Yeah. Game of Newt.
You think that'll actually address some viewership?
Absolutely.
Well, it's like, yeah.
Welcome to Game of Modes, a weekly podcast from independent validated teams.
Welcome to Game of Newts and independent podcast on something by validators,
except for not me.
I've got no idea what the intro is anymore.
Oh, it's just as good as I could do.
Yeah, exactly.
I didn't know what it was.
That's how I was hoping you would do it.
When it was the long, I can do the original one.
Welcome to Game of Nodes podcast on the Cosmos by independent validated teams.
When it was the long, complicated one, I could do that.
Then it kind of just became we're a podcast and I lost all track of what it is.
Well, I think it's just dropped the Cosmos bit and it's exactly the same, right?
Podcast by independent validated teams.
Fine.
Nothing from shade since, you know, we volunteer to say it.
I just find it odd as someone who's just independent and not a validated team
to even be claiming it's from validated teams at this stage.
Seeing as I'm pretty much, you know, 50% of the phrase time, I would say now.
Yeah, that's true.
Yeah, and our content doesn't exactly come from validators either.
We're like, Hey, what?
What happened?
That's interesting.
Exactly.
And then we talk about validator stuff and people are like, can we not talk
about validator stuff?
Fine.
Well, that's mainly that's mainly me complaining about Null.
When he starts talking about his nodes at the data center, I just kind of snooze
20 minutes.
I know that was a shit show this week.
I was hoping he was here so we could talk about it.
It was like all the perfect data center stuff.
Like he got in late and then didn't ship and then he planned his time and then
he was missing cables and he had to go to the store.
Then he got on a plane and the guy said, Oh yeah, it's ready to go.
You ready?
And he's like, No, I've got another plane.
It was all perfect data center story stuff, which we'll have to hear about next year.
It makes me really excited that he's going through it for the first time so I can
watch and really double down on me not wanting to host my own metal.
I'm perfectly happy with like letting the experts deal with it and let the experts
take care of the hardware places.
We've had like six hard drive replacements in the last two months.
Yeah, or that's six times.
I didn't have to go to the data center this month.
That's exactly right.
That makes me feel so good.
That's exactly right.
Yeah.
Or even if like, even if you have, I mean, you pay for it, but if there's a good
team on some DCs, like, see, we're writing a conversation that Benny does want to have.
But even if we're in some good DCs, like have really, like really capable people
on site that will get involved, right?
And like you send them new stuff and you just give them a window and they handle
it, right?
Or they'll do whatever.
And other ones are like, listen, here's a key.
You go over there and if you want to do something, you have to have somebody
come in and do it for you.
And those are miserable.
Like that's what we're in.
And so everything is like, it depends on like one of us are out of town or that's
going on or those types of things.
It's just, oh, it's brutal.
You don't want that.
You want, you want just like maybe Sips sent some hardware there.
And if a drive fails, like you have like six more sitting in a case that the guy
just can swap in when you talk to him type of thing, like, you don't want to be in
there.
It makes me kind of wonder about artifacts since he hosts his stuff, but not
locally, is he paying someone to do a place?
Since if that happened, he is.
Okay.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
Cause I know that he also like hires his son to some extent, but that would be
expensive flying them all over the world as he does.
Yeah.
No, I think you like, that's what you do.
Like you, you get to deal with a DC that has like really good remote hands and then
you just send them machines and you deal with like that structure of it and then
you give them some spares and, you know, they'll, they might even have logins in
certain situations, which you may or may not want.
Um, cause they might have to do something on the OS or maybe something in IPMI to
change something.
So those are things you don't want to have, but I mean, you might have to,
depending on what's going on, right?
So, but yeah, it's, it's a, it's brutal.
There's something kind of romantic about owning your hardware to me, but the
reality, I think it's one of those things where I really have to let my,
let the reality sink in over and over.
I have to remind it yearly.
Cause yearly are every six months.
Someone talks to me and he's like, Hey, have you thought about this?
And I'm like, I love the idea.
I love it.
And I have to like go talk to John about him doing proxmox or whatever.
And I remember, oh yeah.
No, no, no, I hate this idea.
No, I'm out.
Well, it's nice.
So like we have a couple, like we have a couple of glamour shots.
I have, I have some more glamour shots coming of our stuff too, because those
are nice to be able to show what it looks good, right?
It's kind of like a, it's a little bit of a penis measuring thing, to be honest.
Like, unfortunately, cause it's like, oh, you got a stack and there's like
led lights on it and shit, which is cool.
And maybe sometimes that works, but, but if you're in that business and you look
at a stack of hardware and you see no battery backup units and you see no
switches and you see like no, all this type of stuff, what you actually see is
like just hardware racked.
And then you look at all I see is like problems.
Like I, like how much redundancies are there and like what's the fiber look like
and who has controlled those routes and wants to fail over on the switch that's
sitting at the top of the rack.
And then like, what does the BGP routes go for?
And like, like you start getting these types of things where you just like,
you just depress yourself.
You're like, oh, I don't want to deal with this shit.
Yeah, exactly.
That's that this is the kind of conversation that reminds me that I have
so little interest in the reality of running, like operating.
It looks good.
Yes.
Yeah.
It looks good.
But right, Bendy, is that what you're, this is what you're really excited about?
Yeah, I mean, yeah, sure.
Like when I'm picking my, when I'm picking my validator, I just want.
Ah, perfect.
See, that's the perfect.
I have some twinkly lights.
Have a bare metal validator.
You know, you cut out there for a second, but you like twinkly likes.
I'm guessing that's what you like.
You want to see some, you want to see some like some sexy flashing LEDs.
That's what also induced me to delegate.
You know, nothing else.
That's just, you know, good to know when you get really professional and you put
a sticker of the logo of the network on the machine.
That's how you know you've truly made it as valid or when you can do that.
It's true.
Well, I assume that's what gets you a foundation delegation, right?
Like that's how you get a foundation delegation.
I think that's one step.
What that's one step above tattoo, right?
That's what I was going to say.
Yeah.
So tattoo is like where the station delegation goes in.
And then hardware sticker on hardware is one, one clearly more commitment than tattoo.
It's clearly what's going on.
Yeah.
I've not got access to the spreadsheets.
I don't know what the topics are meant to be.
So I mean, it doesn't really matter.
That's good.
I'll just carry on drinking then.
And you can, you can talk about hardware if you really want to.
And I'll wonder why I'm here.
I don't.
So what, so what is happening this week?
Benny, what have you got?
I'm, I'm basking the LaVonna thing right now.
If we want to start talking about that, I find that utterly fascinating.
How LaVonna, so LaVonna has been like the most touted air, like what native
Airdrop Cosmos Airdrop launch in the last six months.
And the fact that it like pumped and then the market makers immediately tanked
it is just absolutely outrageous to me.
But, Ben, you probably know more about that than I do.
Well, I think you pretty much described it.
So it launches, I think, I think you could buy it to about 60 cents or something
pretty much immediately.
And then it went up to over a dollar fifty.
And then it listed on GMEC, I want to say it was something like that.
And went and then basically the market maker with a sledgehammer fist.
Oh, pause it up.
So I did to close the.
You're breaking up, dude.
Gap between like 170 and 30 cents.
And just send tips there.
And Sonny himself was tweeting about it and all sorts of stuff.
So pretty rough.
But I think the whole sequence thing is weird.
Certainly if you compare it to like what Tia did, Tia obviously have market makers
doing stuff for them.
That seems pretty straight off.
Bendy, I wonder if you should turn your video camera off to like spare some of the
bandwidth because you're cutting out pretty good.
Yeah, I think so.
It might be a good idea.
We're doing that.
Whereas like, look, I think that's probably the issue.
So so catching up on that.
So so it started like varnoid.
Here, I'll make it up.
So it started like 60 cents, right?
Like it's it started at like 60 cents or something similar to that, right?
And then you said it was pumping up to like a dollar 50 because I only saw it when it
actually hit coin get go.
Coin get go, I think didn't get listed till after launch, right?
It was like, I think it started like 80 cents or something because I think it was on the
way down because you said it was already in the over a dollar or something.
So yeah, yeah, it went up quite a bit.
So I, if I remember correctly, it launched at 50 or 60 cents.
And then due to the hype, due to the excitement, it pushed all the way up to like a dollar
50, two dollars.
Yeah.
Oh, really?
And then, yeah.
And then suddenly it didn't like the day candle or the 15 minute candle is like, it
suddenly goes from that that number to like 40 cents or 50 cents in one fell swoop.
