Anna Rose (00:00:05):
Welcome to Zero Knowledge. I'm your host Anna Rose. In this podcast, we will be exploring the latest in zero knowledge research and the decentralized web, as well as new paradigms that promise to change the way we interact and transact online.

Anna Rose (00:00:26):
This week, I chat with Billy Rennekamp who works as the Cosmos Hub Lead at Interchain Foundation. We catch up about his early work on the Clovers network NFT project, and how that framed the directions he took within the space. We talk about his work at the ICF and within the Cosmos ecosystem, Interchain security and other emerging paradigms in this network. Before we start in, I want to tell you about three things happening in the ZK space this month, first off, the ZK Hack is happening right now. If you haven't yet checked it out, please head over. It's a seven week long event, and there's still a few sessions to go. Also, if you're looking to get into the space professionally, we are hosting our fifth ZK Job Fair happening on December 2nd. There we will be featuring some top hiring talent. It's hosted on gathered.town, which is a virtual space. It's quite casual. It's quite fun. It's a great way to meet potential hiring teams as you're applying for the job. You may also in the meantime, want to check out the ZK Jobs Board, where you can find ads from top teams looking to hire. The last thing I want to tell you about is an upcoming Gitcoin side grant focused on ZK tools. This is happening during the next CLR matching round on Gitcoin. This starts at the beginning of December, and this matching round is designed to support emerging ZK projects, tools, and contributors, like all Gitcoin grants. It uses quadratic voting to determine which grants receive, which proportion of the matching funds. This matching round was funded by the ZK Validator, Aztec, Aleo, Dusk, and Deversifi, and possibly some additional contributors by the time this airs. If you have a ZK project or want to start one, this would be a great way to get some early funding. You can already launch a grant over on Gitcoin. And if you meet the criteria, you can add your grant to the ZK-focused side round. If you want to support ZK tech, this would also be a great way for you to do so. I've added the link to all of these things in the show notes. Be sure to check them out, sign up and look for the Gitcoin grant. Now I want to say thank you to this week sponsor cLabs. cLabs works on building Celo. Celo is a mobile first platform that makes financial Dapps and crypto payments accessible to anyone with a phone, this mobile first approach with a snark-based light client with full node incentives and gas payable and ERC20 tokens will allow crypto payments and DeFi tools to reach the 6 billion smartphones on earth. Celo's interoperability, and full EVM compatibility makes it easy to start building Dapps that reach global users across devices, carriers in countries. If you're interested in jumping in join Celo's vibrant ecosystem that is attracting thousands of and projects from around the world, visit Celo.org to learn more. So thanks again cLabs. Now here's my conversation with Billy Rennekamp. So today I'm here with Billy Rennenkampf. Cosmos Hub lead at the Interchain Foundation. Welcome to the show, Billy.

Billy Rennekamp (00:03:16):
Thank you very much for having me.

Anna Rose (00:03:18):
Billy let's first learn about your general areas of focus. What do you work on care about, think about?

Billy Rennekamp (00:03:26):
I'm kind of like a kid in a candy shop in the crypto space. So I've touched on a lot of different topics over the years. Right now my focus is on the Cosmos Hub, Cosmos ecosystem, IBC the different technologies that especially improve the UX of using blockchains within that space. But over the years, I've been especially excited about NFTs and different automatic marketmakers. I was really involved in early bonding curve work. So it's probably all over the space.

Anna Rose (00:03:49):
Cool. What were you doing early on that early like bonding curve? Where was that? Which project?

Billy Rennekamp (00:03:54):
It came out of project called Clovers network which got me into the space. I have a background in art and actually I was building Clovers network as an artwork beginning, like in 2012 even, and sort of like, oh, I, I, this is a crazy idea. Like maybe I could incentivize people to do these sorts of things. At one point I was like, oh my God, that's what a blockchain is. And so I sort of looked into trying to build it on top of Bitcoin back in like 2014/15. I was like, this sucks. So I kind of played around with a centralized version of it over a couple of years. And then when I saw an Ethereum smart contract, I was like, oh, I can finally put this on a blockchain.

Anna Rose (00:04:28):
Clovers. You just mentioned Clovers is an NFT product. Is it still around today?

Billy Rennekamp (00:04:31):
It is on the immutable blockchain Ethereum. Got it. Did like the first MVP 2017, but didn't go to mainnet until 2019 and yeah, it became this vehicle for all of the most exciting, shiny objects across the space for me.

Anna Rose (00:04:47):
That's wild. So your entry point was an NFT, like a proto NFT art project that made you kind of discover blockchain generally, were you, where you aware of Ethereum as it was launching? Or had you sort of like tested the water with Bitcoin and then bounced out?

Billy Rennekamp (00:05:02):
I tested the waters, Bitcoin I'd ran a dogecoin miner for a little bit, kind of sold all of that at the bottom of a market, bought like a couple ETHER, you know, when it was like brand new, but it honestly didn't understand what it was at that time. It wasn't until I like saw a smart contract and I was able to be like, oh, that it all clicked in 2017 or so.

Anna Rose (00:05:18):
Okay. But by 2017, were you thinking, ah, this could exist, like Clovers could exist in Ethereum?

Billy Rennekamp (00:05:25):
No, no. I mean, I was going through the logic of colored coins for the first version of it, you know, where you basically embed logic into a Bitcoin transaction and you process it off chain. And I was like, this sucks. And I didn't understand what Ethereum was at that point and how it really fixed that problem. I thought that, you know, that problem wasn't solved. I didn't give it nearly enough time, I guess. And then sort of off to have fun and Berlin for a few years partying.

Anna Rose (00:05:47):
You were not working in blockchain, when you first came to Berlin?

Billy Rennekamp (00:05:50):
I mean, I, you know, it was I had an art practice set a studio practice was exhibiting and selling work in galleries across Europe and America. And it always using technology as input to that work. And so I was dabbling here and there and software literate, you know, a bit of a hacker sometimes doing some like web dev work on the side. But mostly just living the good life in Berlin.

Anna Rose (00:06:10):
You tell me about your, like your road into the space, actually. Like that sounds like some pre interest curiosity playing around, but like what really sucked you in?

Billy Rennekamp (00:06:21):
So, I mean, 2017, we're building up into like a new hype cycle and I finally like realized what's possible actually get a knee injury. And so I'm stuck in my kitchen for that summer. And I decided to like learn solidity by trying to reprogram Clovers network in solidity. It was like the most gas inefficient system in the world. You're basically doing proof of work validation on chain and a smart contract, which is a bad time.

Anna Rose (00:06:43):
Oh yeah, because Clovers, this NFT it's, it's different, right? It's not just the ERC-721.

Billy Rennekamp (00:06:49):
Well, it was before that, I called it a unique digital asset, a UDA and I'm in the middle of me making it Cryptopunks launched. And I was like, see, this is real, like people want unique digital assets. And then there was a Cosmos Hackathon coming up and I looked at the first Cosmos HackAtom, there was this huge prize pool and like four participants. And I was like, all right, this is easy pickings. I had some friends that had done a couple of hackathons for just kind of fun stuff. So I used that to convince them, to build the first version of Clovers out with me the front end. And the reason we were able to justify it as part of Cosmos network is because the validation took so much gas. It just would never be possible on mainnet Ethereum gas costs were still low then, but just the the block limit was like 7 million gas. And at that point it was like 19 million gas to validate a Clovers. I mean, we went through crazy efficiencies. That was a big part of the learning experience in solidity was just like, how do you write efficient code? What are the mechanisms to move validation off chain? What are the schemes and things like that, which was a real fun part of building Clovers. But we actually all went to Toronto into the woods and spent like two weeks building out Clovers network and then launched it and won that Cosmos HackAtom. And that set me on a journey of going to, I guess I won six Hackathons in six months and then did a hacker in residence with L4 in Toronto where Cosmos was sharing an office. They were just opening up Full Node in Berlin. And so I was like, I want to be in Full Node. So I took a front-end job. Part-Time with Tendermint Inc. And then started doing freelance work for different Ethereum projects like Gnosis and Aragon.

