The Cosmos may be viewed as the place where drama goes to lay its eggs, but some humans behind the scenes are doing what they can for the exponentially growing Internet of Blockchains.
Everyone ‘s heard of the likes of “Toxic God” Don Cryptonium and most know about “Just Joe,” and who could forget Coney Daddy? The uber-famous Cryptocito is still cranking out content and all these “influencers” are but a few bright stars in a cluster that is ever expanding.
Are there people who are in the trenches doing day-to-day things to make Cosmos better? Is there an example of anyone doing anything to help others or the entire Cosmos as a whole? Turns out there is.
Take Crypto Tank for instance. “Tank” is a voice in the Cosmos on Twitter, Twitch and YouTube who is not afraid to call people out and is a staunch supporter of the Cosmos. He is constantly pointing out the good that validators and developers do and advocates “supporting people who are supporting you.” Tank lives up to his handle by absorbing negativity and converting it into positivity for the “IBC Gang™.” Tank is known as a “voice of reason” by some and his mature business style has been called “reassuring.”
An example of Cosmos bravery in the field would be Erialos The Silver Fox. The Silver Fox validates on multiple chains and is a Marine Corps Veteran who did two tours in Iraq. He worked with the Jackal and Stargaze teams on various projects to help them out. He also provides a tool to recommend validators in an effort to help with decentralization. Erialos created another tool that shows unbonding information for chains he validates for and will soon expand it to include chains he doesn’t validate for.
“As a validator, I feel it is part of my duty to help within the Cosmos Ecosystem,” The Silver Fox said. “Code review where I can, tools for others to use that make the UX better than it currently is. In fact, that’s a big thing we all need to focus on, UX for those not technically inclined. Crypto is difficult to navigate and we need to do better to help onboard those who would like to get involved but don’t have the tech skills to do so.”
Erialos The Silver Fox is taking courses to get the necessary information to properly build an API to help others in the future.
Juno lead Reece Williams has a website where his contributions are free for all to use. His biggest contributions –from a scaling perspective– are Cosmos Cache and Local Interchain, which are not Juno-specific and can be used by the entire Interchain. @reecepbcups is working on Local Interchain with Strangelove to make it so any developer can start up multiple IBC chains locally in one command. Any programming language can manage it and it supports web2 and web3 developers natively.
“It’s so awesome I could talk for hours about it,” Williams said.
The Cosmos Cache reduces latency and is a solution Cosmos needs to scale up user requests. Large node teams are interested in this and Williams said he may reach out to Atom Accelerator to get a grant since it is “so critical for all of Cosmos.”
He is also responsible for such hits as Cosmos Indexer, which indexes an entire chains transactions in an efficient way to get highly detailed statistics about the chain. It can index at a speed of two million blocks per hour. Reece plans to build an archive node on top of this to “dramatically save on server costs.”
If Twitter is a bellwether for Cosmos, then an outsider may see negative comments or drama taking away from the spirit of collaboration and democracy that powers it. The individuals in this story are real and having an impact. There are many others doing the same thing and as the “IBC Gang” grows, so should its contributors.
This article is just a sampling of the “good” that benefits the Cosmos ecosystem as a whole and these personas were the ones we were able to get information on and verify by press time. Future articles will include others who contribute in a meaningful way to the Cosmos. If you have someone in mind, please let us know.
