Tendermint's Denis Fadeev: Cosmos sees no Ethereum killers, only a multi-chain future

Ashton Addison: For people who don't know it, what is Cosmos, and where does Tendermint fit in?▶ 00:44

Denis Fadeev: Cosmos is a network of blockchains, not a single blockchain. It's a community of builders and users, and also technology that allows people to build blockchains and connect them. The goal is a large network of interconnected blockchains, in some ways similar to the internet. Tendermint is one of the core contributors to the system. For the longest time we focused on core components: Tendermint Core, the consensus engine, the Cosmos SDK and IBC. This year all of these technologies were finally connected with the release of IBC on Cosmos Hub, which is one of the blockchains in the network.

Ashton: Can IBC connect Cosmos chains with blockchains outside the ecosystem, such as Ethereum and Bitcoin?▶ 04:21

Denis: IBC is a low-level protocol that allows data transfer between blockchains. A blockchain needs three things to implement it: a key-value store, the ability to execute smart contracts, and fast finality. If it meets those requirements, it can implement IBC as a smart contract or a module. Bitcoin and Ethereum don't satisfy them, so they can't implement IBC as is. Work is being done on bridges to these blockchains because they're so popular, so it's a high priority. More modern blockchains can implement IBC directly, and all Cosmos blockchains are IBC-enabled by default.

Ashton: Why haven't the so-called Ethereum killers managed to overtake Ethereum?▶ 07:20

Denis: One thing I love about Cosmos is that we don't see other blockchains as competitors. That's what differentiates us. We want all blockchains to succeed and to enable IBC at some point, because that's the vision behind Cosmos: a huge network where users can easily transfer assets and data between chains. So we don't see any blockchain as an Ethereum killer. Users don't want to be siloed into a particular ecosystem, as good as it may be. Maybe some blockchains are much better than Ethereum, but the future is multi-chain.

Ashton: Why should a Solidity developer, or someone who has never built on a blockchain, start building with Cosmos?▶ 09:00

Denis: We've been working hard for more than a year to deliver the best developer experience I've personally seen in blockchain. It's extremely easy, especially for non-blockchain developers, because it's so similar to building traditional web applications. With a single command you install a CLI tool, and with one more command you create a new sovereign chain with all the source code and a web application that includes a wallet. Soon we'll add a mobile component too. To add functionality, say for a logistics application, you run one command and it adds all the code. You only put your application-specific code into the functions that handle messages. It's the same concept as a web app: you have requests, they change the state, and the blockchain is just the state. I have a background in front-end development, and when we started Starport we tried to bring the great developer experience that front-end developers have to the blockchain world. I think we largely succeeded.

Ashton: Are developers moving to the Cosmos SDK on their own, or are you also offering incentives?▶ 11:56

Denis: Aside from making it simpler and improving the experience, we're investing heavily in tutorials, and we host hackathons. With the Starport CLI it's been incredibly easy to participate in hackathons and win prizes. If projects are interesting, we try to incentivize the builders to bring them to production. We can see on GitHub how many chains are scaffolded with Starport, and new chains come in daily. Some are weekend projects, but that's the goal: to let people experiment over a weekend instead of investing six months to get off the ground. A couple of weeks after going through a tutorial they can really focus on it, and maybe deliver something in a couple of months instead of years.

Ashton: How far can a developer get in a weekend?▶ 14:06

Denis: With our developer guide you can follow the steps and learn from zero to building a DEX by yourself in a weekend. It's an IBC-enabled DEX, so your chain is automatically connected to all of the other chains. It's pretty incredible, to be honest.

Ashton: As we move from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0, how do these communities come together so the decentralized vision becomes real?▶ 14:29

Denis: I think the key is user experience. We need to improve end-user experience of blockchains dramatically before it goes mainstream. Tendermint has been doing a great job on that with our end-user interface. We're making it easy for people not to think in terms of individual blockchains, even though that's how it's all implemented. End users just want to see the list of assets they have across the whole system. One killer feature we need to implement is making key management as seamless as possible. That's probably the hardest piece of this puzzle. People should have control over their assets, but with an experience comparable to signing up on a traditional site, where you press a button and it all works. It's a very big design and UX challenge, but I think we are the ones capable of handling it in the next year or several years.

Ashton: What's coming next for Tendermint, and how can people follow along?▶ 17:03

Denis: You can follow us on Twitter, because we post every update there, and go to cosmos.network/starport for the latest information on Starport. We have a lot on the roadmap this year, mainly Starport Network. We're hoping to launch a testnet and streamline the process of launching blockchains even further. Our end-user interface will get many updates this year, and we're actively working on mobile versions of these applications.