#citizenweb3

Episode link:
https://www.citizenweb3.com/billy-icf

Episode name: 
Billy Rennekamp, Tendermint vs ICF

Episode transcript:
hey it's citizen cosmos where sergeant anna and we discover cosmos by chatting with awesome people from various teams and communities join us if you're curious how dreams and ambitions become code so hey everyone today we chat with billy renekamp he's the grants manager at icf the interchange foundation he's the founder of clovis network and just a very cool guy so hey billy welcome to the podcast thanks for coming on how are you today hi thanks very much for having me i'm doing well how is the situation where you are with corona this is our like start chit chat start yeah of course it begins every conversation the last four months it's it's not bad it could be worse i think the numbers in germany i keep feeling different perspectives about whether we're doing well or not but i feel like we have a pretty high capacity for normalcy right now a lot of people wearing masks which is good but definitely seeing people you know going out and things like that i feel like there was a shift at some point where i started sort of like trying to gauge danger by how much circulating air there was rather than sort of just like an absolute don't go anywhere near another human being sort of thing so like feeling a lot better about being outside with high circulating air and being like oh it's okay we can have like a bit of summer just uh if you go inside of like closed doors make sure you wear a mask basically we just actually came from berlin so you know we really loved it it was and i think we're going to go back but don't tell anyone it's not like everybody's listening to this so so let's start with with some questions and the first question there will be a bit mixed so don't worry about it but uh first question is about the icf and we had ethanol on the show before and he clearly made the distinction between tendermint and cosmos for our listeners but the icf itself isn't the most mentioned vehicle especially outside of the developers community and the validator community so could you further describe your what is the icf for the listeners and what is it you do at the icf in your own words and and sorry it is to add to that just to add to that what is the role of the icf for the average user in the whole of the cosmos ecosystem sure so yeah i think that you know a lot of the efforts around let's say the cosmos network or tendermint have been around in some ways much longer than the icf itself all in bits which is doing business as tournament inc has been around since around 2015 or so and the icf was made in 2017 to really facilitate the fundraiser and it's a swiss stiftang it's a non-profit basically and it holds you know a treasury which was a result of the fundraiser it holds originally 10 of the original total allocation of adams the fundraiser was done in bitcoin and ether so it has reserves in in those currencies as well as uh fiat and um usd and swiss francs i think there's a financial transparency report coming out this month and you can verify all that or get the actual details but that's about what consists of and it's uh at its core it's a funding vehicle it's a way to you know fund this really large and ambitious vision which is this internet of blockchain internet of blockchains and uh it's it's quite like a long-term project you know and so it's good to have you know sort of this treasury that's on standby to sort of make sure that the different development teams who are contributing to this have a source of income until you know a point in the future in which some of this technology starts turning around and maybe generating a more sustainable ongoing platform for for money so yeah while it's its core function is as a funding vehicle it's been used or not used in many different ways you know a lot of the activity around development has taken place primarily within all in bits and tournament inc there you know since in some time last year you started seeing a lot of more activity coming from the icf itself that's when ethan and ariane started doing a lot of operations there and moved a lot of the research and development into the icf itself of course that that group of engineers and researchers you know they've recently spun out into to a new organization uh called informal systems which is really exciting and and since then you know there was almost like a spin out spin in there was this new group called the inner chain gmbh which is a lot of the engineers from all in bits who are working on tendermint and ibc who have joined as this sort of middle organization the interchange gmbh where it's a fully owned subsidiary of the icf and i really am positioned uniquely between those two orgs because i'm i'm the only one who technically works for both the icf and the interchange gmbh although again the the gmbh is a fully owned subsidiary so in some ways everybody at the gmbh is part of the icf as well that's a good explanation i think it kind of has everything in it would you say that you would the front office or or the back office of tendermint uh inc is that like a good enough question i don't know that makes sense um i'm actually not sure what that what that means

i love that that's a good answer what i meant essentially is like a lot of the accountants work usually is described as the back office where the front office is like the face of the company the people who are seen all the time and they're kind of what you can feel and touch so i would imagine the icf is like kind of the back office right totally totally i mean in some ways i think at least in the last year or two you know when let's say the mostly informal people were still part of the icf the icf also did have a bit of a like front office capacity i think in the academic world and research you know so they were doing a lot more of that kind of work and journals conferences for academic purposes you know interfacing with a lot of schools phd programs and you know a big part of their their employee group now is researchers from that phds and and people working really in academics so i think depending on where you're approaching the say the cosmos ecosystem from the icf has been a front office in those ways but you're right as a funding vehicle you know it's really it's the back office it's taking care of making sure that there's a cash flow and people are getting paid and that there's a budget for the the year and that we know where money's going or where it's coming from it's interesting i didn't i wasn't aware of the academical part of that so it's something new definitely would you say that i mean looking at your like bio and looking around you for information around you on the internet you know the internet is evil has a lot of information about you i would describe you especially corona times as a public person somebody who likes to give a lot of speeches and so on and so forth would you say that the icf kind of requires a more cons more concentration on the paperwork or is it kind of go out there and get the projects and find them and find them kind of thing how would you describe it the icf is a pretty small group to just put that out there to begin with you know it's uh it's the foundation council which at this point is five people last month even it was only three people and then it's the board of management which last month was three people and this month is two people uh and