Valentin Pletnev, CEO of Quasar Finance, on Cosmos Ecosystem and Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) Protocol | Ep. 222
In an exclusive interview with cryptonews.com, Valentin Pletnev, CEO and Co-Founder of Quasar Finance, talks about Cosmos, allowing investors to manage their DeFi investments across multiple chains and passing the quickest Osmosis governance proposal ever.
About Valentin Pletnev
Valentin Pletnev is currently the CEO and Co-Founder of Quasar Finance, a vault-based asset management appchain for the Cosmos ecosystem and the broader Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) protocol. Valentin has already had exposure and experience in a variety of blockchain and emerging technology-focused fields and is only 24yrs old.
Valentin Pletnev gave a wide-ranging exclusive interview which you can see below, and we are happy for you to use it for publication provided there is a credit to www.cryptonews.com.
Highlights Of The Interview
- Quasar Finance launching its mainnet, allowing investors to manage their DeFi investments across multiple chains
- Passing the quickest Osmosis governance proposal ever
Full Transcript Of The Interview
Matt Zahab
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Cryptonews Podcast. This is the first epi back on the shirt sm7b back in the cribo in Toronto. Super pumped to be back super pumped to be home. Also very pumped to have my guests on the show, who’s coming in hot from beautiful south of Spain in Malaga. What a treat. I was there last, heck, six, seven, eight years ago after I graduated uni, went on a little three month Europe trip. Slumming it, super poor style, backpacking, hostels. Oh, the stories, the mems, what a time. Time for the intros. Today we have Valentine Pletnev, the CEO and Co-Founder of Quasar Finance. At just 23 years young, Valentine has already had exposure and experience in a variety of Blockchain and emerging tech-focused fields, and is currently the CEO and Co-Founder of Quasar Finance, a vault-based asset management app chain for the Cosmos ecosystem and the broader Inter Blockchain Communication, also known as IBC Protocol. This lad is the real deal. Pumped to have him on the show. Valentine, welcome to the show my friend.
Valentin Pletnev
Thank you so much, Matt. It’s a pleasure to be here. And thanks for the warm intro, though I want to specify that I’m the CEO of Quasar Labs, the company behind the Quasar chain, as chains thankfully don’t have CEOs.
Matt Zahab
Well said. Very true. Quick shoutout Quasar Labs there. Let’s jump into the travel stuff, because you and I were shooting the shit about this before the show. How much fun is the south of Spain? It is just like the food is world class. The people are so friendly. Beautiful as well. You got good weather. I’m sure even in April you got some good weather. It’s just a different vibe in the south of Spain. There’s a reason why all the Brits just live down there for like, six months a year.
Valentin Pletnev
Yeah, no, it’s not a controversial take, but I truly believe Spain is the best country in the world to live in. And that really says something, because I have been to 30 countries and I still believe that Spain is just the one. And look, I love the states. I think the kind of the arguments of young people against the States is not always just a fight. I think the States is an incredibly unique country, especially when it comes to opportunity. But Spain, for living especially in a remote work life where you don’t need to be in the hubs to be exposed to opportunity. God, the weather, the people, it’s warm, you have culture, you have beaches. It’s also not superficial. People still enjoy life for the normal and for the traditional reasons. I used to live in Barcelona, actually last year, for almost the entire year. And Barcelona is different a bit because of Catalonia, and they have this situation, but the Mediterranean coastline of Spain is just unbelievable, truly.
Matt Zahab
So it’s one of the best all time. You also said that you did a world class rip from Vancouver all the way down the Pacific Coast. How much fun was that?
Valentin Pletnev
You said you were on a broke budget. I think I can probably relate. So I went nomadic when I was 18, and basically I lived out of a backpack and hear me out, a pillowcase filled with clothes. So if you take the pillow out of a pillowcase and you fill it with clothes and you hold it on yourself, they let you on it with a plane because they think that maybe you want to sit on it or you want to lean on it. That pillow had more clothes in it than my backpack could fit. And that’s the way I sneaked around, having to pay for check-in fee. And then, yeah, we rented a 35 year old Chevy truck that used to be an airport shuttle. Was it 25 person truck. Like the oldest thing I had like a V8 gas mileage horrendous and could barely reach 60 mph. If it did you would have to put in ear protection. We called her Emma, Emma the fat one. And we rode her from all the way from Vancouver down to LA on the 101, which was probably one of the most gorgeous rides I’ve ever done in my life.
Matt Zahab
So how the heck did you go from riding Emma the fat one down the Pacific Coast Highway to starting and also congrats on Mainnet launch. That’s incredible we’ll get into that shortly. But how the heck did you go from riding Emma the fat one down the Pacific Coast to founding a Blockchain company five years later?
