I am in agreement with Barry - I would love to see a way for the community to deploy things permissionlessly on the Hub, but CosmWasm is kind of an awkward choice that will cause downstream problems for us as the ICL and the community.
EVM PSS is much better, because we could actually integrate some amazing EVM projects into it that could become a distribution mechanism for ATOM (think - Chainlink prices over IBC from the Hub). It also keeps the Hub safer by separating the permissionless smart contracts from the core binary.
To add to Barry’s points:
- We just stopped maintaining CosmWasm. We don’t have engineers that know CosmWasm. Given we maintain and develop the Hub, this would be a huge unknown going forward. Neutron maintains CosmWasm, but it’s unclear right now how much help we’ll be able to get from them.
- “If you do something, do it well” → this would not be doing CosmWasm well. This is why we shut down the EVM - even with the full focus of the company and 10s of millions, we still could not do it well enough to compete with massively funded players. We have shifted focus, this would be a step back for us, as we are definitely going to want to make sure it’s (1) safe (2) not full of scams and (3) usable. We will get dragged into and distracted by this.
- IF IT DOES PASS - keep in mind we will keep it “functional” and as safe as we can. As you said @reasonant, we would not invest into it or try to push it. Right now, all our time and energy is on pushing the stack to new companies and using that to generate distribution for ATOM.
We’re going to let this play out in true governance fashion, but the strong preference from our engineering team is that our current roadmap will suffer from the distraction this will cause. That’s painful, especially after we just pivoted away from a permissionless VM.
Hope that all makes sense,
Mag