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- [00:00]
Bryce
Foreign.
- [00:10]
Brendan
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, gather around the Spotify from Sonos, gather around the. Wherever you guys are, The TV speaker, the Bose, the jbl. We have an awesome podcast recording for you guys today. You guys know me, I'm your co host, Bryce. Not joined by my good buddy across the country, Brendan. Today he got pulled in a couple different directions. So I'm taking on solo and we've got a duo guest appearance today. We've got Josh Cincinnati, who's working over at the Interchain foundation, and Barry Plunkett is joining us, who's the founder of Interchain Labs. Gentlemen, how are we doing?
- [00:51]
Josh Cincinnati
Great, it's great to be here. Thanks for having us on.
- [00:54]
Bryce
Yeah, lovely to be here. Thanks for having us, Bruce.
- [00:56]
Brendan
Yeah, you bet. No, at the Crypto 101 podcast, we always like to get to know who we're, who we're speaking to first, get like to get acquainted. Then we like to get into the business part. But so Josh, give us a quick background. Who are you and what's the kind of sort of work that you're doing at the the foundation? And Barry, then we'll get to you a little bit about your background and then up to speed of what we're working on here at the. Found at the the labs.
- [01:20]
Josh Cincinnati
Sure, yeah. So as succinctly as I can manage it, I got into the industry back in as a hobbyist in 2012. I was working at a startup at a time, at the time, hired a developer who happened to be early on in the Bitcoin talk forums. And he basically, even though I hired him, he became a mentor to me and I got obsessed with bitcoin. I had kind of the perfect background to be obsessed with politics, math, obvious programmer, that, that was it for me. I was just, I was sold. Sold, totally sold. And so I knew I had to get into the industry. So in 2015 I joined a Bitcoin and then Ethereum API company called Block Cipher, was there as a developer advocate for two years and then learned in that process that like, you know, I love, love Bitcoin, love Ethereum, but they have fundamental privacy issues that I didn't understand at the time. And that got me interested in zcash. So I moved over to zcash, became executive director, the founding executive director of the zcash Foundation. Learned a lot about managing cryptocurrency, nonprofits, board interactions, and also angry communities. I was just gonna say that I've had a lot of experience with that now, but I will say I learned A great deal. And I left that right around when the pandemic started and started focusing more on board work and advisory work for protocols and projects. And I had always been somewhat intrigued by the Cosmos ecosystem because to me, especially as an early bitcoiner, it reminded me a great deal of what bitcoin was like in the early days. A lot of the vision is very similar. This idea of empowerment, kind of being able to have an asymmetric relationship with the powerful and your own sovereign way. A lot of that was really meaningful to me and it resonated a great deal. So I ended up joining the Interchange foundation, which is one of the primary supporting partners of the Cosmos ecosystem. Had a whirlwind year, but I can happily say that one of the end results of that work was being fortunate enough to be a part of acquiring Skip to become the Interchange Labs. And I think that's a great segue. Over to Barry.
- [03:58]
Brendan
Man, you must have done podcast or two before. That's a great segue. Thanks.
- [04:05]
Bryce
I'll be quite brief. My background isn't as interesting as Josh's. I was working at a hedge fund called dshaw back in 2020 on a team where the whole mission of the team was, hey, let's watch emerging technologies and let's look at the tech we're building internally at the firm and let's spin out new startup. So I helped them spin out and scale like a developer tools startup, something in real estate tech. And obviously while I was there, Defi summer started happening and I thought it was really, really cool. And I thought, hey, maybe we could make a lot of money here potentially if we could go and work on it. And crypto also just appealed to me because my background before that was in public policy. And I originally got out of that and got into tech and got into startups because I was like trying. I thought, oh, you could change the world with government. And I realized that's really, really hard to do and maybe you can't, but you can change the world with tech. And the thing that I was missing from it was like, you know, actually how can we build systems that organize the way people interact and potentially change institutions? And so when I saw crypto, I was like, oh, holy shit, here's something that is potentially super, super lucrative and can have a really massive positive impact on the world. And then the fund I was at the time basically said, hey, we know you think this stuff is cool, but we can't touch it with a 10 foot pole for legal and compliance reasons. We won't go anywhere near it. So if you want to work on it, you've got to do it on your own. We won't even spin anything off that touches it. So I left and then very quickly found my way into the cosmos ecosystem.