Valentin Pletnev
Yeah, so actually I started with Blockchain even before Emma. I used to be a professional Counter-Strike player in Germany. I was the youngest player of the German championship season, 2016 or 2015. Actually, more accurately, Counter-Strike now is one of the biggest shooters in the entire world. Back then, it was the biggest one in Europe at least. But I got a hand injury, so I had to drop off. I couldn’t renew my professional contract. And so, as fate will have it, just two weeks after that I got exposed to Bitcoin for the first time, which was before the 2017 run. And as most people, you look into this in the beginning and you’re like, oh, money, right? But then you look into it even more and you realize you understand a lot about the background. My parents are both from Eastern Europe, ex-communists and socialist countries. So I grew up understanding the pain of people having to adopt to other systems and very much understanding the pain of capitalistic systems and I am a true capitalist I will state this here. This is a very out there statement, but I am standing by it. But I think people that live outside of that system are exposed to a different kind of relationship to that, trying to understand and learn it. So I learned the pain points very early and realized with Bitcoin that is something that the world needs and our system needs. And so when I was driving Emma down the coast, I was already in Crypto at that point, and we actually did some breaks on the road for me to write some articles back then which barely anyone read and no one really cared about. But I got lucky, was able to write for one of the kind of better research companies in Germany, which was actually acquired in a leveraged file by BlackRock, which, again, really says something. But, yeah, I owned a Crypto early. I never had a plan B.
Matt Zahab
It’s crazy how the world works sometimes. And my apology, sorry for the shitty sports injury. I feel like that’s happened to a lot of us. And then this just falls on your lap. It’s crazy how and I’m sure you were down on your luck. You were probably feeling a little shitty not to know where this thing that.
Valentin Pletnev
That is an understatement understatement. And, yeah, my dad, he says, let time be time, right? And the butterfly effect is really strong. At least I feel like in my life when I look at situations where the most devastating blows were the biggest grails of happiness I could have gotten later down the road, and the biggest mistakes I made were the biggest savers of my path. And I think life has a very product way in twisting it around and what you expect it to become.
Matt Zahab
I love that. Let’s jump into the bread and butter here. Now, before we get into Mainnets, let’s have you give our listeners a quick rundown of Quasar.
Valentin Pletnev
Quasar kazar, anything goes.
Matt Zahab
Quasar Finance, you guys just launched the Mainnet. But before we get into Mainnet, give a little overview about what you and the team are building and working on and then talk about how crazy it was launching the Mainnet and the multitude of shit shows that go on behind the scenes that people like me will never, ever get to see.
Valentin Pletnev
Yeah, depending on who I’m pitching this to, right? The pitch evolves. But I guess the quickest most condensed way to talk about what we do is we believe that DeFi, in order to become something that helps most people, needs to become something that transcends the little mud fights we have in Crypto right now about stuff like which ecosystem is the best or which platform is the best or which app is the best. It feels like system reliability engineers beefing about whether they should host their website on Azure Cloud or Google Cloud or AWS, whereas at the end of the day, the only thing you care about is, does it load fast? Is my data safe, and do I get what I need out of it? And we take this concept and we build the first and only way to manage DeFi assets of any sort through IBC. IBC Inter Blockchain Communication is a fancy term for essentially the only way to trustlessly bridge assets between chains. You can imagine that any chain is like a continent that was never exposed to another continent, has its own language and IBC is them agreeing on a common language for communication. That’s pretty much all it is.
Matt Zahab
Great analogy.
Valentin Pletnev
Thanks. I have a couple more of those, but yeah, for now that should do. And so with this common language, you suddenly transcend the borders even beyond what I guess, nature intended, right. You transcend the state machines that Blockchains are. And what that allows us to do is that we can really democratize access to DeFi for people instead of having different protocols fight for who gets the most TVL or trying to get someone else’s user base. All we do is build railroads and pipelines for people to manage assets on those protocols in whichever they seem fit. It is not my choice and it’s not my team’s decision to decide where you want to put your money our job is to allow you to do so. Something we forget in the west very quickly is access to capital. And access to capital is a common problem with access to financial products right? We think we live in a free society of free markets. But have you ever tried investing in the Citadel Securities, the company that manages 50% of all stock trading in the US. You can’t because they’re private. There’s three people that make money on your trading stocks. Have you ever tried to invest into a hedge fund with $50? You can, you need half a million to do it. And so everywhere we have these roadblocks for common and for average people to invest into what they believe in is right. We don’t feel it that much because we can still buy Apple stock. But try doing that as a person from Kazakhstan, right? It’s not that easy. And with that philosophy, we are breaking down barriers. We’re making DeFi easier. We’re building roads to DeFi protocols. We’re guiding liquidity to those and we’re allowing people to invest it to what they believe in.
