Zero Knowledge Podcast

Dev Ojha on the Osmosis Story and his Return to Privacy

April 1, 2026·1 hr 12 min·6 clips
Dev Ojha declares 'Cosmos is dying' and proposes merging Osmosis into the Cosmos Hub as the only path to survival.
Osmosis is treated as something people lived through, not just a protocol to recap. The guest revisits its place in Cosmos during the stretch when proof-of-stake, cross-chain communication, and decentralized communities were all being tested fast. The network got smaller, and that gives the episode its postmortem feel, though Anna Rose leaves space for Cosmos to still have another chapter. Speed becomes one practical lesson. The guest likes market mechanisms that make bridging faster, even when fees are still messy, because crypto UX asks people to wait around far too often. Then the center of Cosmos comes back into focus. After Terra's breakdown, the 2023 shift, and Celestia's launch, it gets harder to treat Cosmos Hub as the obvious middle. Celestia, stablecoins, and the wider ecosystem all become possible answers to where Cosmos now lives, both structurally and socially. The privacy thread gives the episode more bite. Around the time Skip took over, the guest says he wanted Cosmos to become a home for privacy applications. That felt culturally plausible. The point is not that Cosmos owned privacy, but that a lot of privacy work outside Zcash had weight there. Secret Network comes up directly. Penumbra does too, with the guest pointing to Henry's move into Cosmos to build a chain around problems he wanted fixed and to improve wallet UX. From there, the conversation turns back toward Zcash. What started as ecosystem history becomes a return to the guest's older research world, where privacy is less a feature than the main problem. The close is blunt in a useful way: medical data should stay with the person, not scattered across servers, and the host treats his return to privacy work as meaningful.

As heard by us

A grounded look at Osmosis, Cosmos, and Dave Oja's path back into privacy work.

The episode tracks Dave Oja from the Osmosis origin story into Cosmos with a clear sense of where the ecosystem has been and what it has left to prove.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

Osmosis history, Cosmos aftershocks, and Dave Oja's return to privacy.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →
Listen to the show on