Episode 223: Connecting Cosmos and Ethereum with Gravity Bridge

Transcript

[Music] welcome to xero knowledge i'm your host anna rose in this podcast we will be exploring the latest in zero knowledge research and the decentralized web as well as new paradigms that promise to change the way we interact and transact online this week i catch up with deborah simpier and justin kilpatrick the co-founders of althea the team working on gravity bridge we chat about the history of the althea project and how they aim to build an open marketplace for independent entities to create their own isps we

then dive into the topic of bridges and the gravity bridge project which is a bridge that links ethereum with cosmos and the ibc world we revisit the bridge topic which is something i hope to cover more often this coming year and look into the design they chose we chat about the larger bridge landscape and cosmos the new initiatives and challenges that come with a multi-chain architecture the opportunities and hazards of the current wave of stake drop airdrops and cosmos their next steps and more now before we start in i want to suggest that you check out the zk jobs board if you're looking to jump into zk professionally this is a great place to find job postings from some of the top teams working in zk find the project or team you want to jump into next i also

want to encourage hiring teams to check out the job board we have teams like polygon hermes 001 labs and ethereum foundation posting there in case you want to add your jobs there as well i also want to encourage you to keep your eyes peeled for two upcoming events the zk validator is doing an event in amsterdam on april 15th called privacy and cosmos this is our fourth installation of a series of events that was funded by the cosmos hub we will be bringing together great cosmos projects as well as looking at zk and privacy the event is free sign up today i've added the link in the show notes there is also an upcoming in-person zk summit it's also in amsterdam just the week after the zkv event i'm adding the form to apply in the show notes get your

application in right away and just so you know the spots for this are extremely limited hope to see you this april now i want to ask tanya the podcast producer to share a little bit about this week's sponsors today's episode is sponsored by elio elio is a new layer 1 blockchain that uses cutting-edge cryptography to achieve the programmability of ethereum the privacy of zcash and the scalability of a rollup it gives developers the tools they need to build programs that protect privacy while allowing applications to be regulatory compliant it also features a new programming language called leo that enables non-cryptographers to harness the power of zkp's to build private applications like decentralized exchanges hidden information games regulated stable coins and more go to elio.org to learn more

about the program or roll up your sleeves and visit leo-lang.org to start building that's leo-l-a-n-g.org elio will also be participating in z prize a competition accelerating the future of zero knowledge cryptography visit zprize.io for more information so thank you again elio now here is anna's interview with gravity bridge [Music] today i'm catching up with deborah simpier and justin kilpatrick co-founders of althea and the team working on gravity bridge welcome to the show thanks so much for having us we're really delighted to be here yeah it's nice to be here deborah we first met when we did this event together the xero knowledge validator did an event called

cosmos and privacy and you were one of the speakers and i realized then that you know you were presenting sort of the finished version of gravity bridge and i i realized i don't actually know that much of the backstory of this project and so this is kind of what inspired this episode and i think that might be an interesting place to start so what is althea exactly what is that company the story of althea is the story and genesis of gravity which is quite interesting right so althea is a distributed networking platform that allows for many different entities to own pieces of infrastructure of the internet and a service provider to provide service to the internet and get paid a revenue share for doing so

and so at its core it's a routing and building platform that settles onto a blockchain um so we work with one foot very much in the real world of you know providing internet service especially in challenging environments like very rural places or urban places where there are people under connected because they don't have access to banking and things like that so when we're working in the in the real space we we use stable coins right um so folks can access the internet and load up their routers with like regular this is something they're familiar with right um one of the main kind of ux ways that we look at how people interact with their their devices is that we we don't necessarily look at

it by have that educational lift right of having to understand how everything works right they should just be able to use it and then everything kind of works behind the scenes and so stable currencies are a really big part of that so the bridge was very important because we wanted to be able to interact with the cosmos blockchain ecosystem where althea lives but still use ethereum-based stable coins that are readily available with fiat on ramps so hence we needed an interoperable bridge and um yeah so i mean and justin really i like i want to introduce justin here as as the co-founder and also the kind of you know designer and made it built the majority of what is gravity bridge too so he could perhaps give a more

technical bent to that but from uh hey i've got a fire station that needs to be able to get internet in a rural place in oregon we need a bridge and that's that's where we ended up sort of building this infrastructure cool yeah justin you co-founded althea from that beginning point or did you join later for the gravity bridge part no so i actually started on althea uh first so uh interestingly enough the story of althea is that um there were three three original founders that all sort of worked on the idea of you know blockchain internet service and they'd all sort of poked at it so i think i have the first ever like blog post you know like serious implementation attempt

that was me in early college it didn't work out very well because i wasn't technically capable at the time to do it so i graduated college and i thought for sure somebody would pick it up you know there would definitely be a blockchain internet service by the time i graduated college my opportunity was going to sail on by um but you know i graduate you know i get a nice job at red hat um i'm doing performance engineering and you know i'm i'm just getting kind of bored and i decide well okay let's let's check in on this idea again and there really hadn't been any progress and i was disappointed i'm like this is such a great idea what happened and unbeknownst to me deborah and jahan the third co-founder of althea uh had both been you know sort

