#citizenweb3 Episode link: https://www.citizenweb3.com/denisfadeev Episode name: Tribalism, Cosmos and Tutorials with Denis Fadeev Citizen Web3: Good space, To you all! In this episode of the Citizen Cosmos podcast I speak to Denis Fadeev, ex VP of Product at Tendermint and Creator of Ignite CLI. Along with Denis, we discuss time and value, developers, users and feedback, the passion to build tools, working remotely and the steps in building blockchains. We also talk about the Cosmos Hub, tribalism, marketplaces and sovereign blockchains, motivation and flexibility. Denis Fadeev: And this is the crucial thing, I think. In the beginning, you need to make the developer experience as smooth as possible, building a blockchain is not everything, rating you also need to build end user applications. If something doesn't work, you are free to create something that is better, that has functionality that you want and you don't have to ask anyone. The decisions made through governance actually change the course of events. Citizen Web3: Before we rock it off, into today's podcast here is a roundup of the latest news from the sponsor of this episode, Cyber. The Cyber Congress DAWA has been primarily working on improving the Bostrom Hub. This work includes testing of the contracts, new UI features, verification tools for un-checked governance and polishing the Bostrom decks, adding map protection, new web front and bringing indexing of chainswaps. To try Bostrom, head now to overseeb.ai. Hi, everybody. Welcome to a new episode of the Citizen Cosmos podcast. Today I have with me Denis Fadeev, the creator of Ignite. Dennis, hi. Denis Fadeev: Hey, thanks for having me. Excited to be on the podcast. Citizen Web3: Glad to have you on, because we've had a connection with you over work, well, sort of a work, I guess, right, for a while now. And we've been talking so much and you've been doing so much in terms of building and everything. And finally, we have you. Denis Fadeev: Yep Citizen Web3: Would you like to tell all the listeners and myself what is going on in your life right now? What are you busy with? What are you working on? Maybe what you worked on before as well for people who don't know you. Please. Denis Fadeev: Sure. So I'm going to introduce myself a bit, give some context, some history, and then we'll talk about current situation, what I'm doing. So I joined Tendormint in 2019 as a front-end developer. I worked with the design team, Pong and Nassan, Cyrus websites and web applications for Tendormint Core and the Cosmos ecosystem in general. So we built websites and then we worked on a documentation system, which was used by pretty much all the projects in Cosmos ecosystem in 2020 and 2021. So it featured some functionality that wasn't available at the time with popular documentation systems. So we had that and just recently switched to Docosaurus because nobody has the time to maintain our own documentation system. And yeah, basically I worked on web-related projects for about seven or eight months. And then at some point I looked into building blockchains. We had this idea of building social network kind of application. We were just exploring kind of R &D work into that. And we wanted to use Cosmos Hub as essentially the memo field of a Cosmos Hub blockchain transactions. right So every transaction you have this memo field, I think that was recently renamed to note, at least on the CLI, so that people don't insert mnemonics in this field and expose themselves. But yeah, we thought about using this memo field to contain extra information basically encoded as JSON and put it there. But very quickly realized that that's not at all what you should be doing because even on the website Cosmos.network, it said building sovereign blockchains. And we were taking a blockchain and shoehorning something that wasn't supposed to be there into the application. So I decided to look into how to build my own blockchain and discover that it wasn't actually all that straightforward. So the only tutorial that was available back then was a name service tutorial, which is a good tutorial, but it was very long in that you had to dedicate time to go through it. And it didn't explain all the details about how to build blockchains, right? They gave you a glimpse of what it takes. It wasn't a foolproof tutorial. So I looked into Cosmos SDK and I didn't see, I mean, it wasn't obvious how to build a blockchain from Cosmos's decay because it just had the docs that described this framework. Right? And there was no main.go, no way to start a blockchain Cosmos SDK. And I looked into Viya and it didn't have any modules and Cosmos SDK docs specified that you need to build your functionality in modules. So it was very, very confusing. I spent a couple of weeks kind of learning all reading the docs and figuring things out. And then I realized there has to be a better tool for Cosmos developers that didn't require you to go through all of this and read the documentation and its entirety and understand what's the difference between guy and Cosmos SDK. Like it should, the experience, developer experience should be similar to what developers in