A little bit of chit-chat
Juno may be on its way to becoming Cosmos' fourth chain to be carbon neutral or negative. The proposal aims to buy $39,280 worth of carbon credits from Regen Network to offset Juno's footprint for a year following the Cosmos ZERO Footprint Commitment guideline written by key ecosystem names such as ixo, Interchain Foundation, Chorus One and others.
No-go for that upgrade ✋
Evmos put up a vote for its Mainnet v5.0.0 Upgrade but didn’t find community support to carry it out, losing the vote with 78.85% of negative votes; something unusual when it comes to software updates of a chain in the Cosmos ecosystem.
Some bugs were the reason behind the rejection. The most important one reported by the community was an issue with the MetaMask UI. The team reported on Discord that they are working on fixes for the bug, and will be pushing the new version to testnet in the coming days.
Maybe one of the most important new things to be introduced on Evmos when the upgrade finally passes is the MinGasFee parameter, as we shared last week, which will be set at 25,000,000,000aevmos (~$0.005 per tx at current prices) to prevent spammers from congesting the network.
Cosmos’ Privacy DEX 🌒
We had a chat with Henry de Valence, co-founder of Penumbra, the fully private DEX being built on Cosmos. ZKValidator is an early investor in the project, and we wanted to know more about the project's progress and when we can expect its launch.
Q: You mentioned privacy is much more than just a human right. How would you sell privacy to a stranger?
A: People care about privacy. A fake theme says people don't care about privacy because they use Facebook, Gmail, and so on, but the issue is that the scope of choice is reduced. If you build a private system that is good at what it does, you don't have to sell privacy. The reason why there's an expectation that you have to explain the value of privacy is not actually about the privacy part but that historically the privacy products have underperformed as products. I want people to use Penumbra because it's actually better at being a DEX.
Q: What are your main learnings so far from testnets deployments?
A: Whenever you build real software, there are always edge cases that you'll never find until you try to make it work for what it's designed to do. And the big reason for us to try to do these public testnets at such an early stage, even when everything is incomplete, still somewhat broken, is that it works as a forcing function. We can see if it is possible for people to deploy and use our software.
And the process of trying to hit a weekly cadence on testnets has forced us to work towards having a good deployment pipeline. And those are the kind of practical developer experience concerns that either accelerate or slow down the course of development. Because if, as a side effect of trying to do deployments, you get a better, easier-to-use system for running the software, then you can have a much tighter iteration cycle while you're doing the development.
Q: Zaki mentioned during his talk at the Gateway Conference that infrastructure needs to change for privacy to be adopted. You said you are working on building some of those things. Besides tooling like privacy-enabled block explorers, what else is needed?
A: One thing that I think is really underappreciated with trying to build privacy systems is that if you look at what is the technically hard challenge, it's not just how do we do the advanced cryptography that is required to make the ZK, but once you've used the ZK proof to rearrange who has access to what data, you have to think hard about what is the flow of data through the system. And a lot of the assumptions of existing blockchain infrastructure don't work in a private context because they assume that all of the data is accessible to everybody all the time.
So we've been trying to focus on building some basic data infrastructure tools that other people could hopefully build on top of to create a lot of different and interesting interfaces.
Q: Is there an ETA for Mainnet? What will we be able to use in the Penumbra's DEX once it's live?
A: So we haven't set a hard schedule on the mainnet launch because, at least for the core protocol. Once you've built it and gone live, you have to have got it right. And that's much more true for a ZK system than for a transparent chain. If you do a transparent chain, you launch the chain. You realise you made a mistake. Like, well, the state is all there, and you can have governance, vote and mess around with it. But on a private ledger, the flip side of all the users controlling their data is that it's impossible to do the same upgrades to the chain. And so, we've been focused on how to move fast and get it right. The short version is that we aim to go to mainnet before the end of the year.
Airdrops List 💦
A new airdrop has arrived at Cosmos. Make sure to check it out.
Wrap Up
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