Osmosis Support Lab Funding Round March 2025-2026

[maxpower]

Introduction

Osmosis Support Lab continues to deliver consistent, high quality service for the Osmosis ecosystem, as well as expanding our support and knowledge to a vast number of bridging solutions outside of the ecosystem. Expansion of skill sets among team members has allowed us to tackle a broader range of challenges, including a stronger emphasis on cross-chain issue tracking and resolution.
Beyond ensuring users, independent developers and liquidity providers remain satisfied, this focus has allowed us to document, and address multi-chain compatibility problems, ensuring quick resolutions and less stress among users having issues.
Because of this, the OSL is ready to tackle and resolve any issues users may encounter when using the new Polaris application.

As a result, OSL is fully prepared to support the Polaris application and address any user challenges.

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Moving Forward - Polaris

With the onboarding of our support team to Polaris, we are ensuring that Polaris receives the same high level of support that Osmosis has enjoyed over the past years. This includes effective tracking of transactions and assisting users across a variety of ecosystems, such as through CCTP and cross-chain solutions involving Ethereum, Solana, Bitcoin, and beyond. Importantly, this will be provided with the same service level agreement set, further demonstrating our commitment to seamless and efficient support operations for users of the Osmosis ecosystem.

Key Polaris support features include:
Transaction tracking across various chains
CCTP & cross-chain solutions for Ethereum, Solana, Bitcoin, and more
Consistent service levels matching Osmosis

OSL is already assisting early access users and will provide full support as Polaris moves toward public launch.

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Term in Review

Over the past year, the OSL has made significant strides in expanding its capabilities and improving its service delivery. The team has successfully integrated new tools and processes, including the initial stages of onboarding Polaris.
Collaboration with Interbloc and the creation of ‘ISG’ has bolstered the team’s technical expertise and operational efficiency due to an increased presence and strengthened relationships within the broader ecosystem.
Day-to-day operations have been streamlined, ensuring that users continue to receive timely and effective support they are used to with the expansion of the ISG organization as a whole.
This term also saw the team’s skill set diversify, allowing for a more comprehensive approach to troubleshooting and ecosystem-wide problem-solving.

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Metrics

In the last year, OSL has utilized the support.osmosis.zone web widget to support over 4400 user inquiries through the widget, and countless requests through the Osmosis Telegram and Discord.
We also continue to remove thousands of scam accounts from the Discord and Telegram each and every year.
The newer “Osmosis Technical Community” Telegram group has also seen over 7500 messages since its creation during the last cycle where we also [refer and assist developers and integrators]. OSL will continue to use the widget analytics for reference of user requests and support needs.

We continue to analyze widget data to optimize our support operations.

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Transparency

As mentioned previously, DAODAO provided a significant increase in treasury transparency as well as public visibility of transactions and payment to members.
In addition, the clear timesheet tracking we have employed allows every payment to be justified and corroborated through internal data and support/social channel activity.

View OSL Treasury on DAODAO

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Giving Back

With the much awaited Polaris launch, user satisfaction is of the utmost importance, and first impressions are critical.
As such, this new vertical was covered under our existing services at no additional cost over the final two months of the current proposal cycle.

As part of the ‘ISG’ umbrella, OSL has worked with Cosmoshield, and during the past year has recover over $250,000 worth of funds across many chains.
Additionally, we maintain a block list for malicious websites reported through any social channels or directly through the Cosmoshield dashboard.

While we cannot help recover funds that have already been moved, including situations like Ryan Lion, we do our best to mitigate damage done when wallets are first compromised.
A large part of this is having the staff available to immediately respond to users with problems like this as they happen, taking quick action if needed.
Many regular Osmosis users have been triaged and directed from within the Osmosis support app itself, which has become a well known and trusted organization not just for Osmosis but for all connected cosmos chains.

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Feedback

Users of the support widget continue to give us valuable feedback, most of which is overwhelmingly positive! Below are some examples of happy customers throughout the year:

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Staffing

Support Lab staffing remains largely the same. We have welcomed back two prior members on a part time basis, enabling coverage for holidays, emergencies or personal downtime to avoid service interruptions.
The overall service level has not changed and thus has no impact on cost per staff member.

This comes with the additional benefit of enabling training, as support needs increase with Polaris launch, there may be a requirement for additional moderation/support agents for coverage.
It is important to our organization to maintain the same level of support and responsiveness Osmosis has come to expect from the Support Lab, regardless of additional protocols/support volume.

