#citizenweb3 Episode link: https://www.citizenweb3.com/figment-network-governance Episode name: Gavin from Figment Network & governance Episode transcript: Serj: 0.01 Hey cosmonauts, welcome to the Citizen Cosmos podcast! My name is Serj, and I take care of the ecosystem for Cyber, which is one of the projects built on Cosmos. Along with my co-host, Anna, throughout the podcast, along with our guests, we will discuss the most vital parts of the Cosmos ecosystem, how they function under the hood. In the first episodes we will talk to Gavin from Figment Network, about governance, personal trust and related decentralized environments. Welcome Gavin to our first episode of the podcast! Gavin is most known in the Cosmos community for all the big amount of work that he does, including the recent creation of the governance working group, creating loads of helpful guides and obviously he's a trusted validator as well. So I hope haven't missed anything out. Gavin: I think that's good. There's like other things too, but I think there, we have staking hub, a channel, like a telegram channel that we do like AMAs. I mean it's meant for discussion with people who are kind of professionals or very experienced with staking, to talk about staking environment. But a lot of the conversations are mostly come from the AMAs that we do, so a lot of new networks that are launching, we'll host AMAs to get an early look at what the staking will be like on their network. Serj: Right, sounds good. Let's talk about, probably, what I presume, most listeners would love to listen to. And that's the governance working group. How would you describe it yourself? I know you have already done that, and it's probably something everybody keeps asking you, but I will ask you to do it one more time and maybe mention how you think it's helpful to all sorts of users in Cosmos. Gavin: Sure yeah. I'll start by saying - I don't think it's very useful to users in Cosmos yet, it's still like a forming thing that I started out with this idea of having a group that would make governance work easier, and I didn't really know what that looked like. The idea would just be to kind of kick start it and then have kind of other people start to to keep it going, but now I'm seeing it less and less in a formal way. I think it'll just be a group of people who pay attention to governance and do some more or less focused on governance work, so most of the activity takes place in calls. We're doing a mid-month call and an end-of-month call, and largely the governance working group is focused on education and providing feedback for people who wish to make governance proposals. That ties into some of the other work that I did for the proposal that funded the governance working group, so I created some best practices and documentation for community spend proposals, those are proposals that are specifically designed to spend money from the community pool of resources, that accumulate on the Cosmos hub. And then also I did the same thing for parameter change proposals, those are specifically for changing how the Cosmos hub functions without having to halt the software, just simply using a governance proposal. With those assets, and hopefully other assets, the idea is that when people want to make a proposal to change something or to secure funding from the Cosmos hub, we can use those as a guide to provide feedback to ensure that people have made high quality proposals so they don't risk their atoms making a proposal that's maybe incomplete or controversial, at least controversial because of absence of information or because of poor information. And then the idea is also so that people can. Because it's hard to make these governance proposals at least high quality ones, so the idea is to lower that barrier so that more people are able to access the resources of the community pool or to make changes that benefit the Cosmos hub as a whole. Serj: 04.10 you mentioned a couple of times that it's hard to make governance proposals. What would you say is the most difficult part for you in as a user or as a validator, I don't know, just anything that comes to your mind, in a governance proposal? Or in a proposal in general? Gavin: 04.28 For me, the hardest thing was detailing a proposal in a way that answered any prospective questions that might come from the broader community in advance, so that once it was launched, people wouldn't say: well what about this or what about that, to make sure that I had covered everything, to make sure that all the information was there. Because once you launch a proposal, that's it. It's it's on chain and once it goes to the voting period it's just a yes or no question. Like do we want this or not. And so you can't say, oh I made a mistake, I need to update this proposal. I realized something because of a question somebody said or somebody asked. A lot of times these questions won't come up until the proposal is being voted on, so it's hard to maybe necessarily get that kind of engagement before the proposal goes up, so that leads me to my second challenge, which is engagement before a proposal goes up. For me, I think that was a lot easier because i have relationships with a lot of the people, a lot of the stakeholders in the hub, so people know who I am, so they're