- [05:54]
Barry Plunkett
Guys, it's been a massive year in crypto with big price movements, headlines everywhere, and major institutions with even countries getting involved. That's why you're here listening to this podcast right now. And if you've been curious but feel like you've missed the boat, don't worry, there's still time like we talk about on these episodes every week. With only 21 million Bitcoin ever to exist, it's designed to be scarce and that scarcity can mean real staying power. And the team at Coin Flip Preferred believe stepping into crypto should be simple, secure and on your terms. That's why they pair you with a dedicated crypto expert who guides you through every step, from your very first transaction to more advanced solutions. Plus, Coin Flip is a registered money services business and does not custody funds, so you stay in control and protected. With nearly a decade of collective experience, Coin Flip Preferred client managers know the space inside and out. If you already explore the world of digital assets with confidence, visit coin flip tech crypto101 or use the promo code crypto101 for 50% off transaction fees valid 1 per customer until May 30, 2025.
- [07:01]
E
Ladies and gentlemen, we are now boarding group A. Please have your boarding passes ready to scan. If your phone is cracked, old or was chewed up by your Chihuahua travel companion, please refrain from holding up the line. Instead, go to Verizon and trade in any phone in any condition from one of their top brands for the new Samsung Galaxy S25 plus with Galaxy AI and a watch and tab on any plan. Only on Verizon with new line on my plan. Service plan required for watch and tab. Additional terms apply. See verizon.com for details.
- [07:30]
Brendan
That's awesome. I mean you sold yourself short there at the beginning about not having a cool startup story, but being in skunk works at D.E. shaw is pretty badass. I would say.
- [07:41]
Bryce
They started the team because when Jeff Bezos left to found Amazon, they didn't invest in it. So they had. They were left holding the biggest bag in the world so bad they were short. I was Cope, basically. I was. I was Cope for Jeff.
- [07:58]
Brendan
That's awesome. I mean, yeah, you guys got, yeah, both incredible backgrounds but. But quite diverse. And Josh, I'll start with you on the foundation side kind of like walk us through the mission of the foundation and really like, why you exist.
- [08:12]
Josh Cincinnati
Yeah.
- [08:13]
Brendan
The same question then will be posed to Barry on the lab side. So you could warm up here.
- [08:19]
Josh Cincinnati
Yeah, yeah. Well, I think you'll find, you'll find there's a degree of alignment now, post acquisition for sure. But the main reason we exist is we believe that these technologies that are being developed, all these cryptocurrencies that, that are being developed right now, that, that developers everywhere have a right to have more say in how they want to develop and build these things and have sovereignty and choice, like, and to be able to do that while still being able to interact with other ecosystems, other people that are participating in these systems. So being able to say, define your own economic system, but not be forced to settle onto one chain or the other, because that's currently, you know, and this is not to cast shade on any particular approach, but just that, you know, if you're building like an L2 on Ethereum or if you're building an app atop Ethereum, you have to, you're effectively tying yourself to whatever that economic system is. Right. And ultimately those economic systems can, they can change on you.
- [09:27]
Brendan
And so basically you guys are looking for like a polyamorous society, whereas EVM is like a monogamous society.
- [09:35]
Josh Cincinnati
That is a way better explanation. You, this is why you're the podcast expert. Just. Yes, because I don't think I would come up with that. But no, that is, I think there is something we said about being open minded, about having the opportunity to make those kinds of choices. And I think that in the case of the Interchain foundation, it was founded on this precept that we need to be able to build tools and systems to enable developers to do this. And one of the refocusing elements of that now, especially upon acquiring SCIP and Interchain Labs, is that we believe that the Cosmos Hub needs to be a central part of that story while still giving people opportunity and choice to build those systems and to provide tooling for people to do that. So that might have been a long winded answer, but that's no.
- [10:28]
Brendan
I like it. I like it.
- [10:30]
Bryce
Yeah, I can give some color on the lab side, but just starting, big picture. To put what Josh said a different way, most big infrastructure projects and crypto start out with the goal of saying, hey, I'm gonna, we're build a blockchain and then we're gonna try to get everybody to use that blockchain. That's what we're doing here. Like, we're here to build a blockchain.
- [10:52]
Brendan
We're raise a billion dollars.
- [10:55]
Bryce
Yeah, we're raise a ton of money. We're gonna, we're gonna. Everybody's gonna build on our blockchain. So Ethereum, Solana, Celestia, whoever, right? That's their approach. And when Cosmos got started back in 2017 or 2018, they took a different approach, which is they said, hey, we're going to build an Internet of blockchains. And when you do that, when you start with the idea of saying, we're going to build an Internet instead of we're going to build a website, right, Your approach is incredibly different. You start from the perspective of what are the standards that we need to do that, how does the Internet work under the hood? The only way we can navigate between websites and share data across websites, or have users log into websites, TCPIP and HTTP, truly neutral protocols that don't have tokens or fees attached to them. They're truly, truly neutral and they're supported and used everywhere now. And that's what made the Internet possible. But back in the day, there were a lot of people with commercial versions of these things. I mean, Apple had its own version of the Internet that you could log on to only if you had the right device that you could plug into your Apple computer. Right.
- [12:06]
Brendan
There are probably so many people that were like betting that that was going to be the future.
