#citizenweb3

Episode link:
https://www.citizenweb3.com/game-of-zones

Episode name: 
Jack Zampolin, Game of Zones & IBC

Episode transcript:
Hey it's Citizen Cosmos, we are Serj and Anna and we discover Cosmos by chatting with awesome people from various teams within the Cosmos ecosystem and the community. Join us if you are curious how dreams and ambitions become code hi everyone hey and we have jack with us today who is one of the people behind the creation of abc he is the ex-director product a tendermint and he also running the piling validator did i miss anything jack yeah i think that's totally fair you know doing all kinds of cosmosy stuff these days what else are you doing that i didn't mention is there anything yeah advise a couple of companies in the space and work with a number of folks uh to help them launch their blockchains i think that that's yeah writes themselves i contribute to all the open source projects too so i think it's on the gos website or somewhere that i've found it oh well i've got a bunch of bow ties i can pull some out later but as far as product leader you know i do think that one of the things that set cosmos apart from other blockchain ecosystems from the beginning is this strong product vision that we've had where there's these individual blockchains they communicate with each other over this standardized communication protocol ibc you know we make it easy to build those application chains with this framework that we've built called the cosmos sdk which is kind of like ruby on rails for blockchains and you know executing strongly on that product division and having really strong products is what's kind of driven us forward out in the marketplace and that's why we have a lot of developers using the platform i do love working with the various different product teams within the ecosystem as far as the aficionado of bow ties i don't know if you guys remember but before cosmos launch i did wear a bow tie i have a number of them yeah you know what i'm gonna go straight into a controversial question do you like what you do right now are you more comfortable what you're doing right now than what you're a tender mean i mean it's a lot of the same stuff all those folks over at tinderman aib still doing great work on the ecosystem front and on various fronts you know i know alessio still contributes to the code so it's a lot of the same stuff and i still love doing it yeah i guess that's the main thing as long as we enjoy doing what we do right when you create amazing products yeah i wouldn't be here anymore

let's talk about ibc you probably have a million questions and i've asked you previously like a zillion times that was me personally how would you describe ibc in your own words without using any the terms that you've used to describe it anywhere before just the way you think about it you know i always think about it like the internet it's like tcpip tcp is this protocol that we use all the time and we don't really think about it this connection is being mediated over a number of different tcp connections and it's this sort of foundational piece of the internet that we've all sort of begun to take for granted developing the ibc protocol i've like learned a lot more how tcp works and how information security over that tls works as well and like how you do authentication sort of cryptographic handshakes and doing a bunch of proof systems and that's basically what ibc is and in the same way that the internet allowed individual computers to connect with each other in this sort of trustless manner ibc allows individual blockchains or databases or communities or companies to connect with each other and transmit information that they're both independently verifying i think that's the best way to think about it because the two communication protocols are very very similar from an architectural standpoint yeah make sense it's easy way to describe it let's talk a little bit about product development now as a product manager i'm really interested in your way of product development ibc it's not only a protocol ibc is very specific product we don't have market and users yet like usually we have so it's hard to define metrics and how you do that tell me about how you work with products in that way yeah i think that's a great question there is this thing called ibc and there's this whole ecosystem of blockchains out there that have joined the cosmos ecosystem and it adopted the cosmos sdk partially because there is this promise of interoperability there is this promise of knitting all these communities together so there's a market there and you know one way to measure conversion would be to measure the number of chains that we're getting to connect to the hub via ibc then even broader than that you could think of each chain having a market cap and you can think of the whole ibc network having if you're thinking about kpis like the kpi would be assets under management in the ibc network and like how do we increase that or the number of users on chains in the ibc network so when i'm thinking about kpis and sort of like what value we're going to try to drive for atom holders that's exactly what i'm thinking about from those top level goals like how do we filter those down into more bottom level things and as you mentioned it is very difficult to find metrics and you do kind of have to have a plan and start executing on it just those few little places where you're sort of finding those measurables along the way make sure that you're checking your assumptions but also at the same time you have this sort of traditional product development cycle on the software side and that's go talk to your users bring that feedback back to the business filter that through business goals bring those requirements to the engineering team and then work with marketing to ship that product out to end users and keep that cycle going as quickly as possible that's exactly what we're doing with these test nets and starting with the ibc test net that we did a couple weeks ago we're going to be restarting that next week and then moving into game of zones we're trying to constantly seek feedback