Bryan in 1896 or something. He was kind of equating the sort of undying devotion to the gold standard that people had back then to Christianity. And so Even the belief in gold is also a religion as well, and all currencies are religion. And so I think the narrative is very important.

Citizen Web3 
That's really cool that you said that because a lot of what we do has a lot to do with it. I'm not going to pull over the quilt on myself, but it's really interesting that you said that. Back to economics a little bit and back to your projects and Sikka. I have a little bit of a strange question. The second interesting project, which doesn't fit into the box, is Straightedge and I'm sure I've heard one of the episodes of Epicenter that you talk about criticize the distribution of Edgeware and you did rightfully sell my opinion. But What do you think is would be the perfect distribution process in terms of a decentralized crypto project?

Sunny Aggarwal 
So, I mean I don't know what the perfect distribution is because I give you an interesting distribution. I don't know if it's the perfect distribution, but here's an interesting one. You know I'm helping out with productionizing Ethermint right now, which is our EVM on the Cosmos SDK. And For this chain, we want to have a distribution for it. And you know We want to distribute it to Ethereum stakeholders in some way, right. So Who are those stakeholders? You know Maybe holders, maybe some other people. But one of the things that edgewear so the thing I kind of got into an argument with Edgeware was about was the way they kind did some stuff in a very sneaky way in order to give the Web3 foundation a lot of. One of the things that claimed was they want to distribute to developers. And I'm like, okay, that's interesting. How do we distribute to Ethereum developers? So what I did was, I actually wrote up a blog post on this, and it's called the Gas Drop. What you would do there, is you distribute. So the question is, we want to distribute to Ethereum smart contract developers, and we want to distribute more tokens to people whose contracts were more useful. And So how do we do this? I think what we could do is, look how much gas was spent interacting with each contract. And so You could say that, look the most useful contracts, you know how do you let the market decide what's useful, and if it's useful, people are willing to spend money gas to interact with it. And So you could say something like, uni swap it. Look how much gas was spent interacting with this contract. It means it's providing value. You can also sort of like benefit composability here as well. Where you could like lets say the gnosis multisig contract, right. Probably people don't spend a lot of gas interacting with it, because it's pretty likely you think you can just use it, and then you make a transaction doing something else. But you know It's probably one of the most useful contracts on Ethereum. So maybe what you want to do is also take into account like look in a transaction, this much gas was spent the gnosis multisig was in that contract in that execution. Let's take give it some value for how much other interaction Ethereum that this contract enabled. If that makes sense.

Citizen Web3 
It does make sense. I've read your post actually and saw it was interesting. We did our drop a little bit before it and we did it to the user specter rather than to a specific target group, but it's really interesting and I would love to see somebody implement it and try it out.

Sunny Aggarwal
Yeah, it's definitely not a perfect distribution, but I think it's an interesting distribution.

Citizen Web3 
Oh, definitely. Definitely. Going to be provocative here. Do you think game of stakes was successful on distribution?

Sunny Aggarwal 
On distribution, yes. I think that game of stakes had a couple of goals, and think that it accomplished some of them and it did not accomplish. It failed at some of them. The ones that it accomplished well were one it there were a lot of validators who wanted to the Cosmos fundraiser happened all the way back in like April 2017 and after that there were a lot of entities that came up and wanted to become validators and but they didn't have any atoms. I think game stakes was pretty successful in distributing atoms to these want-to-be validators. I think it was successful at that. I think it was successful at helping us test our software. Like throughout the game of stakes process, we found so many bugs, and we're able to rapidly fix them and that was a good process. I think the thing that it was unsuccessful at was getting validators to improve their security because I think there were certain design choices that we made. So for example, this like hyper vapid inflation of game of stakes, what ever it was like 2,000% a day or something. I don't remember what it was. It forced everyone to have a hot script that would automatically withdraw the rewards and redelegate them. But the problem is, that's not what you want to be happening. in That's not helping you practice your operational security at all. And so I think that's one thing where game of stakes sort of fell short, in my opinion. I don't think anyone was running in their actual production environment or anything like that.