more inclined to maybe engage with me. I imagine that thhats the biggest problem, probably, for most people. So that's probably a problem i'd like to tackle next. How can people get attention of the biggest stakeholders so that they can make so, that their proposals can be more likely to be successful. Like you know, if they're high quality proposals and if they will benefit the hub, but then also that introduces the problem for the stakeholders for people maybe with a lot of delegations or people with a lot of tokens. Is that they might have a lot of proposals coming their way, like people asking off-chain, hey can you pay attention to this, hey can you pay attention to that. And eventually, you know, that they just might not want to be paying attention figuring out maybe a process for bridging that connection. So that people can get the attention they deserve for their proposals. And so that's the other kind of another important part of the governance working group, is that having dedicated attention to people's proposals so that they like almost a pre-processing. Big stakeholders, that hey this this proposal has been reviewed and we think it's complete so we think it's worthy of your attention now, because you know it's not going to be just like a patched together proposal. It's gone through a process there's there, got best practices, and people have made lots of considerations and people have provided lots of feedback and stuff, so you should be able to get a quick understanding of what this proposal intends, and whether or not you want to support it. Anna: 07.16 So it looks like personal communication is a significant part of what you are doing actually? Gavin: 07.25 Yeah. I think that even though with blockchain technology and decentralized technologies the goal is trust minimalization, and automating things, I still see governance processes as very human and intensely political. Serj: 07.45 That actually brings me to kind of a weird question, but more of a personal weird question. Every time I see someone doing something it doesn't matter what it is, and I see that the person really enjoys doing it, I always ask try to ask. Understand or ask the person, what are his personal reasons? Like what is the inside that drove you to do that? I mean let alone everything you explained, about you know, getting the proposals done right, getting everyone to see it, structure and communication. What drives you personally to do that and not something else? Gavin: 08.23 Yeah absolutely, it's a great question. There are like many layers to that I think. Do you want them all? At the probably least connected to blockchain layer of reasons, my motivation is a personal understanding of what it means to coordinate, in a way that that effectively considers all of the voices of the stakeholders involved. I want to be better at that because I think it'll be important for my family. Everything from a family to a community, to I guess, to a country, but I don't... I guess i'm not as interested on that kind of scale. I also think it's valuable off-chain, because I think that these are really valuable experiments to understand how to coordinate and govern, in a way that there's value at risk. Because a lot of, because they're real assets with real value but most of the people that have... I'm gonna speculate that most people are speculating that they'll be valuable or useful in the future. The people that stand to lose from governance experimentation, I think are the best positioned to lose, but I don't think that they want to lose, so I think they'll behave in a way that reflects a lot of the behaviors that we might see in the more human space. It means we can run experiments that maybe will mirror the broader human governance space, but if we ran similar experiments in like more traditional way, the most vulnerable people would be at risk. I think that we can, it's a great opportunity to experiment without putting vulnerable people at risk, and I think that we can take the things that we learn and we can apply them to the way that we govern outside of blockchain. Serj: 10.11 Yeah, that totally makes sense. Because when I hear about governance and about blockchain, at first it's hard to connect often, and it's great to see that this what drives you, because to me personally it makes a lot of sense and it kind of inputs trust into the person who's doing it, because I know that he's doing it for the same reasons that I feel that it should be done for, if you know what I mean... if I'm making any sense here. Gavin: 10.36 Yeah absolutely Serj: 10.38 I'm not sure if I wanted to ask that, but I will. A semi controversial question, but I mean obviously, you know, we have to ask something like that, right? Otherwise it wouldn't be as interesting. When you did the proposal there was some feedback, that right now it's not the way. Talking about the governance working group here obviously. Right now it's not the way that the community funds should be spent. Now, how did that make you feel? Did you feel that this is something personally against you or did you feel that maybe that feedback had some sense? I mean generally, I think you get the question. Gavin: 11.14 Right yeah. Okay, so this is interesting. The way that I thought and the way that I felt were two