front end world enjoy right where they have a framework and they also have a companion CLI tool that essentially guides you through the process and at least takes some of the burden when you're just starting. And this is the crucial thing. I think in the beginning you need to make the developer experience as smooth as possible because what people do is they dedicate a weekend, for example, to learn Cosmos, right? And they only have a weekend and it's actually very valuable, right? We as people who are building frameworks and enabling developers, like we need to really value their time and not require them to jump over hoops and spend count shours figuring things out. Right? So we need a very straightforward onboarding process for developers. And once I figured out how to build a basic custom blockchain with Cosmos SDK, I decided that I still I tool that would help people like me to start their Cosmos developer journey and have this tool. So I spent a couple of months working on that featured some. So I decided to understand like what makes a CLI tool good, right? And I came up to a list of features that I wanted to have in the very beginning, right? It should create a new blockchain, which is pretty trivial operation, but blockchain should be complete, right? It should be it should spit out software projects that you can build right away. You don't have to make any modifications or nothing. Just run a command, you get a blockchain. And the next thing that people would do is they would start their chain, right? So I wanted to have a command that will start a blockchain node, initialize it, install dependencies, build it, initialize it, do all these things that you typically want to do. We could have done this with a make file, of course, but at the same time, this iterative approach to development that is very common in front end development, I wanted to bring that to blockchain development as well, right? So you have the source code and every time you make a change to the source code, everything restarts, rebuild, re initializes, you can experiment very quickly. And that was crucial, right? So having a command to create a blockchain, having a command that will start a blockchain node of your custom blockchain without any configuration required, that was very important. The next part was providing users with a complete feedback loop, because what took me a long time, and I apologize if I'm going into details, but I just wanted to describe the functionality of the first version and because I think it's quite important. So the next piece of functionality was a complete feedback loop. So when you're building an application, I think it's very valuable to be able to get to a point where you can submit data to your application, to your blockchain, read it back, update it, delete it, these sort of things. So create, read, update, delete, crowd operations on a very simple data type. So I added the functionality to generate that code. So you would be able to say back then, right now the project is called Ignite, but back then it was called Starport. So you would type Starport scaffold post with a title and a body, and it would generate all the code you need to write block posts to your blockchain to read them, right? And that gave you like a micro application that you can study, modify, and you can see how the changes that you make to this small application affect the outcome. So maybe you would add, you would create this type with two fields, and then you would manually add a third field just to know how it's done. And since all the code was there, it was very easy. So it functioned as a quick prototyping tool because that's something you would do as a developer when you need to build the project. But at the same time, it also worked as an educational tool because you would create something and then you would study it, modify it. Yeah, so these pieces were very important. Then I, of course, added a web template because we all know that building a blockchain is not everything, right? You also need to build end user applications. You need to make it possible for users to actually interact with what you've built. And I used Cosm.js library from Confio and shipped a first template based on view and Cosm.js. So that was basically the functionality of the CLI when I first released it in late July 2020. And after it's been released, we've seen people using it and several big projects actually used the first version to scaffold their own chain. The CLI didn't have that many features besides what I talked about, but it was still a very convenient way to get a new blockchain up and running. So crypto work used the CLI, CIF chain, Metcana and some others. And also wrote tutorials to help people get onboarded because you can write the best tool in the world. But if you don't have tutorials, if you don't have documentation, people are not going to know how to use it. They're not going to spend time exploring this, right? So I prioritized that as well. Yeah, that's how it started. And after we realized back then, which is me, but once we realized in the company that this was cool, this was valuable, people are interested