Sunny Aggarwal is the co-founder of Osmosis, a decentralized exchange (DEX) on the Cosmos blockchain, and Sikka, a decentralized social media platform. He is also a co-host of Epicenter, a podcast about the Cosmos ecosystem. ^[1][2][5]

Education

Sunny Aggarwal attended Bridgewater-Raritan High School and graduated in 2015. He then went to the University of California, Berkeley where he studied Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) with a minor in Political Economics. He left his studies after his second year in 2017 to focus on his work and research in the blockchain space. ^[2]

Career

Sunny Aggarwal served as an Ethereum Developer Intern at ConsenSys in 2017 where he was involved in the design of the Ethereum Developers Course to train enrollees of Consensys Academy. He was also a Course Designer and Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley co-designing and teaching the Cryptocurrency Decal to students. ^[2]

Blockchain at Berkeley

During his time at UC Berkeley, Sunny co-founded 'Blockchain at Berkeley', a student organization that evolved into an award-winning blockchain consulting and development team. While leading the Education and R&D departments, he co-created the cryptocurrency decal, initiated weekly whitepaper circles, mentored students in developing blockchain proofs-of-concept, and fostered the Berkeley Bitcoin Meetup. ^[1][2]

Tendermint / Cosmos

Sunny stumbled on Cosmos in the summer of 2017 and was allured by its architecture. Convinced that it held the key to the future of the blockchain ecosystem, he dropped out of school and started working with Tendermint as a research scientist. Sunny played a crucial role in bringing the Cosmos SDK to life, paving the way for Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC), and the launch of the Cosmos Hub (Gaia). Sunny worked at Tendermint from June 2017 till 2020. ^[1][2]

Epicenter

Sunny joined Epicenter, a cryptocurrency podcast in May 2018. He became co-host, contributing to discussions that explore technology and the stories behind revolutionary projects. With over 15,000 subscribers, Epicenter is a platform for Sunny to share his enthusiasm for blockchain. Beyond the crypto realm, Sunny also dives into diverse topics in his second podcast, Conspiratus. ^[8][1][2][6]

Sikka

In a bid to understand the intricacies of the Proof of Stake ecosystem, Sunny alongside Dev Ojha founded Sikka^[5] in November 2018. Sikka is a company focused on building and operating secure infrastructure for blockchains and other decentralized networks. The platform runs one of the largest validators on the Cosmos Hub, where they have quite a number of delegators and are extremely active in the governance process. They also run validators on the Kava mainnet and several other testnets. Sikka runs high availability secure cryptographic signing nodes to validate Proof of Stake blockchains. ^[5][1]

Osmosis

Sunny Aggarwal co-founded Osmosis Labs alongside Josh Lee in February 2021. Osmosis Labs is the core team responsible for developing Osmosis. Both founders were responsible for building the Byzantine-Fault Tolerant engine Tendermint technology, which governs the Osmosis platform. Osmosis Labs is responsible for the protocol’s initial code development. ^[7]

Osmosis (OSMO) is a decentralized exchange (DEX) and multi-chain automated market maker (AMM) protocol designed for the Cosmos ecosystem. The platform offers interoperability between blockchains using Inter-blockchain Communication Protocol (IBC) and Axelar. With the Osmosis AMM, users can create unique liquidity pools that are controlled and voted on by participants. The platform allows for native trading of assets from over 47 different chains within Cosmos. ^[7]

"Osmosis is a decentralized exchange but what makes it unique is that it is a decentralized exchange built as its own app chain. So instead of being built on top of Ethereum or EVM or L2s, it's its own chain for the purpose of being the best DEX possible" - Sunny on what Osmosis does ^[10]

OSMO Token

OSMO is the native token of the Osmosis network. The OSMO token is a governance token that allows staked token holders to decide the future of the protocol. OSMO is primarily used for voting on protocol upgrades, setting the swap fee for the base network, and allocating the mining rewards for liquidity pools. ^[9]