different things. The way that I feel, is it feel like it's a personal attack against me, which I found fascinating, because I know it's not. I think that though your first your initial reaction is just kind of automatic. But I think that the way that you respond to that is really more who you are. I like to remind myself that because I don't. The thinking part of me doesn't like the the way that I automatically respond to that, it feels threatening, it's scary, but I know that it's not personal. I know that people have good intentions when, with the things that they've written, and the things that they're paying attention to. I appreciate that sort of criticism and I'm always looking for that, because I think it's an opportunity to learn. Ideally it's an opportunity for me to refine what I'm doing and to kind of counter evidence to what I'm sure is right. If I come from a science background, it's kind of become a second nature for me to when i'm certain about something, to start looking for counter evidence. Having critical feedback is really important, and I found some of the critical feedback important, and some of it I found to be, maybe missing what it was that I was doing. It almost seemed like I think I was very methodical with the way that I laid things out. But some of the critical feedback I got, I think missed a lot of the points, so I tried to address where I could, but one of the challenges that I ran into, is that with such public scrutiny, it's hard to answer everybody. And it's hard to read everything they've written, so it doesn't scale. Trying to respond to feedback is very challenging, when there's a lot of it, because I'm also responding to different kinds of feedback, and in different ways. Some of it is very public, and some of it is very private. And eventually it makes it really hard for me to do to actually, do the work, because my attention and time is wrapped up, in that I try to read through some things. I have to read through really quickly, and some things I just can't respond to and one of the things that I didn't respond to is broad criticism. Some people had suggested, maybe only the people who need it most should get funding from the community pool. So I'm affiliated with a VC backed validator operator, we have funding, and others are running on really thin margins. And so maybe we shouldn't be getting access to any of the funds there, because we're much less in need of funding. And you know that I respect that. People have different values and they think that it should be used for different things, and I don't know how it should be used. I don't have a strong position in terms of who's deserving and not deserving. I guess I haven't formed a strong position on that, but if I had to guess how the Cosmos hub wants the funds to be used, I would guess that they would want common community funds to be used, to provide valuable outputs for the hub. Just like thinking about where this fund, because this funding isn't just specifically minted for the community pool. It's being taxed. It's taken off of any staking rewards, so the source of the funding is 2 percent of any of the staking rewards, whether that's block rewards, like inflationary block rewards or whether those are transaction fees. And for the most part, it's just inflationary block rewards at the moment. But in the code it's called a tax, and the way that it behaves, I'd say primarily because of the transaction fees aspect to it. But anyway, that's another story. I think it's safe to call it a tax if we're taxing. I think that those are the ones that are represented with those funds, how it should be used will be determined by how those votes are carried out, which makes sense, because voting is proportional to the tokens that are being taxed or the tokens that are staked that are being taxed. One comes before the other, so I think the voting, maybe people can influence how people vote by saying, oh this is how we should use it, by trying to establish norms or whatever. But I think, ultimately, people will vote, and then based on how they vote, that's how the funds should be used. I think it will be seen in retrospect. I don't know. That's really long and convoluted answer. I think the Cosmos hub should get something they value from the funds that have been taxed from their rewards, and they'll vote that way. And then we'll learn about what the Cosmos hub values. Serj: 16.09 Makes sense. I mean it's a good answer, I think that's unstructured, but I like that because I think it's getting at what you feel. That's what I wanted really to hear. I wanted to hear your thoughts, rather than a structured answer where you say: one, two, three. And it's much more interesting, to me anyways, at least as somebody who was on both sides, to hear the back of what you're thinking and it makes more sense, to me at least now. One thing, you mentioned this is just curiosity... You said you have a scientific background. What's your background? This is interesting to hear. Gavin: 16.38 Yeah, I have like three quarters of a bachelor of science in psych neuroscience and behavior degree. Serj: I was just saying three quarters sounds good... Gavin: Yeah, I took a year off. Then that turned into two, and probably now we're moving to three years off, so I'm taking a