Emeris and Osmosis: Interoperable DEXes for the Cosmos Hub
Finally, a bit of interoperability gets up and running--TLDR; it's amazing.
Osmosis made history on June 18, 2021, by launching a massively inflationary token in an extremely creative way. 1,000,000,000 $OSMO tokens will become available over the next 10 years after a quadratic fairdrop distributed the first massive chunk of them to the community for free. I highly recommend starting here and reading all of their articles on Medium.
Emeris has also earned the right to a place in this article by launching without a native token at all. The existing Cosmos ($ATOM) token will do just fine as a way to pay gas fees on this decentralized exchange built right onto the Cosmos Hub. The rollout was slow, but interoperability with Osmosis was absolutely worth it—picture an Ethereum Uniswap-type application which was completely interoperable with all ERC-20 blockchains no matter which L1 or L2 blockchain they might currently reside upon! This single innovation represents what is likely the most substantial indication yet that IBC will end up superseding (by incorporating what works and leaving behind what doesn’t) all of the best that any other blockchain ecosystem can offer.
The Interchain Future
Cosmos is the driving force behind interchain adoption, as founder Jae Kwon’s vision has been picked up by a powerful and growing group of developers from around the world. The most obvious place to see this is in the vision for application-specific blockchains which can be built by even relatively inexperienced devs using the Cosmos SDK. Think of the scaling implications for a blockchain such as Ethereum if Uniswap and OpenSea had their own seamlessly-integrated L2 solutions which could boost throughput and reduce congestion while ensuring minimal transaction fees by completely eliminating the need for these and other applications to compete with one another for throughput and low fees.
The vision has recently been rendered exceedingly clear by a simple and very easy to illustrate concept:
These top assets show up on 2 blockchains, when it isn’t 3! I have one that’s only on one blockchain too, because all of my $OSMO has remained on its own chain! Each asset has a number next to it which signifies the number of IBC-compatible blockchains it resides upon. I was excited to learn this, but it took me a bit to learn the truth of my Osmosis token: I never thought about it before but I suppose there isn’t much need to ever transfer this native token to the Cosmos Hub! I’ve seen some folks have a hard time with this and even decide that maybe Osmosis is more important than the Cosmos Hub, but I think I see a strong reason to disagree if the Hub will be hosting technologies such as this which make it a true Hub for the user by making true one-site interchain DeFi possible.
There is substantial need to add other tokens into the Osmosis blockchain, such as my $REGEN which appears on its own native IBC blockchain as well as on Osmosis, but as more people join in and the incentive for providing liquidity drops further, this should level off and essentially provide the world of its first glimpse of a Uniswap-type application that is extremely cost-effective, secure, and fast.
There have been a few minor throughput issues, but as a daily user of Osmosis since launch (if you count time spent reading, since BEFORE launch) I believe I have seen a large enough cross-section of the network’s development to make a judgment on it. The judgment is, simply, in the affirmative. I see what the team is up to and I believe the application-specific chain architecture is now borne out by over 2,000,000 transactions and a TVL of over $200M. Emeris does not offer the free transactions currently available on Osmosis, but with over $20M TVL already despite a lack of massive inflationary Osmosis rewards, it is rapidly scaling nonetheless. Low-cost transactions and massive volume make it an appealing concept to provide liquidity to sufficiently large tokens anyway.
Our new magazine is called Cosmoswriter and we are thrilled to have brought Interchain to the Cryptowriter ecosystem. As Paragism explained last week, Cosmos-based DeFi is here and it is hot. It does, in fact, pay my rent. And I did not make a massive investment into the ecosystem—it was the quadratic fairdrop that supplied me with the seed that has now grown large enough to pay my rent.
Interchain is here, folks. ERC-20 tokens should be supported in these remarkable applications in the near term, allowing for a gigantic migration of Ethereum-local liquidity into the IBC environment we know as Cosmos.
The Vision
I would be remiss if I failed to laud the remarkable vision of the Cosmos founding team and the Regen Network dev team which has stepped in to supercharge the most compelling vision of decentralization available in blockchain today. I have had the pleasure of meeting and interacting with a remarkable proportion of them in the $ION Governance Working Group and other notable Telegram channels dedicated to supporting and interacting with the growing Cosmos community.
If you’re a DeFi enthusiast or even a layperson, I strongly recommend (just because it’s amazing, not as financial advice!) getting a feel for Cosmos SDK products in this space. Earlier this year, we saw Polygon ($MATIC) seize a massive amount of L1 Ethereum transaction volume without successfully bringing over the massive Ethereum liquidity base. The token appreciated massively and I still count myself as an ecosystem member and fan of Polygon’s technology, but as a cryptocurrency investor, the big question on my mind here is this: will the Cosmos Hub DeFi and AMM products suffer this same fate? From here, to me, the answer looks like a resounding no. A low-fee ecosystem to trade and provide liquidity for ERC-20 tokens will be a boon to projects such as my Work In Progress Publishing company (WIP Publishing; ) and our DAO-as-product PAGE DAO, which currently boasts an ERC-20 token called $PAGE.
It is positively thrilling to see the Cosmos ecosystem exploding just in time to incorporate my own personal passion project into it! Kudos to all of the hardworking Cosmos community and team members. Here at Cryptowriter we’ll be eagerly following every exciting update that comes out.
Good to see some COSMOS articles appearing in the writer ecosystem. I've been bullish on COSMOS since I first started in the crypto space and I honestly believe that the best is yet to come and COSMOS will change the way that the crypto space works. With the ETH bridge in development, connections to Terra coming in less than 2 weeks and many other big caps coming to join the IBC such as SOL and MATIC I see big things ahead for COSMOS in the short and long term. This is a project that is here to stay
I really like DeFi platforms and passive income. The idea of being able to generate regular income with a certain investment is very nice. I'm totally addicted to passive income! Whether it pays my rent or not. :P
I've read all of Cosmoswriter's articles and everything is going well for now. See you in the next article, thanks!