Sunny Aggarwal has vivid memories of some of the worst days of his life earlier this year. The blockchain co-founder and his Osmosis protocol were hit hard by the Terra–LUNA collapse and are still recovering from its fallout today.
“The Terra crash hit us incredibly hard because we were one of the biggest DEXs for providing liquidity to TerraUSD and Luna Classic,” he explains, “At one point, it made up over 50% of our liquidity.”
“I always tell people that the Terra Luna protocol was created by someone with either an IQ of 50 or 150. And frankly, I can’t tell which one.”
Aggarwal is a co-founder and leads the development of the $225-million Osmosis DEX, which, at one point, eclipsed $2 billion in TVL before the coming of the crypto winter.
The rise of cross-chain bridges
Osmosis is a decentralized exchange (DEX) operating on Cosmos, the creator of the interblockchain communications protocol (IBC).
At the time of the last bear market, the development of interchain technologies, allowing users, data and tokens to port between chains, was close to being on the edge of the unknown.
Laser-focused on price movements of tokens, few traders were across terminology, such as IBC, Tendermint or Cosmos. But fast forward five years, there are now nearly 50 blockchains using IBC to conduct more than 10 million IBC transactions daily across the ecosystem. And it still has more than $1 billion in total value locked across the protocol despite the market sell-off.
Apart from his work in blockchain, Aggarwal is known for his eccentric selection of hats.
Osmosis aside, Sunny Aggarwal is also known for his splendid hat collection. Source: Sunny Aggarwal
The meme that started a crypto career
“A good friend of mine walked up to me and said, ‘Did you know that Dogecoin just sponsored the Jamaican bobsled team?’” he recalls. “And I was like, ‘What the hell is Dogecoin? What does it even mean?’”
Aggarwal first became aware of crypto’s…
..