Citizen Web3 
This is really funny, but the first question that one of the validators in our test nets asks us, give us a script to. It was exactly that and we were like, what guys? Anyways, what do you think about multi signature validation? Like what do think about lets say well There is obviously two ways of doing this. Let's say there is one way of having an operator which would be multi signature and having a one single machine to do the computation. And then there is the more complicated way which I would love to see like a real multi signature validator. We have three different machines going for it, and I think that would be something big level up in security. In terms of security, I'm not sure about the costs, obviously, because I think the costs here would be crazy. but

Sunny Aggarwal 
So do you mean, let's say I split my validation key across multiple servers and they have some sort of consensus between them? What is your attack model here? Are you worried about Byzantine failure of one of the validator nodes or crash failure of one of the nodes?

Citizen Web3
Well, I think both and really, because obviously, in terms of Byzantine failure, a think that might actually add to the attack, because one of the operators or two of the operators might be Byzantine so. And I kind of ruined the whole story. But let's imagine that they're not Byzantine. Let's just imagine for the sake of it. For the sake of theory, is it something that would be possible at all in terms of? It's good to hear feedback.

Sunny Aggarwal 
yeah so here's actually I have a design for how to do this. I haven't implemented it yet, but I'd like to eventually. So one thing is Some of the validators already do for This one, I believe they actually use RAFT. They have a couple of validator nodes and they use RAFT between their nodes before they sign the validator. And I think that's pretty interesting. But I think I have a solution that's even simpler or better than using raft between the validators. Because RAFT has a lot of you know You have this high communication overhead within your system before you can make nodes, A sign every single block. And You also need to have at least three nodes in order to do raft. So here's my solution. This problem would be Let's say I had two validator nodes. Let's say I had a primary and a backup, right? I want the primary to basically always be signing, and if it falls if it fails, you want the secondary, the backup to sort of take its position. This would be simple to do if you had a perfect communication link, like a perfectly synchronous communication line between your two validators. But then the problem is we don't because what if something happened between that wire that connects you to validators. But Here's the thing, we actually do have a perfectly synchronous communication link between the two nodes and it's the blockchain itself. So, what you could do is you can make a simple rule. In Tendermint and in the Cosmos SDK staking module we kind of say, you can miss hundreds of blocks without getting in trouble, right? We can just make a simple rule that says, look, the primary is signing blocks always but and the secondary is watching the blockchain. If the primary, if it ever sees 10 Tendermint blocks in which our signature is not on, the primary signature is not on it. It will start signing and what the primary will say is if I ever see 10 Tendermint blocks in a row, in which my signature is not there, I will shut off and never turn on again. I will not sign after that. And This guarantees that there's no situation in which there's any block in which both the primary and the secondary tried to sign it.

Citizen Web3 
That's interesting. That's interesting. Have you seen any similar implementations to what you say?

Sunny Aggarwal
No, I don't think I've seen any similar implementations. I think Hyung from B Harvest might have proposed something a little bit similar. But his was a little bit more complex, as he was suggesting, actually making transactions on the chain letting that thing know. He had a similar insight of using the blockchain as a synchronous communication mechanism. But I think it was a little bit more complex than I thought it should be, because you don't actually have to make transactions on the chain. You can just look at the signatures on the Tendermint block, which is what you're supposed to be doing anyways.

Citizen Web3 
Yeah, I will definitely ask him. I think we're recording actually a couple of days anyways sorry to interrupting go on.

Sunny Aggarwal 
Yeah, and I mean, I've worked on designing this protocol, and like improving the design with the Chorus One team. And so yeah You can even design it in such a way where like you have it, so your when your primary falls off and started shutting off, you can actually make it so it becomes a secondary. Ans So you can always use these two nodes sort of as this, like tag team thing it.

