Google and Coinbase strike a deal, BNY Mellon begins crypto custody and WisdomTree’s Bitcoin ETF gets denied: Hodler’s Digest, Oct.9-15
Contrary to expectations, Aggarwal did not find Ethereum to his liking.“It just didn’t click for me, and there was no roadmap as to how the network could have worked out in the long term.” But the experience turned his attention toward a novel mechanism called proof-of-stake consensus.
And so, Aggarwal went out and read all the proof-of-stake white papers he could lay his hands on.“Out of all of them, it was the Tendermint piece that I liked the most,” says Aggarwal, citing the protocol’s simplicity.“Devs could build this in, like, a couple of months if we all wanted to.”
That summer, Aggarwal reached out to the Tendermint team, which is the core developers of the Cosmos and IBC ecosystem, and asked if any positions were available.
At the time, the would-be Osmosis co-founder didn’t even know that Tendermint was behind Cosmos.But after hearing about its projects in development, such as IBC and cross-chain bridges, Aggarwal felt that the ecosystem was a perfect fit.Sunny Aggarwal at Cosmoverse, with his iconic headdress.
Source: Cosmoverse
“Everything just clicked.The idea of Cosmos solved all the issues I saw with the Ethereum model.
So, I dropped out of UC Berkeley that September and began working on Cosmos full-time.I’ve been doing it for the last five years.”
According to Aggarwal, what really fascinated him about IBC was its scalability on both the technical and social levels.“Just take a look at Ethereum,” he says.“It has gotten so big to the point where there’s tens of thousands of DApps building on it.And that, in my view, means that technical advancement on the blockchain grinds to a halt.” Subscribe The most engaging reads in blockchain.
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Aggarwal explains that it’s simply unfeasible to consider all Ethereum projects’ needs, given the sheer numbers.“Things would be much simpler if instead of you had fully vertically integrated app chains that could iterate the protocol layer very rapidly like IBC.” In addition, the history of Ethereum hard forks further solidified his belief in IBC.
“Each application and community should have sovereignty over their own system.
We can’t fork a blockchain every time there is a disagreement.If one application wants to fork, that shouldn’t cause my application to fork as well.” Osmosis developers at WeWork.Source: Sunny Aggarwal, Twitter
Users of the Osmosis DEX can make use of 89 cross-chain bridges across 45 blockchains on Osmosis.That means one can swap in and out of connected tokens in a noncustodial manner, as well as earn swap fees for providing liquidity.
Like most co-founders, on an average day in Osmosis, Aggarwal spends most of his time taking calls and coordinating the team’s internal focus.About 25% of his time is devoted to coding and the remainder is spent networking with stakeholders in the ecosystem and with those looking to join.
But the event made Aggarwal and his team think long and hard about the protocol’s vulnerabilities.“Experiencing two tokens making up over half of our liquidity crashing to zero in a matter of days made us implement stricter safety controls.” On Osmosis, bridge rate limiting is now in place where, for illustrative purposes, a pool containing $100 million of digital assets can only have $5 million or so moved across an IBC bridge every six hours.
IBC protocols such as the Osmosis DEX connects digital assets across blockchains.Source: Map of Zones Reflections and the road beyond
Moving forward, Aggarwal sees himself working for Osmosis in the next five years or so.“What Osmosis means will change over time; will it always just be a DEX, or transition into some other element? I can’t say for sure.” But it’s Aggarwal’s firm belief that most crypto projects will be built on Cosmos “in the next decade.” “Hence,” he says, “I can definitely see myself working on this stuff for the long term.”
As to his ultimate vision for DeFi, Aggarwal says it all boils down to one catchphrase he’s polished over the years:
“It’s all about enabling privacy for the individual and transparency for the system.”
He points to the example of Robinhood and the firm’s practice of selling customers’ order flow to big hedge funds to make a profit: “That’s why we want to build a privacy-enabled DEX where none of that stuff happens.But at the same time, we want the system to be accountable.
We want users to see, for example, how much overall leverage the protocol has.And not some clouded manifestation like in CeFi.That’s the vision I want to give.” Read also .