course right now actually. Just one course. At some point I'll probably have to go back. Anna: 17.00 Why did you personally decide to work with such things? I mean to work with a lot of people, it's kind of high pressure, and obviously you need to deal with a lot of information. Gavin: 17.15 I don't know. Like those weren't... I kind of knew that those would be some of the challenges. Just at the periphery, I didn't want to be overwhelmed by all the potential of the challenges, so I kind of thought, well I'll just take them one, take them as they come, because I thought that it's important work, and I didn't see anybody else doing it. I just thought this is something I'm interested in, and it seems like it's important, because Cosmos was essentially introduced with just this, like rudimentary functionality. There was no user manual for other than how to send a transaction or whatever. To make a governance proposal. But other than that, there wasn't really any guidance from the creators. So I thought well, there's an opportunity here to establish good practices early on, and to legitimize that functionality, because the upgrades for the protocol before, didn't really use. They were just kind of like handed to it from developers at All in Bits. We don't want this to be All in Bits network, we want it to be a decentralized network. And this is part of it. So while it'll be important to use the governance process to direct how those upgrades are done, and then that's part of legitimizing the governance process, as well. There's a lot of work to be done here because there's no layer one that's just the function, there's no norms. Nothing established, so I thought it would be good to do that early. The reason is, because I think that this could be a really big weak point in the network, so you know everybody's done all this work, to make this cryptographically secure and incentive mechanisms, and all that. To make these networks predictable. And we've seen that work with Ethereum and Bitcoin, for the most part. I see this is like a giant hole. Security hole in how the network operates, so anyway I thought, I think on-chain governance has the potential to be a massive failure and disaster. And so I'm hoping to mitigate that. That's another driving force for engaging in this. Anna: 19.16 Looks like another challenge! Gavin: 19.19 Yeah, definitely. Serj: 19.20 You said the Cosmos hub was introduced with only a manual of how to send a transaction. You mentioned Ether, you mentioned Bitcoin. And that was a couple of questions ahead... I'll try to put them together. One thing is, how did you get into Cosmos? But straight away, I will add something to that, because we're friends, we follow each other on Twitter, and I see your Twitter handle says, @ethergavin, so I was just wondering, how did it all get together? Did you get into Ether first, and then... I mean tell us your crypto story. Gavin: 19.52 I think it was in the first year of university, maybe 2015, maybe it's 2014. Yeah, I think it might have been 2014. I came across videos on YouTube somehow. I have no idea how, but I came across videos of Vitalik and Steven, talking about Ethereum, and it was really fascinating and neat. It was kind of like something I couldn't get my head around, so I, you know, got in touch with anyone I knew, that had computer science background. And I was like, what do you think about this? And they were like, I have no idea what this is. And so it was just this, you know, these kind of quick little overviews of what Ethereum proposes to do. But it was really a different paradigm. I didn't really understand how to get a grasp on it, so I watched these videos over and over again, trying to understand what the hell they were talking about. First I thought it was because I didn't have a technical background. But then I realized it was because it was kind of other worldly thing. Something that just really didn't exist yet, in any other kind of form. I was really fascinated by it, and I couldn't forget it. And anyway, they did a crowd sale, and I was like, I don't want to have to get Bitcoin to do it, because it's such a pain in the ass. So I just waited, and then eventually I bought a bunch from the market. And, so anyway, I you know... Was just mostly a lurker. I didn't really contribute in any sort of way. I just kind of followed excitedly, like what's gonna happen, watching the technology develop, you know. And then when the prices started going crazy, it was kind of surprising how when Ether was like a dollar fifty, and now and then, all of a sudden it's like a hundred dollars or something, right? At some point, it was a thousand dollars. So seeing that was kind of surreal. I tried to avoid a lot of the ICOs and stuff, but then eventually I got sucked in, because I was like, well it's like free more Ether, because I can buy them, and then just sell it back and get more Ether. But that was my main... I really was into the base layer protocol. That was what I was most excited about, and some of the apps that were being built and that sort of thing. I was pretty excited about that. Was thrilling for me for a number of years, and then I put some Ether into the Cosmos fundraiser. Yeah that took forever, for Cosmos to launch. And I started to get interested in