Anna Rose (00:08:22):
I didn't know you worked with all of those teams. I have seen you at Full Node for many years, but I didn't know what you're doing there. Who's we, you kind of mentioned this, We, was there a team that you would, that had originally formed around Clovers?

Billy Rennekamp (00:08:34):
Yeah, we called ourselves Bin studio. We're pretty loosely affiliated. We don't actually have like a legal entity or something like that. We're friends. We shared a studio for many years, Alan Woo, Nicks Court and Everett Williams. Everett is actually my roommate.

Anna Rose (00:08:47):
Cool. Are they still building Clovers? It's like what happened to that group basically?

Billy Rennekamp (00:08:51):
Yeah. so everybody had sort of freelance gigs doing full-stack web development and everybody was getting excited about crypto at the same time, but freelance web dev life, you actually just have tons of work all the time. And it's kind of hard to say no. So we were never able to like fully get organized into like a company. But we certainly overlapped on a lot of projects together and Clovers was the biggest one. And so we really banded together, especially through 2019 up to the launch and, you know, continue to have studio do other projects together. Everett and I still work together with on folio.app, which is a NFT gallery, very tightly curated.

Anna Rose (00:09:24):
So I mean, most of this episode is actually going to be focused on your work in the Cosmos ecosystem, but I don't want to skip into that yet because I'm kind of curious about like, let's talk about folio. Let's also talk about like, what is Clovers now? Like, you know, you launched this or you're thinking about building in 2017, it went on mainnet in 2019. You said, is it still a thing or is it too expensive to use?

Billy Rennekamp (00:09:46):
It's kind of a thing. I mean, it's on Ethereum, so it's not stopped to any degree ever. And I spent a lot of 2018 and 2019 working with CAD CAD, the simulation framework for token engineering. And actually this goes back to your very first question about like bonding curves. You know, I got into bonding curves because I wanted to launch this project, but I didn't want to give a bunch of people a shit token that they couldn't trade anywhere. And when I heard that you could launch kind of a decentralized exchange that gave liquidity to a brand new token. I was like, hell yeah, I need this. So went through all of the early sort of stuff that Simon de la Rouviere was writing about and sort of starting to tweak those and work on my own versions of it. Bancor was kind of the go-to implementation to sort of use. I got really, really familiar with that protocol, how to adjust it for different needs, you know, Bancor was using in a pretty square way. And it turns out that there's a lot of different ways to modify it and use it for really exciting stuff. Slava Balasanov was a big part of working together with that. He's actually an old, old friend from New York. He's like a DJ and we know each other from the art music scene.

Anna Rose (00:10:41):
What's his role now?

Billy Rennekamp (00:10:43):
He runs Relevant Network and does a few different DeFi projects and some engineering inside the Cosmos space as well.

Anna Rose (00:10:50):
Okay. And then Clovers today?

Billy Rennekamp (00:10:52):
Yeah. So sorry was working with CAD CAD to, to do these simulations, like, all right. I built this extremely complicated token economic system with multiple participants that have multiple desires. There's like actions for incentives here and there. How do I know that this is going to work to any degree? And that gave me the ability to sort of build it out in a simulation model, create different like actors with their own sort of incentives and then run massive, massive simulations over to see how it works. And that included, you know different pricing mechanisms, different like rarity metrics as well as gas costs, but I never incorporated gas costs getting as high as they immediately did when we launched in summer of 2019 during the ETH Berlin Hackathon. And it was great. We were the number one gas guzzler on Ethereum for a couple of weeks in a row. I think there's something like 40,000 Clovers, which have been minted, you know, it's this massive number, which is also totally antagonistic to the degen mentality of NFTs where it's like, wait a minute. There's like potentially unlimited number of these like, hell no.

Anna Rose (00:11:47):
But they still have rarity? Right. There's a way that there's value in them?

Billy Rennekamp (00:11:52):
It's, it's a, I mean, it's, it's an art project, you know, you get into it and it gets esoteric and things like that. And I rethought it a couple of times. I was like, do I want to make this like a product market fit project? Or like, do I want to make this an artwork? And I was like, it's an artwork I need to like, stay true to that. So it's going to be a little bit obtuse. It's not going to be easy to swallow, but after the gas costs went really, really crazy it invalidated tons of the simulations I'd done. And so that's when I was actually like, oh, this is a fundamental problem with Ethereum. And if I were to like really build this in the way it needs to be built, I would use Cosmos technology and Cosmos hadn't launched IBC at that point. You know, there's a lot of sort of core work that needed to be done. And I'd been working closer and closer with the organization over the years, since I began as a front end engineer, I started doing developer relations just because I had such good connections to the Ethereum community. And I was like, all right, the best use of my time is to make Cosmos tech work so that it can be at a point that I would choose this tech to launch Clovers if I were to do it again and, you know, whatever time period. And I've kind of put Clovers in that box, you know, wait until I'm ready to rebuild it and relaunch it in a successful way.

Anna Rose (00:12:50):
Very cool. Let's now move a little bit into Cosmos because Cosmos would need then a smart contract platform within it. And when you were doing it, like it was just the base chain, the Atom chain.

Anna Rose (00:13:04):
There was Cosmos Hub. Okay. There was already Ethermint.

Billy Rennekamp (00:13:06):
When I did that Hackathon, I justified it by using Ethermint because you can adjust all the parameters. You can launch your own proof of stake chain with an EVM module. So I was like, cool, I'll have an EVM chain and I can have 19 million gas per block for Clovers network to work. But yeah, in general, it's about building custom modules rather than a shared state virtual machines.

Anna Rose (00:13:22):
Okay. But yeah, like what, what I was going to say though, is like now, and I realize, yes, Ethermint was around, but it was, it's like testnet form, right. It wasn't like...

Billy Rennekamp (00:13:31):
Like went through many iterations.

Anna Rose (00:13:32):
And now we're seeing a lot of these zones come online with IBC making it. I mean, I know some of the zones have already been here, but like now it's the Cosmos vision is being realized. What would that mean? Like, do you still plan on running Clovers on Ethermint and then bridging to other things? Like, what would that mean for that project? Like the new kind of Cosmos that exists and almost exists today because it does exist today, but it's still growing up.

Billy Rennekamp (00:13:57):
It's one of the product stories that we like to talk about with Ethermint. You know, when attracting projects, which originally built in Ethereum, like rather than having to reimplement everything and Golang you know, why don't you just drop it into an EVM on a Cosmos chain, you get all the benefits of Cosmos and you don't have to rewrite everything. There are limitations to the EVM beyond being run on like Ethereum let's say. Yeah. So I think the long-term path is to, you know, redeploy rewrite it and Go, but if you want to like hit the ground running, then you can just drop everything inside EVM and start like that, and then work out a timeline to when you would transition. So I might do that. I also just like the experience of working in Go. So it might be like like I said, this project Clovers has been a vehicle for me to like onboard new skills so many times.

Anna Rose (00:14:38):
Oh, but you want to do you, would you need to learn Go because you built it in solidity? I guess

Billy Rennekamp (00:14:41):
I did a bit of Go development inside of Tendermint when I was being a developer relations engineer there. And so I'm, I'm legible and I'm familiar with how the Cosmos SDK works pretty intimately, but I haven't had to do too much actual, you know, production code engineering. So it would be nice to spend some time back in the that way.