then there's one other employee so that's like at a maximum really it's it's eight people really uh which is very very small especially compared to some of the other foundations you know which have 30 40 people really like fully operational capacities and and then there's also interchange g and bh you know this is a group of maybe 10 to 15 people and so when you're such small sort of groups you're wearing a lot of different hats at the same time i would say that in these roles i definitely have like a public facing hat i also have sort of a back office hat there's also sort of this middle hat i would say which is that i feel like i'm seeing a lot of people all day long you know since since probably march i'm on like an average of five hours of video calls a day and um especially this year the icf has you know started working a lot closer with a bunch of different organizations who are contributing to core technology you know it's no longer just all in bits there's informal as we mentioned and interchangeabh but there's also region network agorik has been very active for a very long time there's obviously looney who's been the sort of flagship wallet for a long time but then there's confio you know working on cosmosm and there's chainsafe who's taken a much more active role in different areas there's althea network who's working on pegi as well as swishlabs working on pegi you know there's a lot of projects that that are really contributing to the core of the infrastructure and i i have to talk to all of them all the time i mean we all talk to all of each other uh all the time but there's there's also you know just a much more coordination that's taking place than previously and and then as part of the grants program you know we've done a really big revamp to get the grants program running a lot more efficiently uh started doing a much more concrete quarter cycle you know the first part of this year was really putting that program like the final touches on the sort of new design of that program and then testing it out for the first cycle and the first cycle just ended you know a week ago we finalized the last things yesterday and so that's been really exciting but that also includes you know so many video calls which is which is great you know because some of the most interesting things for me is is actually that i feel like um i have a really short attention span you know like i want to be involved in all the things all the time i like i know just enough of everything to feel like i really get why things are exciting and that's really dangerous because it means that i want to get involved in every single thing which is great from my new position because you know i don't have enough time to build peggy myself but i get to like check in with the peggy team and be like oh cool that has that feature now great let me try it out and then i get to you know play with it inside my machine or um you know ethernet you know i i'm coming from solidity as a developer and so i'm really excited about the sort of capabilities that are there and testing out their frameworks and seeing like what's different and what's new and it's it's a it's been great for me to get access to all that stuff but in that way you know i do feel like i'm being public because i'm talking all these teams obviously these aren't public facing calls but you know it feels like i'm reaching out to so many different people that at some point i've i've had private meetings with the entire population or something like that that makes a lot of sense to me anyways it does because i'm in my work always fluctuating as well it looks like your mastermind a little bit of everything and in the process of communication between people so do you personally think that communication is the one of their significant part of work within the decentralized project and with the not that big company and vehicle let's put it that way so how do you feel about that part i mean i think communication is one of the most important let's say you know tools that humans have in no matter what sort of capacity traditional business decentralized business you know open source whatever it's like if you can effectively communicate with the people you're working with you know that's gonna have compounding effects i think that like at our at its core you know humans being effective it really comes from being able to collaborate well and being able to collaborate well comes from being able to communicate well yeah how do you discover it is it that something that you always know that is the core thing or you discover it during your work that it's okay but now it's the x factor of success how it happened i don't know i i have a lot of siblings maybe my whole family loves to talk they're all really good communicators my my dad is a horse trainer he's kind of like a horse whisperer and so he's really good with like dogs and animals and i feel like my whole family has like a real sort of appreciation for communication at many levels you know like communicating with people is like building empathy you know whether it's through language or body language and being able to work with animals is as you're like you're not able to use words and so you really have to think of other ways like empathize with the person you're the animal that you're communicating with and so i think communication is definitely like emphasizing my family my upbringing maybe that has something to do with it yeah it's cool actually because i'm very close to horses but for business firstly i think that harsh skills is something super important yeah you know and communication needs something okay but you can communicate or you just have to do your work and why you need to spread your knowledge around the team and why we need all this stuff and then once i just discover that oh it's one of the most important thing among the team it's cool that someone just know it by its nature yeah from the family as in your example i'll let you in on a secret you just broke on as hard because she's a horse person so and a dog person so you know and she's semi-like on it so yeah i have a strange question for you how did you decide to join the scf because i mean how does one combine art and grants i mean obviously you're an artistic person and i have other questions related to that a bit later on but how did that come together where is the connection i guess that began with like my involvement in the blockchain space at all so i studied film and art i've been working in berlin for for many years as an artist and making you know exhibitions the studio practice a lot of the work is informed by technology i sort of like and parallel was was you know working from time to time in a freelance capacity doing mostly web development just to sort of keep the lights on but my my lifestyle was very much about minimizing the amount of let's say like cash work that i was doing and maximizing the amount of uh sort of artwork for a while i'd been working around concepts related to like play games and systems and the way that the sort of rules within those contexts relate to the rules and technology and and sort of what's possible when you start looking at technology as as like games or trying to embrace the play aspects of them and and in the middle of all that sort of came together this this concept for uh this game clovers which had been sort of present for almost 10 years probably in my practice but didn't really turn into explicitly