Kill Bill: Vol. Cosmos

Polkachu Intern | 2023-01-29

The Cosmos ecosystem has a problem. It is easy to spin up a chain, but it is an uncharted territory if, when and how a chain should wind down. If we want to foster a healthy ecosystem, the competitive selection should weed out chains without product-market fit. This essay attempts to write a playbook on how to wind down an NGMI chain.

It is time to send Cerberus Chain to a far far away farm.

Cerberus chain was a bull-market project. The founding team never had a vision to create utilities for users. It could not even make a sustainable meme to stick for this supposed meme coin. Its most valiant effort was to sell some NFTs for pennies. See image below.

As the bear market prolonged, the chain became an empty shell. The founder began to fade away and sometimes took days to respond to a simple request. Finally, the founder deleted his Discord account and called it a day. This left hundreds of nodes still making empty blocks every 6 seconds. At the time of this writing, its Osmosis pool has $16K in liquidity and high trading slippage.

The chain still has some builders and supporters. However, it is difficult to develop on a chain when a disappeared anonymous founder holds a large bag and is able to rug the project any time. In the Cosmos ecosystem, because it is so easy to spin up a new chain, it makes more sense to just support these builders on a new chain if they insist on building.

So the time has come. Here I propose a playbook to wind down Cerberus Chain:

Submit a text proposal to get the community approval to wind down the chain
If the prop passes, >33% VP validators coordinate to wind down the chain. It is possible that builders want to continue to build on a new chain with the same community. If this is the case, validators should continue the network until the builders are able to take the snapshot.
If the prop fails, regardless of how they have voted on the prop, validators can choose to wind down their nodes as long as they give the community a reasonable notice period. They need to coordinate a bit to avoid 33% VP being offline at the same time.

If Cerberus Chain does wind down, we should celebrate. When a guddest boi goes to a faraway farm, another guddest boi is born or rescued. And establishing a good playbook to wind down an NGMI chain will be its lasting legacy to the hoomanity. 🫡