Matt Zahab
Well said. Before we get into more stuff, give me some more analogies, big analogy fan on this pod here because a lot of this stuff, especially when we’re getting into the cross-bridge, cross-chain protocols, anything communication related to ZK rollup, ZK SNARKs, whatever you want to call it. The terminology and the jargon just become.
Valentin Pletnev
It’s so freaking wasted. It’s just acronyms after acronyms.
Matt Zahab
And it’s so tough because it’s one of the biggest catalysts for not allowing Average Joe’s and Josephines to get into the space.
Valentin Pletnev
We are a technocracy, whether we like it or not. We are massively technical.
Matt Zahab
We need more analogies. If you don’t mind buzz a couple.
Valentin Pletnev
I’ll give you more. Let’s actually take the bridge example because that’s one of the most passionate about most people that listening have probably used the bridge at some point. Bridges are great in one thing and that’s about the only nice thing I can say about them. And what is great about them is it allows you to hop between chains, right? You can take your assets to another chain. Here’s the issue. You can’t take your assets to another chain because Blockchains are, as I said, continents that don’t know about the existence of other continents. Ethereum chain does not understand the concept of country lines in the globe, neither the concept of Binance Smart Chain. It doesn’t exist for Ethereum, and so how the assets abridged is basically you take a centralized entity like, let’s imagine a post office or a bank and you bring the bank in, you’re now in the United States, let’s say that’s Ethereum and you have a piece of gold, let’s say that’s whatever token you believe in. You go to the bank, which is a centralized entity which has only legal obligations to you on a minimum extent, and the rest is trust based, right? And you give them a piece of gold and you say, I would like to bring this piece of gold to Germany. They’re going to tell you, well you can’t fly with that piece of gold it’s too big. We’re not going to let you. But here’s what we can do. We’ll take a piece of gold and we’ll give you a piece of paper. That can prove to Germany that you own that piece of gold. And we promise you that that piece of paper is worth it. So all right, so you give them a piece of gold. You take the piece of paper, you fly with the piece of paper, you bring it to Germany, you show the piece of paper and they see, oh, it’s from Jp Wong. That bank still exists. Seems legit. All right, we believe you. So what do you want to purchase, right? And you can sell your gold with a piece of paper. Now, what happens if Jp Wong dies? You kind of have a worthless piece of paper. Now, Jp Wong dying does not seem that realistic because it’s an institution that existed for 200 years and the US Government will bail it out. But the central parties that in this analogy are represented by Jp Wong are a bunch of people five to seven, that thought it was a cool idea and kind of just build that. I don’t know if I just dropped out, but let me just rephrase in case I dropped out. So what JP Wong is represented by in this analogy, which is hard to believe that they ever going to fail because they’re an old institution in the US government to pay them out is in Crypto five to seven people that thought it was a cool idea to build that barely have a legal structure. But they’re promising you that they’re not going to abuse your funds because the only way you can move assets through a bridge in Crypto is by putting them in one address controlled by these people then they print an asset representation on the other chain. But bridge hacks have been the biggest attack vector for all of Crypto, period. As much money has been lost in bridge hacks, maybe even more than in FTX or Mount Gox.
Matt Zahab
Every month there’s a new one every couple of weeks. It’s crazy.
Valentin Pletnev
And what people don’t realize is they think, oh, what are the odds of me getting hit in a bridge attack? I just barely use it for half an hour. No, every second you hold the asset on the non-native chain, you are exposed to that bridge being hacked entirely. So bridges are horrendous because you trade everything you care about in Crypto for a bit of convenience, but you also don’t really have a choice, right, because the other route is going through a centralized exchange, same shit, swap the tokens even more work, and send them back right? Now in comes IBC, and you can think of IBC like the global standard of passports. Every country has its own passport. They’re all a bit different, but they have the same form factor. There’s like four countries colors they can choose from, right? And they all share a system which allows them to scan your passport to check if it’s a real passport, right? So they have a proving mechanism in their own continents to check if that’s a real passport. So what happens with IBC is your power of gold is now a passport. You take it to fly. It’s your approval to leave the country, right. So the country scans and says, yes, that is a real passport. That is a real token. We’re sending you off to your destination chain. You fly in, you arrive in destination chain. They see it, and let’s say you are again a US passport holder. Germany looks at your passport, sees, oh, yes, that is a US passport, scans it, approves it as a real US passport, and gives you a stamp. And that stamp is the number in which Germany registered you by being in a country as a US passport holder, you still have US passport number. But now Germany has a number assigned to you and can verify who you are with their internal system, that is IBC. So tokens can move because there is a standardization between the chains to accept a certain type of token, and it can only move if the chains can prove to each other by sharing information, that it has left this chain and wants to arrive in that chain. And that is the only way to bridge assets without more security assumptions beyond the security of the actual chains that are in the system, right? The passport controls are only as secure as the passport controls in countries, but at least they’re not dependent on some random as five person team that promises you they’re not going to abuse their power. And that’s what we build on. So that’s the IBC analogy I like to use.
