The Interop

If you want to start in Cosmos, congratulations, you picked the right tech stack. Figure out liquidity.

That's like the thing.

There is this thing which is like liquidity dependent core, Cosmos, which is struggling, everyone knows that.

But then there's also this Cosmos tech non liquidity constrained cosmos, and that's thriving.

What is the. So that. That transition from going from Cosmos to Ethereum.

Yeah, it is a new playing field, but it's a bigger playing field and the willingness to work together is

pretty high. I remember two years ago in Cosmoverse, people said like, oh, you can't connect IBC to Ethereum.

Like, it doesn't work now. It works.

I'm here with Valeyo

How you doing?

From Quasar.

Hi.

What's up? Welcome to my hotel room.

Beautiful. I like the wood on the walls.

It's a great room. So what's happening?

Yeah, we're in Dubai. Carlsonverse 2024. I think everyone's here can tell Vibes are a little bit different.

I wouldn't say bad, but more focused on the core.

Again, I feel like we've kind of scraped all of the just nonsense excitement and we're back to like core.

I feel like the panels are more foundational. It's more about the actual essence of Cosmos and Interchain.

Yeah.

So it's kind of refreshing to some of you. I feel like the, you know, the uptick coming and.

Yeah, just kind of enjoying the 45, gazillion thousand degrees of Dubai.

I was talking to last night and I was telling him, yeah, like, the vibes are different.

He said something which I thought really made sense.

He said, like, this is, this is the therapy session for the Cosmos ecosystem.

Like the last two years, I think a lot of folks were, you know, the markets were different and I

think people were still very enthusiastic kind of coming off the last cycle and still very hopeful.

And so Medellin was like, just insane. It was super hype.

And then last year in Istanbul was still very good. Right. Like, people were, I think, good spirits.

And now it really feels like you said.

Right.

It's like kind of the bare bones stripped away. A lot of. A lot of stuff.

And yeah, I think, like, people are kind of just coming off of that high and now realizing, like, okay,

now we have this, this great tech, we have this great ecosystem of people.

Yeah.

What do we do with it now?

Yeah, I mean, also I feel like, you know, when you look at the Turkish community, especially, like, they're like

one of the biggest adopters of crypto. Right.

So Even in the bear market you had so many people in Turkey, from Turkey at the conference.

Luba is obviously written more with people that chase money or kind of go for that.

So this feels like the core Cosmos kind of conference right now is just core Cosmos.

But I also think that this is the first time we see the different tracks that they have, the EVM

track and the BTC file.

And I think maybe the zeitgeist is changing when it comes to there is this thing which is liquidity dependent

core Cosmos which is struggling, everyone knows that.

But then there's also this Cosmos tech non liquidity constrained cosmos and that's thriving, right?

I mean that's Babylon, that's upcoming barricade chain, that's Union, that's Celestia, there's so many of those.

And I feel like you can really see that they're taking over bigger parts of the conference.

So yeah, let's see how we navigate author chain two by the way. Not forget doing incredible Polaris as well.

I feel like is a great example of osmosis figuring out a way to do like the core cosmic side

but now also not be liquidity constraint on that side. Yeah, times are changing.

It's, you know, we're not the only ones expanding.

What do you feel is the next step for Cosmos?

Like I mean in a year or two years, if Cosmoverse continues, which I think it will, what do you

think will be kind of the main thing we'll be talking about next year?

Yeah, it's a good question. I think IBC is starting to really become almost an interoperability standard.

Obviously we are kind of like on the CRUSP of that really happening. Like Union isn't fully live.

It's still in Testnet.

But I remember two years ago in Cosmopolitan people said like oh, you can't connect to IBC to Ethereum.

Like it doesn't work now. It works right.

So I think that if anything Cosmos export is going to be IBC at the very least.

Just absolute enumerability of every chain everywhere.

I honestly think that the bitcoin ecosystem is going to be another very big one that's going to change all

of Cosmos.

We know we had Terra, obviously which was like this behemoth that used the tech and provide liquidity to the

entire ecosystem.

I almost think bitcoin can be that and Babylon where essentially all of the cost and liquidity constraints might be

fixable with BTC denomination simply because bitcoin not being evm, not being any ecosystem is like very prone to Be

well adjusted to just being part of cosmos adjusting to Bitcoin, if that makes sense. Especially with Babylon. Right.

I think that's going to be another.

Big cosmos kind of like going away.

Yeah, I think so.

I mean, Sunny has been screaming exactly from the rooftops for like four years that he wants to be, wants

us to be bitcoin maximalist. I think Thor Chain is obviously in a good position for that as well.