a game until rather recently and and it was very much like an incentive game so it was like how could i convince a bunch of strangers to interact with this system even if they don't care about art or if they don't care about games even like how could i just you know coordinate these people where could i align incentives to convince them to do this that like you know place the carrot correctly and that's so much about like mechanism design and cryptocurrencies and i first looked into sort of making it into a cryptocurrency project back in probably 2013 or so it was around the time of uh bitcoin colored coins and it just felt too early like the technology was too nascent there was no way to really i didn't feel like i would be capable at building a tool that really used this stuff and so i kind of put it on a shelf until around 2017 and i encountered my first like a solidity hello world contract or something like that and was kind of like oh like this is something i can work with it coincided with a knee injury actually where i ended up like having to basically sit in my kitchen for like a month and a half and not you know move at all which works really well when you're trying to like onboard a new skill so i just did a sort of deep dive into solidity and ethereum blockchain in general uh i came in contact with cosmos for the first time around then and yeah my goal was to build this artwork as like a game and then start sort of trying to get familiar with the community around the blockchain space to find collaborators to inform the design and progress the development of it in that process i sort of got nerd sniped by cosmos and and really the technology itself you know like i came at it for this very specific need or like purpose you know to build up this game but there were so many interesting concepts and so much sort of richness and the the technology itself that i started getting much more excited about these these uh larger ideas than my specific use case those ideas but clovers was always this really amazing lens for those ideas too so there's like automated market makers there's non-fungible tokens there's sort of general token economics there's efficiencies on gas usage there's like different tricks and tools to offload computation there's scaling efforts and all this sort of i experienced first through clovers and realized that it had all these other applications and and there were all these other interesting people who were thinking about it in different ways and i got really excited about communicating and collaborating in those those efforts paralleled all of that is sort of an involvement with many projects and one of them being cosmos i began as a front end developer actually on looney i was on fabian's team with pong and then i had an art residency in new york uh to to work on clovers and so i wouldn't be able to dedicate the same amount of development time which was kind of required for the front end team and so uh i shifted into developer relations with the sort of idea that somebody coming from ethereum would be able to communicate well with you know other people coming from ethereum and thinking about scaling efforts with cosmos and and so started doing that more and more and then just sort of i was always half time i think with tendermint and then i think last august or so i switched to full time and then this year you know when it was sort of like what's the best way for us to be most effective and we decided to make the gmbh i was sort of on board to do that and then bucky asked me if i would be interested in sort of helping run the the icf and i could see that there was sort of a need for it especially as informal was leaving and as the icf was becoming more important and coordinating all these different entities was kind of like okay somebody needs to step up and do this i feel like i had good enough relationships with everybody in the ecosystem and i felt like i had a pretty good understanding of all the moving pieces so it also sort of made sense to me why i might be good at doing that in that that sort of role so i put on that hat as well obviously sorry you mentioned there that's ethereum and i know i've seen around i'm not sure if i've seen any rappers but i've definitely seen around your twitter dimensions of aragon and gnosis so care to share what you committed to them or if it's open of course totally yeah um so that's with relation to work that i was doing i guess god my timeline seemed weird either in 2018 or 2019 maybe it was 2018. with gnosis i was helping a bit around uh while they were building the dx dao so i'd been doing a lot of the sort of bonding curve work especially through clovers and had been always really close with the team at aragon black because they were doing so much sort of bonding curve work and they were the ones who were working on the continuous organization for aragon daos so that's basically a dow that has a bonding curve people would be able to say buy or sell into this and the tokens that they receive would give them some sort of like shareholder rights within like that dow as a company the money that was locked up in collateral and that bonding token might be possible to use as like for operating costs you know so it's a bit closer to what a normal investment company vehicle would be like except for that it has an automated market maker for it so it's like no matter how small your company is it's like you could have a liquid stock that people could buy and sell and then you know that might help the operation so i helped on some of the design with that as well as some of the solidity implementation and then gnosis was interested in doing something similar for their dx dao which is is you know they helped build but is operated independently of gnosis and so i joined there and the first sort of thing i wanted to work on was ways to prevent front running so they funded a lot of the the research and proof of concept building that i did around batched bonding curves so this is like a way to batch orders to prevent front running and that design was later implemented inside of the aragon black fundraising system and actually a really similar design has now been implemented inside of the cosmos bonding curve module that's coming from ixo and been built by developers at simply bc which i'm really excited about and so the work is still on the 37 release of the sdk but they're going to be updating it to 39 and 40 soon so i'm really excited to see that coming out and being usable in a very like generalizable way because i think that's some of the most exciting tech that is there there is to offer inside the blockchain space these automated market makers yeah i agree but so judging from what you're saying sounds like a little bit of a definitely five person we had a good discussion with different whether it's defio defy we had a good laugh about that but um is defy a big fat scum bubble or is that the new economical world order in your opinion when we're talking about blockchains we're talking really about programming languages that have money built in as a primitive right and obviously this lends itself to financial software and so if we're talking about decentralized finance as you know financial software that uses blockchains like this is definitely going to be a part of the landscape it you may even say that it's by definition going to be everything whether it wants to be called defy or not you know a video game that has you know