**A** (0:00):
Foreign.
**B** (0:07):
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Crypto news podcast. We are buzzing as always. Still coming in hot from Mexico, folks. It is so toasty down here. I'm sweating my you know what, off. Next time you guys see me, I'm gonna be 10 pounds lighter just from losing all this sweat. Gotta stay hydrated. Gotta keep crushing electrolytes. But this ain't about me. I am super pumped to have this lad on the show. We've been trying to get him on for a hot minute. We finally got him on. Coming in hot from New York City, the best city in the world, imo. Today we have Sunny Agrawal on the show today, co founder of Osmosis. You guys already know what Osmosis is, but we're going to jump into the bio anyway. Again, co founder of Osmosis, the premier Dex and Defi hub for the one and only Cosmos ecosystem. To date, the Osmosis Dex has facilitated over 35 billion Wowza in trading volume and more than a hundred separate blockchains connected to the Osmosis blockchain. At Tendermint, Sunny served as core developer of the Cosmos SDK and contributed to the development and launch of Cosmos and ibc. Sunny then decided to build on top of the foundation he had developed at Tendermint and co founded Osmosis, which was really needed to develop an app chain and Dex that rivals even the most robust centralized exchanges. A true goat of the crypto industry. Sunny, welcome to the show, my friend. Pumped to have you on. How you doing this lovely afternoon?
**A** (1:28):
I'm doing great. I wish I was as hot here as it sounds like it is there, but a little chilly here, but yeah, excited to be finally on after been a while.
**B** (1:37):
I love that New York City is pretty elite in the fall though. You know, like you walk, take a walk through Central park. All the trees are changing and fall sort of nice like if you're style. I mean, I have terrible style as you can see. I'm like a plain tee guy with a bunch of hats. I mean my hair is ferocious. I need to wear a hat most of the time. But like New York City is elite in the fall, you know what I mean?
**A** (1:56):
Fall and spring, you know, that's that, that's the best for New York.
**B** (1:59):
100% absolutely elite. Let's jump right into it, dude. Before we get into of course Osmosis and this EPI is going to be heavily focused on the Cosmos ecosystem, which is actually great because it's been a hot minute since we've talked about Cosmos on The show. I'd love if you could tell us a little bit about yourself, your journey into crypto. Maybe a little bit, you know, maybe a little of what you did before that, and then we'll get into all the fun stuff here.
**A** (2:20):
Yeah, sure. So, I mean, I got into crypto when I was in college. So in like, 2015, got involved with crypto, helped start this club at UC Berkeley called Blockchain at Berkeley. And, like, really started learning just by, like, teaching people. So I, I, me and two friends, we started teaching a class on, like, how bitcoin works. And so we kind of got a lot of people interested, and that's how know, for me, the best way to learn anything is to teach it. You know, similar to, you know, I'm sure that's part of why you do podcasts.
**B** (2:52):
Retweet, dude. Retweet.
**A** (2:54):
Yeah. And so started doing that. Then fast forward two years, 2017, summer I started working at. I mean, I started a little bit at consensys. I was interning there, working on some, like, Ethereum stuff there. But, you know, there's stuff that just didn't click for feel right for me. So that's why I kind of ran off and looked for something else to work on. And I found the Cosmos ecosystem and kind of started working with them that summer. And then come fall, I was so obsessed with what I was doing there, and I dropped out of college to work on Cosmos full time. And I guess I've been working on it since then. It's been over seven years now. So, you know, I was working at the original core dev team for Cosmos called All In Bits AIB for three years. And then that company had a little bit of a meltdown, you could say, and so kind of left that team. And then about three and a half years ago, started Osmosis.
**B** (3:56):
I love that, the dropping out. A lot of really incredible founders in crypto. It seems to be a bit of a trend. Like the college dropout kind of thing. Was that tough? Like family members, network, peers, being like, sonny, you're off your rocker, dude. What are you doing? Like, you're so close. Just finish off or did you know it was the right thing day one?