Citizen Web3 
Makes sense. Makes sense. Validator things is quite complicated and interesting. And I think it's good to see that in the Cosmos ecosystem, a lot of users who are not validators get very curious about the work of the validators and get interested and they ask questions and I think it's really good because I've seen a lot of other systems. Well For example, Bitcoin right where. I love Bitcoin but I don't really hear Bitcoin user asking questions about what is the security of the Bitcoin nodes. and I've never seen that on there. Well, sometimes you do, but I think in that system, it works better. Anyways, this is just so like thinking out loud. Going back to the economics and Cosmos. Do you think that in general Cosmos has a good distribution?

Sunny Aggarwal 
Umm No, I mean I think it could have been way better. I think the original fundraiser um was I didn't like the design I wasn't really part of the project at that time. I joined about two or three months after the fundraiser. I didn't actually participate in the fundraiser myself because I thought if someone showed it to me, and I looked at it, there like oh check out this Cosmos thing and I opened it up and I'm like at that time, I was a complete Bitcoin maximalist. And so I opened it up and I looked at it, I'm like, oh, proof of steak, that thing doesn't work. And so I turned it off, and I didn't look at it. I think that the fundraiser could have been a little bit you know the fact that it ran out in 17 minutes, no one really had a chance to I think that could have been done better. But you know That being said, I mean it is what it is. And you know  I think the distribution has only been increasing since then, right? Like Once it goes on the market and a lot of the early participants, they you know took whatever increase in value that they could get. And yeah It's been increasing since then. And you know, anyone who wants to be part of the system, there's enough liquidity of atoms on the market that you can buy into it.

Citizen Web3 
Do you think that the way to improve that is just going organic?

Sunny Aggarwal 
Yeah, I think so. Unless you like The other option is you could use governance to sort of find if you want to inflate the supply and or like use the community pool and distribute it. But it has to be like very targeted. Like This is who we want to distribute it to for this reason, and I'm not sure who that would be for the Cosmos Hub. I do have a proposal for Kava. For I made I made a proposal that they should increase the supply a little bit and distribute it to DAI holders. Because I think it's you know a sort of competitor bank to maker. And Going back to the whole narrative thing. I think it's an interesting narrative where you could say that, "Look, I don't want to distribute to MKR holders, I want to go to DAI holders because the DAI holders are sort of like this customer of the maker bank." And so by air dropping to the DAI holders is you're kind of be like, "Hey, you guys are customers of that bank, come be partial owners of this bank." And I think that's an interesting narrative pitch there that you could really sell. So I think it makes sense for Kava in that case, I'm not sure who would be the target. If we're going to increase the distribution of of an atom, we need to have a good articulated, like this is who we're going to do it to and why.

Anna 
Yeah, it's interesting. How do you think if we are just attract early adopters then or we have more than enough early adopters and we came to more typical users thinking about segmentation and all that kind of things?

Sunny Aggarwal 
I mean Right now, I feel that we've been kind of mostly focused not on increasing the distribution, but really building out IBC and stuff, and something that actually makes a distribution even useful in the first place. It seems a bit weird. To like go out I mean Staking is not a product on in of itself. Like you know There's so many validator companies and just like companies who are like, "oh, come stake, and look, you're gonna get this like 20% yield or whatever." It's like not really. So it's for that reason you know Staking itself isn't a product and currently, the Cosmos Hub doesn't have a real product yet. It's just like got the bare bone and so I think the first step before we try to like tell people to buy into this thing is first, let's build a product that's actually worth having which is, will come through IBC and shared security and things like that.

Anna 
If I understand you right, we are just at the beginning of a long, long way.

Sunny Aggarwal 
Yeah, yeah I think the Cosmos Hub has a lot of there's still to go and. This IBC that's like going to be launched very soon. With Games  It's the first step. IBC is just this bare bones communication layer and on top of that now. I hope we're going to start to see a lot of theres a lot of development that has to come on top of IBC. And It's great to see that people like Agoric just had the proposal for how to improve IBC, and I think we're going to see a lot more protocols being built on top of IBC and so. There's a lot more to come.

