Cosmos for EVM Devs with Sam Hart

Oct 4, 2023

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My guest today is Sam Hart. Sam is a developer, artist, and biochemist. He is Head of Product & Strategy at Skip Protocol and co-founder at Timewave Labs. He has contributed to the Cosmos ecosystem for years, and is also co-founder of Folia, a blockchain art collective.

On September 1, 2023, Sam wrote a long and detailed post to the MakerDAO forums pitching Cosmos as an interesting option for the appchain aspect of Maker's endgame.

Inspired by that post, this episode is an introduction to Cosmos for EVM devs. In this conversation, Sam and I discuss the major components of Cosmos: CometBFT, Cosmos SDK, Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC), VMs like CosmWasm, and client tooling like CosmJS. We also compare the design philosophy of Cosmos and Ethereum. Good starting points for interested builders are included at the end of the interview.

It was fun chatting with Sam about Cosmos, which is an ambitious project whose many flexible affordances can make it challenging to get a handle on. My thanks to Sam for sharing his knowledge. I hope you enjoy the show.

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

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(00:00:00) Intro (00:01:48) Sam Hart’s journey into Cosmos (00:06:40) Sam’s biochemistry DNA sequencing background (00:08:45) Cosmos’ origins: Jae Kwon & Ethan Buchman (00:12:10) Cosmos culture (00:14:00) Cosmos vs EVM architecture (00:17:40) Cosmos overview: Cosmos is a design pattern (00:22:15) CometBFT (00:28:00) Validators, operators, delegators, and liquid staking (00:34:00) Dydx on Cosmos (00:43:30) CometBFT Mempool (00:47:30) Cosmos validator selection (00:52:40) Modifying CometBFT (00:57:40) CosmosSDK (01:03:10) Getting started with Cosmos as an EVM dev (01:06:10) IBC: Inter-blockchain communication (01:13:20) Programming languages and wallets in Cosmos (01:15:00) Outro