Summer Siesta:  Recap of July Community Call

We know you’d much rather spend your July mornings, afternoons, and evenings at the beach with a cocktail in hand than in front of the computer. That’s why we greatly appreciate everyone who joined our July Community Call last week to get the latest updates on Inter Protocol, Agoric, and Tribbles. 

We kept it short and breezy, and instead of discussing one hot topic, DCF’s Ric Shreves, Inter Protocol’s Bob Calabritto, Agoric’s Dean Tribble and Brendan O’Toole, and Tribbles’ Zaki Manian came together to share the highlights of the past month. Yet, that doesn’t mean that major amounts of alpha weren’t delivered too. Here’s a recap for those of you who missed it. 

The July Community Call had a brand-new co-host. Bob Calabritto, the man responsible for all things marketing at Inter Protocol, shed some light on the ongoing UI/UX redesign and rebranding. Both endeavors came about as a result of community feedback and seek to make Inter Protocol much easier-to-use, more user-friendly and recognizable. The roll-out of both is scheduled for Cosmoverse, so stay tuned.

Undoubtedly, one of the biggest and most ambitious achievements over the last month has been Agoric’s Upgrade 16 and the Orchestration Core functionality it introduced. Brendan O’Toole took the stage to outline the implications of this latest Agoric upgrade for Inter Protocol: 

“Upgrade 16 includes several Inter Protocol-relevant updates, such as price feeds performance enhancement and optimization. It wasn’t possible to add more collateral types before activating the upgrade, but from now on, the process will be much more streamlined and efficient.”

Let us use this occasion and encourage you to make your voice and preferences for new collateral types heard. It is up to the Inter Protocol community to make that decision, so go to the Agoric Discourse and start a conversation.

Brendan also provided a progress report on the Inter Protocol roadmap, and more specifically, on its liquidation visibility features. He confirmed that a dashboard exposing more liquidation and auction data is in the works. It is to allow for deeper analyses and easier troubleshooting. What’s more, by showcasing the liveness of the auctions and the exact way they work, it will also contribute to a much better user experience.

The Agoric developers have been focused on improving another UX aspect too. Since IPFS brought about various issues, the team has decided to create a new decentralized approach to the Inter Protocol’s front-end, and is now in the final stages of testing it. The solution, expected to be deployed over the coming weeks, will drastically improve the user experience of accessing and navigating the Inter Protocol dApp. 

The last piece Brendan touched on was Orchestration:

“We’re starting to think about an IST minting widget that leverages Agoric’s Orchestration capabilities. The idea is to create an embeddable front-end widget that extends IST minting to any dApp and makes remote IST minting possible. We’re currently discussing that project with some partners. That would be an exciting use case for Orchestration that increases the visibility of IST.”

Dean Tribble offered the perfect segue by presenting Upgrade 16 and Orchestration Core in more details:

“What Orchestration is all about is programmability for cross-chain applications and workflows. Here’s a simple example: if you have USDC on Ethereum and you want to use it to buy OSMO, TIA, or BLD, and then stake it, that simple operation would currently involve 4 signatures on 3 chains. It would take time, and it won’t be simple. You have to be really dedicated to actually execute it all the way through. And that is just a very simple case, we want to be able to perform much more complicated operations. What Orchestration enables is interacting with blockchain assets and services independently of the underlying chain, which is a core part of the Cosmos vision.”

The Agoric platform was built to facilitate multi-chain operations. The synonymous term “Chain Abstraction” is gaining considerable popularity, which actually shows that people are starting to realize the need for simplification. 

Upgrade 16 rolled out Orchestration Core, the root functionality that leverages the JS programming and smart contract environment on Agoric to empower developers to easily write cross-chain programs. It allows for easily responding to IBC messages, creating accounts on other chains, and controlling them remotely. 

“Something that was previously really hard to do, can now be expressed in 8 lines of code, because the Agoric platform has the unique native ability to run transactions and use operations that span multiple blocks and talk to multiple other chains. You can write understandable, human-readable code in JS, and combine multi-block workflows into one block of code.” 

Now that Orchestration Core is activated on mainnet, other incremental functionalities and applications can be rolled out too. In fact, the forthcoming Orchestration API is what will make everything described above much smoother. 

