Denis Fadeev on building blockchains with Cosmos and Tendermint

0:01i'm ashamed addison from block west capital for investmentpitch media in the cryptocoin show and today on blockchain interviews we have dennis fedev the director of developer experience at tendermint dennis welcome to the show and thank you so much for coming on today ashton thanks for having me you're very welcome i'm excited to dive into the world of cosmos and tendermint

0:23your team's been working on so many different things making so many connections in the blockchain space i think it's a really great impact that tendermint's having on the industry i would love to kick off our time together uh by just hearing a little bit about tendermint cosmos stargate starport all of the things that you're working on and maybe a little bit more specific on your

0:44specific role in growing all of these initiatives and then we can dive into the details sure so i think the best place to start talking about all of this is uh what is cosmos for people who might not know so the uh the main idea behind cosmos is that it's a network of blockchains so cosmos is not a single blockchain it's uh it's a community of people of

1:09builders of users and also technology that allows people to build blockchains and connect them so the the the goal is to create this large network of interconnected blockchains in some ways similar to like the internet right um and that's what we've been doing for many years now and tenerman is one of the core contributors to this whole

1:36system so for a long while for like for the longest time we we've been focused on like core um components of this system uh such as tendermint core the consensus engine cosmos sdk uh ivc and this year all these technologies have finally been connected with the release of ibc on cosmos hub and cosmos hub is one of the blockchains in this cosmos network

2:05so this this year ibc was launched on cosmos hub and on other blockchains as well and it's kind of like its adoption continues to grow with more and more blockchains enabling ibc and also teams are building ibc implementations for other blockchains as well recently tannermint as a company is focused on

2:33delivering building end user products so one of these products is amorous which is the interface for the network of blockchains for cosmos essentially right so it's it's a user-friendly end-user tool interface for people to send receive tokens also swap tokens and do all sorts of cool things so it's very user friendly and this is one direction that the

3:00company is going into like making blockchains accessible to end users and the second main direction is developer experience so making all of this also accessible to developers and not only to blockchain developers or cosmos developers but pretty much to anyone and that's where starboard comes in starboard is a his all-in-one platform

3:28for creating building and launching blockchains so from developers perspective it's a tool that you install and you can use from your terminal to quickly create a blockchain add features to it uh very quickly iterate and development and create um essentially a new blockchain that you can then deploy launch and um yeah right now we're busy

3:55building um starboard network which is the second piece of the puzzle that will enable empower developers to launch their blockchains live i mean you can do it right now but we're aiming to make it as simple as as deploying front-end application great background dennis thank you for that and i'm curious i want to talk more about starport but i wanted to just

4:21cover some of the things you said uh there about ibc you know i i think the viewers probably aren't familiar with uh the inner blockchain communication protocol which was one of the updates that your team came out with back in the first quarter of this year and with that inner blockchain communication protocol having all these different blockchains being built

4:42through the cosmos sdk is it all i know that there's a bunch of blockchains out right now that have been built with this technology so does that technology the ibc allow them to cross-communicate with each other as well as cross-communicating with blockchains like ethereum or bitcoin that are outside of the tendermint ecosystem or maybe you can elaborate on

5:05that sure so ibc is a low-level protocol um that allows data transfer between blockchains and there are three requirements for a blockchain to be able to implement ibc so i mean it is quite technical but like it has to have like a key value store ability to execute smart contracts um and it has to have uh fast finality

5:34so if a blockchain is capable of that if it satisfies these basic requirements of ibc it can implement it either as a smart contract or as a module or whatever right um both bitcoin and ethereum are do not satisfy these requirements so they can they cannot implement ibc as is so there will um so right now work is being done on implementing bridges to these

6:01blockchains because they're extremely popular so of course it's high priority to do that but other blockchains that are there i say more modern can implement idc directly and of course all cosmos blockchains are enabled idc enabled by default definitely and is there some notable blockchains that people are familiar with that were

6:29probably built with the cosmos sdk but people don't really understand that because that's the back technology that you don't really hear about well aside from cosmos hub which is like the poster child for cosmos sdk and ibc uh there are many many other blockchains i mean you can visit cosmos.network we have an ecosystem page with literally hundreds of blockchains

6:52but some of them are like terra akash region osmosis so many many blockchains that actually are very interesting because they implement a particular application like they're not they're not only about smart contracts and tokens right they they implement a particular business app i mean not business application but uh they implement a particular application that users can

7:20play with and um yeah and the advantage is that they're all connected so it's yeah it's really cool definitely and with the development of all these you know more modern blockchains uh there's been all this discussion around like you know the ethereum killers or you know when is one of these blockchains gonna take over and be the new network effect that

7:43people go to because of the inefficiencies of ethereum where it's at right now do you have any insight on you know why that hasn't seemed to happen yet and you know these ethereum 2.0 killers really aren't able to grow as big as ethereum so what i love about cosmos i mean i like many things about cosmos but one one thing in particular is that we don't

8:08see other blockchains as competitors and that will that's what differentiates us from others because we want all blockchains to succeed and we all want all blockchains to enable ivc at some point because that that implements the vision behind cosmos to have this huge network where users can easily transfer assets data tokens what have you between chains

8:35so uh so that's why we don't see any blockchain as an ethereum killer right we we just wish all of them were we're connected because that's that's for the benefit of end users and users don't want to be siloed in into a particular ecosystem as good as it may be like maybe there are blockchains that are much better than ethereum but it doesn't mean that uh the future is

9:00multi-chain basically that's that's kind of the idea behind cosmos definitely yeah i know i agree as well and i'm curious you know you're focused on the developer experience how easy and fluid has uh the team made it for developers that say they have developed on ethereum using solidity or maybe they just use traditional programming languages and they've never