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Budget Request

OSL requests $485,100 from the Osmosis community pool to fund operations for the next year, budgeted at 52 weeks. The service period would begin March 1 2025, and through the end of Feb 2026.
As a departure from the previous funding requests, OSL will be requesting funding from the community pool 50% in USDC and 50% in OSMO. This will reduce the OSMO sell pressure and utilize the USDC in the community pool, OSMO portion includes a 10% buffer for price volatility.**

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Services Provided

The services offered by OSL during 2025 will include:

• Support through web widget on: https://support.osmosis.zone/
• Support through web widget for Polaris
• Support in Telegram group: https://t.me/osmosis_chat
• Support in Polaris Telegram group
• Support in Technical Integrator Telegram group Telegram: Join Group Chat
• Support in Discord server: https://discord.gg/osmosis
• Forum moderation and management: https://forum.osmosis.zone/
• Support requests through Twitter: x.com
• Dev team communication through shared Slack group for Polaris and Osmosis.
• Development and maintenance of custom tooling to assist users in cross chain transaction issues (Eg. manual relaying of CCTP transactions, tracking issues through Axelar/Coral/Squid/ChainFlip/Bitfrost/Nomic, recovery and clearance of IBC transactions, etc)
• Screening and routing of incoming marketing/integration requests to the Osmosis & Polaris teams

[ValarDragon]

Hi OSL Team,

First, I want to commend the Osmosis Support Lab for the dedication and consistent service you’ve provided to the community. The expansion of your support to multi-chain solutions, the proactive approach to addressing cross-chain issues, and your readiness for the Polaris launch all highlight the value your team brings. It’s clear that you’ve taken steps to broaden your scope and enhance the UX here.

That said, I have concerns about the proposed budget of $485,100/year. While I recognize the importance of quality support, this figure seems disproportionately high given the reported workload: 4,400 support inquiries and moderation of 7,500 messages over the past year. This is over $100 per ticket when spread across the entire budget, not including the chat moderation, which seems difficult to justify even with the added complexity of cross-chain support.

I also appreciate the transparency provided through DAODAO and the clear tracking of payments, but I believe we need to consider whether the cost-to-value ratio aligns with the long-term sustainability of the Osmosis ecosystem. Many in the community are conscious of how treasury funds are allocated, and large recurring expenses like this set a precedent for future funding.

A few questions and suggestions come to mind:

• Could you provide more granular data on the nature of support tickets? For example, how many were simple inquiries versus complex, cross-chain issues?
• Are there opportunities to optimize the workflow or explore automation for handling common support requests to reduce the cost?
• Would a tiered budget, scaling with the actual support volume (especially as Polaris adoption grows), be feasible?

Your efforts have clearly had a positive impact, and I’d love to see a path forward that continues to deliver high-quality support while being more mindful of the financial impact on the community.

Looking forward to your thoughts

[aaronxkong]

Hey folks,

I share the same sentiments as Dev above.

My view & feedback has remained the same for pretty much all OSL funding cycles, with some nuance for 2025 since AI is now relevant. I’ll detail those below.

Pros for OSL

• OSL does great work in fulfilling its mandate, attempting to address all inbound support requests.
• OSL relays valuable feedback that can then be triaged & addressed

Cons for OSL

• The demand / load for OSL’s services does not match the outsized funding for it and it never has, even with the prior reductions in funding.

Potential Solutions/Ideas

• Shift down to somewhere between 8-16 hour support windows, instead of 24/7.
  – Immediately cutting costs by roughly 33-66%
  – Binance US used to be 16 hour help windows.
  – Current funding request is around $55/hour for 24/7 support, ticket average is around $110, so this is around 1 ticket per hour, 12 tickets a day.

• Train up an AI Agent that can likely be implemented over website support and telegram, monitoring the AI agent and improving it over time.
  – Binance US now just has a 24/7 ai agent.
  – AI Agent support can compensate for the reduction in live manual support.

• Improve user triage tooling (tutorials, Guides) instead of immediately directing flow to live support.
  – Currently, each ticket is over $100, how many tickets could go through a help funnel before requiring manual support? $100/ticket is incredibly high, I’d even ask how this compares to the average size of the transaction being supported.
  – https://help.coinbase.com/en/exchange Coinbase support directs to tutorials, help links, and eventually a link to contact + a phone number.
  – Once a user reaches that point, then it can be an inbound email/message that can be addressed (Kast Card on Solana does this via Telegram)

• Shift funding requests for Polaris to when demand is clear, and not pre-launch. Potentially going to OGP for that when params are clear.