of looking for the same thing and were also disappointed that it didn't exist so i started the development of what would become alpha uh just because i wanted to see it exist and that is where you know jahan found me and said okay well let's sort of make this uh less of a fun open source project and more of a cryptocurrency startup and then deborah found us and said hey i've got a town that needs the internet so i remember i quit my job at red hat and i worked probably too many hours to say and i shipped out the first demo router to deborah about three weeks later cool i still have that router router number zero so it's probably on my shelf providing

the very first you know blockchain internet service so a little tiny town in oregon and um it's grown since then but you know it was a it was a really exciting moment when i first got that router number zero can you give me a bit of a sense i wanna i think for right now i wanna focus on althea and the general core idea of sort of the isps in this private band like what exactly can you maybe paint a picture of like what would it be used for actually and just before that just a question like did blockchain was blockchain in its inception or did that come later so blockchain was definitely in the inception okay okay um and the idea is to build a more efficient way to buy and sell internet so right now

let's say you own a mile of fiber it's not useful how would you sell that myelofiber to somebody and the answer is that you can't really one thing mile of fiber when you say that what does that mean is that the wires yes yes yes so like let's say you have a mile or 10 miles or 100 miles of fiber optic cable you know it's buried maybe by the side of the road maybe across people's property but anyways you have a high bandwidth capacity link between two places and the problem right now is that there's no way for you to sell it uh and us as internet customers we have you know maybe several different lines to our home uh but we can only buy from one provider and we're sort of locked into

that one provider so isn't it kind of ridiculous that you can have two different internet wires to your house you know let's say one is one is at t and one is time warner or you know some other big monolithic provider well they both paid to have somebody come out and run a wire to your house so you're paying for twice the infrastructure then you can use and then if time warner goes down it's not like you can just switch to the other one you know you're stuck you know you have to call them sign up have somebody come out the come out to the door so there's sort of two sides to this problem as a customer you're locked in for no good reason you have this infrastructure to your home that you can't use that you're paying for twice because no matter which

provider you're subscribed to you're paying for the wire they installed and then somebody who maybe has the asset that you need that has that buried high bandwidth line to let's say the front of your neighborhood there is no way in the world for you to buy that from them that's ridiculous the metaphor i really like to use is that it's like if a grocery store insisted that they'll only sell you bananas on a subscription and that subscription is for unlimited bananas and they tell you how great unlimited bananas are but you can only ever get them from this one store and then you really need to wonder like which grocery store is going to have the best bananas is it really worth paying 70 bucks a month for should i just not and this is where you get a lot of underserved people who don't purchase

home internet because they have to pay a high entry price and they have to really evaluate like what's it worth and in this comparison it quickly becomes ridiculous why don't you go into the store and just buy a single piece of fruit why is that not possible so this is what althea makes possible but you mentioned sort of like someone owning this fiber it's not like an individual i'm assuming these are companies that have installed these fiber optics under the ground or are there like individual independent fiber layers i don't know if that's what you call them yeah i think that's what's so exciting is that you do have new entrants into the market um because of what althea makes possible and we've actually seen this to be the case we're independent

investors are buying you know some uh we have a for example a network in illinois um it's 10 miles of fiber to the home and that's owned and uh separately by someone who's investing in that that particular piece of fiber optic cable and then there's a service provider that's decoupled so okay althea decouples the service layer allows anyone to be kind of be the network operator it's a local company called silo communications that's worked in that area for a long time has the trust of that community who is installing the network and maintaining it and they get it you know a daily fee automatically transparently on the blockchain and then the the investor who put money into that fiber optic cable is also getting a revenue share of that transparently

programmatically automatically on the blockchain and it's these really agile and flexible configurations that the althea protocol and blockchain make possible and this is i guess built with the cosmos sdk i always never i never know if you're supposed to say on or with do you know that's a good question good question okay we'll go with with the cosmos sdk i guess so for a lot of blockchain projects they start with the blockchain and then move to sort of the application they want to build because obviously they want to like front load issuing a token and sort of be like uh be like funding part of everything for althea like i was describing it started as sort of a

passion project you know we wanted this to exist so we developed the home software so the actual althea routers that people have in their home that are running our software that we flash with our custom operating system uh et cetera we developed that all first and we got that running and now we are looking to move to cosmos sdk from xdi which we selected as a stop gap for low fees and native tokens so there's two enormous components obviously developing a in-home wi-fi router is not a small product to build um and it much less integrating with blockchain and all of and making it work reliably enough for people to use as their home internet so this is all a big challenge and that's

the challenge we solve first so we have real customers we have um there are althea networks uh currently all over north america and a couple international that are that are making revenue that have real users that are operating in a very literal sense you really can't fake selling somebody bandwidth you know like what are you going to do give them fake netflix anyways so now we are looking to move to cosmos sdk which comes back to graphic bridge we needed to build our own bridge because there was no way to get dye or any other uh ethereum stable coin for that matter into a cosmos sdk-based althea block got it and xdi we're talking now renamed i guess to no system chain okay but what operates today is still on