nfts you might say by definition is decentralized finance so i i don't know if i'm like uh a cheerleader for the term or like so much predicting that the moon is going to come from from d5 or something like that but i i think that defy in one form or another is definitely here to stay it's very rational way to think about it so you know i like their explanation that we have beauty in blockchain it can be maybe a kind of technology or some other things so do you think that kind of art or beauty of blockchain itself is something that can push the blockchain technology to a real world and attract more and more people to deal with it i think there's a couple different ways that art interacts with blockchains and i think that each of them are interesting in different ways the way that i think i'm most interested in it is sort of from a perspective of like a history of art and technology there's sort of like a tradition in in fine arts of an interrogation of technology and a misuse and a reuse and it's it's sort of begun i think i mean some might say that it begins with painting itself and and also sort of like camera obscuras that have been used in in sort of historical painting for realism but i would say that actually like the the photograph is is probably where mostly this timeline gets kind of exciting and the idea of like artists use of photography photography as a medium and the sort of conceptual framework of like you know looking at the medium itself uh instead of like the photo that comes from a camera what is the the stuff itself that makes the camera what does it mean to have reproducibility and so there's you know a very long and rich history of of artists using photography without necessarily being photographers and this sort of continued into moving image with film especially 16 millimeter film in the 60s and 70s conceptual artists uh constructionism and and uh sort of like marshall mcluhan you know like the medium is the message what does it mean to be using these materials and it actually extended even to the 90s and 2000s and beyond for internet art you know sort of like what does it mean to have this material uh what does plasticity mean how does this change what it means to be human how does this change what it means to be an artist when you have these new capabilities can i turn this material inside out and sort of like examine it by making an artwork that really dissects it or something like that you know this was this was a big part of my education in school is sort of like media theory and examining how is technology used as a mirror and also a tool inside of like an artistic practice and i feel like blockchain is especially exciting in that tradition it has so many conceptual frameworks that can modify or or change the way we think about society or the world it's also still at such a like early period that we haven't seen whether or not those sort of predictions are true it's so much of a theoretical framework at this point in any ways that it's really like rich for artistic interrogation you know proof of concepts or or pieces that use it or talk about it even that sort of like can elicit those sorts of exciting thoughts there's also i would say like the other use of it which is a bit more like if we're looking at the camera again it's not trying to think about photography itself but it's actually just looking at the photograph that was taken and that's maybe a bit more like the sort of nft art world that you're seeing with blockchain as well you know it's just a it's a new medium that people are excited about you know just using itself instead of being too conceptual about it and then there's also the actual infrastructure you could maybe say this is the d5 version of it which is what happens to the art world as a as an industry when you can have sort of hyper financialization on a super micro macro scale switching between them you know like when you can now have an artwork which is millions of dollars but it can be shared or owned by thousands of people you know how do you crowdfund you know masterpieces like what is the role of a museum if you actually now have the ability to still fund artworks which are just as expensive or just as important but don't need the level of top-down coordination you know how does it change when you have decentralized autonomous sort of public taste building into this system instead and there's been some really interesting projects sort of trying to think about that and then there's also like very commercial projects trying to think about that as well that we've seen it's interesting to describe it that way because if i'm not mistaken i really can't i was trying to remember the name while you were speaking but i really can't but i'm sure that the first camera well the first prototype of the camera when maybe you can correct me that was invented by the sun of the scientist who said the sentence a sky full of ghosts and he was the first person to realize that the stars aren't actually what we see that is the light and so on and forth and then his son invented the camera like 20 or 30 years later the first product that was really interesting how he was combining as well like science and art in the same frame but i really can't remember the name

we can't just move on that's beautiful you can't just move away from that idea i'm sorry i know that a lot of things it was like a combination of science and art and for example edison as far as i remember he was the person who discovered that a two machine or someone who was in fact the scientist says more about technology than of body art but he just think that okay we need some something to make this easier process easier so in any process we have a dreamers who move forward the industry the technology can be dreamers in kind of art or in field of technology at the same time totally i think that's actually sort of what's most important when you think about like what does it mean to be an artist as well and something that i've definitely like had on my mind a lot lately where i'm i'm not spending my time making art but it's really sort of what does it mean to sort of like pursue your intrinsic valuable activities you know like for me a lot of it is sort of like making or used to be i mean still is in some ways making objects or exploring ideas that are just extremely interesting to me but maybe they don't have an application to them you know what i mean i think that you can look at a lot of art that way i think that you could say a lot of blockchain technology actually is that as well where people are just pursuing these ideas because they're extremely interesting and a lot of them really don't know how they could be applied or how they would be applied and i think blockchain gets criticized for that a lot but you know that's really probably one of the characteristics that make me so excited about the space yeah and one more characteristic that i personally like that a lot of people can share that ideas and even invest money in that ideas and it's like something that works itself not need to go to some investors who need to understand how it works just the people around you who can share your inspiration and to move forward absolutely i mean that's open source in general it's it's so inspiring to like not have such a scarcity mindset with your ideas or your work or your output and and having such like low barriers to collaboration it's super exciting this is actually the point i think i was more or less gonna make about the nft tokens that you were saying that a lot of people and i personally think it's a brilliant metaphor or analogy whatever you prefer that nft tokens are essentially dna on the blockchain i don't know if that makes any sense but your your work with nfc tokens a lot so does it um i mean if you are talking about nfts as sort of like building blocks that can be potentially compounding and uh into like new configurations or just the idea that you're publishing in a format that doesn't have you know restrictions about exactly how those those things can be used and reused yeah like that's absolutely a great way to describe it okay so moving a little bit onwards talking about i recently saw tess awarding you on twitter with the worst uh hashing metaphor about the chicken you can't undo a chicken nugget

