The highly anticipated ATOM 2.0 whitepaper was released at Cosmoverse 2022 and it proposes a swathe of changes to the way we currently know Cosmos Hub as. We talk to Sam Hart from Interchain Foundation who's also one of the authors of the whitepaper to understand the proposed changes in more detail and their possible impact on the Cosmos ecosystem.

Blockchains generate loads of data and tackling the issue of data availability and validity is an important one. KYVE is a Proof-of-Stake network that uses Arweave to facilitate data storage and data retrieval.

In this episode, we talk to Vasiliy Shapovalov, Alex Esin, and Spaydh from team Neutron. The new smart contract chain aims to be the best platform for smart chain developers to build a wide range of apps in Cosmos, by maximising interoperability with the rest of the ecosystem and minimising overheads for developers.

Evmos is a decentralized proof of stake blockchain in the Cosmos ecosystem, that is also Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible. Evmos’ goal is to bring the world of Ethereum-based applications and assets to the Cosmos ecosystem. In this episode, we talk to Federico, co-founder of Evmos, about what differentiates Evmos from other chains, its ambitions and much more.

Archway is a smart contract platform that aims to reward its developers that build on the network with baked in incentives and rewards. In this episode, we talk to Michael & Griffin to understand Archway's mission, how it's different from other smart contract platforms, and a lot more.

In this episode, we talk to David and Oak from Autonolas. Autonolas has been conceptualised with a vision to 'make DAOs autonomous again'. It does that by providing a software stack to help DAOs with their off-chain operations and also with the help of an on-chain protocol. We discuss David and Oak's history, how Autonolas came about, its journey, and more. Dig in!

In this episode, we talk to Billy Rennekamp, Cosmos Hub Product Lead at Interchain GmbH. As of May 2022, there is an ongoing governance vote on Cosmos to add CosmWASM to Cosmos Hub. The vote right now is leaning towards no, however some people in the Cosmos ecosystem feel like this vote is a mistake. Billy is one of those in the Cosmos ecosystem that believes adding CosmWASM to the Hub is a good move. We have Billy on the show to express his views about Cosmos Hub, CosmWASM, interchain security, liquid staking and a lot more.

In this episode, we talk to Ganesh Swami, co-founder of Covalent. Covalent provides a unified API that brings visibility to billions of blockchain data points. There are over 500 cryptocurrency projects using Covalent's API currently. We talk to Ganesh about Covalent's origins, technology, and its future.

In this episode, we talk to Lex Avellino, founder of Passage, a platform that will enable people to build virtual worlds on Cosmos. Metaverses have been the talk of the town since 2021 and Passage is its torch-bearer on Cosmos. We deep dive into Lex's history, Passage's roadmap and much more

On the show today, we have Bijan Sharohki, Head of Product and Brandon Case, Head of Product Engineering from O1 labs, the development company working on Mina. Mina is the first protocol to use recursive zero-knowledge proofs to track the entire state of a blockchain. Using zero-knowledge proofs to track states rather than a full ledger of transactions, Mina is able to keep their blockchain to a fixed size of ~22kb. Mina enables a new category of applications called ‘Snarkified Applications’ or ‘Snapps’. Snapps get executed once by developers and thereafter nodes verify associated SNARK proofs, making these new types of applications highly scalable on Mina’s recursive blockchain. Snapps are going live on testnet by the end of 2021, so we caught up with Brandon and Bijan to discuss what problems Snapps can solve that dApps as they exist today can’t solve. The podcast forays into how Mina snarks can be used as a bridging tool, the dynamics of their snarketplace and future Mina scaling solutions, plus so much more.

On the show today, we have Arjun Bhuptani, founder of Connext. Connext is an interoperability network, which is going to market with NXTP, a non-custodial cross-chain protocol. Connext is trustless, meaning there is no trust placed in external validators outside 2 native blockchains where a cross-chain transaction is occurring. Connext makes use of ‘routers’, which are nodes that facilitate cross-chain transfers and hold liquidity of different assets on multiple chains. If a user wants to move from Chain A to Chain B, they would signal their desired route to Connext network. Connext then broadcasts a user’s desired route across chains for routers to submit the best price they can give the user (like Uber). A user would then receive the cheapest route possible to transfer their assets across chains, from routers that have the most available liquidity and most competitive fees. We talk to Arjun about the trustlessness nature of Connext, how it locally verifies transactions versus other possible models, how routers facilitate transfers, the intricate economics of Connext, how Connext ecosystem actors interact with each other, plus so much more.