**A** (4:15):
I knew it was the right thing for day one. My mom gave me some trouble about it. My dad was, like, super supportive of it. And I don't know, I think I did a good. I still recommend people go to college.
**B** (4:26):
Yep. Teaches discipline.
**A** (4:28):
Teaches discipline, learn. I think it's a lot of it just like the network, like you know, even my co founder, I met him at Burke while in college. And I think I did like the alpha play is, you know, go to college for a year or two, then drop out, but keep living in the college town. So like, even after I dropped out, I was actually still living in my frat house. And so I was getting all like the social benefits of college and networking benefit, just not having to go to class. And even then I would just like drop in on classes whenever I, you know, if there's a class I found interesting, I would go like, just like sit in on it and like, you know, learn. So yeah, I think that's, that's, that, that's the alpha.
**B** (5:06):
Yeah, take advantage of that. That's some good alpha to start the pod. What frat were you in?
**A** (5:11):
I was in Alpha Delta Phi.
**B** (5:12):
Nice. Awesome. Good, good, like traditional college frat, huge crib, like, good parties, the whole nine yards.
**A** (5:20):
Yeah, definitely. And you know, it's, I tell all my like, you know, mentees, I'm like, yeah, you should definitely join a frat. I think it's one of the, you know, you know, you'll spend most of your time in college. Like, you know, you'll meet people through classes and like clubs and stuff and they're all going to be like really tech nerds. You should also have like a core group of friends that like, is just like super diverse and.
**B** (5:44):
Yeah, yes, I, I was in a frat too. Dude, you're preaching the quiet here. I absolutely love it. Let's jump right into it here. Osmosis, Cosmos. Before we get into osmosis, because, and again, I'll, I'll let you the elevator pitch in a bit because I feel like everyone already knows Osmosis is the biggest decks, you know, of the Cosmos ecosystem by a country mile. I don't even think there's a close second. But let's talk about the Cosmos ecosystem for a bit. And again, whenever I have someone on the show, if I have like, you know, someone in perhaps the ETH ecosystem, I don't really need to disclose that I'm invested in eth. It's sort of a no brainer. I do own a bag of Adam. I've had it for a while. And it's not the reason why you're on the show. You're on the show because you're brilliant and because you guys are doing incredible stuff and our listeners would love to learn more about this. But again, I do need to do the due diligence, let everyone know that I do Have a bag of Atom, of course, on Twitter. And it's for good and bad reasons. Crypto. Twitter literally runs crypto. It's sort of wild because there's no under no other industry that acts like this. But the Cosmos ecosystem has been getting shat on for, you know, last couple months and I don't fully know why. Obviously the, the main easy, low hanging fruit reason is obviously just price. Whenever the price doesn't rip, it's like, oh, these guys suck. They're not shipping quick enough. There's, you know, they're not base, blah, blah, blah. In your opinion, why does the Cosmos ecosystem get shit on?
**A** (7:05):
Yeah, I think so. Okay. The price is obviously a thing, but that's like a, I think that's a effect, not a cause, you know, cyclical, but like, okay, what's downstream of that, upstream of that. So you know, I mentioned, I briefly mentioned, you know, at the original core dev company I was working on, that company had a bit of a meltdown. And I think what happened was like Cosmos is just this idea of a network of app chains and stuff built on this common stack, right? Like I, you know, the example I give is like Cosmos is meant to be like Linux. It's open source tools that lets people build stuff on top of it. And it's designed to be like customized, right? Just like on Linux you have all these different distros and forks, right? That's what Cosmos is meant to be. Cosmos is this open source toolkit and I actually think that Cosmos is actually very successful right now. People don't realize like so much of like the ecosystem, crypto ecosystem is built using the Cosmos stack. Like, you know, even so, you know, on one hand, you know, you have chains like Polygon and stuff built using Cosmos tech. They don't really say that. They don't like to say the word that they do that, but they are. But even if you ignore things like that, like you look at projects that are like very like clearly Cosmos project, they call themselves Cosmos Projects. In the top hundred tokens by market cap, I think like seven of them are Cosmos tokens. While like if you look at Solana it's like