Yeah, right now it's that it's listed.
I think it's 32 right now.
It's down 64% in 24 hours.
Oh, it's listed at 32 cents right now.
32 right now.
And at least that coin got go towards showing.
Wow.
So 32 and nine, actually 33.
So yeah, it looks like it was pretty, pretty brutal.
I mean, this is, it's so, but what, what I don't understand is what, why would market
makers be forcing down?
Like what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what,
what, do you know what actions are taking that would force this amount?
I thought usually they were there to be able to be able to obviously prop up through
through actions, not necessarily take profits.
Yeah.
So it sounds like it was an odd situation gone wrong.
Right.
There's a currency between a dollar 70 and somewhere else.
I think I was most it seems like a dollar 70.
And then I see a different exchange, different decentralized exchange
were launched at the same time was like 30 or 40 cents.
And so rather than trying to like equalize them, they decided that the 30 cents
or whatever it was was the correct number.
And then did a single sell to try and drive it all the way down to the other side.
Right.
Which is like that's something I would pull as like, if not a trading, not a
market maker expert, I'd be like, I don't know.
Let's just like do a big like, seems like times right.
I don't know.
Yeah.
Like, oh shit.
But I'm also not an expert.
People don't pay me a market make, right?
They pay me to run servers.
That's so fun.
So like, even me, even me, I don't think that I would see, you know, the,
the slippage at like 80% and feel I would be like, I should probably not make
this move right now.
Like you don't necessarily need to be an expert to recognize to not hit the button.
Yeah.
Exactly.
All right.
All right, Bendy's back much more festive situation, still no lampshades, better
wifi signal.
Hopefully.
So we'll see.
I mean, I probably need more blinking lights on my hardware.
Otherwise, connection last right.
Exactly.
Yeah.
There's not too much of a lag between your lips and your sound.
That's good.
Yeah.
So, so that's, that's a hell of a, I mean, it really sucks for a team like that
too.
Like they've been working so hard on that.
And then what, I mean, say it went through a similar situation, right?
When, when the tokenomics came out, like right at launch, like there's, I guess
everybody, every new chain has a, it never starts 100% positively, right?
But, but shit like this always like leaves a, that's such a bad taste in people's
mouths for it.
Like they kind of, then they, then you start questioning the whole situation.
All right.
Yeah.
And I think LaVanna obviously has a slightly troubled history dating back to
their NFT collection that essentially was considered at the time to be a bit of a
rug turns out, obviously not to be a new, you've got a bit of an air drop in
exchange for that early sport and stuff.
But it, it's a, it's a really good product, but absolutely terrible launch.
And, uh, you know, ultimately I'm probably bullish on the token because I
think that the protocol makes, it actually makes a revenue and it hasn't
even, you know, it's not been live very long, but would I buy anything right now?
We don't give financial advice on this podcast.
So I'm not going to say.
Well, yeah, that's an interesting thing, right?
Is that if you kind of look at it from more holistic perspective, so the
original, originally it was the dev wall, I think was accused of selling, if I
remember correctly, and that's where the Twitter was really focused on.
But if you kind of look at it from the dev's perspective, they make something
like $50,000 per week in trading fees, I think $50 per, $50,000 per week or per day.
It's some pretty decent number, honestly.
And so to drop the market, I think it's weak.
Okay.
So to drop the market so drastically for a $400,000 profit, it would just be
insane, right?
So I don't know, I feel bad for the devs as well.
Like that, assuming it wasn't them.
I don't think that we do know that it was the market maker that caused it to happen
versus the dev wall.
They, Lovanna have said it was a market maker.
So Lovanna gave the market maker the tokens.
That's why it looks like a Lovanna foundation wallet.
I guess because basically it is, but they've given that to the market maker.
The market maker's off doing whatever they're kind of instructed to do, I guess.
Which is, I assume that it looks like they're targeting 30 cents as they're kind
of like, this is roughly what we think the price of Lovanna should be.
I don't know enough about how people do token launch as well.
But the whole sequencing of this and the way it's been done.
And, you know, Lovanna, there was a lot of stuff they didn't do brilliantly.
Like they didn't publish breakdowns on how the airdrop work.
So like some people are saying, I did do trading and I did register and you've
not given me an airdrop and people don't really know why because they don't know
how much volume they were meant to have done.
Yeah.
And, you know, like I, I got the airdrop because I've been doing some leverage
trading, which previous, like, which I did to get the airdrop, right?
So that as a piece of marketing, it's worked.
And I've used the protocol and it's really good.
But like, I think in the end I've done like, because it's all leveraged, right?
But like 90,000 or something like that in terms of volume, which is, which
is seems like a lot of money to me, but I wouldn't know whether I just scraped in
or was like way over the threshold.
And if you don't tell people that kind of stuff, I can understand why people
get frustrated.
But you can tell it when they can just get it.
Right, like some sort of, like some sort of guidance, right?
If you tell everyone, then they can game it, right?
That's the problem.
Right.
I think you should tell it, at least when you make the airdrop, you should say
what the criteria was.
So even if it's perspective, so that you can at least know, oh, I missed out
by five cents or whatever it is.
Right.
I don't know.
I think the concept of airdrops are so fascinating.
I almost don't think that there should be any announcement.
There shouldn't be an explanation of where it came from.
Part of the point of an airdrop, my understanding is for proof
of stake chains is to get liquidity away so that the SEC has less of a claim
or some entity has less of a claim of it being a security.
Right.
Like you're trying to distribute it that way the market can kind of make itself.
And so are people entitled to an answer for where this airdrop came from that
they were like, why should they justify every single ounce of support for
like the airdrop?
I think it's useful for community.
Community building.
I think you can I suppose that's the problem.
There is cultures start to build up.
So we're used to transparency about what these things are.
So people expect it.
And then if you don't do it, the team gets shit.
But I think it's interesting because there's no actual reason like Lovano
isn't a proof of stake token, right?
It's just a token doesn't do it literally does nothing right now.
It is just as much use as Cerberus or puppy or newt, all of which are, you know, hold
on now, you can't be thrown shade at newt right now.
All right.
I have a financial invested interest in the success of newt.
So you can hold off on that.
I mean, I I I love newt too.
But what I'm saying is Lovano is doing Lovano is just a mean point right now.
It doesn't secure a chain.
It doesn't give you revenue.
You can't vote.
It gives you nothing.
There's the future possibility of governance and other stuff after that.
But, you know, newt's going to do far more than that.
It's going to secure the hub as far as I can tell.
So next step.
So I thought that Lovano actually was going to do revenue sharing in it.
If not, then I guess kind of what's what's what's I think that's what they're
saying they're going to do.
But they they aren't like there's nowhere for me to stay right now.
Unless I've missed it, there's nowhere for me to state my Lovano to earn revenue.
And there's no governance that's going to enforce that.
So like when Stride launched, if you remember, everyone was
shitty about it because it's just another farming token.
Everyone's just going to dump it.
Dada, Dada, Dada.
And actually what happened is governance passed a proposal when
see that money that goes to the foundation.
Just could you direct that over to Stakers?
And that's what happened because that was governance, right?
But if you don't turn governance on, the community can't take the money away
from your foundation and you can keep telling them that you're
going to give them revenue in the future.
It's a cunning, cunning plan.
I'm I'm I'm flooding a bit there, but like they haven't worked it out yet.
They were that seemed quite clear from the spaces I listened to.
They don't know what they're doing in the like immediate steps.
They have a plan, but they haven't worked out what the steps to that dance are yet.
I mean, that's the way to do it, right?
Like that was the entire NFT craze of 2021 is you say, hey, we're going to
get these NFTs and these these NFTs, they're going to you're going to play games with them.
You are going to look at them in the metaverse.
But listen, you can't do that right now.
That's this is this is like six years down the line.
Just meant the next NFT series that comes out next.
And then once that happens, OK, well, just meant the next one.
That seems a bit funny as well.
I'm not I'm not quite that jaded.
I'm just growing parallels.
The thing the thing here is, is that what I suppose I am saying is
that I don't buy Lovanna by Newt because
Lava and the five's future hinges on it.
And from my point of view, as I delegate a lot of stuff to Lava and the five,
I want to have more Twinkly lights on their on their hardware.
Full circle, baby.
All comes back around to more Twinkly lights on hardware.
That means more newt.
Yes.
It's called it's called Game of Newt for a reason.
That's right.
But I think it's interesting, actually, because newt got a lot of fud
for launching in the way that it did, which was there's just a load of newt in an LP.