Anna Rose (00:14:59):
Cool. So we're actually speaking here at the Cosmoverse conference community conference here in Lisbon. So it's, it's really cool by the way, I think this is one of the first in-person interviews I've gotten to do a really long time. I love it. So, you know, we're here, we're actually learning. I mean, for me, it's been fantastic to see a lot of the projects that I have known about, but really in the virtual world come together and like be corporeal, like having the people behind it, standing in front of the banners of that project and being like, oh, I've heard of that one. Oh, I've heard of this one. And this is really exciting moment, I think for Cosmos, the Cosmosverse, especially because, because of like IBC having been launched during quarantine, right. It was like, we, right, It was like, we didn't actually get a chance. This is the first time I think that like a lot of people who are now bridging to each other's chains actually get a chance to meet. Why don't you give me a quick, from your perspective, like, what is Cosmos right now? What's the vibe, what's the feeling?

Billy Rennekamp (00:15:58):
I like to give, you know, people overuse this metaphor probably in the crypto space, but like the launch of the internet or something like that. And you know, before TCP IP and the internet, you had a bunch of personal computers and garages. And like maybe if you were lucky, you know, they started rolling out ethernet cables between them, you know, I mean, you'd have land parties, basically that could do that, but it wasn't feasible between say houses. And we're at the moment where we're just getting like internet access. And so it's small, you know, it's like Darpanet almost. There's just like, you can count the number of computers that are on the internet at this point. And it's really exciting because that number is growing like faster and faster. Every day, new networks are joining. They're enabling IBC. They're starting to participate in this internet of blockchain. So it's like so validating to, to like finally see this happen and like, feel like you're hitting product market fit. You know, we have this thesis of applications, specific blockchains make sense for scalability sovereignty. They require some more work, but people are going to want it and to be able to see like all these people who've put in work over the years, finally, like flipped things on and just start sort of having compounding value is really exciting.

Anna Rose (00:16:56):
That's cool. What do you think if there was some like update or something really significantly different in the ecosystem today, maybe versus a year and a half ago? What is it like maybe some projects that have really emerged as like important or some concepts that are much more talked about today?

Billy Rennekamp (00:17:14):
I think Relayers are probably something that is, is recognized as being so important today, that you know, even a year ago was, is not an afterthought, but just not a priority compared to just like implementing core IBC at the state machine level.

Anna Rose (00:17:30):
Maybe we should actually define what a relayer is. And maybe even very quickly what IBC does, because I think my audience might know this, but if they don't.

Billy Rennekamp (00:17:38):
We often talk about IBC as the internet of blockchain equivalent of TCP IP, which is the packet protocol that moves data between computers and really makes up what the internet is. And so if you think of a blockchain as a computer then IBC will gather outgoing information, put it in a standardized packet, like a shipping container, and then it gets moved over to the destination chain. And so the relayer is who actually moves it over. So you can think of them as a bit like the internet service providers. They're the ones who are actually connecting the TCP IP packets and making sure that they get sent to the proper destination. And then on the other side of that, you know, they're able to unwrap that packet. They speak TCP IP, they parse the data inside and they do something useful with it. And inside of those, you've got other protocols like HTTP got SMTP for emails. And that's what the IBC protocol level application logic is like. The only one that's live right now is token transfers. But you can write as many of these as you want and sort of enables massive aspects of like processing communication between these applications

Anna Rose (00:18:35):
What other things could it be like? I guess it's information. So could it be kind of an action on one chain and some, some part of that is communicated through, but it isn't necessarily a token transfer? What other kind of stuff?

Billy Rennekamp (00:18:47):
I mean, arbitrary data is usually, you know, the, the term that people talk about. So that means anything that you want. But if we're getting concrete to the next packet type that we'll see go live is called Interchain accounts. And without Interchain accounts, you would probably start iterating through all the different types of messages that one blockchain can process. So a transfer message, you know, many blockchains can process. And that's what the first IBC is. It's an IBC transfer. You could imagine, oh, I want to vote between blockchains. So maybe I'll put a vote IBC packet. So then you send it through one blockchain and then it's able to hit the destination. They unwrap it like, oh, this is a vote. And it's from this person. And then it's yes, on proposal, whatever. But if you were going to do that, you'd have to write a new IBC standard for each message type that you want to communicate across blockchains. So Interchains accounts really accelerates this capability. Interchain accounts is essentially a standard packet that accepts an arbitrary message. So that means that IBC doesn't need to know what kind of message it is. It means that it assumes the destination chain will be able to parse whatever message. So it's, it's sort of a, a layer of attraction above the message itself for IBC. So you could put a vote message inside of it. I could see it as a no, that exactly.

Anna Rose (00:20:00):
And then on the other chain, it's recognized like some, some indicator says this is a vote, but the actual IBC doesn't really care whats in it.

Billy Rennekamp (00:20:06):
Exactly. IBC says, is it a message? You know, it's able to just confirm that it's a message where it has no idea what type of message, what the information inside of it is. Whereas at the transfer version, you know, IBC itself says, Hey, tell me who it's from. Tell me what's to tell me how many and tell me what the type of token it is. And this is just like, Hey, give me the message and tell me the destination. I don't need to know what's inside of it.

Anna Rose (00:20:26):
How would those standards actually be decided upon though, like, is that something that just two, two networks, two zones we'll have to agree on every time they want to send these things back and forth. This is a vote. When I say number four, I mean, vote something like, or is this something that you'd see as like an ecosystem, white standard.

Billy Rennekamp (00:20:41):
It's an ecosystem-wide standard. The token transfer, I think is ICS-20 and Interchain accounts, I believe is ICS-21. There's one for NFTs, which is going to be, I think ICS-30 numbering system is a little strange, but yeah, it follows a similar sort of IP process,

Anna Rose (00:20:57):
Interesting. But NFTs would have their own.

Billy Rennekamp (00:20:58):
Yeah. I mean, you could have a, an NFT transfer inside of Interchain accounts, but I think there's, there's some justification for having it as a standard itself.

Anna Rose (00:21:06):
Will that affect the way that these things have to be built on the chain themselves, like, will they have to follow a standard? Like I use the NFT example. I mean, in Ethereum, there is, there are standards, but early versions of NFTs were built differently, but they still did the same thing roughly. So yeah, like would each zone need to adhere to an NFT standard in order to use this NFT? Like, I'm just curious, does this make for like inevitable standardization, maybe for efficiency reasons?

Billy Rennekamp (00:21:33):
Yeah. I mean, it's the same with computers. So if I sent, you know, an SMTP packet over TCP IP to a computer and, you know, they didn't have proper like mail software to understand or read what SMTP is, then it would break. So it's in their interest to, to, you know, get on board with the applicationable standards.

Anna Rose (00:21:51):
Is it something that would go through the governance of the hub, or like, how did the standards get fixed?

Billy Rennekamp (00:21:55):
They're essentially modules. So IBC is a module, but it doesn't have any messages which can be sent directly to it. One way to think about the Cosmos SDK module system, at least comparing it to Ethereum is like a method or a smart contract let's say is a module. And that smart contract can have multiple methods that can be executed, in Cosmos those methods. Don't all go into the same message type, which is, I think ETH call each one gets its own message type. And so the IBC core module doesn't have any messages that are submitted directly to it. It's more of like a helper module. So there's a transfer IBC module, which imports IBC uses that module to sort of confirm, Hey, this packet really came from where it said it is once that's been checked off, then it's handed over to the actual like logic. And then it says, you know, Hey, I'm gonna use the bank module to make a new token. And that's a representation of the one that came from the other one. So each of these are modules that get shipped inside of the IBC go repository. And so if you don't want to have to implement it yourself, for instance, you would be able to do it there. But if you're building somewhere outside of the Cosmos SDK, and you want to interact with an IBC packet that came from anywhere else, you would just need to make sure that your implementation deciphers it correctly says, okay, this IBC packets coming in, it's been encoded like this. I should expect here from here to, and here at an amount. And then it's up to me to like record that inside of my accounting system. You know, if I'm on Ethereum at that point, I would update the balance of this user inside of my smart contract, rather than using the bank module.

Anna Rose (00:23:25):
Could you almost do something creative where you like misinterpret something on purpose? Like you decide to like read an NFT as a vote or something?

