An Interview with Jae Kwon, Founder and CEO of Tendermint

Jae Kwon is the CEO of Tendermint, a project aimed at liberating the blockchain from the costs and drawbacks of proof-of work-mining. His mission is to make this technology more accessible, in order to accelerate the adoption of decentralized ledger technology. He also serves as an escrow on the WeTrust project.

Hi Jae, thanks for chatting with us! Could you tell us about how Tendermint got started, and what you hope to achieve with this project?

Sure — Tendermint was started in 2014. Around 2013, I decided I wanted to get into blockchain, and I wanted to develop a proof-of-stake system. At the time, people in the community didn’t know how to solve proof-of-stake, so I started working on an exchange instead. It wasn’t until I stumbled onto an obscure academic paper from 1988 that I switched back to working on proof-of-stake. The paper was called Consensus in the Presence of Partial Synchrony, by two professors at MIT. I started building on the work in the paper, and the concept of Tendermint came about. Tendermint provides a way to allow blockchains to communicate with each other, including handling scalability and interoperability. It lets people send info securely between blockchains, as long as the packets are understood. Tendermint is building the Cosmos hub to allow this interoperability between blockchains.

Sounds very exciting. There’s been news recently that some nation states are creating their own national digital currencies. Is this an area where Tendermint could potentially be used?

Yes, in this case they could use Tendermint or use Cosmos, take advantage of both, could create ledgers that connect to both.

Will a token be created to facilitate use of the Cosmos hub?

We are designing a token, which we’re calling the Cosmos Hub Atom. The Atom is a staking token, which grants you access to a decentralized organization. You use it by putting them at stake, like reputation, which allows you to secure the network and participate in governance.

What are your thoughts on the current state of the blockchain space? Aside from Tendermint, which projects are particularly exciting?

There are definitely many interesting projects in the space. I’m particularly excited by other projects in the Internet of Blockchain, such as Polka Dot. I think they are working on something that could be complementary to the Cosmos Network.

How did you learn about WeTrust? What excites you most about the project?

I learned about WeTrust after meeting George and Patrick at a blockchain conference, where we talked about a faster consensus algorithm for Ethereum, called Ethermint. We talked about whether Ethermint could be a good fit for WeTrust, and there may definitely be opportunities for collaboration. WeTrust seems great, I like that you are creating a new offering in trusted lending services. I’m interested in peer to peer economic experiments in general, and am very interested to see where WeTrust goes.

How do you think the people working with blockchain can drive greater acceptance of cryptocurrencies among the “general public”, people who aren’t intimately familiar with blockchain technology?

I think the next generation of innovation should focus on making blockchain applications friendlier and safer for consumers. Thankfully, the hardware wallet makers are making great strides, their innovations are helping us in this front. There also needs to be more work on specifying how to deal with contingencies.

When we solve the problems of scalability, interoperability, usability, and security for the entire lifecycle of using virtual tokens, the public will feel the benefits of this new technology.

Thanks for chatting with us, Jae!

To learn more about the WeTrust project, join our slack!