[Messari AMA] Jack Zampolin, Product at Cosmos
Messari hosted a public AMA with Cosmos' product lead, Jack Zampolin in the Messari community group. This is a transcript of the conversation.
Messari: I’m pumped to have Cosmos' product lead Jack Zampolin with us this afternoon! Cosmos was one of the most anticipated protocol launches in years, and it has not disappointed. Thanks for being here, Jack!
Jack Zampolin: For sure! Thanks for having me
Messari: We have a lot of great questions in the chat and from Slido. But before we jump in, can you give us the SparkNotes on your background, how Cosmos came to be, and a quick ELI5 of Cosmos?
Zampolin: (Resume) TL;DR cooking (fine dining southern food for those asking) -> kickstarter campaign -> devbootcamp -> influxdb -> Blockstack -> Cosmos
Cosmos is the result of some novel research on PBFT consensus algorithms done by @jaekwon in ~2014. He met up with Ethan Buchman and they formed the Tendermint company at that point. From there the vision of cosmos really began to solidify and they launched the fundraiser in March 2017. Happy to answer more questions there if you would like me to go more in depth
ELI5: Cosmos is a way for blockchains to talk to each other
Messari: That's great, thanks! We have a couple general protocol and use questions that might help as segues into unpacking that a little bit.
Messari: First question is about the security bug last month: can you summarize and speak to any development changes post-bug? “Has Cosmos development changed at all since last month’s security bug?”
Zampolin: Well, I think there were a number of great lessons learned there (validators should have a security email setup being top of mind), but Jessy (our Head of Security) has had processes and procedures for incidents like this on the books for a while. Even though she was in AUS during the incident things went very smoothly. During her keynote at the recent interchain conference she mentioned the need for a CosmosCERT which would partially be staffed by community members. Details there are TBD.
But as far as development, no real changes. These type of bugs happen and the most important thing is responding promptly and properly
Messari: You were discussing this a bit before we started too, but can you speak to any privacy development for Cosmos? “Is Cosmos working on privacy features?”
Zampolin: Well, there is definitely Sentinel VPN which is a pretty cool project built on the SDK, but as far as on-chain privacy, there are a couple of teams working on non-public stuff right now and there has been significant interest in seeing the ZKVM on top of the SDK.
The ICF would also fund a grant in that area if you are looking to work on something like that.
Messari: Regarding interoperability, can you speak to this question about competition for Cosmos? “A lot of projects are working toward interoperability now, who is Cosmos’ biggest competition?”
Zampolin: Well, I don't really view us as having competition there. There are projects (Polkadot and ILP come to mind) that are also building protocols in the area, but they serve different use cases. IBC is essentially HTTP for blockchains (arbitrary data over connections) and we have broad community involvement in the spec we are developing. If you are interested in joining the process please DM me!
Messari: We have a couple general use questions regarding delegation risk and wallets. What are your thoughts? “Best practices for minimizing risk when delegating?” “What Atom wallet should I use?”
Zampolin: Best way to delegate is to pick 5-10 valdiators that you like and split the delegations among them. This minimizes risk and helps support the network. As for wallets, lunie.io was built by a team working for cosmos so I'm a bit partial to that one. There are a bunch of others out there.
Messari: Cosmos came up pretty frequently in conversations about Facebook’s Libra project announcement, and we have a couple questions about that. The first is about this tweet: “What dos this tweet from Shane mean?” The second: “What are the similarities between Libra and Tendermint?”
Zampolin: HotStuff (LibraBFT) is essentially a small tweak to the Tendermint consensus algo and FB mentions Tendermint in the first page of their whitepaper. Also the size of the validator sets (100) are the same. And they went the Swiss foundation route, so a bunch of similarities there.
I think Shane was saying that the similarities mean that the technical choices made by teams building on cosmos were validated by Facebook building in much the same direction
Messari: On the topic of validators, we have an interesting question on the cost of becoming a validator. “Currant entrance threshold to become a validator is about 150k USD. Don’t you think it might scare potentially interested teams and harm development of Cosmos?”
Zampolin: There is an active discussion in the community about increasing the validator set size (to ~150) to lower the barrier to entry. We are shipping a feature with the next release that will allow governance to change this dynamically. I anticipate seeing that as a governance proposal soon, and I expect that proposal to pass.
Messari: So we touched on similarities between Libra and Cosmos, but we have a couple questions about similarities between Cosmos and a couple other protocols. First, about Algorand: “How do you think Cosmos (or at least Tendermint) compares with Algorand?” And second, about Binance Chain: “What are the similarities between Binance’s chain and Cosmos?”