- [12:09]
Josh Cincinnati
Right? I think I was one of, I think it was, was the, one of the services. I'm that old, so I remember that.
- [12:16]
Bryce
Yeah, exactly. And you know, that didn't work. What worked is neutral, open standards and tools, right? You say, okay, rather than, if there's going to be an Internet of blockchains, I can't just build one blockchain. I have to build a toolkit that enables other people to build their own chains. And that toolkit has to have the same principles that those standards do. They have to be open source, it has to be neutral, and it has to be deeply flexible. Right. You have to be able to customize what your chain does, how it interacts with the world, how decentralized is it, what are the things you want about it. And the purpose of Interchain Labs is to build the, the products and build that toolkit and support those protocols that bring that Internet of blockchains into the world that make it possible, and to do it in a neutral way at the part of it. A part of the Internet of blockchains that we focus on specifically is also the Cosmos hub, right? Which is built with this whole toolkit for people to launch their own blockchains that incorporates all of the standards for them to be able to interact with and interoperate with other blockchains in standardized ways that everybody can trust and rely on, that can be open. And we want to use the Cosmos Hub to help grow that Internet of blockchains as well. Right. But that, that is really the key difference, right. Wherever everyone else are saying like, hey, you have to build on our thing, we're saying, hey, just, just build the Internet and you can use our tools to do that. And if, if you want to have a relationship with the Cosmos Hub, you can. Right? But you, but you don't have to. And that's I think really what defines Cosmos. And our role is just the product builders in that, trying to bring people into the ecosystem, trying to give them the tools that they need.
- [14:02]
Brendan
Awesome. So, so yeah, I think, yeah, a lot of people are probably familiar with Ethereum and like interacting with Metamask, right? That's kind of like the number one way I think a lot of people kind of get it. And so Ethereum could kind of be compared to Cosmos and all the other like apps call it like AAVE could kind of be compared to, or let's use Uniswap, which is built on Ethereum, could kind of be compared to like Osmosis, which is built on Cosmos. But what you're kind of telling me is that whereas AAVE isn't its own blockchain, it's just kind of like an application built on this platform. You have Cosmos, which is more of like a network and that enables different sort of layer ones to be built on it. Could you just kind of talk a little bit about that technical architecture but just like boil it down to like why it would be relevant for like the average Joe to maybe know or maybe it's not relevant to know. I don't know.
- [14:59]
Bryce
Yeah, I mean, I think the hope is it wouldn't be relevant, right, for the average Joe to know, like you don't really care about the back end infrastructure of the different websites that you use.
- [15:12]
Brendan
All about the application, the use case.
- [15:14]
Bryce
The thing that you care about is, is, is this a world class application, right? Are we using good streaming software right now? Or you know, is my bank reliably showing my true balance or not? And like, is it easy, is it easy for me to log in, can I use my email address to log into all these different things? Like you want a certain level of data and security and access interoperability across different sites, but you don't really care like how it's built in the backend. And that's really where we want to go for the Cosmos ecosystem is that people can use the tech stack and the benefits for developers are you can build really big, you can customize super deeply, you have all of the power of choice. But from a user's perspective, it's just like, oh, I'm interacting with all these great applications and it just works. So.
- [15:58]
Brendan
So it's really like a developer preference that you guys are built there for.
- [16:03]
Bryce
Yeah. And for users what we want is it just works and you don't have to worry about it. Right. So there are a bunch of Cosmos chains that sort of similar to Ethereum, you just use Metamask to sign in on, to sign transactions. There are a bunch of Cosmos chains where you can use Phantom, right. Your Solana Wallet to sign in and use it. There's also Cosmos chains that have sort of Cosmos specific wallets. I think where we want to go is a future where any of these chains, you can use any wallet you want. And sort of the layer that we operate at is building the tools that make it super easy for a developer to do that. But we want Robinhood to be able to come in and build a Cosmos blockchain and not worry about oh, what, what wallet is a user going to have to use? It's just like, no, I can, you know, I can log into my email and with Cosmos we can actually make that on chain. Right. It doesn't have to be this weird off chain process.
- [16:52]
Brendan
So that's actually on that point. Josh, I want to get to you, but on that point real quick was, you know, I hear a lot of people talk about like how cumbersome it is to develop with EVM and stuff is developing with Cosmos, like more Web2 developer friendly. So kind of anybody could come in with their sort of computer science level of training or whatever and like develop on Cosmos. Easier than having to go learn solidity.
- [17:16]
Bryce
It's a great question. There's a bunch of different. The thing that's nice about Cosmos is a bunch of different ways, right? So you want to use Solidity, you can use Solidity on a Cosmos blockchain. If you want to use a different language like Go or Rust or whatever, you can do that too. So from that perspective, it can be a lot more accessible for people, but also it can be accessible for folks who know how to develop crypto smart contracts somewhere else. One of the big things we're working on, for example, on the lab side is a partnership with Solana, so people can write Solana smart contracts on Cosmos blockchains. So it's all about that ease for users and choice for developers.