“By the end of this quarter, it will become unrecognizably easy to get multi-chain projects off the ground.”

Over time, this Orchestration functionality will be extended out to the EVM world, Solana, and so forth. It will enable not just simple connections, like the ones bridges already provide, but also programmability to boost rich economic actions all across. 

“People are coming to us with new and unthought-of workflows. What’s even more delightful is that people with existing products and customers come to us, because their customers want more. We can provide a really powerful customer retention technique since, by using our tech, these projects can enable their users to interact with multiple chains, but still remain on their platform.” 

At the same time, Agoric has been enhancing its tooling and documentation, so building from scratch becomes as easy as a children’s game. Developers are invited to join Agoric’s Early Access Program to start exploring this groundbreaking technology.

But where does IST fit in all this? All Orchestration builders will pay for their actions on the Agoric chain with IST. As a result, the Inter Stable Token will be easily transferable between chains and ecosystems. An economy flourishes when one can build interesting workflows. All future cross-chain use cases and applications to be built on Agoric will need a stable currency to move value back and forth, and will most probably choose to integrate IST.

“The original purpose of IST was to pay gas. A nontrivial part of our goals is to make it possible for builders to create things that have never been possible on any other platform. All of which, including installation and execution, will be paid for with IST. It is super excited to see that Orchestration may really make it possible for IST to become the stable token of the Interchain.”

That was Bob’s cue to turn the conversation to Zaki Manian and inquire about the furry invasion that has been dominating the social space lately. What Tribbles are, and what’s the vision behind?

“Tribbles are a culture token for Agoric. At the time, when I was dreaming the Sloth idea, I was also percolating the Tribbles idea. Sloths have been a really great cultural institution with the forthcoming Sloth chain. So, there are similarities, but what we wanted to do with Tribbles was something that has never been done on Agoric before, and even in Cosmos, and maybe has never been done in crypto.”

First and foremost, what Tribbles is going to be is a fungible token on Agoric. What’s more, all user interactions surrounding Tribbles, some of which are happening right now, involve IST. However, Tribbles is not an official Agoric project and is not an official IST project.

The vision for Tribbles consists in: 

1. An early access NFT, minted in IST, that opens the gate to a private Tribbles channel within Agoric’s Discord community. Discord is the place where all the latest updates, contests, and quests will be published, so owning one of these NFTs and joining the community will be essential. The Tribbles NFTs are the first step to building the Tribbles community. 

2. A Tribbles fixed-supply meme coin where the supply will be predicated by the amount of participation in the minting process. 

3. An airdrop of the Tribbles fungible token, which will require a small deposit in IST to be claimed. The airdrop will be gamified, as all quests and eligibility criteria will also be rolled out on Discord. There has never been an airdrop of such magnitude implemented on Agoric, but the Tribbles team is currently working on making it possible. 

4. The collected IST will be put into a liquidity pool for the airdropped Tribbles token. Funds generated by the NFT mints and the memecoin claim process will be used to generate a permanent IST/TRBL pool.

“Once we get there, and we already have the airdropped token and the liquidity pools, there’s a larger vision. It consists of a token that has a derivative and sort of continuous evolution.” 

This derivative nature of the Tribbles token, is inspired by a couple of different things: 

• The EigenLayer token and its built-in forking mechanism; 

• The idea of an intersubjective memecoin to be massively airdropped to thousands of addresses on Agoric. 

But what is intersubjectivity? Intersubjective means what people want it to mean, there are no absolutes. Over the course of building, there are going to be different versions of Tribbles tokens, each with unique features and utility. It will be up to the community to decide which version is the true one.

“At one point, there are going to be template contracts on Agoric, and it will be really easy for community members to create new Tribbles with new features, derived from a previous version. And that is the intersubjective vision.”

Along with its features and utility, Tribbles’ tokenomics will also evolve, and the Tribble holders will have to chose whether they want to convert their tokens to the new versions.

Finally, when asked about the timeline of the invasion, Zaki indicated that Discord is the place to get news. 

“I’ve committed to supporting a mustache, so we have that pressure.”

Listen to the full conversation here and make sure you join the August community call too! Follow us on X  and join the discussions on Discord to stay in the loop with all the latest news.