On the show today, we have Shane Vitarana, co-founder of Stargaze. Stargaze is a fully decentralised NFT marketplace. Stargaze has built the first standard in the Cosmos ecosystem for NFTs, which is similar to the ERC-721 standard on Ethereum. Stargaze is IBC-compatible, meaning NFTs minted on Stargaze will be able to be sent to any other sovereign network in the Cosmos ecosystem, which is also IBC-compatible. Stargaze is using novel incentive mechanisms such as staking rewards to incentivise users to take certain actions within the network, which has never been done before in NFT marketplaces. Tune in to hear more about the evolving idea of Stargaze, from a web3 version of twitter to a staple NFT network in the Cosmos ecosystem.

On the show today, we have Hendrik Hofstadt, director of digital assets at Jump Trading and core contributor to Wormhole. Wormhole is a simple, generic protocol that delivers a pathway for any kind of information—funds, votes, programs and more—from any blockchain in the network to any other. In short, Wormhole acts as a notary that allows message passing between networks. Recently, Wormhole announced they would launch version 2 of their network, which will go-live connecting four networks - Ethereum, Terra, Solana and Binance Smart Chain. Wormhole has a set of 19 validators known as guardians, which attest to finalised chain state in a p2p network that is verifiable. 19 guardians publish a signature if they see a finalised message being posted on a network and Wormhole network aggregates the signatures to produce verifiable action approvals to be consumed on other networks. In a way Wormhole acts as a light client itself on networks it connects to. This podcast is a deep-dive into one of the hottest networks of 2021, tune-in to hear all about the origin story, the intricacies of the network, how it can be used, what’s to come in the future and so much more.

On the show today we have Brent Xu, founder of Umee. Umee is a suite of cross-chain DeFi protocols that interconnects between Cosmos and Ethereum. Umee takes inspiration from Brent's experience in DeFi, Proof-of-Stake and Fixed Income. Umee has 3 core products at launch, multichain staking, cross-chain DeFi rates and interchain leverage. The podcast explores Brent's background in TradFi and some TradFi concepts such as the term structure of interest rates and covers how Umee is bringing a lot of TradFi concepts to DeFi such as a term structure of interest rates. We discuss everything from why time-values are important in crypto, Umee 2-token model for cross-chain lending/borrowing, how Umee builds yield curves for staking rates and much more.

On the show today, we have Sergey Gorbunov, co-founder of Axelar. Axelar network is a decentralized state machine responsible for facilitating cross-chain requests. Axelar’s gateway protocol is a delivery and routing protocol that can work with any arbitrary blockchain regardless of consensus. This means any decentralised network can plug-in to Axelar seamlessly to access liquidity amongst other things from all other decentralised networks. Axelar also gives developers the freedom to connect their dApp into external networks that might have been previously inaccessible to them without redesigning the smart contracts. The show with Sergey covers his previous experience, how Axelar is different from Cosmos and Polkadot, what validators do for the network, their solution for scaling threshold cryptography and their vision for an interoperability network that is consensus and state transition agnostic.

On the show today we have Jack Zampolin, co-founder of Sommelier. Sommelier network improves tooling for DeFi liquidity providers (aka LPs) on Ethereum. The first DeFi vertical that Sommelier is targeting is Uniswap V3 liquidity provision. Right now, the experience to swap assets on Uniswap is great but the tools for liquidity providers to optimise their returns are lacking. Sommelier will be used as a one-stop shop for Ethereum LPs to maximise their returns through pooling of liquidity, informed optimisations and structured products. We speak to Jack about how Sommelier democratises the LP experience, how they built the protocol and what a user can expect before their upcoming mainnet launch.

Joining Felix Lutsch and Xavier Meegan on the show today we have Dean Tribble, co-founder and CEO of Agoric Systems. Agoric is a developer-friendly environment and economy for expressible, programmable, composable and secure smart contracts. Agoric aims to be a platform that offers developers a secure version of Javascript to deploy smart contracts safely into. Agoric’s own network encourages cooperative economic activity using two tokens, RUN (a stablecoin) and BUILD (a staking token). The Agoric economy uses novel incentives to promote the safe execution of smart contracts in a stable economy. We speak to Dean about using Javascript to enhance security of smart contracts, the pros and cons of composability, the minimal set of market institutions to run a smooth economy and why paying for execution of rent and postage using a stablecoin is critical for economic accounting and interoperability.

