Moving On To Greener Pastures 🌲

Cosmos is dead

Hello everybody,

I am afraid it’s time for me to say good bye to Cosmos. I have been building in the cosmos ecosystem since the olden Terra days, inspired by Do Kwon’s saying “decentralized finance needs decentralized money”, worked with very talented people across multiple protocols and did my best to provide as much value to the community as I could by developing protocols, creating content, dev tools, bots and even trained an AI to answer dev questions on Cosmos and CosmWasm. I also had the opportunity to mentor over 60+ people to become proficient in CosmWasm, which was a humbling and rewarding experience that taught me a lot.

In spite of all the efforts, it was impossible to deny the lack of enthusiasm in the community and how uphill it felt to build in Cosmos.

The next passage is a dump of different thoughts and ideas about the cosmos ecosystem, and they don’t necessarily might be in a coherent order so bear with me 😅. I am sure there are more good or bad things to say but this is just what came from the top of my head at this point.

Some Thoughts About Cosmos

Cosmos tech is great, it’s modular, easy to understand, has permissionless token bridging via IBC and the idea of having multiple chains to solve scalability was ahead of its time. CosmWasm, the framework used to write smart contracts, is elegant and much better than other frameworks out there in other ecosystems.

One big common issue that is faced in the tech industry as a whole is premature optimization. Having multiple chains to solve scalability sounded great, but did we actually needed it? Of course not. Terra, the most used cosmos chain ever was never congested, besides a very few instances like the launch of galactic punks NFT collection, who remembers that?

Everybody was welcomed and encouraged to build their own chain, because why not? It was easier to raise money being an app chain vs a protocol because of the possibilities it brought to the table. But then, the few validators securing those chains were operating at a minus, with a constant selling pressure on the token price, bleeding it to ashes.

The Terra community was great, but that community died with the chain. Even though there were some that stuck around for yet another cycle like me, they were spreading thin little by little into other ecosystems.

There was this fake “kum ba yah” feeling with the app chains and their interconnectivity. Chains “partnered” to unite the communities via IBC, stating how amazing it was going to be for everybody, tokens flowing back and forth and all that, but at the end of the day it was classic PvP and it all boiled down to sucking up the TVL from one chain to another.

Then comes the governance drama. Some argued that it was a beautiful thing and it was proof of peak decentralized governance performance. Maybe it was like that, but imo it was all mental gymnastics and psyops. I never engaged with that cuz it felt like a waste of time and bs imo. I focused on building and proving value, that’s it.

I was surprised that Confio, the company building CosmWasm, was having issues raising funds. How come the company supporting and building one of the most critical pieces of technologies for the ecosystem was not being supported? Weird.

The leadership (or the lack of) was another factor contributing to the demise of cosmos. Speaking of which, I still don’t understand why they pushed so hard for making cosmos EVM compatible, while pretty much neglecting and/or trashing CosmWasm. Somehow they thought that making cosmos chains EVM compatible would attract all the ethereum devs, but what they failed to understand imo is that devs are not necessarily attracted by the tech but the network effects. For those who know don’t, let me tell you that back in the Terra days, nobody knew how to code CosmWasm, but guess what, the devs came because there were incentives, money to be made and most importantly, network effects. Why would any EVM dev come over to say the Cosmos Hub when they can just build on Arbitrum or their L2 of choice which already have the TVL, all the protocols and tools they are familiar with? I asked this question multiple times and nobody “in charge” was able to reply, they just ignored the question. Nonsense.

The Path Forward

This industry has a lot of offer and seeing the direction the world is going I believe it’s more important than ever, I am not going away but I am changing lanes.

Nothing is set in stone yet but after carefully analyzing different chains, I have decided to build on Solana due to its network effects. It’s fast and there’s no need of non-sensical L2s, bridging and all that crap, everything can be settled on the main chain. The community is great as well as the dev resources, so that’s where my next adventures are gonna be.

I still don’t have a position yet, so lmk if you know anyone looking for protocol engineers on Solana, I’m more than happy to have a conversation with them.

Thank You

Ultimately, I am grateful for all the people I worked with in Cosmos, the friends I made along the way, everything I learned, the mentors I had, my followers on this newsletter and X, but most importantly for the fair chance I got. When I started building there was no documentation or guides to follow, it was you and the cosmos sdk. I had experience with software engineering but I barely had experience in Rust. Anybody willing to put in the time and effort was given a fair chance to build and succeed in the ecosystem, and that was amazing for me to see. I don’t know of many industries where you can just come with your wish to contribute and actually have an meaningful impact, without going through gatekeepers or being silenced in the process.

Keep building folks. Onwards.

P.S.: What about this newsletter? There’s valuable content in here so it will prob stay online, but I don’t think I’ll be pushing new content. I have ideas of creating a new one, so stay tuned and follow me on X if you want to jump into that journey with me.