Prop 247: Reigniting Gravity Bridge: Grant proposal
Gravity Bridge was designed to connect the Cosmos SDK and Ethereum ecosystems as an efficient, decentralized bridge. Gravity has indeed lived up to its design and purpose, maintaining reliable and affordable bridge infrastructure since its launch in 2021, serving 76 connected chains. Gravity Bridge also maintains its status as the only fully decentralized Ethereum bridge, with no admin keys or closed source components of any kind. Gravity has achieved many impressive milestones over the last 4 years, with a total bridge volume of $1.6B and supporting a peak TVL of nearly $250M. While Gravity continues as a permissionless bridge for any use in the ecosystem, its design is optimized for practical use cases in hard assets and infrastructure (RWAs). For this reason the Althea L1 blockchain community has selected Gravity as their primary bridge on launch. The team at Gravity LLC has been pleased to support the Gravity blockchain and community with development updates and other support over the last five years. The Gravity LLC team would like to propose to continue this work in the upcoming year, and support the Gravity community, its validators and stakeholders, to update the chain to Cosmos SDK v0.50 and continue supporting the ecosystem. For this continuing work, the Gravity LLC team is requesting 100M GRAV. The Community pool will have 670M GRAV remaining after this grant, should it pass through governance. Any portion of the tokens that is delegated, will be delegated across many validators outside of the top five. As Web3 reaches a pivotal moment, the Gravity Bridge ecosystem has a unique opportunity to reassert its role as a practical, interoperable solution for cross-chain value transfer. The Gravity LLC team, as active contributors within the Gravity ecosystem, continue to propose and assist in implementing ideas for what a revitalized, next generation Gravity Bridge could look like. We’re excited to collaborate with the wider community on shaping this next chapter. There are several areas where community input and governance discussion could be impactful:
- Fee structure and inflation parameters
- Validator commission rates
- Fee distribution between the auction module and stakers
We suggest the community upgrade the integrated address blocklist. Gravity was launched with a governance-maintained blocklist that prevents known bad actors from interacting with the bridge. It is likely this list is outdated. We recommend both an update to the list and community consideration of a more dynamic blocklist feature that provides more responsive automatic updates. On the technical front, contributors may wish to explore improvements like instant liquidity mechanisms, orchestrator-free validator operation, UX enhancements, or other protocol upgrades that increase usability and adoption. Other ecosystem features like new wallet integrations and block explorers may also be helpful. With the SDK 50 upgrade immenet it's time to invite conversation on the above. With broad participation, this next phase can be both practical and transformative, and we look forward to building together with the community.