As a community funded operation, the community should be seeking to optimize this mandate. There are clear ways to do this, those should be taken.

As it currently sits, I am against this proposal and would recommend a no vote.

[maxpower]

Thanks for the feedback!

Our ask for this upcoming year is exactly on par with last year. Polaris isnt increasing the budget, however we’re not keen to reduce budget with polaris being onboarded. Regardless of volume of support tickets etc, this will entail creation of a full knowledge base for Polaris which is currently being offered in addition to the same support service level as Osmosis for no additional cost over last year’s funding cycle.

-Cost per ticket estimation is not a particularly encompassing metric and excludes all other factors of support. Irrespective of the number of tickets we still need to have people on call 24/7-sometimes a shift will have several concurring tickets while another might only have 1.

-AI is a tool that is not at a place where it can replace real knowledgeable agents responding directly to the users. We have seen this repeatedly from user feedback, and the alternative is eliminating one of Osmosis’ USPs.

-We aren’t keen to pivot toward a support style offered by Binance or Coinbase. For example, we recently had a user coming with a transaction of 1000 eth that was stuck. One of their first comments was how much better the user experience was than on Coinbase.

Another example of this recently with a high value ticket was a user with several BTC stuck that required a Nomic upgrade to resolve. User was incredibly happy with the level of support and responsiveness. Values of transactions like these being met with AI responses or service time windows would greatly diminish our ability to retain these kinds of larger users on the platform. We have shared a small sample of user feedback but have hundreds of positive comments complimenting our service as superior to any CEX/DEX.

-Regarding the type of tickets we solve, the simple queries like swaps and funding procedures account for 10% of the tickets while most of the support requests are cross-chain issues, contract interaction failures and queries that require consulting third parties (relayers, developers, etc.).

As for financial impact, we are hoping that the split ask in USDC for this funding cycle would reduce concerns about price impact or sell pressure due to the recent $OSMO price action.

This is probably the spend that benefits the community the most - reducing the number of hours would have a negative impact on the Osmosis community and we have worked for years to make it the most efficient and impactful service it can be.

[kill-dill]

I want to start by saying that the OSL does truly great work. The support services sets Osmosis apart from the competiton and will become more important as Osmosis grows and market cycles continue.

Our challenge stems from the fact that the infrastructure was built out before there was enough demand to warrant these service levels. We may or may not reach that level of demand this year, so making the commitment now is a risk, though It could very well be that that risk pays off this year.

As it stands, i will begrudgingly vote yes to maintain these service levels for the year with polaris on the horizon and the potential for a shift in crypro market sentiments this year.

I would gladly vote yes if a slightly leaner team could provide service with adequate coverage throughout the week for 250K USDC and 250K OSMO, with a stipulation that additional funding could be proposed to expand service once demand catches up.

[LeonoorsCryptoman]

I do understand the reasoning for the amount of spending, but that conversation can be held for literally every payment we do to supporting services.

We don’t have similar conversations for the spending on for example the OGP, where the output is a lot less visible and I certainly can’t justify the spend vs what we get from it.

So why do we keep having this conversation? Is it just because the OSL is transparent on their metrics and makes it therefore easier to target their metrics? So if we would ask them to be much more vague, would be just approve blindly like is being done on the other majority of funding requests?

I for one think that the OSL is one of the most self-critical organisations around Osmosis existing. They have proven to be of use, proven to be open to cut costs where possible if we look back in history and also deserve our support.
But let’s agree on KPI’s in general. We have never ever done that for any funding request, but we need to start on that in general ASAP.

And with Polaris coming around, we might see new inflow which will heighten the amount of requests. This is not the time to reduce support, but keep it in place, agree on metrics and go from there. If the costs remain to high after the go-live on Polaris we can have the new conversation imo.

[maxpower]

I actually just made a tool to get telegram statistics for any group (not just those with certain level of activity / users as is the case with the app itself) but the tool itself is not really finished so I didn’t include those statistics. Anyone can see them from the main telegram of course, but the smaller tech group for example does not “qualify”.

Beyond simple user / message counts though, there is not a whole lot to be tracked as far as metrics go. We aren’t giving out money to projects, onboarding projects or users directly, doing any kind of direct marketing campaigns or launching any applications etc.
It’s basically just direct user feedback, or a lack of loud public negative feedback.

One thing that we do admittedly need to improve on is the user guides on the support site library section. That is one kpi we could be tracking alongside any user facing updates to the app / protocol and it’s one that we probably wouldn’t be doing very good on right now.