gnosis chain then yeah what operates today is currently on gnosis chain and we are looking to launch and move over to the althea blockchain obviously we had to get gravity bridge up first okay which we got up just recently so now we're taking a bit of a breather stabilizing gravity bridge and getting ready for that next sprint cool just to kind of roadmap that a bit we're looking to launch the alfia blockchain here in the next few months so if there are folks that want to come on board and be validators or participate in any of the many roles in althea there's like an opportunity here over the next several months to you know to to join that community and help those networks grow where does the decision come to move from gnosis chain to a cosmos sdk chain because i guess if you did it on on xdi

previously and notices chain now it's it's solidity smart contracts i'm assuming that like allows you to use this so to make a whole new chain yeah i'm just curious why why the shift well we are i haven't checked in a while but we were like over 71 or 72 percent of the microtransaction traffic of xa already we are on a platform that is not going to be able to scale with our enormous growth that we're projecting over the coming year we have several large urban areas that are coming on board um and so really it's just a matter of this this chain not being able to scale to um to wealthiest you know needs as a worldwide service provider for telecom so evm base chains

are designed as financial blockchains so the person who pays the highest fee should be the one who gets in first and this is not appropriate for a telecom platform where we want predictability above all else so we don't have the sort of low level control over gnosis chain or any evm chain that's required to guarantee that you know hey it doesn't matter what happens how much load there is you know when everybody starts streaming the super bowl this thing's going to stay up everything will work correctly everybody will remain in consensus and there will be not a stutter a glitch or any sort of problem so we need that low level control and that sort of sovereign chain

to achieve that okay um you know so we've worked a long time and very hard to develop and stabilize this software and get it to the point where it's extremely reliable and can run across you know hundreds or thousands of different routers remain in consensus do things that even traditional networking software provided by very large organizations you know can't compete on but now the limit to our reliability is the blockchain platform we're on you know we can't make gnosis uh chain work better for our needs and that doesn't mean that it's not working great for their needs um but you know that's what we mean when we say as we scale up uh we need to move to the althea blockchain so that we have

sort of the reliability and also to expand into other applications in the telecom space that will better help people you know construct infrastructure maintain infrastructure et cetera will you be building this althea chain as an evm compatible one so you could just migrate the contracts over or are you like is it built for this use case with things like i'm just kind of curious how what you've built today can actually live on this new chain so althea actually developed the first sort of native rust client for cosmos sdk chains which we have dramatically updated for use in gravity bridge and now that same code is going to go on to

our routers and allow them to talk to the chain because it's actually micro payments rather than the need for any specific sort of evm contract so this is relatively easier to port but we have always been focused on keeping our technology you know compact simple and swappable so we're going to swap from sending native evm transactions to native cosmos sdk transactions as a bit of a detour you know we had to write our own ethereum encoding library as well oh and the reason for that was because these the processors and the routers were actually not supported by anything that encoded ethereum transactions when

we first started development so we had to actually write the software to encode the ethereum transactions ourselves so we're sort of sort of familiar due to our requirements you know they're very strange you know these little boxes out in the middle of nowhere being rebooted overheating stuck in a cabinet um terrible network connections um doing weird things all the time uh existing tooling doesn't often work for us so we're sort of used to having to build things from the ground up just to follow onto justin's thought i mean it has been very a fascinating and rewarding journey to like uh work with blockchain which is such a new and evolving ecosystem into the you know day-to-day lives of like like i said whether it's a fire station

or we're in a mosque in nigeria or you know just you know people's houses in the country or in urban environment where they're you know we're looking at you know three four hundred megabits per second and um and all of that sort of day-to-day demanding 99.9 uptime it's just it's really led to i think a very hard system a very practical system and to justin's point also you know that's why we focus on that simplicity and i mean literally testing and prod cool i want to move on now to or very soon to the gravity bridge and bridges in general but i just had one last question for althea as a concept like is there ever a use case for

situations in like conflict zones obviously right now like a lot of people are thinking about technology for that kind of environment or is is this sort of it would be kind of complicated to lay the foundations like the what the fiber needs to be there it needs to be accessible or yeah is that even something that's that's been thought about in this project yeah so a lot of the reasons why we do this are to protect the core freedoms of the internet and we think that the the best way to do that is with decentralized ownership right and a distributed type of network i think a lot of our later work that we've been working on with an lte core embedded into the router also empowered some very interesting sort of

you know agile dynamics as well where you could literally have like a small cell anywhere right and those sim cards can then be you know activated to be on that network and deployed in a really rapid way so i think there are difficulties with communications without having some of those foundations you know laid beforehand right you know everything is all communications are going to come back to an ix or data center at some point but i think we're evolving to get to that point and i think there's a lot of sort of you know agileness um and resiliency that comes with decentralized ownership so let's now jump into the gravity bridge i actually have over the next few months this plan to invite a number of bridge

teams on i think you are the first of this not official series but somewhat series um and i think it's good for us to explore and maybe redefine for our listeners what bridging is exactly what it looks like maybe what's out there i mean maybe some of the techniques so before we go into specifically the gravity bridge let's do sort of a high level on bridges and then we can look at the bridge that you guys built so let's talk about bridges what do you think people need to understand to understand a bridge what are the concepts that might help our listeners like get into this topic so across blockchain bridge is an application that locks up an asset on one side and

