Product Keynote: Polaris Cross-Chain Router

Summary

In this video, I introduced Polaris, a new product designed to bridge the liquidity gap across various blockchain ecosystems. Building on the success of Osmosis, which is a leading decentralized exchange in the Cosmos ecosystem, we recognized that the current crypto landscape is overly chain-centric, making it difficult for users to access liquidity seamlessly across different networks. Polaris serves as a unified interface, allowing users to connect their wallets from multiple ecosystems and aggregate their asset balances in one place. I walked through its features, including the ability to make trades without worrying about specific networks and the innovative Polaris Vaults, which extend wallet capabilities using a secure multi-party computation service. With autopilot functionality, users can execute complex transactions across chains effortlessly, ensuring a smooth trading experience without the hassle of managing multiple steps. Ultimately, Polaris aims to redefine the user experience in crypto by simplifying access to tokens across all chains in one app.

Key Takeaways

Polaris is a new token portal designed to provide a unified interface for trading across multiple blockchain ecosystems, addressing the fragmentation of liquidity in the crypto space.
The platform allows users to connect various wallets and aggregate their assets across different networks, simplifying the trading experience without the need to constantly switch between different chains.
Polaris Vaults extend the functionality of existing wallets, enabling users to interact with networks they don't natively support while automating complex transactions through an autopilot feature.
The service automates gas fee payments to ensure users can complete transactions seamlessly without worrying about having the right tokens for fees.
Polaris aims to enhance user experience by prioritizing an intuitive interface that abstracts away the complexities of blockchain networks, allowing users to focus on trading rather than the underlying technology.

Detailed Analysis

In the recent presentation on Polaris, the core message revolves around creating a seamless and integrated experience for users navigating the fragmented landscape of blockchain ecosystems. The speaker, a co-founder of Osmosis, emphasizes the challenges posed by the "great chain divide." Essentially, while users are looking for a fluid trading experience across various platforms, most existing solutions remain chain-centric, focusing on specific blockchain environments. Polaris aims to bridge this gap, offering a unified interface that allows users to access liquidity across multiple chains effortlessly.

This approach aligns with broader trends in the crypto space, where user experience (UX) has become a pivotal factor in adoption. As the market matures, the demand for interoperability and ease of use has surged. Users today want to interact with a multitude of assets without the cumbersome barriers that often come with managing multiple wallets and platforms. Polaris addresses these challenges head-on, aiming to simplify transactions and make liquidity accessible regardless of the underlying technology. This innovation is crucial, especially as we witness more users entering the crypto world, many of whom are not deeply versed in the technicalities of blockchain networks.

The implications of this initiative are significant. By focusing on the user experience and removing the friction associated with cross-chain trading, Polaris could potentially attract a broader audience. The introduction of features like Polaris Vaults, which allow users to extend their existing wallets to support additional networks without the hassle of managing multiple wallets, is particularly noteworthy. This not only streamlines the trading process but also enhances security by leveraging existing wallet infrastructure. However, the reliance on an MPC (Multi-Party Computation) service introduces a layer of complexity that may raise concerns around trust and the potential for centralization.

While there are numerous strengths to Polaris, such as its user-friendly interface and the promise of streamlined transactions, there are also limitations to consider. The effectiveness of the autopilot feature, for instance, hinges on the reliability of the underlying infrastructure. If the service encounters issues or if users face unexpected fees, it could lead to frustration instead of the promised ease. Furthermore, the success of Polaris will ultimately depend on its ability to attract liquidity and users from various ecosystems, which remains a challenging task given the competitive landscape.

This video is particularly useful for developers, investors, and crypto enthusiasts looking to understand the latest innovations aimed at improving user experience in the blockchain space. It serves as a call to action for anyone interested in leveraging the growing potential of cross-chain operations, as well as for those who are frustrated with the limitations of existing platforms. By showcasing a forward-thinking solution to a prevalent problem, Polaris not only illustrates the evolving nature of crypto applications but also invites a broader conversation about the future of decentralized finance.

