Intro to Osmosis
It’s hard to explore Cosmos ecosystem today without first coming across Osmosis. Launched in June 2021, Osmosis is primarily a DEX but true-to Cosmos ethos of horizontal scaling by creating application specific blockchains, Osmosis is also a blockchain with DEX being the primary purpose. It has Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) built in and allows for swaps and liquidity pooling of IBC-enabled, Cosmos SDK assets.
Today, Osmosis is the top DEX in the Cosmos ecosystem by Total Value Locked (TVL), Daily IBC transfers and Daily Active Users. Although the TVL has come down significantly from its peak of ~$1.8B, it’s still the top application to come out of the Cosmos-ecosystem (excluding Terra which uses the Cosmos SDK but started out as a completely separate and unconnected blockchain).
Today, Osmosis is at the heart of the Cosmos ecosystem with a transaction to almost all the other chains in the ecosystem as can be seen from this Mintscan visualization.
https://hub.mintscan.io/ibc-network
Because osmosis is IBC-enabled, it allows for easy bridging to all the other Cosmos blockchains. One can easily deposit/withdraw another Cosmos blockchain’s native token via the DEX.
# Daily Active Users
Daily Active Users or DAUs as its commonly known as is one of the most commonly measured metrics for tracking product growth. Let’s see how Osmosis has been doing on this metric
## Observations
- At its peak, the DAU reached 60K users! On the chart, I’ve marked some of the significant events that caused the DAU to increase. Most of these events include integration with other products (Terra, Trust Wallet, Keplr, SOMM, SCRT) as well as new product developments such as Superfluid staking.
- The DAU peaked in mid-March and since then have been trending down with an almost 50% reduction from the mid-March peak.
- After an initial drop in DAU, we see a small resurgence around the end of April. This is because the following governance proposals for deciding a canonical bridge provider went
- https://wallet.keplr.app/#/osmosis/governance?detailId=210
- https://wallet.keplr.app/#/osmosis/governance?detailId=209
- https://wallet.keplr.app/#/osmosis/governance?detailId=208
- https://wallet.keplr.app/#/osmosis/governance?detailId=206
- https://wallet.keplr.app/#/osmosis/governance?detailId=205 - Overall, the DAU on Osmosis have been highly correlated with the price of the OSMO token. The decrease in price is likely because of users taking profits at all time highs and after a double top, they expected OSMO to drop given the market conditions. As OSMO price continued to drop, we see a decrease in the DAU numbers.
# Appendix
The details of the events on the chart can be found in these tweets:
(Tweet embeds below. If nothing shows up, you might need to adjust your ad-blocker or browser privacy settings to be less strict and allow Tweet embeds to show up)