and validation from the users that we're expecting to adopt this and ensuring that it meets their use cases and then also at the same time trying to make it a wonderful and really easy to use product that is an experience that we're kind of driving through this piece of software we call the relayer in tcp you know each computer can actually has a network card and can make network requests but a blockchain can't really make network requests so there needs to be some sort of actor making those requests on behalf of the individual chains and that actor and the system is the relayer so most of the interaction for users is going to be driven through this concept called a relayer as you're thinking about these big high level goals like assets under management and number of users how do you filter those down into small product goals making the product as easy to use as possible this very complex topic ibc you know connecting blockchains you'd say and you're like wow what does that even mean and like how do we do it making that complex topic understandable throughout the tooling and the documentation and the examples that allows the knowledge to spread from what is right now the core team and sort of the goal of game of zones is to spread that knowledge out throughout the ecosystem and ensure that everyone understands how ibc works and can use the protocol so that's kind of the short-term goal of ibc that that's sort of trying to filter into some of these more long-term goals does that make sense yeah for sure it's interesting how you can see the several levels for the product so do you have just one north star matrix or not or you think it's not possible for the moment you know i mean those two metrics that i mentioned are the kind of north star metrics like how do we grow this community and what are those numbers that we want to use to grow the community how do you get those wins like if you're aiming for users and assets under management on cosmos based chains that sort of says well we need more chains so we need more of these experiments and we need to grow those individual experiments we need to provide support for the existing ecosystem members i think from a software development standpoint the way people have done this in the past with small teams is you make it as easy to use as possible and you make the software teach the users and then the users start teaching each other it creates this feedback loop and you get this really cool online community and you have a group of people who are really bought in and help support and build the software and that's kind of the open source model that's what we do here it's like a creating a snowball effect yeah for the community and so on do you use some extra tools for your product management or your use only github that's a great question you know i do use only github i think that you know you mentioned that it is sort of the space where it's like hard to find metrics and it's like very fuzzy and like kind of feely and like i mean even in my answer i kind of got into that but it's like yeah you kind of gotta ship and iterate you gotta like take this feedback and you gotta do some something with it then you put more software to users and that whole thing does kind of feel like a black box sometimes i find that the product management tooling that's closest to the folks actually doing the work is going to be the most useful you know you can build really gorgeous gantt charts and dashboards and asana and all of these tools but if you don't have your engineers which are your users for these product management tools actually engaging with that you've lost your users so uh like meeting your users where they are especially with the pm tooling i think is really important so yeah github is where we're at there was a sentence one of my friends said talking about i think ethereum saying that ethereum is a great example of where we see that investors believe what the developers do because if we hit it the other way around it would be a terrible terrible mess if developers would just believe blindly what the investors say and develop something random so yeah i think that was called web 2.0 yeah exactly exactly yep so we have a name for this yeah do you see any as specific of their product development in distributed team you need to collaborate with a lot of people to understand how your product should be shaped yeah if you look at sort of a more traditional company there's a lot of different ways that product management and product development are sort of managed and you know there's a lot of companies there's this kind of like traditional top-down management style but i think if you see tech companies these days the product role is more like this role where you have a lot of sort of like implied authority like you're the product manager but you don't really actually have people reporting to you and you can't really force anyone to do anything so the role ends up kind of being this you have to talk to all the stakeholders get alignment and then make sure everything is happening and you know that's exactly the way it's been in the cosmos ecosystem when i was a tinderman i ran the product organization which was like me and one other guy marco who's fantastic and kind of does what i do for tinderman he's in berlin he's great you guys might have met him and i worked with the whole engineering team you know that was definitely sort of the beginning of that and also throughout that process being the first point of contact for new projects coming in and trying to talk to them from a product standpoint talk to them from a roadmap standpoint ensure that we met their needs i got kind of used to this sort of multi-stakeholder model and ensuring that everyone is aligned and that we can move forward and now in this world that we're in now there's a lot more entities within the cosmos that we do need to coordinate around so that skill set is working now but instead of just within one company it's across a bunch of different companies one last question about product management i could talk about product management for an hour so happy to happy to chat about this hannah

