Key Cosmos Contributors: Founders (Part 1)
4 min readOct 3, 2022
This article will introduce the outstanding project creators in the Cosmos ecosystem.
The first 16 founders are listed below.
1/ Ethan Buchman — Co-founder of Cosmos | CEO Informal Systems | President Interchain Foundation
- Education: University of Guelph — Canada.
- Ethan works in software, research, education, and the garden. He is also an Internet Biophysicist. Sustainability Existentialist. Monetary Localist.
2/ Jae Kwon — Co-founder and CEO of Cosmos, Tendermint | President Interchain Foundation | Founder GNØ Land
- Education: Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.
- Jae worked as a professional developer in Silicon Valley after completing a B.S. in computer science from Cornell in 2005. His employers included Alexa and Yelp, where he oversaw the mobile application development team. Additionally, he was a founding partner of the productivity service iDoneThis.
- He is also president of the Interchain Foundation, which is based in Zug, Switzerland. The Interchain Foundation (aka ICF) was established to promote the Cosmos vision of the internet of blockchains to enable public blockchain interoperability and scalability.
3/ Sunny Aggarwal — Co-Founder of Osmosis and Sikka | Builder of Cosmos | Host of Epicenter Podcast
- Education: Engineering and Computer Science Degree at the University of California, Berkeley, USA (2015–2017).
- Aggarwal worked as a research scientist at Tendermint in 2017. The same year, he was also co-hosting the weekly blockchain podcast, Epicenter. Before co-founding Osmosis Labs in 2021, in 2018, he founded Sikka, a blockchain infrastructure company focused on participating in protocols and networks for the decentralized internet. Sikka currently operates a Top 5 validator on the Cosmos Hub, Kava, and Akash networks.
4/ Josh Lee — Co-Founder Osmosis and Keplr Wallet
- Education: Anderson University, in Indiana, USA.
- Lee, South Korean, subsequently worked for various blockchain companies, including Lunamint as a Project Manager, and Tendermint (Ignite) as an ecosystem development analyst from 2019 to 2021. Building Keplr wallet, the most versatile wallet service for the Cosmos ecosystem of blockchains.
5/ Zaki Manian — Co-founder Iqlusion and Sommelier | Contributor Cosmos and Agoric | Shape Rotator
- Education: University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
- He’s knowledgeable about: Cryptography, Encrypted Messaging, Cryptocurrencies, Mass surveillance, Embedded systems, Image Analysis, Linux, Functional Programming.
- He has corun a Bitcoin meetup in Mountain View and provided advice and analysis to several Venture Capital firms and startups in the Bitcoin space.
6/ Federico Kunze Küllmer — Co-Founder & Director Evmos & | Co-Founder Tharsis | Working on Cosmos and EVM interoperability | Co-founder Sommelier
- Education: University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA.
- Experience: Core blockchain technology, which protects more than $170B in assets, was built by a software engineer with more than five years of expertise. He’s working on Golang and Solidity frameworks for building blockchain and decentralized applications and resolving blockchain interoperability right now. He has also worked with distributed systems, distributed systems technology, and decentralized financial applications.
7/ Mustafa Al-Bassam — Co-founder Celestia and CEO of Celestia Labs
- Education: Ph.D. Computer Science of University College London, London.
- Experience: Co-founder of Chainspace (acquired by Facebook): built a sharded smart contracts platform after conducting scientific research on the scalability of blockchains. In 2019, Facebook purchased the Chainspace team. Advisor at Nym and Secure Trading.
8/ John Alder — Co-founder & Chief Research Officer of Celestia | Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Fuel Labs
- Education: University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
- Experience: Creator of Optimistic Rollups, previously scalability researcher at ConsenSys.
9/ Ismail Khoffi — Co-Founder and CTO Celestia
- Education: The University of Bonn, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany.
- Experience: Former senior engineer at Tendermint and Interchain Foundation, Senior Software Engineer at Informal Systems.
10/ Jake Hartnell — Founder Stargaze | Systempunk building Juno Network, DA0 DA0
11/ Lobo Juno — Co-Founder Juno Network | Securing & expanding the Interchain web SG-1 & C-Root
See more lists of Juno’s contributors
12/ Jorge Hernandez — Founder Stargaze
13/ Shane Vitarana — Founder Stargaze
14/ Tushar Aggarwal — Founder and CEO Persistence | Forbes 30U30 Asia
- Education: Nanyang Technological University Singapore.
- Experience: LuneX Ventures’ crypto/blockchain VC and Decrypt Asia’s podcast host. Previously worked as a management consultant for the financial services sector with a passion for technology, business, investing, and racquet sports.
15/ Dove — Founder Kujira
16/ Dean Tribble — Founder and CEO of Agoric
- Education: Stanford University, CA, USA.
- Experience: Dean was the Principal Architect at Microsoft Corporation for 9 years. Vice president, ePayments Product Engineering and Development at Deluxe Corporation, and CTO at VerifyValid.