mints a like representation so it's sort of a synthetic representation of that asset on the other side so presumably both sides are programmable blockchains but then it's not necessarily required to achieve the locking and unlocking that we're talking about here so the key thing to understand about cross-chain bridges is that there are a couple of key questions when you're thinking about bridges and that is who holds the locked assets on one side or the other side how do you know that you can trust them what happens if they were to defects from the protocol and do something that they are not allowed to do and what guarantees do you have that the code you are seeing will stay

the same and these are really the key sort of questions around bridges and bridge security because i will highlight this again and again when you bridge ethereum when you bridge some other asset you are not receiving the same thing on the other side it's a synthetic token that represents the locked token that was locked on the native chain the native chain being the blockchain where the asset originated so from here let's move on to the sort of the designs of bridges there are various kinds of bridges depending on the constraints between the chains for example you can have a light climbing bridge

where the bridge interprets the actual consensus state from the other blockchain and takes actions based on that interpreted consensus state this is the most secure type of bridge but for example you can't use it with ethereum because ethereum is still proof of work and the lack of finality means that you can't actually be sure that any presented uh like chain header or in this case a block is the final version but ibc is a like client-based bridge so this is what happens when you have an idc channel is that it actually interprets the state of the other cosmos chain and it's updated and moved across and this provides a really high level of security but also

if they're difficult to develop and often quite specific obviously right now ivc only goes from cosmos blockchain to cosmos blockchain because it's difficult to implement and also somewhat difficult to work with because you have to find the right cryptographic information to present to the other side now there's also simple multi-sick bridges and this is actually the plurality of all bridges right now and these are bridges where you you really just have a multi-sig on like the ethereum side they're most common on ethereum once again because proof of work is a big constraint makes it hard to build a bridge that is extremely secure um hopefully and very hopefully

ethereum will have finality and proof of stake soon and we'll be able to solve some of these problems and provide you know much better guarantees so for a multi-sig bridge it's just 4 5 10 16 arbitrary number of people who hold the assets on the ethereum side and perform the actions of a bridge by minting assets on the other side and unlocking them on that side and gravity bridge being an ethereum to cosmos bridge is it kind of both are you doing like ibc on one side like client like it's a little bit complicated so okay gravity is sort of a hybrid design so we wanted to achieve the same

security as ibc but we wanted to do it on ethereum and i just said as long as ethereum's still proof of work this is extremely difficult so what we did is that we designed a very specific very lightweight sort of light client for the validator set on the cosmos side i guess yes for the validator set on the cosmos side so the validator set on the cosmos side is represented in the gravity bridge on ethereum and it executes a weighted vote of the validators based on their signatures so it essentially provides the same level of security that a traditional tendermint like client would in terms of operations unfortunately once again because of

proof of work it's not as provable as ibc otherwise if it was as provable as ibc we would have just implemented idc for ethereum and then when it comes to the other direction uh you know so we've just described how stuff gets moved from gravity bridge to ethereum now we have the other direction for ethereum to gravity bridge every gravity bridge validator runs a light client or a full node for the ethereum blockchain that they then use to observe the state of the ethereum blockchain and make claims about it so you'll notice this isn't a header proof they're not doing anything cryptograph well they are doing cryptographic operations but that's in the ethereum node

so this this let us really separate out the complexity and say well each validator they just look at the actual state of ethereum and then they say what they think well they say what they observe as the current state of ethereum so this is how gravity bridge provides the highest level of security currently possible with ethereum wow what you've just shared though you've shared from gravity bridge to ethereum from ethereum to gravity bridge but where does it connect to the hub or something else like does it have to then use ibc and i guess there's no multi-sig here right you're you're running an ethereum full node on gravity bridge in a way or like the validator running full nodes so they're

not they're not doing multi-sig that's the one thing i don't hear on your design so on the ethereum side it is looking at the full votes of the validator set okay so that means everybody is submitting signatures it's performing the like weighted vote calculation so this is much closer to a light client than a multi-sig because normally the the defining factor of a multi-sig is that it's not automatically rotated the defining factor of validator set is that it is automatically rotated got it um so the validator set on gravity bridge as it changes produces an update that is then brought over to ethereum that updates the validator set on ethereum and the validator set on ethereum is made it's in smart contracts i'm assuming yes

there's a smart contract okay so smart contracts have been deployed on the ethereum side are there two different validator sets or is it the same validators it's the same validators um now they can separate a little bit because we can't get a transaction into into ethereum instantaneously and in fact a lot of the complexity around the gravity bridge is how to optimize it so that we can have 200 validators in the gravity bridge contract and in fact um we spent a long time on performance optimizations for the gravity bridge ethereum contract that make it more efficient verifying the signatures and votes of a 200-member validator set than your average 10-member multi-sig and were there any tools like dow tools that

