Ethan Buchman talks with his hands, and the range of subjects he wants to talk about is vast.

He wants to talk about Alexander the Great, cell biology and the similarities between neuroscience and religion. He wants to talk about ecological sustainability, community sovereignty and how to structure a company so it respects and rewards its workers. Surveillance capitalism, the history of computer science, the laws of thermodynamics: all come up over the course of an hour at a coffee shop in Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood, over an oat milk cappuccino (and prior to the most recent set of COVID-19 restrictions).

The Cosmos ecosystem, a blockchain protocol that Buchman co-founded, is worth US$125 billion, and its Atom token has increased in price to a market capitalization of US$10.1 billion during a month that wiped out over US$700 billion from the cryptocurrency market, or more than one-third of its value. But he doesn’t want to talk about that.

“We’re really focusing on not just building the same old patterns of speculation and gambling that are so prominent on Wall Street,” he said. “Token prices are important, but they only tell a sliver of a story.”

Buchman has a different story he wants to tell about blockchain technology, which he believes has the potential to restructure society in a more equitable way. He’s interested in how it might allow small communities to govern themselves and pool resources, and incentivize people to take care of public goods like land and water.

Amid a news cycle dominated by the astronomical price increases of dog-themed tokens, eight-figure NFT art sales and JPEGs of apes as status symbols, Buchman’s priorities stand out. He’s a successful cryptocurrency entrepreneur who’s the antithesis of the crypto-bro stereotype, and who has flown under the radar despite playing a key role in building a highly respected and widely used protocol with the third-largest community of developers, behind Ethereum and Polkadot.

That protocol, Cosmos, is working to solve one of the toughest problems in crypto: allowing blockchains to communicate with each other and share data. It’s already powering some of the biggest names in DeFi and has positioned Buchman as an influential figure in debates about blockchain’s technological and political foundations.

“Crypto may, from the outside, have this certain air that it’s all about bro culture and people getting rich and meme coins. But if you look at crypto at its core, it is testing governments, it is testing how you can let communities own resources,” said Brian Mosoff, chief executive officer of Ether Capital. “It makes sense to me that Ethan would be a real thought leader in this space.”

Buchman’s crypto journey began in 2010, when he transferred from the University of Toronto to the University of Guelph in the second year of his undergraduate degree. He was the guitarist in an electronic jam band at the time and made the move to live closer to his bandmates.

He had a hard time finding a program that was a good fit for his wide-ranging interests. He started in psychology, which he disliked, and started taking biology and biophysics courses in an effort to replicate a neuroscience major, which Guelph didn’t offer at the time.

Buchman said he convinced the school to call his “slew of random courses that didn’t fit into any degree” a physical science major. His fourth-year undergraduate project involved analyzing a large number of microscope images, which led to an introduction to a professor in the engineering department who was studying neural networks and machine learning, then-emerging technologies that Buchman thought could be useful in his work.

As his studies veered toward computer science, he was also falling “down the crypto rabbit hole.” He started travelling back to Toronto to attend Bitcoin meetups hosted by crypto entrepreneur Anthony Di Iorio, which Ethereum inventor Vitalik Buterin also frequented. Buchman found a niche within a niche in that early crypto community, bonding with others who were convinced that Bitcoin’s energy-intensive method of publishing blocks of verified transactions to the blockchain—known as mining, or proof-of-work—was flawed.

After hearing developer and entrepreneur Jae Kwon talking about the topic on a podcast, Buchman reached out. The pair founded a company called Tendermint, Buchman convinced his graduate supervisor at Guelph to let him write his thesis on blockchain technology, and the ideas behind Cosmos started to form.

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There are many different things motivating people who are excited by cryptocurrencies, and likewise, there are many competing visions of how the infrastructure powering a blockchain-enabled future should be designed. These competing visions spawn loyal—sometimes quasi-religious—factions, and intense infighting.

People often talk about “the blockchain” as if it were just one thing, but there are thousands of different cryptocurrencies running on many different blockchains. Similar to how apps on a smartphone can each perform specific functions, but can’t share data with each other, these blockchains are limited in their ability to connect. For example, people who buy NFTs of basketball highlights on NBA Top Shot, which runs on Vancouver-based Dapper Labs’ Flow blockchain, can’t resell them using popular NFT marketplaces like OpenSea, which is built on the Ethereum blockchain.

Some people think one blockchain, such as the one powering Bitcoin or Ethereum, will eventually form the foundational layer of most activity, with the others going the way of Betamax tapes once VHS became standard. Buchman, on the other hand, believes there are good reasons for groups of people to continue to want the control and freedom that come with running their own blockchains—which means it will become increasingly important to make them interoperable, less like apps in the app store and more like the internet.

