Juno AMA Coverage — by Secure Secrets
Greetings Juno community! This AMA occurred on 6/7/2021 in the Juno subreddit with co-Founders of the Juno Network, Jake Hartnell and Immasssi! A special thank-you to everyone involved with the AMA. This is our first piece of content created for the Juno community, we look forward to creating more in the future! -Secure Secrets → A Juno Testnet Validator
[Begin AMA]
[Immassi]: Today we hope to focus the conversation on the functionality of Juno, the use of Juno Smart Contracts, how it utilizes ATOM, the Juno chain and it’s future, and a little bit about the mainnet launch.
[Community member]: Why was the decision made to bring smart contracts off-chain and to build Juno as a separate Network instead of just using CosmWasm on the hub?
[Immassi]: Great question.
So a large group of atom supporters ie. validators, developers and ecosystem enthusiast came together early in the year in order to advance cross-chain smart contracts.
There is/was a shared vision around offloading smart contracts to a sister Hub ideally to preserve the neutrality of the Cosmos Hub. So the idea is to have a dedicated smart contract zone that can specifically focus on smart contracts while at the same time providing utility to the cosmos Hub. So the plan is to make an early IBC connection to the cosmos hub and later in the year utilize shared security.
Other key ideas were around having this new sister hub in the hands/governed by atom holders. Specifically in the hands of staked holders that support the hub and participate in onchain governance. This directly ties into the Juno distribution model which we can get into in a minute.
[Community member]: What are the plans for JUNO when Cosmos Hub supports shared security? I suppose that’s up to governance but is it something that was considered?
What sort of privacy features could be supported?
Is there a confirmed validator list for the JUNO network?
What kinds of applications do you think JUNO is best suited for?
Could JUNO be used to create a new peg zone by building a bridge to other networks?
[Immassi]: Yes correct the shared security question will be in the hands of Juno holders (atom stakers) later in the year although the common vision is to utilize a hybrid system whereby native validator security is enhanced by shared security.
There are around 90+ validators currently that have expressed interest in securing the Juno Hub upon launch. Many have been on the testnets. We will soon be going into testnet-6 and possibly another one before the smart contract competition starts.
In terms of applications that Juno is best suited for, therte is literally no limit. Everything that is currently built on Ethereum will be built on Juno. This is also how the smart contract competition will be structure were we will have several categories that will be incentivized so that developers tackle a wide array of dapps on Juno and eventually deploy them on the mainnet ranging from gaming to defi.
[Community member]: Is there a tentative launch date planned?
If someone wanted to get involved with the development of Juno, or deploying their own smart contracts, where should they go?
[Jake Hartnell]: They should pop into the Juno discord and say hi! https://discord.gg/cRkUv6rfrr
As for launch date, we’re waiting on a stable 1.0 CosmWasm release which should happen soon. The reason being, we want to deploy a fully functional chain and we also don’t want to break any smart contracts with an upgrade. The 1.0 CosmWasm release will have a stable API that will be supported for a long time.
[Immassi]: Yes are aiming for a launch shortly after Cosmwasm 1.0 gets released which is expected at the end of June.
There is no rush because the top priority right now is the smart contract competition which will give Juno a strong adoption kickstart right at launch due to the way we are planning the challenge.
The best way to get involved is via the Juno Discord Validator Lounge, Validator Lounge or Delegator Lounge.
✅ Juno Discord: https://discord.gg/QcWPfK4gJ2
[Community member]: I think for a lot of people are pulled to the idea of cross-chain smart contracts. Just how difficult and innovative is this to pull off? How much research and development is required to make this possible? What will be the advantages of developing smart contracts on Juno instead of directly on another chain itself?
Thanks!
[Jake Hartnell]: One of the great things about the Cosmos Ecosystem is the sheer amount of modules available for integration. Moreover, tools like Starport make it super simple to create a new chain. We’ve also benefited immensely from the work of the Confio team on the CosmWasm module. Thanks to all these community efforts, Juno is fully working today.
While it was fairly straight forward to pull off, the harder part is building a community. We need to create an ecosystem of people who know how to write smart contracts in Rust! To do this we’re running a Hack Juno event with ~%1 of the Juno supply available as rewards for those who write useful smart contracts or documentation.
We’re also looking to financially support crucial parts of the ecosystem as well of development of Juno itself through the community pool.
[Immassi]: Jake will get into the first part of the question so he can give you a bit more technical details and i will focus on the dsecond part of your question.
“What will be the advantages of developing smart contracts on Juno instead of directly on another chain itself?”
Here a breakdown that shows you the key benefits of developing & utilizing Juno.
⚫️ Interoperable smart contracts
⚫️ Wasm & (EVM)
⚫️ Smart contracts in multiple languages Rust & Go (C, C++)
⚫️ High scalability
⚫️ Ease of use
⚫️ Modularity
⚫️ Ultra low fees & deployment of contracts
⚫️ Free & fair asset distribution 100% to staked atom
⚫️ Onchain governance
⚫️ Community Pool (Stacked)
⚫️ Balanced governance (Zero top heavy control)
⚫️ High network incentives (Staking 2.0 model)
⚫️ Permissionless
⚫️ Decentralized
⚫️ Censorship resistant
[Community Question]: What's Junos plan to bring more education to Cosmos Smart contracts?
Will the EVM module make Juno interactable with Ethereum?
