blockworks.co
The Osmosis Foundation closed its first fundraise of $21 million today for its automated market maker Osmosis in a token sale led by Paradigm, the company said.
Other participants in the round include Robot Ventures, Nascent, Ethereal, Figment and Do Kwon, it said. The funding will be used to help the foundation grow its Osmosis protocol.
Osmosis is a decentralized peer-to-peer blockchain project built on the Cosmos ecosystem that features an automated market maker (AMM) with which user can pool liquidity and trade Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC) enabled tokens, Sunny Aggarwal, cofounder of Osmosis Labs, said in an interview with Blockworks.
The project has grown from essentially nothing to $500 million total value locked on its decentralized exchange since launching in June, the foundation said.
“We had this initial bump in liquidity, and we noticed every time there’s an addition of new assets, that was sort of when our liquidity grows,” Aggarwal said. “I think really our goal right now is to help grow the Cosmos ecosystem as a whole and get more projects built on Cosmos and existing ones developed,” he added.
The project was launched because Aggarwal and other developers who were a part of the original Cosmos development team wanted to build out applications on Cosmos’ ecosystem, he said.
“Because IBC is this super permissionless protocol, all of these projects were able to set up IBC with Osmosis on the DEX pretty permissionlessly,” Aggarwal said. “We have over 15 assets and for the vast majority of them, Osmosis is the main liquidity venue,” he added.
An eagerly anticipated addition to the Osmosis DEX that became available for trading this week is Terra’s LUNA, and its USD-pegged stablecoin UST. Terra’s governance voted to enable IBC on October 21, and incentives in the form of OSMO tokens have already attracted over $10 million in liquidity to the LUNA/OSMO and UST/OSMO pools.
Osmosis also ranks first among Cosmos IBC-enabled chains by number of IBC transactions, comprising over 42% of all IBC transactions made across the entire ecosystem, according to data from Map of Zones.
In the future, the company will have more DeFi innovations, Aggarwal said. “We want to build on top of this and mature the ecosystem,” he added.