Laika is simplifying smart contract requests on Osmosis.
The Osmosis DEX suite is growing exponentially, and it can be hard to keep track of all the teams building exciting new features. This series of Ecosystem Spotlights allows you to get to know the teams in their own words (lightly edited). To see more, check out our other posts or the Osmosis Ecosystem website.
What is Laika?
Laika is request builder for smart contract developers, similar to popular web2 tools like cURL, Postman, Hoppscotch, and Insomnia that generate requests to interact with various backends through their APIs. Laika does this as well, helping developers on Osmosis query CosmWasm smart contracts.
Having a clean UI that auto-generates smart contract queries is a huge time-saver, since developers would otherwise have to use the command line for every little thing they want to test, or worse, construct a whole frontend just for testing. By removing these hassles, Laika significantly upgrades developer quality-of-life, letting builders build.
How does it work?
Laika simplifies the request-building process by making it easily accessible from a simple UI. Developers select the message request they want to send, e.g. checking how a smart contract is calculating yield, and Laika generates the code.
Laika also includes other tools to give developers a better experience in developing smart contracts, such as a data converter for changing from uOSMO to OSMO, for example, or from hexadecimal to another base. The app also includes a collections management tool, that is, a place to store previous requests for easy modification and reuse.
Any risks / safety concerns?
The risks associated with Laika are very limited because it does not control or collect any information on what users are developing. Think of it as a cleaner UI for what you already have to do on your own: writing command lines to request small interactions with smart contracts.
II. Team
What are your origin stories? What got you into crypto and DeFi?
We started as a group of college kids who really loved DeFi. We wrote Laika as a hackathon project, and since a lot of people love it, we have continued building it!
What got me (Nonthakon) into DeFi was the term, “programmable money.” When things are programmable, there is endless opportunity to build new things. And, since finance is one of the most integral parts of life, building out decentralized, transparent systems gives you the sense that “Hey! Anything is possible.”
What’s your edge?
Our team is really adaptive. We have faced many obstacles along the way (e.g. the Terra crash), but have swiftly changed our strategy accordingly every time. And since we believe so strongly in a decentralized future, our team is organized in a way that is democratized and transparent.
III. Building on Osmosis
What attracted you to Osmosis? Where do you fit in the Osmosis ecosystem?
What attracted us the most was Osmosis’s vision of independent appchains. Building an early version on Osmosis and later scaling up to your own chain just makes sense.
As a devtool project, our place in the ecosystem is to benefit and ease other developers’ experience by helping them test their smart contracts faster and more easily. We want to be a catalyst that helps accelerate the ecosystem.
IV. Roadmap & Additional Features
We have already developed an Osmosis MVP (minimum viable product) and presented it at Osmocon. Next on our roadmap is additional minor features, dark mode, and more documentation and educational content about developing smart contracts on Osmosis. After that, we will be developing advanced features like environments (the ability to quickly use the same data in multiple requests), the unit converter mentioned above, and integration with block explorers, as well as the ability to generate snippets of code. We will also potentially be working with Osmosis Beaker on further CosmWasm tooling integrations.
