The DEVine Cosmos and Fairblock’s tale
or why did you start Fairblock in Cosmos?!
So it’s been one year and a half from the day that I started developing and exploring my research in grad school in the industry, and long story short: during this time we got unbelievable support from the Cosmos ecosystem (financial, technical, business, friends, etc), built a startup (Fairblock) that I’m actually enjoying every bit of it, raised from ~20 investors, and built amazing partnerships with some of the really big names!
And last week was a symbolic milestone for me: I partied the whole week with the gigabrains of the Cosmos family in Prague; and in the meantime, Atom Accelerator and Cosmos Hub community supported Fairblock which was insane!!
I get the question “Why are you building Fairblock in Cosmos?!” on a pretty much regular basis from almost everyone. So I decided that this is an exciting time to write a short summary of my path, reasons, and experiences:
- The first time I heard about Cosmos was because of the Tendermint paper which was very well-written and more exciting compared to 30 years of very long BFT research papers.
- I was pretty close to Sergey (my supervisor) and the Axelar team, so I observed the unbelievable capacity of Cosmos SDK which allows you to build production-ready blockchains in months.
- I started with the Ethereum ecosystem (like everyone) but it was not the best place to start for our project because of the high gas fees and slow block times, the very complex process of modifying consensus and validator codes, and most importantly the fact that writing cryptography code in Solidity is a pain.
- So I started playing around with Cosmos SDK, building with the tutorials, and although docs were a little confusing to get the concepts, it was an amazing experience to build a decentralized application on top of your own blockchain in just a couple of days!
- Then I realized that Cosmos app chains can work together in a really cool way, you can use shared security from other chains, provide service to them (e.g. as an oracle service), and use IBC (Inter-Blockchain Communication) in an almost frictionless way. So it made a lot of sense to build our own chain and enjoy cheap gas costs, fast blocks, and IBC to interact with app chains that already have tons of users.
- Also, cooking cryptographic protocols inside the consensus is 10X more straightforward since Cosmos SDK is in Go and a lot of serious cryptographic libraries are already in Go (or at least easy to convert)!
- Then we got amazing support from the Cosmos ecosystem and Informal Systems team which was unbelievable and made shit really serious:)
- Then I realized that it’s 10X easier in Cosmos to cooperate with the biggest names, within a few weeks, we were already in group chats with almost any team and brainstorming every single day for hours. Without exaggeration, everyone is surprisingly knowledgeable in engineering, finance, game theory, business, and cryptography, and we just learned by talking to them frequently.
- Then we also realized that there are unique engineering flexibilities like ABCI++ (Vote extensions), Begin/End block, etc which basically makes a lot of impossible applications for other ecosystems possible, which we are still very excited about.
- And tbh 97.6% less politics/ego, 96.7% more creativity, and execution.
So in summary, Cosmos is a magical place to grow, learn, execute; and expand to other ecosystems.
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Okay, you may ask what’s Fairblock anyway? Well, we’re bringing pre-execution privacy to Cosmos and other ecosystems using some new cryptography schemes for the first time. WHHat? So your transaction is in plaintext and everyone can see them before execution, so they can learn about it, reorder them, censor them, and front-run them based on their contents (bad MEV, not good MEV, and arbitrage). It also limits some of the very important functionalities and applications of blockchains e.g. private voting for proposals (less manipulation, less voter apathy, more realistic results), sealed-bid auctions (less manipulation, better price for users, etc), randomness generation, censorship-resistant shared sequencers, private intents and more.
We will have some exciting news and more technical articles in the coming weeks and months, and we love questions and ideas, so please follow us on Twitter, and send an email with your resume if you want to join our team (We are mainly looking for a full-stack software engineer, devops, and business dev)
hello@fairblock.network
