ZKV presents Privacy in Cosmos: Scalability Edition - Gravity Bridge

Transcript

awesome well thanks again for having me here today and um uh i'm deborah simpier i'm the ceo and co-founder of alcia thea is a distributed internet infrastructure platform um and we're also the driving force behind gravity bridge which is what i'm going to share with y'all today here kind of from a high level little overview um so gravity bridge is a purpose-built neutral and decentralized blockchain built on the cosmos sdk for specifically bridging assets between ethereum and the evm ecosystems and the cosmos ecosystems um so kind of an overview of of how it's designed and works it's um a

non-custodial and decentralized uh instance essentially using the full validator set of that um the cosmos blockchain it's built primarily and purpose built to just be a piece of infrastructure that bridges these assets um that there's no interconnected decks or amm or anything like that instead we focus on simply um allowing other cosmos blockchains to use the gravity bridge infrastructure through ibc and through the cosmos bridge um to access stable coins and the liquidity from the ethereum ecosystem in a seamless way and then

or they can go the other way around if they want to have an ethereum representation of their cosmos asset for example if you wanted sentinel or akash or um any other cosmos blockchain um on uniswap you could simply use idc and the gravity bridge to to do that in a kind of permissionless and easy way i kind of like to think of it as a b2b to you business model very similar to the business to business the customer approach um we take kind of the blockchain to blockchain to end user approach so many different front-ends can connect to the gravity bridge um and then many different dexas and cosmos blockchains can utilize it to access that liquidity of ethereum

the um the other kind of core um or interesting innovation with gravity is the batching right so there's very little fees or no fees to go from um ethereum assets into cosmos where there's very low gas system there and then on the other side when we are sending transactions from cosmos or withdrawing um back to the ethereum ecosystem we use a batching mechanism to basically spread that gas cost out between all of the different participants in that batch and that makes it really efficient which was um a really driving force for us because um with althea we want to enable you know financial services and d5 for a much larger

you know retail set of customers um and so we need to be able to have you know micro transactions and have withdrawals not be two to four hundred dollars per per withdrawal um so uh this is a i have a couple of different slides here that um pull from the from the 1k access team they did an excellent article on called blockchain bridges building networks of crypto networks um and uh i highly recommend that uh that you check that out if you have the opportunity they did a really great job with that but they kind of broke it into kind of different uh types of bridges uh you know based on you know functionality and these other kinds of of determining factors and uh so i thought this was kind of an interesting way to

look at where gravity fits in the whole bridging ecosystem and uh in this one here you can see we uh we use the the light clients and relays and validators of the cosmos uh uh blockchain as opposed to using either external validators um or um like a liquidity network like connext similarly uh they have kind of divided this up by the different uh trusted uh trust mechanisms right so you have on the left hand side you know you might have um some bond or um something at stake right that that it could be slashed or um lost right or you have a fully permissioned set of actors who secure

the bridge or and then on the on the other side here is gravity bridge who uses the um security of the uh cosmos underlying cosmos blockchain which is a lot why we focus on decentralization and resiliency um as a security mechanism as well to see if many different people that can participate um or no one uh you know one person has too much of the voting power then it's a much more secure system um and in fact actually when we launched we launched with over 100 validators um and with the decentralized start which we're really really proud of that um and are excited to see the new the new validators also coming on board as well so basically how it works

you have an ethereum contract then you have the gravity cosmos module e-signer and oracle which are run by the cosmos validator and then you have a market of relayers who submit these transactions to ethereum on behalf of the cosmos validators what's kind of interesting here is um that we sort of originally looked at this as a separate market and i think you know later on we might also see this as a distinct group of of relayers as the transaction volume increases right now what you're seeing is mostly these relayers are um also the cosmos validators as well um but i'm excited to see a more robust fee market

um and the the node operators be more properly incentivized to continue to run uh better infrastructure for bridges so gravity bridge works very similar to how many bridges work uh you send tokens to the ethereum contract they're locked on the gravity soul and then they're minted on the cosmos chain um and then similarly when you go to withdraw you users um send tokens to the gravity module with the free fee and that's really kind of where um we look at where that batching comes in as well um kind of skip over to this because this is where the interesting part happens right

um the uh the so when you're sending transactions and you're batching them a lot of people ask okay well how long is it gonna take how much is it going to cost um so my co-founder and and and justin who wrote you know the majority of gravity i think it's something like 70 000 lines of code it's quite a monumental undertaking like he describes this as a metaphorical bus right so you um you want to send a transaction you you get on the bus you put your money in the little uh jar in the front and you take your seat right and then the bus goes when everyone's done that and it's full so very similar we kind of batch transactions between cosmos and ethereum

however if you want to you can pay for the whole bus and go right now so what kind of becomes interesting now as we start to have these user interfaces and ux designs come on board is how are we going to look at displaying that those choices to the user so i'm excited to see some different interpretations of what that can look like and hopefully some better ux than we would normally stay with with wallets right um so right now how can you use the bridge so if you are another cosmos blockchain you can use the bridge to generate ethereum representations of your tokens on in almost a permissionless process right so you do have to um submit a governance proposal to the

