What do you do when you can’t transfer funds from Osmosis to another Cosmos chain? Who do you talk to if something on Osmosis is broken? How can you get official help and avoid scammers? Osmosis Support Lab was created to address these concerns.
According to Osmosis Support Lab staff, (OSL) is a community-funded decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) that is independent from Osmosis developers, the core team or foundation. What started out as something assisted by the current team has grown into a neutral organization focused on users. The support team is not pressured to say certain things or push specific ideas or views on those seeking help.
“Osmosis wants to compete on a centralized exchange level, and for that you need a support team that is competent and capable to answer any and all questions,” OSL Staff Member Max said. “Our goal is to address concerns with developers in an effective way and provide effective solutions to common areas of confusion, emergent issues, as well as things like front-end bugs or potential or ongoing exploits.”
Max said OSL played a key role in shutting down the Osmosis chain and stopping what potentially could have ended the entire project with the v9 Nitrogen network upgrade exploit.
Osmosis users who run into problems with the platform have an official support option with OSL and anyone can get live support nearly instantaneously with their live chat.
Cosmos News ran into a situation where Gitopia’s LORE token was not able to be withdrawn from Osmosis’ permissionless decentralized exchange Frontier. After trying a few times to withdraw, it was apparent the transfer was not going to happen using Osmosis, and so we decided to try and use the live support chat to see if they could help. We were instantly greeted by a support staff member named Rose and we proceeded to tell of our problem with the LORE token. Rose was able to check the IBC status and said a problem was indeed happening due to some recent front-end changes to Osmosis. Rose suggested we do a manual IBC transfer in Keplr and walked us through the steps. The transfer went through and our problem was resolved in a matter of about five minutes. Rose said she would alert the Osmosis team to the problem so they could fix it.
Osmosis Support Lab is not just live chat support. They also offer educational resources to help onboard new Cosmos users with Keplr wallet and Osmosis DEX tutorials. Support users can also drill down into more specific topics, such as manual IBC transfers, liquidity pool mechanics, governance, bridges, and a general explanation of what crypto is.
OSL staff handles many problems on a daily basis. Some are easy to fix and can be resolved with the “turn it off and back on again” approach and others need a more delicate touch, such as tracing error messages for smart contracts. Some issues are not Osmosis related, but the team helps out on those as well, in a bid to help the overall Interchain.
The crypto industry has its problems with scammers, so it’s refreshing to see a community-driven initiative set up an official channel where users can get support for the growing set of features Osmosis is cranking out.