now talking to you the question is where does cryptography come in with all your work i mean are you also a cryptographer do you also like research in that field or no oh is that why the metaphor was bad i don't think i can even claim authorship of that metaphor i i'm not sure where i first heard that but it's definitely been said before me but i do think it's one of the better grotesque visualizations for a trapdoor hash function i am very excited about cryptography i don't think that i have you know very much to contribute to the field of cryptographic research beyond maybe demonstrating applications you know like i think blockchain is exciting but it's if you really like sort of drill down into what we're all excited about it's cryptography where the name cryptocurrency comes from of course you know none of this would be possible without really sort of groundbreaking developments in encryption and cryptography things don't necessarily have to be distributed on a shared ledger to be exciting like there's already sort of just the idea of putting public key cryptography into people's hands opens up so many sort of really exciting ideas around self-sovereign identity and improvements on security in general i always often look to estonia's e-residency program as sort of you know something that that is should get more hype than it even does i mean not that it doesn't get a lot of hype but just the idea that every citizen has access to this capabilities that there's so many cool things you can do with it that don't require a blockchain blockchain can can augment a lot of them in really interesting ways but just being able to sort of control those forms of identity or encryption and then what that opens up is something that definitely keeps me engaged in the space i once spent about a few good hours anyways i was going to say about six hours but i think that's a lie uh with adam buck and oleg guns that is the guy who's doing slingshots for stella after that conversation uh it was like a three-man conversation and they gave me good cryptography lesson and after i came out oleg said you know search now you know 95 more than any cryptographer knows so don't worry about cryptography going back to the icf okay i want to go back to the icf a little before uh ask a couple of questions about clover network it's a bit of a controversial question and it's your choice to to answer that or no would you say that the grant process the decision decision-making is a decentralized decision-making or is it a centralized decision-making so there's the grants and funding program at the icf which you know i mentioned has been around for a while but the icf itself has changed many times throughout its life cycle and or his lifetime and the grants program has as well there was a lot of work uh last year sort of designing ways to improve the current funding program and like i said a lot of this year for me has actually been implementing a lot of that so for the first time we have created a new group of external experts who are not part of the icf they're not part of all in bits that are people who have experience in the ecosystem expertise technical community based product base and we've we've invited them to be part of the the grants process so i think that's definitely a really exciting step and i don't know if i want to call it decentralization but sort of a a more accountable system that has a much greater depth of perspective which i think is important to sort of bring a high quality program around we're retentively calling this group the technical advisory board and while we've started working with them it still hasn't been ratified into our bylaws until then we refer to them as external experts which is what we've we've done for our funding program from the beginning you know if an application comes in it has to do with whatever it is uk snarks or something or something that we don't have somebody immediately available to do a technical evaluation of you know we reach out to an external expert and ask for for help evaluating uh the merit of the funding proposal so this is a bit like that currently the system now has basically four stages the grants at the lowest level are administered by what are called grant entities and that's informal and interchange gmbh they basically take the applications they review them i think we try to get at least two evaluations per application and then they make a preliminary sort of decision with in accordance with like the board of management to say okay i think that this is maybe a good thing to continue and try to fund that eventually goes directly to the board of management who sort of goes through all of these recommendations and says okay like is this going to fit within our quarterly budget and does it make sense for the goals that we're trying to do right now whether or not it's i mean there's there's plenty of applications i think that come in that are really high quality but for one reason or another we can't proceed then the board of management takes this group of recommendations gives them to the technical advisory board and that's when they're able to review them as well and add comments and this is in some ways you know the goal is like oh you're working in a validator in southeast asia you know i bet you have perspective on the validator community there better than we would from over here in europe and you know here's this tool that's supposed to be useful for validators like d are you already using something like this is there something already available there that we just weren't avail like aware of can you inform us if this really is a good idea to proceed so that's been really great and then those comments are included in the proposal to the foundation council who then does a final review and then ratifies the the budget itself and then we can proceed and making service agreements with all the different groups of course this is not a decentralized process you know decentralization means it should be public from the get-go all the material should be public and i think that there's a real case for many types of funding proposals to fit that i think there's also a case for many types of funding proposals to not fit that often the information that's submitted includes proprietary information stuff like what do you pay your developers you know who are your clients how are you funded and things like that and if that information were public all the time it would be at a disadvantage for the the companies who are making those proposals you know like um if you were to see oh your developers only paid this much i might be able to poach them