Osmosis Updates from the Lab & Clawback Party — 2021/12/15, ft. Citadel.one, Regen, and CosmWasm
Osmosis Updates from the Lab occurs every Wednesday at 10 AM EST (3 PM UTC) on the Osmosis Zone Twitter Space.
What a day for Osmosis!
We activated our v5 ‘Boron’ upgrade this week, upgrading the chain to Cosmos SDK v0.44 and IBC v2, adding the modules Authz (account privilege delegation), Bech32IBC (cross-chain auto-routing), and TxFees (multiple asset txfees enabled), and implementing The Clawback of unclaimed $OSMO and $ION to the community pool. This clawback occurred at 5 PM UTC today, the six-month (180-day) anniversary of the Osmosis genesis. More on the Clawback Party and its special guest below.
First, we had a truncated but informative Updates this week. An AWS failure degraded the audio stream (making us wish Twitter ran on Akash), but Kevin Berrey and our guests persevered. This week, Vlad, Head of Community and PR at DeFi aggregator Citadel.One, discussed their upcoming Osmosis integration, and Regen Network founder Gregory Landua announced a proposed 1.4m $REGEN DAO-to-DAO grant to the Osmosis community pool.
Citadel.one is a cross-chain wallet aggregator that aims to offer a one-stop DeFi experience. They offer web and mobile platforms, and a browser extension is coming next quarter. To use Citadel.one, you can create new wallets on multiple chains using a single seed phrase, or you can import existing wallets with Ledger or Trezor (seed phrases are not stored on the platform). Keplr and MetaMask integrations for trustlessly importing hot wallets are coming soon.
Osmosis is one of the first three DEXs being integrated into the platform, along with Uniswap and Pancakeswap. For now, Citadel.one offers swapping and staking, and they plan to add more advanced DeFi applications next year by enabling Kava, Secret, and more. Stakers earn $XCT, allowing them to vote on community pool decisions. Currently, these votes occur on Binance Smart Chain, but Citadel.one plans to upgrade to their own Cosmos chain later next year.
You can check out Citadel.one on Telegram, Twitter, and many other social media outlets. And for more information from our point of view, see our preview.
For Gregory Landua, Osmosis & Regen is a match made in heaven. A couple of months ago, the Regen founder posted a proposal to grant 1.399 million $REGEN to the Osmosis Community Pool. (You’ll notice from the proposal link that you can now access Osmosis Commonwealth at gov.osmosis.zone.) This constitutes half of the remaining tokens in the Regen Network Development, Inc. pool, which was mandated to be granted to the Cosmos ecosystem in the Regen whitepaper. After discussion there and on the Regen governance forums, Cephalopod validator has put up Prop 101 for a vote on Osmosis.
In the language of the proposal, Regen expects the grant “to be used strategically for protocol-owned liquidity provision, use-cases exploring eco-credits, modest allocation of yield farming incentives, matching grants to public goods, and open-source development funding.” Since Sunny was not able to join the call, we did not hear a discussion about implementing these use-cases, but I expect we will discuss them in the coming weeks, assuming the vote passes (over 99% in favor as of this writing, with 40% turnout).
The allocation will further align our two communities. Indeed, we are already more aligned than may be immediately obvious. Regen is building the infrastructure (oracles, registries, indexes) to track and tokenize ecological outcomes on the blockchain. As part of this effort, the Regen developer team has long been active in the Cosmos interoperating app-chain vision, and in fact, has been so ahead of the curve that they have been the lead maintainer of the Cosmos SDK since early 2020. Hence, Regen was a natural fit to be the first adopter of the Osmosis LBP (liquidity bootstrapping pool).
During today’s meeting, Greg started to share Regen’s vision of creating a new ecological asset class in DeFi, one that may provide the backing for future monetary systems. We see the beginnings of this with Celo blockchain’s Climate Collective (of which Regen is a member), which is backing Celo stablecoins with tokenized green assets.
Unfortunately, the audio began to get bad at this point, so we ended the meeting with Greg exhorting everyone to vote YES on Prop 101. For a deeper look at Regen Network and the future of money, watch his Cosmoverse talk, or find Regen on Twitter, Telegram, and Discord.
And now, we turn to the Osmosis Clawback Party!