Matt Zahab
Very well said. Quick question on IBC. You just sold it very well. But why is an IBC bigger if it’s as prominent and powerful and useful?
Valentin Pletnev
Absolutely right. So IBC is actually really underrated in the Crypto space because it’s already facilitating billions of dollars of volume. In fact, there’s actually a case study now which has been, like, not leaked, but publicized. There’s two Japanese banks that use IBC, a fork of IBC, for them to send each other Japanese yen. They’re starting to use it because the reason it’s not widely adopted is because while this vision sounds great, imagine how the passport rollout looked like before countries had the infrastructure, right? Before you have a piece of paper and suddenly you’re saying, okay, you need the scanners. They’re standardized. Oh, the supplier doesn’t deliver to your country. Damn. Okay, so we need to create a supply line. Suddenly, oh, everybody wants a scanner. Well, there’s only ten people that build it. And suddenly scaling and growth issues are always the name of the game. And the reason IBC is not bigger is because right now it has been optimized for the Cosmos SDK chains, which you can almost look at, like the European Union, where every country is totally their own country, but they all agree to certain sets of rules. So the Schengen area was faster to adopt a common standard for travel. But now you’re asking me why is it not adopted in China? Well, because it’s a massive work to do, and it’s not necessarily as plug and play as someone joining Schengen, because all these different chains want to keep their sovereignty. So adopting IBC does not mean they can just use Cosmos SDK and build on top of that because they already exist, right? China is not going to join Schengen. So now we have to create a translation layer for the standard, which is what teams are building on, and it’s expanding beyond Cosmos. Teams are building and bringing it to Polkadot, to Ethereum, to Rollups like that is happening. That’s what’s currently being built on in the background. And it’s one of those moments where no one knows about this and suddenly everyone uses it and accepts it as a standard. That’s how it’s going to look like.
Matt Zahab
It’s crazy the growth of Cosmos and Atom over the last I’d say year, more specifically six.
Valentin Pletnev
I need to stop you because Atom is a massive misconception in Cosmos and I have a pet peeve with this, a really big one. I’ll give you another analogy.
Matt Zahab
Hit me.
Valentin Pletnev
When people buy Ethereum, they buy it because it’s a commodity that powers any and all activity on all of Ethereum, including Rollups, because at the end of the day, you have to pulse transactions that are paid in gas fees of Ethereum. Atom is a marketing play on the name Cosmos. Atom is one chain in Cosmos and people buy it because they think it’s a commodity of Cosmos, but it’s not. Every single Cosmos chain pays the gas fees in their own token. Atom is one of 50 chains and the entire market cap of Atom, for lack of better term, is people being confused, including me when I got into Cosmos.
Matt Zahab
Including me, who should know this.
Valentin Pletnev
And I meant I don’t blame you at all because there are still people in Cosmos that don’t realize that. And look, I’m the last one to make any assumptions about the economic value of Atom with replicated security, not to hop 50 topics, but with different updates coming to Atom, there is more value in Atom being added, but it is not the backbone of Cosmos, the same way that Ethereum is to ETH. And that’s a massive misconception that actually a lot of people in Cosmos, including us are fighting because it means that people understand that they’re not exposed to our protocols with Atom.
Matt Zahab
Super interesting. So if I wanted to have some exposure to the whole Cosmos ecosystem.
Valentin Pletnev
There is no good way of doing that, which is actually a fantastic leading up to our flagship vault coming up. But it all sounds so good to be true, but that’s actually a good follow up because we face that issue in the team because most of us bought Atom and then realized is not the commodity, including myself. I made that mistake one and a half years ago. So what we then figured, I was like, okay, but there needs to be a way for us to invest in IBC, right? Because IBC doesn’t have a token. That’s kind of what it makes a genius, too. It doesn’t have a token. So how do you invest into IBC? Well, I guess the next best thing we can do is invest into protocols that use IBC. And then you realize that there is 50. You’re like, yeah, no, I’m not about to hold 50 tokens and manage them. So actually, one of the first products we’re going to launch with after this errors is the first and only Cosmos ETF that is going to be a proper ETF. Like the financial players in the top can use an ETF. Let me ask you, when you buy the S&P 500, is there any way for you to redeem it from the underlying shares?
