Osmosis co-founder reveals cross staking through mesh security in chainmail armor at Cosmoverse

Osmosis founder Sunny Aggarwal attended the Comosverse stage in Medellín on September 26th to talk about mesh security systems, not Omosis.

Aggarwal began his lecture in a suit of 40-pound chainmail armor. He said he carried it “across two continents…for one line jokes.” Given the party atmosphere already seen at the conference, the armor suited the atmosphere of the event.

A political compass for network coordination

Aggarwal started talking seriously about the differences in network tuning. The diagram below shows an interesting subsection of his type of network with the economic left and right on the x-axis and authoritarian and libertarian on the y-axis. The image is political compass It is often used to distinguish between the left or right side of the political spectrum.

The image “really spoke to me,” Agarwal said, calling it “a kind of meme … but a good model for defining network structures.” Based on his traditional network architecture found in his Web 2.0 version of the Internet.

Aggarwal says that authoritarian systems “have a centralized point of failure and require building a mesh system.” Downplaying the authoritarian system leaves either the “consensus adjustment” system or the “emergency adjustment” system under the libertarian banner.

The Green System of Images (Adjustment by Consensus) is built using a consensus protocol. Aggarwal gave an example of the Tendermint BFT consensus system or consensus protocol in traditional democratic concepts. However, Aggarwal argued that:

“The problem is that these green systems don’t scale very well because they require nth power communication.”

Aggarwal argued that the scalability issue of the consensus protocol was known when Cosmos was developed and is the reason why inter-blockchain communication (IBC) was invented. According to Aggarwal, IBC was a way to allow “green subsystems” to communicate with each other.

However, if a particular network sits at the center of the entire network as a metatopology, the network of “green subsystems” can evolve into a more authoritarian system. Aggarwal argued that his Polkadot parachain or his Ethereum using rollups are prime examples of this in practice.

“If we were just trying to reproduce this in Cosmos, I think the whole Cosmos experiment was a waste of time… we didn’t really get anything done.”

Aggarwal argued that this scalability problem “requires a mesh system” but means that “voting does not work at the inter-chain level.” Therefore, he settled on the “yellow system” representing the “emergency adjustment” in the diagram above.

NATO security method

The Osmosis co-founder reasoned that the Cosmos ecosystem has already formed a mesh system similar to the “yellow system” in the chart. His IBC system in Cosmos allows chains that need to communicate with each other, but does not enforce such relationships across the network.

In the world of security, Aggarwal argued that the NATO alliance is the best example of a “yellow system” in the real world. In NATO, each country is a sovereign state with its own internal policies and network architecture. However, if one is attacked, Article 5 states that all other members must protect it.

The NATO example is what Aggarwal sees as directly relevant to interchain security. Validators are currently validating their own blockchains.

Interchain security version

In version 1 of interchain security, one validator set fully validates another sovereign blockchain. Aggarwal found that this method is neither ideal nor novel, as it resembles increasing the block size.

The second version of interchain security will be where a subset of validators fully verify another sovereign blockchain, Aggarwal explained. This version is called “sharding” in other ecosystems. It is more scalable and does not require consensus to add additional blockchains. Aggarwal argued, however, that this version still lacks the overall sovereignty of a proper mesh system.

In the third version, Aggarwal detailed a system in which Cosmos validates the blockchain and a subset of Cosmos validators validates Osmosis. At the same time, a sovereign validator set up in Osmosis will also validate its own blockchain.

However, in the third version, Cosmos still acts as a centralized “red” failure point for the entire ecosystem, as shown in the diagram below.

Aggarwal believes the solution to the centralization problem in version 3 is to allow chains such as Osmosis to validate the Cosmos chain through a subset of Osmosis validators, creating a mesh network.

“Every Cosmos chain will be both a provider chain and a consumer chain…a mesh network of security.”

The future of cross-staking and mesh security

Aggarwal then showed that about 75% of the Osmosis validator set also ran validators on Juno, and 72% of Juno validators also validated Osmosis.

According to Aggarwal, the impact is not an increase in centralization, but a form of “soft shared security” where malicious validators on one chain are reduced on another chain through governance.

Aggarwal presented the concept of cross-staking within the Cosmos ecosystem to codify this shared security. Cross-staking allows a validator to use her IBC to “submit transactions and associate identities on both chains” to increase rewards across the Cosmos ecosystem.

To avoid centralization, all delegators choose validators with the highest rewards due to their involvement in cross-staking. Aggarwal explained that a delegator can also cross-stake another validator.

Additionally, Aggarwal revealed that smaller chains can limit other chains’ voting rights to protect against 67% attacks.

According to Aggarwal, cross-staking is likely to be very attractive to chains with high economic interdependence.Chains such as Osmosis and Axelar, and Osmosis and Mars have multi-million dollar economic activity. are sharing. The ability to protect each other is therefore in the best interest of both parties.

Viewer discretion is advised.

As a small Easter egg, to demonstrate the laid-back nature of the event, here’s a clip from the Cosmoverse opening, before Aggarwal’s talk. The Cosmoverse conference opened with a version of Eminem’s “Forgot About Dre”, with the lyrics altered to apply to the Cosmos chain. Words to the chorus

“Today all tokens want to talk as if they have a use case. Nothing is shown and they tell you to buy a dip. What was that? Cosmos not good just like.

A clip of the song is below. Some scenes contain high levels of cringe, so viewer discretion is advised.