Citizen Web3 
What is the most excited market that you can imagine with IBC usage right now? Like something crazy, not talking transfer. Tell me something weird and something that excites you instead its, obviously we talk about IBC. We're not talking about token transfer data transfer. We're talking it's just data. So obviously chain can exchange whatever they want unless they agree on the rules. So what is something that excites you? What kind of markets?

Sunny Aggarwal 
Okay, here's a interesting a cool design I came up with which I like. So let's imagine we have shared security, obviously shared securities, probably the most important IBC protocols that has to be built. So allowing the validator set of one chain to also validate another chain and allowing them to. Any validator set changes that happened here, you need to copy that validator set there. Any Byzantine faults that happen there, you send that data over IBC to this chain, so they can be slashed. That's obviously one of the things but once you have that, let's say you have the Cosmos hub that's co-validating a bunch of these other chains right. Let's say one of the chains that they have is a CryptoKitties chain. You don't want to move your monetary assets like your Bitcoin or your DAI or whatever to that chain. You want to store your money on the secure Cosmos Hub. How do you pay fees on that other chain? How do you pay fees on the CryptoKitties chain? So this is a fun idea, cool design I came up with how to pay fees for one of these chains on the Cosmos Hub. How you do it is the validator set of the Cosmos Hub, It's sort of you like can have kind of be represented as an account. And What you can do is you can open a one way payment channel to that validator set on the Cosmos Hub. And what you can do is when you want to make a fee payment to make a transaction on that chain, you sign a payment channel update like sort of increasing your payment there and you take that signed payment channel update and put it normally in a transaction, in the fee field you just say you just put in an amount of money right and when it gets executed pulls out money from your account. But here instead, what you're going to do is you're just going to put a signed payment channel update in the transaction. And The validators, when they get that transaction, they can see "Oh yup, this is a valid payment channel update to our thing over there that's added to that, let's provide that transaction." But now what's to stop them from taking that sign channel update and just executing that closing the payment channel. Why do they actually have to include the transaction? So what you can do is use IBC for this where you could say, "look, if you have the latest sign channel update, you also have to prove that the transaction that that's related to actually did make it into the other chain." I call this conditional payment channel where like it's a payment channel payment that's conditional on something happening. So in this case, it's conditional on an IBC proof of a transaction actually being included.

Citizen Web3 
That's interesting. I hear a lot of people describe it as TCP IP. To me, it resembles HTTP more because what do we use HTTP for to communicate between databases. What is IBC? The same but it's centralized in a more secure way to communicate and incentive between databases. This is a perfect example I think of something that would work. I mean I can't imagine the implementation as good as you do. A question on a different note, I follow Solana a little bit as well. Solana obviously because they use GPUs like we do. Probably the only two projects in POS that use GPUs we're weird. And I've heard your talk on the Solana podcast with Anatoly. What are your thoughts about validators in GPUs? Is that big no no? Is that something that can be useful of the computations?

Sunny Aggarwal
I don't have an issue with validators and GPUs. My concern is when it comes to normal full nodes and light nodes and especially light client. If you have a system that has intense hardware requirements for running a validator or even if it's for running a full node. You want to make sure you have really good solid light clients. And that's one thing I'm kind of worried about With Solana at least I hadn't seen any sort of light client specification on how to do that properly. So completely It makes a lot of sense to for blockchain operators to have sort of sophisticated hardware but as long as you know whether it's using zero knowledge proof or if it's using some sort of just really good light client system, or something to make sure that the average user shouldn't be required to have that sort of hardware or they shouldn't be relying on trusting a full node. They should be able to verify themselves or somewhat.

Citizen Web3
Yeah, definitely 100%. Before I ask the next question which I did have but now you gave me another question. What do you think about something like Iota for example then where a user verifies? Not Iota as the team behind Iota and all that for that but as the verifying part of Iota what do you think about it then? Where each used to verify two random transactions and then it goes on and goes on. 

