Founder Story: Federico Kunze Küllmer, Akash Khosla, and Nic Z. from Evmos

Evmos is bringing the world of Ethereum-based applications and assets to the interoperable networks of the Cosmos ecosystem, all while aligning developer and user incentives.

Evmos is a Circle Ventures Portfolio Company. 

Tell us the story behind founding Evmos.

Since the start of 2018, we’ve helped build the foundational technologies that have brought the Interchain to life, most notably the Cosmos SDK and Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol (IBC). Upon the completion of the Cosmos whitepaper, we remained focused on continuing to build out the vision of interoperability, next turning our attention to enabling the Ethereum ecosystem to become deeply integrated with Cosmos and vice versa. The story of this project traces back to Proposition 44 on the Cosmos Hub in April 2021, when the Hub’s governance community granted funding to Tharsis Labs (our developer team) to build the Ethermint library, a codebase we’ve developed to enable the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) to run on the Cosmos SDK. The launch of Evmos on mainnet in May of this year brought Ethermint to life with a general-purpose decentralized application platform that’s compatible with both the Ethereum and Cosmos ecosystems.

What is Evmos solving for the Cosmos ecosystem and its users?

Evmos brings the EVM to Cosmos, so developers don’t need to choose between building in one ecosystem or the other. Devs save time and resources when they only need to deploy dApps once, because the platform gives them composability across the Interchain and the EVM space. Meanwhile, users reap the benefits of having a single instance of applications to interact with that offers the best UX. Evmos is built for a future in which users are no longer just participants in siloed blockchain ecosystems; they simply access dApps without needing to worry about using ecosystem-specific wallets, tokens, and so on. 

What’s on your roadmap for Evmos going into 2023?

We’re excited to build out the functionality for any dApp on Evmos to directly leverage Cosmos’ Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol (IBC). It’s the best interoperability standard out there, and it’s rapidly gaining functionality with Interchain Accounts, Interchain Queries, and more. These tools will enable dApps on Evmos to not just move assets between Evmos and other blockchains in the ecosystem, but also to manage accounts and monitor data on those other chains. There’s a massive design space to be explored with IBC-enabled dApps, but one of the first things we expect to see is the rise of cross-chain DeFi. For instance, a dApp on Evmos could manage positions on Osmosis or Injective. 

What new innovation on Cosmos excites you in the next 12 months?

We’re most excited for upgrades to IBC like Interchain Accounts and Interchain Queries and especially excited to bring these interoperability mechanisms to the application layer, so dApps can compose across the Interchain. Another thing we’ve got our eyes on are blue chips from Ethereum and other ecosystems deploying their apps and tools in Cosmos (dYdX, USDC, The Graph, Chainlink, etc.). We expect these high profile moves to grab attention and help spur a new wave of appchain development. And thirdly, in a space where so much attention is on DeFi, we can’t wait to see the emergence of a ReFi (regenerative finance) ecosystem with Regen launching their marketplace for carbon credits and other ecological assets.

What would you say to fellow entrepreneurs in web3 getting started in this market?

Now is the time to build and make connections that can help when we break out of this bear market (it will happen!). The people you meet now who are also staying focused on building are exactly who you want to be close with when the market turns around.