Gravity Bridge (GRAV)

Gravity Bridge is a purpose-built, decentralized, trustless blockchain that bridges assets between the Ethereum and Cosmos ecosystems. Ethereum and EVM compatible tokens can be transferred across the Gravity Bridge to a Cosmos wallet and then onto other Cosmos wallets or DEXs (such as Osmosis or Gravity DEX). Cosmos SDK-based blockchains can similarly send tokens across Gravity Bridge to the Ethereum ecosystem, making them available for transfer or potentially trading on Uniswap or other ETH DEXs.

Basics

• Based in:
• Started in / Announced on:
• Testnet release:
• Mainnet release:

History

• From their blog (26-8-2021):

"It all started with a Cosmos whitepaper written in 2016, which envisioned an Ethereum Peg-zone as a stand-alone bridge blockchain. The Cosmos ecosystem values many sovereign chains, interconnected through Inter Blockchain Communication. Based on this whitepaper, what would become the Sifchain team, began work on “Peggy” — an Ethereum to Cosmos bridge.

In 2020, a distributed bandwidth platform called Althea started looking into how they could build a bridge between Ethereum and Cosmos chains. They needed stablecoins for their distributed bandwidth network, and they needed them on a sovereign chain to ensure telecom level reliability. Althea created its own design called the Gravity bridge — an Ethereum to Cosmos bridge that focused on simplicity and decentralization. This design had clear value beyond just Althea’s bandwidth network and soon garnered interest from other teams looking for access to Ethereum.

In 2020, Althea and the Iqlusion team partnered to form Peggy JV and together brought funding and development resources to the project. Peggy JV has now evolved to use the bridge software on the Sommelier blockchain, a Cosmos DeFi project.

1. Firstly, Althea that brought the bridge into existence with 70,000+ lines of code, rigorous testing and supporting the bridge across the projects working on it.
2. Next, the Sommelier team, with code improvements, feedback, ergonomic improvements, and testing.
3. The Injective team has also been working on the bridge for their blockchain and has contributed code improvements and bug fixes to the ecosystem."

Audits & Exploits

• Bug bounty program can be found [insert here].

Token

Token Allocation

• From Citadel (1-4-2022):

"Gravity Bridge launched with a decentralized validator set and roughly half of the tokens allocated to community DAO discretion for airdrops, future ecosystem support, and liquidity mining. It is supported by a community of token holders and validators who will make guiding decisions like the implementation of interchain staking, LM and airdrops."

Utility

• From Citadel (1-4-2022):

"Graviton ($GRAV) is the Gravity Bridge blockchain’s native token. The validators employ $GRAV to secure the bridge."

Technology

• Whitepaper or docs can be found [insert here].
• Code can be viewed here.

Implementations

• Built on: Cosmos SDK
• Programming language used:

Transaction Details

• Capacity (TPS):
• Latency:

How it works

• From Citadel (1-4-2022):

"Gravity lets people transfer tokens from Ethereum to Cosmos and back again by locking up tokens on the Ethereum side and minting equivalent tokens on the Cosmos side. Unlike many bridges, Gravity is completely non-custodial — you only need to trust in the security of the Cosmos chain, not some third-party bridge administrators who could run off with your funds."

• From this bridge blog (21-4-2022):

"They created a non-upgradeable Solidity contract that allows users to lock assets on Ethereum and mint equivalent tokens on any Cosmos chain. They can be sent back or between other Cosmos chains. Different Cosmos chains can use this bridge to access ERC20 assets like $wETH, $DAI, $USDC, and $wBTC. Assets from Ethereum can flow into the Cosmos ecosystem and interact with various applications such as Akash Network, Sentinel, Regen, and Osmosis. Assets on the Cosmos ecosystem can flow to Ethereum and interact with Ethereum DeFi."

Roadmap

• Can be found [Insert link here].

Pros and Cons

Pros

• From this bridge blog (21-4-2022):

1. "Non-custodial. You only need to trust Ethereum and Cosmos’ security when transferring your assets.
2. Credibly neutral. The bridge is not focused on capturing users for a particular blockchain or DEX. It is designed to enable traffic flow across the bridge. The neutral nature of this bridge lowers the barriers to access liquidity on the Ethereum ecosystem while at the same time allowing new and small blockchains on Cosmos Hub to participate.
3. Secure. There is an active validator set on the Cosmos SDK-based chain. Validators must stake a hefty amount of tokens, and any misbehavior by validators is punished by slashing the validator’s stake. It is also permissionless and censorship-resistant. Representative tokens will be minted when at least ⅔ of the validator set attests a deposit. Withdrawals happen when the bridge batches multiple ‘SendToEth’ messages."

Team, Funding and Partners

Team

• Full team can be found [here].
• Althea and Iqlusion (8-2021)
• Justin Kilpatrick is the lead engineer, co-founder, and CTO of Althea Network and has been responsible for leading a small development team using innovative technology to change the way we buy internet service for the better as well as building up the Gravity Bridge. He is also a Sommelier cofounder,