The Interchain Lab Ep. 9 — The Osmosis Support Lab
This episode is going to be a little different than the ones in the past! Today is all about the Osmosis Support Lab — which the show is hosted by… So we get to talk about ourselves — hurray!
We’ll chat a little bit about what we’ve been up to and our plans moving forward in to the next proposal cycle.
Joining us are hosts Robo, Waterspinner, and Togg, as well as Mike who is from the accounting and transparency department!
Everyone that touches Osmosis in one way or another has probably had some sort of interaction with the Osmosis Support Lab. The OSL also finds itself helping people from other ecosystems due to Osmosis largely being the ‘center’ of the ecosystem where people branch out from.
Some of the OSLs achievements over this most recent quarter have been development of public goods and infrastructure tooling for the Osmosis community, as well as the addition of the community operations to help engage and bring people in during the bear market. The OSL has helped build and maintain the support website for Osmosis where you can find answers to frequently asked questions, instructional guides, as well as 24/7 live support.
Togg: ‘The support website is actually really important to us — we take pride in the fact that as of this quarter we have pretty much full control over the content and what happens on that support site. We can publish articles as we please as we notice fairly recurring questions coming in, or get a head start on articles for new features. Two of our support lab members, Max Power and Rose, write these articles up. Our artist also creates the wonderful graphics and images that you see on that website and it’s a really fun and collaborative process. So that’s just one thing that we actively try and do.’
As far as community initiatives, the OSL also recently absorbed the community operations when the Ministry of Marketing disbanded. This included things like the OsmosisCC Twitter channel, the Osmosis Community Updates blog, and has expanded to include things like the Crew3 quests that have launched recently.
Robo: ‘The Osmosis Community Updates blog I would say is one of the more prominent sources of Osmosis related information currently. It is entirely a community-run Blog. We source writers from the community and we welcome guest articles from projects that are looking to expand their reach. We have recurring regular weekly articles that that discuss things like new project listings and major chain upgrades. We have Updates from the Lab recaps that are posted as well as recaps from The Interchain Lab. We also host articles from groups like Flipside who are always trying to get more information out there about the kind of metrics and data reporting that they’re doing. A few of our articles have actually been featured in crypto news sources as kind of source of truth on certain things like chain upgrades and what they mean for the future of Osmosis.
Another one of these Community measures we have started is the Osmosis Crew3 campaign and that’s been that’s been pretty widely effective. We’ve seen an increase in social activity by quite a bit — I believe it increased the Osmosis Discord server membership by something near seven percent overnight. The last item I kind of want to highlight is the osmosis Community updates Twitter account which is also another great source of information. If you’re not following you definitely should because there’s a lot of good information coming out of that account. ‘
As far as impacts, the Community Updates Blog has over 15,000 minutes read, with over 12,000 regular views, which translates to almost 120 visitors a day over the last 90 days. The launch of Crew3 helped to bring in over 3000 new followers to the OsmosisCC twitter, which is a 90% increase over last quarter.
In addition to the community initiatives, the new tooling ideas that have been put in place have been very successful. The OSL has dedicated RPC infrastructure, as well as continuous relaying on multiple different chains and channels. The OSL has also built a custom interface where users can go to clear stuck packets themselves instead of needing to try to contact their relayers for help.
Waterspinner: ‘Our RPC that you can interact with has a 100% uptime as of right now. Another big thing that we’ve been doing is relaying — We have been consistently in the top five active relayers by 24-hour packets. Just in the last 30 days we’ve done over 15 000 transactions. We relay 24/7 on Osmosis, Mars, Evmos, Stars, Atom, Axelar, Medibloc…and plenty more to come! A big thing that we’ve also done with the relaying is we’ve built a front end where the user can go and clear a stuck packet themselves.’
Robo: ‘That’s something that I think is a really cool feature to highlight — the way that the support flow used to go is if an IBC channel would go down, the OSL would be the first ones to hear about it because OSL members would effectively have to go hunt down whoever was relaying on that channel let them know the relayer was down. What we’re pushing towards now is cutting out the middle man so to speak — so when we get reports like this we can just relay those packets ourselves. Ideally in a perfect world with this new site, even users can relay it themselves. I think that’s really cool’
The new proposal will also include a portion of funds for a web-dev to help flush out an OSL-built alternative front end for Osmosis. The new site will combine the support widget with the live trading app, as well as providing access to the channel clearing tools, and allowing users to access a single ‘source of truth’ for metrics pertaining to the Support Lab.
Engagement-wise, the OSL has been working on an NFT project behind the scenes! These are planning to be used in giveaways on twitter, crew3, discord, telegram, etc — as well as having all the mint proceeds returned to the Osmosis Community Pool.
Robo: ‘This all started with a conversation about making sure that we’re contributing value and giving back to the community. Essentially what we settled on is this nft project that we’ll do a limited mint of. All proceeds from that will flow back to the osmosis community pool, but in addition to that the nfts themselves that aren’t minted out will constantly be the subject of giveaways ways to get the community more involved in education. This is something that we’re really excited about and we just want to make sure we get it right. So it’s taking a little time but it’s a really cool project’
Togg: ‘We are looking at a whole bunch of different ways we would like the osmosis Community to benefit. Obviously that’s why we’re here — and so we are asking folks who are very prominent in the nft community on Stargaze as well as Osmosis to help run the ozzy-multisig. We’ve already generated the images; we just need to figure out how the mint is going to happen so we’re literally right on the cusp. We have something to the tune of over 2 000 images that are completely unique. This will actually allow us to reduce just a little bit of spend on giveaway cost, reducing our overall spend as well.’
The current treasurer for the OSL is MikeBarb. He’s been with the support lab since the beginning. Mike joined in to talk a little bit about what to expect in the new proposal, as well as running through some of the reasoning for the increased cycle length of six months.
Mike: ‘The budget is pretty similar to what we had last quarter, but there are some key facts or features that are changing. First and foremost the OSL has decided to try to move to a six-month proposal this round. We’ve been considering this change for a few proposal cycles, and have listened to a large amount of community feedback. We think it’s time to make that switch as long as the community agrees — so we do intend to put a six-month proposal up on Commonwealth to see how the community feels. Initially we liked the three month proposal because it’s very high touch — we get a lot of interaction with the community. For the most part though, our spends are pretty regular as well as the sixth month still gives us a lot of time to discuss with the community and iterate for proposal cycles during that time as well.’
Another key difference in the upcoming proposal is the removal of the signer pay. Due to the new structure in the OSL, and with the addition of multi-sends being available, the time commitment as well as responsibility on the individual signers has been reduced.
The OSL also switched over their live chat service provider, saving nearly 10,000$ per year.
Since the airing of this episode, the new proposal for the Osmosis Support Lab has gone up on Commonwealth! Make sure to check it out for a more in depth breakdown of the budget, as well as a further in depth look at what the OSL has accomplished this quarter.
Make sure to catch the full recording of this episode on the OsmosisCC Youtube channel!
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