My guest today is Billy Rennekamp, Grants Manager of the Interchain Foundation. Interchain Foundation develops and maintains foundational decentralized protocols, and supports organizations in building an internet of shared resources, security, and value creation. Their goal is to responsibly shape a new technological paradigm that is open-source, interoperable, and community-owned. Billy is an artist and developer from Louisville, KY living in Berlin, Germany. Billy is the Grants Manager of the Interchain Foundation where he supports different entities and contributors across the ecosystem. His work in software, sculpture and moving images uses influences from games, play, and cognitive science. He is also the founder of Bin Studio multidisciplinary research, design, and development studio based in Berlin, DE. Additionally, he is a contributor to ETH, cosmos, and gnosis. Billy is also the founder of Clovers Network, a Blockchain game that encourages the creation of scarce art. We discuss a variety of topics: Comos Ecosystem, Interchain Foundation, Clover Network, Bitcoin, Interoperability, and much more. Our conversation begins by discussing the intersection of crypto and art. Billy discusses how art was his gateway into crypto. We also touch on how distributed systems make it possible to more elegantly align incentives. Another topic we discussed was how the game Othello inspired the creation of the Clover Network. Billy explains the parallels between proof-of-search and proof-of-work consensus mechanism. A very cool topic we discussed centered around the Clover Network. Billy discusses his experience designing one of the first NFT projects. We also discuss that there is a tremendous amount of white space in NFTs/Web3. Our next major conversation topic centered around Cosmos. Billy discusses what initially attracted him to Cosmos and how Cosmos is building the blockchain for the future. We discuss the Cosmos ecosystem and how IBC enables them to be interoperable. Billy discusses how Cosmos SDK is enabling builders to build application-specific blockchains to tailor the infrastructure of an applications blockchain to fit the problem it's solving. We go on to discuss the relationship of ATOM within the Cosmos Ecosystem. Billy explains why creating an internet of blockchains is how you scale blockchain technology for the masses. Our next conversation centers around grants. Billy explains how grants are awarded to fund projects. We also discuss Interchain Academy as a way to onboard new builders to the crypto space. Our next conversation topic centered around Interchain Security and how it will streamline the process of creating new applications. Our final discussion topic centered around the upcoming Cosmos upgrade. Billy explains one of the major updates coming in the upcoming upgrade, Liquid Staking. Billy also discusses the tools they are building for new applications that people haven’t even thought of yet.
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