nine. So it's like, you know, it's like I think people like are over crediting or you know, the death of Cosmos kind of where it's like, no, actually Cosmos is pretty big. And it's like so, you know, you look at, so what do we have? We have like Celestia injective mantra, say Thor chain like you know, Kronos So you do actually have quite a bit of Cosmos project now. I think what people are like, the current sentiment is actually quite bearish on right now is like you said, Atom. So Atom is one token of the Cosmos ecosystem. And I think part of what happened is Cosmos was designed with this goal of being non hierarchical. Right. It was designed to be like give empower projects to be, you know, not have limits to what their potential is. And like. And so you know, it was designed in such a way that Atom isn't this like, you know, rent extractive thing that's like, you know, it's. Yeah. Unlike you know, ETH in the Ethereum ecosystem, a Sol and Solana ecosystem. It wasn't designed to be that centric asset. For better or for worse. Right. That's just not how it was designed. But, but then the expectation was that you'd have entities like aib, the company I used to work for, you know, work on features for the Cosmos Hub that would bring value to Atom and be a service provider. Atom will be a service provider to the Cosmos ecosystem. So it could do things like bridging and maybe even have liquidity, like provide liquidity or things like IBC routing and stuff, you know, name services. A lot of stuff that the Cosmos Hub could have, should have done. But then the company that was sort of supposed to do it disintegrated.
**B** (10:33):
Exactly.
**A** (10:34):
And so it was kind of left in a very, you know, leaderless state for a long time. And I think that like, you know, and there have been like projects that have like or like sorry teams that have like stepped up to the mantle of like, oh like I think we, you know, let's step up to like do this on Fixed Save Adam and stuff. But you know, I think there's always been like either you know, they haven't gotten this like clear mandate from the community that yes, we're going to like let you set the vision and like execute or they've been like way too passive where like the ones that have gotten the mandate from the. So you know, Cosmos Hub, Atom has like on chain governance where atom holders vote and so like things that have gotten the mandate from the community, like getting governance approval to like, okay, here's funding to do xyz. They kind of have been, I don't know, I'd call it like less ambitious. They've been like, okay, they've been in maintenance mode, they do grants. But there wasn't this like clear vision of like this is what to do. So I think that's been the Challenging thing that Adam has been stuck in for. You know, it's history. And so there are stuff coming up on the horizon that I think can change that. Unfortunately, I can't actually speak too much about it right now because it's like, you know, still backroom stuff happening. But I feel you, you know, Zaki, one of the other Cosmos contributors, he like, has this like, thing, the one thing Adam seems to have that's so powerful. It's like constantly like it emits like, I can save her energy. Where it's like, no matter how bad it is, there's always like people out there who are like, oh, I can save her. You know, I'm gonna. And so there's another attempt coming in the coming months and I'm pretty excited about it.
**B** (12:30):
I love that. Well, look, we're have to have you back on to break that, but quick question here, just a little follow up to that. Do you think the Cosmos ecosystem would be in a better place if it did go the Eth or Solana route and just had sort of one overarching hierarchical. I don't even know if that's a word. I think I just made that up. Hierarchical token. Like we'll call it a cosmo. Let's just say it wasn't Adam and it was just Cosmo. Would that have done better for everything as a whole?
**A** (12:56):
Better in what way? Right. It's like, what is the goal? And you know, I think there's definitely value to that. But then you could also argue. No, the point of Cosmos was not that was like to. To be different than that. And then it's like, you know, yes, maybe that would have been better for the Price of Adam, but would that have like, fundamentally lost the.
**B** (13:18):
Exactly.
**A** (13:19):
Purpose.
**B** (13:20):
Yeah.
**A** (13:21):
What we were doing. So I would say, like one thing. Maybe I would, you know, maybe what we could zoom out instead and say is I think one of the problems that the Cosmos ecosystem did was it tried too many radical things at once where, you know, this like, meme that everyone talks about.
**B** (13:40):
No Star. Yeah. No North Star kind of thing.