what Cosmos was doing, particularly because I went to EDCON 2017. I think it was... remember 2018... I think it's 2018. Anyway, I met up with Sunny and Adrian and Zacky, and at that time I had no involvement in Cosmos at all. I kind of knew who they were a bit, just based on a little bit of the work, I started kind of getting interested in the work they were doing. And then I wanted to know how Cosmos worked. We chatted a bit about that, and it was a little tough for me to get my head around. I thought, oh and I was interested in proof of stake, because I wanted to stake, but then I was like ah, there's no way I can stake. Only the top hundred can stake. There's no way my pittance, of what I put into that crowd sale, will put me in a position to validate. I kind of wrote that off. I didn't even really consider it. Once Cosmos launched, then I started to get interested in how it worked. I wrote an article about it. It was one of the first articles I wrote. That's when Figment Networks found me. I wrote this article about supply side stakings. I wanted to learn about what these staking services were doing. And then I tweeted it out, and I tagged some relevant people and then they retweeted it, and then Figment Networks picked it up. And within, in the same day, they were asking to hire me. I was surprised. Surprised by that. I wasn't really looking for a job, so I just... I didn't say no, but I said, maybe I could do a little bit of work for you or something. I was planning to go back to school. I did some work for them, for maybe two weeks. I really liked working with them. It was a really good experience in ways that I hadn't had before, you know, and I have a young family. We have an 11 month old boy, and at that time we were pregnant. And anyway, I really like that they're a family-friendly company. A lot of, the everybody, has well... almost everybody, has like a young family, and Andy, one of the Andrew... We had a scheduled call and he missed the call, because he had slept. He had fallen asleep with his kid apparently. That's not terribly, that wasn't terribly uncommon for him then. When that happened, I thought, well these guys are for real, you know, like they talked about being family friendly, but combined with some of the things that they had told me, it was really made me believe that they were. So anyway, I loved working. The work that I had started with them and then I also loved that they were so flexible with family stuff and they understood it and valued it. I asked for a full-time, I said, hey is that full-time position still available? And they're like, yeah of course, so it's been... In May, it'll be a year that I've been working full-time with Figment Networks. And I've spent a lot of that time working in Cosmos. I'm excited to keep going. I really like it. Serj: 24.50 You mentioned Figment Networks a few times, and I kind of wanted to leave it to the end. I mean it's the best place to ask about it. While talking about what Figment Network do, maybe you should mention why they run a validator, if you fancy, and what's your role in Figment Network as well. Gavin: 25.11 It's really more... I was writing content first, I was kind of understanding the networks that we support and may support, at all different levels. And understanding what stakeholders want and bridging the connection. I was the eyes and the ears because a lot of people in Figment Networks were focused on, they had a lot of things to pay attention to, and it's hard to keep up with like a shifting, with the shifting space. And the community and so it was kind of the eyes and the ears for the community. And then translating that into useful stuff. I guess synthesizing that information into palatable content, and that evolved quite a bit. I mean i kind of know the Figment story, but I'll probably screw it up. So I just don't want to represent it wrong... Serj: 26.00 Okay. Well why does Figment run a Cosmos validaotr? Let's go the easy way. Gavin: 26.05 Our business is primarily staking, so we provide services for cross networks. It's not just Cosmos, but Cosmos was one of the first, you know production-ready proof-of-stake networks. I don't know this well enough, probably to represent it, why initially we started with Cosmos, because I wasn't there. It was probably six months or even more that work joining Cosmos. The Cosmos hub was probably six months prior to me being hired, but I know that the reason that we're there is a belief of end user adoption. Figment supports networks that they basically believe will have end user adoption and try to drive that in any way that we can, which is software development, infrastructure, and many other things. I don't know the company line. I don't know all of the things that we sell, and all that kind of stuff. So I'm the worst person to represent Figment Networks when it comes to that sort of thing. A lot of times I forget that we're running a business. I just get really involved in the other stuff. Serj: 27.10 One thing I do want to ask, is maybe your personal thoughts. And I'll try to structure the question. When I go on the Figment website, I see a huge amount of networks. I mean, usually, validators don't do even half of that. My question is not the Figment story behind it, but what are your personal thoughts