in using it, we decided to create a whole team around it, start hiring and hire developers to essentially implement the vision that we had for the tool. And after that, I focused on the CLI and the team was called Developer Experience team, because even though our project, our main project was the CLI, the mission behind the team was improve developer experience of blockchain developers. Citizen Web3: Then why did you, I mean, I'm going to get to ignite in a little bit, but I have some questions to get to know you a little bit first. So first of all, why did you decide to concentrate on building for developers? I mean, I understand the importance of foundation, but if we were to draw an analogy, I mean, any work in a house is important, not just the foundation, right? Building the doors, the windows, working with the wood, with the stone, also important. So why did you have this passion to concentrate? Because what you did before was also kind of building for building. So I'm curious, where did this passion come from that you have to concentrate on the developers, on the builders, and not the people who come already after? Denis Fadeev: Sure. So well, first of all, I think I saw the opportunity like this area was really lacking, of course, back then, but really even right now, you can focus on great many things. You can focus on building wallets, on building, I don't know, end user dApps. There's just so much stuff you can build. But I just realized that this area was really lacking. And this is something that I think prevented the cosmos from growing, because you need to give the tools to people to let them experiment and build. And if you don't have that, you're limiting the potential of the whole system, right? So cosmos SDK is great. But at the same time, if the barrier to entry is very high, then we're kind of artificially preventing people from experimenting with cosmos and building, right? And the more people you get engaged into building, the more dApps eventually you will have. So to be honest, I think the reason why I also decided to focus on this, because before joining Tendermint, I actually participated in a hackathon during Paris Blockchain Week in 2019. And we built blockchain with cosmos's decay, actually, and it took us forever. And it was very difficult, and it was very unintuitive. And we won the first prize on this hackathon, right? We got the first place. But I also saw how other teams were doing, and they weren't doing great. So some teams, most teams basically were just able to go through half of the tutorial. Like that's all they did. And that's why we won. We didn't build anything great. We just managed to build something that compiled and worked. It was a two-day hackathon, so it wasn't that much time. But still, you should be able, as a participant, to go through, I don't know, a 30-minute tutorial and get a pretty good understanding of how to build with a tool if the hackathon is only two days. So basically, one year later, I focused on fixing that problem. Citizen Web3: I get it. I get it. And I also saw from your history that, but this thing is, I'm going to try to dig in this question. I know when you ask a guest a question and they answer, you're not supposed to re-ask them. But I really want to get, I'm really curious. So because I noted work before Tendermint that you did, when you did design, you also built for builders over there. Denis Fadeev: So the company I worked before Tendermint was a decentralized CDN for video. And product was in a way for builders, but I was a front-end. And before that, I focused on prototyping for enterprise companies. And yeah, I think that experience also kind of helped me understand the pain points that developers face. In enterprise, you get to experience that quite a bit, right? Citizen Web3: It's interesting how sometimes, the reason I'm asking is, it's a cool thing. I'm older than I look. We're probably some more or less the same age, but I'm older than I look. But anyways, about a bit older. And I realized over the time, I had a couple of careers, which at first seem completely different. But then I was having this conversation once with somebody and I realized that there was just like an obvious thing from inside my head that connects all of those things together. And this is when I was looking at your history, trying to do my homework a little bit. I noticed that you almost always concentrated on creating a tool that will help somebody else to create something. So it's like, I was trying to get curious inside your head of where is like the passion, maybe when you were two and you were putting already Lego blocks together, you know? Denis Fadeev: So I had basically a dream before I learned how to code. I really wanted, after I started learning how to code, I realized that I wanted to build something that other developers would use. So I thought that would be a library of some sort. I started learning actually with Ruby and Ruby on Rails. And Ruby on Rails actually was the inspiration for the CLI tool, because it had all this functionality, but for traditional applications. And I after going through Cosmos docs, I realized