what is the most valuable or most challenging part in your product management work is communication with the others or engineering part of work yeah i think that that's a great question so i was talking earlier about you've got users you bring the feedback back to the business you bring the feedback you bring the roadmap to the engineering team the engineering team ships it and you work with marketing to ship it and you can think of that as like a cycle and basically what you're trying to do is keep that moving you know for me only find myself coding when the engineering part of that cycle is kind of broken and it's not moving quickly that's the part for me that's kind of easy in fun that's a bit of my background over the last few years prior to coming to cosmos i do think some of the biggest problems we have in this world are people talking to people and if you look at the coronavirus i think that's a great example of that being probably the biggest problem we have so people are always the hardest part of any system you know the wet code as some people in this industry say i do think that's that's the hardest part a lot of the technical challenges in cosmos are man hours and engineering time there's not unsolved technical issues all of those there's a bunch of projects working on them in the cosmos vision is that it's modular and that we're going to be able to incorporate these advances as they come to market much more quickly than other ecosystems and we've seen that there's a few teams working on some privacy tech right now and a few other things but this ecosystem all of the really exciting stuff happening in blockchains you can find happening in cosmos as well and i think that that's because of the modularity and the openness of this community yeah it makes sense i think one question that arises from it which i wasn't going to ask i kind of asked the previous speakers and it's something that you brought up yourself partially now is as a project gets more decentralized as we get more and more shareholders and more project joining like let's say via ibc do you think it becomes more difficult in terms of governance yeah absolutely how to improve it how do we improve it i think that's a great question if you think about the network effects as you add more notes to the network the number of potential connections grows exponentially and it's the same way with organizations as well and when there's this very very point to point individual to individual coordination that has to happen as the size of the ecosystem grows that coordination cost increases exponentially that's kind of a piece of it i think in the past people have always dealt with this through companies and like adding more layers of management and more that i think as decentralized communities we're going to have to rely on governance as a shelling point and be able to build out features there to meet our needs as a community and i think that right now with the situation with the icf that we still have this money from the fundraiser and that we're able to fund the infrastructure development that's great and the hub governance is kind of like finding its way and we're doing some great stuff there but you know in a few years the hub's going to have to start making sure that it funds this activity and it's going to start making decisions on what its inflation percentages are and things like that and as i was saying earlier the engineering piece of it isn't the hardest part it's the people part that governance piece is going to be increasingly important in this ecosystem as we move forward yeah i mean that makes a lot of sense i guess do you have any examples in the blockchain space of a project that in your opinion succeeded in terms of governance are we still in your opinion so way young in governance well you know the united states has been around for like 250 years and would you say we've succeeded in governance

they're not governed via blockchain don't don't tell me that don't tell me i miss when they move on the blockchain have projects succeeded in governments i mean aragon's doing really cool stuff yeah you know if you look back in the day like the decreed folks i think or in dash also z cash is doing some very interesting things with their foundation i think there's a lot of really exciting experiments happen right now but i don't think we're far enough into it to decide who's succeeded or failed and i think there's a lot of good ideas in experiments at this point so yeah that's i guess where i'm at kind of a cop-out sorry nah no worries okay let's move back to ibc i think it was last week on a call the relay office offers hours right is that what it's called or yeah something like that sorry no i'm terrible with names to be honest with you i am too i named that calendar invite and i forgot about it and i guess it is the relay or office hours i i i trust you on that i asked you about what did i ask you but now forgot about you about sorry no i'm kidding i'm kidding you guys are fun this is a blast that was the point you see we try which good now that you said it a lot of people ask us well a lot you're the fourth person we record but um let's imagine that we had a lot of recordings like what do you want to achieve by that and the idea is to speak not to projects but to the people and to understand why do people do what they do so okay i know you're doing ibc but why i should have kind of told you that at the end but anyways i asked you during the call about your views on markets that ibc will create has anything has changed since then did you have any ideas or no no you know i have some very basic ideas of kind of how markets are going to develop you know some some zones are like going to produce things like stable coins or other zones are going to have reasons for people to move tokens there like a decentralized exchange or potentially some of these oracle solutions you know kava you can lock up tokens in a cdp and then mint stable coins that you can then go use throughout the ecosystem akash you're going to be able to buy compute using crypto and sell compute as well so you know there's these fundamental