No airdrop, no, no, nothing, just buy it if you like it.
And obviously, that's really different from the way that the majority of tokens
in Cosmos are distributed.
And so
golden ratio is getting is getting a load of abuse for being a whale
who's going to dump on everyone and, you know,
bug them for however much their stack of newt is worth.
And this was one of the things they published a rich list of all the big
wallets that had all of these huge numbers of tokens.
But they included things like the tokens that are in the LP and the tokens
that are in the IBC addresses, because the PIC is the biggest
IBC addresses, because the people posting the list haven't got a clue
what what that list actually means.
So they've just posted a list of stuff and got
it's my favorite kind of fud is the fud with zero evidence.
It's the same as the people saying that it was the LaVanna Foundation,
like five minutes research is before you post that solves that problem for you.
I saw that that that complaint as well with newt that it had no airdrop.
It was just stick in the LP and then who wants to buy it by.
I like it. I'm fond of that.
I think that's awesome.
Now, I think the big downside of that, of course, is that, you know,
whoever makes it is going to go, oh, I put it in the LP and then I bought
a thousand dollars worth and that thousand dollars because it was worth
basically nothing originally.
Now you have like 10 million coins or whatever.
Right. That's lame.
But otherwise, this kind of make turns into an organic price discovery.
Well, I think also, like, I mean, again, it's, you know,
but I think the person, as far as I understand it, I think it was
eight thousand dollars worth of atom or something.
They they burnt they burnt their LP shares, right?
So that person's already invested an amount of money.
I don't see why they shouldn't see some upside on that.
I think the challenge with a lot of this is about
how are you as the person that creates that meme coin and the people that get
in early and the community as a whole able to have fun and not love your fun?
Because, yeah, you could you can do it.
And people to this algorithm
during the bull run, there was this really easy
UI that allowed you to mint a shit coin, distribute it, set up an LP,
do all this stuff and it's like five button clicks.
It's brilliant.
But essentially, it was just a way for people with the best shit coin name
and a bit of liquidity to make real tokens off their shit coin.
Excellent, excellent thing.
And I guess the project that had the, you know, the minty button
probably made a bit of money off that.
But if you actually want this to be a fun thing, then you're not that.
Even if you get in early, you're not going to just dump on the community
because otherwise the fun thing is over.
And I think that's what what's been interesting for me is the fact that the idea
that you could have fun and make profit in Cosmos seem to bring a lot of new users
and volume to Astroport to the point where it needed more blinky lights on its hardware.
Right.
It certainly has need a lot of blinky lights on its hardware.
Yeah. Yeah, I know.
I feel bad for what?
No, go ahead.
I was that kind of feel bad because I was I was in the new telegram pretty early on
and I was throwing them shade because they were like going down.
I was like, listen, I've got all these notes back to have just just pointed out
my hardware for a while and like, it'll be fine.
Yeah.
So for a couple of days, they were like, no, no, we got bolted down.
We're good.
But yeah, I threw them quite a bit of shade for that.
Like I have notes.
I've gotten a ray of notes that you can point out.
It'll work fine.
You don't need to use public stuff.
But I'm just going.
I guess they were I think they were using they had their own notes initially.
And then and then in the bear, like it was expensive notes, right?
So so I understand that they wanted to go public or at least or at least I think it
was probably a mix of different types of node structures that were supplying that data.
But just recently, so we took over some mass report
traffic this week and even in the last like like literally the last two days is
really what it started.
But yesterday on the 18th, I guess, was Wednesday.
I'm sorry, Monday night.
So Monday night, like even on injective,
they were doing a lot of catch up because the indexers were catching up and things
like that. And like we were still getting 20, like 2000 to 4000 requests a second
on injective and another another six or 700 on different chains.
And then today, which was fine, like everything was great, like things were
catching up and then say had some.
Is there some meme stuff going on and say today too or yesterday?
Say has inscriptions right now going on.
Oh, there's something else.
I think there's something else on Astroport too, let's say.
Because we we we provide some endpoints there.
And then there was a huge amount of say traffic for a little bit too.
And then today on Astroport, we we started to feel that the real wrath of of of shit coins.
So like on injective, it went from which was totally fine, like two, three, four
thousand a second, and we had a couple spikes of eight and 11,000 transactions a second
or 11,000 requests a second.
And injective does not do well with that.
So with a with a small handful of nodes at 11,000, like they were struggling.
So we set up another one today.
And then and then I guess it was also a significant amount of requests coming from
a specific region.
And so the Astroport teams to put a little bit of a little bit of breaks on a
specific region that was like overly doing requests.
And so that really helped out.
And so now now we're sitting right here actually as we're talking, it's at seventy
eight hundred a second.
And I have some breaks built in on the back end to like just so the point where
the node doesn't shit the bed, which it was like it was like it was just it would
just give it up. I mean, you know that too, right?
They would just stop responding.
It would just sit there and it would it would move the blocks any forward.
It would it wouldn't respond to anything.
It wouldn't even say that it wasn't sinking anymore.
It would just like and so.
So yeah, so that was fun.
So that was kind of a firefight this morning because we were I think living
out as we're starting to it's like crazy, trying to get them to stay at least
close to the head and and and we had a couple of times when they're all of them
were down at the same time for like 30 seconds.
So it was ugly for a couple of times today, but now it's actually started to
lay down and then it also I think the other thing I know that team is working on
right now, it's not a very efficient site.
Like there's a lot of requests per page view where
where there's there's a lot of things there to like move that away from
straight RPC calls and sense over G RPC, which is obviously
a little bit less taxing and less open ports and that kind of stuff and
and our open connections and then and I think just the efficiency of using
indexes more for when you can use those types of things and and what can come
out of the back end versus what can go out of the client.
So yeah.
So anyway, 11,000 injective RPC requests a second is just too much.
Like it's just like you can't have that's like five or six nodes to actually
make that thing deal with it.
And that's just too much.
So if the actual ball market came back, you know, tomorrow, how screwed
would all of Cosmos's infrastructure be?
Because I assume everyone has scaled down, right?
Like what you're describing with Astroport, they've scaled down for the bear.
Save money.
Very sensible.
If everyone suddenly went, wow, this is shit.
And, you know, we saw the mean point season times three happening.
How screwed how screwed would we be?
I mean, I don't know.
You I mean, Schultz again, just to I think you'd have some you'd have some
not great user experiences for a short period of time and how fast those
teams react to that and understand it.
I think you can solve that problem pretty quick.
Like this stuff today, I mean, stuff like this injective stuff.
I mean, it's ugly this morning, but that I mean, that was for a very good reason
that I think is very solvable and trying to separate what's good traffic from bad
traffic, I think also helps.
So I think the other piece, we were talking about this with the it's not
only just that, but it's also like liquidity makes a big deal here too.
Because like that Stargaze stuff that was going on with people buying bad kids,
I think you probably saw a bunch of stories on Twitter this week.
And that was an infrastructure base.
That was purely like, you know, we I transferred in this much
ethernet and we had a huge amount of slippage or something else happened
because there's enough liquidity in the pools, like all those types of things
kind of happen too.
Right.
So I don't know.
It depends on also, also I think some of the stuff.
The other thing is like, like each of these sites, I think it's quite different
in terms of efficiency, right?
And not it's just because just because it was 11,000 RPC requests to
injective today, doesn't necessarily mean that that's that's probably
only 5,600 concurrent users.
So, so at 500 users, it's not a big deal.
Right.
And so this is just like this, this is just a blockchain is a really
inefficient database and it's a, it's a poor solution for these types of things.
And so there has to be a balance of like showing data that's slightly old
because it's indexed and cash versus literally hitting hundreds of contracts
43 times in every single pull or equal every single page view.
Right.
Like it's just not, there has to be, there has to be a balance between those.
And some of the data has to be real time and I get that, but some of that stuff,
like it has to be better solutions for that, right?
Or smarter architectures for that.
Yeah.
Um, to, to answer your question a little bit as well around what it'll look like
for, um, for, for people that if, if the know what hardware can keep up secret,
I think is a really good example of this.
Um, secret.
I think was really set up to be very successful early on.
Um, and what ended up happening was NFTs started to become big and secret NFTs are
actually really cool because there's all sorts of metadata and stuff you can hide.
Um, because, you know, they're all encrypted and everything.
So you can, you're like, you can choose what's available to see and what's not.
But anyway, I'm getting off topic.
Um, so when these men started happening, all men team was happening behind five
nodes provided by a, a node provider and it would go down inevitably.
And it's just like a minute.
