@bharvest Thanks for bringing this up. It’s definitely clear that DeFi has emerged as a predominant use case in crypto, and Cosmos should want to position itself to capture growth in this market.
In regard to the broader Cosmos ecosystem — there have been some early signs of validation of the thesis around App-specific chains for cross-chain DeFi (Kava, VEGA, Acala, Terra, Celo, Thorchain, and many others), and I think longer-term, Cosmos is on the right track to being competitive in this space. However, I very much echo the concern that Cosmos is moving too slow, and I am fully onboard to jam on what we need to do to speed up the progress.
I like how @dogemos has framed things in terms of the prerequisites. IBC & shared security are the obvious must-haves, and until we have those, it will be tough for a great cross-chain DeFi ecosystem to pop up on Cosmos.
Honestly I see better business development from Polkadot than Cosmos to achieve this goal, despite of their late implementation, when I consider current status of Cosmos.
A big part of this is that Polkadot has the more complete product at this point — they’re on a clear, short-term timeline to shared security (parachains) & cross-chain communication.
The core differentiator for Cosmos is the community/ecosystem it’s built over the past couple years. Once Cosmos has IBC/shared security, its value prop grows significantly. The faster we can get here, the better —though much easier said than done. As a community, I think we need to rally to get these things knocked out before anything else. Would love to hear others’ take on what all this might entail.
One thought on this: With development decentralizing and the community pool funding key projects, we should consider offering much larger rewards to dev teams who are building key pieces of infrastructure. Cosm-Wasm, for example, seems to be viewed by just about everyone as super, super important for the Cosmos Hub, and yet we only spent about $75k (at the time) to fund development on this. Admittedly, I know little about the cost of funding development, but given the value this is going to add to Cosmos, it feels like we underpaid here. If we were to create much larger bounties for key development priorities, this would hopefully incentivize more developers to get involved and accelerate the progress. Theoretically speaking, if we can spend $1mn to drive $10mn/$100mn/$1bn in value to Cosmos, it is worth it every time.
The other question in regard to DeFi on Cosmos which has been discussed a little already is ‘What role will the Cosmos Hub play in the ecosystem?’ This is something I’m still thinking on, but at a high-level, it definitely makes sense for Cosmos Hub to own some of the key primitives of the cross-chain ecosystem we hope to build around it. This is another thing we should get started on as soon as possible.