**A** (13:42):
Yeah. You know, this meme like everyone talks about, like, oh, all the cool greatest ideas in crypto originate from Cosmos and then they end up getting copied elsewhere. And I think the problem is, I think that's valid. I think that's actually what happens. And I think what happened is like, you know, the Cosmos ecosystem, we had a lot of great ideas and we tried to do all of them at once. And I think that, like, lack of focus on, like, you know, I Think it's very hard. I was reading this like, you know, I don't know where it was, some startup blog or something about like, you know, it's like, you know, you should pick what is your fundamental like thesis of what you think is different than the rest that no one else agrees with and then focus on like that and like everything else, just use the standard thing. You know, it's like, you know, oh, you're trying to build this new product. Don't also try to be like, oh, I want to invent a new programming language to do this thing right. It's like, okay, stick to the standards and then take the one counter thesis that you want to focus on and do that. And so I think Cosmos, we had too many counter thesis, right? We were very early on app chains, right Back when everyone else was like, no, general purpose chains is the way to go. Now it's changing. But that was one of our theses. We were very early on proof of stake that one ended up, I think we were obviously very right on that. We were very early on this, oh, non hierarchical systems. We were very early on Rust and cosmosm. So in a time when everyone else was doing EVM stuff, we were one of the few that was like, oh, this thing isn't scalable and so we have to build a new smart contracting language. So I think we were trying to do, I think we had a lot of right ideas, but because we had too many right ideas and trying to execute on all of them at once, we weren't able to properly ship or execute on the whole vision because our focus was too split, combined with all the organizational issues and blah, blah, blah.
**B** (15:45):
Well said. Well, there's one thing for sure and that is that the, the premier decks on the Cosmos ecosystem, Osmosis is an absolute behemoth. You got to give us the sort of the elevator pitch and of course the story of how this was founded and segue this into. Did you ever think that you guys would facilitate over 35 billion in trading volume again? I love this. I'm so happy for you guys. It's got to be cool having such an advantage. Like a lot of other EcoSystems have multiple DEXes that are pretty close. Like you guys are the big dao. Like walk me through that, how it got started, the founding story and sort of just the segue into the incredible growth that you guys have had and experienced.
**A** (16:25):
Yeah, sure. So the founding story. So me and one of my co founders, we were actually not setting out to build a dex, we were setting out to build privacy tooling. My co founders especially, he's like, super privacy build. And like, you know, that's his, like, you know, mo. And. And so we were like, okay, we can build privacy tech, but we weren't sure who was going to use it. And I think that privacy is a feature, not a product. And unless you have a product that it's well packaged in, you can't have the ux. You can't have. People have to do additional work to do to use privacy. You want them to have a really good product that happens to be private. And so, you know what we ended up. We're like, okay, well, the thing that seems to have traction in the one at the time and maybe even today, the one product that has any product market fit in all of crypto is exchanges. And so we're like, all right, let's build a decentralized exchange and then build privacy as this, like, core piece of it. And so what ended up happening was that, you know, when you start building that, then you get sucked up into a bunch of other things. And unfortunately, we haven't actually gotten around to the privacy stuff yet, but we will. And that is something that I'm actually going to be giving a talk next week at Cosmoverse about how we're going to finally bring privacy to both osmosis and beyond. Yeah. So we started doing that and we chose to use the Cosmos stack partially because it was what we were familiar with, because that's what I worked on in the past, but also I think at the time and even today, it's probably just the most flexible stack for building anything novel at the protocol level. Like, if you want to go add new cryptography or you want to change how things work, which what you need to do in order to build a privacy system, be like, okay, let's use this stack. And then it just got a lot of traction because Cosmos, even just like today, like, you know, I said there's like seven top hundred assets at the time. There was also 