Matt Zahab
Don’t think so.
Valentin Pletnev
Should there be?
Matt Zahab
I mean, of course.
Valentin Pletnev
Because there is for the hedge funds and banks, they can redeem the underlying assets of ETFs yet again, another stage where we think we have a free financial system and we should look under the hood it’s not really free. You can’t so what we need to do is we need to democratize access to those financial tools. And that’s what we’re doing. The Cosmos ETF we’re going to launch with, you can redeem it for all underlying tokens. So you basically buy one token, which is ETF, and you can redeem it, and you get the entire list of underlying based on waiting with that one token as well n our vaults, because we use IBC, if you stake it, we can stake all the underlying for you in the background on the native chain. And you hold the staked assets so you get the staking rewards accumulated. And we’re currently working on that. You can vote on governance of every single underlying with the proportional amount of your underlying holdings.
Matt Zahab
No one else has this, there’s not one Cosmo ETF right now?
Valentin Pletnev
It does not exist anywhere in Cosmos, period. Not even Crypto.
Matt Zahab
How, though that seems like such a no brainer you know?
Valentin Pletnev
Because it’s fucking hard.
Matt Zahab
Right. Of course.
Valentin Pletnev
It’s so insane. If you knew the code insanity that’s going on in Quasar, you would understand. Imagine this I told you the passport analogy. And now imagine that you want to build an economy on passports.
Matt Zahab
That’s like multiple dozens of hundreds of notches above my pay grade.
Valentin Pletnev
Yeah. And that’s kind of what we did with IBC, right? So it sounds like a no brainer because, like, you know, from a non technical side, it is a no brainer. But on a tech side, you know, my devs you know they have their opinions about me pushing these things, but I think what they need to happen and the team is actually so hyped with how we advance IBC. Because IBC should not just be a passport control, it should be an economy built. It’s basically globalizing the world through standardized security checkpoints and movement of goods and you don’t have ports, and if you don’t have standard papers and if you don’t have scanning devices, then that’s what you’re dealing with and that’s what we’re dealing with.
Matt Zahab
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Valentin Pletnev
Almost everything.
Matt Zahab
All we see is the text ad go up. We see the landing pages go up. We see all the front end stuff. We see the countdown on social media platforms, and that’s it. What actually goes on? Give folks a little sneak peek.
Valentin Pletnev
I’ll gladly spill the beans. I can’t speak for other projects, but in our particular case. We had a lot of unique issues to fight with. So, first of all, let’s change the passport energy for packages. And let’s imagine that you build a system for packages this size. So, like, all the scanners at this size and then weighing them goes up to ten kilos or £20, right? Now, imagine that we came along and we want to please send packages this size, and they weigh a ton. So what happened is we’ve tested everything rigorously, and then once we deployed, all infrastructure broke, which not to raise red flags. The infrastructure breaking does not mean people lose their funds. It means that they’re not being sent. It’s not package burned. It’s more like package not delivered. Nonetheless, the package not delivered is not what you want if your entire protocol is built on package delivery services, right? So we’ve had essentially the entire team is Dubai, right? So I’m painting a scene, and I know the negative stigma about Dubai. We were only there because we are international team, and visas were very easy for everybody to acquire. So the entire team is Dubai all together in one room, 14 people grinding it out. And the first thing that happened was we realized a dependency that we were counting on was not properly implemented. So the first exchange that we build on is called Osmosis, which is the biggest dex in Cosmos. And they upgraded to V15, and it included a thing called Async ICQ, which is something we co developed with two other companies in Cosmos. It was actually a grant by the Interchange Foundation Async ICQ. Again, fancy words, but super simply just means that you can request data through IBC.
Matt Zahab
Got you.
Valentin Pletnev
Instead of having to use an oracle. So that’s all it is. You’re just requesting of data, which we need because we need to know how a position is doing, what are prices, what are pools. So we need to request data between chains. But in order for you to basically call the hotline, the Async ICQ hotline and ask a question to the other authority, you need to have a phone number. A parameter, and that parameter was forgotten. So they implemented it, but there was no number to call, so we couldn’t use it. And we realized that four days before our launch date. And passing a governance change proposal to change that takes seven days in Osmosis, I think six, seven, eight, which we didn’t have. So we were basically accepting that we’re going to fail Mainnet launch just by the timeline of a governance proposal until we realized there is a thing called expedited vote, which has never been tried, never been used, and never even, like not even not even attempted. Because what you need to do to pass an expedited governance proposal on Osmosis is to get two thirds of all staked Osmo to vote yes on your proposal in less than 24 hours to give you a feeling, a normal proposal.
Matt Zahab
What was the dollar amount to that you need.