Billy Rennekamp (00:23:32):
I would love to do that. I mean, this is the kind of stuff that gets me going, but I don't have nearly enough time to spend on it.

Anna Rose (00:23:38):
Interesting. Okay. Let's talk a little bit about your role and I'm curious how, I mean, I know you from this role of working at the ICF, the Interchain Foundation, how long have you actually been, have you been there?

Billy Rennekamp (00:23:50):
Since February of 2020.

Anna Rose (00:23:52):
Okay. And this was, was this when that was founded when it was formed?

Billy Rennekamp (00:23:54):
It started in 2017. Perform the fundraising event for Cosmos network. They raised 17 million in like 30 minutes for a fundraising event. And then they also received the Bitcoin and ETHER from that. And 10% of the Atom, of course, everybody loves Swiss foundations to do their fundraising events. So that was the justification. 10% of the token went to Tendermint Inc. in order to do engineering. And typically the relationship was that Tendermint Inc would do engineering work and build the ICF and basically pay for the the work to happen. Over the years, the scope of the project, I mean, it didn't expand, but I think people realized how large the scope of the project was. And we started getting contributors from all different directions. And the ICF is basically the funding mechanism to work on all this open source tech. And so it also, at one point started building out its own research and development team headed by Ethan Buckman co-founder the project, he spun that out into a co-op called it informal systems and around February, 2020, right at the same time that there was a large group of engineers who left Tendermint Inc. moved directly into the foundation to start, to continue core development, especially on Tendermint core and IBC.

Anna Rose (00:25:04):
There's also Interchain Berlin, which is different. So it was part of the engineering to the foundation and then to Interchain Berlin, or was it split?

Billy Rennekamp (00:25:14):
So Interchain Berlin is, is Interchain Gmbh, which is a fully owned subsidiary of the foundation. So for all intents and purposes, it's, it's part of the same organization. The foundation has org management and finishing council, but, but really there's not many people directly employed by the foundation. So it's really just an employment vehicle.

Anna Rose (00:25:34):
Got it. Okay. So your Cosmos Hub lead at the Interchain Foundation, let's find out a little bit more about what that means. You mentioned funding. Do you, do you do development as well? Do you do research? What kind of stuff are your working on?

Billy Rennekamp (00:25:47):
Yeah, so the last year I was primarily working as the grants manager. So making sure that all the different core organizations were able to, you know, get paid to work in the core tech, but also help prioritize what was getting worked on by who, what wasn't getting worked on was actually the biggest sort of piece of attention. And that was a two person team worked hand-in-hand with Sam Hart. Who's fantastic human being absolute salute. And it, it ended up looking more and more, almost like a product role for the Cosmos Hub, you know, because we're sort of like taking this extremely high level view across the entire ecosystem. We're like, all right, what is Cosmos? What is the Cosmos network? You know, it's, it's, it's way more than just the Cosmos Hub, certainly the Cosmos Hub in the middle of it, there's this organizing factor, what are the directions? What are the things that need to happen? And you know, we, we sort of built out a team that we call it a CRUD which is, you know, the acronym from development, create, read, update, and delete, and also sounds like the word crud is great. But our whole thing was like, all right, we're scaffolding solutions right now. And maybe a solution is that we can hire a new person or build a new team internally, or maybe it's a grant or maybe it's, you know, funding an entire new organization. What do we do to be able to like fill all the gaps that we can identify from this vantage point? And so recently I'm transitioning Sam is, is leading that, that effort directly I'm taking sort of the momentum that is much more product focused in that capacity and focusing in on the Cosmos Hub, especially.

Anna Rose (00:27:10):
Interesting. I'm kind of curious about this relationship ICF Cosmos Hub, because ICF I understand is an organization that's there to sort of support and fund the larger Cosmos network. And that's different from the Cosmos Hub, which is where Atom lives, the Atom, the token. Tell me a little bit about like your vision on that. Like, do you see in a Cosmos ecosystem, or do you feel like the mandate of the ICF is to focus on that hub?

Billy Rennekamp (00:27:36):
Actually, when I first joined, I think there was this real sort of attitude of focusing on the tech for the success of the larger vision. You know what I mean, that larger vision I think is really, really especially exciting and why we've had such talented people involved in the projects. And so early, you know, we were focusing on building the Cosmos SDK first instead of building the Cosmos Hub first, you know, that was a much more Securitas path to launching a blockchain. But the point was so that other people would be able to launch their blockchains much more easily.

Anna Rose (00:28:05):
But then the hub was the example, like you were, you were actually building the tech for the hub, anyway.

Billy Rennekamp (00:28:10):
Absolutely. Absolutely. But just thinking, you know, like we could have just built a Golang implementation of a blockchain that wasn't, you know, reusable or modular for other people. And, you know, I think that was part of the exciting vision of the whole project is, you know, like we want there to be many, many blockchains. And so that was, that was prioritized. And I think especially through the, the duration of the beginning, there was this real emphasis on the larger vision of the network and all the other projects. And I think that we actually, you know, we can call that a success like we have this massive ecosystem was an accumulative market cap in the hundreds of billions and, you know, we, we hit product market fit with that, that aspect. That doesn't mean though that the Cosmos Hub was completely left out of the scene or anything like that. But I do think that if you're looking at this as sort of a pendulum, that there is a reemphasis on the Cosmos Hub itself, like it serves an extremely important purpose by just being a proof of concept for, you know, cutting edge technology, proof of stake, Cosmos SDK and IBC. But there's this really amazing opportunity for the Cosmos Hub itself. Who's in the middle of this vibrant ecosystem to provide value across that ecosystem. And so over the last year, there's certainly been a re re emphasis on making the Cosmos Hub itself more valuable and participatory in the larger Cosmos network. So the foundation you know, it, it has a pretty broad mandate about basically supporting the development of new technologies, especially decentralized technologies, especially around the Cosmos network. And so it also sort of depends on what your definition of Cosmos network is. You know, I think we've gotten a lot of confusion around this maybe for better or worse, but is the Cosmos network Cosmos Hub or is it the greater IBC ecosystem or is it the entire world of blockchains? You know, that is the internet of blockchains.

Anna Rose (00:29:50):
Where is it anyone who's used the Cosmos SDK? Cause I know that's a big question is like does Binance, which uses it count if they're not playing within it.

Billy Rennekamp (00:29:59):
Totally count them. I mean, again, I like to think that everyone is a part of the Cosmos network, whether they realize it or not.

Anna Rose (00:30:04):
Tell me what, what could the hub actually do to kind of add that value just described?

Billy Rennekamp (00:30:09):
Yeah. I mean, again, I would like to always reiterate that like the Cosmos Hub has served one of the most important purposes, I think in any blockchain in the history, just by being, you know, the first place to deploy this, this extremely important technology that I think will change the paradigms and the success of blockchains in the long run. So, you know, if it ends right there, I will feel like satisfied and accomplished. But again, like I said, I think there's a huge opportunity to do way more. At its core, the Cosmos Hub is a staking blockchain. The Atom is a staking token and I feel like that is one of the sort of strongest feature sets, which is why recently I've gotten really excited about Interchain security, which we can dive into a little bit, but that really opens up a lot of options. In general, though, I like to think of the Cosmos Hub as almost like this VC in the middle of this new ecosystem with like, you know, how can I be helpful? And so

Anna Rose (00:30:57):
Do you think of that because of the, like the community fund. Do you think of it because of like, is it the funding part?