- [17:58]
Brendan
Awesome. Yeah, Josh, Yeah.
- [17:59]
Josh Cincinnati
And I mean on that choice for developers side, I mean something that I go back to, Barry's right, that users shouldn't care about what these apps are built on. They should just use the app. Just like they don't care that, you know, when they log into their favorite website, if it's running AWS or Google Cloud, who cares? Right, Good point. Right. But, but you know something that's interesting is the developers do care. Developers building these things care. And what you find time and time again, especially when looking at these applications that have been on chain for quite some time on Ethereum or Solana, is that many of them, many of the developers behind the people that are building against them are finding that they are constrained by the environments that they're in that dictate that they have to live on that chain. And you see this happen time and time again where they start to migrate, to try and build within, take things off of that platform to their own because it gives them, it affords them more customization, more ability, and it makes their users happier. Right. And that, you know, it's not a common story yet, but it is a story that is becoming more common. And in a way, to me and to a lot of people that have seen this happening time and time again in other ecosystems, it is just further validation that this sort of Internet of blockchains, this Cosmos vision, is what is actually bearing out to be probably the final state for a lot of these applications, whether they are built initially on, you know, on Ethereum or Solana or elsewhere.
- [19:34]
Brendan
And no, I mean, I definitely actually kind of want to stay on the application stuff because I think that's where a lot of the meat is. We've seen a lot of different applications, like in Defi and Deepin and Gaming arise throughout crypto. Is there any like, specialization that Cosmos is uniquely fitted for or that you guys maybe more important question is where do you guys actually see developers adopting Cosmos for like the, like. Yeah, where are they really focused on?
- [20:04]
Bryce
Yeah, it's a great question. The reality is there's a ton of developers building Cosmos applications across basically any vertical you can think of. So you know, just in the past six months or so, there's been a lot of new AI chains that are emerging. So decentralized platforms for AI training like Akash and Kudos and the Artificial Superintelligence alliance, all built with Cosmos.
- [20:41]
Brendan
Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, I've heard of the asi.
- [20:44]
Bryce
That was, yeah, the ASI thing is a Cosmos chain, right? So like there's a newer generation too of, of chains that are more focused on creating economies for training data, right? So giving users sort of value back for the, the data that they're putting in to train LLMs based on actually where those LLMs are being used by trying to trace that value all the way back to the data. There's a bunch of cool stuff there in Cosmos, Elora, 10 Planet, a handful of others that have raised 15, 25 million plus dollars from different venture firms and are pre launch still. That's sort of been recent. But if you look over the history of the Cosmos ecosystem, just basically any meaningful vertical that you can think of in crypto has big traction. Another big one recently too is bitcoin and bitcoin L2s. So Babylon, which is the bitcoin staking protocol that's going to be launching in the next few months, has $10 billion of Bitcoin staked or some insanely large number. That's a Cosmos chain, right. There's a bunch of Bitcoin L2s that are built as Cosmos chains. So many things that you may interact with. Barachain, you know, is built as a Cosmos chain. So it is really sort of like living up to this goal of saying hey, we want to build the Internet of blockchains. So the tech should be used in a ton of different places by a ton of different people that have different goals. But one of the things you'll notice about a lot of these is they're insanely ambitious. There's like usually, usually like a bad fit for Cosmos is like, oh, I just want to like another copy paste decks. Like you're not going to go through the trouble of building your own chain. You don't need to do that, you're going to deploy that somewhere else. So like we fortunately don't see a lot of that kind of stuff. It's all this kind of really big out there stuff.
- [22:36]
Brendan
Awesome. And Josh, kind of from, you know, this question is probably something that's in the back of the mind of anybody who's maybe seen Cosmos over the years. There's been while maybe a lot of adoption and development and cool stuff going on, a very low price or a sideways price. And I know we're not going to ask you about price predictions or anything like that, but you mentioned at the outset that you've dealt with and interfaced with angry communities. And I'm just curious about the, the impact that this price has had on the psychology of your community. And is there any sort of like, things that the community is doing to maybe address not the price, but maybe the inflation rate or any sort of the, the metrics that go into the valuation of the whole like, sort of network? And how are you guys thinking about that?