Transcript

Speakers: A

**A** (0:05): Hey all. Thank you all for coming. I'm excited to be here at my second breakpoint. So I'll be talking today about a new product that we just announced last week called Polaris. But before that, let me tell you a little bit about how we got here and why we're building this. So for those who don't know, I'm the co founder of a project called Osmosis. Osmosis is a Dex app chain, which means it's a Dex built as its own standalone blockchain. It's currently the dominant Dex in the Cosmos ecosystem and it's connected to over 100 different blockchains. It's the primary liquidity venue for most of the major Cosmos ecosystem assets, tia, akt, dydx. And we're growing beyond that as well with a big focus on Bitcoin liquidity and a lot of the, you know, one of the main things that a lot of our community loves us for is our commitment to like Stellar ux. And we do that by a number of different ways, you know, taking advantage of a lot of the app chain features, building things like one click trading. You can trade rapidly without having to, you know, sign with your wallet every single time. The osmosis chain lets you pay your gas in any token, including usdc, Bitcoin, Sol, whatever you want. We have native cross chain swaps. You can swap from one Cosmos chain to another Cosmos chain without making any transactions on osmosis. And we're working on native privacy stuff so you can stop prying eyes from copying your trading strategies. But we have a problem. We've built a lot of these amazing features into Osmosis that have created this great trading experience. But we face this thing we call the great chain divide, where the problem is liquidity is very fragmented across all these ecosystems. And while we've created this amazing product for the Cosmos ecosystem, we struggle to how do we reach users who are elsewhere? And the problem today is almost every application, most of the infrastructure in crypto, wallets, liquidity venues, the interfaces that service them are designed in a very chain centric way. Right, but the problem is users are not chain maxis. Right? The apps might be chain maxis right now, but the users, they just want to trade everything. And we want to build apps for users, not for the chains. And so we were looking at, okay, how do we solve this problem? Users have wallets that they like to use and you know, liquidity is very sticky in the chains that they're built on. So we realized the best place to tackle this is at the interface layer. So this is why we built Polaris, the token portal. Just like a web portal, it's a single interface that allows you to tap into liquidity across all these different venues and chains. Instead of telling you more about it, I'll show you. So you log in, you come in, first thing you do is you go ahead and connect your wallet. When you connect a wallet, you can choose which ecosystems you want to connect it for. So I'll connect my phantom wallet for both Solana and Bitcoin. You can also choose to filter by ecosystem. So I'll see like, okay, what are the EVM wallets I can connect? I'll go ahead and connect my metamask and there, cool. So I have my phantom wallet connected for Solana and Bitcoin and Metamask connected for the slew of EVM chains. Now I can go ahead and open up the portfolio drawer. This is one of the most useful features for me personally because you can now see all your balances across all the networks aggregated and it even aggregates like kind assets. So for example, I can come over to Bitcoin and it will collapse my, you know, it'll have both my BTC on Bitcoin Mainnet and my WBTC on Ethereum. Same for something like Ethereum, right? It doesn't matter whether I'm holding my ETH on Ethereum or on an L2, whether it's held as wrapped Eth or even as an lsd. Right? It collapses all of those into one place. If users really want to see the more network centric view, they can do that. We will break down the assets by network it's on. And when you're trading as well, you can choose, hey, where do I want to receive my Bitcoin? Do I want to receive it on Bitcoin Mainnet on Ethereum as wbtc, on stacks as sbtc? But we really believe that the end state of crypto UX is that users should not really have to even be thinking about what network they're receiving on. So let's go ahead and make a trade. You choose the asset you want to sell and then you open up the selector. You can use the network selector on the left. But once again we really want people to try to use this all networks view which just aggregates everything. So I can go ahead and search for the token I want to buy and I'll it'll say, hey, cool, I can buy this token on base and it will show up in my Metamask wallet. But let's try to do something even more challenging, right? Instead of buying Degen, let's go ahead and buy something like ton. You'll notice I don't actually even have a TON Wallet. So what can I do? I can go ahead and it will give me the option of connecting a Ton wallet and there's a bunch of Ton wallets that you can install. But I don't want to go install a new Ton wallet, right? So instead we have this option called Polaris Vaults. So Polaris Vaults are one of the unique features that we build. So what essentially happens is the Polaris Vault is a way of extending your existing wallet to support networks that they don't already support. It will use an MPC service run currently by eight independent nodes, but eventually by the osmosis validator set to create a new key that's controlled by your existing wallet. You can also choose to deactivate Polaris Vaults and do it manually. But the problem is then you'd have to sit there and sign every single transaction manually. So instead we have this autopilot feature built into the Polaris vaults, where what it will do is it will secure the vault with your existing wallet and you'll see that here's a very complex trade. To go from SOL on Solana to Ton on the TON network, you have to do many steps. We're going to swap to USDC using Jupyter. We're going to bridge to Osmosis with cctp. We're going to swap to USDT on Osmosis. We're going to bridge that USDT to TON, and then we're going to swap to TON on DDoS, right? These are like five different steps. If you were going to do this by yourself, you'd have to go to five different sites. You probably don't. I bet most of you probably don't even know what TON bridge to use, right? Like, but instead what we do is we aggregate all of us in one. It's all run by autopilot. You know, all you have to do is two transactions. One is you go ahead and prepay your gas fees, right? So part of the problem is when you're doing this, you might be, you might have figured out how to get to USDT on time, but oops, you can't pay your gas fees. That's why what we do is we automate all the gas fee payments for you using our gas station. And then once you've initiated the autopilot, you can log off, go do your own thing, Go, you know, buy something else. And this whole transaction will run in the background automatically. And I'm going to skip forward and you'll end up with ton in your ton in your Polaris vault. So, yeah, that's. Well, that's Polaris, your token portal. A place where you'll be able to trade all tokens across all chains in one app. If you want an early access check over, go to the site Polaris app and you can sign up for the early access and you can follow us on Twitter at Polaris app. Thank you.