because of this or oh i see that you have a rate of this much and your client is this person i can go to that same client and lowball you and maybe i can steal your client there is sort of a level of privacy and competition within developer groups especially that that needs to be preserved in some sort of funding scenarios that being said there's a lot of room for fully transparent systems we've seen it especially in like aragon's funding system is 100 public and then with stuff like the kasuma on chain proposal system you know it's it's definitely an exciting opportunity and of course we have it ourselves inside the cosmos community pool we haven't had you know too many things go through that because there's there is sort of like some red tape around using the governance module on the hub and something that we're making a priority especially in the next quarter is trying to fund research and development which will improve that process you know i'd really really like to see more stuff coming directly from the hub especially stuff that benefits directly the hub you know the icf is a bit concerned with this sort of overarching internet of blockchains idea especially the way ibc can factor into this whereas there's definitely like a case to be made for things which are directly relative to the hub and don't matter to anybody else maybe things which are directly about adam accrual i mean the icf is obviously interested in the success of the atom you know our treasury composes largely of the atom but i think there's also the ability for sort of really really direct iteration and also there's some things that the icf just can't fund at all we are extremely conservative we don't want to show up on any sort of problematic radars and and get investigated for anything that could possibly be accused of us you know we so we try to be extremely conservative and make sure that we do everything by the book which means that we often you know don't uh fund things which could look like certain types of merchant services or things that like might show up on a governmental radar that says oh i need to make sure that this is like happening completely legally you know we'll just maybe steer clear completely and maybe the hub itself would actually like to engage in those things maybe the hub itself wants to be a dex one day or something like that and that's where you know the icf starts getting a little bit wary about funding things but the hub itself if it was being self-funded through the community pool might be able to do things that we can't do and so really excited about sort of extending the capabilities in the hub and i think at that point you know you'll see truly decentralized funding systems so take it as silk road 2.0 is not on the funding list no it's not mentioned before that you have a very clear of you on the process of funding and how it should be related to each other so just one question regarding conservative way of icf so do you have any transaction between fed money and let's say blockchain money or you just focus on fiat money and don't want to do with all this transition our i don't know if you call it an endowment our our balance is definitely composed of cryptocurrencies and fiat and uh depending on the service agreement and also depending on what the request is from the the person making application will work with fiat or we'll pay in bitcoin i think we try we have something like a percentage that we try to keep on fiat and a percentages that we try to keep in each of the different cryptocurrencies so depending on how the market moves we may move between different currencies or if we have more bitcoin than we planned on having in comparison to our fiat we might ask if somebody would be willing to accept bitcoin as payment we're pretty flexible on that we have i think michael's done a great job of sort of creating nice frameworks for us to work with him but no i mean we definitely work with cryptocurrencies uh all the time so you're a kind of fund manager as well yeah that's much more michael yeah he does a great job of that i guess you don't do the whole flash loan thing you know send it to a balancer and then send it okay so what about clover do you plan to integrate it with cosmos because it's ethereum based right so far so for now right do you plan any integrations with tendermint or cosmos sdk i would love to rebuild clovers uh in the sdk it's more of a question of time you know my my goal with clovers was mostly to to get something that was working and live and stable so all of the token economics all the design around it was this like balance between trying to create sort of an incentive engine to sort of entice people to come in you know the inflationary token came with like payouts to sort of encourage certain behavior but there was always the the goal that there should be sort of counter pressure on that so that it wasn't just you know running out of money in the first week so there's sort of this balance that clover's reached around the price of gas on ethereum so if the price of gas is low it's profitable to mine on clovers and if the price of gas is high it becomes unprofitable i think there's still a really exciting way of playing on clovers even when the gas is high so i mentioned before that it was sort of like i was trying to create a system that incentivized people who weren't even who didn't care about it as art and really didn't care about it as game to interact with it and that's the sort of like selfish minor user and the selfish miners should really only care about it when the gas price is low but the result of a selfish miner is that they sort of in in mining they they sort of accidentally generate all of this detritus which which becomes possibly really interesting material to engage with as like a game or as somebody who's interested in it visually or in a sort of secondary market capacity and that secondary market capacity or sort of artistic user still has like a very viable reason to play with it even when the gas price is high because they're not just trying to you know make 5 cents every five minutes or something that they're like excited when they find like a really interesting looking clover or they're interested in like a longer term market thing where it's like oh like i found this really exciting super rare and i think very valuable clover but the chances of finding a buyer for it you know i'm in it for the long haul i might have to wait for a while until somebody else also realizes how valuable this thing is and so it's i think in a lot of ways achieved that which i'm really proud of and excited i mean there's obviously a lot of limitations to interacting with it just for the fact that it's a blockchain you know you still need ether to even run a transaction on it and you know we did some work on some some scaling efforts around that to really take advantage of some of the benefits of like poa network that have been stalled fortunately there are some updates to clovers which are actually on github and just need me to do a final code review and like merge the pr because it's not just me working on it you know there's a few others although they also have other jobs and things like that so it's like it's been tough to like not give it the attention that it needs knowing that there's still a lot of exciting things that i can do with it right now and one of those things is yeah you know say rebuilding it on a cosmos zone where you have complete