Sunny Aggarwal 
I think it makes sense. I mean Iota idea was very interesting. I think there was some things of it By the way, the Iota team kind of hates me. We had a hard language early on. If you go check out Youtube I probably have the most viewed technical presentation on Iota on Youtube. And I find It's an interesting idea but the point that I took the most offense to is their whole thing of saying "Oh it's zero fee". And I kind of like show that, no, inevitably in the system there will be fees. Like It should have come as out of bond of payments for fees but it's gonna happen. That being said, so I think Avalanche, it's sort of Iota done right. And When Gun first told me about Avalanche protocol, he described it to me and I'm wait this sounds extremely similar to Iota and he said, it is actually it's probably what's most similar to. I think Iota had some interesting ideas and I think that's really cool. When it comes to Avalanche, I'm actually very excited about Avalanche for a sort of weird reason. Which is I think I mentioned it in Solana's podcast but I think you can do web of trust as a civil resistance mechanism using Avalanche. I don't think you need proof of stake or proof of work or proof of storage or anything like that. I think you can actually do a web of trust-based consensus protocol. 

Citizen Web3
It's really interesting. I actually Before I heard this speech in 2018 or 2017 or early 2018. Like It was more of a theological fantasy article. How will consensuses evolve and then suddenly, after I write this article, I just see his speech on Youtube and then I'm like "What? How did I get it?" I mean those exactly spot on and it's interesting that he talked about the same thing. What else afar from Avalanche surprises you right now? Nothing Cosmos related Blockchain space, no big projects. Forget about Iota, theory on bitcoin and whatever. What surprises you lately? What project or what technology?

Sunny Aggarwal
Good question. It's not new, but it's something I'm personally trying to get more involved with I really love Interledger. Interledger is such like an elegant lead design protocol and I wish it had more sort of adoption and like usage. And I'd like to Sikka would like to get sort of more involved with that project and like working on that. I think that sort of one like If people don't know what it is then definitely check it out. "Wow this is super well-designed."

Citizen Web3
I've never heard about it. What did they do in two words? This is strange for me because I usually know all the projects, I'm like what the hell? I don't know this project. What is it?

Sunny Aggarwal
Interledger is sort of fixes all the problems with Lightning. Where Lightning uses the hash timelock contracts. And Lightning has so many issues with it. The fact that you can sort of dos the network for free. And like I think Lightning doesn't actually work because of that reason. Like If I could just lock up the liquidity and not pay anything for it. It breaks sort of the protocol. What Interledger does is it uses something called streaming payment. Where what it will say is lets say I wanted to something with Anna and we're going through you. What we could do is instead of using hash timelock contracts, we can use streaming payments. Which means I'll send you 5 cents, and then you send Anna 5 cents. I'll send you 5 cents, you send Anna 5 cents. I'll send you 5 cents, you send Anna 5 cents. And so if at any point, you go malicious and disappear, Oh no! You stole you got away with 5 cents. You know No one's gonna pair with you anymore after this. It's like using a little bit of trust in the system. You can actually make it a much more well-designed protocol. And The reason it's called Interledger, is because you can imagine this being used for one payment, like a secondary network on top of one currency, but you can also actually use this for streaming between currency. Let's say I wanted to send BTC and you wanted to receive ETH. You could use that same streaming payment because I could be one of nodes in the middle. And I will Send me a couple cents of BTC, I'll send a couple cents worth of ETH, you send me a couple cents of BTC. Interledger is designed is it's sort of this clearing network layer for payments and then you can settle to any sort of settlement system you want. Rather, you could settle to a layer 1 blockchain, you could settle to a payment channel or you could settle to Venmo if you wanted to. And You could settle to all of these different things. I think it's sort of the best designed payments networks possible. 

Citizen Web3
That's interesting. I'm gonna check it out definitely. 

Anna
Yeah, I have one more question. Who do you tell us about Sunny AI Twitter?

