Chorus One Podcast

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.

Cosmos Governance Working Group Twitter and Social Links: https://twitter.com/CosmosGov

Proposal 23: https://hubble.figment.network/cosmos/chains/cosmoshub-3/governance/proposals/23

Cosmos Governance Working Group Funding Request: https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmSMGEoY2dfxADPfgoAsJxjjC6hwpSNx1dXAqePiCEMCbY

Chorus One: https://chorus.one

Chorus One Twitter: https://twitter.com/chorusone Chorus One Telegram: https://t.me/chorusone

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.

Terra Money Website: https://terra.money Terra's Year in Review: https://medium.com/terra-money/terra-2019-year-in-review-5d4fa2e38b64?source=collection_home---4------0-----------------------

Learn more about staking with the Chorus One validator on Terra: https://chorus.one/networks/terra

Chorus One: https://chorus.one Chorus One Twitter: https://twitter.com/chorusone Chorus One Telegram: https://t.me/chorusone

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.

Stake Capital DAO Light Paper: https://github.com/stake-capital/research/blob/master/Stake%20Capital%20DAO%20Light%20Paper.pdf

Medium Post on Stake Capital DAO:https://medium.com/stakecapital/introducing-stake-dao-by-stake-capital-claiming-future-yield-revenue-7059e0781328 Stake Capital Website: https://www.stake.capital/

Liquid Staking Working Group: https://github.com/ChorusOne/liquid-staking

Chorus One: https://chorus.one Chorus One Twitter: https://twitter.com/chorusone Chorus One Telegram: https://t.me/chorusone

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.

Chainflow: https://chainflow.io

Staking Defense: https://forum.stakingdefense.org/ Chorus One: https://chorus.one

Chorus One Twitter: https://twitter.com/chorusone Chorus One Telegram: https://t.me/chorusone

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! "Proof-of-Stake is less wasteful" Blog Post: https://medium.com/@ercwl/proof-of-stake-is-less-wasteful-b2854a191766 Arcane Assets: https://arcaneassets.io Chorus One: https://chorus.one Chorus One Twitter: https://twitter.com/chorusone Chorus One Telegram: https://t.me/chorusone

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.

Multicoin Website: https://multicoin.capital/ Kyle's Twitter: https://twitter.com/KyleSamani Binance Blitzscaling Blog Post: https://multicoin.capital/2019/11/07/binance-is-blitzscaling/ Torus Blog Post: https://multicoin.capital/2019/07/09/our-investment-in-torus/ Kyle's Argument against Sharding: https://multicoin.capital/2019/07/30/the-world-computer-should-be-logically-centralized/

Chorus One: https://chorus.one Chorus One Twitter: https://twitter.com/chorusone Chorus One Telegram: https://t.me/chorusone

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.

NEAR Economics Whitepaper: https://near.ai/economics NEAR Economics Lunch & Learn Episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhQi2nAd-r0 NEAR Website: https://near.ai

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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.

Microtick Website: http://microtick.com

Microtick Testnet: http://microtick.zone

ShapeShift: https://shapeshift.io/

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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.

Chainsafe: https://chainsafe.io/

Ethermint: https://github.com/cosmos/ethermint

Chainsafe Report for Aragon: https://github.com/ChainSafe/AGP-Report

Aragon Chain: https://blog.aragon.one/aragon-chain/

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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.

IBC Website: https://cosmos.network/ibc

Cosmos Game of Zones: https://cosmos.network/goz

Chris Goes Website: https://pluranimity.org/about/

Cryptium Labs: https://cryptium.ch/

Stash: https://stash.ai/landing

Wyvern Protocol: https://wyvernprotocol.com/

Juvix: https://github.com/cryptiumlabs/juvix

Chorus One: https://chorus.one

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