Valentin Pletnev
$150,000,000. Need to vote yes in 24 hours. And to give you a feeling, the most obvious and biggest updates that Osmos ever had had a turnaround of 40% to 50%. Because the normal quorum is only 20%. And that 50% does not need to be a yes. It needs to be a yes majority of who votes, and it’s enough of more than 20% vote.
Matt Zahab
How the hell do you pull this off?
Valentin Pletnev
We went into the most insane war room mode ever. Basically, I think we have the most comprehensive contact list of Validators in Cosmos. I mean, it’s a joke, but I almost feel like I have their addresses where they live. We don’t. But we have the most comprehensive list of all Validators in Cosmos, and we were running a call center. Figuratively, I mean, anyone that has an Osmo was pinged by us, probably. And so we passed the first attempt at a governance proposal expedited. We passed it. We also got the highest turnaround ever of any governance proposal in Cosmos, which was 77 and a half percent of all staked assets voted yes on us, which translates to the highest single number of voter turnaround, which is 22,000 people voted yes on our proposal in a single day. So that’s an insane thing that happened to put us back on track. Well, it put us a day behind.
Matt Zahab
Hold up. I have a couple of questions on this, if you don’t mind me shifting and jumping in here. What was the workflow or protocol in order to get this done? Did you guys fire up a CRM to just attack?
Valentin Pletnev
First step was I was crying on the ground. That was step one. Step two was, our PM just landed from Germany. Comes through the door, sees me on the ground losing my shit, asks me what’s going on. I tell him what’s happening, and the first thing he says is, do we have a spreadsheet? And then everything snowballed from there. So we had him basically scraping any data points he could have. We had three people in the team that connected in Cosmos that told me any connection they have and sent me their Telegram names with who they belong to. We then created a spreadsheet with all validators and cross checked with on chain changes if they voted or not. And if they didn’t vote, we had a time frame where we would reaping them and then we would ping them on any channel we could find, whether on the website or by connections, through connections, including I talked to the Osmosis co-founders some of the Cosmos hub other influencers that started creating a marketing campaign online that was steamrolled into all of Cosmos knowing about Prop 466 and essentially just kept bothering the living shit out of anyone that has Osmo for a whole day. Oh, also a ton of Red Bull.
Matt Zahab
Of course, and maybe some other stuff, too. But let’s get real, it was sales 101. It was end of quarter crunch time, you guys it was do or die. You had to. I love that.
Valentin Pletnev
Once he came in and said that we have a spreadsheet, there was no question of will we do it? There’s a question of how hard are we going to hit it?
Matt Zahab
I love that. Okay. Sorry to interrupt there.
Valentin Pletnev
We do that, right? We’re day behind, but it’s okay. And so what happens at that point is and that’s the unique thing, right, where I can’t speak for the teams is the amount of outside dependencies we had was ridiculous because the very nature, right? Like if you have your own country, if you’re your own continent, and like Ethereum is your chain, then your dependencies are incredibly minimal because everyone’s speaks a language, everyone knows the streets, everyone knows each other, easy peasy. But if you are basically the first passport check was just created and then you come along and say, how about it? We put everything on this. Then the metal scanners in the terminals break. The waiting of the packages breaks, the x-ray machine breaks, the passports break. Like the first plane just landed and we created a jumbo jet out of wood. I mean, it was truly complete mayhem. So we had basically on call with multiple teams in a lot of infrastructure sites from RPC nodes to relayers, which are basically the way that packages are being sent between chains to the IBC team in our Slack Channel to basically Osmosis designating a guy to help us any time of the day. So essentially it was a game of can we make this all not be broken for an hour so we can launch. And another insanity is that for a chain to be launched, you create something called the Genesis transaction, which is basically the state at which the chain starts, which is where validators except that is now right, the chain. So you start producing blocks after that. But that means you need to coordinate validators. So they all need to be up at a certain time. And then one of them is missing and you need to run up to them and then you can’t start so you delay. And then another guy’s time zone is starting to go into 03:00 A.M. for him and the amount of stakeholder management outside of pendency management. And then on top of that, code doesn’t do what you think the second you think it does it, right? So then on top of that, we have basically two of our team members, the vault boys, we call them, being awake for 45 out of 47 hours. I am not making this up. They were living zombies by the end of it. I mean, true soldiers. I mean, I’m talking military boot camp. Yeah, basically ironing out the last kind of problems, because most of the things. Just you can’t test, because how are you going to test if a jet flies before you try to take off, right? I mean, you can simulate what you want, but at the end of the day, you don’t know if there’s going to be a tornado on the way or not.
Matt Zahab
100%.