- [23:28]
Josh Cincinnati
Yeah, that's right. And to be honest, and just, you know, transparently, I may be the wrong person to ask about that because I'm not as, as on, on the, you know, boots on the ground on the community side. But I can tell you about what I've seen broadly in the past and, and what I know to be true. And, and I think it's actually, honestly, obviously, you know, people get upset when the price doesn't go the way that they want and there's nothing that we can, can really do about that. It is a market, it's an open market, and, and there are lots of different assets out there that use Cosmos technology. So it's not like that, that, you know, anything that, that, that's on the Interchain foundation side has, has, has an impact that way. But what I will say more broadly is I think people get excited about technology that can demonstrate something meaningfully different in the world. Right. And what you really see when you see communities getting excited about things, and I saw this early on in privacy projects in particular, when you go back to the early days of zcash, people knew that Bitcoin had fundamental privacy flaws. And what got people excited is that zcash demonstrated a way to fix those problems in a way that was palpable and real. And it's that kind of activity that you actually do see across the board and all these, these various cosmos chains that people get excited about. The issue that we have, I think more fundamentally is because of how open it is and how customizable it is, there isn't really a, what you might call like a center of mass or some kind of shelling point around community discussion because there's so many different places that are leveraging this tech and sometimes in ways that are somewhat hidden, like the fact that Binance chain is powered by a Cosmos tech, but nobody really knows or cares. Right. And so it's that kind of issue that I think is sort of fundamental to that angst is that you don't see that in a more cohesive way. The way that you'd see it where, oh, look, at these five or six apps that are built atop Solana or Ethereum, because like you can just say, built on Solana, built on Ethereum, and they're very clearly integrated into those ecosystems. That's the fundamental challenge with a technology that is this permissive and interoperable as the one that we're supporting.
- [26:02]
Brendan
It reminds me of a quote from a guy who Barry mentioned, Jeff Bezos, in like 2000, 2000, 2001, the stock price was going down and he goes, it's, it's crazy, it's, it's surreal. I just watch our internals keep going up and to the right, you know, the metrics improving and our stock price keep going down and down and down. And he was like reflecting on that and just like, you know, like we kept building and like, you know, the market does what it does. You can't control the market. What you can control is building the best tech, you know, ushering in the best community, you know, all those sort of things that you can control, but you just can't control the price. Right. There's so many things. And so that's my word of wisdom. I'm a Cosmos holder. I've been a Cosmos holder for a long time and just want to encourage the community to follow the tech and that over time, typically the fundamentals will get you in a good place. And so don't be too discouraged because I think there's a lot of really incredible mind share going on. Now. The one thing that I haven't seen any mindshare discussion on Cosmos is meme coins. So I gotta ask, because love them or hate them, our community has asked a lot about them and we've gotten requests to do more meme coin stuff. And so I've reluctantly, last year, Summertime, got into them, discovered them a little bit, made a couple, you know, 10 X's. I was like, okay, I get why people are excited about this, but all that is on Solana, right? And so I'm just curious, is there any meme coin trenches that the Crypto 101 listeners should be sludging through in Cosmos yet, or maybe plans to.
- [27:38]
Bryce
There are a few. They're in different places. They aren't. It hasn't been as big in Cosmos as it's been in Solana. I mean, I don't think it's been as big anywhere.
- [27:52]
Brendan
No.
- [27:53]
Bryce
As it's been in Solana. There's one chain, one Cosmos chain that is just like there's two that are, or maybe more that are meme coin chains, but there's one recently that's been getting a lot of traction, but to be honest, it's like super deep fried and I do not really fucking understand it. But the website is unicorn meme, so pull it up and you'll realize why I have no idea what the fuck is going on there. They do have a token here. I have never been able to figure out how to buy the token.
- [28:34]
Brendan
I like the lore, I like they.
- [28:35]
Bryce
Have it, they have a super, super active community on Twitter and they're constantly blowing up shit in different places and so funny. One of the things that's weird about them is so Cosmos is all built one of these standards is a standard to connect all of these blockchains so you can very easily bridge. You don't have to have an external bridge. You don't have to worry about, oh, layer zero or any of this stuff. It just works. And the unicorn people turn that off. So I don't know how you're supposed, even if you can buy it, I don't know where you're supposed to take it or what you're supposed to do with it, but this is, this is.
- [29:11]
Josh Cincinnati
That is kind of like the ultimate nihilistic expression of like, insanely deep fried.
- [29:15]
Bryce
Like way too deep fried.
- [29:17]
Josh Cincinnati
I, I mean, I'm like, you know, I, I, I'm gonna maybe saying something polarizing for some of the viewers, but like, you know, I'm not, I'm not the biggest fan of them and I guess partially because I've seen various phases of this in my long and not quite so storied, but certainly witnessed a lot of them in my career, you.
- [29:36]
Brendan
Know, and yeah, you've seen the downside, probably.
- [29:38]
Josh Cincinnati
Oh, I've seen the downside. I've seen how it just ruins and it is to me, like, you know, it's a fun lottery game for a lot of people, but it's a lottery game where most of the time you are on the outside looking in and you're going to get hurt by it. I mean, that's my, that's my take on it. But I understand that people like to have fun, for sure, and I don't want to dispel that. But I will say that I'm in it for the enduring technological change that we can bring about. And I think that that's still. Meme Coins are another expression of that. Sure. But there's so much more that we can do and I'm excited about that.
