Osmosis “Scambuster Upgrade” ready to go live to combat surge in spam events
Cosmos-based Osmosis chain ready for release Upgrade v11.0.0 Block height 5432450 to combat “spam/fraud events”. The block height is expected to reach around 4pm UTC on August 3rd, and users will not be able to interact with the chain for a ‘short period of time’.
According to Osmosis’ announcement, “This upgrade includes only two minor changes aimed at reducing on-chain spam to protect Osmosis users.”
- Osmosis LP Incentive Gauge Creation Fee
- Governance Proposal Minimum Deposit Requirement
Osmosis LP Incentive Gauge Creation Fee
On July 22, malicious actors attempted to bring down the Comos blockchain by creating “20,000 external incentive gauges in various pools to overload validator nodes.” The attack failed, but the user got a dust attack. This is when a small number of worthless tokens are spread across many wallets in hopes of future exploits. Osmosis reports that “this was rather annoying and resulted in a less-than-ideal user experience for him.”
The upgrade introduces a minimum fee of 50 OSMO for creating and adding external incentive gauges. After the upgrade is released, it is considered “too expensive” to recreate the July 22nd attack.
Governance Proposal Minimum Deposit Requirement
Scam offers involving malicious links that attempt to steal users’ seed phrases are becoming more and more common on Cosmos. To prevent such proposals, Osmosis will introduce changes to the proposal submission process, so that “a wallet that submits a governance proposal will pay him as much as 25% of the deposit upon submission.”
The initial cost to submit a proposal is approximately 125 OSMO. The purpose of this change is similar to how it applies to the fee for creating incentive gauges. A similar spam proposal was seen on the Terra blockchain when it collapsed. However, Terra has introduced a whitelist method that hides other suggestions behind the “Show All” tab.
Osmosis’ strategy imposes a financial limit on submission of proposals, but the trade-off of reducing spam may result in a better user experience.
According to Osmosis, another update will ship in late August, “should be an exciting month in the ecosystem!”
