Gravity is the force that pulls objects together in the cosmos, so it’s no surprise that Gravity Bridge is aptly named - pulling liquidity from Ethereum to Cosmos and back again. The pull of liquidity has been impressive over the last 8 weeks, with over 115 million bridged to the Canto blockchain in Cosmos, creating the deepest stable coin liquidity in the ecosystem.
https://dune.com/sohwak/canto-ethreum-bridge
Canto isn't the only DEX enjoying increased liquidity through Gravity’s pull, Evmos liquidity is now being restored through shared $GRAV and $DIFF incentives on the Diffusion platform and the Evmos community has been discussing further liquidity incentives.
Crescent DEX announced new ranged liquidity pool functionality, including a new ranged $GRAV/bCRE pool. Crescent's ranged pools are efficient and easy to use, effectively multiplying the depth of liquidity over a standard pool. The Gravity and Crescent communities have also voted for shared incentives to be implemented soon.
Announcing Interchain Accounts for Gravity:
Bringing interoperability between Cosmos chains and beyond
Gravity Bridge has worked hard on the upcoming implementation of the ICA Controller module, which lets users control accounts on other chains which have the ICA host module.
With ICA, Gravity can become a portal to the entire Cosmos ecosystem.
Since ICA launched earlier this year, there are quite a few blockchains which have enabled the host module (e.g. Osmosis, Cosmos Hub). However, Gravity will be among the first to launch the controller module, which will empower exciting use cases, like protocol liquidity, interchain governance, or ease of use for Cosmos and Ethereum users. A Gravity Bridge ICA account could make swaps on Osmosis or Crescent DEX (or any Cosmos chain with an enabled host account) without ever leaving Gravity.
It’s true, Tyler, Gravity Pull requests are the best, because of the contributors!
Gravity has a vibrant community of supporters, front end developers, validators and contributors, and it was a key contributor, the validator amhost.net, that has pushed the development of ICA to a working and tested state. Gravity is fundamentally different from other bridges that often take a more corporate tact. Gravity is decentralized infrastructure with a large, active validator set, and an open, permissionless front end and relayer ecosystem, which invites open collaborations and ecosystem contributions.
Gravity Bridge takes a unique approach to testing code in the Cosmos ecosystem, focusing on integration testing in addition to unit testing. On every code change Gravity Bridge automatically spins up 24 separate testnets and runs randomly generated workloads combined with exploit attempts against the new code.
This strategy is significantly more time consuming up front, with as much as 50% of all development time spent in test design and debugging. But automated testnets allow Gravity Bridge to perform weeks worth of by-hand testing in 30 minutes and have high confidence in what’s deployed.
This automated testnet system has another advantage of making it easier to contribute to Gravity Bridge. Small changes can have unintended consequences and more automated testing allows the Gravity Bridge community to be both open to contributors and confident in the quality of the code.
What ICA means for Gravity Users:
Adding the host module alone would give other Cosmos users a convenient means to send their assets to Ethereum. By adding the controller module to Gravity, Ethereum users would gain full access to the entire Cosmos ecosystem; without needing to use Keplr, create a wallet for Cosmos, or spend too much effort learning about Cosmos.
Imagine, in Gravity's not to distant future, a portal where a Metamask wallet is used to bridge ERC20s from Ethereum to Gravity Bridge then to Crescent or Canto or Regen, where trades and lends and purchases are made and sent to other places in the Cosmos. Assets could easily then make their way back to Ethereum without needing to leave the Gravity portal, install a new browser extension, generate new private keys and back them up, etc. This is the user experience of the future - easy, seamless navigation of both Cosmos and Ethereum.
The ICA controller module is slated to be added in the upcoming “Pleiades II” Update, along with improvements to bridge security.
The Interchain Accounts Working Group meets weekly in Discord to explore and imagine new possibilities with ICA and is open to anyone.
Coming Soon: Pleiades II Update, Additional Bridge Security
Pleiades Upgrade, Phase II will include more security checks for Gravity Bridge, taking advantage of recent upstream improvements with the speed of invariants checks to run invariants by default for all validators, in addition to the ICA controller module.
Invariants are pieces of code that essentially make sure the blockchain state is good - they identify problems and will halt the chain if any are found. Gravity already has some invariant checks, and the Pleiades II will add more. The goal is to ensure that the chain halts if anything is out of the ordinary, making it much harder to exploit the bridge. Not only does a potential attacker need to find an exploit, they are also now racing against the clock to actually execute it before the chain stops and halts said exploit in its tracks.
The future of interchain and Gravity’s role as interchain Infrastructure, is a bright and exciting one. Instead of walled off and siloed access, DeFi can be accessible to anyone, with open access through Interchain Accounts, coupled with a secure and affordable infrastructure layer, to empower the adoption of the Cosmos Ecosystem.