like, yeah, it's actually very similar to traditional applications, except in Web 2.0, you have the tools and here, you don't have the tools. So yeah, I always wanted to build something that other developers would find useful. And that kind of, that was just a good opportunity for me to build something that is sort of needed and also will fulfill this kind of desire to build something useful for other developers. Citizen Web3: Makes perfect sense. I understand totally what you mean. I have a bit of a strange question for you, which is not actually work related, but I would like to ask you and you feel too free to answer however you wish to answer. So I know that just for listeners who don't know, a few years ago, I was trying to, as one of the community members, I was helping out the guys at Cosmos Hub with some of the Russian things and translations and one of the things we did with them. Another team was one of the hackathons, which was concentrated on the Russian audience developers, sorry, not Russian, but Russian speaking developers, should I say correctly. And Denis was actually the key person to help us and this is why the question is going to be asked. So I'm curious with all of the latest and we hate politics here, but this is not a politics question. This is a question about your work and about your experience and about general like observation of things. How does, I don't know if you're still a based within Eastern Europe, but regardless of whether you are or not, you don't have to answer that because I know you were for a while. How did it feel lately? Is that a problem for work to work in this field in Eastern Europe? Did you have obstacles? Are you still if you're based there having obstacles? I'm very curious about that. Denis Fadeev: Yeah, so I left Russia in February 2022. I lived a while in Armenia and then I took some time to travel Europe and now I'm based in Istanbul, Turkey. So I mean, I'm not going to comment on politics, but personally, I'm just working on the same project, but from a different location. And what I love about decentralized nature of working because Tenermint link has always been a decentralized company. It's, well, we had an office at some point in Berlin, but we've always been working remotely and I created a team also remotely. So for actually two years, I haven't seen people that were working with me for two years, right? So that was an interesting experience. So nothing changed from relocating. That's all I can say, I guess. Citizen Web3: Oh, no worries. Like I said, it's a personal question. So feel free to answer as many details as you want. I totally understand because I've been working remote with teams, managing remote teams and working for remote teams for over six years now. And it's strange, you know, sometimes, but then you get used to it and you're like, and I actually, for the record, for everybody out of like a fan, the first ever episode of Citizen Cosmos was recorded in the Berlin Tenermint office during COVID in 2020. It was with a remote guest, but it wasn't that office that recording. So, Denis Fadeev: cool. Yeah, I remember this office. I didn't have a chance to visit the office because, well, because of the lockdowns. So it started. So the only time I got to visit people from Cosmos was in late 2019 before the pandemic in San Francisco during the hackathon. So that was a great experience for me as well. Citizen Web3: Here's a question for you that just came out now. I'm curious while we're on the same topic. How do you feel now considering you've spent working, you know, I mean, I know my experience, but I'm curious in yours, of course. And, you know, you just said you've met these guys in 2019, then you met them, I guess, during Cosmoverse, right? Like, because I did see you talk at Cosmoverse. So how does it feel to work so much with people to create so many things and considering Cosmos is not, you know, project on the 10th page of Koen Gecko, you know what I mean by that? I mean, it's a lot of stress to be working for something which is bigger, I guess. It feels a lot more that you need to not to, at least for me, this is like how I would feel if I were you. How does it feel not being seeing these people but working so close with them and, you know, what's inside? Denis Fadeev: Yeah, so I always been comfortable with remote work. And I think the events in 2019 and 2020 changed the way many people work. So initially it was not surprising, but I guess, I mean, before that I worked in an office. And then when I joined Tendermint, the work was all remote. So I guess there was like a period of one month where I had to adapt that I don't have to go anywhere. And there were meetings and there are people and everything is in English. And it took me around a month, I think, to adapt to this. But after that, it's pretty much the same thing, except it's more efficient because you don't spend time, you can have short meetings without going anywhere. And you really focus on the code or on documentation or on supporting users. So I just think it's generally a better way of working. However, I would say that after two years of leading the team, what I