Hi! I’m Adair, a nerd with a passion for classical music, sovereignty, and permanence of humankind. Today marks the second anniversary of my acquaintance with Howard, my best friend and co-founder. It also commemorates the inception of Abstract Money, a developer-focused platform for the next-generation of decentralized consumer applications. Our journey begins with a serendipitous meeting at Cosmoverse 2021 in Lisbon.
A Cosmic Encounter
At Cosmoverse, Howard was the first human with whom I dared talk (albeit awkwardly) at the conference, where we discovered a mutual obsession with Terra and Luna. LFG! Like many others, this stemmed from the incredibly lucrative “risk-free” yield farming opportunities on Anchor and Mirror (may they rest in peace).
Star-struck nerds with @sunny
Cosmoverse was my first IRL crypto conference, my roots having been in the EVM space. I ended up in Cosmos due to its truly decentralized ethos which is starkly different from other globalist ecosystems - and shoutout to Cryptocito for highlighting it! On the other side, Howard was CTO at White Whale, a protocol delivering some of the most advanced DeFi products in Cosmos at the time. I was a bit starstruck by him and Sunny to say the least, my professional software experience only having been as a corporate cog.
Bidding Adieu to Big Corporate
At the time, I was part of an amazing team at AWS: a giant corporate structure with startup-like teams and a culture that matched. I loved my team and my autonomy, though the limitations of web2 quickly became glaring. One could have a tremendous impact on customers and profitability, though web2 is not a meritocracy and the cog reaps no rewards from the performance of the engine. I booked a flight to Belgium to work with Howard IRL. Good morning su… cloudshine?
A Problem with Web3
Decentralization is inevitable. Though by definition, decentralization means fragmentation, and this is ever-clear with the development of the Cosmos ecosystem and web3 at large. On Ethereum, everyone is building on the same protocol, hence why collaboration is is incentivized to drive value to that protocol. Cosmos is a different story. Application-specific protocols - read applications - are the basic unit of value-capture, and therefore teams are incentivized to build in silos. Collaboration is secondary as it may lead to others beating your application to market. Every team starts from scratch, makes the same mistakes, and wastes effort!
The Idea
Howard ideated DAO-OS as a modular standard in building CosmWasm applications on Terra, aimed at solving the problems with fragmented development. “DAO” because organizations are the base unit of collaboration, and “OS” as it enables execution of applications and control of data flow. This later became Abstract OS as an homage to the abstraction of OSes. Next up: Abstract Hypervisor?
We unveiled Abstract OS at Cosmoverse 2022 in Medellín as a modular application development platform. Its potential was evident with our victory at the first CosmWasm hackathon with Equilibrium, a cross-chain, auto-balancing portfolio application. However, we weren’t satisfied.