Sunny Aggarwal 
Yeah, sure. yeah I was reading a blog post on a user called Money Stuff. And so he was you know sort of making fun of VCs where he was like most the VCs why he was kind of making fun of VC Twitter and all this thought leadership and stuff that they do. And so He was saying, "Well you know, if the goal of VC is just to get maximum deal flow and Twitter helps him get that, he just probably just invests in making an AI that tweets out thought leadership for them." And I thought that was funny and I'm like so I started looking into it. I found about GPT 2 which people actually have written bots. There's this guy, his name is Max something Max. He works at Buzz. He's a lead data scientist at Buzz Buzz Bee. And so puts together this blog post. It's super simple to run and use and how to like auto generate Tweets and train them on your own on you own Twitter history. And so I just did that and started generating Tweets and I I set up a bot that just like would automatically Tweets every couple hours. It will just Tweet out auto generate Tweets, trained up on my own history. I don't know It's really fun. My Twitter history is mostly crypto stuff and like geography fun facts. It's just is generating and especially when it starts combining these things, it just gets really funny. 

Anna
Yeah, it's really a lot of fun. 

Citizen Web3
I think I've seen books on Amazon that are called written with GPT 2. I think.

Sunny Aggarwal
Yeah, GPT 2. What's cool about GPT 2 is all it's doing, it's just a patterned recondition right. It's saying, here's a bunch of words that I've learned. The model that we're using, they scanned it on all of Wikipedia and so many books. Like all the books that they can find and so they created this model. And then it's just saying given these series of passwords, what's likely to come next? But what's cool is, this is a great blog called "Slate Star Codex", it's like a rationalist blog, it's really great. One of the things he wrote about was what he gave us he trained GPT 2 on all past professional chess games. So all chess games are written in standard chess notation. And In a way, you can consider that sort of a language. And so He trained it on every single past like professional chess game he could find. And He made up to play chess against himself. And It's just like guessing what moves do based off of patterned recondition of chess language. And It wasn't that good. He still beat it but it made some good moves. I remember one he's like "Oh it took my rook and I wasn't expecting it," it made some good moves. What's cool about this is, this this AI has no concept of what chess is. Chess bots have been around 1997 when they beat the human, right? This bot has no concept of the game of chess. It doesn't understand the 2D board. It doesn't understand anything. All it understands is chess notation language. And it just played In a weird way it's sort of a general AI. I wonder if you can describe anything as a language, you can train this bot to kind of understand it. 

Citizen Web3
Yeah, it's really interesting because I think technically probably you could describe anything as a language right I mean weather it's an emotion or an algorithm anything at the end of the day is an algorithm whatever it is. One last question probably I have for you. Coming back to Cosmos, what is the thing that you'd like to see in a year's time in Cosmos that's going to affect everyone that's using Cosmos best. Positive note, I don't know anything. What's something exciting that you're expecting to happen in Cosmos within a year?

Sunny Aggarwal
I think the thing that would to IBC related I think the most important for the Cosmos Hub is to get shared security. And like I want it to be that There are some applications that I want to build the Cosmos chain for and I wanted that Cosmos is SDK based. But I don't want to like do a proof of stake token because the idea I'm gonna have is very simple utility change almost. And I don't want to like launch a token for that. The beautiful thing about Ethereum is I have a contract I want to write, I just deploy it. And I think we need to get to that point with the Cosmos Hub as well. I think once we have that sort of shared security on the Cosmos Hub were going to see a lot more change I think there's a relatively very high barrier to entry for launching a Cosmos chain not because of the software development I mean it is a little bit harder than writing a solinaty contract, but if your building something production ready probably should be writing on the Cosmos SDK instead of solinty. I think the main hurdle is doing that sort of distribution and stuff at getting a validator set community and all that. I think if you kind of abstract a lot along the way, then we're going to see a lot more change starting to build. 

Citizen Web3
I would love to see more and more and more and more and more change. I think I'd love to see Aragon finally. I like Aragon. It's been really cool chatting to you, Sunny and it's really exciting to see that people who are involved regardless of whether they're developers of Tendermint or not, kind of think about the broader aspect of things rather than just concentrating of their own work and I'm really happy as a user, at least right, and not just somebody who's making a project on Cosmos that's another story, but the user I think is definitely kind of makes me happy. 

Sunny Aggarwal 
Awesome, thanks for having me on!

Citizen Web3
Thanks for your time!

Anna
Thank you!

Outro:
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