- [30:19]
Brendan
Heart and, and it does bring to mind. I was listening to a podcast the other Day with the founder of Barachain. And so, so that's an interesting one because it did seem like there was so much memetic, jokey, sort of inside sort of language speak there with like everything that they're building. I, I actually, I didn't catch that it was built on Cosmos, so I probably shouldn't have been distracted or whatever listening to that. But so, so with, with Barachain, what it like, what is that? Because, like, I couldn't really tell. Is it just like a competitor to Ethereum or whatever? It's its own Layer one, but they also have memes.
- [30:55]
Bryce
Yeah, yeah, basically. I mean, they are just a, you know, EVM blockchain. So anything you can do on a normal EVM blockchain on Ethereum or wherever you can do there, they have the bear thing. And then they have used Cosmos to build a new kind of security mechanism that. It's called proof of liquidity. I don't fully understand it, but the upshot is when you have a blockchain, you need to secure it and usually that requires assets and staking them. And in Barachain there's some way by which the staked assets with the proof of liquidity mechanism can be used in defi as well, effectively. So it connects the applications and the chain more closely and leads to higher liquidity, I think, is the idea. No idea if that happens in practice. I know the team, I think they're great, but we don't work super, super closely with them. But just another example chain, and that's the kind of like, creative thing that you can do with Cosmos that's much, much harder to do with other platforms or impossible usually.
- [32:06]
Brendan
Yeah, no, that sounds like it just gives you a lot of, you know, blue sky in order to create whatever you want that has sort of, you know, the security assurances and the decentralization of the infrastructure that Cosmos kind of provides. Yeah, Baruch. And just the way you described it just kind of made me think it's like basically a blockchain with like liquid staking, like built into it at the base layer.
- [32:30]
Bryce
Yeah, that might be a reasonable way to think about it. They've got three tokens. It's like way too complicated. Complicated for me. So, you know. Yeah, no, investigate at your own risk. But the, the bear thing is a great meme, right?
- [32:47]
Brendan
It's Mimi. No, that's interesting. Well, so what else in the future here? I would say in the next, you know, six months here, we're kind of in the middle of what I think is A bull market. I think there's going to be still a lot of excitement. I still think there's a lot of new imaginative things that the market's going to come up with. Like, we just had the agent craze that was like, that captured the imagination of the speculation in the, in the, in the sort of public. And things went up 10x, 20x 30x like in a couple months. And so not necessarily asking, like, what's going to be the next thing to like, blow up that big, but, like, what are you guys excited for? Where you're seeing. You guys are on the bleeding edge of tech. What are you guys looking forward to? And then we'll get to our closing question after that.
- [33:30]
Bryce
Yeah. So in terms of the bleeding edge of tech, I think one of the things that we're most excited about is really these kinds of crypto applications starting to just feel like web applications. Like, this is really a big part of what Cosmos is all about, is not. There's so many horrible experiences that you have if you're actually trying to interact with blockchains today. Like, you need to set up your wallet, you need to bridge between different blockchains, especially now where everyone's launching their own blockchain. You need to be able to manage gas across a bunch of different chains. You sort of need a, a Sherpa for everything that you.
- [34:23]
Brendan
Luckily, Crypto 101 has sold guides to pretty much each of those questions that you have. Right, Right.
- [34:28]
Bryce
So, like, you got, you guys are, you guys are an excellent Sherpa. But if we want to get to, you know, the next wave, right, which, which we really think is, like, possible now, where we can build these kinds of decentralized communities and protocols that put users more in control and those can become parts of people's daily lives, then it can't feel like another Internet. It has to feel like the same Internet. And there's a lot of really cool technologies that we're working on that we've seen other teams working on that are improving Interop, that are improving signing, that are hiding wallets, that are just starting to make it all just feel like, oh, I'm just doing something online. And once we have that, then I think it opens up a whole world of people moving to more decentralized banking options, more decentralized payment options, things that give them better control of their assets, things that cut out middlemen, that are taking fees for not doing anything. You know, So I just think it's. It's still, we're in this world of the technologies in its own way. But I think for the first time I'm seeing a bunch of developments and we're working on a bunch of developments that are actually going to change that, that like actually have a chance of just making it just the same web, but a better web. So we're super excited about that.
- [35:41]
Brendan
That hypes me up. Josh, what are you seeing?
- [35:44]
Josh Cincinnati
Yeah, I feel like my answer is going to fall short compared to that, but I'm going to try. I think that my, I mean, and I also might sound like a broken record, a very old broken record because I've been saying this, this is the year of privacy on the blockchain. It's like this is the year of the Linux desktop.