on a validator picking a chain? Gavin: 27.34 I don't have strong thoughts there. I guess it depends on what your goals are as a validator. I think for startups that are looking to make a business out of being a validator, I almost question whether or not being a validator itself is business worthy. I wonder if it's a way to be a pillar of support in a community that opens up new opportunities to differentiate, maybe to establish yourself as a validator. But then use that position to be able to provide other kinds of value to the network. And there are different approaches to that. I think there's the promiscuous approach, which is to get in bed with all potential chains and then from there, decide which ones are the most valuable, to really focus on and invest your efforts in. And then there's the more selective approach, which is better for startups or organizations, that have fewer resources. And maybe even better for some that do have more resources as well. That approach allows you to really become more of an expert on the ones that you're taking an earlier position on being an expert. Your resources are less divided, we seem to be a little bit more promiscuous, because of the number of networks we support. Then there's value there as well, because it allows us to compare across networks. It allows us to become experts in staking more generally. It challenges us to be experts more broadly and to learn about these networks in a very practical way, rather than just reading docs and deciding whether or not we want to support these networks. Even though we support many networks there are many networks we don't support, so we're not fully promiscuous. We don't just jump on any network. The networks that we're on, we have a reasonable degree of confidence that there's a chance of success for end user adoption. So these are the networks that we support, and my personal thoughts on that is that it's great. These are great learning opportunities. Every time there's a new network that we support, I get to learn more about proof of stake and I get to learn to get to contrast across different networks. And it reveals things that may have just been assumed, that I might not have been able to identify if somebody else hadn't provided that contrast with a different design. We do these AMAs especially, the networks that we are supporting or plan to support, we usually host an AMA and that gives me the opportunity to really try to poke at the design choices. That helps me to learn, but it also maybe helps the designers to consider things that they may not have considered, and then everybody learns together rather than just doing this as an internal process, you can see in our AMAs. A way to see a little bit about what I think about all of these networks and what it is that we value about them. Serj: 30.27 Right. Makes sense. You mentioned networks, a lot of networks, and obviously Cosmos being the blockchain that's supposed to... Let me correct myself - that connects blockchains together. Obviously the IBC demo is up and running for a couple of days, and we've seen a few implementations. I mean, we did one from our team, I've seen Iris Network released something. And going back to governance, as somebody who is representing apart from just a Cosmos user or a project that is Tendermint-based or Cosmos-based, whichever way you want to put it. A lot of the times I'm trying to think of interchain governance, and I would love to hear you thoughts on how you see interchain governance, or maybe now it's not the time to think about it. Gavin: 31.15 I haven't thought about it at all. It's definitely a curiosity of mine, but I haven't given it enough consideration to conceptualize what that may even look like. Do you have any thoughts about that? I know that you're asking the questions, but now I'm curious. Serj: 31.29 Well yes. I think that I don't want to go too much into my own thoughts, because otherwise they'll take the podcast the other way, but generally I think that it is important. I think that even though we are still not even halfway with the governance on Cosmos hub, and we're still figuring out best practices, with you helping a lot on that. We're still working with the governance group, trying to understand how to make the proposals, and so on and so on. I think it may be a good idea to for the other networks to see where Cosmos have gone wrong or where it actually goes right, and try to implement those things, and then understand how to scale it onto the idea of interchain governance. Generally, if we look at how projects in blockchain evolve, especially projects that run on top of other protocols, what we see, is that first - we have, for example let's take Ethereum. At the beginning everybody had Ether, and then, when other projects started on Ether, at first the users who had Ether definitely had a share in those projects. As some of those projects got big, they started to have users, who only had a share in those projects, but didn't have a share in Ether. If that makes any sense... And I think that Cosmos will probably somewhere, be the same, repeat the story or even have the story on a bigger scale, because we have sovereign blockchains. Right now, probably each person who owns a share in a project that is Cosmos-based, probably