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Frequently Asked Questions
What is Gravity Bridge?
Cosmos® Gravity Bridge™ is a purpose-built, fully decentralized, trustless blockchain which 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.
Gravity Bridge is Decentralized
Using the full validator set of the Gravity Bridge blockchain to send and relay transactions makes Gravity Bridge arguably the world's most decentralized bridge, unlike other blockchain bridges which utilize centralized multi-sigs or a private group of nodes and signers.
Gravity Bridge is Permissionless
Any Cosmos-based blockchain can use IBC (Inter-Blockchain Communication) to connect to Gravity and transfer assets from Ethereum and EVM based chains. Similarly, any front-end providers can build a custom solution and enable end-users to send Ethereum and Ethereum based stable coins to Cosmos.
Is it live?
Yes.
On Monday, December 13th, we launched mainnet Gravity Bridge with over 100 validators. The Gravity Bridge has always been a decentralized project and launched in the same way. .Instead of a centralized event run by only a handful of insider validators, Gravity used a decentralized start process that empowered validators to join in asynchronously.
Can I interact with Gravity and send Ethereum to a Cosmos DEX?
Over the coming weeks, we expect many different front ends, DEX integrations and Cosmos blockchains to integrate with the Gravity Bridge. Cosmos® Gravity Bridge™ is neutral infrastructure that supports other Cosmos blockchains, DEXs and DeFi applications in the Ecosystem.
What tokens are currently supported?
The current implementation only supports Ethereum and USDC transfers, due to the current limitation in the Cosmos sdk, however, we expect the community to adopt the next sdk improvements in the Polaris update, which will open up the full range of ERC-20 possibilities. Gravity relayers are set to only relay profitable batches, so the most probable tokens to bridge across Gravity will be the most common.
Gravity is also compatible with any EVM chain, so we could see community proposals to implement other instances, like Polygon, in the future.
Cosmos blockchains that are looking to have ethereum representations of their tokens will need a community governance vote to approve their specific denom. The community forum for discussion of governance proposals is a good place to get started.
Is it secure?
Gravity Bridge has been engineered with security in mind. The code has been in running test nets with a decentralized validator set for over a year and three audits were conducted - Code4Arena crowd sourced audit, Informal and Least Authority.
What about the GRAV Token?
Cosmos® 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 an active and healthy community of token holders and validators who will make guiding decisions like implementation of interchain staking, LM and airdrops.
What's next for Gravity Bridge?
Some of the bootstrapping team are working on ergonomics for front end and project integration, including the transparent IBC forwarder in an update called “Polaris”.
The Althea team (one of the contributors to Gravity Bridge) is also working closely with the Interchain Foundation to support Gravity Bridge renting security from the Cosmos Hub, allowing us to improve the security of the Gravity Bridge with the value of the Cosmos Hub’s staked tokens.
The community may propose these updates as well as any allocation out of the community pool. Gravity Bridge is governed by its community in support of the growth of the Cosmos Internet of Blockchains and the users of the next generation of DeFi.
*COSMOS is the registered trademark of the Interchain Foundation, and is being used by permission. GRAVITY BRIDGE is the trademark of Gravity Bridge.
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