- [36:02]
Brendan
It is kind of a non consensus view. So keep pounding pavement on that.
- [36:07]
Josh Cincinnati
I still believe that to be true and maybe it's not this year, maybe it's next year, but, but that said, I believe that the most interesting privacy projects are on Cosmos. That's part of what got me interested in Cosmos as well. And I think that being able to give users choice where they are engaging in applications and then seamlessly transferring assets and information over to other protocols that are designed from the ground up to preserve your privacy or allow selective information disclosure is actually a very, very powerful building block that has been not really explored in other ecosystems, but can be here. And I suspect that you're going to see a lot more, more of that. Especially, you know, I'm just going to speak independently of, of the political environment. I think that we still see that maybe there are, there are key pieces of evidence that suggest that we want to be able to hide financial information more readily. And that's maybe a fundamental right that we all should have to be able to be able to selectively disclose what financial information we want to be publicly visible on these systems which are generally public by default. So I'm a, I'm a big, big believer of that. And then the other piece that Barry also alluded to that I'm also very excited about is this idea that like with a lot of these building blocks you can actually start to take trust models that you wouldn't normally have in other places and like kind of mix and match them a little bit. So like an example is just an example of a mix and match trust model is just stablecoin issuance on decentralized blockchains, right? Because a stablecoin, that's a traditional stablecoin issuer, like a tether or circle, you trust them pretty much innately that they have the dollars that they say they do. Right. And that's like a kind of binary trust thing. But you can see in the future that there might other kinds of financial instruments that don't have a kind of zero or one trust boundary that may be newer or more interesting than financial instruments you can get in the traditional financial world. And then when those can start to be integrated in other places. I know that's a bit abstract, but I'm thinking about things that might emulate cash flow from various defi protocols being bundled together into a new instrument and black Scholes model.
- [38:34]
Brendan
There's going to be a new Nobel Prize.
- [38:35]
Josh Cincinnati
Yeah, well, let's get. Yeah, I mean, you have to talk to Barry about that because he's the hedge fund guy. I'm just, I, I'm just the idle dreamer. But I think there's something like, there's something really potentially powerful and enabling about that. That. But, but that's also up to the, really the creativity of the people building against this, this tech stack, which I think we are going to see more and more of that kind of explored. And I'm very excited for that too.
- [39:00]
Brendan
I think you're totally spot on with that. We could have talked about that kind of all day as well. Just the innovative sort of products that are going to be built on blockchains that weren't really able to be built on Web2 rails. The first thing comes to mind is Athena's structured product where it's basically wrapping up a perpetual sort of basis trade and tokenizing that and there's all sorts of other stuff. And so, yeah, super cool. And then what you said on the privacy thing is interesting because I know just, I don't know, a week or two ago, the Tornado cash sort of court case took a really positive turn for Tornado Cash and sort of the privacy community at large. I think with the incoming sort of administration or the current administration now with Trump in charge, I think he's like all about privacy and freedom and economic sort of like just like kind of do what you want. And like, he's also been such a victim of overreach by sort of statehood and, and law enforcement. Right. The district of the Department of Justice and all this kind of stuff. He's probably like, yeah, like, what was happening to me as a citizen of America, I would never want to happen to anybody. And it was all a fugazi. It was all, you know, you know, we could go on and on. So I, I think the privacy stuff, you're, you're probably early, because that might be one of the last things to turn because those banking laws are just so gosh darn tough. But I think it's going to be like sort of that last pin to fall. And it's like once it's, you know, which is, I think privacy is kind of a fundamental human right, I think we're going to like blow the doors open off defy and then privacy defy or pry fi or whatever it's going to be called. That's going to be coming up maybe towards the end of his term. But I'm with you. I think, I think you're early on the privacy narrative. But gentlemen, while I'm always early on.
- [40:44]
Josh Cincinnati
The privacy narrative, that's my, that's my curse.
- [40:46]
Bryce
Early on the privacy narrative for 20 years.
- [40:49]
Josh Cincinnati
That's right.
- [40:51]
Brendan
Write it on his, his, his epithet, right. His tombstone. Early this year. I swear this year it's gonna be this year. I guess my last question, it's something I try to ask everybody who comes on just because we got a lot of folks who are in the audience who are just learned about crypto, starting to get deeper. What's your one word of advice, one word of wisdom from a crypto OG somebody who's been in the industry for a while to somebody who might be just getting their feet wet?