Valentin Pletnev
Honestly, I cannot be more honest about the most stress I think, most of us ever experience and the biggest thing we’ve ever done.
Matt Zahab
And my apologies, because I’m sure this is something that doesn’t want to be thought about, but what takeaways or lessons? What are the biggest ones?
Valentin Pletnev
First of all, always plan more time. You think you plan enough time, plan more time. Secondly, plan more time. Thirdly, I would say it was almost necessary for us to just so blindly go into expanding IBC, because I think if we were to understand the state of which IBC was before the launch, it may not have worked, right? It was one of those situations where it’s like, no one told us it’s impossible, so we just did it.
Matt Zahab
Right.
Valentin Pletnev
So I think that another thing I would maybe say, is like, don’t trust as little outside dependencies as you humanly can. There were a couple of situations where if we had more time, we could have done more things in house, which, timeline wise, is horrendous. Business decision wise, is bad. Competitive, landscape wise, it’s bad. It’s not a great decision, but it is a fantastic decision when it comes to having a good launch. The more you can do internally, because the more you have to wait on someone answering your Slack message that’s in a different time zone, right? The more stress everyone experiences, because we had multiple moments where the entire team was looking at a freaking laptop and looking at the bottom left corner of Slack and waiting for it to say, this person is typing, right? And you just don’t want that in your launch because it makes you feel very vulnerable to the world.
Matt Zahab
Very well said. Valentine, this has been an absolute treat here. The Quasar and Cosmos and IBC aside, what else gets you going right now? This episode will air mid April kind of thing. What else gets you going in Crypto and finance?
Valentin Pletnev
Mid going? My birthday gets me going 14th of April.
Matt Zahab
I love that. Happy early birthday.
Valentin Pletnev
Thank you. You mean outside of Crypto or, like, anything?
Matt Zahab
What are you passionate about right now? Are you messing around with AI?
Valentin Pletnev
No, hell no. I am a very strong believer in single focus things. I am a very primal, male brain human, and I cannot do more than one thing good. So I’m not looking into AI. I’m sure I have ChatGPT open and I give myself my daily scale of how far the technology is advancing. But beyond that, I’m not really dabbling in AI.
Matt Zahab
Any areas of Crypto that excite you a lot besides what you and the team are directly dabbling into?
Valentin Pletnev
Sure. Besides IBC, I would say it gets tricky immediately. I think IBC is really like the nonplus ultra for me. But I guess besides IBC, the ETH developments are exciting me a lot. I think that Ethereum, look, China’s massive issues, right? Centralization happening, with the exchanges pulling up, and now with the US scrutiny against taking services. But even looking beyond that, ETH is a modern world wonder. It is an unbelievable feat of human engineering and coordination globally and a vast community, and on top of that, the ETH asset is such a clear cut commodity that Ethereum just really excites me. I think that Interoperability again, it is obviously. But that’s what excites me the most, because once we get to a point where we get beyond the mud fights of which ecosystem is the best, we can start to finally pitch the value adds that people can get from Crypto instead of no, this token is better than that one. I’m excited for new frontiers to be reached in governance more and more, I guess, direct governance. So right now, a lot of governance decisions and a lot of chains are basically the governance says, what a multi-sig, right? Which basically imagine a vault, like a physical vault, not our vault, with like four keys, what they should do with the money. But at the end of the day, they can just use the keys to steal the money. I’m very excited for direct democracy, where basically the vault will mathematically, automatically do what the chain decides. I’m very excited for that because it takes the more human error we take out, the better for everyone in the space. Otherwise, travel gets me going again. Winter is usually hard for me. I’m a Southern person. So flying to New York, seeing the world again.
Matt Zahab
What’s your favorite city in the world?
Valentin Pletnev
My guy, that hard of a question this late. Can I go by continent?
Matt Zahab
Nah, too easy.
Valentin Pletnev
Damn it. All right. Barcelona.
Matt Zahab
Barsa.
Valentin Pletnev
Yeah, but not in summer. Way too full but Barcelona.
Matt Zahab
Do you packed in summer?
Valentin Pletnev
My God. Yeah. And look, I know the irony of me as a tourist saying it’s too full in summer. I understand. But nonetheless, it is so ridiculously full in summer. I mean, it’s completely bonkers. My favorite time in Barcelona was autumn and spring. When it’s already warm, but just not that many tourists yet.
Matt Zahab
Of course. What about most overrated city you’ve been to?
Valentin Pletnev
LA is very overrated. I would say Paris.
Matt Zahab
I love hate with Paris.
Valentin Pletnev
Yes. Right. But I think something is overrated if people only say they love it, but it’s actually love hate. I feel like that’s overrated is an abusive relationship where you live for the 20% relationship or overrated.
