Chorus One Podcast

In this episode Felix is joined by Gavin Birch, community analyst at Figment Networks, who has took it upon himself to improve the decentralized governance process of the Cosmos Hub. We start by going into Gavin's background in the crypto space and how he joined the Figment team before exploring Gavin's experience working on coordinating the upgrade to Cosmos Hub 3. Figment recently put forth a pr...

We took Terra passing the 1 million accounts milestones as a reason to bring Terra's CTO Do Kwon on the podcast. Terra is a blockchain network and stablecoin system with meaningful real-world adoption through integrating their mobile payment app CHAI. In this interview, Brian talks to Do about payment processing and how Terra enables merchants in eCommerce and elsewhere to save on transaction fees...

This episode covers the Stake Capital DAO, an interesting project aiming to form a revenue-sharing staking and DeFi DAO that also issues tokenized staking positions called LTokens. The Stake Capital DAO is a project by Stake Capital, a staking service provider operating on various networks including the Cosmos Hub, Livepeer, Tezos, and Loom. In this episode, Felix is joined by Stake Capital founde...

This episode is a re-upload of recent roundtable hosted by Chris Remus of Chainflow that featured multiple validator team members to discuss the future of business models for operators of staking node infrastructure. The roundtable discussion starts with introductions to the participants before going straight into the current state of the validator space and approaches to business models for node...

There's a long standing argument about the wastefulness of Proof-of-Work mining. To some, Proof-of-Stake is a viable, less wasteful alternative to achieve distributed consensus in a permission-less setting. In this episode, Brian is joined by Eric Wall, Fund Manager at Arcane Assets, to discuss the thought process that brought Erik, who is a strong Bitcoin advocate, to re-consider Proof-of-Stake a...

Multicoin Capital is one of the best known crypto-focused funds worldwide. The team subscribes to three major theses in the space: open finance, Web3, and stateless currencies. In this episode Brendan is joined by Kyle Samani from Multicoin to dive into how Kyle sees the future for the crypto space play out. The interview goes into the role of centralized exchanges and implications for the ecosyst...

In this episode Felix is joined by Illia to discuss NEAR's economic model, its trade-offs and advantages. NEAR is a sharded blockchain with a unique economic model that seeks to unify gas cost across shards through load balancing. With this model, NEAR is able to significantly improve the user and developer experience for cross-shard applications. The episode walks through the founding story of NE...

Microtick is an innovative protocol designed to foster global price agreement for any type of asset through an economic game between market makers providing quotes and traders placing bets. Microtick is a ShapeShift research project that is currently live in the form of a Cosmos SDK testnet. In this episode, Meher and Felix are joined by Mark and Kent, who are leading Microtick's research and deve...

Chainsafe is an R&D consulting firm focused on blockchain technology. The team is building clients and applications for various blockchain projects including Ethereum, Polkadot, and Cosmos. In this interview, Brian is talking to Austin and Gregory, who have been working on the Cosmos SDK module called "Ethermint". Ethermint is bringing the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) to the Cosmos ecosystem all...

Core to the Cosmos vision is interoperability between various ledgers on the "internet of blockchains", sometimes also referred to as the interchain. Our guest this week, Christopher Goes, is the lead on the Inter-Blockchain Communication protocol (IBC) that is core to fulfilling this vision. IBC aims to be the rails of the interchain, analogous to what TCP/IP is to the internet. Christopher is we...

This episode Felix is joined by Mirko Schmiedl, Founder of StakingRewards.com, a website focused on displaying various metrics about staking tokens. We dive into what kind of data users of Staking Rewards can currently see, what this data is useful for, as well as what Mirko imagines the site to cover in the future. Additionally, we talk about the state of Proof-of-Stake and different staking prov...

In this episode Brendan and Meher interview Dan Robinson, Researcher at Paradigm, who has worked on various cutting-edge topics in the crypto space. We start out exploring Dan's background and the various projects he has worked on before starting at Paradigm and how his extensive collaborations with different topics and actors have led to his most recent position. The episode then dives into the i...

Currently in the blockchain ecosystem most decentralized finance applications are built on Ethereum. Kava is seeking to bring crypto-backed borrowing in the form of Collateralized Debt Positions (CDPs) to the Cosmos ecosystem. The Kava blockchain is a Maker-style platform built using the Cosmos SDK that enables users to borrow a dollar-pegged stablecoin (USDX) by locking up collateral from differe...