On the show today we have Eric Chen, co-founder and CEO of Injective Protocol. Injective is an EVM-compatible, interoperable order-book based decentralised exchange that acts as a layer-2 sidechain, built using Tendermint-based consensus. Injective’s canary-chain phase 2 mainnet recently went live earlier in July, which introduced staking and governance to the network. Injective’s Governance has already passed the activation of spot market trading and is likely to enable derivative trading soon. We caught up with Eric to discuss Injective’s go-to-market strategy, the mechanism for proposing arbitrary markets using governance, how Injective improves price discovery for liquid staking assets, their unique usage of yield boosting for community participation, institutional interest in Injective and much more.

On the show today we have Derek Yoo, CEO of PureStake and co-founder of Moonbeam. Moonbeam is a Polkadot parachain designed for developers that combines full Ethereum compatibility with the power of Polkadot. Moonbeam uses another network known as Moonriver to test and verify code under real economic conditions on Kusama. Moonriver won the second-ever parachain auction on Kusama just days ago and is now producing blocks. We have Derek on to discuss Moonriver’s winning auction on Kusama, the tangibility of community on Polkadot, why some projects choose to deploy on Kusama and not Polkadot, upcoming plans in store for Moonbeam, plus so much more.

On the show today we have Sunny Aggarwal and Josh Lee, co-founders of Osmosis. Osmosis is a fair-launched, customizable automated market maker for interchain assets. Osmosis’ differentiator compared to other decentralised exchanges is the customisation it gives all participants in the network. For example, liquidity pool creators have the flexibility to create their own formulas and fees that determine prices of assets. Liquidity providers have customisable tools to provide liquidity to suit their own risk preferences. Whilst users can swap any asset connected to the IBC, making it the world’s first truly interoperable AMM. During the show, we discuss Osmosis network launch, the first stress-test of IBC, the importance of privacy on DEXs, reverse staking derivatives and more.

On the show today we have Scott Sigel, Director of Operations for the Decentralized Wireless Alliance. Helium network is a novel decentralised network because it is not just a blockchain or an application, but a worldwide decentralised physical wireless network, powered by hotspots. The wireless network is known as LongFi and incorporates state-of-the-art wireless network tech with blockchain. Companies use Helium network as a cost-effective alternative to track their IoT devices and network participants set-up hotspots to earn HNT rewards. We have Scott on the show today to talk about their newly announced transition to a Proof-of-Stake network and cover things ranging from hotspots to consensus to their ambitions to build the world’s first user-owned 5G network.

On the show today we have Tushar Aggarwal, CEO of Persistence One. Persistence One is a network in the Cosmos ecosystem with bold ambitions to bridge traditional finance to decentralised finance. Already with 5 products outstanding, we took the time to speak with Tushar about Persistence’s journey so far. In the show we discuss the many products of Persistence, their initial use of validating nodes to bootstrap their protocol, their future plans to bring liquid staking to Cosmos, the importance of interoperability for liquidity and a lot more.

Lunie is a multi-network wallet focused on staking networks and on-chain governance. Lunie was one of the first wallets for Cosmos (then Voyager) and has since expanded to support multiple networks from the Cosmos ecosystem (Terra, E-Money) with Polkadot and other networks coming soon.

In this episode, Felix is joined by Jordan Bibla. CEO and Co-Founder of Lunie, to discuss the crypto wallet and staking ecosystems. The episode begins going into the background of Lunie and the products the team has built (web and mobile apps, as well as a browser extension). Felix and Jordan explore UX difficulties in staking networks, how newly launching networks should go about building communities, protocol governance, and insights from developing one of the most used wallets focused on staking. The second part of the episode dives into Lunie’s upcoming freemium notification feature and Jordan shares his views on the most important developments in the blockchain ecosystem.

In this episode, Brendan and Felix are joined by Soravis Srinawakoon, Co-Founder and CEO of Band Protocol, a data governance framework for Web3. Band is soon launching its own Cosmos SDK chain focused on provisioning oracle data for blockchain applications.

We cover what the oracle problem is, how Band is able to provide off-chain data to blockchain applications in a single transaction, what the team imagines the role of Band Chain to be within the ecosystem and take a look at the parties involved in Band’s ecosystem. The second part of our conversation focuses on decentralized finance and the need for reliable oracle solutions, as well as a discussion of recent events following the “Black Thursday” crash that shook the Ethereum DeFi ecosystem.

‍

We wrap up with Soravis telling us about upcoming hackathons and the current state of the network leading up to mainnet.

Centrifuge is building the operating system for trade finance. In this episode, Brian is joined by Lukas Vogelsang, CEO of Centrifuge, to speak about the technologies Centrifuge is building to enable more efficient, transparent, and privacy-preserving supply chain financing.