10. You know, if Cosmos constantly has a large chunk of the ecosystem, crypto market cap is in Cosmos. And so there's a lot of assets that had high value and, like, just didn't have access to liquidity. So, you know, you had Atom and AKT and stuff like that at the time. But then, you know, we got our really big windfall when two big assets showed up in the Cosmos ecosystem, and those were Luna and ust. And those things kind of blew up like crazy in a good way at first. And you Know, I think that $35 billion of volume, I'd sa probably, I bet like two thirds of that was during that first year of osmosis, like when Luna and UST were at their peak. And we were the biggest decks for ust. And so it was growing like crazy. And then poof, until everything stopped, until Terra blew up. And then from there what we did and a lot of the Cosmic ecosystem did was we brought in a lot of that Terra ecosystem and community. A lot of them stuck around in Cosmos and built on top of the stack and the ecosystem. And so we kind of grew from there. And since then, we've sort of just been shipping lots of different features and improving the stack. And then we are the very dominant player in the Cosmos ecosystem. And then we're like, okay, how do we expand beyond? So one of the things we're doing is focusing pretty heavily on bitcoin on the osmosis side. You know, I think bitcoin is the biggest asset in all of crypto, but there's really not any good, like, decentralized exchange for it, like with like order books and all, like constant liquidity and all these features. So that's one thing we're focusing on. And then the other thing we're focusing on is this new product called Polaris, which is a way of taking a lot of the UX that we've built for osmosis and taking it to other ecosystems and being like, hey, part of our goal with why we wanted to start osmosis as well was the thesis was one of the things that decentralized exchanges have that I think we don't have in Defi, right, Is you can trade everything in one place. And that was like, huge. Yeah, you can go buy Bitcoin, Eth, xrp, Cardano, anything, all in one spot. And I think that like, you know, there's the, the, the UX in Defi, it's so fragmented. I have to go to Defi.
**B** (20:57):
It's not good. Yeah, it's not good. It's not good.
**A** (20:59):
And so we tried to like, do this at. With osmosis. The goal was like, hey, we, we'll build one chain like the Switzerland of Dexes, that you can trade everything in one place. And that works well for app chain assets, for forge tokens whose own chain does not have a Dex. So Atom, tia, Akt, Bitcoin is a big one. Right? Bitcoin doesn't have its own native Dex. Those things we can get liquidity for and be the app chain dex for them. But where we struggle is it's hard to get liquidity for things like Solana assets like Bonk or WIF or Ethereum assets, because liquidity is sticky. And that liquidity wants to stay where it came from.
**B** (21:43):
Exactly. Because it's working and you pull too much, it might not work. Exactly, exactly.
**A** (21:48):
And so that's why Polaris is this like, okay, let's build something higher. So it's called a token portal. Where it's like, you know, the thesis is still like, yes, how do we build one place where people can trade everything, but then we dispatch trades to wherever has the most liquidity regardless of what chain it's on. So if you want to buy Sol, it'll buy you Sol by going to Jupiter. Or if you want to buy, you know, you know, eth, it'll buy that. If you want to buy Bitcoin, it'll go to Osmosis. If you want to buy Ton, it'll go to Stun or DDUST or whatever. Right. So it's this like super Dex and Bridge aggregator. But importantly, it lets you use your existing wallets. I think you know this. I think there are other folks out there trying to build this sort of like, super app, but I think a lot of them are like, you know, I don't know about you, but I don't like to change wallets very often. I want to stick with the wallet.
**B** (22:40):
It's just like you said, Sonny, a centralized exchange is still. I'm sorry to all the incredible people we've had on the show, but there's still nothing better in regards to the UX UI than a centralized exchange. It's absolutely beautiful. It works. You can do everything you want in one place. The apps are freaking good.
**A** (22:54):
Private.
**B** (22:55):
Exactly. You cannot be decentralized exchange.
**A** (22:58):
Yeah. So, I mean, that's our goal. We got to figure out how to go beat the decentralized, decentralized exchange. But yes, we are nowhere close to that. And I think, you know, the two things that Osmosis or our team is working on right now to solve that is one asset breadth in one app and then the privacy. I think those are at least two steps towards beating the centralized exchanges.