And then it would take them 12, 16, 20 hours to get it back up and then immediately
go down again.
And so if I remember early on, there were tens of thousands of users are secret
and in 2021.
And after every single NFT mint, you would see just a colossal drop off of users
because they'd be like, Hey, I got on this.
I'm all excited about this mint.
And I can't actually do it because the infrastructure is too bad.
Um, and it was unfortunate because the provider that was, was giving the nodes
or was being paid for the, for the nodes, they just wouldn't scale up.
They, they were kind of unresponsive and that's just not going to happen.
If, if, if one of our teams that are actually like supporting hardware is involved, right?
Like if I start seeing a bunch of five or three's pop up, even though my, even
though the person that I'm, you know, providing nodes for might not be paying
more, like I'm going to do something to at least make it more efficient to make it work.
Like I'm trying to provide a good product.
Um, this sounds like I'm kind of throwing some shade at the provider that was doing
it and I kind of am, but I'm not going to name names.
Uh, but it's a great example of what will happen.
I would, if we don't, I would much prefer it if you did name names.
I think this, you know, let's have, let's have a culture of transparency for people
that do a shitty job because like, because the problem is, is that, and this is the
thing, right for you, this is a professional thing.
You don't want to throw shade at people there.
But for me, I remember secret is so shit it can't be 10 FT's.
And that damages everyone.
That damages every project on secret.
It damages every token holder on secret.
And that's because someone's running five nodes.
They can't be bothered to upgrade.
And I think after getting paid a hundred thousand dollars.
That, and this is the thing where like, I'm not huge for professionally flaming people.
But I also think that is this, like, if you are in a position of responsibility, then
you have to deal with the consequences of when you are in dereliction of your duty.
And I think that that's probably unfair to then just say that you as a competitor
should out them.
But I think that's a space where the foundation, the protocol, whoever it is needs to step
up and actually say, this supplier has let us down.
And I think that's very difficult.
And I've been in that position in the real world of chain.
But in that position, ultimately, that's relatively private.
The problem on blockchains is, as I say, every single person that has a secret token
suffers from it.
Every single person that has a secret token suffers because that person or that company
isn't doing a good job as a provider.
So I used to work in concerts and ticketing and that kind of stuff.
And obviously, as you know, you'll have all tried to buy tickets to gigs where the website
crashes, right?
You know, that's completely normal.
But like, there's only so much you can scale up your website to cope with Taylor Swift
for about an hour and the rest of the time, you don't need it.
So that's really awkward.
And you have frank and open conversations, but ultimately, you don't throw anyone under
the bus afterwards because you all know it's hard.
Like, that's fair.
But there's no long term damage.
Or if there is, that's when you do start to see the names of the companies involved
because an artist like Taylor Swift, like the incident that happened with Ticketmaster,
she does not want that reputational damage coming on her.
So artist management speak to the promoters, the promoters speak to all the ticketing providers
and they just throw them under the bus.
And that's kind of the price you're paying, right?
But I think this look, yeah, sorry, go ahead.
To add what you're saying, I'll definitely give, okay, I'll give Kepler some props here
because early on, I don't think most people understood kind of how Kepler worked.
You know, Kepler is an interface basically for the RPCs, right?
That's all it is.
It's a wallet.
And people understand that.
But a lot of people kind of think that, or I would say that most people think that Kepler,
for secret, they thought that Kepler was running the notes.
And so Kepler got so much flack for whenever the notes would go to sync, right?
And they were always very gracious about it, like, hey, they never named names,
even though like I checked their GitHub and I could see that they knew who it was and everything.
I don't know.
So I guess it's an example of Kepler was always very gracious about like things going down.
They're like, hey, it's out of our control.
But then I don't, as far as more, they never named names.
And I think there's a balance, right?
Like you have to be professional.
But I think the example you're talking about where it starts to damage the reputation of
a whole load of associated stuff is much harder.
And I think it's really difficult if you're a L1.
So if the poor performance of Astroport starts to damage people's perception of neutron,
as neutron, would you start to be like, that's concerning for you, right?
You can't control what RPCs these guys, you know, what notes these guys are using,
what they're connecting to and who they're being supplied by.
But it's having brand damage to you.
And I think that's one of the really interesting structural challenges of blockchains compared
to what I'm describing in the kind of Web 2 world where it's just like, well, I employ
these people, they employ their subcontractors and that's it.
Like that isn't kind of how we work.
The reputation of damage can spread out quite quickly to all sorts of other things, you know,
slippage on stars is too high, cosmos is shit.
While we're talking, we're back up to 11,000 transactions a second.
I already request a second.
So I'm just watching these do-its.
They're holding on though, doing a little bit of secret shit.
I'm just queuing requests is all I'm doing.
Which I think is the best I can do is just when that request comes in from the client,
just hold on to it until it, there's an open slot and then be able to pass it to you.
I mean, these nodes are not, I don't think they're really architected for really high RPC usage.
Like I could think we probably say the same thing on any Web or any blockchain node.
I can't think of maybe, I mean, I don't even know, Schultz, if you can think of one.
I can't think of one that like is architected around as like a web server handling 20,000
requests a second, right?
Like, I don't know, I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know how to request a second, right?
Like that doesn't exist.
Oh, you know that I'm going to take any opportunity I can to be an absolute stand for NIR.
NIR didn't strip inscriptions recently.
We didn't even realize because they handle it so well.
So they had an insane amount of transactions running for like three days straight.
Didn't even realize.
I mean, I think that's pretty good because we saw it on AppTose like the same thing,
right?
Because even the, we saw the full node struggling with the amount of API calls.
And those are even that wasn't that much.
It was like a couple hundred a second coming in in each node, right?
And it was struggling.
Although I'm not sure if that much of it was API based, but right now,
like other things we've seen, unlike Stargaze, we've seen more.
But I think BlockTime has a big thing to do too.
I saw Reese commented in the structure around caching the request.
Some of these are just not cashable.
I mean, this is a, you have a blockchain with 600 millisecond BlockTimes
that are calling wasm contract calls.
Like that, that, that is a very difficult response to be able to cash in any sort of
realistic perspective, especially since you have a wide variety of contract calls that
are being happening.
And I don't have the metrics in terms of what that repeatability is in there.
And there might be some in there, but it's not massive.
So I think, I mean, caching this in a, in a, and maybe, and what we've been told is like
that data needs to be 100% up to date on the latest block, which again,
we can make a decision on whether how much that really needs to have happen,
or if, if that can be cashed for 10 seconds or something similar that it's very easy to be able
to do. So, so, but up to this point, we haven't.
So that's, I think that might be working with that team to architect what's,
what's kind of next, but whether that's front end or whether that's back end.
I would rather have it be, to be honest.
I would push back a little bit there.
I think there's quite a bit that could be cashed.
So I don't, I don't know what as report is using, but I know that the Python API,
anything you do has, I think five, four or five transactions with it.
And the first two are always exactly the same.
The first one's always to, it checks the status of the node,
and then there's something else.
And those are things that I think probably should be cashed.
Like if it's on a purse, like per block base of 1000 to people,
then it's like, if it's just checking the status endpoint, then who cares?
Like, that doesn't actually mean anything.
That doesn't actually mean anything.
Right?
So that would be 20% kicked off right off the top.
I don't know.
Nothing pushing back and saying you're wrong, just that I think that there is a lot of cash
because there's a lot of inefficiencies.
Because I got kind of deep into this early on whenever I was,
I started writing the back end for live under five and I was like,
how am I rate limiting myself?
And I was like, okay, because this doesn't make any sense.
That's why.
All right, got it.
Perfect.
Yeah.
I mean, none of these are like status hits.
There's no, that's in here.
This is all contract balances.
Okay.
Interesting.
That's quite different.
Yeah.
They're probably using CosmJS or something, which is more efficient.
Yeah.
CosmPy, not to throw too much shade at it.
It's simply not used as frequently.
And so it doesn't have the same resources.
Yeah.
That's a, that's a, it's a good question.
So anyway, I think now that, now that these numbers are not going down,
and maybe they will over time, it actually, these like this,
everything here is holding on.
Like it's not that big of a, I mean, it's not awful.
It's just like, I think the, the binary just depending on what, what's actually being,
what's actually being pulled, you can kind of see,
you can see some of these nodes struggling after a period of time when,
when they're just under that amount of stress for that long,
with those maybe more complicated calls that are coming in.
So, yeah, I think there's, right now it's a little bit brute force.
And I think over time it'll get, it'll get better.