To celebrate our newly topped up growth fund, we held a party, hosted not only by trusty Updates hosts, Kevin Berrey and Dynamicmanic, but also by Cosmos hype-masters Cryptocito and ConeyDaddy. Sunny Aggarwal appeared live from Puerto Rico, where he had been shut indoors updating Osmosis for the last few days, and he brought (virtually) special guest Ethan Frey, CEO/CTO of CosmWasm in order to discuss integrating a custom, permissioned form of the smart contracting framework into Osmosis.
Ethan, also Head of Labs at Confio, reminisced about the early days of Cosmos. He was the third engineer and the second Ethan in the Cosmos, following the founders Jae Kwon and Ethan Buchman. One of the things he’s learned from his long experience in the ecosystem is that consensus is the hardest thing to get right (see Vitalik’s recent article): on the chain, at the team-level, and in the community. He likes what he has seen so far from commonwealth.im in helping to coordinate these levels of governance.
CosmWasm is a smart contracting module that can plug into the Cosmos SDK. According to our own Josh Lee, it is “the most successful smart contracting platform outside of Solidity.” Terra has been extremely successful building out apps from its core platform using CosmWasm, and Juno, which just activated smart contracting with its Moneta upgrade, uses the current v1.0.
Ethan started CosmWasm at a hackathon in June 2019 with Aaron from Regen, Jehan from Althea, Pedro from WalletConnect, and Shane V. from Stargaze. They built out a prototype in two days (with Ethan learning Rust on the fly), received a grant, and kept building until 2020, when they were able to get more funding to build out the team.
During a hackathon, fueled by caffeine, Club Mate, and whatever else propels devs forward, a team can bash out a prototype of a moonshot idea like CosmWasm. After that, they often spend months ironing out the code. Sunny used to be skeptical of developmental sprints like this, until the Osmosis genesis when he made the sleep-deprived decision to drop the Osmosis testnet-token $ION along with $OSMO, just to see what the community would make of it.
The CosmWasm integration proposal is on Commonwealth now, where it is being met with overwhelming approval. This is not surprising, since Sunny has been advocating for a permissioned CosmWasm on Osmosis at least since he and Ethan talked at Cosmoverse at the beginning of November, and now we are seeing the fruits of that discussion.
The proposal is for Ethan and the team at Confio to build a custom integration of CosmWasm for Osmosis, which will unlock the power of smart contracts on Osmosis. The proposal is divided into two deliverables: 1) 300K $OSMO for adding the CosmWasm module to Osmosis, and 2) 450K $OSMO for deeper custom integrations (see the proposal for more details). If we vote YES (once the proposal is on-chain), we will get the team that built CosmWasm working with us to make Osmosis the premier CosmWasm environment.
The smart contracts enabled by this proposal will be permissioned. That is, the CosmWasm integration will not turn Osmosis into a generalized smart contracting chain, but will instead add smart contract functionality only in cases that will enhance Osmosis as a DEX and AMM platform. The core team will likely add some of this functionality, and we will also be able to use our newly enlarged community pool to attract top-tier developers. Some teams have already been approaching Sunny about building yield aggregation, NFT games, and the like, and because we will be funding them, everyone will be incentivized to help Osmosis succeed.
Finally, we celebrated the reason for the season: the septupling of our community pool! The Community Support DAO sponsored a prize to guess the dollar amount in the community pool at the time of the clawback. Congratulations to our winners, Hanjin De, Tony072, and Dovson, who won 420 $OSMO: 69, 150, and 201 $OSMO, respectively. Dovson’s guess of $246,780,000 was closest to the actual amount of $246,644,764.71.
With $246 million or so to spend on development, we have some exciting governing to do. Kevin Berrey gave a brief summary of the Community Support DAO’s work setting up entities to pay admins and community contributors, and the Marketing DAO has been hard at work as well. Talent is flocking to Osmosis, and we look forward to seeing what they can do.
Expect a future-oriented Osmosis Town Hall during the first week of January, where we’ll discuss funding the DAOs going forward, as well as what we’re going to build together in the new year.
Thank you again to everyone involved with the Clawback Party for making it a great success! We look forward to seeing everyone again at our usual meeting next Wednesday.
Have a great week!
Enter the laboratory at Osmosis.zone, the first decentralized exchange powered by the Cosmos SDK and IBC. See our published lab reports at the Osmosis blog, our bench notes at GitHub and help plan future experiments in our Commonwealth
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