economic imbalances that are going to happen i.e tokens move over to one zone more value is generated and then like what happens to that so sort of looking at these zone-to-zone interactions and seeing where these different sources and uses of value are i think is going to be really instructive for the early days of ibc but you know in the same way that the internet sort of unlocked a bunch of potential that no one really knew there's a lot of things that are going to happen over ibc that we just fundamentally aren't going to be able to know for me i'm kind of uh what can i do now to make this situation better and it's like try to make the protocol as easy to use try to make as many people understand it as possible and broaden that knowledge base and the users as much as we can so that we can start realizing some of these really really cool potential ideas out there you know it's going to take a lot of work from a lot of people to do that and i view my role more as sort of making sure that work gets done you um and put in metrics together have you heard of any obscure cases for ibc from any of the teams that you thought oh my god that's weird like i don't know how they're gonna do that or oh my god that's weird and that's got nothing to do with what we're doing like something obscure i think the desmos team is working with bitsong maybe to do like desmos is kind of a social media platform where you know it's sort of kind of like steemit style incentivized likes and stuff like that and then bitsong is streaming service where users can put up their tracks and stream them and they were going to do some sort of collaboration over ibc which is like really cool and you can totally use ibc for that and i'm really looking forward to seeing that code as far as like weird out there use cases like i don't think there's anything weird enough or out there enough for ipc at this point this is the time for like weird experimentation you know all those weird geocities sites we saw in the 90s like i want to see that so let's bring all the weirdest yeah a chain entirely for memes where you can trade them over to like an open c style nft decks that stuff would be super cool and i'd love to play with it you know one of my favorite projects on ethereum is by billy renkamp who works at cosmos and he built this thing called clovers which is like wild and super cool and seeing sort of like art projects like that on cosmos and like i think that's really cool because art has value because it's fundamentally beautiful and people like interacting with it and if you have a zone you can build some really cool interactions and make those available to people in a way that like exposes the value in the underlying work and like that's cool and that's kind of what we're doing here yeah i think that would be amazing i think talking about argon and mems i'm sure district 0x has like a mem district i'm not sure how it works but but i know they have like a district for men so that would be interesting if aragon is obviously moving on to cosmos so they probably will be playing with ibc as well so hopefully we will see something evolved from that yeah i think there's a little bit of ethernet integration work to do there but i'm confident that we can make that work definitely definitely we spoke yesterday as well with sunny about shared security what do you what are your thoughts about that i think it's a critical piece of ibc and it's what i'm planning on working on after we ship game zones and get this thing on the hub there's a huge upgrade coming up that includes basically the last year of work from the entire engineering team the last upgrade we had sort of went poorly the first time and then it took another three months to get it on the hub so there's a lot of work that's queued up we have bez and aaron and the sdk team have substantially refactored amino out of the code base which is like this sort of obscure but huge internal change that's going to make it drastically easier for client-side developers entering the ecosystem which is when we're talking about users and large numbers of users that means javascript and that means writing really nice front-end experiences for them and right now that's kind of a difficult piece of the ecosystem and it's not something that we really design for this encoding change designs for javascript users and should make it way easier for people to build now it also brings a 1 000 times improvement in marshalling and unmarshaling speed which should result in a huge improvement in transactions per second i.e much faster blockchains so that's this huge change that we have coming through another one is the upgrade module the hub we shipped without it weighted upgraded really easily and right now it requires global coordination among the entire hub validator set we have to shut the chain down and then start it back up it's very involved and really invasive regen networks uh has developed an upgrade module that you just run this little sidecar process and it allows for automated upgrades and you know the fastest i think we've done this global coordination we got the chain up in under an hour one time which is great but you know that's me and a few other people calling everyone and running a bunch of chat rooms for a few days to make sure that everyone's coordinated and that's not scalable or sustainable for anyone this upgrade module can bring that time down to a couple of minutes where all these validators are sort of entering this automated restart and upgrade cycle and that's great tezo style upgrades basically where we use governance and we're able to sort of automate most of the process ibc also coming out in a bunch of other really important things like statesync right now it takes days to sync a node on mainnet if you don't restore from a backup statesync can allow that to happen in a much shorter amount of time there's this huge upgrade coming up and that's kind of the next big project i'm going to be working on after ibc in addition to shared security which is critical for atom value capture i think as the hub we want to be able to validate some of these other zones and earn rent from that in those zones will in turn receive much greater security and the ability to bootstrap their validator set much more quickly you know that's a win-win for the whole ecosystem and just kind of a necessary feature for the hub we're working with the icf in the various cosmos engineering teams to put that in the road map and develop it after ibc sounds awesome moving to game of zones because obviously game of zones is a huge part of ipc how many teams have registered by the way i think we've got 50. 