owns ATOM. But at some point, we will get to the stage where people who own those shares, don't necessarily own ATOM, and this will be the place where we have to think, okay so how do we put all those ideas together? How do we make the big governance, the big wheels turn? I think I agree with you, maybe it's not the time to think about it, but I just wanted to hear your thoughts there. Gavin: 33.30 Yeah, thank you. So it's actually just something I hadn't thought. Like, I haven't considered. I've heard people talk about interchain governance, but I don't know, this is the most I've heard about it. I'm getting the impression that maybe interchain governance, back to see if I've got this right, is the idea that we've got the Cosmos hub, ideally, it strives to be, the most credible hub in a ecosystem of independent blockchains. So the Cosmos hub will kind of point in which values exchanged and information, like data is exchanged between these different zones. If the cosmos hub becomes dominant in that way any of the participating zones, like let's say i've got, Kava tokens, and I'm using the Kava blockchain, and that's relying on the Cosmos hub to get assets from Terra for example, for CDPs or whatever. They're for Kava's product, they need assets from other chains, and so now Kava depends on the Cosmos hub for that. They're a stakeholder, how are they represented by the Cosmos hub if Kava users don't have ATOMs. Is that kind of what the interchain governance problem would be here? Serj: 34.46 Yeah, well I think that's part of it. And I think this is a good example, where we see that there are so many questions, and the answers are not even there yet. I'll give you an example. In Cyber, we tried and this is not really interchain governance, but it's kind of going that way. What we tried to do, because we started up a small validator, on Cosmos obviously, and then what we wanted to do, is we wanted to get people from our own community to vote on the proposals as well. So the way we try to do it, is we try to kind of, an off-chain, we say to our community, how do you guys think we should vote on that proposal? Maybe you don't have ATOM tokens, but technically you are in the Tendermint ecosystem, because you're on Cyber. So what do you guys think we should vote? I mean we didn't really have a lot of feedback, which is a shame. Well it was a test, you know, to see how that would work. This is what I mean. I don't know if it makes sense... Gavin: 35.42 I think so. In Cyber community, who were like looking for feedback about how Cyber as whole entity positions themselves in governance decisions on Cosmos. Serj: 35.55 Yeah, exactly. Technically they are still part of, and not just them obviously, let's not talk about Cyber here. I mean every single project out there, whether it's Kava, Terra, Iris, Sentinel, whatever, Desmos. They're all part of this big ecosystem, and the more we grow, the more projects we see. If we go in cosmonauts.world, we see what like 100 or something projects. Gavin: 36.14 It occurred to me that it's in the Cosmos hub's interest to consider, even if let's say Cyber had no ATOMs, and no formal vote in Cosmos hub decisions, because most ATOM holders should care what a zone like Cyber thinks, if they care about having Cyber use the Cosmos hub. Because you know, Cyber could pick a different hub as a way to communicate with other zones. So I imagine that there will be like competition amongst hubs there, could be a way to formalize that or there could be a process to consider what zones that use the Cosmos hub think, or intend to use the Cosmos hub, think, about decisions being made on the Cosmos hub. To me, it could be interchain governance, even if it's not algorithmic or unchained. Serj: 37.01 You mentioned centralization, and the avoidance of centralization numerous times. I'm gonna mention coronavirus here. I'll say why. During and after world I one or world war II, there was a lot of government interference into people's privacy and into businesses, and then it kind of, well it didn't go away. It was supposed to go away, but it stayed. And the reason I'm mentioning this... How do you see the avoidance of the governance working group and the governance in general of going somewhere it shouldn't go, in terms of centralization and trying to keep it as decentralized as possible, if that again, makes any sense at all. Gavin: 37.48 It's a good question. You've got your initial example, which is government powers post world war II. Government's like: we need these powers because there's this black swan event, we all need to kind of unify and you need to let us make quick decisions and execute a lot of power, that ordinarily there will be checks and balances for, and we need to kind of remove those to make these decisions right. So that's kind of initially, that's what's going on with this world war II event. We can see parallels. We see where all of a sudden governments need to make rapid decisions, with a lot of power that impact on people heavily, but people are more likely to to legitimize bypassing checks and balances, because this is an extraordinary situation. It's a slippery slope, because now these might be norms. We've set a precedent. People are used to it, or people, these ways of doing things are