Matt Zahab
That would be a love hate relationship. But you want to rip their head off as well.
Valentin Pletnev
Exactly.
Matt Zahab
We already did the hot take factory. Give me a couple Valentine hot takes doesn’t have to be Crypto to related anything. Health, wealth, happiness, you want to get spicy, politics, you name it.
Valentin Pletnev
All right. I think the world is going to go slowly back into traditional gender roles once the current experiment is going to start failing more and more. This is not an argument against equality. I want to be very honest on that. It’s not an argument against equality, but I think that the current model of everyone should work as much as they can and hustle culture and hashtag side hustle and hashtag. I mean, people are not happy, right? It sounds primal, but we should get kids and we should be able to live with kids and not have to twist every dollar we have. I hope the world finds its way back to that. I think another hot take is that the east will not win against the west. A lot of things point to that, but I think that there’s a sentence I love which Churchill said about the US, which is, you can be guaranteed that the US will do the right thing after they tried every other possibility. It’s a pretty funny statement, but I do believe we’re going to pull through. I did not lose hope on the west at all. Another hot take? I don’t know. I think I’ve already got some really hot takes.
Matt Zahab
Those are two spicy ones, which I love. I mean, the first one is controversial and you and I are in the same yacht. Most definitely, but it’s just tough with the current agenda, though.
Valentin Pletnev
I am incredibly grateful to have lived in a society that has free speech and free opinion, and I want to be very straight as well. I don’t want to be a person that people listen to about this, and I don’t want to decide for others, right? Like, the only thing that I really care about is having a society where people can live the way they want, right? So there’s not an argument about, oh, no, this is a society that doesn’t work right now. Let’s change it. There’s an argument that I think by natural evolution, we’re going to start moving back towards that way. That is the theory.
Matt Zahab
And these are strictly your thoughts?
Valentin Pletnev
Yeah. Not putting them on anyone else.
Matt Zahab
Exactly. These belong to you.
Valentin Pletnev
If something else makes you happy, then I’m happy. You’re happy. Very libertarian on that side.
Matt Zahab
I love that. What a treat. This is a lot of fun, man. We got to do this. And how long are you in the team in Malaga for?
Valentin Pletnev
Currently, it’s three of my team and I, and we’re leaving in well, I’m leaving in two weeks. Two of them actually live here, which is the odds of that happening are pretty funny. But, yeah, two of them live here, and then the other buddy is flying, I think end of May or end of April.
Matt Zahab
Amazing. What a treat. Valentin, thank you so much for coming on. This was a crazy episode. I have a lot to learn, and you taught me something that was so front of mine this whole time. And I honestly own apology to a couple of people because I have told them that Atom is directly correlated to the Cosmos ecosystem. And you learn something every day.
Valentin Pletnev
I mean it kind of is, because people make that mistake. I already know that.
Matt Zahab
But that’s on like, I got to do my freaking homework. Thank you for telling me that. I appreciate it.
Valentin Pletnev
I appreciate you for standing above that and trying to fix it.
Matt Zahab
Thank you. Before you go, you got to let our listeners know where they can find you and Quasar on socials online as well as IBC. All three of you. You’re not big on Twitter, though, right?
Valentin Pletnev
I am, relatively. Look, what is big, right. I have 1.5K followers, but I’m not a personality, in a sense. Well, I’m on my way there, so, yeah, my Twitter is @valeyo777 and then the company Twitter is @QuasarFi which by the way the website is also quasar.fi and on top right you’re going to find all our social links. Don’t trust random people sending you links. The website has the actual right links. And you can find our Discord there, you can find our Twitter there. We have our own blog on the website. We are about to link some media content. But you can find us on CoinDesk. You can find us on Cointelegraph. I have it on video piece on Nasdaq. So if you Google Quasar Finance, you’re going to find a lot of content about us, whether it’s video or text.
Matt Zahab
Love it. Thank you so much man, truly a treat. Can’t wait to have you on for round two. And I will be in Europe towards the end or middle end of summer. I’m going to hit you up. If you’re going to be in Germany, I might have to come see you.
Valentin Pletnev
Sick. Sounds good man. Thank you so much.
Matt Zahab
Folks what an episode with Valentine Platnev, CEO and Co-Founder of Quasar Finance, dropping knowledge bombs left, right, and center taught me something crazy today. The king of analogies and some spicy takes too. We absolutely love to see it. Folks, do go check out all of his endeavors. I will include everything in the notes as always. To the listeners, love you guys. To the team, thank you so much for everything. Justas, my amazing sound editor appreciate you as always. Back to the listeners, love you guys. Keep on growing those bags, keep staying healthy, wealthy, and happy. Bye for now and we’ll talk soon.