But I think, you know, I think anything that's core cosmos needs to figure out liquidity really fast.

And I think it's happening, right?

I mean, Ruijie merger into Thor Chain is already like, you know, sudden you move out of liquidity constraint of

core cosmos to like expand it. Everything that people are hyped about right now is not constrained by causes liquidity.

So I think in one to two years we either won't have protocols that are just constrained across liquidity or

we won't talk about them that much.

Because everyone has kind of used this side where it's like, you know, business in the front, party in the

back, business in front. It's going to be like outside liquidity in front, causal stack in the back.

I think it's going to be all vibe in one to two years.

Yeah. So what's going on with Fraser?

Yeah, lot of things. Obviously, you know, the expansion of EVM was quite a topic of discussion.

I think one thing I realized is a lot of teams are thinking about it, but a lot of teams

are not announcing it like that because they kind of want to ease more into it, which I very much

respect.

I think from our perspective, you know, anyone who knows me, like, kind of try not to be like, no

bullshit, just kind of straight to the point.

And I think a lot of people misunderstood expansion with dropping Cosmos, which is not the case.

Our vault on walls are still live, but it's more that you just have to have an acknowledgement of where

the liquidity is. It's a very, there's not like a political question. It's not like.

It's just there isn't a market here that if we fill it up is big enough for like our ambitions

right now, tech wise. Carlson is actually, I think also in a very interesting spot for AVs.

Sexification as a word, especially with Babylon.

We obviously all know that Cosmos tokens, if they don't have a market maker, they're not listed on sex.

You know, Magma called us down only technology, right? Token down technology, which is oversized security spending for the chain.

It's a finicky topic A lot of validators in the ecosystem doing really important work.

But I think that with things like Babylon coming in, we might get rid of kind of that oversized expense

for security in the early days, which I think is kind of ruminating Cosmos.

So in our case we set inflation to zero.

We're figuring out the details right now, but we have points for EVM right now and the goal is that

is earn the points for the EVM migration. So that's kind of the idea.

Just put the spending onto like a little bit ahead of time, figure out right now what's happening with the

chain. We launched the LRT with symbiotic.

I think we're around 2, 2.53 million TBL working on some integrations which we can make to the topic too,

how EVM compares to Cosmos, because we are walking through that right now.

But also everyone that follows us knows that LRTS are not our final vision. It's all about LSAs.

Anyone who reads the white paper can see that that is not a six month thing.

So really for us right now we are in the phase where we figure out where is the right ecosystem

to start building foundation for it.

There's so many pieces of like the Lego block design to get to an actual LSA that we are now

in the conversations about like, okay, where do we attach into ecosystem wise?

Where do we build a cohesive ecosystem specific vault that you know, essentially solves the issues for the ecosystem when

attracting liquidity and also deploying it and also solves the target group need of like having a passive product.

Because at this point, you know, shared security is like the perfect example.

Everyone's trying to go for stakers, all opportunities taken a lot of time to acquire.

Like defi takes a lot of time. It's not passive anymore. We've matured as an industry.

So what's happening with Fraser? We're looking to which existing.

We want to attach in the middle of that and solve that problem.

So what is the transition from going from Cosmos to Ethereum as a team with Cosmos and developers and having

to adapt to this other programming paradigm which I think a lot of people like building with Rust might, might

think is like an inferior experience to building because it's much more kind of low level programming.

You have to reason about like all these sort of security issues that you don't have with Rust.

Yeah, what's that been like?

Yeah, I mean I think, you know, we're grateful that we had devs that knew both languages, but it's like,

it's obviously A massive shift. It's kind of like, you know, SCRA starting from scratch to some degree.

I think that when we say EVM, there's also I think old VMs that use Rust or Cosmosm where it

isn't that big of a change, but it's still substantial.

I would say on the programming side obviously a very big kind of disruption of the language.

But on the BD side or generally business side, it's so different.

I think that we have this scarcity problem in Cosmos which isn't to anyone's fault.

It's like there's not enough bread on the table. So fighting for scraps, I don't think that's a personality issue.

It's just terror collapse. I think we just never really fully recovered from that.

On EVM side you can feel it's like an abundance mindset.

You either get very clear specifications of you need X amount of TVL for us to integrate you, which I've

never heard a specific thing like that in Cosmos. And also you hear more willingness to work together.

I think because the tech load is also smaller.

If you want to integrate between Cosmos chains, you have sovereign chains.

So you kind of need to figure that out.

It's a bigger load on EVM, at least on mainnet or for that matter also the L2s, same chain, easier

to do, more willingness to do it.

So I would say it is a new playing field, but it's a bigger playing field and the willingness to

work together is pretty high.