Billy Rennekamp (00:31:03):
Well, it is the starting point at a technical level at a social level. It's Hey, I'm interested in this paradigm. I mentioned in this ecosystem, like, how do we get started? What do I do? I looked at the Cosmos Hub, for example, I looked at the Cosmos Hub for validators. I looked for Cosmos Hub for, for validation of the different, like economic models that I'm considering. But I think there's a lot more that it can do. And there's a protocol that we're building out right now that we call it discoverability. Essentially it's a Cosmos Hub is the starting point for the access to the internet of blockchains. There's this real question, especially at an infrastructure level for like how do you navigate that? You know, it's actually a problem with every decentralized peer to peer network system is, you know, what is the node that I originally talked to, to join this network, to verify that I'm actually part of the right network, you know, there's this chicken and egg problem with trust assumptions, whenever joining peer to peer networks and the Cosmos Hub, if it's the best known and if it's largest, if it has the most access, then it can be, you know that starting point, that point of trust that sort of allows you to explore from there. And that's, you know, like I said, no discovery, but it's also things like chain IDs. So even verifying the blockchain you're talking to is the one that you think you're talking to really important when it comes to IBC packet routing,

Anna Rose (00:32:09):
This is similar to like indexing is like, this would be the library index in a way, like the place you start, what are they used to call the thing, the paper Rolodex or the Rolodex?

Billy Rennekamp (00:32:20):
Absolutely. But even like asset registries, you know, when you're sort of like, okay, there's, there's tons of these tokens out here. How do I like actually differentiate where they are? And each space you've seen a lot of various degrees of centralized, decentralized asset registries. You know, I think Parity at one point tried to make like a smart contract, which, you know, kept track of metadata for tokens that MetaMask was using for a while that couldn't up with even like a method names with our IDs was with some sort of attempt. And this also has to do with IBC packet routing, Multi hop packets, assetless, chain IDs, could even be name resolution for things like ENS, which I recently realized you can register names on Ethereum and delegate the registry to other blockchains. So the Cosmos Hub could be Ethereum name service registry for a series of Cosmos domains.

Anna Rose (00:33:04):
Would there be a Cosmos named service itself or would you, do you think that's not necessary?

Billy Rennekamp (00:33:10):
There is one actually already it's called Starname. And they use a different naming scheme, but that's very much the goal. I think it's much closer to the address resolution system that you'd see in, in Ethereum name service as well, but certainly this, this sort of like aspect discoverability, I think Cosmos Hub is especially well-positioned to serve. And there was a really great essay written earlier this year from co-founder of the project, Ethan Buchman and Sam Hart, who I mentioned working closely with Interchain foundation called Cosmos Hub as a port city. And you know, being a port city there's there's aspects that are really useful for, you know, all of the infrastructure and economics that come through them, you know, even, you know, if you, if you compare it to like port airports, you know, you don't have, or sorry, hub airports. It's not that every airport connects to every airport, you know, much more convenient to, to route through these hubs that are well-connected and inside of them, you know, there's certainly there's conveniences, you know, there's restaurants and you can exchange money. You may not get the best deal on that money because the convenience is sort of the trade-off, you know, whereas if you go to a banking town, you know, you have the most efficient sort of DeFi sorts of systems. But there's some things that you can add to make it useful in the process of moving between this, this interconnected sort of blockchain ecosystem. And that's sort of the perspective that we've taken for the ways that the Cosmos Hub can be provided for useful.

Anna Rose (00:34:24):
I remember like the first interview I ever did on the Cosmos ecosystem was Sunny and he totally painted that picture of the airplane hubs. And at the time it was like Cosmos Hub, an Iris. But now what you kind of are starting to see is that there's like, in, in that time, these hubs were quite similar. Like they were kind of doing the exact same purpose acting as these like hubs, but now you're seeing things like Osmosis, also project from Sunny that is quite different in its use. Like it's not, I don't, I don't see it as like realizing the same role as the hub and yet it's becoming a hub of its own, but kind of for different reasons. So is that something that you're expecting to also see more of...

Billy Rennekamp (00:35:05):
Totally. I mean, these sorts of paths they grow organically, you know, you can't like it's not like when the Wright brothers made an airplane, they decided that there's going to be hubs and spokes and airports, you know, it happened pretty organically over the years and it's wayfinding paths and its purposes, but it comes up like a DEX hub basically. And and for that capacity, you know, it makes a lot of sense and we've always sort of been a fan of multiple hubs as part of this interconnected system. And you mentioned Iris earlier, but even like, you know, game hubs, things like that. So, you know, inside of pockets, you'd have a lot more sense to have a hub that connects a bunch of chains. And then from that hub, it can connect to other hubs for other different purposes. I expect to see it grow organically in directions that, you know, we never expected. You can look at Iris for example, again you know, they work really closely with the Chinese government, making a regulated blockchains, a thing over there where it's, it's, you know, much more conservative towards consumer protection and tokens that there's real demand for regulated systems. And that, that hub is able to sort of serve that purpose in that jurisdiction in a way that, you know, the Cosmos Hub isn't necessarily conditioned to do so.

Anna Rose (00:36:08):
But I guess the next question then is like, there is actually a DEX on the hub gravity DEX. Does that make sense for that hub to have a DEX or could it actually be a problem? Like you mentioned Osmosis as this Dex hub, should it be used for discoverability and security, but also for like token trades or do you think that becomes kind of convoluted?

Billy Rennekamp (00:36:27):
I think there actually is pretty good justification for DEXes on every chain. I mean, that's maybe a contentious question. It actually has depends a lot on how liquidity sharing ends up shaking out, but there's, there's certain aspects of having direct access to trades and to price feeds via DEXes that becomes really useful across context. So, I mean, it's a bit of an aside. I do think that DEXes can be justified and in places that you wouldn't expect them, I think that the team behind the Gravity DEX is really talented B-Harvest. They have a lot of really great ideas around how to build exciting DeFi projects. And I think that what we see though is we start getting into the territory that violates hub minimalism, the ethos of hub minimalism, which is when you might start rethinking some of it and having minimalism is the idea that, you know, the hub is too critical to add every bell and whistle that you want to because every time you do it increases the attack surface, the error, the possibility of mistakes, errors, bugs, whatever. And you know, you don't want your blockchain going down for any reason. And it's actually one of the reasons why I'm especially excited about Interchain security. The V1 is really actually more of a scaling solution and a sovereignty solution for a single blockchain like the Cosmos Hub. And you basically have the ability to take specific modules, put them on their own blockchain, but use the exact same validator set with the exact same staking token to run them as independent blockchains. Then they're able to have their own governance token, which can be, you know, even more keyed into exactly the purpose of that blockchain have a more succinct development cycle, have a more reflective voter turnout for its purpose. And it means that the Cosmos Hub can start actually having all of these wild and crazy features in the security that Adam is, is backing them while the critical running of the Cosmos itself is not threatened in the same way, because if they go down, it doesn't stop the block production on the core Cosmos Hub.

Anna Rose (00:38:17):
We use the DEX as an example for what you just described. So like how would it actually work? This is this Interchain security, V1. Where is that? W w where does that come from first off? Is that this like, from coming from the ICF is this research

Billy Rennekamp (00:38:30):
There's actually talks from 2017 with Jae Kwon talking about ways that IBC be used for replicated validator sets in Interchain security.

Anna Rose (00:38:38):
And that's, when you say Interchain security V1, though, you're talking about, like, this is an idea of how you could maybe already today use the hub and the validator set there as the security, but have these like subset chains, zones logged into that, locked into that, but not, they're not necessarily doing their own consensus. They're just, they're using the Cosmos Hub validator set for the consensus, but they're doing something else.

Billy Rennekamp (00:39:02):
Well, from a validator perspective, it actually looks like you're just running a validator on two separate blockchains. Okay. you know, you've got two nodes running on two different servers, you know, it's a lot of validators operate on multiple networks, or they're used to this idea that cool, I'm gonna start operating in this one. And I wasn't heard that one of the benefits of the Cosmos SDK is that it makes it easier for validators to run new nodes on your networks. It's just the same setup. The difference being when you launch this new node on this new network, you don't need to own tokens for that new network. You know, you're already considered part of that validator set because you're considered part of the Cosmos Hub validator set. And so what's happening at the IBC level is the Cosmos Hub is running like normal. And then it starts grabbing the set of validators and their voting power. And they stick that into an IBC packet. They send it to this new blockchain, and that's the source of inclusion of the validator set that this new blockchain uses. It doesn't use its own token to check who's a validator, and who's not, it uses this incoming IBC packet to say, who's a validator and who's not,

Anna Rose (00:40:02):
But would each validator then run each of these instances or would it be like some subset of the validators on the main Cosmos Hub also run these other kinds of validator nodes? Like yeah. Would you picture like all validators running all nodes on all of these sub chains?