We start by exploring the background of the idea and the founders’ decade long background in the area of trade finance with Taulia, a company focused on invoice financing and working capital management, which is currently handling over $20bn in invoices a year. Lukas then goes into how his interest in crypto and the idea for Centrifuge, which is to build to tools to bring off-chain financial assets into the decentralized finance ecosystem, came about. He goes into how Centrifuge turns off-chain documents such as invoices into NFTs and how these NFTs can be bundled into collateralized pools to enable their usage in DeFi using Centrifuge’s asset-backed lending protocol Tinlake. Lukas explains the advantages of transparency for asset-backed lending, Tinlake’s tranched two token model, and their experiments using this system in collaboration with the Maker team and other partners such as Paperchain and Shuttle One. Lukas goes into how real-world assets as collateral could bring stability to Maker’s Multi-Collateral DAI system.

Finally, Lukas talks about launching their own Substrate-based chain that allows Centrifuge to mint tokenized assets using Tinlake while maintaining privacy for asset originators.

In this episode, Felix is joined by Dieter “dete” Shirley, CTO at Dapper Labs. The team at Dapper Labs, a spin-off from Axiom Zen, are the creators of Cryptokitties and have spent recent years to create their own blockchain optimized for decentralized applications building on their learnings of writing some of the most widely used smart contracts.

The podcast begins with Dieter going into his background in crypto and how Cryptokitties emerged out of a series of ideas his former company at Axiom Zen had for blockchain applications. We then talk about how Cryptokitties helped the team realize both the benefits and shortcomings of Ethereum and Solidity development. Dieter explains how Flow is designed from the ground up with composability and developer experience in mind. We go into detail as to how Flow is able to scale by having multiple separate node roles, the interplay between them, as well as benefits that Flow tooling and the programming language Cadence provide to developers. Finally, we wrap up with a discussion of the economics in a blockchain with multiple different roles.

One of the major factors hampering blockchain adoption is that current decentralized applications only function when all associated data is public. Many real world use cases are only possible when participating parties can be assured that their information is kept private. Oasis is a network that is focused on enabling privacy-preserving smart contracts through the use of secure enclaves.

In this podcast episode, Meher and Brendan are joined by Andrew Miller and Vishwanath Raman, who are part of the Oasis Labs team working in product marketing (Andrew) and engineering (Vishwanath). The four start with a discussion of how Oasis got started and the connection to UC Berkeley. Then, in the first part of the interview, an overview of the Oasis protocol and key target markets follows. The episode discusses how the Oasis privacy protocol works technically and how it compares to other privacy-enhancing solutions. Specifically, Andrew and Vishwanath walk through a voting example and go through other use cases, features of the Oasis blockchain, the project’s go-to-market strategy, as well as the roadmap including the ongoing incentivized testnet “The Quest”. Finally, the four discuss implications of Intel security vulnerabilities and the developer experience of writing privacy-preserving smart contracts.

While most other upcoming smart contract platforms seem to have identified throughput as the major bottleneck for why blockchains haven’t found mass adoption yet, Coda has focused on a different part of the stack that they perceive to be a much more important issue plaguing blockchain, which is how long it takes for new participants to verify the blockchain. Coda is using recursive zk-SNARK technology which enables them to create a constant-sized blockchain, making it really easy for clients to verify the correctness of the ledger.

‍

In this episode, Meher and Felix are joined by Emre Tekisalp, director of BD, and Brad Cohn, strategy & operations from the O(1) Labs team to discuss Coda’s approach to building a new blockchain platform. The podcast starts out going into the background of the two, a high-level overview of Coda follows and we discuss what Coda’s unique design enables and cover the go-to-market strategy of the project. From there the discussion leads us to discuss monetary policy and the implications of taxes on Proof-of-Stake networks. After this quick detour, we get back to discussing how the Coda protocol technically works leading to an extensive celebration of zk-SNARK technology during which Brad and Emre explain the progress in the field and why zk-SNARKs are so exciting. Finally, we wrap up the episode with some information on Coda’s Genesis testnet program.

Insurance is a part of the finance stack that has received less attention in the Defi space compared to other segments like lending and derivatives. In this episode, Meher and Felix are joined by Marouane Hajji, Co-Founder at Unslashed, to talk about blockchain risk, insurance, and the protocol that Unslashed is building. We start out exploring why blockchain risks can’t yet be insured using traditional insurance methods, as well as the go-to-market approach of Unslashed and their first product: a fully collateralized slashing insurance. We also discuss the interplay between staking derivatives and insurance and the interplay of the Melon Protocol and Unslashed to manage collateral for risk underwriters.

