Osmosis

Osmosis launched in 2021, built on Cosmos SDK, and became the liquidity hub of the Cosmos ecosystem through IBC. In 2023, OSMO 2.0 cut inflation by 50%, moving toward a more sustainable token economy.

In 2024, the DAO approved Nomic's fee-free Bitcoin bridge proposal with 95% support and it went live in December, opening a BTC asset channel. In September of that year, Osmosis launched Polaris, a cross-chain token portal aggregating liquidity from Cosmos, Ethereum, and Solana. Around the same time, ICP's non-custodial Bitcoin token ckBTC was integrated into the Cosmos ecosystem via Osmosis. In 2025, Osmosis published a major governance proposal to convert OSMO into ATOM, intending to merge OSMO into the ATOM ecosystem—a landmark event for Cosmos consolidation.

End-of-inflation proposal: On October 14, 2026, a governance proposal was filed to end OSMO inflation entirely: the mint module would stop issuing tokens, staking rewards would come solely from protocol revenue such as taker fees, the community pool would no longer receive new issuance, and daily developer vesting would pause with about 51.9 million OSMO left in the module account. On-chain submission was set for October 20, taking effect from the next epoch if passed; at current burn rates that implies roughly 2% annual deflation.

Fees and compensation: Parallel proposals 1051 and 1052 would cut active validators from 70 to 30 and raise stakers' share of non-OSMO taker fees from 22.5% to 47.5%. On October 16, the community approved about 40,500 OSMO in compensation for 1,037 accounts affected by a bOSMO redemption contract flaw, after the community pool redeemed 776,000 bOSMO and withdrew roughly 1.3 million OSMO to contain losses.

On October 14, 2026, governance proposals 1051 and 1052 closed voting: the first would cut the active validator set from 70 to 30 to speed coordination and incident response, the second would raise stakers' share of non-OSMO taker fees from 22.5% to 47.5% while leaving the burn unchanged.

A proposal filed on October 20 would stop the mint module from issuing OSMO daily and pause daily vesting releases to developers, leaving about 51.9 million OSMO locked pending a later governance decision and making protocol revenue the sole source of staking rewards. An initial April proposal to merge into Cosmos Hub and convert OSMO to ATOM over time was rejected; a revised version is still under discussion.

Future strategy and roadmap: Osmosis is advancing inflation-to-zero reform: the proposal submitted on October 20 would halt the daily minting module and pause daily token distributions to developers, with staking rewards paid fully from protocol revenue. It will next assess slashing the validator set and raising non-OSMO taker fee share to 47.5 percent, binding revenue closer to trading volume. A revised integration draft to merge into Cosmos Hub and swap OSMO into ATOM is still debated, proposing a six-month transition window, with the community voting on staking migration and ecosystem synergy step by step.

Sunny Aggarwal, Co-founder, with an EE&CS background at UC Berkeley and co-founder of Blockchain at Berkeley, was a research scientist at Tendermint who led Cosmos SDK development and now drives Osmosis's modular direction and governance. Josh Lee, Co-founder, started as a Korean blockchain media editor and was a Tendermint analyst, worked on the Keplr wallet and Osmosis strategy, and has since left. Dev Ojha, Co-founder, also Berkeley EE&CS, was a Tendermint researcher studying PoS security and scalability and owns Osmosis protocol-level engineering. John Patten, Head of Growth, leads user and liquidity growth. Syed Hemu Rahman, Direction Lead, owns the roadmap and user experience. The founding team largely comes from Tendermint and Berkeley networks, with engineering and research led by the three co-founders and dedicated owners for growth and direction; Aggarwal drives research, Ojha owns engineering, and Lee's former duties were absorbed by other team members after his departure.

Osmosis charges a 0.1% default taker fee on all trades, overridden per pair direction: 0.02% both ways on BTC/USDC, 0.5%–0.8% when swapping OSMO into most assets (0.8% for OSMO→USDC) and 0.05% for USDC→OSMO. Osmosis routes 25% of non-OSMO fees to the Community Pool and 75% to OSMO buybacks, while OSMO fees go 30% to stakers and 70% to burns.