Make Osmosis PERMISSIONLESS

Proposal Discussion
1

Cosmos is dying, Osmosis is the only hope.
8z503z

Why Osmosis can save Cosmos

Since the collapse of Terra, there has been no Schelling point for CosmWasm (CW) developers. They have dispersed to Juno, Kujira, Neutron, Archway, Sei. None of these alternatives have achieved remotely the number of users Osmosis has.

As the DEX of Cosmos, where users go to first to swap for funds and gas needed to use other chains, Osmosis is extremely well-positioned to consolidate CosmWasm developers and emerge as the ultimate place for CW developers to deploy.

Why we need a permissionless CosmWasm hub

App-chains has terrible DevX and UX.

  • DevX––need to find validators, need to run a chain, need to launch a token right away… makes it A LOT of boilerplate to make a simple Dapp; too much boilerplate to facilitate exploring novel app ideas
  • Txs are not atomic from one app-chain to another and users are required to bridge to use one app from another. NFTs on a diff chain, DEX on a diff chain, liquid staking on a diff chain
  • The only case where app-chains make sense is for big synthetics exchanges like dYdX and HyperLiquid
  • Multi-chain gas problem. Very easy to get your money stuck when every chain requires a different gas token and the DEX is on a separate chain; users need a mental model of app-chain state for simple transactions

These problems increase the barrier to entry for new developers, fragment liquidity, and make it extremely confusing for users to use Cosmos Dapps.

CosmWasm is a proven, well-designed VM.

CosmWasm has one of the strongest community of developers in crypto and an extremely compelling value proposition for Dapp developers. It protects against re-entrancy, abstracts away clear primitives so programmers do not need to worry about low-level infrastructure details, and is completely portable, allowing teams to re-use contracts on multiple chains.

Permissionless CosmWasm has been battle-tested by Juno, Neutron, Sei, Archway, and increasing number of chains. They’ve been through chain halts, downtime, enough so that permissionless CosmWasm today operates with no to little interruptions and risks. Most of the risk of CosmWasm comes from interaction with modules like IBC hooks and other custom modules, which should be taken seriously before integration.

Why Osmosis is the perfect place for Permissionless CW

  • Fee abstraction is built-in so users rarely get stuck. You can pay gas with USDC, with ATOM, with OSMO, with any token you want, making Osmosis aligned with holders of all tokens
  • Osmosis has the most users, highest activity, and highest retention among ALL COSMOS CHAINS. The numbers don’t lie; Osmosis is where people go most frequently in Cosmos. Other permissionless CosmWasm chains face the problem of attracting users and developers, Osmosis does not; CW devs deploying to Osmosis will have the HIGHEST EXPOSURE to Cosmos users out of all chains in the ecosystem

Enabling permissionless CosmWasm on Osmosis will allow CW developers to finally have hundreds of thousands of users to distribute to, and drive developers, consumers, and volume to Osmosis to all-time highs.

OSMO goes to all-time highs. :rocket:

Why Permissioned CosmWasm is so painful

Many people argue that permissioned CosmWasm is enough. It’s not. Out of personal experience, it was the only reason we didn’t deploy TAILWIND on Osmosis.

  1. Contract upload cycles slow down shipping speeds. Needing gov permission considerably slow down shipping cycles. This puts CosmWasm developers at a disadvantage on Osmosis compared to other chains; a week in crypto is a month in Web2 time. No bueno
  2. Devs hate politics / permissioned culture. We don’t want governance permission to deploy contracts. Not all apps are immediately understandable; some of the worst-sounding apps have attracted the most users. Prime example: Pump.fun. We don’t want to have to explain ourselves when everywhere else in crypto, developers can just deploy at will

Final Note

I love the Interchain (with exceptions) and am a long-term holder of OSMO. It pains me to see Cosmos continue to go down paths that hurt long-term builders and users of the space.

This does not have to be the case. Cosmos does not have to die and wither away to irrelevance. Terra was the top #3 blockchain in the world in terms of TVL and usage before it collapsed. Things looked good once for Cosmos, but things can change. Things do not look good now for Cosmos, but things can change!

There is a secure path to long-term growth for the ecosystem and this is one of the crucial first steps, led by Osmosis.

Time is running out. Make haste.

With love,
baoskee

3 Likes
2

Linking the two previous discussion threads for context:

This vote comes down to comparing the risk of permissionless cosmwasm to causing a potential security issue when a bug is discovered and not fixed immediately vs the barrier that permissioned cosmwasm causes to development.

In my view, the barrier is incredibly low since Osmosis has never rejected an upload key to a team that went to the chain to ask for one, but there is a barrier that may deter casual developers from deploying.

Conversely, the risk is far greater despite permissionless upload being available on the mentioned chains. Cosmos has just had the IBC hooks bug that was enabled by Terra having permissionless upload enabled.

The next step of the process was to upload the malicious contract used to manipulate the IBC timeouts as code id 3114 and then subsequently instantiate the contract two times.
Terra IBC Hooks Exploit Analysis - Range Security

There was also a high severity patch for CosmWasm in January of this year that was specifically called out to only impact Permissionless chains and required urgent upgrades on all other chains:

There is a time for Permissionless CosmWasm, but that comes after:

  • There have been no high-severity instances for much longer
  • We have more precise rate limiting implemented to control the risk

An alternative solution may be to authorize a subDAO to allocate these upload keys rather than relying entirely on governance. This would make the barrier to upload almost non-existent for anyone who can prove that they are working on a viable project and shorten the cycle time for getting this upload key—although an 8-day delay on deployment doesn’t seem excessive since it is one-time only.

1 Like
3

I agree that Osmosis can & should be the catalyst to make cosmos great again. It’s the most used CosmWasm chain, and IBC has brought some bugs lately, so it would be very efficient to directly deploy contracts on Osmosis, but I’m not sure allowing anything is sustainable, given the current very low fees and knowing swaps (with the taker fee) are most probably more lucrative for stakers. Also, other permissionless CW chains haven’t had a lot of usage nor a good market performance, so I don’t see the reason to push for this atm (can you?).

However, I agree with this:

it makes me profoundly uncomfortable to approve contract addresses instead of contracts, and to say yes to anything that is not open and fully auditable.

so maybe we should define a procedure & provide some docs on how to deploy (request deployment of) CosmWasm contracts, to not scare developers off?

1 Like
4

Yes.

2 Likes