**B** (23:21):
I love that. And we're going to get into that in one sec. Senny, you are on an absolute heater right now. An absolute roll. But we do need to take a quick break and give a huge shout out to respond to the show when we get back. We're going to keep buzzing on Osmosis. Everything Defi and Dex related and of course, Defi based bitcoin, bitcoin based D5 rather, which I can't wait to get into and still no one has really fixed this problem and hopefully it is you guys. Until then, huge shout out to Prime XPT, longtime friends of crypto news.com and longtime sponsors of the crypto news podcast. We love Prime XPT as they offer a robust trading system for both beginners and professional traders. It doesn't matter if you're a rookie or a vet, you can easily design and customize your layouts and widgets to best fit your trading style. PrimeXVT is also running an exclusive promo for listeners of the pod. Use the promo code cryptonews50. That is cryptonews50 crypto news 50 all one word to receive 50% of your deposit credited to your trading account. Again, crypto news 5.0 all one word to receive 50% your deposit credited to your trading account. And now back to the show with Sunny. Sunny. Let's jump into Bitcoin based defi. This is something again. Bitcoin is still the behemoth, still owns what, 50% of all crypto market cap for a good reason. Bitcoin is the goat. No one knows who Satoshi is. It is literally the only true, true, true decentralized coin that still has some legs to it. We love to see it. And another thing that people always sort of forget about when you ask a normie about crypto, they can maybe name Ethereum, maybe name Solana, maybe a couple memes, but everyone knows what bitcoin is and that is also very powerful. The brand, Bitcoin's brand, extremely powerful. What is bitcoin's biggest issue? You can't do shit with it. It's a store of value. You can send some money to people but otherwise you can't do a single thing. It sort of sucks. I still love it. You still love it. We all love it. But it's gotta get better. What does the future of bitcoin based defi look like?
**A** (25:14):
Yeah, I think the future of bitcoin based defi is that the bitcoin chain actually continues to remain simplistic and simple and you know, risk reduced and then the asset becomes the base money of defi on as many chains as possible. That's actually so, you know, going back for a second, you know, when I was talking about my like how I got into crypto and my story, I was like, I joined Consensys and then didn't like it and joined, ended up joining Cosmos and The reason is at the time, still today, maybe a little bit less so. But at the time I was like, very bitcoin maxi. And I found all the Ethereum stuff cool. And I'm like, wow, there's all these cool applications. But I was like, I was like, what is this? Eth coin? Like, I thought we were building for Bitcoin. Like, I thought this was the whole point of so like superpower bitcoin. And that's kind of why I got into Cosmos, because it was like Cosmos was this idea of, hey, we'll have a bunch of app chains, sidechains, and you know, bitcoin is the original app chain. It's an app chain just for payment. And then Blockstream had this idea of sidechains back in 2014, but never really executed on it. And so I saw Cosmos as like, oh, great, this is how we're going to do this. We're going to build a network of app chains and bitcoin. The asset is going to flow off of the main chain and be used on all of these networks. Right? And so I still think that's the vision. I think we're going to see more and more, you know, we can call them L2s. I don't think that. I don't, I don't really care so much about what, whether they're like settling to fraud proofs or whatever is happening on a bitcoin. I don't think that's what actually matters. I think just, you know, I think the goal is to get towards trustless bridging. Right? Like, you know, you. I think there's some protocol changes that can happen to bitcoin that can make trustless bridging better. So whether it's stuff like opcad or drive chains or anything like that, so with good trustless bridging to then use bitcoin as like the main asset in a bunch of these chains. And so, you know, I think we're seeing all these like bitcoin layer twos show up right now. And I think that's, you know, finally the first step in the right direction of, you know, starting to see more bitcoin based defi.
**B** (27:40):
I know you got more there. You got it, you got to plug, you got to plug osmosis. The work you guys are doing with ibc, you got to plug yourself here.