In this episode Felix is joined by Gavin Birch, community analyst at Figment Networks, who has took it upon himself to improve the decentralized governance process of the Cosmos Hub. We start by going into Gavin’s background in the crypto space and how he joined the Figment team before exploring Gavin’s experience working on coordinating the upgrade to Cosmos Hub 3.

‍

Figment recently put forth a proposal to the Cosmos community pool, which is a source of capital that the Cosmos Hub is collecting by taxing block rewards and transactions fees. The proposal (#23, linked below) seeks to fund Gavin’s work to form a Governance Working Group and to create a bunch of documentation and templates that should help everyone to better understand the governance process, as well as lower the barrier of entry of filing a funding proposal to the community pool. Felix and Gavin explore the intricacies of blockchain governance and discuss controversies and learnings from this early experiment in decentralized funding.

We took Terra passing the 1 million accounts milestones as a reason to bring Terra’s CTO Do Kwon on the podcast. Terra is a blockchain network and stablecoin system with meaningful real-world adoption through integrating their mobile payment app CHAI.

In this interview, Brian talks to Do about payment processing and how Terra enables merchants in eCommerce and elsewhere to save on transaction fees. The two discuss the flow of how a transaction in the CHAI app gets included on the Terra blockchain, the regulatory landscape, as well as their metrics such as active users and transaction volume. Do also talks about plans to introduce a CHAI credit card and explains their cashback promotions.

Futhermore, the two talk about the move from incentivizing validators through block rewards to a model that is solely relying on transaction fees. Remarkably, staking on Terra currently rewards stakers with an annual reward rate of 20% without inflating LUNA, Terra’s staking token, supply. This reward rate is solely based on CHAI’s $3m average daily transaction volume, out of which $150,000 are paid daily by partnering merchants as fees (0.5% per transaction).

Finally, Do explains Terra’s recent move into Mongolia and future plans for on-chain foreign exchange markets using Terra stablecoins, as well as grant opportunities for developers to build on top of the Terra blockchain.

This episode covers the Stake Capital DAO, an interesting project aiming to form a revenue-sharing staking and DeFi DAO that also issues tokenized staking positions called LTokens. The Stake Capital DAO is a project by Stake Capital, a staking service provider operating on various networks including the Cosmos Hub, Livepeer, Tezos, and Loom.

In this episode, Felix is joined by Stake Capital founders Julien and Leopold to discuss the recently revealed plans to launch a DAO. It dives into their backgrounds in the Ethereum community working on Flyingcarpeth and other projects leading up to the forming of Stake Capital and their decision to turn their business into a DAO. We explore the relationship between Stake Capital and the DAO, the DAO’s token SCT, the innovative way in which SCT tokens are issued to delegators of Stake Capital, as well as governance questions and other technicalities of the Stake Capital DAO approach. The second part dives into liquid staking tokens (LTokens) that the DAO plans to issue to enable stakers to circumvent locking periods and to enable a more efficient use of staked capital. Finally, the episode wraps up with a discussion of the next steps and long-term plans for the Stake Capital DAO.

This episode is a re-upload of recent roundtable hosted by Chris Remus of Chainflow that featured multiple validator team members to discuss the future of business models for operators of staking node infrastructure.

The roundtable discussion starts with introductions to the participants before going straight into the current state of the validator space and approaches to business models for node operators.

Make sure to check out Chris Remus’ conclusion post that features questions, key takeaways, as well as a video recording of the discussion: https://chainflow.io/validator-business-model-discussion/

Participants:

Adrian Brink, Cryptium Labs Chris Remus, Chainflow and Staking Defense - Moderator Edouard Lavidalle, POS Bakerz Gleb Dudka, Staking Rewards JK, Stake.fish Konstantin Richter, Block Daemon Meher Roy, Chorus One Mira Storm, Ztake We would like to thank Chris Remus from Chainflow for hosting this valuable discussion and for allowing us to publish this recording as a Chorus One Podcast episode.

There’s a long standing argument about the wastefulness of Proof-of-Work mining. To some, Proof-of-Stake is a viable, less wasteful alternative to achieve distributed consensus in a permission-less setting.

In this episode, Brian is joined by Eric Wall, Fund Manager at Arcane Assets, to discuss the thought process that brought Erik, who is a strong Bitcoin advocate, to re-consider Proof-of-Stake as a potential alternative to Proof-of-Work.

The conversations starts by going into Eric’s background in the traditional financial exchange market working with Cinnober on their blockchain strategy. Eric also explains how he got involved with Bitcoin, his approach to Crypto Twitter, and his new fund Arcane Assets.