Billy Rennekamp (00:40:17):
So you know, I mentioned that, that this idea isn't completely new, it's been talked about for a while, but it's mostly been talked about under this concept of horizontal scaling and because, you know, Cosmos Hub, isn't running into scaling issues. It traditionally hasn't been prioritized. But recently, you know, more thinking about the other benefits from it, I think has brought it back into the conversation and really reemphasize things over the last year. But horizontal scaling is, you know, this concept that well, vertical scaling, is this concept that you're trying to shove as many packets as possible into a single block, you know, increase the transactions per second, by any means necessary. But no matter how many sort of improvements in developments, you're eventually gonna run into like a physical limit of what's possible there. And so the idea of horizontal security is that you would just launch a brand new blockchain that has the same functionality, or has complimentary functionality. So it's sort of using IBC to communicate between them, but otherwise distinct blockchains problem with that of course, is that you need a brand new token to do that. And it might not be as secure as the original blockchain. So if you're able to replicate the original validator set across these, then you're able to have the same security as a single blockchain, but spiritually it's still just one blockchain. It's now been broken up into constituent parts, scaled, horizontally to accommodate way more transactions per second.

Anna Rose (00:41:25):
But going back to that question, do the validators have to run nodes on each side? Or is it like such as messages, or just sent over via a couple nodes? Like, I'm just curious if yeah. If you have to run all of them.

Billy Rennekamp (00:41:38):
I mentioned that part first, because when you, when you're talking about like horizontal scaling, you're saying spiritually, this is part of the same blockchain. So it should have a hundred percent of the same validator set. It should be the same token. There's no real differentiation. However, that's not the only option and V2 of Interchain security is this opt-in validator set. And that's basically where every validator on the, what we call the provider chain gets to decide, Hey, is it worthwhile for me to produce blocks on this new chain? Is it worthwhile for me to risk my Atoms in order to receive rewards that this, this consumer chain is willing to pay me? You know, because each of these new chains could have their own economic system, their own reward system, the IBC sending those rewards back up to the provider chain and distributing it to, you know, those validators who produce blocks, but with opt-in, it becomes sort of this free market mechanic of like, what are you willing to do for it? And, you know, if you look at say the shared security model and Polkadot, these parachains, it's sort of a one size fits all. We have an auction model, you know, if it doesn't fit that too bad, whereas there's really this very large design space inside of the opt-in shared security model inside Cosmos, where it's, you know, it could be a completely off chain agreement. You know, I've got legal agreements with these 10 validators and I pay them monthly to validate on my blockchain. And I don't send them any tokens or fees on chain but they're still willing to risk their Atoms because, you know, I'm paying out of band. So it's, it's really a pretty large design space for saying, you know, what's going to make it worthwhile for you to risk your Atoms.

Anna Rose (00:43:02):
Definitely. I mean, as you're describing this, I definitely see echoes of the Polkadot model of like running the main chain node relay chain node, plus the collator nodes, or, but in that case, it's like totally optional. A lot of validators don't run both. They can, but they don't have to. And then I also hear echoes of like, roll-ups a little bit, cause they're also often running like the relayer between those two things. It's not, I don't know what it's going to be like, actually. Now once there's validators, I actually don't know this. I'm just realizing, I won't know. I don't actually know what happens when there's validators on Ethereum and then these other validators on the L2s. But I know like right now you do have to like, basically the relayer between these two things is going to have to be running two clients, at least. So, yeah, I'm, I'm hearing echoes of this in the case of the Ethereum roll-up space, I guess that's also very, very free, but do you see this as in any way similar to roll-ups or do you see it as like significantly different?

Billy Rennekamp (00:43:58):
No, I mean, they definitely exists inside of, you know, the same space or are solving the same problem with different benefits and drawbacks. So they're complimentary in that way. But actually I think what's, what's kind of exciting is, is the V3 of Interchain security. That's where you actually have a project, a blockchain that already has its own staking token. And you do this sort of like insurance between them. So you still receive either the full validator set from the provider chain or partial validator set from the validator chain once it's been received, though, you mix it together with your internal accounting of your current staking tokens validator set on the hub. On the consumer chain, the provider chain have sent their validators who were willing to risk Atoms or you know, to help produce blocks. The consumer chain receives that. And then it compiles those internally with its own records. So it might be like, oh, every two Atoms is worth X voting power. And every six of my local things are worth, whatever, you know, it's sort of a design for the consumer chain to decide at the end of that, you have a new list of validators with voting powers. You might have a validator who exists on both records. You know, I own tokens locally and I also own them Atoms. So that gives me like double the placement on the list. Or I just have so many Atoms, I get to make a spot even they don't have any of the tokens. And so in Celestia has been vocal about being interested in that configuration. A lot of projects have been especially excited about that. And I don't know if you caught, Sonny's talk yesterday talking about super fluid staking and this real vision for this kind of like cross mutual shared risk reward system, like a mesh net of security across the Cosmos space. And the V3 really makes that possible where you could even imagine Celestia paying some token fees in order to receive security from Atom and the Cosmos Hub, potentially doing the exact same thing the back ways you have this sort of mutually assured destruction and shared validator sets.

Anna Rose (00:45:43):
So you just use this term provider chain and consumer chain. What are those? Because like, I remember I actually saw your talk on this yesterday and also wasn't clear then, like, is the provider chain, the Atom hub Cosmos Hub?

Billy Rennekamp (00:45:57):
Yes.

Anna Rose (00:45:57):
Okay. So that's a provider chain. Why is it? Is provider a validator?

Billy Rennekamp (00:46:01):
Yeah, so we used to use the term parent chain and child chain. Parent chain has the staking token child chain consumes the, the validator set from the parent chain. But especially when we get into this V3 where it's more of this like potential mutual back and forth, we didn't like using such a diminutive term for the child chain. So

Anna Rose (00:46:21):
The child selling the food back to the parent.

Billy Rennekamp (00:46:24):
They're a legitimate part of the system. So they're consuming the validator set from the parent and the parent is providing the validator set to the consumer.

Anna Rose (00:46:33):
Got it. So then the let's use going back to that original idea, this idea of using like a, let's use a DEX as an example, and walk through what that would look like. So if you wanted, would like, could you imagine a DEX living on the consumer side and then, but not having its own validator set and like yeah. Maybe can you paint a picture for what that would look like?

Billy Rennekamp (00:46:57):
Yeah. I think for something like the DEX, which is maybe a little bit more spiritually identified as part of the Cosmos Hub already, since it's literally on the Cosmos Hub, it would make sense to have the full validator set, you know, this kind of horizontal scaling version of it. However, I'm a big fan of the idea that on this other chain, there should still be a governance token, which is keyed specifically for the purpose of that module. I've gotten feedback from validators before who were like, you know, we're node infrastructure operators. You know, we don't know how to vote on proposals that come up that have to do with DeFi parameters. You know, why should I feel qualified to participate in this? And the idea that you would have a governance token, which is, you know, suited to the purpose of the application rather than the operation of the infrastructure. I think makes a lot of sense. It's certainly easier to imagine. Well, in terms of migration, it's a little bit more difficult to say, move a module off of a blockchain onto its own blockchain likely you'd want to have the new blockchain running. And the DEX is still being on the Cosmos Hub, maybe doing some sort of a liquidity migration incentivization or something like that, to make sure that moves over and a timeline or a cutoff would probably be the sort of cleanest thing. But you could also imagine it working the other way around, for instance if the gravity bridge were to be on its own chain with its own token, it could actually launch with a validator set. And once Interchain security, V1 is live, that validator set that that staking token can be converted purely to a governance token. And then the validator set comes directly from the Cosmos Hub instead. And so in some ways it's easier to convert a pre-existing blockchain to using Interchain security than the other way around. And that's the way we might actually see, you know, Interchain security, start to roll out on the Cosmos Hub itself, you know, launch a sort of a temporary validator set that gets converted to a governance token.