realized, having occasional meetups and time working together is incredibly valuable. So I wish we had more opportunities to do that, but we couldn't because everything was locked down. But now I would advise to remote teams to occasionally, like every quarter, have a week where everyone can be in the same room, can really discuss things and just socialize. This is a crucial element of team building, but it's also very important for the product. Because there was a difference between meeting a person on a video conference and in person. Citizen Web3: Then you spoke to work back to reality. You spoke about Cosmos Hub, mentioned several times. And of course, you've been involved within the Cosmos Hub since the very beginning, almost. Or since the very beginning. Apologies if I underestimated it. The Cosmos Hub role in the ecosystem has been spoken about, I don't know how many times, by many people. And it's changed over the last couple of years, the ideas. And especially though with Proposal 81, 82, 83, that recently were and regardless of their outcome, regardless what we think of them, not the point. I'm curious about your personal opinion for the Cosmos Hub, especially somebody who, well, it's partially your child kind of thing. So like, you know, I would like to know what do you think is the role of the Cosmos Hub is? And what is your personal vision? If you can talk about it, of course, for the Cosmos Hub. Denis Fadeev: Yeah, just a small correction here. I actually joined the company, I think after a month after launch of Cosmos Hub. So Cosmos Hub launched, I think in April 2019, and I joined actually a couple of months later. So just to set the record straight, I haven't participated in the development of the original Cosmos Hub. As for Cosmos Hub as it is right now, I think it's incredibly valuable, an important project, and it will hopefully forever remain a heart of the ecosystem. I think it's incredibly important to understand that it doesn't have a CEO and it doesn't have a single company behind it. It has a community of people and they're passionate. They're ready to express their opinions on very controversial questions about how it should be developed, how in which direction it should go. And these directions are very different from one another, right? People have different visions how it should expand. Should it be a minimalistic hub with almost no features at all? Should it have a specific function in the Cosmos ecosystem? Should it be a blockchain for everyone with all the features? I don't think it matters all that much what I believe Cosmos Hub should be, because Cosmos is more than Cosmos Hub and that's why I want to focus on the project that is my metaphorically child, because I want to give developers the tooling to be able to expand Cosmos, right, and experiment, and not have to be confined to a single chain because that's what Cosmos is all about, right? If something doesn't work, you are free to create something that is better, that has functionality that you want, and you don't have to ask anyone and you have to pay anyone. That's truly important for me. I like to say that Cosmos has no competitors, not because it's better, but because the goal is not to out-compete another ecosystem. It's actually to connect all the ecosystems and expand the applications of blockchains in general. So going back to Cosmos Hub, it's really up to the community and I try to vote as often as possible, unless I forget or unless the issue is irrelevant. But yeah, what I do love is the passion of people who are voting. I think Cosmos probably has, Cosmos has an ecosystem, has the most active governance systems in crypto, and these governance systems are actually consequential, right? The decisions made through governance actually change the course of events, right? It's not just a forum post with thumbs up and thumbs down. It actually changes how the blockchain will be upgraded and what features it will have. And I think I just love to watch this system evolve. And that's also one more interesting aspect of Cosmos is that it was designed, but not all the bits of Cosmos were designed the way they are right now. Some things evolved, right? So at some point we saw that there will be hubs, right? All the zones will connect to each other with hubs, but that didn't happen exactly this way, right? Because the system evolved differently. And the fact that Cosmos allows for that is incredibly powerful because you can see how the system evolves and change what you're building based on that. So maybe the hub idea, and I'm not talking about Cosmos, I'm specifically talking about the idea of blockchains acting as hubs. Maybe that will change as well. Maybe right now we just didn't get to a point where blockchains are hubs because they're only 50 plus blockchains when you have thousands. And I do believe that we will have thousands and tens of thousands of blockchains. Eventually the hub idea will become more important because you cannot connect all of them to each other. But what will remain unchanged hopefully is that people will still need the tools to expand this ecosystem. Tools might change. The way people