It seems like there is a something of a, like a,
like a inverse correlation of block speed to how much each actual node can handle.
Like say, it doesn't seem like it can handle a lot of input per node from what I could tell.
Like it does great.
It goes fast and everything, but it seems like Stargaze handles
attention, node attention better than, than say nodes do, if that makes sense.
They require more, more requests per second for Stargaze than it does for say.
I think it might be inverse to block time a little bit.
So like it takes longer to process or because it's expected to take less time to process it.
Or more blocks.
I mean, it sounds like it has a, a,
it's not a snapshot of the whole chain in time, right?
Or maybe more blocks to be able to create the output or I don't know exactly how that is,
but it seems like they're somehow related there.
Or maybe the nodes is too busy dealing with P2P and all this other shit, right?
And then it, then it has time for in terms of producing the result that's required.
But, but yeah, I definitely, I would, I agree with you.
Like over time, faster block time and does, does seem to limit then just the, the pure number,
although in SAVE, actually, I mean, actually these numbers are higher than SAVE.
So I can't really talk about it.
SAVE, I think we've, we usually structure like two or 3000 a second, which is still,
I mean, honestly, it's a decent amount of traffic.
Like it's, it's a lot of data.
So right now I'm just, I'm just taking a look and see as long as the nodes are staying active,
which they are, they're, they're right at the top within, I mean, I'm just,
I'm just watching the head here and they're all within two blocks and I'm updating every two
seconds. So it seems like they're fine. And I am, I am stalling some requests out.
So I just, I basically limit how many connections per node concurrently.
And then depending on, it's weird because it's like 400 connections per node.
It can't have more than 400, 400 actual TCP connections per node actually times two,
it's 800 per node. And that equates to about 2000 to 3000 requests a second.
Because the requests are obviously,
Why, why does it times two?
I'm sorry. Cause I have two balancers. Sorry.
I'm limiting each balance.
Okay, I was like, yeah, yeah.
Sorry.
Got it.
Inside baseball there. Yeah. Sorry.
Two balancers. So each of those is, each of those is cut in half. So yes, that's right.
Sorry about that.
I have 100% glazed over at this point.
Sorry.
You can, no, this is why me coming on a validators podcast is no use. Cause like,
I know all the other stuff, but the actual bits of like, how the blinking lights work is,
you know, gobbledygook to me, but you know, I'm sure if Gray and Null were here,
they would just think very excited.
Just think of a really inefficient global database with, with like tons of issues.
That's mutable. That's mute. That can be changed.
That can be changed.
That requires a lot more power.
Like those everywhere.
And it's significantly slower.
Significantly slower.
And that's very secret for a lot of these assumptions.
Yeah.
The dirty secret for a lot of these is a lot of these apps will be running with like postgres in the
background. It's like, don't say anything.
So like if you hear like someone's using an indexer, yeah, they're probably using
postgres or something, which is, you know, an actual reasonable database rather than,
I mean, that's what I'm doing. That's what I do with my backend is I consume the database and
then I put it into postgres so I can consume it faster.
That's right. It's one indexer. That's what they are.
I mean, honestly, like, I'm actually thinking the actual web hits here,
like these numbers are nothing. Like these are, these are like, these are, these are nothing,
right? But the amount of power that requires to actually get that data to return it compared
to other methods is, you know, whatever, but it is, you know, it's on chain. It's right there.
It's just a matter of, I guess it goes back to, back to the UI and back to the front end.
Like it's not just, it has to be more than just throwing requests at a, at a backend.
Like it has to be some engineering there and trying to really identify what's important,
what's not, which going back to Stargate is not to keep bringing them up, but like kudos to that
team. Cause like Hori and that team, they have done so much work over the time we've been working
together the last three years that the number of requests that even our nodes see, like we've
we've continued to loot, to remove nodes from the balancers because it is so efficient that
it requires less and less hardware to be able to keep that, that site common.
And that's, that's really a testament to them, right? Stargate strikes me as like,
when I asked the question about like, how bad will it be when the bull market comes in terms of
infrastructure, Stargate strikes me as an outsider. Like, yeah, I remember like it occasionally had
issues, but for the most part, like super popular mint, fine, not a problem. Can cope. The problems
for Stargaze are all around liquidity, right? So I was listening to a friend of the podcast,
Rama was, he's got a prop up or coming on chain very soon. So this liquidity dial for Stargaze,
where they're going to take some of the community pool and use it as kind of protocol on liquidity
to deepen the pools on various chains. And, you know, that that seems like more of an issue for
how Stargaze will perform in the, you know, bull than actually how the tech will hold up. The tech
seems very robust, but I don't like I was talking to him about when after the filter minted, I think
they sort of went, oh, the mint price will be like 30 bucks or something. And probably by the time
the mint roll around, the mint price was like 45 bucks. And that's one of those things where
people are excited, they're buying the token, the token price is going up token price comes
straight back down after the mint bike because everyone's right, right. But and there's not
a lot of reason to hold stars other than in those moments. Right. But it shouldn't be that a one
collection moves the price that much that team can't plan what price they want to launch at it
roughly. You know, obviously things fluctuate, but for it to go up 50% or something like that's
just not, it's not helpful to the team when they're trying to plan. So I think, but I think like
actually tech wise, it looks like stars has no obvious, you know, like it's held up to anything
that's been popular. Yeah. Yeah, it's done pretty well. Like, I think again, back to that team,
like we are weekly months, jump to only about maybe two or 3000 requests a second,
which is not that big of a deal. And then just recently, we brought all the image manipulation
in house, which has been really cool. So they, they used to use a third party site for that that
would pull data out of like IPFS and then that would restructure that for different sizes.
But that now that's now internally within our infrastructure, which is really cool.
Oh, it really said, yeah, we pulled all that in. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. So that that's using a,
so, so if there's like a new, so if you actually go to the site and bring up any collection,
and you'll see like, you'll see some images that like fuzzy load, that's all Vercell doing that.
But those images are being served off of the Stargates array, the array that we built.
And then those get cash within cloudflare and distribute globally and those types of things.
So it's something that Stargates dot zone in case anyone is listening. That's right. Exactly.
If you haven't yet mentioned something. So that that's really good to be in site. So really,
like right now, there's no part of this infrastructure. I think that's not within the team,
including the indexers, obviously constellations through Penso, all the images, IPFS,
all the RPC and everything else is all internally. And then obviously that with the stuff that's
going on with swaps and all that other kind of things, those services keep growing, right?
And that's all using the same kind of baseline. So I would agree with you like that that
infrastructure that that team has built has been has been awesome. Like there's,
it's just a really well engineered thing in the site. I think the site is actually really fast.
It's very responsive. The images are very responsive now. We're in the past, so things
took a little bit longer. Everything's edge, like it's all cash locally. And you know,
there's a lot of data on the site too. Like if you look at it, there's just like each,
go to it. I mean, you go to like a collection page or say a shitload of data, right? You have
all these prices and when it was listed and when it was listed for and like, you know,
all the filter on the metadata and the images themselves, there's just a shitload there. So
I mean, that's all the front end team doing all that work, which is pretty cool. Yeah. So I don't
know. The Stargaze conversations, again, going like circle back around to the secret stuff,
just for a little bit, the conversation around Stargaze, I think is really interesting because
I'm going to post a link to Stash in the chat. Stash was Secret's big NFT playground, right?
And it has a lot of really cool features. And by rights, it should,
like Secret should have just skyrocketed with how cool this site, less so now, was. Like now,
they require email to sign up on a couple of other things. And so I understand why they would do that,
but this is just, this is a great example of going like coming full circle of Stargaze has always
operated really well. They, I'm pretty sure they launched after Secret's NFT marketplace, right?
If Secret had done well, why would Stargaze have like it shouldn't, nothing should have happened
to Stargaze, but Stargaze, I was always really reliable. It always had a good user experience.
And so people stayed there and they continue minting there and continues usage. Stash,
can't say the same. Yeah, I remember heard of it. Well, I remember the,
because there was the Tarantino NFT, right? Like this was like, that was, was that on Stash?
Was that Stash? That was on Stash. Yes, it was. Yeah. So like,
like that was like huge news. And I remember thinking, oh, shit, Secret's absolutely going
to explode. It's going to be the only place for NFTs because the ability to do these kind of
like hidden metadata, and then you can share who can, you can choose who can see it and
the kind of that kind of model for collective ownership of NFTs and stuff like that. And
all of these really interesting things you can do when you have privacy. And then
somehow it was a huge humble, right? And like, but you know, you land the single most iconic
film director of all time, I would argue, and you don't make money. I like it's breathtaking.
