21 IBC: Connecting the Interchain with Christopher Goes

Core to the Cosmos vision is interoperability between various ledgers on the "internet of blockchains", sometimes also referred to as the interchain. Our guest this week, Christopher Goes, is the lead on the Inter-Blockchain Communication protocol (IBC) that is core to fulfilling this vision. IBC aims to be the rails of the interchain, analogous to what TCP/IP is to the internet. Christopher is wearing many hats in the cryptocurrency space: aside from his Researcher role at Tendermint, he is also a Co-Founder of staking infrastructure provider and protocol development team Cryptium Labs. In this episode Brendan finds out about Christopher's background and the various projects he has worked and is working on, also covering his motivations. The main part of this interview covers what IBC is, why it is needed, and what IBC might be used for. Additionally, Chris contrasts IBC to different interoperability solutions like Keep's tBTC. Furthermore, we go through the current implementation of IBC, its road to production, and possible application layer protocols on top of IBC. Finally, the episode covers the incentivized testnet "Game of Zones", which aims to test the IBC protocol before its production release and cover the hopes and risks that Chris sees for the Cosmos ecosystem.   IBC Website: https://cosmos.network/ibc Cosmos Game of Zones: https://cosmos.network/goz Chris Goes Website: https://pluranimity.org/about/ Cryptium Labs: https://cryptium.ch/ Stash: https://stash.ai/landing Wyvern Protocol: https://wyvernprotocol.com/ Juvix: https://github.com/cryptiumlabs/juvix Chorus One: https://chorus.one Chorus One Twitter: https://twitter.com/chorusone Chorus One Telegram: https://t.me/chorusone