Bessie Liu

The launch of MetaMask Snaps brought expanded functionality to MetaMask wallets, allowing users to access different layer-1 blockchains without needing to install different extensions or wallet applications.&nbsp;



These features enabled the primarily Ethereum-based wallet app to become interoperable with other layer-1 blockchains, such as Bitcoin, Solana and Cosmos chains.&nbsp;



Snaps achieves this by deriving addresses from other blockchains, according to Christian Montoya, the global product lead for MetaMask Snaps.&nbsp;



“We can derive from a Cosmos address, so rather than going to a bridge that allows you to transfer tokens from Ethereum to <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/cosmos">Cosmos</a>, you can just do that within MetaMask and the Cosmos Snap that you install into MetaMask,” Montoya told Blockworks in an interview. “The addresses you’re using to bridge from one way to another are within MetaMask and fully self-custodial.”



As a result, Snaps could <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/metamask-snaps-interoperable">expand cross-chain traffic by giving users simple access</a> to bridges.&nbsp;



There are currently 36 open Snaps in Open Beta, and the Cosmos MetaMask Snap is one of them that has been made available during this time.&nbsp;



MetaMask is currently one of the most popular crypto wallets today. According to a <a href="https://www.coingecko.com/research/publications/most-popular-crypto-hot-wallets">report</a> by CoinGecko, as of Aug. 1, 2023, a total of 22.66 million users had installed the MetaMask wallet. Making it the most used crypto wallet. Coinbase Wallet, the second largest wallet by installation, only had 11 million users.&nbsp;



Why Agoric’s hardened Javascript for Cosmos Snaps?



Connecting <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/metamask">MetaMask</a> to Cosmos was no easy feat, and the development team chose Hardened JavaScript for its ability to operate with third-party applications without compromising security.&nbsp;&nbsp;



Agoric CEO and founder Dean Tribble told Blockworks that his team dug into research about how to make JavaScript applications more secure, having previously worked with the founders of MetaMask on extensibility projects.



“Agoric was founded around this: how do you harden JavaScript, how do you safely run confined components written by other people when you don’t trust them,” Tribble said.&nbsp;



Hardened JavaScript, previously referred to as SES, is what Tribble refers to as the “JavaScript you thought you were programming in.”



JavaScript itself is mutable, so different libraries could change the programming language, Tribble explained. Hardened JavaScript locks down the programming language in the way the spec says it is programming in.



“It gets rid of a few things like non-determinism, but it makes it much better suited for blockchain uses, and it was really the hardening in the ability to run third-party components that got [MetaMask co-founders] excited about it,” Tribble said.



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Agoric

Inside the code choice that connects MetaMask with the Cosmos ecosystem

Macauley Peterson

“We’re so early,” as the crypto meme goes, but when it comes to the experience of working as a Web3 developer, that’s not necessarily a good thing.



There are multiple challenges facing blockchain-focused teams looking to attract developer talent, sources tell Blockworks. These range from finding funding in a bearish macro environment, to the novel smart contract programming languages and practical considerations such as infrastructure and workflow tools.



Forcing devs to deal with novel workflow issues is a problem with serious consequences — not merely a drain on productivity, but, with money on the line in decentralized finance, major financial losses result when security missteps occur. Just ask <a href="https://blockworks.co/tag/bridges">cross-chain bridge users</a>.



San Diego, California-based Cubist, which announced the close of its $7 million seed round today, is focusing on the tools software engineers need for multichain and cross-chain development.



The round was led by Polychain Capital, with participation from venture capital and other investors including dao5, Amplify Partners, Polygon, and Axelar.



The company’s initial focus is on chains supporting the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), CEO and co-founder ​​Riad Wahby told Blockworks, noting Ethereum has the most well established developer tooling, but only for the needs of individual developers, not larger more professional developer teams.



Some in the crypto space use the lack of developer familiarity with <a href="https://www.blockworksresearch.com/glossary#solidity-programming-language-ethereum">Solidity</a>, Ethereum’s smart contract language, “as an excuse,” Wahby said.



“I think there is a slice of the developer ecosystem in Web2 that’s basically like Javascript or nothing…but I don’t think that’s actually the problem,” he said, adding, “I think the actual problem is, all the other tooling that goes along with developing serious applications in Web2 is just totally missing.”



Wahby cited continuous integration testing — automating the merging of code changes from multiple contributors into a single software project — as one example where Web3 falls short.