50. oh my god that's cool that's awesome are you gonna participate yourself guys i as part of the game of zones team i will be helping run the hub for game of zones doing a bunch of software troubleshooting i don't know if i will personally have time to run machines on the game of zones but i do know a number of other teams will it's like right around 50 right now i think that we'll probably see a few more folks that's a great turnout for an extremely complex technical event to basically help us test and ensure the stability of this software for maintenance production and it just goes to show what an awesome community cosmos is and like how many people we have that are dedicated and willing to spend time and energy doing this and hopefully with the prize pool from the icf we can help pay some of these folks back for their server costs really looking forward to seeing all the innovative zones that come out of this competition really looking forward to battle testing ibc um and really looking forward to you know i think it's going to be a lot of fun for everyone involved too so uh that's also something i'm really looking forward to got a lot of live streams planned and a lot of conversations like this bow ties yes definitely oh for sure yeah there will be bow ties obviously game of stakes apart from testing one of its another things was to have some like allocation leg distribution serious location well the same thing really for game of zones apart from testing everything does it have any other purposes apart from testing contracts testing security and so on and so forth yeah i mean we are going to try to allocate this prize pool pretty widely and ensure that folks who are helping us do that are being winning prizes for doing the things that we're asking so that that's going to be a piece of it and then there will also be sort of larger prizes for individual things and yeah that's we're working on a lot more detail in that scoring framework and i don't want to say a whole ton of specifics right this moment but yet distribution is definitely a part of that ensuring that the community that helps build and run this and it helps us test this is paid for that essentially i think that's extremely important yeah it makes sense different question completely did say i'm gonna ask some controversial questions shoot them shoot them let's do it before i ask i have to say that i'm all about this i mean my nick on twitter says decentralized decentralization so i think the more teams that work on anything whether it's code or regardless the better but i can't help asking what caused the breakdown in the tendermint team to break into two there's a lot of public blog posts about that but i want to hear your opinion i mean i've read the blog post i want to hear your personal opinion i think that the working situation that we've developed now is working better for everyone involved and that's great okay cool not the greatest answer sorry but that's what you got all kinds of amazing projects have their own yellow brick throat you know i have tried to just keep the interests of the community in mind and do the best that i can in the difficult situation and you know i think that that's kind of what everyone has done and yeah well thank you for thank you i appreciate that and i think that's what everyone has done and all trying our best to keep in mind the needs and wants of the community and trying to ensure that this software gets out there i joined cosmos to help ship this vision this vision of a bunch of app chains that are each independently sovereign and able to conduct value with each other i think if you think about the dream of decentralization and the dream of blockchains and this ability for sort of like these mutualist societies to form in us to be able to like form contracts with each other and transact over the open internet in a trustless and really truly like democratic and free way that's something i fundamentally believe in working in the blockchain space for the last few years i found cosmos to be the truest embodiment of that from a software architecture perspective and i'm here to help ship that and like i want to see that out in the world and that's like selfish on my part you know it's like that's something i believe in and i want and i'm going to go try to make that happen and you know i think that there's a lot of other folks in this ecosystem that kind of feel the same way it's something that makes it special but it also you know when you have a bunch of people who are in it for selfish reasons trying to make the best decision that they can at any given time and you know that's never perfect and decentralization and if you look at the history of sort of political movements you can see that this kind of thing is relatively common so these are things that we're going to run into and i think trying to make sure that we handle them in the calmest way possible and keep everyone who wants to be involved still involved and not kick anyone out start excluding i think is really important you have very positive way of thinking by doing the power of positive thinking you know what they say yeah to be honest that's the kind of answer i was hoping to hear because personally i don't wanna still pull the quilts but um i've been doing blockchain for about 10 years for now something like that like since the very beginning pretty much professionally for about like five or six years or something like that a lot of people when you tell them that the reason you do it is not because you're trying to earn money but because you're doing it for a reason to achieve a personal goal for yourself a