Cosmos bills itself as “the internet of blockchains,” aiming to make it relatively simple for people to launch their own blockchains using common programming languages. Blockchains in the Cosmos ecosystem can share tokens and data with each other using a tool called Inter Blockchain Communication, or IBC.

Cosmos launched in 2017 with a US$17.3-million token sale and went live in 2019. Today, it powers more than 260 apps and services, including some big names in the crypto world.

The second and third most popular chains for DeFi applications—Terra and Binance Smart Chain—were built on Cosmos software, although a chain called Fantom briefly overtook Binance’s over the weekend. So was Crypto.com, the Singapore-based cryptocurrency-trading platform that’s been making high-profile sponsorship deals with sports teams, including the Montreal Canadiens.

Osmosis, a decentralized exchange on the Cosmos network, recently broke the US$1-billion mark in total value locked, a measure of the assets being secured by a DeFi application. Osmosis recently launched a “bridge” that will allow it to offer trading of Ethereum-based digital assets and developers are planning a bridge with competitor Polkadot for the first quarter of 2022.

​​Gregory Landua, chief executive of Regen Network Development, which aims to incentivize behaviour that’s good for the environment by making available on the blockchain transparent data that can be used to for carbon credits and other markets, said he created his business on Cosmos because it allowed him to easily build a blockchain tailored to his needs. An open blockchain makes sense for certain use cases, but not Regen, which wanted the farmers, scientists and institutions with a stake in the credit system to be the ones governing it, Landua said: “The Cosmos framework allows us to align our stakeholders with the governance, security and ownership of this public infrastructure.”

Despite its high-profile applications, Cosmos hasn’t received as much attention as competitor Polkadot, which also believes blockchain interoperability will be key to the sector’s future and has a token with a market capitalization nearly double that of Cosmos’s Atom. Bryan Pellegrino, co-founder and chief executive of the Vancouver-based blockchain startup LayerZero Labs, said Cosmos flies under the radar because the problems it’s solving are similar to problems with a building’s plumbing: you notice when something’s going wrong, but don’t pay attention when everything is working smoothly.

LayerZero—which hasn’t officially launched yet—recently raised more than US$100 million at a US$1-billion valuation in a round co-led by Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan-backed cryptocurrency-trading platform FTX, according to a report by The Information, on which Pellegrino declined to comment. The company is also working on blockchain interoperability, building software that can transport data between different protocols.

“Blockchain interoperability really sucks. That’s the state now, where none of this stuff can talk,” Pellegrino said. “But once it can, it’s not that exciting. Not as exciting as owning 15 trillion Shiba Inu and thinking about it going to $1.”

Buchman has also long eschewed venture capitalist financing, opting to bootstrap Tendermint with Kwon in the early days of the project after some meetings with investors that left him feeling like they weren’t quite ready to understand what he was building. That meant the companies and organizations associated with Cosmos weren’t hitting traditional startup milestones that would normally trigger media stories.

The Cosmos founding team has had some challenges, too. In January 2020, Kwon tweeted he was stepping back from the project, with the crypto press later reporting on some disputes with team members and unusual views that Kwon published on GitHub and Twitter. That same month, Buchman launched Informal Systems, a Toronto-based company spun out of the Swiss non-profit the Interchain Foundation, to focus on research and development in service of Cosmos.

Kwon did not respond to a request for comment. In an email, Jelena Djuric, a spokesperson for Informal Systems, said Kwon stepped down from Tendermint “for a variety of personal reasons unrelated to the work at the [Interchain Foundation] or the founding of Informal,” adding that the founders had always hoped multiple entities would form and contribute to Cosmos’s development.

Buchman’s interests in equity and economic justice have spilled into Informal’s corporate structure. “Member-employees” have control over corporate actions like the election of board members, with Buchman designing a “fire drill” thought experiment to test the system in which he would fire all his employees, have the employees call a shareholder meeting, have the shareholders elect a new board and CEO, and reinstate their own jobs. (So far, the team has not deemed it necessary to actually run the “fire drill.”)

Buchman hopes to see more community and sustainability-oriented projects like Regen built on Cosmos, but ultimately, it’s out of his control. Cosmos is an open source protocol, and developers can use its tools to build anything they want, which is so far mostly DeFi applications.

Like any promising early-stage technology, Cosmos has massive potential, but no guarantee of success. The same is true of the blockchain experiment more broadly: it might usher in a golden age of community ownership and incentives aligned with the public good, or a nightmare of economic instability, or simply fade away entirely.

For Buchman, that’s what makes it interesting.

“Every good technology simultaneously threatens to destroy and save the world,” he said. “Blockchains are no different.”