established, and they work easier to do. Because it's a pain in the ass to move through checks and balances and to listen to different voices when you're just trying to get something done. The same thing can manifest in some governance working group, because this might be part of the reason, that this sort of thing exists. Well one of the main reasons this sort of thing exists is to make governance easier, because it's hard to do. Also, that means we could default this. Could set a social norm. Governance working group could become a powerful organization, it could be recognized as the only way to to do governance. You don't get governance proposals passed unless you go through the governance working group. So it becomes almost like a power broker situation. Right now, I don't see any risk of that happening. Mostly because it's mostly just me. There are lots of people joining calls and there are lots of people interested. There's not a lot of actions taking place. Zaki wants to form a legal entity. He wants to do an actionable thing, that he's working on, that could be related to the government's working. It's largely his endeavor right now, there's like no risk of that I think. But it's definitely... but in order to mitigate that risk I think it's good to be aware of those power dynamics before kind of establishing these norms, and be taking care to. If we recognize that these sorts of power dynamics are forming to work to dismantle them in a responsible way, I shouldn't be the only one who's able to pass the governance proposal. I shouldn't be the only one who's able to help somebody else pass a governance proposal because I have established relationships with large token holders, who let's say, they don't want to be paying attention all the time, they just default to like what Gavin thinks. This is a good idea, yes or no. And then somebody's like, well I need to get this governance proposal passed. I obviously need to go through Gavin, so he can tell big stakeholders, yeah this is fine, you should vote for it. I am aware that the position that I'm in, could lead to me being a power broker. That people could pay me to try to get their proposals passed, and that's what. So this is something, these are things that I'm aware of, that I'm working to dismantle or will be like mindful to the dismantle. But I'm probably a bigger risk in that sense, than the governance working group. What I'm trying to do with the governance working group, is I'm trying to decentralize the stuff that I've learned. And the power that I've kind of accrued, I'm trying to disperse that to other people. And hopefully a diverse group of people who are. And to build capacity for those people, to be able to to do governance work effectively. Does that make sense? Anna: 41.30 Yeah sure. It makes sense. Moreover, you are very reflexive about this thing. I mean about being in a point of power. And you realize that you could push some decision, and people to make this decision. It's really cool that you can understand such type of things. Gavin: 41.51 Yeah. I think it's really important until these networks are like worth governing. Until there's something that makes them worth governing. People won't care. So I think that the first step is to make them useful, make the network useful, and to be pragmatic and simple. Take a simplistic approach and then make sure that that approach provides room for growth for new stakeholders. As the network becomes more useful, we'll see new stakeholders with different preferences, and to be able to make room for that growth. So that whatever norms we establish they're able to either change, or develop with the network as the network develops. Hopefully the stuff that I'm doing now, will also be useful. Like, let's say in 2 years or 3 years, when there's all kinds of new stakeholders. If Cosmos fulfills its mission for a run up. Serj: 42.36 I just want to say, if they do start paying you, I won't tell anyone, if you start sharing the money. So that's okay. Let's start! I'm kidding obviously... It's been really great talking to you, and it's been really great hearing what's under the hood of the ideas that you have. I think it can be really awesome, if more people hear this, the way that you share, and I believe that I know a lot of other people who share what you've been saying, but sometimes it's not enough to, you know, you want to look under the hood, and you don't have the possibility to do it. And this was the whole idea of this conversation. I'm hoping that for future podcasts we will have exactly the same thing with people, where they are able to share what they really feel as rather what they're doing. So yeah. Thank you for that. Gavin: 43.25 Yeah, I appreciate that. This in a trust minimalized environment. It seems to me like trust has never been more important. Serj: 43.33 Especially with blockchains... Gavin: 43.43 Yeah. I think it's probably, so I think that this is a great theme, if this is, you know, if this is something you're considering as a theme for interviews for your podcast. I think it's a really great approach. Serj: 43.47 I hope so. Thanks again. Anna: 43.48 Thank you, that was really really nice to speak to you. Serj: 43.51 Okay, and thanks to all the listeners. We'll see you next time on next episode. Thanks!