cosmos uh gravity bridge validators um for your dnom right so that that they're aware of what that is um but other than that then you can use you can have your sentinel or akash or um you know agoric or whatever else other cosmos asset on um the um you know swapper or theory in texas similarly if you are a user um or for a blockchain that wants to um have the liquidity of the ethereum stablecoin ecosystem or um any of the ethereum assets or evm assets as well too so this isn't just specific to ethereum but erc20 and all evm assets

as well um then you can you know sort of permissionally connect a front-end and then use ibc to uh to uh interconnect your blockchain as well and then have stable coins which i mean like the an interesting use case is althea right so um what we needed to have was uh stable coins in our ecosystem right so easy to onboard staple coins right die um usdc things like that that people are used to using um to pay for you know their bandwidth and then can go through the gravity bridge where you have that nice uh aggregation of traffic right so the more aggregation of traffic that the sort of

um efficiency of volume that comes with many different people participating um then we uh and then we can we can get that efficiency the gas cost is really low for our end users as well um i thought this was really interesting too so sort of looking back to the history of the bridge um it it this really has been envisioned as a separate kind of pegged zone within the cosmos ecosystem since the the cosmos white paper um and in fact back in 2017 is at jun young i hope i'm pronouncing that right he submitted a a cosmos hackathon um

uh called at gates or et gate um so that really kind of got i think people thinking about what a bridge between the two ecosystems could look like and then in 2019 switch lab um starts work on what they call peggy that now became sift chain we started kind of taking on that torch back in 2020 uh with that real need that we have and currently we're using the xi bridge and there's a lot of there's a lot of pain points for our end users around that and ethereum gas costs are extremely untenable um so we started working on that work together with the somali a team mazaki and inclusion and formed something called peggy jv uh that then became sommelier

uh and uh back early or mid-2021 somalia injected launched their own kind of forks of the graduating gravity modules part of their cosmos blockchain um and then as we rounded out the end of 2021 gravity bridge uh blockchain is now at mainnet we launched that really amazing decentralized start um with over 100 validators participating which was very excited about you know really focusing on that decentralization and the in the community and we really have a just a you know mad props to our amazing validators who have been part of this journey um and many of them who tested uh the gravity module for you know essentially

almost a year um and in fact there's also been three audits on the bridge as well um so what's what's next right so we have mainnet uh what we're uh what you'll see coming soon is the user interfaces um i know that cosmos station is is working on one which is pretty exciting um you also start to see uh the stable coins and ethereum tokens um on dexes and in cosmos blockchains um and then the other way as well i i think within you know within this quarter we'll definitely also start seeing and actually much probably much sooner um cosmos blockchain is also on aetherium so really excited for what's coming next and um if you'd like to get a hold of us uh

gravitybridge on twitter or gravitybridge.net um we also have a discord as well hi sorry about the little delay there um thank you so much for that talk there are actually a few questions in the chat going whilst you were talking so um we have a few minutes just to quickly address those so mark asked are evermost and gravity

bridge competing with each other both presenters have discussed bridging eve joking to ivc he's asking about the subtleties in the differences yeah i think that there's a further nuance and that we so there's gravity bridge uh the module gravity bridge was an open source project so uh like sommelier injective and edmos are using that for integrated into their ecosystem for their specific you know applications whether that's for um you know evm applications on the on the ethmos chain or somalia uses it for um

uh like some arbitrary logic and uh ethereum um you know being able to rebalance your positions uh in d5 um but what what's what's true with those is that those are very um you know uh business to user focus right so you have something integrated within that chain that you're going to be accessing and siloing that user to um whereas the gravity bridge blockchain is uh you know permissionless for any blockchain to be able to use it so it's it's uh it's just a road a piece of infrastructure that anyone can drive along right um so you know any any different front end can connect any different blockchain can connect um and it's a it's a neutral piece of infrastructure whereas what you have with all these specific instances

is they're going to focus their user in on their specific application okay i'll just ask one more question really quickly and then we'll get going with the panel so how does gravity bridge verify ethereum proof of work proofs in the ibc paper it says ibc protocol is not suitable to validate proof of work proofs due to the cost of the operation right so there's a couple different things happening there um i mentioned kind of like gravity bridge and ibc almost uh simultaneously so um you have uh what uh what happens when you uh so ibc is not verifying the ethereum uh proof of work right we're not uh so

what's happening is that you are sending things over to the gravity bridge and then the gravity bridge is forwarding them along ibc so i think the confusion comes where um you know yeah ibc isn't necessarily um interacting with a proof of work based chain um but what's happening is gravity is doing that and the validators are are verifying those transactions and then the ibc is taking them along to the next um uh to the next blockchain so it's a two-step transact it's a two-step transaction that happens but it um but it happens for the user seamlessly through um through gravity bridge so it doesn't feel like it's two stops to the end user okay just one last question i lied um will the gravity bridge be able to

support erc 721 tokens so yeah um i i as it is now there will need to be probably a governor's proposal to support those kinds of tokens but i and i think it just depends on whether the community thinks that's a priority when that will happen but i'm sure that at some point in time um you know nfts will come to cosmos that way