lot of people don't understand what you mean by that and i really like your answer because this is exactly the way i feel and this is the reason i do what i do i don't really care about anything else but achieving letting my point of view be heard by what i do because i think it's gonna make some things better and this is what i heard from what you said more or less yeah absolutely and you know i think that we all kind of feel the same way and everyone involved has made huge contributions to the ecosystem and wants to continue to do that and that's great and i think of all of the ways this could have gone this is about the best outcome we could have possibly imagined and that's great and that makes me happy for everyone involved yeah thanks for clarifying that what about pylon validator what's the story i mean how did that happen so i had the bow tie on i launched the blockchain and then i turned the live stream off and i thought oh my god i'm a product manager and the thing i just launched i'm not a user of i gotta [ __ ] fix that and i went and spun up a validator and that's how i started my validator company there's a picture when i go on a website i really like there is like a space man going with um a spacesuit something like with the back what's the meaning of that picture well i have a friend that i've known since i was uh god i think we were eight when we met we've been really close friends for a number of years he and i bought into bitcoin for the first time back in 2013. he actually lost a bunch of tokens in the mount gox hack and we've been in a crypto adventure together for a really long time and just love talking about this stuff and he's a user experience designer and knows a bunch of really talented graphic designers a couple years ago we back in 2016 2017 we were looking to start a bitcoin mining company and you know i was helping him with that and throughout that process we were kind of thinking about names and uh the name that we ended up coming up with was pylon pylon you can think of as kind of this unit of intrinsic value it's sort of this modular piece of compute that is has some intrinsic value associated with it and you know you can think of one pylon leading to a few pylons and you know these sort of independent modular business units and mining is one way to think of that business model and validating is also another way to think of this sort of like modular business model as well you know validating on each of those independent chains kind of has its own own risk and comes with its own costs and servers and we thought that the name would work great for pylon validation services as well that's kind of how the name came about and that piece of art was done by this really talented artist artist named alex rice i think it's really cool and i think it sort of describes what pylon does into the void if you're just thinking about being a validator how do you think how much time do you will be involved in that kind of business how much time you will keep this going yeah i mean it depends on you know from a server administration cost like my pager duty goes off very infrequently once i've set it up it has not been a whole ton of work now if you're talking about from and i mean there's work on the tax side which has been and you know that depends on your jurisdiction beyond those two things unless you're doing some really intense marketing efforts or you're actively growing to go support a ton of other networks or you're trying to get a lot more delegations those are activities that you could spend a lot of time on but i don't really spend any time on those you know mine are mainly just admin costs and as a slightly unusual validator because my marketing essentially is doing things like this and getting out there into the community and building the stuff that the community actually wants and that's sort of what i do in my day job i'm maybe not representative of what it's like to start a validator yeah it doesn't take me a whole ton of upkeep time right now and i also do have a couple other people i work with on it so so it's not a separate type of business it's just supporting your general cosmos work yeah i think so yeah i have as a part of my employment at tinderman i was i earned some atoms and my thought was like what am i going to do with these atoms like i do want to stake them i do want to like be staked in this network it's it's something that i'm passionate about and continuing to work on in the thought of doing that with another validator or a series of other validators it's like i could do that i also want to run hardware and support this network and validate the transactions coming across it i do view it as sort of part and parcel of my work here and i prior to working in blockchains i spent a while in cloud infrastructure so like i like running services on the internet so like this is a great excuse to do that if you weren't working on ibc and you weren't involved with tendermint or cosmos anyhow is there any projects out there that you would want to work with in blockchain obviously uh i can't think of any right now i've been so deep in this rabbit hole lately like i'm not i'm not deep into these other projects right now i do know that there's a lot of exciting stuff going on you know i see that your protocol team doing a lot of exciting stuff i think koto with ck snarks is really interesting you know the lazy ledger team ishmael who i worked with here at tendermint i think is fantastic mustafa just really really smart guys really cool idea excited to see them chase that down there's one other member on that lazy ledger team whose name i'm forgetting right now but he's awesome too anyway yeah there's a few cool projects out there but you know cosmo supports large ecosystem and keeping that running up sustainable ensuring that the software is updated the security vulnerabilities are patched like that's that's really what i'm here for right now the reason i'm asking is because i found your cv i think online and it said that you used to work for three years in hotel in the kitchen now i come from a managing restaurant and i worked as an fnb manager