Celo is a Proof-of-Stake network focused on usability and financial inclusion in emerging markets. The team is combining innovations that aim to financially empower unbanked people in developing economies. In this episode Brian talks to Marek Olszewski, founder and CTO of Celo Labs. The episode specifically tackles Celo's staking and full node incentive design, but also goes into how Celo built a...

This episode recorded during Berlin Blockchain Week is a discussion between Anatoly and Eric from Solana and Brendan and Felix from Chorus One. The conversation covers Anatoly's and Eric's backgrounds and how the founders got together to build Solana. The second part of the conversation then mainly focuses on discussing the value proposition of a blockchain system that can scale without the need f...

Arlyn Culwick is one of the pioneers exploring the design of an internet of blockchain s. With Blocknet, he is working to realize this vision of the interchain. In this podcast episode, Brendan and Alwyn explore the API ecosystem in Web2, the interoperability technologies that Blocknet is buildin g, as well as details and challenges of their design. The conversati on specifically covers the differ...

Avalanche is a novel consensus protocol that is able to scale consensus by using local consensus snapshots and random sampling. In this episode Meher sits down with Kevin Sekniqi, Co-Founder of AVA Labs, who are using the Avalanche consensus protocol as the basis for their smart contract platform AVA. They discuss Avalanche consensus and its key differences to traditional protocols, the layers of...

In this episode, Felix is joined by Dillon Chen, Co-Founder of Commonwealth Labs, to discuss Edgeware, a smart contracting platform build using Polkadot's Substrate framework. The episode covers the Commonwealth governance framework, what Edgeware is aiming to accomplish, as well as the project's innovative token distribution mechanism and controversies around it. Finally, Felix and Dillon discuss...

This episode is a recording of Brian's talk at BUIDL Asia 2019 in Seoul, South Korea. In the talk Brian covers the state and evolution of Proof-of-Stake (PoS). The talk compares PoS to the DeFi space going into the benefits to composability. It concludes with thoughts on how tokenized staking positions could help PoS to unlock economic potential and innovation. BUIDL Asia Website: https://www.buid...

In this episode Meher discusses fungible staking positions with Ryan Park of Ellipti, who was also part of the winning team of the Cosmos Seoul Hackatom. Ryan's team is working on the Everett protocol to create staking derivatives that could allow staked assets in the Cosmos ecosystem to be used in decentralized finance applications. The episode explores this design and its implications. Everett W...

In this episode Brendan sits down with Matt Luongo, Co-Founder of Thesis (Keep Network) to discuss tBTC during Berlin Blockchain Week. tBTC describes a way to issue a decentralized BTC-backed token as an ERC-20 token on Ethereum. The interview goes into Matt's background, how the technology and economics around tBTC work, as well as the role of the Keep Network in creating tBTC. tBTC Whitepaper: h...

In this episode, Meher and E. Dean Tribble explore the Agoric platform and the value proposition. Dean and his team are among the first to work on smart contracts, starting in the 80s with the Agoric Open System papers. Agoric's focus on object-capabilities security approach enables developers to write secure smart contracts in JavaScript.  The episode dives into the long history of Agoric and exp...

In this episode, Felix walks through the history of Proof-of-Stake and explains how PoS compares to economic arrangements like surety bonds. The episode covers early examples of surety bonds, the parties in such an agreement, the analogy between Proof-of-Stake and surety bonds, as well as important dates in the history of Proof-of-Stake starting with the inception of Peercoin in 2012 over the Tend...

This episode is a discussion on the impact of 0% fee validators between Brian Crain (Chorus One), Sunny Aggarwal (SikkaTech/Tendermint), Michael Perklin (ShapeShift), and Chris Remus (Chainflow). The discussion covers the trend towards no commission validators on the Cosmos Hub and opinions on whether this trajectory harms the network as a whole. The discussion also covers experiences on other net...

This episode is focused on our efforts to become the first climate positive, green Proof-of-Stake validator. Brian and Felix discuss the impact that operating permissionless blockchain networks has on the environement and how we estimated our company's influence on climate change by sizing our carbon emissions. We then dive into how we plan to offset these emissions and turn our validator operatio...