build blockchains might change. But yeah, I really like this idea of an expanding ecosystem where you don't have a single blockchain, but rather you have a network of blockchains that you can contribute to and you don't have to ask anyone for permission. Citizen Web3: Well, I always make notes while I was picking the first note. When you said the word hubs, I was like hubs, yet. And then you said not yet. And I was like, ah, okay, okay, okay. So I don't have to discuss this. No joking. This is actually something I would like to hear your opinion about because, well, you already mentioned it, but just to reflect kind on what you said. I just don't think that the tools are there yet. I agree. Like the communities are not there yet. The tools are not there yet. I think that we will definitely, as those blockchains develop, like from a personal perspective, I feel like we will see those blockchains become hubs and more applications, kind of like being built on top of these blockchains rather than separate blockchain. Well, it's separate, but IBC enabled blockchains with other connected blockchains. I think it will get to there. I kind of have the feeling, but I'm not sure. Then do you then think that tribal is the worst enemy of the community that we could encounter in this case then? Denis Fadeev: Well, I think every community eventually gets to a point where there are kind of coalitions and they compete with each other. I think the problem is not that these coalitions or tribes exist, but rather situations where you cannot really participate unless you belong to a tribe. Again, this, what makes Cosmos different is that you can. So if you have an idea of an application and you can't find a blockchain community that would accept it, you can just do your own thing and launch your own application. So this way of kind of going around these tribes or coalitions is just building your own thing and attracting people to your own idea. And what you basically need is good idea implementation and you need to convey this message to validators. And if they're convinced and users are convinced then you will have your own saying without having to join any tribe or coalition. If you don't want to, you can do your own thing. That's very cool, I think. Citizen Web3: Absolutely. I think we have exercised it so far to an extent, but one of our goals, I think, is to be the bridge between layer zeroes. And in this case, layer zeroes are the communities, not the underlying technology, because I think that is very important because a lot of the bridges that will exist and as they get stronger, I mean, the technological bridges, these communities have to talk to each other. These communities have to coexist in one big ecosystem. And I'm not talking about just IBC, I'm talking about generally, you know, whether it's Grandpa or, I don't know, NIR or IBC or whatever. There's somehow we have to coexist and we have to develop things. And this is actually a very good point to come to ignite, I think, because, well, before I ask any questions, maybe you can introduce Ignite in like two words, what it is. And then I can ask a couple of questions about launching communities and launching blockchains and the importance of it. Denis Fadeev: Sure. So Ignite is a tool for building and launching sovereign blockchains. That's basically the shortest description I can give, but it's made up of two projects. One is the CLI that lets you build blockchains. And the other one is the Ignite chain, which is currently under development. So the CLI was released in August of 2020. And actually three weeks after release, I came up with the idea of a blockchain to launch blockchain. So we kind of started working on that pretty soon after and we demoed the proof of concept in late 2020 and for a while we've been working on chain as well. So the chain, the purpose of the chain is very simple. It's to coordinate launches of new blockchains. So instead of using centralized services like GitHub, you would use the CLI or a web interface to publish your blockchain on Ignite. Validators will see that. And if they're interested, they will apply to become validators. And there are many interesting pieces of functionality that we added to the system. For example, incentivize test nets and you could essentially distribute your token supply to validators and users even before your chain is live, which is something you can only do by using a blockchain, which is why we built this system as a blockchain. So of course we're using Ignite CLI to build the Ignite chain. We've announced the Ignite chain and Launchpad, which is a graphical interface, web interface to the Ignite chain in September, Cosmoverse, and it's already available. So it's not yet in mainnet phase, right? It's currently running on just a couple of servers, but soon we'll enter the testnet phase. But what's important is that functionality is and has been available for months now. So people are actively using it to launch the testnets. We're getting feedback and we're iterating and making sure that the system works well for both our coordinators, so teams who are launching chains as well as validators because