Anna Rose (00:48:42):
Could you ever imagine something like, like Osmosis has a pretty vibrant validator set? Although a lot of the validators are similar to those on the hub, would it ever make sense to like merge? And I hope the Osmosis team isn't annoyed by even this suggestion, but like, would it ever make sense to take two existing zones or one, one zone in the hub and actually like merge it in like say they, maybe their validators set starts to like dwindle or something? Yeah, by the way, not saying that that's going to happen on Osmosis.

Billy Rennekamp (00:49:12):
So if, if what you're asking about is sort of ignoring the idea of Interchain security at all, just the idea that, Hey, there's these two blockchains, why aren't they one blockchain? I mean, this is...

Anna Rose (00:49:21):
Why don't they take advantage of this just like save, save people sort of the trouble.

Billy Rennekamp (00:49:25):
It gets me thinking about this, this concept of like blockchain mergers and acquisitions, which I really love. I think Sunny was suggesting that the Cosmos Hub acquire Starname, you know, which is this name service we talked about earlier. You know, when you start thinking like at a technical level, what does it even look like? Like how do you kill a chain? Like, how do you, do you buy the tokens? Does the Cosmos Hub community pool by them?

Anna Rose (00:49:45):
Well, there are mergers happening there's Keep and New Cipher, which is like quite far along in their merger. And those are, I believe, like kind of equal mergers and then there's Hermez and Polygon, which is like a purchase of a network. And it's going to be very interesting to watch those go. I think so far what it looks like is, I mean, basically exchanging the tokens for new tokens and incorporating the teams. So one of the, one of the two or both will like you know, trade in their tokens for a new token. And that just sort of solves the problem

Billy Rennekamp (00:50:15):
I always wonder though, is there going to be like a contingency who refuses or some leftover, it's actually really hard to kill a chain. Somebody is willing to validate on the old one, you know, it becomes a fork or it becomes contentious or not, but like,

Anna Rose (00:50:28):
Not even just a chain, I think of like DAI and SAI. Like I remember when they switched to multi collateral DAI, and you could switch your tokens over. And I did, and now look at SAI and apparently a bunch of people didn't, it's worth way more than a dollar. Right?

Billy Rennekamp (00:50:43):
Yeah. I was so glad to realize that I forgot some SAI.

Anna Rose (00:50:47):
I did not. But that's interesting though, like, yeah, that, that question of the merge and in this case, like if, if this chain became this consumer chain though, and so it wasn't that it was completely like, you know, consumed by this buying chain, but rather became like it was purchased or acquired somehow, and then became this consumer chain, like there still would be potentially used for their token as a governance token.

Billy Rennekamp (00:51:16):
Yep. It actually is from a technical level, rather convenient, too. We did some research into what's the easiest way to separate the governance module from the staking module. Cause they're quite intertwined. And in order to like, you know, basically replace the staking module with the Interchain security version of it, you know, where you just receive the validator directly. And then you hand that up to the Tendermint consensus. And it was funny because we realized there's two lines inside of the staking module in which they send the validator set up to Tendermint and it's in the nit chain and N blockers. So what happens at the end of every block and also when the blockchain launches, if you remove those two lines. So the staking module is no longer telling Tendermint who the validators are. Then you just have basically elected officials who represent you for governance, but don't have the responsibility of operating validator nodes anymore. And so you have the entire governance system, except for you're, you're representing people who are like their sole job is to vote for you. You delegate to them, they receive a commission on the block rewards for like being a well subscribed. You know, it's this, this kind of bizarre version of a few different governance systems. And I mean, it is the governance system we have today, but because they're serving multiple roles, you never really think about them. What if they were purely this governmental representation? And I was really taking a step back. I was like, oh my God, like we build this governance system so that it would, it would support staking and validation, but like, there's actually really interesting features for it purely at a governance level.

Anna Rose (00:52:40):
Wow. It's kind of replicating the meet space or something.

Billy Rennekamp (00:52:44):
In parts. I mean, you, you don't get paid directly for how many people are constituents in your jurisdiction. And then you also have the, like, anybody can basically sign up as one of these representatives. So you don't have to be limited to 150 validators, and you can have thousands of people who want to be self representing and they're lobbying people to delegate to them because they're going to have great votes and then they're changing what their commission rate is because, you know I don't know, I'm so successful for the network. I'm going to drive the token value up and that deserves, you know, a larger cut of the block rewards for representation. It just as a, as a whole new design space, that that's kind of interesting.

Anna Rose (00:53:17):
I want to take a slightly different direction now and talk a little bit about bridges. We just mentioned IBC, and I don't know if the creators of IBC call IBC a bridge technology, but I can't help, but kind of think it's at least falls into a similar category. But I do wonder about like other kinds of bridges in the Cosmos ecosystem. Like, do you imagine, or is there writing around this where it's like, there is the IBC bridge between two networks, but could there also be other bridges? Would they serve any purpose or when you talk about like other networks that are not built on the Cosmos SDK that do not have IBC enabled, like, will they be like, I think that's kind of inevitable that some bridging will come from outside. So yeah. What's the thought process around bridging IBC and Cosmos?

Billy Rennekamp (00:54:05):
Totally. I mean, I often describe IBC as a bridge in a box. You know, bridges are messy. They're, they're hard to do. They have all these security vulnerabilities and trust assumptions, and like IBC tries to simplify, maximize the integrity to the max and then make it deployable like a, just a pop-up bridge. Anybody can do it. You don't have to have these trust assumptions. So very much it's in the conversation for bridges, it's bridge in a box. But you know while obviously it's being implemented in the Cosmos SDK, it's being implemented in rust to be able to work in rust-based environments it's been implemented in solidity. The goal is to have IBC accessible and usable in as many diverse settings as possible by no means restricted to just the Cosmos SDK. But certainly there's conditions that make that easier or harder. IBC asks for proof when you send over a packet and the highest integrity of proof is like client proofs especially efficient light clients.

Anna Rose (00:54:59):
So this means light clients living on other networks, if they want to interact with IBC.

Billy Rennekamp (00:55:02):
Exactly. but that's where, you know, we want to see IBC use with the utmost highest degree of trust assumptions. However you could have the proof be I'm the boss and here's the signature that says this happened over here. Don't ask questions. IBC doesn't necessarily care. You know, it's, it's bringing over some proof that maybe you should question. But at a protocol level, obviously it's like, cool. This is the proof I was given. Like, do, what is it, what you will? And so there is a very large design space strictly using IBC for a pretty diverse set of endpoints, but it's going to take a lot of work from, especially the projects who have diverse end points to really understand what's capable there. And the short term solutions are basically multisig bridges, which is what we have today. And so, you know, while I'd like to see the most complete version of it impacting everywhere possible we certainly have a long way to go to that. And there's gonna be many stepping stones that, that require different bridge implementations

Anna Rose (00:55:57):
Like for example, why do you need the gravity bridge? If you have IBC, maybe this is kind of speaks to this a little like,

Billy Rennekamp (00:56:04):
So one of the reasons would be because Ethereum is not going to make a pre compile to validate light client signatures from Tendermint. So if you wanted to have a Tendermint chain like Cosmos Hub as an IBC package directly the two Ethereum, it'd be very gas inefficient. One of the other problems is that IBC wants to assume finality. You would have to make some pretty bizarre modifications to accommodate a probabilistic blockchain like Ethereum. You know, when is the IBC packet finalized or not? You know, how long do you have to send the confirmation between them? You know, you'd have to use these really, really long periods. It gets kind of, kind of messy. So there's a couple reasons that Ethereum is not an ideal solution for native IBC implementations, I, which is why we have so much work. That's gone into the gravity bridge mutation, which has a lot of efficiencies around batch token transfers to make sure that the gas costs are, are minimal on the Ethereum side. And it also has the same trust assumptions on the Cosmos side, as the validator set itself, it basically hijacks the validator set and says, Hey, you also have a job of acting as an Oracle. You are now going to tell me when tokens get locked up on Ethereum, and they're going to mint them locally inside your state machine. And there's a few different incentives and slashing mechanisms to make sure that people don't do a bad job or don't slack off,

Anna Rose (00:57:18):
But there's no is a relayers in the gravity bridge. Do you know that this...