could help you here and i know it's sort of a different part of the stack but i'm just wondering like could you like for the voting did you have to fully develop that was that completely bespoke that is completely bespoke mostly so that we can integrate all of these optimizations for example we have storage optimizations that reduce the cost of cost of storing the entire validator set even as it grows very large we have signature checking optimizations that reduce the number of signatures we have to check uh and say hey you know um we're only going to check 66 of all signatures sorted from highest to lowest power uh because after that it doesn't matter right so you know you have all of these little optimizations and they build and um one

on top of the other to achieve a performance which is really pretty incredible um when compared to what you get out of like a normal multi-sig or even other bridges the work that you did on that side on the ethereum side is can it be used by other projects or other even like maybe other concepts or is it would it only be useful for bridge stuff or like working with a validator set kind of off the chain uh it would be useful for any application in which you wanted to mirror a proof of stake validator set on ethereum to keep gravity bridge simple and very robust we sort of reduced the design scope as much as possible made it compact easy to use easy to understand this has resulted in

cosmos sdk chains that use the use gravity bridge quickly becoming the most common type of ethereum bridge on ridge on cosmos there are obviously several different ethereum bridge implementations for cosmos at this point but a plurality of those are now gravity bridge based because of how simple and easily reusable it is interesting okay so i think we've explored the ethereum side and i sort of added i put the question in but then didn't pursue it so what happens on the cosmos side like right now all i know that is that you can bridge from ethereum to gravity bridge which also is gravity bridge a blockchain or is it a bridge uh it is it is a blockchain that runs the bridge okay different from althea so it's it's a sep it's not what we had

talked about earlier with like the althea moving to cosmos sdk this is a unique instantiation gravity bridge is its own chain okay so once you're on gravity bridge you can use ibc to get wherever you need to go so this is this is wherever else you need to go in the in the cosmos sdk ecosystem or the ibc ecosystem that's maybe the question is would you would you kind of do a hop so you basically like if you're moving tokens you're on one side interacting with ethereum smart contracts somehow locking those tokens and then they move over into the gravity bridge cosmos chain live there as a synthetic and then they'd go over ibc and be created on a new chain as a new synthetic

yes that is how you use gravity bridge and that's how many chains already are using gravity bridge right now so we are working on simplifying the process where you send a message on ethereum and the ibc tokens just show up on the destination chain okay and that will be out by the end of this month you kind of skipped that middle step i was gonna ask if you're supposed to do anything in the middle step like does does one have to manually push it through right now if they want to use it or yeah so right now um the existing bridge so the existing user interfaces for the bridge you know they open metamask and they say okay submit your ethereum transaction then they open kepler and they say okay submit your gravity bridge ivc transaction and then they're like

okay you're on destination chain let's say persistence um and you can do what you want to do there so we're sort of kicking out that middle step you'll just have to use metamask and you'll make it uh make it to the destination can i talk a little bit about why like some of the like the business reasons and kind of the way that we look at gravity bridges blockchain's usefulness sure is that okay go for it so um you know justin's just sort of described a bit of the technical you know too hot process that we're going to be obfuscating with a forwarding module that sort of seamlessly takes that transaction and then forwards along for ibc um so that the ux for the end user is very simple right it's just one click send to

one of the dexes or other blockchains i want to use it in cosmos um and i think that really speaks to you know this the idea of gravity bridge as this infrastructure layer right some plumbing it's an aqueduct or a sewer or something that's that's useful in the cosmos ecosystem to send transactions in a neutral way making front ends for gravity bridge is permissionless anyone can do that and we've actually written some really great documentation on that and sort of hope to move that into kind of like a gravity bridge api for anybody that wants to any any blockchain that wants to interact with the gravity bridge and have their users interact with an easy front end that they build

um and then on the other side it's just an ibc connection that anyone can you know any blockchain can connect to permissionlessly right so it's just this kind of plumbing you can connect up to use a front end of your design or one that already exists um and then you have this sort of forwarding module that just sort of sends it directly to your chain so you have somebody um like althea that wants to use it for stable coins or you have maybe something like a cost as well maybe you want to pay for you know decentralized compute um with uscc um and that's what gravity bridge makes possible in this kind of like infrastructure layer i have sort of a side question which is about the stable coins like right now i mean the use case the initial use case is this needing stable

coins on a cosmos based chain but why not have native cosmos staple coins like and i and i feel like that is happening somehow but yeah why was the decision taken to go from ethereum stable coin to a a cosmos chain so we can also get a little bit into also some really interesting things you can do with arbitrary logic and you know talking to the ethereum blockchain for you know different reasons that you might want to do as well but i also think that it speaks to the resiliency of being able to operate with ethereum right there's many different stable coins with many different sort of you know functions or more use on you know on a national scale on the ethereum side the on-ramps to

fiat are much more robust over there so we're not relying on a single use case um and i think also it speaks to sort of the neutrality and permissionlessness and why we think that's a resilient use case too right so if anybody can make a front-end and use anything on the ethereum system it's very resilient to having one stable coin or one coin or something have uh have problems then you can simply move to another one or one front end has a censorship attack then uh you can move to a different front uh and that's you know this is what you see in our design with althea it's just a really open interoperable neutral platform and it's the same with how we think about gravity bridge too got it in doing research for gravity

