Quasar 🛰️

This concludes @CosmoverseHQ 2024! Some thoughts: 1. Cosmos is back to barebone and focus on what matters. There was very little fluff, and also not too many people outside the ecosystem, but pretty much all builders showed face, include multiple @QuasarFi team members 2. EVM / BTCFi are the name of the game. Core Cosmos lacks liquidity, and pretty much anything that excites people does, in some form or way, expand outside of core Cosmos. Whether thats @Polaris_App (which got great reception), @babylonlabs_io (which is the biggest name in the game right now) or @union_build - the focus is clearly finding yield outside of Cosmos. I was happy to see some clear pragmatism around this and while many teams don't announce their expansion quite as radically as we did, the consensus is there 3. @Cryptocito and the entire Cosmoverse team are troopers, and we as an ecosystem are incredibly lucky to have them. This is not an easy market for Cosmos, yet they delivered another world class conference. I for one actually liked the consolidation of events, rather than 400 side events 4. Ecosystems are starting to understand that they need to convert stakers to users, and current DeFi is too complicated for this task. Reception to LSAs (quasar.fi) has been overwhelmingly positive and the value prop of liquidity control is starting to gain steam. The meta of aggregation is finally upon us, and i'm stoked for it to grow this circle. Inshallah, believe in something

I got some questions recently about how I structure Core Cosmos vs. non-Core Cosmos and what LSAs are actually aiming to do. I think the first question kind of misses the point a little bit, which boils down to a corresponding thesis for me—in order for crypto to grow into the mainstream, the hierarchy of focus needs to shift from technical details and narratives to usability. For the longest time, we thought usability would be solved by creating mobile versions of wallet apps. Sure, that helped, but it missed the mark on delivering apps that people want to use from their phones. Then we thought we would deliver usability by making interfaces easier. Again, that also helped, but it missed the mark on what can be easily accessed, as with DeFi's relentless rush towards more complexity, anything interesting or worth being exposed to wasn’t easy to use. We hit our first stride once we started being more pragmatic about liquidity. At the end of the day, it’s half of the most important equation in crypto (the other being capital efficiency)—where there is liquidity, there is opportunity. I think this was the moment that Core Cosmos had one of its first crises. With the appchain thesis severely fragmenting the number of liquidity destinations and versions of bridged assets, it was completely reliant on outside capital flowing in. Our big break, Terra, turned out to be a Trojan horse, and thus its collapse meant that the type of liquidity went from predominantly USD-denominated into appchain-token denominated, which as a unit grouping has a massive dependency for its value on liquidity, or USD. This collapse started a slow bleed in our ecosystem. Now, when I say Core Cosmos is facing challenges, I strictly mean liquidity-requiring projects, not the tech stack. The tech stack is actually crushing it and will continue to do so (what I consider non-Core Cosmos: @berachain, @CelestiaOrg, @THORChain, @noble_xyz, @union_build ...), but the effects of liquidity constraints have started to affect Core Cosmos appchains (@osmosis's new product expands liquidity rails outside of Cosmos, @ibc_fun is offering a lot of non-IBC transactions, @TeamKujira and @Levana_protocol are migrating to @THORChain, us @QuasarFi are expanding into EVM...). It goes without saying that liquidity needs to be accepted in its actual form to be valuable, which is where bridging fragmentation causes massive issues. I think down the line we will see more canonical bridges, as the standardization of the wrapping/bridging standard will just follow the standardization of, say, industrial products like grades of steel. With liquidity pragmatism gaining a foothold, it’s time to tackle the second part of usability—capital efficiency/level of exposure. While CL might come to mind on capital efficiency, I'd like to actually focus more on the meta of desirable capital allocation. DeFi has matured at a rate that is hard to comprehend; it’s barely half a decade old, and it’s already incomprehensible for any newcomer. So unless we want to just repeat TradFi, we need to find a way to allow desirable exposure while keeping usability high. Thus, abstracting the complexity away from the end users while still allowing high levels of exposure into desirable primitives and yield destinations will be the next break in the dam towards new inflow of liquidity. Think about it—Yield & Points Farming/Hunting has turned into a full-time job (see @phtevenstrong)—you cannot expect the average Joe (who, by the way, like it or not, will be the driving force for the next run) to just pick up @pendle_fi and use it. At the same time, pure asset exposure without allocation (say holding BTC instead of staking it with @BabylonChain) will severely impact the actual growth of DeFi, which, whether you like it or not, underpins most of crypto's current value. That's why I truly believe that LSAs (Layered Staked Assets) are the solve-all, end-all primitive. If you can provide a completely passive experience to the user on the front (buy BTC, ETH, USD LSA, hold it and don’t do anything else) while retaining high capital efficiency and level of exposure in the back (having experts guide the underlying strategies for you in a completely verifiable, trustless, and non-custodial way), you create the holy grail of global distributed ownership and efficient asset allocation. That’s why I believe in LSAs. I think combined with liquidity pragmatism, they offer the only solution against a new technocratically led, non-humanity-advancing, non-DeFi-helping, government-overreaching, dystopian future. I kinda don’t vibe with that, so neither should you. Feel free to find out more about our vision here: docs.quasar.fi/litepaper