So you're saying the willingness from EVM Ethereum projects to work with projects that are outside of that evm?

Exactly, yeah. I wouldn't say it's not perfect.

You do have kind of this big club and you ain't in it.

Energy to some degree, but it's still, it's very meritocracy based, which is good, you know.

So like if you have growth trajectory, you know, they're not accumulating, they're like, okay, now if there's tvl, let's

tvl, let's work together. Now to be fair, there's like very deep layers of EVM politics.

I think we've all seen the Aven waffle stuff. There's like a lot of stuff brewing there.

So you kind of need to make sure that you can't work with everyone.

Like the willingness to work is high, but once you pick different teams it's like it blocks other paths you

could take.

It's not that, I mean, I guess it's similar in Cosmos to some degree as well, you know, do you

go with Astral Astropod or sources? But yeah, it's very interesting.

Yeah. And what have you found is the, the kind of reception to like generally, you know, the Cosmos ecosystem.

I think like, you know, if I look back on the last couple of years, there's been from, well, particularly

the EVM ecosystem, a lot of respect for Cosmos ecosystem.

The tech, the vision, you know, sort of modular and app chain theses sort of came from that ecosystem.

Now when you're approaching folks in Ethereum or in the EVM world and you're building on Cosmos, like how do

they sort of receive you as a cosmonaut?

Yeah, yeah, it's very fair. I think it's like there's two sides of this question.

So the first is like there is this overarching kind of positive association of like, yeah, Cosmos has a bunch

of gigabrains. Right. Like, I mean so many things have been pioneered in Cosmos.

So there's certainly like a respect on like the thesis side of things when it comes to like the defi

world slash kind of liquidity side of things. They just see that the numbers are very small. Right.

So I think that the Twitter feuds and beefs that we keep having are not great for our outside perception

outside of Cosmos.

So there's kind of this perception of the ecosystem having this toxicity to some degree and then there's the perception

of the gigabrain tech bros that actually keep coming up with the next paradigm in Cosmos.

It happened so many times at this point, proof of stake, IBC app chain thesis.

So you know, you have to navigate it.

You're still a new kid on the block and I would say that we won't lose the causes branding for

a while and I'm okay with that.

Again, it's really like a search for liquidity, not like a, yeah, evm, like changing the mask.

Like it's a search for liquidity. And I can see some teams struggling to enter that big club.

But Cosmos perceived, I would say, net positive.

Yeah, yeah.

And like what do you think is the biggest sort of lever that teams in Cosmos can pull on to.

You.

Know, attract liquidity from other ecosystems?

Because like you said, I mean that's, that's really the, the biggest issue I think that Cosmos now is, is

liquidity.

Yeah.

Yeah. What does that look like?

I mean like if you, if you had to sort of provide a roadmap, like a set of things, like

here are the top five things that teams should do or maybe three or whatever, try to attract liquidity from

outside.

Yeah.

I would say number one, which is kind of the overarching for the top three probably is like look at

these products that I call causal adhesion.

I had a post about this which is the Celestia, the union, the bearer, the Babylons of the world.

Because you have the tech compatibility but you don't have the liquidity constraints.

So like if you are building calls and if you indeed is right looking in that direction because you still

keep the core Cosmos, you're still compatible in tech, but they're bringing liquidity from the outside.

Then the second one which is in line with that is like BTC 5.

The BC price huge simply because the benchmarks basically zero. Right. Like you're starting from.

It's a new ecosystem of the biggest chain now is it going to be perfect? No.

There's a lot of finicky tech solutions to make BTC5 work which aren't as clean as EVM.

Like no one needs to sugarcoat that. But I think that inevitably it will become a trustless thing.

It will become like a real ecosystem and Cosmos is really well positioned for that.

So I think thinking about BTC solutions and BTC products there, honestly I used to say user experience for so

many years, but at this point I don't even think that's it. We have really good user experience.

I think, you know.

Yeah, like not to say we should stop with getting better at it, but that's not the issue anymore I

think.

Yeah, I think chains thinking about how to transition into becoming an app chain is probably going to be a

new meta. Like the oversized security spending in the beginning really is like a blessing the curse. Right?

The blessing is you can have a lot of tokens staked and locked, which is always good.

You want to keep supply down to some degree and have people long term aligned.

But on the other flip side, you have an outside security spending. I think for validators too.

It's probably better for everyone if projects have lower security spending in the beginning, figure out that they're actually onto

something, then transition to being independent validators. Don't have to make 50 small bets and hope one works out.

There's going to be 10 that are all high quality. I think that's better for everyone in the ecosystem.

But yeah, really, like if you want to start in Cosmos, congratulations, you picked the right tech stack.

