Barry Plunkett, Co-CEO and Co-Founder at Cosmos Labs – Interview Series

Barry Plunkett, Co-CEO and Co-Founder at Cosmos Labs, is an entrepreneur and researcher focused on building blockchain infrastructure for institutional finance. Before joining Cosmos Labs in January 2025, he co-founded and led Skip, a blockchain infrastructure company that developed tools supporting tens of billions of dollars in transaction volume before its acquisition by the Interchain Foundation in 2024. Earlier in his career, Plunkett built new ventures at the D. E. Shaw Group and conducted reinforcement learning research at the Wharton School, where his work applied artificial intelligence to real-world economic systems.

Cosmos Labs develops the open-source technology behind the Cosmos ecosystem, providing institutions and developers with infrastructure for launching sovereign, interoperable blockchain networks. Its modular Cosmos Stack combines tools for application-specific blockchains, Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus and cross-chain communication, with a growing emphasis on tokenization, stablecoin payments and regulated digital ledger deployments. Under Plunkett and fellow Co-CEO Maghnus Mareneck, the company is working to make Cosmos a practical foundation for financial institutions adopting modern blockchain rails, including projects involving cross-border payments, central bank digital currencies and tokenized assets.

Your career has taken you from reinforcement learning research at Wharton and venture building at D. E. Shaw to becoming Co-CEO of Cosmos Labs. How did those experiences shape your conviction that interoperable blockchain infrastructure will underpin the future of financial markets?

At D. E. Shaw I saw how much of the cost in financial markets hides in the plumbing, such as settlement layers, intermediaries, and systems reconciling with each other that were never built to connect. That’s the problem I came to care about most. Financial markets are a patchwork of separate ledgers, and I don’t think the fix is one system replacing all of them. It’s letting them connect while each keeps its own rules. That’s what Cosmos builds, and it’s why I’m here.

Cosmos Labs, Peersyst, and LNET are collaborating on the CBWeb3 Project to explore interoperability between central banks, financial institutions, and tokenized markets. What specific problem is the initiative trying to solve, and what would a successful outcome look like?

Tokenized financial assets are not interoperable across borders. Inside one institution, you can build something efficient, but the moment value crosses into another counterparty or region, you’re back to slow, expensive, intermediary-heavy rails. CBWeb3, executed by LNET and funded by the Inter-American Development Bank’s IDB Lab, brings central banks and financial institutions together to evaluate how tokenized assets can flow across regional networks while preserving sovereignty, to ensure each participant keeps control of its own environment. Cosmos provides the interoperability and infrastructure used to test that cross-network settlement. Once success is shared, practical evidence and a blueprint for how the region’s interconnectivity will evolve.

Why is Latin America and the Caribbean an especially compelling testing ground for tokenized financial infrastructure?

Latin America is one of the most active regions in the world for payments and financial innovation. The players there are genuinely ahead in how they think about digital money and tokenized assets. The gap is that the networks across these countries are disparate, and moving value across borders still carries real friction. That’s exactly where interoperability matters most. The region is already deeply interconnected and already innovating. Connecting those networks makes existing flows cheaper, as well as  it unleashes new, vital use cases that improve the lives of everyone in the region.

The project will examine how independently operated ledgers communicate through the Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol. How can institutions achieve interoperability without surrendering control over monetary policy, currency issuance, transaction rules, or sensitive financial data?

Each institution runs its own sovereign network: it sets its own rules, controls its own issuance, keeps its own data local. IBC connects those networks directly to each other, with no central hub or shared operator in the middle, and preserves privacy and security. Connecting to the network doesn’t mean handing control to it; interoperability and centralization are opposites here. Every participant stays autonomous, and every connection is opt-in and governed by rules both sides agree to preserve sovereignty and work within each participant’s regulatory framework.

Connecting multiple institutions introduces challenges beyond the technology — FX conversion, settlement finality, identity standards, regulatory compliance, network governance. Which will be the hardest to solve?

Governance. The technical problems like settlement finality, FX, and identity, are hard but tractable; they have engineering answers we can test. Getting independent institutions to align on shared rules, on liability, on who decides what when something goes wrong is the harder work, because it’s institutional rather than technical. Identity and compliance standards are close behind, for the same reason: they only work if everyone adopts them together. You solve it by getting the actual participants in the room, which is what this initiative does.

CBWeb3 is being developed as an open-source initiative. How can an open architecture reduce vendor lock-in and encourage regional collaboration while still meeting the security, privacy, and accountability requirements of institutions?

Open source means every participant can inspect the code, extend it, and run it themselves with no dependence on one vendor’s roadmap or pricing, and no lock-in. It makes regional collaboration possible, because there is open sharing and collaboration. Security and privacy come from the architecture  (permissioned networks, local control over data, clear accountability at each layer), not from keeping code secret. You get transparency where you want it and confidentiality where you need it.

How do you expect different forms of digital money — tokenized deposits, regulated stablecoins, and other tokenized instruments — to coexist? Distinct roles, or increasingly competing for the same activity?

I expect coexistence, not a winner-take-all outcome. Different forms of tokenized money have different issuers, trust models, and settlement guarantees, and those differences map to different use cases. The question we’re focused on is whether they can interoperate. If they live on isolated systems, you’ve just rebuilt today’s fragmentation in a new form. The infrastructure has to let them settle against each other across networks.

Beyond cross-border payments, which tokenized assets are best positioned for early adoption in Latin America? Where could blockchain-based settlement deliver a meaningful advantage?

Payments and remittances first, because the friction is most visible to last-mile customers. After that, trade finance, tokenized short-term and government debt, and FX settlement, which are rife with intermediaries, settlement delay, and reconciliation cost today. Wherever value crosses institutional or national boundaries and picks up cost and delay each time, tokenized settlement on interoperable rails has a clear advantage.

Cosmos enables institutions to build customized public, private, permissioned, or consortium networks while retaining interoperability. What would lead a bank or government to choose this over a shared public blockchain or a conventional centralized database?

They want two things that are usually in tension: control and connectivity. A centralized database gives you control but no interoperability. So basically you’re an island. A shared public blockchain gives you interoperability but asks you to give up control over rules, privacy, and performance. A dedicated network in the Cosmos model gives both: you own your rules, data, and governance, and you still connect to everyone else through IBC. For a bank or government, that combination is usually the precondition for participating at all.

Cosmos Labs is positioning around tokenization, stablecoins, DeFi, and institutional financial infrastructure. How does CBWeb3 support that broader strategy, and what role do you see Cosmos playing in the evolution of global financial markets?

Tokenized finance will run on many sovereign networks that need to interoperate, which is exactly what CBWeb3 tests with real institutions and real requirements. Cosmos focuses on similar areas with our work across tokenization, stablecoins, and institutional infrastructure. The role I see for Cosmos is the interoperability layer for institutional finance.

Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit Cosmos Labs.