Thanks 😁
[Immassi]: Thank you for the great question. Initially the Juno Hub will only support Cosmwasm 1.0 at launch but yes the plan is to bring the EVN asap so that Ethereum developers can bring over their contracts to Juno and therefore to the Cosmos ecosystem :)
[Jake Hartnell]: This is one of the main reasons I got involved in Juno! We’re having a Hack Juno competition to incentivize people to write Cosmos Smart contracts (hello examples), as well provide how to blog posts and documentation. There is an extremely large amount of rewards, and we hope it will kick off a Cosmos Smart Contract community much like Game of Stakes created a community of validators.
Many chains are opting to use the CosmWasm module (including my main project Stargaze), and while Juno is a chain that will specialized for Smart Contracts we hope that educating more people will benefit the entire Cosmos Ecosystem.
So learn to write Smart Contracts! It will be an extremely useful skill and it’s a good chance to earn some Juno.
[Community Member]: For the uninitiated, what exactly goes into writing a smart contract?
Will Juno have an easy-to-use user interface to interact with the chain?
[Jake Hartnell]: An easy-to-use interface for interacting with Smart Contracts on chain would be a great tool for the community to fund! So hopefully we’ll have something like the Remix IDE soon.
That said, the great thing about writing smart contracts in Rust is that you can use all the existing Rust tooling. VS Code has some pretty great Rust tooling!
Anyone wanting to learn more about smart contracts should reach out in the Discord: https://discord.gg/cRkUv6rfrr
We’re working on our documentation (contributions welcome), but the CosmWasm docs are pretty excellent and a good place to start: https://docs.cosmwasm.com/
[Immassi]: The easiest way to get started on your journey to develop smart contracts on Juno is to check out the beginners guide to Cosmwasm
- Documentation: https://docs.cosmwasm.com/
- Awesome CosmWasm: https://github.com/cosmwasm/cawesome-wasm
- Production grade smart contracts: https://github.com/CosmWasm/cosmwasm-plus
- Trivial contracts: https://github.com/CosmWasm/cosmwasm-examples
- Testnet information: https://github.com/CosmWasm/testnets
- RPC, LCD, Faucet and block-explorer information under subdirs: https://github.com/CosmWasm/testnets/tree/master/musselnet
[Community Member]: What kind of governance proposals do you expect to see on Juno? What would you like to see?
[Immassi]: The governance genesis so to say will introduce the staking 2.0 model which was discussed by the community for the past 2 months. It will bring a reward model that is very sound.
Details can be reviewed by everyone here: https://github.com/CosmosContracts/Juno
The community pool will initially have a lot of resources with a total of 20 million Juno at launch. This is more than any cosmos sdk based chain.
It will be up to everyone to use this as primary means to fund promising tools & infrastructure to facilitate easy onboarding of new develiopers into the ecosystem that want to deploy smart contracts.
This should be the ultimate focus early on. There is a massive shortage of good developers in the space. Our job should be to create an attractive environment for them to get started.
[Community Member]: Could you fill us in a little more on the Hack Juno competition? Is this up and coming or to be created still? Will you wait for CosmWasm 1.0 to begin the competition?
Also, could you quickly cover the distribution of Juno?
What are you personally looking forward to the most with Juno? Are there any smart contracts you are looking forward to being able to write up?
It looks like we’re approaching the hour pretty quickly, are there any last comments you’d like to put in before we close up?
[Jake Hartnell]: Hack Juno will be launching soon, but you can start working on it today! Approximately, 1% of Juno supply will be given out as rewards to the most useful community contributions.
There are 3 ways to earn points:
- Write smart contracts
- Make educational docs, videos, stack overflow responses, blog posts, etc.
- Build other useful tools
This repo will be a good one to watch: https://github.com/CosmosContracts/hack-juno
We welcome feedback from the community on the competition! If you have thoughts or suggestions, please hop in the [Discord](https://discord.gg/cRkUv6rfrr) and share.
[Immassi]: yes Jake will cover the Juno Hack part and i will answer the distribution part.
Here is the distribution breakdown. Also available on the Juno Github readme: https://github.com/CosmosContracts/Juno
A 1:1 stakedrop is distributed to $ATOM holders, giving 100% of the $JUNO supply to staked $ATOM balances that had their assets bonded at the time of the Stargate snapshot on Feb. 18th 6:00 PM UTC. Addresses that qualify will be included in the JUNO genesis block at launch. Exchange validators that failed to vote on prop #37 (Stargate upgrade) will be excluded from the genesis allocation. Including delegators bonding ATOM to those exchange validators. Additionally any unbonded ATOM at the time of the snapshot will be excluded. A whale cap was voted in by the community, effectively hard-capping $ATOM accounts at 50 thousand $ATOM in order to ensure a less top heavy distribution. 10% of the supply difference to be allocated to a multisig committee address for the funding of a core-development efforts. The remaining 90% of the excess supply to be allocated in the following ways (20 million $Juno community pool, Smart contract competition 2.373.341,66 million to be managed/distributed by the multi-sig committee. The remaining difference will not be included in the genesis file ie. burned)
“What are you personally looking forward to the most with Juno? Are there any smart contracts you are looking forward to being able to write up?”
I'm most excited about seeing a live network that launchers with the scalability & interoperability topics covered.
The most painful thing in the space currently is to see great innovations on Ethereum but no usage due to the scalability limitations (massive fees).
Juno not only covers that but the network and contracts will be interoperable with other chains in the cosmos ecosystem. This is very exciting.
Additionally its very motivating to see all the great volunteers that are pushing Juno forward since day 1. This is truly an organic grass roots movement fueled by the ideas of many and not driven by greed or profits.
[End AMA]
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