 What's up guys? I got my good friend Ethan Buckman here. Ethan is the founder of Cosmos And I won't be talking about Cosmos because he's a man to talk about it Ethan. Welcome to the show brother Thanks, Amir. So why don't you start off and tell us what's Cosmos? What's Cosmos? Well, so This project started years ago When Jay Kwan founded the tenement project essentially to build a secure proof-of-stake Blockchain cryptocurrency system and since then tenement has evolved quite a bit has become a lot more general purpose useful for much more than just currencies And now that we're cut we last year We're kind of reevaluating where to go with tenement and take sort of taking a look at the space seeing all the open problems I mean decide you know what now that we have this really strong underlying consensus system Let's use this to go back to the original vision of building out a public proof-of-stake cryptocurrency But rather than just having you know just another dumb currency We want to actually use this to solve some of the outstanding problems in the space in particular Scalability and interoperability across different kinds of cryptocurrencies in different blockchains So the essential idea with Cosmos is that it's a network It's essentially a network of blockchains where you have many independent blockchains that are all able to Interoperate with one another by moving coins and moving data through a central hub But down the road there could certainly be more hubs and what we're really focused on is rather than like Defining a particular model and throwing out that model and saying this is the best model We're building Cosmos as a set of much smaller much more module primitives That can be composed in the way that you think is best to put together You know your public blockchain network So we're doing it in one particular way But the modules we're building are going to be much more general purpose than just for the Cosmos network So you probably get this question a lot is what's the difference between you and Ethereum? Great question. We do get it all the time We we have a different focus So a theory the main component of Ethereum is the Ethereum virtual machine Which is the the application state that runs on their proof-of-work blockchain What you can do with Cosmos is you can can support the Ethereum virtual machine completely in its entirety like exactly to spec and Actually use the Cosmos network to upgrade the capacity of Ethereum So you can build a bridge to the Ethereum network allow people to move their ether onto the Cosmos network and then have many Independent Ethereum blockchains running on the tenement consensus and that provides both the vertical and the horizontal scalability Talking about consensus. What's the major difference between your proof-of-stake model and say theorems proof-of-stake model? There's similar in a number of ways. So the latest iteration of Casper Looks quite similar to tenement at least on the surface. It uses the same Byzantine fault-tolerant constructions essentially some of the major differences are around the censorship resistance and availability guarantees of Casper, so the focus of Casper is really trying to Really trying to focus on on making sure that the system is always available Even if it means in the short term we're not getting some kind of finality So that the blocks are always being produced even if there aren't strong economic guarantees that they're going to be finalized and Additionally Casper makes let's call it much more draconian Rules around punishments of validators. So not only do they punish validators for double signing which tenement also does But they're very strict about punishing when there may or may not have been censorship It's very hard to detect censorship in one of these public systems But anything that looks like it could be censorship Casper is is is trying to punish to basically Prevent colluding validators tenement and cosmos takes a slightly less Byzantine position on that I guess draconian position and you guys raised how much do you guys raise earlier this year? So in April we did a public fundraiser. We raised Around 16 million dollars in 30 minutes beautiful. Yeah, and so where you're on the roadmap right now We're coming along we just published a very extensive analysis of the tenement consensus engine using the Jepsen distributed systems tool so we really put it through the ringer and It came out great. So no tenement as far as we know satisfies all its guarantees So we're really we're really pushing to bring tenement to a production ready status within say the next month We're getting close and then on the cosmos side. We're still building out The framework to enable us to build the cosmos application because again, we want to do it in a really modular fashion So we don't just throw up an application But we actually provide a framework to make it easy for other people to build applications talking about applications What are one of your guys first use cases you want to focus on? I think one of the first things We're really interested in is is helping to scale a theory of there's a lot of there's a lot of hype and a lot of excitement in the Ethereum community a lot of projects that want to build there, but the current Ethereum network just doesn't have the capacity The proposed scalability designs. I think are a little more further out. They're very promising, but they're a little further out I think cosmos is a lot closer and can provide potentially a significant upgrade to the Ethereum network in the short term So we're hoping to be able to facilitate that So to summarize for some people that might be confused is if I build an application on Ethereum My identity my tokens can move on to the cosmos network. That's right and then vice versa back and forth Yeah, yeah, cool. So we're looking at the space right now I know this a little bit off tangent is two things I want to ask you number one What's your current take of the space and number two? Where do you think we're gonna be in the next year or so? Wow my current take? Very broad big question. Yeah. I'm very excited by it I think there's a lot of really interesting things going on a lot of cool projects A lot of people are starting to pay attention. It seems like we might be moving out of the very early adopter stage into some kind of more large adoption That said I think the all the ICO hype is very dangerous. It's it's become a little Explosive I'm scared of it. There's I think quite a few scams out there And I think a lot of people are gonna get burned really badly You know, I'll be on a panel later today talking about this ICO madness Recommending that people not participate or do extreme due diligence or be prepared to lose all their money But you know ICOs aside, I think there's an incredible amount of innovation particularly interested in how this space is is really making Cryptography and databases and like formal verification all super cool Areas of computer science and really kind of giving AI a run for its money And and I think this is a way more important space to be in right now than AI We have a lot of work to do on the socio-economic foundations of society practical because you can use it right away You can use it right away And it really provides new ways for for humans to coordinate and collaborate Yeah, I think there's enormous potential there for solving like really fundamental issues in society I think we'll keep it at that. I'll keep it nice and sure Ethan. Thank you so much. Thanks so much If people want to get in touch with you best way I'm on Twitter Buckmanster. You can just search for Ethan Buckman B. C. H. M. A. N And connect with me there awesome guys. Yeah, thanks. Peace. Thanks