And also, and also to the point where they don't even, they, they did one, I think he was signed
up to two, and they just came to the second one because it didn't, it didn't, it didn't,
the bids weren't high enough, right? Like no one, no one wanted it. That was, or not high,
not high enough price. It's sold for one and a half million, if I remember correctly.
So it's pretty decent, but
but he, but to be fair, he could have sold that at a real option in real life for a lot more.
And the time the NFT, and the time the NFT market was crazily overheated. And I suspect
had it gone, had there been an equivalent version on Ethereum, he'd have done 10 times that amount,
right? Like it's just that, you know, it was a Cosmos J. That wasn't great. Yeah. So
I think this is the problem is that like, I think this is my fear about the bull market. It's like,
are we really ready? And like, certainly one of the conversations that I had a lot
during my stint at AADOW, which I do like to mention from time to time,
was, was around bull market preparedness. It's like,
who is producing the content that's going to help us on board new users? Who is producing
those guides? Who is producing these things? Who is providing the infrastructure? How is,
how are we abstracting away IBC so that when you decide you want to come into Cosmos,
you don't have to figure out how to flip to get your tokens over these places. Like
IBC is wonderful, but it is probably also our biggest barrier to adoption.
Because people think of bridges in a completely different way to the way that IBC is.
Universal gas tokens, right? Probably one of the more controversial takes in the interchain,
because every type chain will want their token to be the gas token. That's a use case and
awful, awful, awful user experience. So, you know, while it's working on this kind of thing,
some chains are doing bits, you know, as Moses has this bit that plugs into their, their
decks where you can pay with any token. We, well, I say we, but Robo Magobo got that onto the hub.
We advocated for it and basically, well, I, yes, this, this is what everyone should be doing,
because it makes better user experience, regardless of which decks gets the volume,
because I think we got a bit of a pushback from there. It should be Astroport. It's like,
Astroport need to build the code then. Like, I'm not waiting for perfect
when it's about user experience. User experience just has to be better than it is today.
And I hope, you know, I hope that that's what my ex colleagues will continue to push for,
is like better user experience and being user focused rather than being token focused.
Like, allow the app developers, chain developers to worry about the tokenomics of what they're
doing and things like that harder on the hub because there isn't anyone actually in charge. But
in the wider area of cosmos, my big thing is if you're issuing grants, what you really,
really need to be doing is pushing everyone to make UX better and not just better than it is today,
but better than it needs to be today, because in three months time, you're not going to be able
to ship the updates you need to catch up. Like, no one uses something in web two and goes, oh,
well, I'll come back to that in a few months once I've got it working. That product dies.
And like, no one's willing to sacrifice that to go and use a
bigger, slower, less usable thing today. So why should that be the same in blockchain?
You know, I totally agree. The noble USD thing, the USDC experience has really surprised me.
Not the experience, that's not a real phrasing. How much has flowed into the ecosystem?
I didn't realize that cosmos's ecosystem was bigger than so many other ones, like Arbitrum.
The fact that there's more native USDC in the cosmos ecosystem right now,
then, and almost every other, completely force me. And that's not even including, you know,
AxlR USDC, which is where most of the USDC still is. It's crazy to me, which means that we need
to be, you're right, we need to be ready like three days ago. Yeah. And like, you know, the noble team
don't get as half as much credit as what they should get. And, you know, equally the wider
team that were involved in the onboarding of DYDX, because, and this is where it's really
interesting, DYDX are such a user experience focused team that they forced, like, if cosmos
wanted them, cosmos had to up its user experience in order to make it happen. And that's fascinating
to me, is that like, if you want this golden, like, and that's when cosmos learned that lesson,
where you've got OGs suddenly turning their attention to these problems,
rather than worrying about particularly fancy forms of cryptography concept too many Baileys.
But it's just that thing where it's like, getting back down to a user level and having a product
that people really want, and solving for that, it needs to drive stuff. I used noble USDC properly
to off-ramp for the first time today. And it was bloody brilliant. Like, I just had a super seamless
experience, lower fees on my centralized exchange than if I'd have had to bring Atom into there.
So I saved myself a few pounds. So, you know, like, great for my point of view. And the few
pence that it cost me in terms of some revenue to noble as the kind of, with the way that their
routing works, didn't didn't touch the sides compared to what I saved. Oh, yeah, versus bridge
fees and those types of things you mean? Yeah, for sure. Like, I mean, even if I've done it,
even if I've even if I'd have just done it in Atom, right? Because that's how you used to have to do
it where you just want things to Atom, and then I would just send and then selling and then I would
sell that token on the set centralized exchange. Right. There's no, there's no selling cost to
SDC online. So, yeah, and even in or transfer cost, even who's coming out of the out of the
CXE would mean might have some and those types of things. But yeah, I know we always talked about
like, what's the new hub and like, and that idea of being able to bridge USDC without fees across
any of these type structures is a huge fucking advantage. Huge, right? Like, it's a total wall
garden situation where like people wouldn't like that. Like, you don't necessarily like it because
it you know, it's very quote unquote centralized from a single chain and all that kind or a single
a single asset and there's risk associated that asset and it puts in like false securities
associated that I totally agree. But from a user experience perspective, it's fucking great.
Right. So and I thought that, you know, there's their current business model where they charge
a few, few points on the IBC transfers and all all your so even if you're moving your noble from
osmosis to neutron, it actually roots by noble and it charges you that way. You can't root
you can't root directly. Except obviously you can because IBC is permissionless. But and it was
interesting. So I asked them this and I was like, well, why, why would anyone pay you? And they were
like, well, why wouldn't you? Ultimately, why would you go like some decks eventually will
set up a thing and it will just cut us out fine. But like, who like in terms of the network effects,
you're going to have a different version of the token, all of those problems that we have with
IBC in general. And I think that actually when we talk about the hub,
that's really what the hub should have been is to go all of these user, all of these use case
problems that we have with tokens are solved by routing, where you just route via another thing.
So packet forward, middleware and all of these things have been fantastic because it means that
this mess that IBC will become in its current model, if you have 10,000 IBC chains and everything
has to talk to everything, that's just absolute chaos, right? Yeah. If you actually start to put
more sensible structures in place, and you go, yeah, that's going to cost fractions of a token
to move it, you know, as an additional bit, there should be something in there for relays as well.
Like that becomes a more obvious relay thing. And one of my frustrations is everyone goes,
oh, well, that's not how it works. As if it working badly today means we shouldn't try to change it,
or just go, you know what, yeah, we're going to leave all we're going to leave and support all
of these old channels. They'll continue to work as they are. But if we genuinely believe there's
going to be 10,000 chains, what's it matter what the first 50 or 100 did, right, then maybe
it's going to be in the same sense of scale. Like it really what precedent is nonsense here,
and we need to come up with structures that are more efficient and workable.
I think it's back a little bit here. I don't think the cosmos could handle
even the current amount of traffic that's an IBC, right? And that becomes such a liability
where if someone attacks cosmos, you take down the entire, what would effectively become the
economic zone, that puts a lot of fear in me. I think that the way we're currently doing it
isn't awesome because of how convoluted it is. But if we only had one single hub that manages
so much traffic, but I think that you could have, you could have alternatives, right? Like,
I'm not saying you just have one, I think that you could totally have different like different
hubs. That was the whole vision of the original model, right? But this is the thing is IBC was
designed to work with the original model. And then we haven't delivered the original model,
but expect IBC to work. And that's my problem is like the hub should have done hub relaying,
and I think it should still do that. But I also think that if really, if you're osmosis,
you'd probably have this argument for why, why wouldn't you do it? You're a dex,
everyone's going to be moving their tokens in and out of you anyway, just make it part for
the feature you offer, right? And then you can compete on price and relays can do different
things. And you can actually create markets around this. And then you will decide what works and
how we balance security risk, economics. So I'm not dismissing what you're saying, Chelsea, but I
feel like what we're what we're doing at the moment is we're at like, we've done
half of the step. And then we can't work out why it doesn't work. Because what we've done is as
typically, we've done the hard technical bit. And then we've just given up, or we've moved on to the
next interesting technical problem. And I think this is really what the straights me at times in
cosmos is like, if it isn't a big, hard technical problem, there isn't a lot of interest in doing
it. And I think that that's where the reputation of cosmos is being like, super clever, great tech,
no one actually uses it comes from. Because actually a lot of the people solving for these
problems, that is what they're not interested in making the chains usable or having volume.