9:22developed on a blockchain you know why should they go and start using the cosmos ecosystem to develop and how easy has your team made it yeah we've been working hard for more than a year now to deliver the best developer experience that i personally seen um in in blockchain it's extremely easy especially for um for non-blockchain developers because because of how similar it is to building

9:51traditional web applications pretty much with just a single command i mean with literally a single command you install a cli tool with one more command you create a new sovereign chain with all the source code with a web application that includes a wallet soon we'll be adding mobile component to that as well so it's it's a complete platform that you can build on top of and with just

10:18a few commands you can add functionality like for example um you want your blockchain to deal with i don't know with products for like a logistics application or something and you just run one command and it adds all the code and the only thing you need to do is put the the application specific code in the function in the functions that are responsible for handling messages

10:43and the whole concept is very similar to traditional web applications because you have requests you process these requests and these requests change the state and the blockchain is just the state so it's very easy to understand and it's very easy to get started with and especially with with the starboard cli tool that we we have that you can just go today and start

11:06playing with it um it's it's not much different than building like a web application except that you get all this these great benefits of having like um currency as a primitive right like that's what differentiates um blockchains from traditional applications and also the fact that it's essentially immutable right so um it's decentralized so you don't have

11:28to trust anyone um with with with your application and yeah for for smart contract developers it is also very simple because they at some point were a traditional application developers right so they they they are familiar with the flow even though smart contracts are different from cosmos sdk modules um even if you're not a go developer like i i have background in front-end

11:56development and it it it is very easy for for front-end developers because we try like when we started starboard we actually tried to bring the the great developer experience that front-end developers have to the blockchain world and i think we largely succeeded that's great to know and do you see a flock of developers just naturally moving towards wanting to develop

12:24through the cosmos sdk are you also providing incentives and and trying to attract smart developers to to move there or is it a balance of both so aside from trying to make it simpler and trying to improve the experience uh we are investing heavily in like tutorials and making it accessible from like the learning perspective but also we um we host hackathons um and

12:52uh and with with starboard cli it's it's been incredibly easy to participate in hackathons and earn prizes and of course if projects are interesting then then we we try to incentivize people who are building to to build more like bring this to production and um i mean we we can see even on github like how many chains are scaffolded with starboard and

13:19like daily new chains come in of course some some some some projects are our weekend projects but that's that's the goal like our goal is to make it possible for people to experiment on a weekend and not have to like invest like six months trying to get off the ground and they can just like they can just do it over the weekend and uh maybe decide whether that's for them or not

13:43and uh in a couple of weeks after they they successfully tried going through a tutorial they can like really really focus on it and maybe deliver something in in just a couple of months instead of years definitely yeah i could see that as being a big barrier to entry for developers thinking they need to develop an application and if it's going to take months and months

14:06then there's going to be a lot more uh preparation needed before they can just go and jump in to starport and just start coding it sounds like your team has made it super easy to just put a couple lines of code in and have something you know ready to be built yeah absolutely and with with a developer guide we have you can just follow follow the steps and learn from

14:29xero to building a decks by all by yourself in like a span of a weekend like literally in a weekend you can go from zero to building a dex an ibc enabled deck so your chain will also be automatically kind of connected to all of the chains so it's pretty incredible to be honest it's very incredible and this is more of a high-level question but emerging from

14:54web 2.0 to web 3.0 how do you see these communities bridging together properly so that down the road here as we have all of this communication between blockchains that the true nature of the decentralized vision that everybody wants comes into fruition and everything is nice like roses i think the key is user experience like we need to improve end user experience

15:22of blockchains dramatically before it it goes mainstream and um i think tenerman has been doing great job at that with with amaris um so we are making it very easy for people not to think in terms of like individual blockchains even though this is how it's all implemented but end users might not care about that right they they they just want to see a list of

15:49assets that they have um in blockchain right like in the whole in the whole system and that's that's what mrs provides and of course one of the one of the killer features that i think uh we need to implement at some point is to make uh key management as seamless as possible that's probably like the the the hardest piece in this puzzle to make sure that

16:15people are both they can they can they can have control over their assets but at the same time have experience comparable to what they get if they just like sign up you know using a traditional sign and sign up slow right they just press a button and it's all working of course it's it's a it's a very big design and ux challenge but i think i think we are

16:42we are the ones that are capable of like handling it in the next um i don't know year or several years definitely and i agree dennis i think the user experience on decentralized exchanges and and you know non-custodial platforms is going to be key because when there's no cut you know custody you have to deal with it yourself and if you're not technically

17:03inclined the developers need to make these applications as easy as possible for people to be able to use it and get into the decentralized world really easily great well thank you so much for coming on um i would love to know you know for the developers that are interested in learning more about cosmos sdk as well as just people that are interested in

17:28you know the blockchains that have been built so far and what other things are coming down the road for tendermint what's the best way for them to learn more and to get involved so you can definitely follow us on twitter because we we post every update there so tendermint hq starboard hq and amorous hq uh that's our handles and also cosmos dot network slash starboard to get

17:54latest information about starboard um so yeah we we have a lot of plans on the roadmap this year um mainly software network we're hoping to launch test out of this blockchain and streamline launch streamline the process of launching blockchains even further amorous will get many updates this year and we're actively working on mobile versions of these applications so that's

18:20that that's pretty exciting very exciting and thank you for those links i will leave those in the description box below as well all the best on moving forward with starport and everything in tendermint as well dennis thank you so much for taking the time to come on and let's follow up in the near future thank you bye you