Introducing The Token Portal - Solving Crypto UX

And Dave. Yeah, hey guys. Yeah, I'm one of the co-founders of Osmosis. And so Polaris is sort of the next product of our team. And so we have been working on this for like past three months, kind of maybe a bit more. But we were kind of all originated a few months ago when we were like, how do we take Osmosis to the next level? How do we expand our user base? And so it kind of came up at an off site that happened. And Dave was there, Josh was there, a bunch of team members were there. So I guess there was sort of a co-effort of a bunch of people to set this new direction. Oh, OK. Hello, co-founder. So I'm sorry, is Sunny here? Yeah, we started working on Polaris because we think about how do we solve the kind of cross-chain fragmentation that we're all facing? That right now is tendency to push everything onto one chain because the cross-chain UX frictions are so bad. But Osmosis is trying to solve the interchange decks. But they look at the same problem. You have to onboard onto the one chain for it to work. So let's make a UI that serves everyone where they are. Or, and that's kind of the origin of how we started Polaris. Beautiful. And Merton, Lily, what's the connection for you guys to Polaris? Yeah. So a few years ago when Osmosis first launched, I got involved with Osmosis at launch. I guess a core contributor to Osmosis since then. So myself have been doing crypto for a while. I have a number of things that I'm pretty interested in with in crypto. I've always been a big fan of Cosmos. I think it's been pretty visionary in terms of articulating why app chains might be important. And what is important to kind of growing the tech decks within crypto. Also really involved in Solana and President of Solana Foundation. So do a lot there. But I just always had an interest in affinity for Cosmos and have been helping out. Cool. I'll go nuts. Hello, I'm Mert. I guess my relationship is the app uses Helius. So that's a good relationship for my bags. And I also ship host on Twitter. Great. I love it. Well, why don't we just start with the main question that we have to answer in this space, which is what is Polaris? And what is the motivation for building it? You guys wrote a really long blog post that I thought was excellent. I love the branding of the token portal. But why don't you guys suddenly endave like explain to us the inspiration and how this solution came to your mind when thinking about this problem of fragmentation across the space? Yeah, sure. So I can give it a first go. So our goal with Osmosis was always like how do we build this like inner chain decks? These are so as people want to trade everything in one place. And I think that's what what sexes are very good at. Like I can trade ETH and SOLE and Bitcoin and XRP and Cardano and whatever you want, right? In all in one place. But that's just like not the case in DeFi today, right? Like if you want, you have to go swap between, I have to go to Jupiter, trade on Salona, I've got a Uniswap to go out trade on Ethereum. I've used like a different wallet for each of them. And you have to figure out what bridges to use between them. And it's just like not, you know, and I think that's one of what makes it a lot of DeX's struggle to get user-based. And it kind of happens because liquidity is just so fragmented in DeFi because of stickiness, but also just like incentives, right? Everyone's trying to like, well, not everyone. A lot of projects today are just trying to like build their own like internal DeFi ecosystems, right? Or there is a spot DeX, a local spot DeX on all of these chains. And so liquidity just ends up getting like, you know, stuck in those local spot DeX's and it doesn't really want to leave. And there's only like very few assets, you know, like your Bitcoin ETHs and like stable coins basically. That really see a lot are probably like the lion's lion's share of like cross-chain, where people actually move cross-chain. And so what we kind of said was like, okay, you know, osmosis is really good for like app chains, right? Like, you know, where we can do it, where people are willing to bridge to osmosis is in situations like Tia or AKT or dy-DX, right? Assets that don't have their own native spot DeX. And which is like, you know, I mean, big, I think this is a huge market, obviously. I think Bitcoin is like the biggest asset that doesn't have its own spot DeX. And so that's where, you know, for osmosis, I mean, I've been pretty clear about that for a while. That's where I want to spend, I think osmosis needs to go. But, you know, how do we access like the Ethereum and Solana markets, for example, which are like, definitely like huge markets right now? And so this is kind of where it's like, okay, let's maybe go up the stack instead of saying that like all the liquidity needs to sit in one venue, why don't we make it so instead we can have one application that can tap in to all of these different liquidity venues, but really just abstract it away for the users as much as possible. And so, you know, that's kind of where this idea came about of this like token portal, right? Like, similar to like web portal, so where it's like, you know, you use a web portal to access like everything in the web. I think that's the same thing here. It's like, okay, you use one token portal to access all tokens on all the different blockchains. Dave, don't add anything? Yeah. So, something to add is that for some things like having your own local decks is actually makes sense of a lot of things, computer distribution, like I think. So, you want one UI that gives people the caters to everything a user wants because these are doesn't care what decks they execute against. But then even if it's not fragmented across chains, it'll probably stuff some degree of fragmentation across decks just like there exists many exchanges, especially in like permissionless markets. So, yeah, part of inspiration is also like, let's make that happen. Further, I kind of think the future of apps is should be that they focus on, right now all apps are very chain specific. Even in like the app chains at sense, like with exception, maybe Stargaze and Osmosis, I think almost every other app has to give to think about where your assets are. Whereas, what really should happen is you kind of have, you want to use the app, maybe the app involves paying for something. So, funds