The two then cover what attracted Eric to Bitcoin before they transition to discuss Proof-of-Stake. The discussion goes into different arguments related to the social costs of both PoW (electricity) and PoS (locked up capital). In the final part of the conversation they also discuss tokenization of staked assets and the interplay with decentralized finance protocols, as well as the role of custodial players.

You can find a summary of Eric’s thoughts on the topic in his blog post linked below. The Chorus One Podcast will go on hiatus the coming week. We wish our listeners happy holidays and a great start into the new year!

Multicoin Capital is one of the best known crypto-focused funds worldwide. The team subscribes to three major theses in the space: open finance, Web3, and stateless currencies. In this episode Brendan is joined by Kyle Samani from Multicoin to dive into how Kyle sees the future for the crypto space play out.

The interview goes into the role of centralized exchanges and implications for the ecosystem, starting with taking a look at Binance’s approach that Multicoin has dubbed “blitzscaling”. Brendan and Kyle further explore networked liquidity and the DeFi ecosystem discussing who might dominate in the space of protocols, aggregators and robo-advisors if non-crypto players with better distribution channels join the space.

During the second part of the podcast, Kyle and Brendan dive into Multicoin investments like Torus and Solana and the role that Kyle sees these projects playing in advancing crypto adoption. Finally, Kyle shares his views on a multi-chain environment and the two discuss shared security approaches and associated challenges.

In this episode Felix is joined by Illia to discuss NEAR’s economic model, its trade-offs and advantages.

NEAR is a sharded blockchain with a unique economic model that seeks to unify gas cost across shards through load balancing. With this model, NEAR is able to significantly improve the user and developer experience for cross-shard applications.

The episode walks through the founding story of NEAR, what dynamic sharding is and how it works and NEAR’s fee model for computation and state storage. Furthermore Illia explains validator selection, incentives and penalties, including NEAR’s plans to incentivize smart contract developers by sharing a part of the generated gas fees.

Microtick is an innovative protocol designed to foster global price agreement for any type of asset through an economic game between market makers providing quotes and traders placing bets. Microtick is a ShapeShift research project that is currently live in the form of a Cosmos SDK testnet.

In this episode, Meher and Felix are joined by Mark and Kent, who are leading Microtick’s research and development. We dive into the background of Microtick and how the project developed inside of ShapeShift. Mark and Kent explain Schelling points, how the protocol works at a high-level, the notion of a short-term options market and Microtick’s use cases, which range from Microtick as a price oracle, over Microtick as a product to hedge price exposure, to Microtick as a tool to build synthetic assets.

Chainsafe is an R&D consulting firm focused on blockchain technology. The team is building clients and applications for various blockchain projects including Ethereum, Polkadot, and Cosmos. In this interview, Brian is talking to Austin and Gregory, who have been working on the Cosmos SDK module called “Ethermint”. Ethermint is bringing the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) to the Cosmos ecosystem allowing developers to launch their own blockchains with EVM support. One of the chains that is going to use the Ethermint module is Aragon Chain, which Chainsafe has also been commissioned to build. This episode dives into the design of the Cosmos SDK, challenges of building Ethermint, the report Chainsafe wrote that assisted Aragon’s choice to migrate into the Cosmos ecosystem, and much more.

Core to the Cosmos vision is interoperability between various ledgers on the “internet of blockchains”, sometimes also referred to as the interchain. Our guest this week, Christopher Goes, is the lead on the Inter-Blockchain Communication protocol (IBC) that is core to fulfilling this vision. IBC aims to be the rails of the interchain, analogous to what TCP/IP is to the internet. Christopher is wearing many hats in the cryptocurrency space: aside from his Researcher role at Tendermint, he is also a Co-Founder of staking infrastructure provider and protocol development team Cryptium Labs.

‍

In this episode Brendan finds out about Christopher’s background and the various projects he has worked and is working on, also covering his motivations. The main part of this interview covers what IBC is, why it is needed, and what IBC might be used for. Additionally, Chris contrasts IBC to different interoperability solutions like Keep’s tBTC. Furthermore, we go through the current implementation of IBC, its road to production, and possible application layer protocols on top of IBC. Finally, the episode covers the incentivized testnet “Game of Zones”, which aims to test the IBC protocol before its production release and cover the hopes and risks that Chris sees for the Cosmos ecosystem.

This episode Felix is joined by Mirko Schmiedl, Founder of StakingRewards.com, a website focused on displaying various metrics about staking tokens. We dive into what kind of data users of Staking Rewards can currently see, what this data is useful for, as well as what Mirko imagines the site to cover in the future.

Additionally, we talk about the state of Proof-of-Stake and different staking provider models, the research studies the Staking Rewards team has carried out, as well as the difference in interest around staking between the Western world and Asia.