control over the the gas and things like that which would you know do a whole lot for i think lowering the barrier of entry to the whole project at the same time you know it's it's still in my head a bit of an artwork and it is a bit of a obtuse strange bird if i were to say build a game that i just wanted to be an addictive really fun game i probably would not have built clovers like clovers has a very strange shape that makes parts of it very hard to swallow but i think that's also for me what makes it interesting and the sort of like blurry line into art you know art's not necessarily the the easiest thing to swallow all the time or at that point you know it maybe becomes pop culture or something like that which is also really exciting but i definitely wasn't trying to build clovers as like a pop culture thing and i probably would have done quite a few things differently if i were it does sound like there is a lot of game theory there and i can totally relate to the scarcity thing i've been into the blockchain space for for a while and i like what people call [ __ ] coins or altcoins or whatever and at one point a friend he told me oh yeah this is because you've been collecting coins for the past 30 years in real life so now you're collecting just the [ __ ] guys you know so you're just like but well i'm not actually kidding it is actually true but going back to um blockchain what is the part in blockchain technology that currently excites you the most and let's leave it cosmos unrelated because that's a bit unfair sometimes i get more excited about the sort of like high level conceptual thing about like oh my god yeah like look at this crazy new coordination tool that i can use to sort of like i don't know i i'm a sucker for like starting new endeavors all the time you know i have working groups with my friends you know we have half-finished papers or half-finished books together you know whatever it's many sort of like opportunities for coordination that i always get really excited about and i think that there's obvious sort of alignment with what becomes possible in blockchain and these coordination tools and then there's a very sort of practical thing that i would maybe say i'm more excited about and that's getting these tools to the level of usability that it feels the same level of empowerment that i felt when i built like my first ruby on rails app or the same level of empowerment that i felt when i built my first like react or bjs app oh my god like i thought that i was able to just sort of tweak some things here and there with code but actually like i can build a full-fledged app like i have the power to make this thing that in some ways previously i just thought was sort of in a black box in my computer obviously somebody smarter than me was building this the moment that you realize you actually can do it yourself is such a great feeling and that feeling in general is sort of our only saving grace in the dystopic future of you know the big four computer is a big scary black box like you don't know what's happening in there and so you don't have the empowerment of being part of it or like this this right to repair you know what i mean as soon as we like really lose the ability to shape the tools that we're using all day we're going to be completely subjected to those tools and have no control in there you know we'll be absolutely under the domain of scary big brother or something like that and so the more often that i can imagine like instilling that feeling of being capable with technology i think that's truly exciting and i'm starting to really see that with these development kits you're starting to really get around the the really crazy sharp edges that we've we've been dealing with for years in the space and just sort of laying out the user story for building an app that doesn't have to be 100 decentralized and like world war three proof from day one this is a requirement that i think we all want to instill in every single thing that we're building but is really not necessary in every situation and i know it's also like not the most blockchain friendly perspective i'm just exciting about building apps that have scarcity as a primitive and let the security of those apps be proportional to the value and the use of them clovers is a super exciting and funny thing but it doesn't need the same level of security as die it doesn't need it's not like a world currency that like people's life is going to depend on that has to be uncensorable or something like that so why should users of clovers be paying 71 gway per transaction it doesn't have the same requirements and when you start building with this idea of an internet of blockchains whether you're building it with a cosmos sdk or you're building it with substrate or you're building it with you know a fork of geth it doesn't really matter the idea is that you're able to sort of have you know the capabilities that you require match uh your use and i think that opens up the door to much more developer activity much more empowerment in building applications without having to go through this world war iii decentralization requirement before even having a seat at the table do you feel that currently people and users at least in maybe not generally in blockchain but in the cosmos space are a community where people i mean we call ourselves like citizen cosmos and it's that's for a reason right do you currently as a member of the community of cosmos feel like you're a cosmos citizen do you feel that thing of decentralization that you can decide and so on and so forth or is that something more of um somewhere there you know we still need some time to get there where people will be deciding as a decentralized entity on all their decisions and or is it just not even that's not the first and not the the second thing is it's just some sort of statement which we will never get to will we ever live in a world where people can say okay i'm not a citizen of germany i'm not a citizen of the united states i'm not a citizen of russia i'm a citizen of cosmos i decide my tower decides the best things in the world uh there is the financial vehicle inside of it that i can get passive income or whatever does that make any sense in that direction yeah i think one of the qualities that i appreciate the most being used to describe decentralized tech cosmos whatever is anti-fragile and i think that sometimes anti-fragile comes from friction so the idea that there are say like state borders you know that you have different languages in different countries that you have different laws in different countries like that can be really frustrating because whatever my sim card doesn't work here anymore or like oh i have to change money or oh i have no idea what the hell this person is saying you know whereas if there was sort of some universalism or like i can't be held down by these corporal strands you know i'm a citizen of the world actually there are some sort of benefits to being anti-fragile in that scenario because if we all sort of had one universal citizenship say to cosmos but like cosmos broke then the whole world would break down or something like that there's alternative of that which is these areas of friction i think though that there is a really exciting version of that which is plurality you know if i am not just a citizen of the united states or i'm not just you know a citizen of germany but i actually have many different types of citizenship