[Govmos]

Given the divisive nature of this proposal, we are upholding our neutral stance in alignment with our responsibility toward our delegators. As such, we have chosen to abstain from voting while encouraging our delegators to exercise their own independent and informed judgment when casting their votes.

[Winfred]

Commenting as Winnie and not a rep of Stakecito.

Personally I really appreciate the work you guys do. But I at the same time can’t help but feel that given the price point, this is harmful for OSMO since you would have to sell the 50% requested for salaries.

Tbh I’ve used DEXes for so long without needing support, and I think Osmosis is easy enough to navigate that there shouldn’t be a need for this much resources to go into support.

I lean towards voting no on this proposal. OSMO price has been on a down only trajectory lately and this would only facilitate more downward pressure.

[nostradamus]

First off, I want to give a huge shoutout to the OSL team for all the hard work they’ve put in. Having been around back during the formation, I’ve seen firsthand how much dedication goes into providing solid support for the Osmosis community. The team has done a fantastic job expanding services, improving transparency, and being a reliable resource for users—so major respect for that.

That said, I have to agree with others here that the cost relative to the volume of support requests just feels too high to justify in its current form. I completely understand the need to maintain high-quality support, especially with Polaris coming up, but I hope there’s a middle ground where OSL can continue doing great work while also optimizing costs. Suggestions like reducing coverage hours, leveraging automation, or adjusting rates make a lot of sense to me.

With that in mind, I’ll be a ‘no’ vote on this version of the proposal—not because I don’t support the mission, but because I’d like to see a more efficiently priced version that incorporates some of these cost-saving measures. If a revised proposal comes back with a leaner approach while still ensuring quality support, I’d be open to reconsidering.

Again, big thanks to the OSL team for everything you do—I know these discussions can be tough, but they come from a place of wanting to see the best for Osmosis.

[SasoLithops]

Huge respect to OSL team. Quality support should be paid well. And they do offer quality support, did to me on TG as a user many times also helped me connecting with other ecosystems. Their help is trully next level.

I see some validators/voters mention voting NO as 4400 tickets cost 100$. Do know there is much more done daily then “just” tickets (check under services provided).

I have been a moderator in an active chat and can share from first hand it is not an easy job. Taking all the heat head on, deleting scammers hourly, be full of knowledge to help, not bother devs with fake proposals for partnerships, fake listings and keep up with updates of project progress regulary and that is only TG and Discord…
As for AI agent I would not trust him right now with managing my portfolio, let alone with help…for newbies or web2 incomers especialy English as second language(like me) 1 to 1 help always surpases only one way of explaining with technical vocabulary.

Before I “lock” my YES vote @maxpower could these payments be done monthly(swap OSMO to $), as OSMO price might increase or fall so this could hurt either treasury or OSL team.

I however belive some kind of DCA trades of OSMO to BTC/stables(for healthy treasury) should be done if OSMO starts rising to diversify treasury and not hurt OSMO price in such larger fundings. But that is for another thread.

[maxpower]

Hey friend, thanks for the support as always.

Actually this is the reason a large portion of the ask is directly in usdc this time. This is revenue earned for the protocol by mev anyway and is in the community pool to be used by the community, for the community.
It seems like a much better idea than selling osmo for usdc anyway. I guess it might make sense to make the full ask in usdc as well.

As to the other point, investing for security or some kind of yield has been brought up just about every time now but I have always believed that sort of thing (beyond the obvious direct risk involved to what is literally feeding people’s families) carries a large number of ethical concerns and should not be done without explicitly stating the intent before the funding is approved. That is not something I would personally ever consider doing, or support doing.

[maxpower]

We have done this every time, have always made it known that it would be done, and the price impact is essentially zero. @whitemarlin was very loudly critical of this in the past until he actually saw how little effect it really has.

[ctrl-Felix]

Hey guys,
we’re really appreciative of everyones constructive criticism/feedback that we’ve gotten. As an organization, we will be taking some time over the next few days to implement internal changes and redraft our proposal in a way that should be much more favourable to the community. Our goal is to continue to provide current service levels without the need to fully lay off or let go team members, and are working towards creative solutions to make it happen.

If the current proposal were to pass, however unlikely, we will still be implementing these changes - we definitely agree that we missed the mark with this current iteration. Our team works for the community and the developers, and we’ll be incorporating all feedback in a fashion that we’re hoping will make our continued service an easy ‘Yes!’ on both fronts.

[ctrl-Felix]

The fundamental necessity for support is not directly connected to ‘how good a product is’. First of all we need to categorize users. You mainly have 3 kind of users.