**A** (27:46):
Yeah, yeah. So like I said, I mean, my goal was always to build bitcoin based defi. And so we've been working like, how do we get bitcoin more and more used in the osmosis Dex. And so we've been working with a number of different bridge providers actually to allow Bitcoin to flow very seamlessly onto osmosis. So we work with two main bridge providers. We work with one called Nomic and another one called. Well, it's called icp, like the Finity protocol, but they have a really good bridge actually. So what we've actually invented on osmosis is this concept of alloyed assets. So what that means is, so you go in Coinbase today and you want to like deposit eth, right? It actually lets you deposit from Mainnet Ethereum, but it also lets you deposit from Optimism Arbitrum Polygon base. Right. And what they're really doing is they're kind of having a basket of different ETH on different chains in the back end. But, but that's like letting. It's serving as good ux, letting users deposit and withdraw from any of them. Right. So we kind of wanted to do the same thing on chain but like in a very transparent way. So we have this concept of Alloid assets where, you know, the, the canonical bitcoin on osmosis is actually a basket of different flavors of bitcoin, right? So it includes bridged wbtc, it includes like Nomic bitcoin, it includes the CK bitcoin. So it allows us. So, you know, if you want a bitcoin on osmosis, you can deposit WBTC from Ethereum or Bitcoin from Mainnet. And so this is growing on osmosis. And now you're starting to actually see other Cosmos chains also adopt alloyed Bitcoin as well. So you have like Nolis, which is a lending protocol. In Cosmos, they just added support for alloy Bitcoin Levana, which is a derivatives trading protocol, they added support for alloy bitcoin. So I think we're going to start to see Alloy bitcoin grow as this like core asset in the Cosmos ecosystem.
**B** (29:46):
I love that. And I just want to segue a little bit over to the smart accounts and one click trading that you guys have done for the, you know, the UX improvements that is absolutely massive. I'd love if you could tie that in Sunny to sort of the future of Dexs and Bitcoin based Defi. Because in my head here, if I'm sort of picturing a world and a workflow or just a consumer journey of Bitcoin based defi, like in my head I'm like, oh God, this is absolute nightmare fuel. How do we make this work? Like how do we set up a bitcoin native wallet? How could this possibly work with the Dex? Could it somehow be like the current setup and workflow that you guys have with the smart accounts and the one click trading that really helps spur adoption and ease ability of use?
**A** (30:31):
Yeah. So you know, on osmosis we built that smart account functionality or kind of traction is another way of putting it. But like, you know, because we're like, hey, centralized exchanges, like they have all these like UX benefits and like, why don't we have. We need these in decentralized exchanges as well. When you like, you know, make a trade on Binance and every time you click it doesn't ask you to like re authenticate with your password and everything. Right. It asks you to do it when you withdraw off of Binance. So it's like the same thing should be happening on Osmosis as well. You come in, we have this one click trading functionality where like, you know, the session keys is like, you know, you make a transaction, you sign the first time and after that you can just do as many trades as you want. We have like risk parameters in there where it's like, hey, if it's like, you know, if we see that you're trading your bitcoin into like some coin, like unauthenticated coin, with like, no, with like zero liquidity, they're like, okay, maybe there's an issue here. So that's when we ask you to authenticate or especially if you're withdrawing coins off of the exchange, that's when we ask you to authenticate. But otherwise you can sit there and trade as much as you want without having to. Especially if you have a ledger, don't have to click, click, click all the time. So I think doing that on Osmosis, it really showed the potential of this thing. And now with Polaris is how we're trying to say, okay, this is what I meant by how do we take the UX that we've built in osmosis and bring it to elsewhere? If you want to trade Solana Assets or Ethereum Assets, how do we still give you that like one click trading experience in all of these places? And so we're using a bunch of like MPC stuff to like make that possible.
**B** (32:10):
Gotcha. I love that. Sunny. This has been an absolute train episode here, dude. We are, we are getting a little tight for time. Any other areas of crypto really getting you going at the moment? I know we've obviously done a huge deep dive into the Cosmos ecosystem. Of course, OSMOSIS your baby. Any other areas of crypto get you going? Like, are you a meme lord? Are you dabbling in the shitcoins? You're probably way too busy for that shit, you know? Rwas anything else that really excites you at the moment, outside of what you and the team are moving and grooving on?