to many different areas of interest or groups of common fellows whether we're like politically aligned or commercially aligned or you know familially lined whatever you know like i think that the plurality of those also creates a sense of anti-fragility because if one of those groups that you're a part of fails in some way not all of your eggs are in one basket it's another reason why i've always sort of like cosmo's ecosystem as well is because it sort of banks on this plurality of many different chains many different reasons many different types of users for for many different capacities you know there's sure like make your completely permissioned private blockchain you know that's great do that but make sure that it still can talk to my fully decentralized system over here that has this very specific purpose there's no sort of necessarily maximalism either you know maximalism is effective because you have 100 conviction because if you're not right about this then you lose it all you know what i mean when you put all of your money all of your hopes into a single sort of vertical you will get fanatical about making sure that that succeeds and that can be really effective there's nothing more effective than somebody with real conviction but sometimes that conviction is is based solely on irrational thought and fear of losing something instead of you know very real and rational evaluation of what the actual conditions of your scenario are i've always really sort of appreciated that level of assessment and and embrace of many different reasons for many different things that especially cosmos has brought and so in that way i mean it also depends on what you mean when you say a citizen of cosmos there's the cosmos hub itself which is a token that somebody could potentially be like a solely focused maximalist on but i think that at a higher level it's this internet of blockchain idea and that i very much consider myself you know mentally a subscriber to or citizen of that was kind of the thing i wanted to hear we have to be a little bit of devil's advocate right you understand that we want to sometimes get information out of you before we jump to our traditional question there is one question we left out which i have to ask the not okay with me twitter account did it did it lock it is that an alter ego that escaped and locked itself so people like hosts podcast hosts don't snoop on you or because there was some very cool things there and now it's locked so you know what happened today if you scroll down far enough on my billy renicamp twitter i used to use it quite often for pretty idiotic things like uh just really speaking to myself in a very like non-productive way but that was also sort of what i felt was best about twitter especially you know there's this sort of like twitter is composed in some ways of all these different almost like professions or specialist interests but there's also one of those specialist interests is weird twitter which if you ever want like a great weird history lesson look for like the history of weird twitter and i feel like that was like my primary use of twitter i mean it was that and just personal community a bit art world art world doesn't really use twitter though and so weird twitter was where i was at and where twitter was basically like comedy but also absurdity and i think probably that's how i was like interested in using twitter mostly and as i got more involved in blockchain space and technology world you know i started using it more to like keep tabs on progress on things and update people on progress and so like at some point it really just there was a conflict in the way i was using twitter and so i made like an alt account and i went back and forth between making it private and public and sort of just started slowly following you know the people that i used to really interact with on twitter and it became like the place for me to like dump my dumbest ideas and yeah i wasn't really sure how precious to be with it i kept switching it from public to private and i'll probably switch it to public many more times it's it's not like permanently closed by any means i kind of like the idea of it just opening and closing randomly or something but the idea is that it also should be sort of a safe space for me to be saying dumb stuff and a safe space for me to like tweet things that i don't care if anybody likes i think there's this weird sort of social media condition that people get too absorbed in where it's like oh if i didn't get a response on it it wasn't valid or i shouldn't use this or i'm doing it wrong or something and so like the not okay with me is a place where i can have very low bar of dumping out thoughts on the internet i can relate to that a lot my alter rigo escapes like quite often so a traditional question that we have for for all the guests is what are three blockchain projects that you like right now they have to be outside of cosmos it can't be ethereum itself and you can't say bitcoin or ethereum doesn't work like this gnosis in general is a project that has always been really close to my heart and the way that they work in such sort of high technical integrity and with such a sort of vision towards a real sort of sustainable product they recently launched omen which i'm excited to see or i guess the dx dow launched it their timeline is always sort of so slow moving but so consistent as well that i constantly am like re-excited and and even within noses itself actually the the nose is safe i think it's one of the most exciting projects you know it really brings a massive amount to the table for improving the user experience just recoverable accounts daily limits just the things that you should expect from using an application in the same way argent has been able to bring those features even more front and center to like a very slick user experience but i think what's really you know core underneath both of those is level of technical integrity that you see a bit more so and the gnosis safe i'm really excited to see what's coming out of curve labs a group who recently formed in order to sort of do research and experiments around bonding curves and automated market makers i'm not sure if they're still planning on it but they might be doing something around avatars which i know kia crutler krutler has also been sort of doing a bit of research on and ongoing sort of work below her work at gnosis and strategy that i'm excited to see this sort of blurs the line with stuff like little michaela from that company brad you know i think that there's a lot of very fertile territory around decentralized avatars and collective identity collective ownership of personas and forte who's a blockchain gaming company that i had some calls with a bit last year that i think are really doing a good job to approach building in uh real game economies without preventing real sort of game development from taking place as well cool i have to check out foreign because i'm not very familiar familiar with the others of course but so is there something we didn't ask you that you want to add be prepared for stargate everybody public service announcement selling car yeah cheaper i'm a volkswagen 2018 thanks for coming on and yeah it's been really a pleasure talking to you and um really great to see that we have a lot of profound thinkers behind the project thank you very much for having me on yeah thanks everyone for listening thank you thank you for coming bye