Yeah, I mean, I'll agree with that for sure. I've had several hour plus long meetings with
people trying to figure out like the best way you can unwind IBC transactions just to kind of work
around the horrible use case of the way IBC tokens function, right? If if we had just done the hub
system, then we would just know how things work. Well, that that token that signed here and came
through here done, rather than okay, well, it bounced around and how are we going to handle that?
It would definitely handle a lot of overhead.
What's Josh from Cap, had this it's on Twitter, people should look up or I might even try and
find it and I'll give it to you, sir, point in the show notes. He's got this really great
explanation of why IBC works the way it does in terms of by having the path that it's been on,
you can know the trust assumptions behind that token. So if there's an exploit on a given chain
within the IBC network, you could know if a token comes from somewhere where something dodgy's
happened. So for example, let's say on a network, they suddenly come up with the ability to clone
the tokens. Rather than the system being a wash with forged coins, as it were, you can actually
go well, actually, we're just going to say all of these coins can't be trusted anymore. And you
just pass a governance proposal that says it and you can check it in the code and it's there.
And there's a kind of like that ability to have that audit trail is really useful because it
gives you some additional security, but you lose usability because of it. And how that plays out over
time will be really interesting because what we haven't really seen is the need for that yet.
We haven't had that kind of exploiting cosmos thus far, I'm sure it will happen, where we get
bogus tokens, but that's the kind of thing that the original thinking was designed to protect us
from. And I think it's easy for Johnny Cumm-Late, like me, to shit on people that did a lot of
hard work and a lot of hard thinking early on and say, oh, you came up with something that doesn't
work. So I'll find the explanation from Josh because it's really, really good and people should
read it because if you're worried about the way IBC works, it will just challenge some of the
assumptions you make about why is it so shit. Was there anything else Rama wants us to talk about?
I say Rama because he's really in charge of the show now, right? That's the way this is actually
worked. Well, he is the director. Is he? Would he be the producer? No, I don't know.
No, don't say that. I think technically he's only the researcher, but I feel like he exerts the
authority for producer. Now we talked about all the ash report and the kind of aping and every
as he said, aping into every goddamn token that exists on Astro point. It's probably right.
And we talked about Lavan a little bit. We talked about the node structure associated
with those. Yeah, I don't know. Those are all the kind of current highlights, I think.
Should we move on to Christmas party kind of stuff? Yeah, I guess.
That sounds amazing. If I can get, go ahead. No, I wasn't sure whether there was, you know,
sure he had any sort of Christmas party games lined up or, you know, his review of the year,
his quiz. Oh, review of the year. And I have to come up. It's on the spot. Oh, no.
Can't do it. Not happening. What? 20? What? Give me 20 words on 2023 for L five.
20 words on 2023 for L five. You know, I don't know if this really counts, but I think that
one thing I'm really proud of for this year is, you know, there at one point there was six of us
in lab number five, right? And now there are three. And one thing that was a crowning achievement
of this year is having like clear verticals, having clear responsibilities. And early on,
my philosophy as a leader was kind of like, Hey, we're all part of this. This is a startup. You
know, if you want to work on a certain thing, then just work on that. I'm not going to tell you
what to do. And I think that's a good idea in theory. But the more that we as a team have grown,
the more I've learned that there's, there's a lot to be said about just like, once someone
has decided like what they want to work on, like you kind of declare that like, okay,
you've been working on this, you like working on this, this is your responsibility. Like you own
it. If there's decisions, it's your decision to make and I can help you decide on it or whatever.
But this is your decision. And there's a lot of power to be had there. And I'm really proud
that this year we've kind of reached the point where we now have our different ownership positions.
I of course still kind of working all of them because lab under five kind of I am the representation
of it, but ultimately everyone has a responsibility and it makes this work so much smoother. If there's
a question around nodes, then more often than not, people are going to go to go to James because
James is the one managing them a lot of the time. I rate like the automation behind them,
the monitoring, things like that. But James is the day to day. He knows them better. Like I'm
working on software, Erdemans doing the business stuff, and things just work so smooth. It's so
nice to just have that. I think next year should learn how to count to 20. Well,
so I was just kind of rounding a little bit. You know what I mean? If you squint a little bit, it was 20.
That's good, man. It's tough to be able, especially in a small team and things like that.
I think it's a tough business to kind of work out in terms of delegation and roles and responsibilities
because it's not only just, because you have a lot of repeatable pieces here in terms of knowledge,
but there's a lot of intricacies within those chains, right? And obviously you guys are getting
involved in new things. And it's not just a cookie cutter thing over and over, which is tough. Plus
you have the time zone issues, right? And all of the type of thing that fits into that. And just
because somebody has expertise in something doesn't mean that they can be available to solve that
problem, right? So you have a lot of overlapping of skill sets. It's a tough business to scale, to
be honest. And I always, always, always been like in the past, like where, where it's a, it's always,
the comment was like every time that you double in terms of employees, that's really
becomes like one to two is really hard, right? And two to four is hard. And then they get together
and you get the four to eight and things like that. And, and kind of getting into those groups
because everybody's kind of roles change and you have a bunch of responsibilities change. And then
obviously you guys are getting involved in more different, different things. So yeah, that's good.
I'm glad you guys are getting into a group with that. It was tough. That, that doubling, it, it's
true. It going from one to two doesn't sound like a big deal. Like one plus one is really simple.
But it is because before you just communicated with yourself, right? If there was something
that needed done, you knew that, well, like I hadn't done it. Therefore it needs doing, right?
However, going from two people, now there's potential like outlier of, Hey, you know,
I woke up at six a.m. and they're probably not even up yet. But sometimes they got up early. So,
hey, I'm, I just have to message them and say, Hey, like, did you already do this? Right?
We use notion for that in order to track, you know, what's been done. But even that, that's
now an extra piece of software that you have to have in mind to be like, Hey, okay, now I need to
check the tickets. Has this data chain been upgraded happened yet? Oh, I guess it has. I just
checked the, the status of it. But that's still, that adds, you know, let's say a minute overhead
and that adds up without being flippant. Was it harder to double in size or to have in size?
It's a great question. I guess there's kind of two aspects of it, right? From an emotional
perspective, it was far more difficult to have in size. Really, really tough. And now I operate
way more conservatively. Yeah. But in terms of delegation responsibilities, I'm far more discerning
about what a hiring is for and what need it serves. And so it's, it's kind of more stressful to double
in size in that way. But emotionally, far more stressful to have far, far more stressful.
Yeah, you're affecting people's lives. It's always, that's always tough, right? But, but
taking on the responsibilities is usually easier. It's just that's different type of stress, right?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, yeah. Yeah.
I think, I think what interest, I think that's what interests me from,
I mean, my experience of this year is very different. But this year, for like you guys,
from a viewer perspective, there were points in this year where like, as a viewer, I just want
to put my arm around you guys, because you could see all sorts of things going on for different
ones of you over the course of the bear that's just like, there were just some leaks where I was
like, Oh, I really don't even know that I want to chew in because the guys will be suffering.
And, you know, like, I just did tune in because I enjoy giving you a shit in the chat. But like,
it's that thing where, you know, yeah, but, but it's, it's that thing where you kind of go,
what, the reason that I always advocate that people should watch the show is because it really
takes away the kind of moonboy culture because I think, you know, what Shortsey's describing there
with that kind of having to try and figure out how to be responsible in terms of, you know,
scaling up and scaling down and how, you know, the bull runs coming, probably going to scale up
again, might need to scale down again in the bear, how you approach that this time around,
you've got a bunch of experience in the bank, right? But I think that that's where this kind
of program's been really interesting because it's like, it's quite good to just talk about how you
assess risk and how you manage that emotionally because I think for a lot of the assumption is,
oh, well, you know, you just huddle and you're diamond handed and if you sell your week or
whatever, like there's loads of just all of this sort of Twitter nonsense versus the emotional
reality of what this show has shown over this year. And I think that's probably my game of notes
thing is that this year has been a pretty raw one in some ways, you know, more ruled on like
Prop 16 and the chainholt and all of that kind of stuff, which felt like it happened live on the
show, but it felt like it was good times. Whereas this year's just been like some really,
really bleak weeks. I think that's a totally valid take. I think that's fair. Yeah, no, I totally
agree. I think that that our 20 words this year, I think similar to that, I guess,
it allowed us to spend some more time on focusing on what's important versus trying to go after
everything, which I think was really beneficial for us this year. And I think Betty, your point is
right. Like, it focuses you on identifying where you're going to spend time and maybe what is the
outcome of that. And then things that are, you know, in the past, you kind of go after anything
you could hopefully get. And now you be a little bit more cautious about those types of things.