Figure out liquidity.

That's like the thing Cosmos tokens, once they're listed on like you know, on, on the Dex, it's very hard

to get them sex listed. Really, really Hard.

I mean there's like literally a Cash Osmo Atom, Thorchain and even Thorchain is already Cosmos adhesive. Right.

And Akash was, because the AI meta was so huge.

But otherwise, unless you're really like a staple core thing, it's really hard to do that.

So you need to kind of really figure out how do you make the token not the downfall of a

good product? Because I think we see that a lot in Cosmos.

So I'd say those are like the four or five.

Yeah, yeah.

And like you mentioned, you mentioned inflation and I think that's my feeling is that in the next couple of

years, I mean we're already serviced. People are talking about this already.

And we've seen examples of chains going from like full sovereign app chain with their validator set to becoming an

ABs or becoming a roll up.

Is that something you guys are thinking about and like what's the, what's the calculus that chain should be making?

Yeah, you know, deciding whether or not they should.

Yeah, it's a good question.

I mean like downgrade their security but be more, more efficient with it's downgrade.

Independence, I would say. Yeah.

Because you can probably acquire the same amount of security for less spending if you turn into an abs, but

it's definitely losing independence.

Sovereignty.

Sovereignty, exactly. Yeah, I would say it's a good question. And you know, we don't need to hide around that.

I think we are experiencing what a lot of Cosmos teams were experiencing initially.

Our design with the Interchange vault, you know, that was a tech flex.

Like we had the first, you know, contracts on Kwaser that had no deployment anywhere else and started executing on

osmosis. But it was very finicky where it was too complicated to run through IBC back then.

So inevitably from a user experience standpoint we realized, okay, this is technically cool, but user experience wise, not stable

enough.

So once we pivot to the Outpost model, obviously that's when you have like the crisis of okay, what's the

purpose of the chain?

Now in the long vision of Quasar, the chain is vital because it is the actual co processor of taking

the strategies from off chain on chain.

So when we think about like a five year vision of LSAs everywhere, the chain is very vital for that.

But now we end this gap right now.

And in this gap my main concern was make it sustainable again, keep spending low on the chain and transform

it into being able to be a entry into other ecosystems.

Because right now I think there's the cargo lacks liquidity, but so many Other ecosystems have liquidity and lack actual

products and projects to work with.

And so given that, the chain in the ideation of the strategy given at work becomes a core thing of

our vision right now. Setting it up to basically see, look, is it going to be a roll up?

Is it going to be an abs?

Like where is the ecosystem align we're looking for is what we're doing right now.

So do I have an answer as of right now what it will be? No.

But I can tell you everything's on the table.

And that was the design choice with the token delisting and the 0% inflation that we are back on the

drawing board to be able to decide anything.

So now we can really sit down and see, okay, what is this ecosystem offering?

What are the opportunities for the product quasar in that ecosystem?

Go through the entire list and not have, you know, situation of, well, we are cosmos, we are evm or

well, you have a token out. We don't have a token like not having this kind of situation happening.

And it's going to take time. Like BD is not a fast thing.

But I can already notice in conversations that all of these choices have made us a more attractive partner to

talk to.

We did this conference, like this little mini side event in Singapore and the name of the panel was Liquidity

Wars.

Yeah.

And one of the things that was brought up, I mean we talked for like, you know, 45 minutes, but

Rushi for a movement brought up this idea that like you just mentioned, like there, there are these ecosystems that

have lots of liquidity but have no product.

Yeah.

Like Cardano is one example, right.

Where there's like maybe three Dex listings and it's all sex liquidity and I mean there's you know, whatever $12

billion of liquidity. How much? Oh yeah, yeah. It's just, it's, it's absurd. Or actually it's probably more absurd.

Yeah, I mean there's like tons of liquidity there and it's just not being utilized. And so which is.

It sounds bizarre, right?

Yeah, with, with proper bridging and proper. And sort of like connection.

Proper connections to other ecosystems that, you know, FAT12 is more like $200 billion of liquidity, you know, could flow

into other ecosystems and actually be useful.

100%.

Yeah.

I mean Noble was like kind of a good example of that. Right.

Like thank God for Noble, the ctp, USCC into the system.

Like we don't have the most competitive yield, which is why, you know, a lot of this going to dydx

and such. But like that's what we're talking about, right. Being able to connect to Cardano.

And I mean there's so many L2s that have so much raised capital and so much kind of attention. Right.

Like the most sacred resource in crypto is like distribution attention.

And they have that and they have almost kind of no teams to work with.

And I think, I don't think there's going to be an exodus of causal projects.