bridge another project called gravity decks comes up sometimes is there any relationship between these two or uh projects or is it just happening you happen to have a naming collision yeah well you know they kind of came about about the same time and um so they were both kind of tooling for the cosmos ecosystem that kind of took that gravity name so i think you know they they really speak to the alignment in the cosmos ecosystem with the gravity bridge blockchain we worked very closely with the inner chain foundation with informal systems who did the one of the audits and a lot of these key cosmos entities were part of shaping the design and the use cases for gravity right so adam

is one of the first blockchains that now connect to the gravity bridge so if you want to send atoms across the gravity bridge you can use them on the ethereum ecosystem um and indexes like you know uniswap or however you would want to use them in ethereum d5 right so this was also one of the main use cases as well so i think the gravity name just essentially sort of speaks to that alignment that we have in the cosmos ecosystem cool does sommelier for sucky's project somebody is there some connection there as well because i know he had mentioned that he had like been working with you guys at some point but are they using the gravity bridge are they using like a variation of it or how does that work yeah so we we worked together with wasaki in the early part of that project

specifically on there on their gravity bridge module and i'm going to let justin kind of talk a little bit about what some of the cool things that you know gravity bridge as the bespoke module can do on the ethereum ecosystem which i think is kind of neat but uh but yeah we've long supported many of these sort of uh you know forks or bespoke instances of gravity that these different blockchains are using just in in really specific types of ways right yeah so i think the best way to do this explanation is for me to break out like a genealogy tree of graphic bridge forks um because the fundamental design of gravity was focused on simplicity and there are a lot of different different cosmos sdk chains that want a bridge

that does exactly what they need and of course they pick up gravity because it's by far the easiest to use and understand and integrate but you know they have their own things that they want to do so they start to make some tweaks so at this point we have i think three or four different chains that are using forks of gravity bridge so they have taken like they have branched off at some point in the past have passed in that genealogy tree and then we have i think it's two or three that are using the gravity bridge module directly you know so they work directly on the current code base that the gravity bridge blockchain is using and this sort of speaks to our integration with the larger cosmos ecosystem that we are trying to make something that is generally useful and is

overall something that the entire cosmos ecosystem can get behind not just the instance you know like the one use case of gravity bridge chain but everybody who needs to access ethereum can and if they want to do something custom if they want to do something where maybe you know like sommelier is reaching over to ethereum to interact with lp positions there so they want to use gravity bridge as less of a bridge and more as a way to run stuff on ethereum and that's great that's something that we support and that's something that we can share code back and forth so together all of these different forks of gravity bridge uh contribute to each other you know we all look at each other's ideas and say like oh this is a good idea um and often

we'll be working on the same problems and we'll come up and we'll say like okay this solution works for everybody let's let's do it that way i think what's exciting now is that we do have the gravity bridge blockchain out that for chains that that don't want something specific or the you know the lift of running a bridge module along with our blockchain is is you know not their core use case so that's why gravity bridge you know um blockchain is really important to maintain you know that kind of like neutral infrastructure that any chain could connect to and just now justin you kind of alluded to this idea of like having these different use cases i actually wanted to ask you about like the type of bridge in a way like so far the examples we used was very much

tokens bridging over but i know that there's also like the messages bridging over like is that sort of that use case you defined there it was more like sending messages over it instead of tokens is messages also a part of the current gravity bridge or is it really focused on token transfer gravity bridge right now is really focused on token transfers and soon nft transfers um the stargaze team is team is contributing ft support and we're hoping that'll be done by the end of the summer but yeah so gravity bridge is not a generic message passing system and this comes back to you know trade-offs you can have something that is you know fast cheaper good is you know the classic example and

what gravity bridge focuses on is being really really good at moving tokens across providing a high level of security there moving other assets then if these are not so different than tokens and doing this in a highly efficient way generic message passing is a different problem and it's a much harder problem if you want to achieve the level of decentralization and security that we can provide with gravity bridge so this is this is sort of because we're on one end of that trade space we get a lot of other users of gravity which are like oh i see how we can add just our feature on top of this pretty easily but by the time you say we want to be able to want this bridge to be able to do anything the burden of operating it and developing it

goes up and up and up and up and eventually it becomes impractical to reuse because the burden of running the branch just increases and increases and increases and then eventually nobody but your project will be interested in using it are there right now other bridges that you know of or you know the bridge community i doubt is massive i feel like you probably know the other bridges out there on cosmos but are there bridges that are doing that that are not gravity bridge based that you know of the do-more message stuff i think nomad is working on generic message passing or has a layer that involves generic message passing that they then build a bridge on top of do you know if axillar is too or

yes so xlr i i don't think xlr is doing very generic messaging i think they're mostly focused on transfers and they have some sort of messaging uh but in my like quick review of their white paper you know they can't you know uh hashtag with this defining cross chain messaging is being able to send an arbitrary event uh from chain a and receive it on chain b that's not a capability xlr has right now to my knowledge okay how do you view other kind of bridge projects like is this a competitive space or is this a collaborative space in a way like would you almost envision dapps using one bridge for one hop