I thought we were incredibly lucky this year with some things. And that's what this business is,
honestly. There's a lot of experience in there and there's a lot of that. And there's just a
shit load of fucking luck in some things. And we were lucky last year at the end of last year in
2022. And then some of that stuff carried over into this year. And we missed out a bunch of shit too.
So like, you know, like anything else, like there's things that we ignored because we didn't
think we were going to go anywhere. We just didn't have time or, you know, those types of things. And
then they turn into something great that you're not part of and, you know, whatever you move on.
Right. But, but yeah, I don't know. It's been, it's been a pretty raw year. I think I especially
gave me notes like to your point, like, just talking about some of the challenges and you
got to have a sense of humor around it too, because otherwise, like, what the hell can't
sit there and like, you know, like you got to, you got to have a sense of humor, especially with
people shit talking in the comments. That's like the best part. So it was, it was, it was a weird
year. It was a very strange year. I think the year started a lot really strong. And something about
it just, it felt like everyone started just getting worn down. And it, I can't even put my finger on
why that is because if I remember correctly, a lot of the market was down further at the beginning
of the year than it is now. Right. And so I don't know why, like what happened that caused such a
a bleak perspective for so many people. I think just the time to write, like, it just, like, it
just builds because I mean, it's really started what March of last year. Yeah. So terror was last
year, right? That was, that was around April and April 22 or something. Yeah. But FTX was this year.
So I think that that's kind of the thing is that you've had by the time you're at
the end of Q1, Q2 this year, you've already had the year of almost perpetual Black Swan events.
Right. And then if you're me and you've cared about the Cosmos Hub, then you've had things like,
I think prop 69 rejection, prop 82 rejection. You know, these big sort of like, from my point of
view, just taking the wrong direction and not doing things and, you know, a lot of division in
the community. And it's all super draining every time you go through one of those. And, you know,
yeah. And then, like, it feels like the we're on an upward curve at the moment, I would say,
sort of since November. Don't think that's got anything to do with anything particularly
happening. It's almost like the absence of anything shit happening has just given people a bit of
a relief. And obviously, there's the the coming Bitcoin ETF and all of that stuff that's giving
people a bit of hope in the future. So there's a bit more ethory, and it makes things a bit easier
to deal with because everyone's a little bit nicer. But I definitely find that uncomfortable. I
realized a couple of weeks ago that I definitely preferred the bear market from like, I had got
psychologically comfortable in that space. I felt far less comfortable with people making money. And
everyone's been nice. And, you know, just like, what is this? I don't know where I stand anymore.
I think it's really good. Yeah, and the bull market really brings a different level of stress,
which I don't think a lot of people talk about. I mean, if we come full circle back to the game of
Newt's, I put in, you know, a couple hundred dollars at the start, right? And I had more liquid
that I could have put more into, right? And so I could have gotten more gains if I put more in.
I typically don't think too much along that effect because, okay, whatever. But when the bull
market starts hitting, that becomes really tough, really toxic, like, hey, I know my friend talked
about this two weeks ago, and I should have done it. And I didn't. I didn't for no reason, but I had
no good reason why didn't. But I'd be rich now if I had, you know, bought Shiba Inu Doge, Obama
clips or whatever. Right. That's my, my, my new story is that I, so I basically flew over the
weekend and was in bed. And it was nighttime, my time. And I saw something in Telegram with someone
saying, Hey, new this new token market cap 30k. And I was like, that's going to pop off. I can't
be to use Astroport. I can't be in the UK. So I would have had to have left my bed.
Plus you can't use it on your mobile. So I couldn't be bothered to get my laptop
because I didn't want to get out of bed. And I could have made 100x, you know, and that's
like, there is a stress with that, right? Like I had a friend that was willing to give me a heads
up. I didn't take an opportunity. They made some money. I didn't like, all of that stuff is stressful.
It's more, it's more stressful than the slow grind down than I'd had, because I'd kind of
price that in, right? I was like, Oh, well, it would just come back up when the bet bull happens.
So I'm just going to hold and I kind of, you know, and I've made sensible decisions. And now
what you have to do is like make completely crazy decisions and then figure out when you're meant
to sell and when you're not and all of this stuff. And like, yes, I think what I'll do
over Christmas is I'm just going to write down some numbers on pieces of paper. And I'm going to
stick to those, whether they're right or wrong, just so that I don't have to think when the time
comes, because I can't trust my emotions. But it's like, so the LaVanna airdrop, I sold some of it.
I helped eat some of it. I've held some of it in a kind of ratio that I think is
conservative, because that's what I'll do just to preserve my sanity, because I'm definitely not
going to sit there and go, Oh, I find me either sold or hardwood or whatever. Like you just,
you can be an accident, teret yourself in this market. And yet another great example is Celestia.
Most of the LaVanna 5 teams sold the vast majority of our tokens at $2. We were like,
hey, we made profit. This is awesome. Like feeling good. And it crested $15 for a minute there.
Right? It's really easy to see that and be like, yeah, we're relayers. We could have, you know,
got to really increase that emergency phone with that.
That, that thinking is why I own one billion Chihuahua. Exactly why.
Chihuahua was flying at the moment. You should be, you must be making bank now.
It turns out that the key thing is to, to FOMO in three years and that's fine.
Ignore it. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. That's it. That's the plan. That's my long-term plan.
Hold on for 10 years. Forget about the wallet. Think about it later. Just don't just use the
keys. You'll become one of those people, right? Where it's like, oh, there's this wallet and
it's dead and it's in, you know, dormant. And then one day it'll be like bang back to life and a
whale alert will go off. I do have Bitcoin somewhere. I know there's wall keys on some sort of spinning
hard drive that's in the cabinet behind me. I know there is. I know there is. I know there is.
Because I remember minting it. I remember running it. It's probably dust, but I know it's on there.
It's on there somewhere, which I'm never going to go look. It's gone forever.
I've talked about this before, but I have, I had like 20 Bitcoin that I used to trade with
Diablo 2. I got scammed out of something, some small amount, like a quarter of a Bitcoin or
something at that point. I just toasted the wallet. So somewhere in, in reality,
it's 20 Bitcoin just sitting there because as a college student, I was like, screw this stupid
token money. Is it real? PayPal is not going to help me out. I'm out of here.
I'm out. I'm done. That's what they said. Like the amount of Bitcoin they thought
is lost is like a huge percentage, right? Of, of outstanding. It's a massive number. Yeah.
Yeah. One day that will be nuked too, because there's a finite amount of it. No more is coming.
Uh-huh. Yeah. That's right. That's right. Don't pump. Listen, don't chill on here.
Keep your fucking new talk out here. How's my net at doing, by the way?
I think it hit like $40 recently. Did it really? Get out of here. I think so.
Where's that? Are those sites still exist? Golden ratio again.
I'm sure. Made. They, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they, they,
I'm sure like two months ago and we're just like, if you know, go out, goes up, surely
net will pump at some point. So they probably own enough to like take all the, all the liquidity
at some point. I do not. I mean, that guy, he's on top of it. He really is. He calls each and
everyone, which makes you wonder, like at some point of his influence, does, does coins start
becoming a thing because he's influencing them or is he, who's influencing them?
As soon as, as soon as intense are a thing, right? Like I just want to tell, tell contract
just to copy trade him just to be like, you know, at like a thousand of his size, because
I don't have his money, but just to be like, because like he hits everything. It's amazing.
Yeah. There was, there was this. Yeah. That's what you need. You need it. That's an intense site.
That's a good, that's actually a good idea. Those exist in the market where the East is
exist in the market as well, where you could like, somebody would actually have a portfolio,
right? And you would just mirror that portfolio and then you, you provide,
you would have a set this up and they would just mirror trades at the same exact time.
That's what we should do. He could take 2% out of whatever crap coins I have in there.
That's perfect. Let's do that.
This is another game of nodes product that isn't going to ship in 2024.
For sure. But we bring the ideas. I mean, that's a good idea.
Those shirts are coming any day now, by the way, almost there. We did actually, no, never mind.
It doesn't matter. Why, why you bring it up? Doesn't make a difference. That's right.
Why, why not even say, well, I literally was going to be like, Oh yeah. On the,
by the way, on the shirts, we have huge news. We do not, we do not have huge news.
No, we don't. There's no huge news.
So really that's the summary of the year. Another year, no game with notes shirt.
Merry Christmas, everyone.