to transfer there, but you shouldn't have to care that much. You should be able to like pay USDC or pay like a soul from wherever it is. I get access to the app. You shouldn't have to think about what percentage of my money is on this chain. So, part of the goal player as well is that if you want to, we should hopefully even promote like kind of more app competition. And these apps can go wherever is best for them. They don't have to feel co-located decks to liquidity. Because you can now have a one UI that can help onboard people in, of a used playerist and just get money brought in and out of whatever app you meet. Yeah, coming from the modular world myself, I fully agree with this. It's like, app chains having a huge problem of splitting up liquidity everywhere. And someone needing to reunite that and knit it back together. And I think that polarists are really exciting development in that direction. And I also know that Osmosis' vision from the beginning was always to build a deck but with a centralized exchange type of user experience. And I think at least the demo that I saw, this is like the closest I've ever seen to that in a decentralized way. But I want to kind of kick it over to Murt and Lily because to me, part of this thesis of polarists is the fact that there's these walled gardens and different chains and different ecosystems want to protect their liquidity. And it's also kind of like an app chain forward thesis about, hey, people should be able to build apps wherever, which seems a little bit contrary to the integrated thesis. So I'm curious, first of all, does the Salana ecosystem believe in, is there such like an incentive for like walled gardens? And also, how does Salana feel about this sort of like, an approach to sort of like abstracting away the infrastructure and making it possible for people to build apps anywhere? Yeah. I mean, I think that first of all, all of us in crypto were unified by a fundamental belief that self-cancid is important. I think sometimes that gets lost a little bit when we have our kind of day-to-day discussions around architectures and trade-offs and all of the different dimensions and this trilemma and that trilemma. But, you know, first of all, I think that we all kind of agree that self-custody is a very important thing. Also, on-chain finance is super important within that because self-custody gives you economic sovereignty. And I think, you know, you pull in that little bit and it gets self-sovereignty pretty quickly. And to me, that's kind of the big picture of why we're in this and also why creating fluid on-chain, sophisticated on-chain financial experiences is really important. I think that infrastructure needs to be in service of applications. And I think that, you know, strangely to me, that actually seems to be a viewpoint which gets debated from time to time. And I actually feel like a lot of this industry is infrastructure-driven applications, rather than application-driven infrastructure. So to me, there's just kind of like a little bit of mindset around that. And so, you know, to me, I kind of see it as I think that Solana, you know, first of all, there's a viewpoint within Solana kind of the basis for Solana's to believe that the network is not going to be immutable, right? That was the first 10 years of crypto, what people thought that a blockchain should be because that's, you know, what Bitcoin-positive. But then the perspective is that the network should change and get better over time. Now, certainly in terms of performance, that's an easy one to kind of measure and to look at, you know, as hardware gets better, the network should get better. But then also the network should get better in service of the applications that people actually want to build using infrastructure. So from that kind of perspective, I actually think it's very aligned in terms of infrastructure should be here to support better applications. And then I think it's, and then I think there is like a diversity of discussion as to, you know, what type of infrastructure innovations and the various trade-offs therein. But, you know, that's kind of the way I see it, which is also why I'm a big fan of what Solana does, a big fan of what Osmosis and Cosmos have been doing. Because I think from that kind of purpose-driven perspective, there actually is a lot of alignment. So probably three things for me, I think. So number one would be the main draw of Solana for me is the global state machine aspect. So I think one of the biggest use cases, or actually probably the most important use case in my view, is globally shared states and not having walled gardens as opposed to the contrary, you know, close off versions of the internet where it's, you know, paid API access to some centralized servers. Crypto obviously removes that. And I think that means anybody on anywhere on the planet can do whatever they want on any chain. And obviously, like, I don't think, and totally the series is me on this, but I don't think a single chain can scale to meet the entire world's demand in any fashion. And so an app that can abstract kind of a verticalized use case, so like trading tokens. I think is actually pretty in line with being able to illustrate like a global state machine. Like obviously, it's not a global state machine, but it's kind of a global machine where you can have access to all sorts of different data sets or tokens in this case. So I actually really like that aspect. It's one of the reasons why I'm in crypto. And yeah, I mean, I have a cebled on slanted for that reason, but it's not the only possible approach to that problem. And then second, I guess would be like fundamentally what this enables as far as I understand is competition between, let's say the assets, right? So obviously a big, big, big, free market. And so if the friction is reduced to a point where the assets, like people buying assets and like assets discovery and price discovery and whatnot, are more efficient. But I think that's a fundamentally good thing for crypto, but also those assets on those chains, right? So obviously the assets have to be deployed somewhere. And if the assets on Salana are worthy, let's say, then they'll still get users to interact with them or swap them by them, whatever the UI is. And the third thing is kind of what Lily said, which is, I mean, I've been screaming about this for a while, but fundamentally,