**A** (32:37):
I mean, I think the things that I'm, you know, bitcoin and privacy are sort of maybe my two biggest, like, things that I'm really excited about. Beyond that, you know, if I had to throw out something, I mean, I'm just really excited about, like, some of, like, you know, some of the new stuff DYDX is working on with, like, permissionless perps Market. On the meme coin side, I've been following unicorn quite a bit, so that's pretty fun. When it comes to meme coin, I'm not a big meme coin person, but what I do like meme coins. I like when there's scarcity around meme coins and I feel like if there's just infinite tickers, then it's kind of boring. But in something like Unicorn, there's only a fixed number of emojis. Right. So there's actually scarcity in the meme coins or on hyperliquid, they do something where it's like, oh, you have to, like, there's an auction once a week to create a new meme coin that's like, I think meme coins are cool, but they need some notion of scarcity to them.
**B** (33:38):
Interesting. How. How can we do a better job at that? Do you have any ideas? I mean, I know I'm put. I know I'm putting you on.
**A** (33:44):
Yeah, yeah. I mean, like I said, the unicorn one is cool because it took something that, like, is culturally resonant, which is emojis. People, like, use them all the time and made them tradable. So I think that was brilliant. And they are fixed. Right. I think you could argue friend tech was an early scarce meme coin, right. Because it's based off of identity of people and so you can't just mint infinite of them. Right. So I don't have the answer off the top of my head, but I'm sure there's other interesting verticals where you can create meme coin economies but have this notion of scarcity. Like, I'm. I guess you could argue I'm pro meme coin. I mean, I'm. Dogecoin is probably one of my, like, you know, favorite coins. One of. One of my larger. I probably have more dogecoin than I have eth. But like.
**B** (34:37):
I love it.
**A** (34:38):
I mean you said earlier you go out on the street. I think if you go out on the street, most people, everyone's heard of bitcoin. I bet more people have heard of dogecoin than ethics.
**B** (34:47):
So I agree with you 100%. Yeah, eth, not eth memes are good for onboarding normies to crypto but like the means of onboarding, it's again, it's tough to explain but like it's good to get them in the arena but they themselves will then need to have the wherewithal and the want and the drive to then learn about incredible companies like yourselves and the builders like yourselves who actually move the needle and do good job, you know. So it's, it's a little different. But Sunny, this has been a treat of an episode, my man. Any news coming out? Mind you, this is going to air in about a week or so, but any news popping off, you know, before mid to end October when this thing airs?
**A** (35:26):
No, I think, yeah, most of. Most, most of what we covered. You could check out our demo of Polaris that we gave at Solana Breakpoint online. It's on the Solana YouTube channel so check that out to see what's coming up next.
**B** (35:40):
You got it. And as always we will include that in the show notes. Sunny, really appreciate you coming on. This was a great episode dude and your ability to explain crazy complex topics into nice little bite sized, you know, bits of info is huge. And really appreciate your time here as always. Before we let you go, can you please let our listeners know where they can find you personally and of course Osmosis online and on socials.
**A** (36:00):
I'm on Twitter @SunnyA97 for osmosis the site is Osmosis Zone. You can use it today. And for Polaris it's Polaris app and it'll. You can sign up for the wait list and get early access.
**B** (36:17):
Love it. Sunny, really appreciate your time brother. Can't wait for round two. Wishing you and the team all the best and we will keep in touch.
**A** (36:22):
Thanks man.
**B** (36:23):
Folks, what an episode with Sunny Agarwal from Osmosis. The biggest decks on the Cosmos ecosystem. And of course he is the co founder of Osmosis. We touch a little bit of everything here. The Cosmos ecosystem, Bitcoin based defi the future of decentralized exchanges. What an episode. Huge shout out to Sunny and the team for making this happen. If you guys enjoyed this one and I hope you did, please do subscribe. It would mean the world to my team and I. Speaking of the team, love you guys. Thank you so much for everything, especially Eustace. You are the man and listeners. Love you guys. Thank you. As always. Keep on growing those bags and keep on staying healthy, wealthy and happy. Bye for now and we'll see you on the next one.
**A** (37:00):
Ciao.