Like that wouldn't be the right move.

But I think trying to figure out problems for these ecosystems and solving them for them could be beneficial for

both parties. Yeah.

So what's the vision for LSAs?

Yeah, I think if you speed running crypto right now and you're being a little bit cynical about it, we

are literally copy paste creating finance like traditional finance. The biggest vaults on EVM are multi SIGs. Right.

A lot of the yield is going back to cdfi.

Real world assets, which, don't get me wrong, bullish, and real world assets long term, but they're also permissioned.

We're in this phase right now where it's back to get maximum yield in, you know, sacrifice of all of

the other stuff.

And I think a lot of people end up underestimating how fast defi has matured as an industry.

Like we are a super mature industry.

If you talk to someone that's not in finance and try to explain Pendle, you will fail tremendously.

And it's one of the biggest protocols.

And so the vision for LS8 really is like, okay, if we are actually trying to not just replace a

financial crazy with a technocracy, but we're actually trying to build like a, a different financial system.

And this isn't a communist speech, it's about accessibility for me, like the ability for everyone to contribute and be

part of it.

Then you need to also acknowledge that a lot of people cannot participate with how complex it is.

So if you think three, four, five years from now, do I want people to go on BlackRock and kind

of buy a centralized solution that gives them exposure to crypto?

No, I want people to be able to actually have ownership of defi yields and defi ecosystems, but without having

to do anything about it. And that's where layered staked assets come in. Right.

It's essentially single delta, so just one denomination, let's say product. It's a liquefied voucher.

So it's liquid vault share, which means a vault really. It's just a fund to some degree.

Like it's just money together. One place doing one thing right.

So if you think about it that way, why is a third of all global capital like trillions of dollars

in funds? It's because of the exact same problem it's been run through 10 times.

There is not a lot of users research you need to do.

So there's three vision, five year vision for LS Aces.

I want people to have an app that feels like a savings account, pick their favorite asset, you know, whether

it's B2, C, E, Sol, whatever it might be, click on it, get exposed and essentially earn at the worst

staking yield and at the best, substantially higher yield without ever having to actively deploy it.

And then on the flip side, what's interesting about this is you give more layers levers back to the protocols

to decide if they want to subsidize for directing liquidity where they needed to grow.

So essentially spending for growth or do you want to just have the liquidity directed to the highest yield destinations

to maximize actual revenue for the end user.

And once you give those levers back to the ecosystems, you have quite an attractive transaction where user gets high

yield and doesn't have to do anything.

Protocol gets power to direct liquidity again and can actually grow more actively and more kind of with intent.

So three to five years, that's kind of where I see quasar.

Cool.

Yeah.

Anything else you're excited about right now?

I'm really excited about union launching. That's one thing. Like IBC everywhere, like we need that.

I think it's going to be really exciting from a bridging standpoint.

I'm excited for Babylon to figure out how to trustlessly stake bitcoin. I think that's like a massive unlock.

The fact that they already have, I think it's 0.2% of the entire bitcoin supply.

That's bonkers with the current design speaks for the appetite for bitcoin to be liquid like to be used in

defi. So once they figure out how to do trusted staking, that's going to be insane.

I'm excited for the upcoming DYDX upgrades which are going to make them more competitive. Competitive with hyperliquid.

I'm excited for Bar Chain. I think it's not a meme that everyone thinks they're going to do well.

I think they're literally going to do incredibly well.

And it's also they're going to bring vibes, you know, I think like Air Chain is overhyped.

I think they're unbelievably hyped. I Honestly not sure if it's overhyped. And to be fair, I am biased.

I am in the rounds, right, to be fair. So maybe I'm just coping.

But I think they are a community of multiple years of background that have never had a single destination to

deploy into, it feels like, without even having launched one of the most robust ecosystems in DeFi.

And I think they're like, branding and narrative are still underappreciated in crypto as a whole.

They didn't reinvent any wheel, but they're so good at that that it doesn't matter. It simply doesn't matter.

So are they overhyped? Maybe they're very hot right now, but I think they're going to do great.

I think they're going to bring vibes back to Cosmos. Like, we need that.

We want us to just have, you know, fuck around, find out energy, just, you know, shoot the shit energy.

So, yeah, bearer chain. And obviously, you know, for our EVM plays to play out, that's like the most excited.

It's a. It's a lot of work.

We're on it, but I feel like a reignition of kind of rolling dice in a new ecosystem and kind

of go there and finding the right ecosystem for us to partner with.

Like, I think a lot of people are going to see that as a really cool thing for them to

look into.

All right, Upwards and onwards.

Sounds good. Thank you, man. Appreciate it. It's good.