In this episode Brendan and Meher interview Dan Robinson, Researcher at Paradigm, who has worked on various cutting-edge topics in the crypto space. We start out exploring Dan’s background and the various projects he has worked on before starting at Paradigm and how his extensive collaborations with different topics and actors have led to his most recent position. The episode then dives into the ideas that he has brought forth, specifically Yield Tokens (yTokens).

yTokens are a novel way to lend or borrow any type of asset that is using a design inspired by zero-coupon bonds from the traditional finance world. The yToken design is an interesting building block that allows for the creation various financial instruments, e.g. interest rate swaps. Dan, Brendan, and Meher discuss how yTokens fit into the DeFi stack, risks of the design, as well as thoughts around price oracles for and liquidity of such instruments.

Currently in the blockchain ecosystem most decentralized finance applications are built on Ethereum. Kava is seeking to bring crypto-backed borrowing in the form of Collateralized Debt Positions (CDPs) to the Cosmos ecosystem. The Kava blockchain is a Maker-style platform built using the Cosmos SDK that enables users to borrow a dollar-pegged stablecoin (USDX) by locking up collateral from different blockchains (BTC, ATOM, XRP) in the system. In this episode, Brian interviews Brian Kerr, CEO of Kava Labs to learn about the history of the project, the core functionalities of the platform, as well as differentiation from Maker, other applications for the Kava platform, and Kava’s Binance Launchpad IEO plans.

Celo is a Proof-of-Stake network focused on usability and financial inclusion in emerging markets. The team is combining innovations that aim to financially empower unbanked people in developing economies. In this episode Brian talks to Marek Olszewski, founder and CTO of Celo Labs. The episode specifically tackles Celo’s staking and full node incentive design, but also goes into how Celo built a mobile-first smart contract platform. This includes a lightweight identity protocol that maps phone numbers to public keys, a protocol to create stablecoins through overcollateralization, economic abstraction to allow fee payments in different tokens, an innovative light client protocol, as well as pilot programs that the team of 40 are currently working on in different parts of the world to test out their technologies.

This episode recorded during Berlin Blockchain Week is a discussion between Anatoly and Eric from Solana and Brendan and Felix from Chorus One. The conversation covers Anatoly’s and Eric’s backgrounds and how the founders got together to build Solana. The second part of the conversation then mainly focuses on discussing the value proposition of a blockchain system that can scale without the need for sharding. Finally, the episode goes into Solana’s approach to creating a developer ecosystem, as well as the experience of building a validator community leading up to the incentivized testnet competition Tour de SOL.

Arlyn Culwick is one of the pioneers exploring the design of an internet of blockchains. With Blocknet, he is working to realize this vision of the interchain. In this podcast episode, Brendan and Alwyn explore the API ecosystem in Web2, the interoperability technologies that Blocknet is building, as well as details and challenges of their design.

The conversation specifically covers the differences between the Cosmos model and Blocknet’s approach, how to move digital assets across chains, DEX scaling and liquidity, as well as the XRouter Beta, a product to orchestrate contracts on any chain to enable interchain dapps.

Avalanche is a novel consensus protocol that is able to scale consensus by using local consensus snapshots and random sampling. In this episode Meher sits down with Kevin Sekniqi, Co-Founder of AVA Labs, who are using the Avalanche consensus protocol as the basis for their smart contract platform AVA. They discuss Avalanche consensus and its key differences to traditional protocols, the layers of the AVA platform, feature-specific subnetworks, plans for the AVA token and the project’s timeline.

In this episode, Felix is joined by Dillon Chen, Co-Founder of Commonwealth Labs, to discuss Edgeware, a smart contracting platform build using Polkadot’s Substrate framework. The episode covers the Commonwealth governance framework, what Edgeware is aiming to accomplish, as well as the project’s innovative token distribution mechanism and controversies around it. Finally, Felix and Dillon discuss about the state of blockchain governance and various ideas floating around in the space.

This episode is a recording of Brian’s talk at BUIDL Asia 2019 in Seoul, South Korea. In the talk Brian covers the state and evolution of Proof-of-Stake (PoS). The talk compares PoS to the DeFi space going into the benefits to composability. It concludes with thoughts on how tokenized staking positions could help PoS to unlock economic potential and innovation.

In this episode Meher discusses fungible staking positions with Ryan Park of Ellipti, who was also part of the winning team of the Cosmos Seoul Hackatom. Ryan’s team is working on the Everett protocol to create staking derivatives that could allow staked assets in the Cosmos ecosystem to be used in decentralized finance applications. The episode explores this design and its implications.