Billy Rennekamp (00:57:21):
They call it an orchestrator. It's essentially the same thing. They orchestrators are often just the validators things get a little bit easier when it's the same party. It's not necessarily a requirement. You know, that's one of the beauties of IBC is that anybody can be a relayer, there's sort of a disinterested third parties.

Billy Rennekamp (00:57:37):
Technically that's possible with gravity bridge implementation, but for convenience, the way it's operated is there's an assumption that you're a validator and you're also the, what they call the orchestrator. Who's, who's relaying the information between them acting as that Oracle.

Anna Rose (00:57:49):
The gravity bridge, as I understood, it was like Ethereum mostly to the Cosmos Hub, but are all the other zones also implementing that?

Billy Rennekamp (00:57:56):
Yeah. So there's a huge community actually, who are contributing to gravity bridge. There's multiple implementations that have, you know, extreme overlap between them just slight variations, different trajectories, different use cases, but a lot solidifying around a roadmap that I'm especially excited about, that supports what's called ABCI++. So this is an update inside of Tendermint which makes it a little bit easier, to reuse Tendermint itself and more arbitrary ways. So essentially gravity bridge reproduces consensus, and the state machine, you know, it's consensus on Oracle information. It says, Hey, do you guys all agree that this thing happened over here? And like I said, it has the same trust assumptions as Tendermint itself. You've got the same validators who are voting on different things at different places at the same time, whereas you can actually reuse Tendermint for that process. Instead of just coming to consensus about block production, they could also become in consensus about the Oracle activity of the bridge. And so seeing ABCI launched will certainly be the direction that the sort of bridge invitations are moving in order to remove tons of the, you know, complicated work of rebuilding consensus in the state machine, which will be a huge sort of efficiency gain simplicity reduces security attack vectors and the other direction that I especially want to see the bridge world move towards. Is reusing the IBC semantics at the packet level. So they don't need to do the transport ordering, which sort of requires these, these, you know, what's the proof, et cetera. But once it's landed on a different blockchain destination style, you could still reuse the application level packet style to kind of unify the transport system. So it's like a little bit like the, the container shipping container, you know, maybe this one came through a ship and you can call IBC, you know, moving things through ships plus containers. And the bridge is this bizarre helicopter, but it's still say a shipping container that's being transported.

Anna Rose (00:59:49):
Cool. All right. I think as a last topic, I want to understand what you're looking forward to what's coming up. I mean, you did mention Interchain security V2 and V3, which aren't there yet, but what else? And maybe we can work in a little bit about privacy because we've been doing this Zero Knowledge Validator, been doing events every quarter, looking at privacy in Cosmos, or also DeFi and privacy within Cosmos. I know we've had a conversation offline at some point where you did describe this really interesting way where like IBC enables like some very cool privacy principles. So maybe we can explore a little bit about that.

Billy Rennekamp (01:00:23):
Totally. so I told you sort of what got me into Cosmos the first place. You know, I want to push this tech to the point that I would use it myself and I've never really let go of the idea that there's a lot of applications and fun concepts that I want to build. You know, I love building projects, you know, I've done all these hackathons. There's a hundred projects that are unfinished to some degree, but I should probably pick back up sooner or later. And it's actually one of the reasons why I'm so excited about Interchain security. It puts the Cosmos Hub in this position that actually it could be the source of security for a huge variety of applications. And a lot of blockchains, a lot of blockchains don't need tokens. That's basically what I was going to say. But in, in a proof of stake world, every blockchain needs a token, you know, it's obvious you need a staking token, it's instant justification, but there's certainly applications that exist that don't necessarily need them. And, you know, I've always sort of struggled to figure out like where, how do I, I deploy the system that has the benefits of application specific without having to just come up with an artificial token. And so there's still a lot of work that needs to be done to, to make sure that the hub is as useful as possible inside the ecosystem. And that's really going to be my focus for a while. But the long-term direction. The thing that I want to see enabled is the ability to make, you know, a really wide variety of interesting and amazing blockchains out there because once the sort of core utility and functionality of the Cosmos Hub is secured, I think that's going to be the best use of everybody's time is just, you know, expanding and making it as diverse, colorful, valuable, and interesting of an ecosystem as possible.

Anna Rose (01:01:49):
What about privacy?

Billy Rennekamp (01:01:50):
Privacy? Yeah, so I love this concept of IBC and that, you know, this is the part that's public, but on both sides can kind of be any kind of blockchain. And so I think the conversation that we specifically talked about was like a zero-knowledge state machine that has, you know, these, these shielded pools or shielded logic, whatever sort of capacity there while still being able to connect to the larger internet of blockchains from a, from a cryptographic level that's possible, but even from a permission private blockchain system, that's possible. So it's why I think the Cosmos ecosystem and architecture is especially attractive to enterprise players, which we started to see people finally realize, you know, you can run all of your own validators. You can have the validators not provide queries publicly, you know, you can control it, access it, however you want that state. And that entire blockchain can be as private as the servers that a bank runs. You know, they don't give unfettered access to it. It doesn't mean that they wouldn't benefit from having a fully auditable state machine that keeps track of a deterministic record of events. But, you know, they still want to be able to interact with the larger financial world instead of having to do a custodial money transfer system that exists in the TradFi world. They can use IBC to bring in assets externally and send assets externally. You know, IBC is basically the gateway into the public blockchain, while you can have either artificially private or cryptographically private state machines and applications that are able to participate.

Anna Rose (01:03:11):
And there are, I mean, there are a few projects now that exist as zones in the Cosmos ecosystem who are going to be very, very private at least locally. And it is going to be, I think it's going to be very exciting to see like them start to interact with IBC, but do you envision ever like a full private IBC transfer too like, could you do private zone to private zone fully private?

Billy Rennekamp (01:03:34):
Yeah. I mean, I haven't really thought through this, but we were talking about Interchain accounts before and at that level, you know, IBC is just saying, Hey, this is the blockchain that it's coming from. Just the blockchain that it's going to, this is the account that's supposed to execute this message. But what's inside of that message, you know, who knows. And that scenario, that message itself could be full of encrypted content or zero knowledge stuff. So the IBC packets, you know, in that way would be unrevealing and the content that's going back and forth between them. I'm sure that there's other clever ways to extend that to even the other parts of the message, you know, that would be its own new application layer, IBC standard. But even with the standards, you know, that we have today, I can imagine you could start utilizing it for privacy.

Anna Rose (01:04:15):
Cool. Yeah, I do. I do get the sense from our events and having spoken with some of the folks from like the Cosmos privacy intersection that would be a really, that would be like a goal to see that happen. Cool, Billy, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Billy Rennekamp (01:04:31):
I'm so glad to be here. Thank you for having me.

Anna Rose (01:04:32):
And sharing with us sort of your perspective on Cosmos and giving us a little bit of an update on what's going on over there.

Billy Rennekamp (01:04:38):
Absolutely.

Anna Rose (01:04:39):
I want to say thank you to the podcast producer, Tanya, the podcast editor Henrik, and to our listeners. Thanks for listening.