those are two groups that we want to build our product for, right? Those are main audiences that we want to cater to. Citizen Web3: Can I try to look at it if you don't mind from a different angle? So is the whole, like, I know the Launchpad CLI, the chain are different products, I understand it. Just for the sake of conversation for some stigmas, if we were to put this one product, could you look at it as some sort of like a marketplace to launch your chain? Denis Fadeev: Yes, it can be considered a marketplace and you have two sides. One side is coordinator, so a team building a chain and they're announcing a chain on this marketplace and they're trying to attract validators and validators apply and they launch testnets and they get tokens in return for their participation and for their trust. So yes, it's a way to match good projects with good validators, right? So if you build something, you can publish this on Ignite and expect validators that validate for other projects in the Cosmosec system to apply and become validators for your project. And the key point here is that it's for, initially it's built for sovereign blockchains because we think that this is something that is truly aligned with the Cosmos vision. So it's not a shared security story. It's all about empowering developers and teams to launch their sovereign chains. So once you launch from Ignite, you actually are not connected back to Ignite chain, which I think is very important because it's like a literal Launchpad and your blockchain is a rocket and it takes off from a Launchpad and then it travels independently. Citizen Web3: You said there was no connection and the rocket travels independently. Can I ask, is there an economical connection? Denis Fadeev: No, after blockchain is launched, it's no longer owes anything to Ignite. It's not connected. But we kind of realized pretty early on that it's not about launching a single mainnet, right? Rarely does a project launch a mainnet as the first network, right? That like that never happens. You build a project and you launch a very rough testnet just for friends and family where stuff is not working and you don't want to make it public. Then you make a better testnet and then you go through a series of testnets and that's what Ignite is built for, right? So when these testnets are launched, they do have connection to Ignite. Well, some of them, if you want to incentivize validators, Ignite keeps track of who signed which blocks, right? So if a validator was performing well and they were proposing blocks and signing blocks, they will get rewarded. So during testnet, during incentivized testnet period, your testnet is connected to Ignite and that's one of the ways Ignite token will accrue value. Actually, I'm not going to talk about the token, but there is an economic system behind this because Ignite is going to be an independent proof of stake blockchain. It's going to have some token and their tokenomics system behind it. Citizen Web3: Sure. I'm not going to ask anything questions about the token plus. We don't usually do. So if you do want to mention anything else, please do. One more question though about Ignite and we are not at Citizen Cosmos. We don't like legal things, but I know that a lot of developers do find those things important. So I'm going to ask, will Ignite as a launchpad also help teams on that side of the questions? Or is that the kind of things that the teams are? This is a building tool. You guys build the blockchain and everything else, whatever it is you do, economics, legals, I don't know, whatever. It's out there. We can help with the validators. We can help with the CLI with a tool with a chain, but that's it or is it a bit more than that? Denis Fadeev: Yeah, I think it's important for Ignite to also help teams build. So we started focusing on the tooling because that's what you need. That's what scales best. We built a tool and literally thousands of experiment projects used it. right We're built with the CLI and dozens of projects are in production right now, thanks to the CLI. But eventually, I think it's going to be very important for us to also support teams that want some help from the people who are experts on building blockchains. right So we have an accelerator program right now and you can learn more about this on the website. And we are looking into providing more help to developers and teams who want to get more from the CLI. But I think building the tooling first was the right approach because we've been using the CLI for building the chain every day and that's what allowed us to improve the CLI and that's what allowed us to build the chain so much faster and iterate quicker. Citizen Web3: Quick resumes Blitz, Dennis, because I know you have timings. So three questions, feel free to answer the shortness up to you. Three projects. This is the first question. Outside of the top 20, technologically, you're curious about. Denis Fadeev: Three projects within the Cosmos ecosystem. Citizen Web3: No, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's not that easy. Come on. Let me make it harder. Come on. Denis Fadeev: Okay. Oh, well, I'm still