In this episode Brendan sits down with Matt Luongo, Co-Founder of Thesis (Keep Network) to discuss tBTC during Berlin Blockchain Week. tBTC describes a way to issue a decentralized BTC-backed token as an ERC-20 token on Ethereum. The interview goes into Matt’s background, how the technology and economics around tBTC work, as well as the role of the Keep Network in creating tBTC.

In this episode, Meher and E. Dean Tribble explore the Agoric platform and the value proposition. Dean and his team are among the first to work on smart contracts, starting in the 80s with the Agoric Open System papers.

Agoric’s focus on object-capabilities security approach enables developers to write secure smart contracts in JavaScript.  The episode dives into the long history of Agoric and explores the benefits of a system with object-based access control compared to the current blockchain paradigm of identity-based access control.

In this episode, Felix walks through the history of Proof-of-Stake and explains how PoS compares to economic arrangements like surety bonds. The episode covers early examples of surety bonds, the parties in such an agreement, the analogy between Proof-of-Stake and surety bonds, as well as important dates in the history of Proof-of-Stake starting with the inception of Peercoin in 2012 over the Tendermint whitepaper in 2014 and Casper research in 2017 to the emergence of the Proof-of-Stake validation ecosystem and the many PoS innovations we are currently witnessing.

This episode is a discussion on the impact of 0% fee validators between Brian Crain (Chorus One), Sunny Aggarwal (SikkaTech/Tendermint), Michael Perklin (ShapeShift), and Chris Remus (Chainflow). The discussion covers the trend towards no commission validators on the Cosmos Hub and opinions on whether this trajectory harms the network as a whole. The discussion also covers experiences on other networks, differentiation between validators, and goes into whether a protocol could or should be designed to intervene in such a market.

This episode is focused on our efforts to become the first climate positive, green Proof-of-Stake validator. Brian and Felix discuss the impact that operating permissionless blockchain networks has on the environement and how we estimated our company's influence on climate change by sizing our carbon emissions. We then dive into how we plan to offset these emissions and turn our validator operations carbon positive with the help of the Regen Network team. Finally, we talk about ways to expand this practice in the wider PoS validation ecosystem.

As mentioned at the end of the episode, we will use one of three pilot projects on the Regen Network to improve ecological health. Help us choose the right projects by taking the survey linked below!

In the fifth Chorus One Podcast episode Brian is joined by Gregory Landua, Co-Founder of the Regen Network. They cover why and how an immutable, transparent blockchain ledger could help to reverse the effects of climate change.

Gregory also introduces two pilot programs the Regen team is working with and explains how the Regen Network is designed to allow parties to enter into economic agreements between land stewards such as farmers and entities seeking to improve ecological health.

This episode features Brian and Meher discussing delegation vouchers. Delegation vouchers are a Proof-of-Stake design concept that would enable staking positions to unlock their full economic potential by becoming useable in decentralized finance applications (#StakingIsDeFi). Chorus One and Sikka implemented a version of delegation vouchers using the Cosmos SDK at a Cosmos Hackathon. In this podcast episode, Brian and Meher discuss the need for alternative staking designs and the advantages of the delegation voucher system in comparison to the current implementation.

In this episode, Meher is diving deep into the Terra protocol with Nicholas Platias. Nicholas is the Head of Research at Terraform Labs, the company implementing the technology behind the Terra network.

The interview covers how Nicholas got to work with the Terra team, the stability mechanism behind Terra's stablecoins, as well as the research that went into designing the system.

‍

Chorus One operates a validator node on the Terra Network. Stake your LUNA with us and earn rewards! Go to https://chorus.one/networks/terra to learn more.

In this interview, Felix is joined by Alfonso Cevallos. Alfonso is a researcher at the Web3 Foundation mainly working on optimizing Polkadot's Nominated Proof-of-Stake (NPoS) incentive mechanism. NPoS is based on a novel algorithm that seeks to optimize decentralization across validating nodes in a PoS network.

The interview covers Alfonso's background and his work at the Web3 Foundation, staking in Polkadot, as well as details and implications of the NPoS mechanism.

This is the first episode of the Chorus One Podcast. In it, our team (Brian Fabian Crain, Meher Roy,Brendan Dillon, and Felix Lutsch) introduce themselves, Chorus One, the topics we plan to cover in this podcast, and the things we are most excited about in the crypto space today. We talk about topics like staking, decentralized finance, interoperability, network governance, DAOs as new organizational structures, and blockchain education. Have fun listening and subscribe if you want to learn more about projects and protocols working to create a more sustainable and open financial system using blockchain technologies.