“That’s still nascent technology, whereas in Web2 that’s just table stakes,” he said.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">There are only so many early adopters</h2>



For Web3 startups, the goal should be attracting developers that are not going to be your fanatics, they’re going to be your customers, according to Dean Tribble, CEO of Agoric, a company facilitating building DeFi dapps in JavaScript.



“It’s fine to get fanatics, but there are just a limited number of them, and the goal is to transition to where we get lots and lots of customers from this platform technology.”



There is certainly the programming language aspect, Tribble said, noting that the number of JavaScript developers in the world sits at 15 million and the language&#8217;s strengths in building frameworks of components — composable software from many different contributors.



“Being able to build on the shoulders of others is critical,” he said.



But a more salient problem right now is the overall market downturn. “People don’t communicate what’s the value [proposition] of it, for people solving their own problems…what’s the actual advantage here?”



Among the obstacles: New jargon, new patterns, the security hazards, the perceived fraudulent behavior — “scummy, scammy behavior,” as Tribble put it.



“FTX’s same-old-same-old brokerage fraud of mixing customer funds with investment — the fraud part didn’t have anything to do with Web3, the technology stack and what opportunity is enabled, and yet from 10,000 feet it all looks like a mess,” he said.



Tribble expects to see applications that rely on other chains bringing their value, but acknowledges the potential downside of application dependency, a form of counterparty risk.



One example is Agoric’s own stable token IST, which can be minted from Ethereum-based stablecoins like DAI, USDC and USDT that are brought over to Cosmos via bridges like Axelar and Gravity.



“But if one of those bridges goes down, that impacts our business and reputation even though we do not have control over those bridges.”&nbsp;


<div class="wp-block-image">
<figure class="alignright size-full is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Wahby.jpeg" alt="" class="wp-image-48723" width="250" height="250" srcset="https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Wahby.jpeg?w=500 500w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Wahby.jpeg?w=300 300w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Wahby.jpeg?w=150 150w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Wahby.jpeg?w=257 257w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Wahby.jpeg?w=261 261w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Wahby.jpeg?w=219 219w, https://blockworks-co.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Wahby.jpeg?w=80 80w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 250px) 100vw, 250px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">​​Riad Wahby; Source: Cubist.dev</figcaption></figure></div>


That’s among the problems Wahby’s team at Cubist aims to tackle — to improve the ability for developers to safely build and deploy multichain.&nbsp;



“I love the hacker ethic — of course that’s part of the reason why we love to work in Web3 — but I also want somebody who’s going to give me a [Service Level Agreement],” Wahby said.



Cubist is building tools for interchain developers, using the Axelar Virtual Machine (AVM), a new piece of permissionless infrastructure, Axelar’s content lead Galen Moore told Blockworks.



Axelar has a mission to make building interchain-native applications easy, as co-founder Sergey Gorbunov said at the recent <a href="https://interopsummit.com/">Interop Summit</a> in Denver, where he described how developers spend 70-80% of time dealing with the minutiae of software deployment in a multi-chain stack as opposed to being able to focus on building application logic.



“It&#8217;s possible to make Web3 easier — maybe even easier than traditional web development,” Moore said.



Gorbunov sees the development of Ethereum and Cosmos coalescing in the future.



“In some sense now the Cosmos stack I think is becoming more and more glued together with the EVM stack, and I think, as time goes by, these are going to be indistinguishable ecosystems, I believe,” Gorbunov said.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">But first, solving the money problem</h2>



No matter how interested in Web3 potential developers are, teams have to be able to pay them. Griffin Anderson, CEO of Phi Labs, is seeing foundations reneging on promised grants, and projects funded by token issuance are suffering from the bear market downturn in token prices.



“There’s tons of demand to build apps and projects, but I would say the overwhelming 50 or 60 percent are depending on a financial grant in some capacity,” Anderson told Blockworks.



“It’s not like they don’t know Web 2.0 engineers and don’t want to bring their friends into the space, it’s that they can’t pay their salaries, at the end of the day, in this environment,” he said.



A core contributor to Archway, Anderson is working on devising alternative incentive mechanisms to bring more developers into Web3 by leveraging the underlying strengths of the technology.



The basic concept behind Archway, which is also Cosmos-based, is to programmatically reward developers based on the value and users they bring to the network.



