Interviewee’s profile

• Senior Software Engineer at a Big Tech Company.
• Building a Cosmos chain.
• Researched L2, sidechain, and Ethereum ecosystem.

Q&A

• Why are you building a Cosmos chain?
  • Our team concluded that we needed an independent execution environment. We concluded that it could not be done if we used another chain.
  • We also have a business rationale, but I can’t talk about this.
• How is your experience building a Cosmos chain?
  • As an engineer who spent much time on Web2 engineering, I cannot say it’s good.
  • It’s not about the proficiency of blockchain since we understood the Cosmos SDK, and I think the concept of the Cosmos SDK itself is good.
  • It’s about re-inventing the wheel and UX of the Cosmos SDK. For example -
    • To use the Ignite tool in production, we had to modify it a lot.
    • Even though we use Evmos, there are a lot of things to code on Cosmos SDK.
      • For example, the ERC-20 module.
  • I figured out we were doing the same job that Terra or Cronos did because there is not much difference in ours from other Cosmos chains that use Cosmwasm or Evmos.
  • Almost all jobs we dealt with Cosmos SDK could be abstracted using Smart Contract if we build an EVM-native chain.
  • Also, since Cosmos SDK requires hard-forking for the upgrade, we have to set up the update schedule with validators when we upgrade the chain. In contrast, upgrading a contract is all we need If we were building an EVM native chain.
• Have your team discussed building a chain on Ethereum?
  • Sure. Our priority was building L2 than Cosmos SDK, but we decided to use Cosmos after our experience PoCing an L2.
• Can you elaborate on your experience?
  • We tried to PoC Optimism code. Running the code was convenient; however, they had two problems.
    • We couldn’t find any guide to run the code in production.
    • We couldn’t find any clue to customize the code. For example, changing the native token.
  • Other codebases were worse. They didn’t have a proper guide or launcher that launched the code in the local environment.
  • Moreover, building essential tools for the chain was also a huge problem. Such as a token bridge, block explorer, and monitoring tool
  • In conclusion, we concluded that the rollup codes are built for the code author themselves, and it’s quite hard to run it on our own unless someone makes it easy.
  • Therefore, we concluded to build a Cosmos chain because they provide tools that enable us to launch a chain, and the code and community are designed to launch users’ chains.
• Are you willing to use Ethereum’s L2 if the problems that you mentioned? Why?
  • Yes. Because -
    • Cosmos is a thriving community indeed, but I count EVM as the original blockchain community.
    • Maintaining L2 is much better since we don’t have to hard fork to update the chain's business logic. Upgrading the smart contract will do.
    • L2 is inherently more secure than building a DPoS chain since it inherits Ethereum’s security.
• What problem should be solved with the highest priority?
  • The most fundamental problem is that we don’t have someone working on lowering this barrier.