2023 Looking Back-Me and Confio

Intro

The year 2023.

Tough year for me professionally. New challenges and changes; a lot to achieve and process, both externally and internally. And here I am, looking back on this awful and amazing year, my 4th year with Confio.

Funding crisis: to be or not to be, that is the question

In late 2022 and early 2023, Confio had an unstable financial situation. Ethan asked me to step up as VP of Sales and Marketing to take the ‘financial’ burden off his shoulders. I spread the word by meeting the relevant people. I tried my best working with Ethan and Simon to solve this fundamental crisis. We briefly explored setting up the CosmWasm Foundation idea, but it didn’t come through due to many realistic limitations. When we announced Confio’s New Path, halting all the public goods building, the communities reacted positively. To our surprise, the Hub community was the first one reaching out, and the community proposal and voting were made in our favor. During this time, I encountered many people; some showed empathy, some offered to buy out, some criticized our business model, and some poured anger. Barely getting my mentality, by March 2023, we secured the funding for public goods development thanks to ICF, Hub, NYM, Osmosis, Terra, DoraHacks, and Stargaze.

CosmWasm Academy: all for one, and one for all

With faster CosmWasm adoption, I conducted the chain survey in early 2022 to figure out what they do with CosmWasm and their pain points. Every chain was crying for more CosmWasm devs, and I was happy to be the project manager of CosmWasm Academy (until I got pretty tied up with AwesomWasm preparation), where people can learn the backend and frontend side of CosmWasm. 100% free. After certain trials and errors, we learned our lesson; we had to meet somewhere, compromise our resources, and still satisfy learners’ needs. We ended the hands-on approach after 5 cohorts with about 500 learners. This initiative gained significant interest from both individual developers and chains, as this leads to more developers on CosmWasm chains. When I met people in person who told me they learned a lot from CosmWasm Academy and could get a job, I truly felt happiness and accomplishment.

AwesomWasm & HackWasm Berlin: my blood, sweat and tears

“It is your event,” said Simon at Porto in May when I asked his opinion about AwesomWasm MC.

Organizing AwesomWasm and HackWasm Berlin, the first CosmWasm-focused conference and hackathon, was one of my best professional achievements this year. I appreciate all the support inside and outside of Confio, as I could not have done this alone.

I proudly added ‘organized a crypto conference and hackathon’ on my LinkedIn. Man, there are so many things behind this one sentence, so much work… I had no idea before I got my hands dirty. But indeed, there is this sense of achievement when you see the outcome of your orchestration.

Confio has been building CosmWasm for the last four years, and it was about time to gather CosmWasm enthusiasts. What we did through AwesomWasm was;

• Share the tech knowledge and opinion at this, the best dev-fest in Cosmos
• Prove how vital CosmWasm is for the ecosystem.
• Leverage the synergy between builders and networking.
• Talk out on Public Goods development and discuss the alternatives.
• Help shine new faces and shout out to those who deserve it.
• Gather feedback on Confio’s future commercial offerings

I contacted more than 100 entities, leading to my comprehensive overview of the CosmWasm community, inside and outside Cosmos. I am very proud that I got Near, Solana, and the Stellar team onboard at AwesomWasm. Also, my ‘risk management’ skill when things had not played out exactly as planned.

Mesh Security — Confio’s consulting work

The prototype of Mesh Security was born at HackWasm Medellin in late 2022, and we have been working on it throughout 2023, getting the grant from OGP. You can check our articles on Phase 1 and Phase 2 for more information. I am looking forward to seeing the product in 2024.

Neutron Strategic Partnership: permissionless-CosmWasm chain, knighted by Confio

Neutron acquired a 25% share of Confio, a blockchain with a common vision about interchain smart contracts. Confio serves all the CosmWasm chains as before and works closely with other long-term partners. Find more details in this article.

What went well?

• CosmWasm awareness is enhanced inside and outside of the Cosmos ecosystem.
• Almost every new Cosmos-SDK chain implements CosmWasm by default.
• CosmWasm was acknowledged as one of the four major Cosmos stacks by ICF; collaboration around marketing improved. Numia is supporting CosmWasm-focused data mandated by ICF, which we plan to share on our CosmWasm website starting January 2024.
• Confio published more tech articles from more diverse internal devs.
• Networking and shared knowledge with Avalanche, Ethereum, Stellar, Near, and Solana over events; EthDenver, Avalanche Summit, AwesomWasm, OsmoCon, and Cosmoverse
• CosmWasm tech ecosystem matured: Abstract, Celatone, Croncat, CWD, Welldonestudio, Starship…
• I had to spend some time convincing but finally got the internal agreement to work on our new commercial offering and leverage it from Q3, and some deals have been closed since. The details will be announced shortly.

What is learned?

• Overcoming the funding crisis, we have learned who the faithful supporters and friends are.
• Public Goods funding has limitations, especially with the bear market and the community proposals. In the case of community proposals, the counterparty is often unclear, and people tend to hear the loudest voice at certain times. That is what happened with the Terra community funding halt; you can find the event details and our answer here.
• We learned we must set a solid business model to guarantee a sustainable income stream. ICF will not have infinite resources; we want to avoid absolute dependency on them.
• CosmWasm communities are solid, and Confio’s reputation is much appreciated, as proven in AwesomWasm.
• We must care for ourselves; emotional security at work and work-life balance are essential.

What is in progress, improving?

• Funding situation: we are having the first Christmas that we do not need to worry about our financial crisis in the next few months
• New commercial offering
• Keep shipping +A class CosmWasm family suites.
• Better documentation
• Education and dev rel activities, including CosmWasm Academy and hackathons: we need to figure out where this could fit into our service offerings

Outro

Bittersweet 2023. I wish next year is more sweet than bitter.

With our upcoming announcement in the brand new year 2024, it will likely be. So please stay tuned.