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In this conversation, we chat with Christopher Goes - the Co-Founder of the Anoma Project, a member of the Anoma Foundation Council, and Research & Development Lead at Heliax. He is also Co-Founder of the proof-of-stake validator Cryptium Labs and the blockchain R&D company Metastate, and formerly led on the design and development of the Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol (IBC) at Tendermint.
Christopher didn’t always work in blockchain, though, having started his career programming autonomous underwater robotic submersibles. He switched to designing distributed ledger technology by building Zchain, one of the most used explorers for ZCash and the Wyvern DEX protocol which powers NFT marketplaces like OpenSea.
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1’15”: Christopher’s foundational experiences & an in-depth into the background he needed to participate into some of his early experiences
9’11”: Control Theory: what a thermostat, the Fed funds rate and EIP-1559's gas price adjustment mechanism have in common
12’06”: Christopher’s early startup and founder experiences & identifying what is good or valuable about privacy
25’02”: The multichain vision between Ethereum, Cosmos, and Anoma, & their community’s differing opinions on the role of blockchains
32’12”: Expanding Eliezer Yudkowsky’s analogy of a map vs reality to the various ways culture influences technology and vice versa
39’25”: Introducing Anoma: What it is, the problem it is trying to solve, and the potential outcomes derived from its success
42’26”: Integrating into the Anoma ecosystem: what is the process for developers and projects, and what are the incentives driving them to so do?
44’00”: The role of zero-knowledge proofs in the protocol
44'40”: The steps Anoma are taking to grow the ecosystem, and the channels used to connect with Christopher & learn more about Anoma
Sneak Peek:
Christopher Goes: …Ethereum community, the Cosmos community, the Anoma community are really highly overlapping and very aligned on many topics. And there are many people who would consider themselves part of all three communities or part of several of them. There's a lot of shared vision, and I think we can all cooperate both on the community level and not on the protocol level. We don't need to be competing with each other. Yeah, I think there are differences certainly in parts of the communities on opinions about what the role of blockchains are and what the relation between blockchains and assets are. So let me dive into that a little bit.
So the first part is what is the role of the blockchain? So the Ethereum thesis, at least at the moment, is that Ethereum will be the global settlement layer for a bunch of layer twos, and Ethereum will provide a trust anchor for all of these layer twos or layer threes, layer fours, et cetera, and it will have this kind of deflationary monetary policy based on burning ether, and maybe some people, I guess not everyone think that ether can become at least a very widely used, if not the dominant world currency, something like this.
Then the cosmos vision is that there will be sort of an internet of blockchains, that those blockchains will do many different things and the blockchain should be interoperable. There will be many different monies and they will just exist for different communities, something like this. Anoma is certainly on a monetary policy side more aligned with Cosmos, as in we're not the Anoma... There will be kind of an Anoma network token that we coordinate, but the protocol is designed to be open and designed to make it easy even to switch between different representations of value.
Where Anoma and Cosmos differ is that Anoma standardizes more as in Anoma standardizes all of the protocol stacks so that you have Anoma applications, but those applications can be used on different security models. So, in the Cosmos world, there are many different blockchains which have different security models. They have different validator sets, but they also have different application stacks. So, applications in a state are not portable across the blockchains. And I think the idea of Cosmos is that there will be many different blockchains which specialize in…
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