Hello World,
TL;DR - Goodbye Citizen Cosmos, Hello Citizen Web3
I’m the founder of Citizen Cosmos, Serj. Around 3.5 years ago, me and my ex co-founder, started a project together - Citizen Cosmos. Today, I am sunsetting the project, but with a twist. Here is the full story:
Roughly, at the start of 2012 I heard about Bitcoin. Luckily, the person that pilled me (into blockchain I mean), was more or less a friend (btw, the guy ended up stealing a lot of money from myself and a few other folks down the line, but I guess that’s not the story), which helped me to stay focused, even though I didn’t believe in any of that crap (I’m using this word, cause that was exactly how I viewed it all back then), or so it seemed… For then, it pursues my passion for economics and for libertarian views.
Winter 2013 was fun. By this period of time I got familiar with mining, and visited a few meetups in the Middle East (I’m trying to skip as much geographical and precise info as possible due to my personal privacy preferences, but yeah…). In December 2013 me and some partners had an idea to purchase a hotel in the Baikal lake, to escape the upcoming end of the world. You know, a lot of fresh water, good ecology, all that =) I’m an ex HORECA person. Could work. Of course, it ended up us losing our first earned money in the bear that followed.
Another year passes, and I realize that this Bitcoin thing goes a lot further. I started to understand, learn and even preach crypto. I started to organize small meetups in places, where people looked at me like crazy just for saying the word crypto. But who cares when you love it! Come 2015/6. I decided it was time to go full crypto. At this stage we had a small in-between-friends altcoin fund. I was a top author on Steemit for a few months, and I bump into Cyber fund (the truth is, we already met and cross path by chance before, but didn’t connect). One thing leads to another, and we launch Golos, then come 2017, 2018… Only all this is a very separate story, and I would like to get back to the primary subject.
I guess a fun fact to mention is that what was once cyber fund, then became many projects – Very, Many projects =) Some of these you probably recognize: Cyber, P2P, Citizen Cosmos and plenty more. BTW, as much as some people love conspiracy theories, the truth is that we are so far away from cooperating with each other, it’s crazy. This is why we all split in the first place. Although a lot of us maintain great, and even sometimes friendly relationships.
After I left Golos in 2018, I started my own project in blockchain consulting, and I was also helping as a guest COO at projects. I did a lot of public talking. Started to get deeply involved in free education, on-and-off line. In 2019 due to my own stupidity I got hacked. The story goes public. I lose everything I have. Luckily for me, back then, my ex co-founder helps me to get out of it. And I get a call from a few friends. The guys that are building Cyber – they help me out a lot, and at one point convince me to work with them on Cyber.
This leads me to starting to work on Cosmos a lot. I start translating “today in Cosmos”. Start to organize some local events. It was cool. Even launched prop 26, the grandaddy of web3 funding, although it was rejected. BTW, this is really what you may call, long story short, as we are almost 8 years fast forwarded from the start of it.
Somewhere during that time, an idea of a podcast focused on the Cosmos ecosystem arises. It’s not pretty, not polished, but one things leads to another and the first episode of it is recorded in Berlin, in the ex Tendermint office during Covid. Iconic I guess.
Things started to evolve fast at this stage. A series of events leads to the fuckGoogle validator being rebranded and given to Citizen Cosmos. We organize a HackAtom. We are here, there and everywhere =)
In January 2021 I decide to leave Cyber and work fully on Citizen Cosmos. Oh boy. The amount of fuckups I made. From wrong teams, to wrong priorities, to wrong decisions. It was all there. Having quite a big experience in enterprise and private business, my biggest lessons – doing a business alone, is very hard. Like harder than you think…if you think you can imagine. Though again, not the point.
Citizen Cosmos had its ups and downs. One thing is – it was always true to itself. No advertisement model. Only web3. Pilled plenty of projects and people into Cosmos and monetization via validation (because it’s important to actually utilize the economy and not just HODL tokens underneath the mattress) and much more. We had 2 or even 3 teams, depending on how you count. 1 of these teams even left to fight in a war, alas.
This brings us to today, or rather 2–3 weeks ago. As you can imagine, this 10+ year journey described on 1.5 pages of A4 does not contain everything, and I don’t think it should. But let’s just say, that I’m cutting corners, or it will be too boring.
At that point I decided that it was enough and that the project needs to be revamped. Yes, prop 818 was a trigger reason. Yet, I can tell you that the reasons are plenty, starting from the fact that it has been sponsored purely by me and working at 85 percent minus recently. And going to such reasons as (not enough) security, personal stories that will stay out of this and much more, such as well… let’s be honest – no one wants to listen to values, people want bread and entertainment.
I’m not going to go deeply into my emotional involvement and why I think that a lot of the things that are happening around in crypto are not fantastic. Yes, I’m referring to centralization of services, governance and many other things. Reason is: 1) There are plenty of good things too. The world is Ying Yang after all, and, 2) It’s no one’s fault in particular, it’s collective.
I will say one thing: I truly hope that we will all learn to recognize 1 thing: shit smells. No matter who it belongs to, a plant, a human, an animal, a mycelium. Its shit. Instead of thinking that my shit is more important, let’s try to just accept that all shit is shit. Its equal. Instead of picking shit, let’s try to actually look deeply, preferably alone in a dark room, into a mirror – but not to point the finger – to just understand that we are all the same. And the person in the mirror too. That alone IMO helps to liberate and to concentrate on what’s important – freedom. And decentralization is something that can help that freedom to prevail. So stop building crap you wouldn’t use yourself. Stop blaming others for using the tools you don’t think you should use and be an example… But hey, sorry - went off-topic.
So what will happen to Citizen Cosmos?
Right now, the project is going to a full revamp. We will keep some of the media, we will keep the monetization model. The new project will be called Citizen Web3. It will take some time to prepare the new infra, the new team, the new focus, which is going to be validatorinfo.com
This means that the following 2–3 months Citizen Cosmos… oops Citizen Web3 will be working on minimal operational cycles. We will still release content (we have a lot on the kitty), we will still keep on validating. Everything will happen gradually, so there is no need to panic (not that someone is, but it sounded cool) and no need to do anything.
Following prop 818 we have already started to make changes to our infra, with the introduction of Horcrux on some of the nodes and have made some updates to other servers. Carrying on, part of the change to Citizen Web3 is the move to a far more secure, bare metal focused set up.
Things will be slow, as we are trying to figure things out, step by step. One thing is for certain: Some might see this as a fall. Well, so be it. Call it what you may. If so, look at this post as the song of the Phoenix. We will rise and reborn. May the code be with you!