for big chain hotels so i know exactly what it's like oh yeah so what's more difficult working in the kitchen or being a product manager for a crazy gluing protocol internet project ibc what's worse oh what's better i think the kitchen the kitchen is way harder really i've been telling that to everybody nobody believes me you know and i've been saying guys look i've done for 12 years i've done haruka in three different continents and believe me i just really it's really cool it's like a yellow brick road that you just go along with the wind and there's no trouble there's like no way i mean yeah it's you know there's always the wicked witch of the west like right on the side of the yellow brick road and that's kind of the way of block chains yeah i don't know i found the hours to be really tough you know working all night every night is tough i still cook all the time so i get to do the thing that i really love from that period make really great food i think my wife really appreciates it and it's still something i enjoy but doing it 12 hours a day is very hard and it's physically challenging in a way that this isn't cool to hear that you also you have also spent some time in hotels because like you know a lot a lot i spent a lot of time jamming restaurants and then i decided okay i'm bored with jamie restaurants i was about 30 i think just before i was 30 i moved to work for a big chain and then i realized okay i don't want to do that anymore it's too crazy i don't want to be working 20 hours per day it's time yeah totally let's do some mighty that's easier just some personal question how many hours you spent for a project now in a day like 12 hours or 40 or 8. i work around 8 to 10. this is something that i am passionate about i think it's really important is sustainable pace and i try to talk to all the engineers and other folks i work with about this as well try to get good sleep and i think especially with the sort of 24-hour nature of blockchains and when i'm going to bed at night people in asia are waking up when i'm waking up in the morning you guys are like rocking in europe and i've got the middle of my day it's just so easy to let yourself fall so deep into that hole you don't take care of yourself and getting out getting exercise walking biking lifting weights whatever it is in addition to sleep and like having some time for yourself and to do things outside of work i just think is really really important so my average day i kind of wake up early i deal with a lot of folks in europe so this is kind of my europe time and then in the afternoon i try to do focus work coding project management stuff like that intake meetings i just try to keep a really regular schedule and do the best i can on my off hours i think it's the most difficult part of working in distributed team to take care of yourself it is it is and you know i've ever since i started in software i've been working as a remote employee the first job i got i got hired without having physically met anyone at the company that was so weird for me but now it's like so normal for me that this sort of like idea of like having to manage yourself and like that being a really important part of being able to contribute to work is something that i've been dealing with for a while so yeah i just think it's really important and especially in this coronavirus time where everyone is like really fully remote that's self management and being able to step back take that time take a little bit of emotional space just really really important how big is the current team that's working on ibc right now that you manage you know i don't manage i work honestly with every single one of them there's chris and the interchange berlin team and i think there's three or four folks over there and then agorik you know it really depends on where we're at in the process during the spec process there were probably 10-ish folks that were really regularly working on the spec and actively contributing to calls and code reviews and at various points throughout the implementation we've had more and fewer folks working on it cool it's really great to hear that the people who work on the things we use and the things we as a project are going to use this is the reason why we chose cosmos three years ago or how many whatever years ago it was when we started to work on our project it's great to hear that you know people take all the things that you set into consideration that they do what they do because they want to do it and not because they're enforced or because this is their only choice and this is every time when i speak to someone i hear pretty much the same thing and i get really excited the people i'm around are excited about what they do i mean it's cool you know we are kind of a bunch of anarcho-mutualists in a way yeah that's true that's true i think it's a differences i mean involving can be a part of their life that you're saying it's the differences between good and amazing projects and other projects in blockchain space let's put it in this way yeah i totally agree with you you know there's a lot of other strategies and if you go look out there at tron you can see a marketing driven strategy that kind of works so you know maybe the way we're doing it is wrong too yeah that's true that's true but i don't think we're doing it you're doing it wrong i don't either

i think the professional dreamers is really important now now more than ever for sure yeah yeah yeah maybe we missed something important you want to share with us there's a game of zones live stream happening 10 minutes after this but other than that um everyone just go sign up for game of zones if you're at all interested in ibc play the first the phases are gonna be week one is gonna be you just basically have to keep a connection alive it's not gonna be very difficult phase 2 you're sending some transactions all of this is really easy with the relayer software and some basic linux skills so if you have basic linux skills in cosmos come try out game of zones you're going to win some atoms come give it a try go sign up

godz.cosmosnetwork.dev i think is the website awesome thank you