In today’s article, we’re having a look at Althea’s Cosmos Gravity Bridge Blockchain. Gravity Bridge is an independent and credibly neutral Cosmos-SDK blockchain providing the whole Interchain community with a neutral bridge to Ethereum, and over time, all major Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) chains. The Gravity Bridge blockchain launched its Mainnet in December 2021 after years of testnet developments and going through 3 audits. That said, let’s look at this blockchain and what makes it so unique.
Before we dive into the Gravity Bridge blockchain, it is essential to note that when people talk about Gravity Bridge, they mean the bridge between Ethereum and Cosmos-based blockchains. In a nutshell, by locking tokens on the Ethereum side and minting identical tokens on the Cosmos side, Gravity allows people to transfer tokens from Ethereum to Cosmos back-and-forth. Furthermore, Gravity, unlike many other bridges, Gravity is fully noncustodial; you only have to trust the Cosmos chain's security, not the security of third-party bridge administrators who might steal your assets.
The Gravity Bridge Blockchain is the decentralized, neutral Cosmos blockchain, whose primary purpose is to make sure the operation of bridges between Cosmos-based chains and other blockchains' “layer one” ecosystems runs smoothly.
As mentioned previously, the Cosmos Gravity Bridge and IBC enable sending assets from any ETH to-and-fro to any IBC compatible blockchain. That is why the value of the neutral Cosmos Gravity Bridge is not centered on capturing a user for any single DEX or blockchain; rather, the bridge's value is concentrated on allowing all traffic to travel across it. Therefore, so is its blockchain’s value. As a result, the neutral Cosmos Gravity Bridge lowers the entry barrier to the Ethereum ecosystem's liquidity, allowing smaller or newer Cosmos blockchains to participate. In addition, the Cosmos Gravity Bridge is secured by the chain's validator set, which may be a big lift for smaller chains to run on their own.
Governance
The Gravity Bridge roles within its ecosystem are that of validator and relays. Before being transferred to the Ethereum chain, transactions from Cosmos are grouped into batches. This is because processing transactions on Ethereum is expensive, and batching spreads the cost over all the transactions in the cluster.
Relayers constantly monitor the batches in the batch pool. A batch can be submitted to Gravity.sol once it obtains signatures from at least 2/3s of the validators in the current checkpoint recorded by Gravity.sol. Gravity.sol's primary function is to lock up ERC20 tokens on Ethereum to be minted on Cosmos. The tokens are locked in Gravity.sol back the tokens on Cosmos. Relayers can decide whether submitting a batch is profitable, and only submit the ones that are. It is a profitable batch if the fees included in it are greater than the cost of gas to submit it to Ethereum.
Updates to the Validator Set preserve Gravity.sol's knowledge of Cosmos' validator set up to date This is significant because, according to Gravity's trust model, trusting Gravity.sol is equivalent to trusting the Cosmos chain that runs it. At least 2/3s of the current validator set in the checkpoint stored by Gravity.sol must sign a validator set change.
A Cosmos message requesting a validator set update can be sent by anyone. The Gravity module saves a snapshot of the current validator set when this happens. This snapshot is then signed by the validators. Once it obtains the signatures of two-thirds of the validators in Gravity, it's ready to go. A relayer can submit sol's current checkpoint to the Ethereum chain.
The Gravity Bridge Native Token: $GRAV
Graviton ($GRAV) is the Gravity Bridge blockchain's native token. The validators employ $GRAV to secure the bridge, which contains the native assets, is bridged on Ethereum. Gravity Bridge started with the default Cosmos SDK inflation and leave future inflation modifications up to governance. Meaning, at the start, a moving change rate was utilized to best estimate the optimum market rate for inflation incentives. The shifting change rate mechanism assures that if the percent bonded is above or below the goal percent bonded, the inflation rate adjusts to further incentivize or disincentivize bonding. Setting the percent-bonded objective to less than 100% encourages the network to keep some non-staked tokens on hand, which should help with liquidity.
Gravity Bridge was released with the standard Cosmos ecosystem slashing settings of 5% for double signing and 0.01 percent for downtime. $GRAV is supported by the Cosmostation wallet.
For now, you can have a look at the Stakin validator addresses via the links below.
- Gravity Bridge Skynet Explorer: https://gravity-bridge.skynetexplorers.com/validators/gravityvaloper1haznywsf8l60xftvkgl79dstyuw3vw5x0v7kgn
- Mintscan: https://www.mintscan.io/gravity-bridge/validators/gravityvaloper1haznywsf8l60xftvkgl79dstyuw3vw5x0v7kgn
DISCLAIMER: This is not financial advice. Staking, delegation, and cryptocurrencies involve a high degree of risk, and there is always the possibility of loss, including the failure of all staked digital assets. Additionally, delegators are at risk of slashing in case of security or liveness faults on some protocols. We advise you to do your due diligence before choosing a validator.
