work-in-progress for fixing pulsar 1.0 blockers

[elias-orijtech]

Work in progress for pulsar 1.0, so far fixing #50 and #37. Builds upon #108 to avoid merge conflicts while it's in review.

@aaronc @tac0turtle in light of https://github.com/cosmos/cosmos-proto/issues/2#issuecomment-1483558053, is there a point in continuing this work?

CC @odeke-em