very biased towards the Cosmos ecosystem. Citizen Web3: Let's go in Cosmos. Denis Fadeev: Okay. So, aside from Ignite, obviously. Citizen Web3: Obviously. Denis Fadeev: I think Celestia is doing great work. And again, this is not endorsement of any project purely on the technological merit. I think Celestia is doing exceptional job. They're doing roll-ups on Cosmos data availability layer. It's a different way of thinking about building decentralized systems. So I have huge respect to that team. And there are projects that are very interesting in terms of how fast they were able to implement their vision. So I have a lot of respect to the Stride team, for example, for building liquidity solution, liquid staking. Yeah, it's just, I just really enjoyed watching this project kind of develop from zero to the state there and right now. Other than that, I would say actually Cosmos SDK itself. It's not a chain, but I think I just want to give map props to the decentralized group of people working on these technologies that make all of this possible, right? Introduction of IBC and interchange accounts and soon interchange queries. Like all of this opens so many possibilities that will make it fun to build in Cosmos for years to come. So I really appreciate the work that different companies are doing to push the state of the art forward. Citizen Web3: Two motivational things that in your daily life help you to achieve results and keep on building and creating things. Denis Fadeev: Oh, that's an interesting question. I guess the first one is that we're building open source and decentralized systems that hopefully will outlive us, not in the way they are right now. But the fact that what we're doing is not going into some proprietary system black box sort of thing that someone else, some for profit company will benefit from. But everything we're doing is in the open and it's valuable and people are using it to build other cool things. And that was motivating for me, right? The fact that no effort is wasted. Everything is invested into building this open system. And we don't know what it's going to be used for. But the fact that Cosmos is so malleable, right? So flexible and can be adapted into different use cases like that's that keeps it interesting for me for more than three years now. And I think that's the main thing that motivates me. Citizen Web3: I love that answer. Last one, one person to follow that will help people to stay cool and happy. And it doesn't have to be developer. It could be actually a dead person that wrote a book. It doesn't have to be a social media account. It could be a GitHub page. I don't know. Somebody you think that you would recommend to follow. It doesn't have to be a number one priority, but somebody that inspires you. Denis Fadeev: Hmm. That's an interesting question. Well, I don't think putting like this pressure on a single person is is wise. Like I don't have an idols. I don't have idols. I don't have people that I believe in unconditionally and this changes changes quite frequently. So if you want to know who I follow, well, you can just go to Twitter.com slash my surname. And then you will see a list of people I follow right now and it changes. And I think there are a bunch of smart people in this list. And Citizen Web3: cool. Denis Fadeev: That's my I understand. That's not exactly an answer. And kind of Citizen Web3: it's a perfect answer. It's a perfect answer. I think I think I love and guests have a different way to answer the question rather than just the typical answer because it gives a whole different perspective. But my idea is not to get the person you follow is to get your answer. So it was perfect. Thank you. Denis I like I said, I know you have short on time. If I didn't ask something and you want to mention it, please do other than that. Thank you very much for this conversation. But please, if I didn't ask something and you still have some minutes left, please feel free to mention it. Denis Fadeev: Yeah, I guess if what I talked about was interesting for you and you want to explore more about how to build in cosmos, you may be a developer. Maybe you're not even a developer and you want to get into this visit. GitHub.com slash Ignite slash CLI or ignite.com and read the documentation. It's all free and open source and we'll have a little be happy to see you on Disrord. Answer any questions. We're just building this for the cosmos ecosystem and we would love to see more people building and exploring with us. Citizen Web3: Yeah, guys. And just for everybody, all the links Dennis is mentioning will be in the description to the episode. So if you don't catch anything, just look at the description of the episode on the website and you will find it there. Dennis, thank you very, very, very much for finding the time and thank you very much for answering the questions and for clearing some things up. Thank you. Denis Fadeev: Thank you for having me. Citizen Web3: Thanks, everybody. Bye. Outro: This content was created by the Citizen Cosmos validator. If you enjoyed it, please support us by delegating to Citizen Cosmos and help us to create more educational content.