- [41:18]
Josh Cincinnati
Yeah, yeah, for sure. I would say that it is easy to get discouraged or dissuaded or distracted by a lot of new trends, and that happens to anyone that's been through these cycles that seem to get more and more rapid. But my general advice would be, if you have a deep belief in where the future can go when these systems wind up empowering people and that you want to build something that's special, that can't be built in the existing system, that you should pursue it and, and no matter what the naysayers say, and there will be many of them, you have to keep going because there, there is a lot of opportunity. And it's way more, in my view, than the passing fads of like the meme coin stuff and everything else. Like, there's something much more enduring to this that will be around and honestly like to stick it out because that is the hardest thing to do when you go through a cycle and you see the, you know, the hype and then the implosion and the hype and the implosion and it can be very discouraging. But ultimately, over time, we gain more and more adoption, newer and more interesting use cases emerge, and then we get the bleeding edge Gets way, way more interesting as a result. And there's always going to be something worth building here, so just stick it out.
- [42:47]
Brendan
I love it. Stick to your principles, right? Have princes. That's right, 100 to them. And, you know, even throughout the volatility, it's like, you know, when there's big flush outs, like there have been, you know, in January, a little bit of February, right, There's these big flush outs. It's actually your conviction in an asset that's going to get. Let you put the. The buy in, right? When things are crashing, you're like, things are down 50%. It should be your principles and your understanding of, like, why you're invested here, your conviction in that asset that's going to say, okay, this is a good deal and I might not know. And typically when it's down 50 in a day, it's like, it's always a good time to buy, but I love that it's a good one. Josh, what about you, Barry? What's your word of advice to all the good citizens of Crypt Nation who are tuning in today?
- [43:27]
Bryce
Yeah, I guess it's just. You can just do stuff basically. Like, truly, like, that's the crazy thing about the industry is it's so nascent and it's so starved for talent and the demand for crypto products and the demand for new tokens and the need for new infrastructure and the need for new applications is so high and so many teams in the space are incredibly understaffed. Like, if you just start engaging with people or you have a skill, whether it's marketing or ops or engineering or finance or honestly, anything like memes, you can get a job in the industry.
- [44:11]
Brendan
Look at TiVo. TiVo's our producer. He's in the background. He's a meme expert. TiVo, isn't that right?
- [44:18]
Bryce
And it's so new, right? It's so new that you don't need to do something else beforehand. You can just be like, all right, I'm going to do this. And then pretty soon you can become an expert. Like, you become TiVo meme wizard, like, overnight. And that's not possible in, like, traditional finance, and it's not possible in traditional tech either. It's really like the Wild west in a good way. And that means there's a ton of opportunities to just do stuff. Folks can reach out to me on Twitter, for example. I don't know if you guys will be able to link my handle, but it's.
- [44:47]
Brendan
Yeah, we always try to link show.
- [44:48]
Bryce
Notes to everybody's Twitter 400. And, like, I respond to all the DMs that I get, unless it's someone trying to sell me something. But if. If it's someone who wants to work on a project, like, I'm there. And same is true of all the other folks on our team and many folks throughout the Cosmos ecosystem and other ecosystems, too.
- [45:04]
Brendan
Awesome. Barry, could you actually repeat what your. Your Twitter handle was?
- [45:08]
Bryce
Yeah, it's BP as in my first two initials and then IV 400.
- [45:15]
Brendan
Okay. Awesome. Yeah. Josh, do you have a handle or does the foundation or labs have a handle or anything? You guys want to have us put in the show notes there?
- [45:23]
Josh Cincinnati
Yeah. Yeah. So check out my handle on Twitter is a city in Ohio. And then the Interchain handle is Interchainio, I believe. But let me triple check to make sure I'm not misremembering.
- [45:38]
Bryce
Perfecto.
- [45:39]
Josh Cincinnati
Yep, that's the Interchain foundation handle. And then I think, Barry, do you guys convert over to Interchain labs on Twitter?
- [45:49]
Bryce
I think our handle is still at Skip Protocol. Okay.
- [45:53]
Brendan
At Skip Protocol.
- [45:55]
Bryce
Love it. Will change soon.
- [45:57]
Brendan
Yeah. Awesome. Well, those are gonna be in the show notes for you guys. Thank you so much for joining us, Barry and Josh and everybody at home. We appreciate you guys tuning in and learning all about Cosmos, the Atom Token, and everything going on at the Interchain Labs and foundation. Come back same time, same place next week. We're gonna have some more killer guests. Josh and Barry, take care.
- [46:19]
Josh Cincinnati
You too, Bryce. Thanks for having us.
- [46:31]
F
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- [47:01]
G
Are you tracking all our cars on Carvana Value Tracker on all our devices? Yes, Kristen, yes, I am.
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Josh Cincinnati
While I've been looking for my phone.
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G
For in Dax's domain, we see all. So we always know what our cars are worth.
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H
All of them.
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G
All of them. Value surge trucks up 3.9%.
- [47:19]
H
That's a great offer.
- [47:20]
G
I know. Sell.
- [47:22]
Brendan
Sell.
- [47:24]
G
Track your car's value with Carvana Value Tracker today.
- [47:29]
H
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