Zampolin: Well, Binance Chain is built directly on the CosmosSDK. They aren't using our staking/slashing and gov modules but it’s very similar to the hub. They will enable IBC once it’s live. They are also pushing improvements upstream.
Algorand uses a random proposer selection algorithm to pick a subset of the validators to sign blocks. This allows for much larger validator sets, but makes lite clients much harder and introduces a large surface area for attacks
Messari: Stepping back for a minute, we have a question about Cosmos’ launch, lessons learned, and advice for future protocol launches. “Can you give a retrospective look on the launch and locking of transactions? How’d it go? What did you learn? Advice for other networks going live soon?”
Zampolin: I have a blog post about the testnet process and launch that is in review rn that I would post here to answer. Womp. I think it went really well. We learned a TON about launching networks like this. Also the economic model we had (inflation to incentivise staking) seems to be working (network at ~60% staked). There is a lot I could dig into with that question, anything specific I should expand on?
Advice for other networks launching: spend time working with your validator set and ensure you have a solid set of operators that you have open lines of communication with
Messari: I think that's super helpful, and we actually do have one question about the economics of Cosmos that you might touch on a bit. “Why exponentially increasing supply?”
Zampolin: To incentivise staking
Messari: I also wanted to bump this question and note your answer here: “Can you also discuss relationship with Cosmos and Agoric?”
Zampolin: Polkadot has started working with the IBC working group. Agoric also had a similar cross-chain transfer standard they were working on. Once they started getting involved with the IBC calls we reconciled the two standards and they are now working directly with us on IBC. Their decades of experience building protocols and languages has been invaluable over the last couple of months
Messari: Here’s a quick question about Photon: “Can you tell us something about the Photon project?”
Zampolin: Zaki is working on that right now. He gave some thoughts about the project direction in his keynote for Interchain Conversations last week. Video will be up soon. I would defer to him. Won't be a straight up airdrop tho. Users will have to opt in
Messari: We’re jumping around a bit right now, but on incentivizing staking: “Is the concentration of ATOMs on exchanges a threat to Cosmos Staking Participation that could lead to high inflation in case of low staking participation?”
Zampolin: I see exchanges building validators themselves and then offering users the ability to trade their staked atoms on the exchanges books in return for large commissions. So I don't see that lowering staking participation.
Messari: Here's a fun high-level question for you: “Is Cosmos ready for a bull market?”
Zampolin: Oh yeah. I think in prior bull markets the approach has been "one chain to rule them all" and the overall crypto market has scaled by adding a bunch of shitcoins to absorb all the inbound demand leaving a bunch of disconnected chains w/o liquidity in the rubble. The cosmos architecture allows for chains to interoperate and the network as a whole can actually scale. I think Cosmos was built for a bull market
Messari: Before we end with a couple generic questions, here’s one about zones: “What will be the top 5 problem / business domain or category in which the 1st 100 zones will sign up, and how costly is running a secure zone for a year?”
Zampolin: DEX, DeFi (i.e. financial primatives), High volume social or automated transaction zones, Oracles, Peg Zones
As far as zone security, depends on what level of security you need. There are a number of different ways you can deploy tendermint. What is nice is that you can customize it to the amount of security your zone requires. Also we will be shipping the ability for the Cosmos Hub to help colateralize and validate other zones via IBC (similar to shared security) after the protocol is live that will add even more options for chains built on the CosmosSDK
Messari: Last question (from me): what does Q3 and Q4 look like for Tendermint? What's coming up?
Zampolin: Well we have a network upgrade coming up in the next couple of weeks so look out for that. It will add some pretty cool governance features. We have also made some significant investments in increasing the usability of the SDK for devs both on the Go and Javascript side. Expect that Dev UX work to continue and be a major focus. Q4 should contain an IBC release and enablement on the hub. Also be on the look out for TONS of projects announcing chains built on the cosmos SDK in the lead up to IBC enablement. I've also started doing regular technical video updates on roadmap so if you are interested in more details hmu and check those updates out.
Messari: Can you share the best ways to continue these conversations and keep up with Cosmos development (before we officially call it a day)?
Zampolin: Follow Cosmos (and @jack_zampolin, shameless plug) on Twitter! Thanks for hosting this and letting me take over your channel for a bit!
Messari: Thanks again for chatting, this has been a lot of fun.
Zampolin: For sure!