One Cosmos founder believes that Blockchains are at a stage of convergence, where previously competitive ecosystems look for ways to collaborate in order scale their industry.
In an interview with Blockworks at Permissionless II Ethan Buchman (co-founder of Cosmos, and current CEO of Informal System) noted that today there was an opportunity for blockchain ecosystems from different places to come together to create similar architectures.
Additionally, as new chains come to Cosmos, Buchman believes there’s an opportunity to move beyond speculation and into genuine consumer-focused apps — potentially the first step in crypto achieving its political and social ambitions.
Blockworks: What is your opinion of the story that blockchains have finally reached a convergence point?
Buchman: Cosmos was thinking of many issues from the beginning, which many ecosystems have only begun to address in recent years. In some ways, Cosmos had an early start. But in others, there are other projects or ecosystems that have advanced more than Cosmos. There’s a chance for us to now be moving towards similar architectures.
It seems that our Cosmos app-chain vision, which we first pioneered a few years back, is increasingly adopted by the industry as a way to move forward. Rollup-based scaling is largely driven by the app chain scalability concept, in which you let each rollup decide for itself, as opposed to a top down monolithic framework.
It’s been our experience that the best way to enhance Ethereum is for people to send good ideas in Cosmos. They will take them and use it. People might say you don’t need Cosmos. Ethereum will take care of all our good ideas. Where will all of your great ideas come from?
Blockworks: What’s fascinating is that a storyline from the Cosmos eco-system, which has grown more evident over the past couple of months, shows a greater alignment with Ethereum. What is your opinion on this?
Buchman: Part of it is the success that rollups are experiencing and their problems, for which we have already developed solutions many years ago. The work that we have done has a great deal of potential for these companies to gain from it.
Cosmos has never been intended to be a’versus-type of independent thing. Cosmos’ original goal was to scale Bitcoin and Ethereum. It was the most important thing. It’s what really matters. [emerged from]We owe and respect a great deal to [Ethereum]. It’s great to see Cosmos ideas and technologies being applied in scaled-down projects.
We’ve felt like we were always on the same page, but it wasn’t until Ethereum rollups became popular and gained a lot of traction that we realized how much we could contribute. There’s now a clearer way for Cosmos to make a contribution. All of us are now at the point that we feel centralized sequencing is not a good way to go forward. Decentralizing the sequencer will make it look more like consensus. What is the most efficient consensus engine built? Cosmos.
You’ve also got these rolls. What will be the interoperability? Where can we find standards that will ensure interoperability and what are they? Lo and behold — IBC on Cosmos. With the increasing success of rollups there is a great opportunity to integrate Cosmos technologies.
Blockworks: A common critique I often hear about Cosmos is that despite all the good tech, there aren’t many users…
Buchman: Cosmos has a large number of users. Terra is a very popular platform, built using Cosmos. I believe that with Terra’s bear market and collapse, a number of people have moved back to Ethereum. Ethereum is supposedly safer, or has more consolidation.
We’re beginning to see more activity in the Cosmos eco-system. New blockchains are being built: Celestia Anoma Penumbra. They’re pioneering innovative approaches in cryptography, modularity, application design, privacy, which is only possible in Cosmos. What is the number of users they will have? What do you think?
I believe the entire industry struggles to find use cases. It’s hard to create a trading menu with the fragmented liquidity. Everyone wants to consolidate, which is why Ethereum has most of the liquidity.
As new use-cases emerge, we will see users’ activity in Cosmos and the other ecosystems pick up again. It’s important to me that this technology can be applied in real life, not just in speculative scenarios. We’re working hard to make that happen, but there is still much to do.
Technical problems are only a part of what is addressed by crypto and how it can be resolved. It’s addressing a broader range of social, economic, and political challenges. These take much longer and are more about changing institutions. This will take many decades, as it is not possible to measure in terms of product cycles.
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