Osmosis Frontier FAQ

What is Osmosis Frontier?

Osmosis Frontier is the new “Wild West” Osmosis front-end designed to supplement app.osmosis.zone.

Why does Osmosis need another front-end?

The more the better, from a censorship resistance standpoint. Specifically, while app.osmosis.zone will have a curated UX featuring canonical bridged assets (chosen by governance) and select CosmWasm (CW20) tokens, Frontier will be practically permissionless, with multiple representations of each bridged asset and as many CW20 tokens as teams choose to list.

Isn’t Osmosis already permissionless?

Yes, the Osmosis blockchain is permissionless. Anyone can transfer a compatible token to Osmosis, pool it with other tokens, add external incentives, and trade with whatever liquidity is available. Further, making front-ends that access Osmosis is also permissionless. Many alternative front-ends already exist, like ping.pub, rango.exchange, Cosmostation, Citadel.one, and others, or one can use the CLI (command line interface). Frontier is designed for expert, adventurous users of app.osmosis.zone who want to trade all available assets, and who do not mind sorting through the degraded UX of prefixed assets and shallow pools.

Who decides what is listed on Frontier?

Everything can be listed on Frontier except fraudulent “mimic” tokens, coins pretending to be other coins. Any entity wishing to list can follow the integration docs. For further token onboarding questions or troubleshooting, ask around in the Osmosis Discord or Telegram.

When will my favorite Frontier asset be listed on app.osmosis.zone?

That is up to the Osmosis DAO. Frontier assets that are approved for regular OSMO incentives will also be listed on app.osmosis.zone. Assets that lose their OSMO incentives will be relegated to the Frontier.

Can I use Frontier for all my Osmosis needs?

Yes. Frontier has all the features that app.osmosis.zone does. You may find it more annoying to sort through all the CW20s and different versions of bridged assets, but everything available on the main site will also be available on Frontier.

Are there any OSMO incentives on Osmosis Frontier?

Assets duplicated from the main front-end will have their normal incentives. But for assets that are only on Frontier, there are no regular liquidity mining incentives. Some Frontier-only assets may have external incentives (adding these is permissionless), and governance decides whether or not to match these with OSMO. That matching will not necessarily be connected to the base OSMO liquidity mining incentives going forward. Either way, a pool’s incentives (or lack thereof) can be seen on its page.

The Frontier sounds exciting. What should I watch out for?

Assets on Frontier are likely to be riskier. Non-canonical bridge assets and obscure CW20 tokens can be highly volatile and prone to bugs and rug-pulls. DYOR. Similarly, the many prefixes of different bridged assets may become confusing, as may the proliferation of CW20 assets. Be sure you know the risks of the tokens you are interacting with.

Because not all pools on Frontier are incentivized, many will be quite shallow. These shallow pools can cause several problems. First, a shallow pool is likely to cause large price impacts, where your buy drives the price up (or your sell drives the price down). This price impact is dynamically shown in the user interface (where it is referred to as “estimated slippage”), and the number turns red if the impact is over 1%, but inexperienced users can still miss this if they are not looking for it.

A sneakier potential problem of shallow pools is multi-hop routing. The Osmosis router does not yet properly account for price impacts on intermediate pools, so if you get routed through a shallow pool because the router thinks that intermediate asset is cheaper, you can have a surprising price impact even between two highly liquid tokens. Always check the price impact.

Providing liquidity into a shallow pool can also have unexpected results. You are more likely to capture a large portion of the fees, but the volume is likely to be low. Impermanent loss will also be magnified. And as mentioned above, liquidity provision is less likely to be rewarded on Frontier-only assets.

What happened to the Great Osmosis Bridge-off? When is the vote?

Frontier is giving the DAO a chance to test the different bridging interfaces in order to make a more informed choice. This trial period will also give the market a chance to indicate which bridge’s assets are preferred.

Is Frontier a long-term solution?

Probably not. Once Osmosis develops token lists, app.osmosis.zone users will be able to use various permissionlessly available lists of assets within the UI in order to customize which tokens show up for them. These lists will also be searchable from the site. This will more efficiently solve the UX problems that Frontier addresses.

However, it is possible that people will grow fond of Frontier. Perhaps, in the future, the DAO will come up with new uses for a differentiated, decentralized Osmosis front-end.

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