Power users
Those users use cryptocurrencies regularly and know the details and core concepts. They understand how transactions, wallets, private keys and DeFi products work and how to use them properly. Since you work for Stakecito you probably belong to this category. And I agree with you that as such the need for support is not that high. Maybe there are some general questions from time to time but speaking about volume and KPIs it’s not very high. However, it’s still important to mention that if issues occur they usually take a longer time to resolve as the issue is a ‘real one’ and not only some surface level problem. For instance issues with funds stuck during bridging process (Nomic had to upgrade which was a ticket handled by OSL) is something that can happen to everyone.

Standard User
The standard user is in crypto for investment purpose and does not do many transactions. He knows roughly how crypto works and how to do everything he needs. He doesn’t need support for standard operations. However, everything that comes out of the ordinary or that requires a bit more in depth knowledge is something he needs to contact support for. Example cases are about superfluid staking, concentrated liquidity, ‘missing rewards’ (mostly based on misunderstandings), etc. These tickets take a while to close as we operate as educational entity helping those users to better understand what they are doing and why certain problems/misunderstandings happened.

Newbie
The newbie is someone who is either new to Osmosis or even new to crypto. He doesn’t know how crypto works (IBC, Cosmos, Keplr, etc.). Here we act as first response to help them achieve what they want. Often it’s also misunderstandings about IBC, different chains and tokens etc. And not only crypto new people but also people from other ecosystems are sometimes confused about IBC and the general concepts we are all very familiar with as we deal with them every day.

To sum it up, the need for support isn’t erased by a good project but is tied to usage and volume. The more people use Osmosis (or Polaris soon) the more you will encounter issues. And it doesn’t matter whether those are because of actual Osmosis errors or just issues on the user side. Both have to be dealt with and the latter ones are actually the ones that take the most time as we try to help the user to better understand the Osmo ecosystem.

I hope that helped you but also everyone else reading this. If you want clarification feel free to ask any time!

[mrntxID]

I prefer to use AI agent/solutions approach

[FatTiger]

Considering Polaris is coming soon, I will vote for this.
Maybe in the future we should consider embedding the existing osmosis documents to build a vector database, and then connect AI to build a RAG (retrieval augmented generation) service. I’d be happy to help if the team needs it.

[maxpower]

This is not a solution tbh. AI is nowhere near the point where this would be useful. This is not even counting the significant number of tickets requiring interactions with external teams to solve the underlying issue.

[maxpower]

Sorry for not addressing this one sooner.
I had a similar thought – smaller funding amounts over a shorter timeframe—but we’ve tried that approach before, and it comes with unavoidable overhead. Gathering and organizing metrics, writing the proposal, and managing everything properly is a sizeable team effort to be doing every 3 months or so, which is why we extended the overall timeframe.

We’ve also operated on an extremely lean budget in the past (such as the round before this one), and frankly, it was unsustainable. Without the necessary budget, critical management, administrative, and organizational tasks were left unpaid, which isn’t a fair or realistic expectation.

I’ve also seen comments suggesting that “three full-time people could do this for a third of the cost.” While that might sound reasonable at a glance, the reality is very different. A three-person team working 8 hours a day, 7 days a week would struggle almost immediately. The workload isn’t just routine support—it includes handling unexpected escalations, covering multiple platforms (not just the support widget), and tracking high-level or emergent issues that often take days or weeks to resolve. This often requires coordination with external teams, including those from brand-new chains or projects where we have to establish relationships from scratch. If all we had to do was tell people to hard-refresh their browser, I’d agree—but unfortunately, it’s far more complex than that.

Beyond the support widget, we manage multiple Telegram channels (both public and private), Discord (across multiple channels), Twitter, Reddit, emails (surprisingly high volume), and direct messages from users, developers, and other teams. Despite only having one person “on duty” at any given time, 24/7/365, some tasks require multiple people, which is where a decent portion of the budget goes.

There has always been a tendency to view this as simple chat moderation or entry-level helpdesk work, but the reality is that much of what we do is difficult to quantify. Metrics only capture a fraction of the actual effort involved. Just because a fire department isn’t responding to fires every day doesn’t mean its funding should be cut—because when a fire does happen, the response needs to be immediate and effective. Similarly, our team is structured to provide the necessary coverage and expertise, not just to handle routine inquiries but to ensure Osmosis remains a leader in user support and community engagement.

[LeonoorsCryptoman]

Hence the reason why this proposal has my support.

We miss an iceberg picture in here, with the OSL people see vs what the OSL really does.