Finding applications that excite developers and play to the strengths of Web3 can help, Tribble said. Testing applications across multiple machines, let alone multiple chains, presents novel problems.



“That’s rarely something engineers have experienced in non-crypto…[but] it is one that Web2 engineers actually find enticing — that’s interesting from an engineering point of view — it’s part of the attraction,” he said.



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Solving Web3’s Developer Problem: Web2 Remains Hesitant

<div id="highlights-block_6345b22cc14a9" class="highlights">
 <ul>
 <li>“Atom 2.0 will enable more cross-chain DeFi — which makes a cross-chain stable token more valuable and more important,” Agoric CEO said</li>
 <li>IST will integrate high-quality, price-stable tokens including USDC, USDT and DAI</li>
 </ul>
 
</div>



Two weeks after Cosmoverse, developers from the Cosmos interchain community are back to building. For Dean Tribble, the CEO and founder of Agoric, the focus is on a new Cosmos stablecoin and the dapps that will use it.



Agoric, an open-source development company working on the Cosmos software development kit (SDK), is developing its native stablecoin (IST) for the interchain network and assisting the development of <a href="https://agoric.com/blog/announcements/announcing-5-dapps-to-launch-on-agoric-mainnet/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">five decentralized applications</a> that will launch alongside the Agoric mainnet.



Tribble founded Agoric in 2018 with the general mission of enabling large-scale decentralized cooperation, but he had been working in distributed systems and smart contract technology since 1989.



He and his team built Agoric, a proof-of-stake chain, to enable application developers to be able to write smart contracts in a hardened version of JavaScript.



“Not only can JavaScript actually work in a smart contract environment with deterministic execution, but it’s a framework that build[s] upon the work of others. And it’s that building upon the work of others that gets you exponential growth of an ecosystem — and that is our target,” Tribble said in an interview with Blockworks.&nbsp;



Tribble predicts that JavaScript will allow crypto’s smart contract world to move into the mainstream. It’s a simple numbers game: There are 6,000 developers who can write in Solidity, Ethereum’s native smart contract language, he told Blockworks, compared to 17 million Javascript programmers worldwide.



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Why a stablecoin?</h3>



To ensure that Agoric has a thriving economy to launch its product, Tribble said, it will be important to launch the inter protocol token (IST), an overcollateralized, cryptocurrency-backed but decentralized stable token designed to maintain parity with the US dollar.



“We realized that the stable token we were building for Agoric had all the properties you need for the Interchain,” Tribble said. “IST lays the groundwork for a cross-chain economy so that businesses can have their price comparable with everybody else’s price and are paying for things at the same unit of price — things that we take for granted in the modern economy.”



Tribble says that the first release of IST will integrate high-quality, price-stable tokens including USDC, USDT and DAI that are fully backed and collateralized and made available in the Cosmos ecosystem.



By doing so, Tribble says that IST will recollect the fungibility across different sources of liquidity into a single point of reference and as time goes on, new risk-managed tokens will be incorporated into IST.



The Cosmos ecosystem recently revealed that <a href="https://cms.blockworks.co/usdc-is-coming-to-cosmos-in-2023/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">USDC would be available natively</a> to its interchain, but Zaki Manian, co-founder of Iqlusion, believes that this will not change the importance of having a native stablecoin on the Cosmos network. 



&#8220;IST is a key piece of the emerging stablecoin ecosystem. Being able to take bridged assets and native USDC and turn them into a common unit of account is an important step forward in Cosmos DeFi,&#8221; Manian said.



IST will also come at a time when the Cosmos ecosystem <a href="https://cms.blockworks.co/cosmos-is-forging-a-new-atom-starting-with-interchain-security/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">revamps its native token</a> ATOM. A move, Tribble says and will be synergistic with the launch of IST.



“Atom 2.0 will enable more cross-chain DeFi — which makes a cross-chain stable token more valuable and more important,” Tribble said. “There&#8217;s two sides of it: the capital, funding side and the ability to execute commerce side.”



As the Cosmos ecosystem continues to grow, Tribble acknowledges the most important factor right now will be to foster a robust, healthy governance and integrate IST in as many parts of the ecosystem as possible.



“We want to roll out very conservatively and carefully,” he said. “We&#8217;re sort of a risk managed portfolio of all the mechanisms for producing a stable token — so IST will have a life that is about the interchain and not about Agoric.”



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