another bridge for another i'm just curious if you're like what your feelings are about the other bridge projects i have a lens here um that that does probably look like there's going to be some arbitrage between different bridge tokens um they aren't you know functional between each other at this point you know i think early on in you know gravity bridges history they there wasn't any other sort of like bridging projects it was very new and so we sort of looked at like you know perhaps a bit of a standardization because you know gravity is so aligned with cosmos um you know we we were we were building that bridge that was going to be the kind of neutral or the infrastructure but now i think also there you know a multi-bridge future is where we're at

you know these bridges are you know are here for many different ecosystems um and i think that it's going to be an evolving discussion about now what do we do about you know ten different usdc representations and cosmetics um yeah i think that that conversation is here and that i i don't think that's an avoidable conversation um so you know there's a lot of different discussion around you know how that you know should be presented in ux or perhaps that should be you know uh you know soft or aggregated or you know there's a lot of different things that are going to evolve i would caution us from making you know too quick of a you know any kind of permanence around it at this

point because i do think it's going to evolve and i do think it's going to evolve quickly so i'm really excited to sort of embrace um you know this this new multi-bridge future yeah and what it could bring and um you know we're going to be very agile and adapt to to that kind of evolving landscape got it that problem of multiple kind of synthetic versions from like what like basically the idea here is like if you had from ethereum to i don't know some decks some cosmos decks huh like chain you could potentially end up with like multiple versions of usdc from different bridges and i i haven't fully explored this problem

i know true mentioned on a previous episode and i was trying to actually like quote it the other day and like couldn't fully articulate the problem it sounds bad it sounds like it would lead to problems but i don't actually know how i think it could also lead to opportunities right like as i was saying there's there's a there's conversations about particular you know like arbitrage or swapping between the tokens or perhaps aggregating them and then into another token i i think i like i said i think that it's an important basket interesting yeah i think it's an involving landscape i think there's also a bit there's market opportunity there there's also the ux of that right um that we need to balance um my thought is that the market will

you know evolve these discussions for us right you know having where where volume aggregates too is an important kind of part of that as well too so we can talk about it a lot but we should also i think be responsive to this evolving market what are users going to do right what where do users want to do this and and i think you know um always that's typically how we tend to look at businesses around traction and users and letting the kind of market evolve the product market fit got it and i think this is a topic for me also for future episodes to fully like flesh out so look for that but it's cool to hear your your kind of perspective on it i want to move on to another topic which is that of

airdrops in cosmos and particularly the gravity decks airdrop right now we're in a moment where there's tons of projects dropping tokens some of them you know some of them you've never heard of until that week i think there's cosmos airdrops is a twitter it has like a twitter handle that like i know my team has looked at a couple times so let's let's go into that topic yeah and i think um you know i kind of want to come back to where we were talking about earlier in the conversation about you know gravity bridge being this plumbing and infrastructure you know aqueducts or sewers or these these um you know kind of long projects and how we look at what the project needs to be healthy

right it needs stability it needs to just work it um you need to not think about it really like how often do you think about how your water gets to your home right and so when we think about what an airdrop mechanism is for and you know how we want to use those to support the community and support community involvement we took a very long-term approach we thought gravity's going to be around for a long time it needs to be around for a long time um and we want to use long-term air drops right so we looked at the airdrop that we did as sort of the initial sort of alignment we also airdrop to the osmosis ecosystem their community pool there's also a nine percent allocation to different core entities in cosmos that's icf and

tendermint peggy jv these folks have sort of you know anchored it in the community and then you know airdrops don't have to just be a once and done um that was sort of surprising to me that that was the uh you know kind of constraint that was always thought about oh you're you did your airdrop and now it that's the only thing that's ever gonna happen and that was a really i think kind of like surprising uh part of it but the way that you know at least from from our perspective of course the gravity bridge community will continue to evolve this is that it that evolving it over time with use and traction having you know um continuing incentives we have 50 of the or roughly 50 of the community

pool there for just these kinds of things to give incentives and rewards to folks that are using the bridge and those that are building on it um over probably years it's interesting i think you just touched on something here which is like i mean airdrops started the purpose of them was kind of to get engagement for these projects but i do think right now because there's these airdrops happening often it's almost like people are just kind of like chasing the biggest one and they want the best free money and that makes them excited and it's like as i could see on twitter there was almost like a cr there's criticism of the airdrop not being big enough or not being enough or something but yeah you're one thing you're saying here is

that it doesn't need to be a single shot there could be multiple maybe you want to hold it out because yeah when you when you do your community allocation all at once who's to say half of it doesn't get dumped in the wrong way into the wrong hands right afterwards you know like maybe you do want to slowly roll something like this out yeah and i think what you see with airdrops in the in the past is that their users are known right like they they might you know know these are our side of users we can airdrop to them these are the stakeholders that we that we know we have um but with gravity bridge um you know we're going to have users over several years right and you know the the bridge is just now starting to you know function people can use it

