Osmosis v11 Upgrade — The Scambuster Upgrade
In response to a number of scam/spam events that have occurred over the last couple of weeks, Osmosis will undergo a chain upgrade at block height 5432450, or approximately Wednesday, August 03 at 16:00 UTC. While the upgrade is ongoing, Osmosis users will be unable to interact with the chain for a short period of time.
This upgrade contains only two minor changes aimed at reducing on-chain spam to protect Osmosis users. This article will delve briefly into the issues that necessitated this upgrade, as well as the methods that were chosen to remedy them.
Osmosis LP Incentives Gauge Creation Fee
On July 22, an attacker attempted to halt the Osmosis chain by creating over 20,000 external incentives gauges in various pools in an attempt to overload Validator nodes at the Osmosis epoch block.
The attack was ultimately unsuccessful and the epoch block processed as normal (subject to a < 4 minute delay). Though unsuccessful, this attack did result in most Osmosis users being dusted with small amounts of tokens that they could not easily dispose of. From a user perspective, this made for a rather annoying and less than ideal user experience.
To prevent this from happening in the future, this upgrade allows for messages to be assigned a fee which, if not paid, will cause the message to fail. Using this new feature, the upgrade assigns fees to creating external incentives gauges and adding tokens to them as follows:
- CreateGauge: 50 OSMO
- AddToGauge: 25 OSMO
These fees will be treated as the minimum gas fees required for these transactions to process, meaning that the fees will be distributed to OSMO stakers when paid by the gauge creator. After this upgrade is implemented, gauge creation will likely be considered too expensive for any potential attacker to create thousands of them for the sole purpose of spamming the network.
Governance Proposal Minimum Deposit Requirement
Over the last two weeks, numerous chains in the Cosmos ecosystem have fallen victim to scam proposals that were placed in the deposit period and contained links to malicious sites that have attempted to steal a user’s seed phrase. Osmosis is no exception:
As always, we’d like to remind Osmosis users to never enter your seed phrase on a website. No legitimate website will ask you to enter your seed phrase to use Osmosis or any other crypto project. Osmosis team members, developers, and community admins will never ask for your seed phrase. Please remember to keep your wallets safe and secure!
To prevent further proposal spam, the v11 upgrade will now require wallets that submit a governance proposal to also pay 25% of the deposit at the time of submission. At the time of writing, this amounts to 125 OSMO. This fee should deter further scam proposal activity, but the community should continue to be vigilant when examining proposals and embedded links for potential scams.
More to Come
This upgrade was shipped with minimal new features in order to quickly and safely address the above issues. Osmosis continues to build out major features. Another major upgrade is scheduled for August, which should make for an exciting month in the ecosystem!
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