right so it makes more sense as people use it that you know you have rewards and you give stakeholdership to those people that are using the bridge every day and those people that are continuing to build on the bridge every day rather than you know just this still kind of yet you know known user base so i i think yeah i'm excited about how we can evolve and actually can i share we are introducing our gravity grants program which has some really amazing structure around you know how we think about you know small working groups and governance around those processes and i'm really excited to see how we can evolve that over time and we wanted to make sure that there is you know an

ample amount of community pool to continue those efforts was there any sort of distribution back to althea like to connect those two things is there a connection in that like that's something i'm curious about yes there was um both to the team and the early monetary supporters of althea as is you know fair for the years that went into building this project if you actually look at our distribution um it kind of aligns with the you know contribution effort right so althea came in with the kind of largest allocation of resources in terms of time and and uh and money and um you know then we had you know the peggy jv team that also

came in um with with those sorts of same things as well and then the icf gave a grant there never was any sort of community pool spent or anything like that there's some misinformation that there was you know community pool allocation which that that did not happen so that's if you look at kind of the genesis allocation it kind of follows those resources that were allocated and again i want to iterate it was over several years so we started working i mean gosh when was the first test that was in 2020 i think that was the first test now we've been working you know uh even before that too so um it just sort of follows the you know the alignment of builders that sounds cool so i wanted to go back and talk a little bit about the airdrop in that in the design of gravity bridge

we've been really committed to decentralization of all the bridges from ethereum to the cosmos ecosystem we're the only one without an upgradeable solidity contract so that means that full control of the bridge is in the hands of the validators there is no upgrade there's no outs we were we made sure to get it right before deploying it and we've also done something that's fairly novel in terms of the airdrop you know most airdrops are built into the chain by the developers we didn't do that instead we made a governance proposal type where anybody can submit an airdrop and it will execute if that proposal passes and this gives the community direct control so most of the time when you hear there's

funds in the community pool that's a hypothetical thing you know the only proposal you can submit on most cosmos sdk chains is a community spin proposal which goes to one address so that's for funding more developers which is a nice use case but that's not really something that you're that your average user of the chain can participate in and also most airdrops are you know heavily controlled who who is the airdrop going to what amount exactly what amount to which user that's something that really only developers have the ability to execute that's not true on gravity bridge with the airdrop proposal it is possible for any community member to submit a proposal and for governance to pass it and this comes from our deep commitment to decentralization and sort of long-term thinking you know we don't want gravity

bridge to be dependent on any one development team we want it to live independently and for its governance choices to really matter and this aligns with what we do with althea we're building infrastructure for people an infrastructure that's supposed to last you know if you're building good infrastructure it can't fall apart when you leave or you haven't done your job yeah i mean there are a lot of those air drops that seem also very short-sighted they sort of seem like gambling kind of stuff so i mean it's nice to hear that there's like thought and long-termness in your thinking around around this airdrop and getting the community involved just to highlight justin's point with the airdrop proposal that was proposed the initial one it was done

with community members you know validators and core gravity community members working alongside core cosmos entities to sort of think about what would be the best initial air drop distribution so there was a lot of thought and you know community member engagement that went into that this wasn't a top-down directed engagement cool and it sounds like there's more to come maybe we can talk about that we don't have very much time left but i want to hear a little bit about those next steps i had heard something about nfts and stargaze what's what's going on what's coming next uh for the timeline for gravity bridge we're going to have um ibc auto forwarding which is where you

sort of get to skip the intermediate step and go directly to your destination chain that's going to be up by the end of this month we are also working very closely with stargaze who has contributed a lot of development power to implement nft support for gravity bridge and we're hoping to have that up by the end of the summer we are also working on support for multiple evm chains so this would be uh this would allow gravity bridge to communicate with any chain that implements the evm that was going to be a question actually yeah we've only talked about ethereum whoops okay cool so you know we really focus on getting the decentralization of the bridge right first you know so that

means you have to get the solidity contract completely right because there's no great ability you get one shot so we did that but now we have this really wonderful ethereum contract why not use it more so that is coming i'm hoping that we have test nets for that also by the end of the summer so let's see but what about althea do you go back because like what about so so far it's all gravity bridge timeline but althea are you building this at the same time yeah okay i filled two things at once but like will what is althea also going to be coming the cosmos portion is that coming online soon we gravity bridge has now integrated some really awesome projects like calm

desk and um nim and um gosh there's there's just a bunch of them right so stargaze also too has their uh their denomination over to ethereum um chihuahua chain so a bunch of different great projects so atheia is just one project's gonna implement into gravity bridge too so got it if the cosmos basalt althea when will that happen or be live or maybe it already is very soon so we're working on that roadmap right now um uh and like like i said earlier in the conversation we want to encourage folks to um join our discord and if they want to be part of the validator set now is the time to jump on because we will be running up you know some early test nets and then going straight to the althea blockchain itself so it's

definitely just around the corner very cool i feel like you just mentioned nim really quickly and i realized we didn't even talk about privacy on the zero knowledge podcast and i'm sorry i didn't get a chance to get to it in this one but um i do want to say a big thank you to both of you for coming on sharing with me the story of althea gravity bridge and what's coming up in the future thanks so much for having us it was great yeah thank you i want to say thank you to the podcast producer tanya the podcast editor henrik and to our listeners thanks for listening you