Gravity Community Call with Alpha Growth!

Recorded: July 28, 2023 Duration: 0:27:07

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Good morning Joe. Gonna get some of the announcements out about today this morning and I figure we will kind of keep it to
about 15-20 minutes, kind of give folks a look at how everything is going on. And maybe share a little bit about the upcoming larger spaces. Perfect. Sounds good.
Hey Brian, nice to see you. Just kind of letting folks trickle in here. I think we also just have Justin joining us today. So one moment please.
All right, as people kind of trickle in here, we'll go ahead and kick us off with a kind of a brief introduction on this community call today. Behind the scenes, I am Deborah Sampir. I am the CEO of Hawk Networks and co-founder of Altia and we support Gravity Bridge with the development
and some other things as well and have been doing so since it before it launched back in 2021. So gravity's been here and back for quite some time now just just bridging as they say and bringing the community together and
community lab project that that's that's the steering of gravity bridge and and makes the makes all the decisions. So today we're planning a short kind of community call here just some updates on where things are at and we're also joined with the Alpha Growth team
I think who are going to share a few of developments for them as well and maybe kind of share what's kind of upcoming as well. So Brian, Joe, if you want to say hi, tell us a little bit about who Alpha Growth is and then we can kind of kick into announcements.
Go for it, Joe. Yeah, yeah. Thanks for having us on here. We're the Alpha Growth team. We'd like to think of ourselves as just pretty super power BD crypto team. We do it all, but we're super excited about the Gravity Narrative.
And we're very well connected with lots of different L1s, L2s, and we like to see gravity exist everywhere. And so we're working together on kind of seeing how we can push that forward and get everything going.
We've got a couple conversations already with Archway, with Phantom, with Lido, and there's many more to come. We're going to be posting out the proposal on chain for what the engagement is hopefully going to look like.
And then also we're pleased to share a video today that we're going to be posted into the community to just kind of give an idea of why we're so, you know, why we're so interested in this narrative and why we're so excited about gravity. So thanks again for having us Deborah.
Yeah, super excited to have y'all here and just having those discussions with some of the other teams, building things in which you need bridges. One of the things that gravity is really struggle with is just awareness that we're here. It turns out infrastructure is kind of boring, so glad to have the AlphaGrow folks
making it seem a little more exciting and talking to folks about the appeal of boringness and infrastructure. Brian, please go ahead. Yeah, I think exactly the right point is infrastructure, you don't really care about until a bridge collapses on you and all your funds are gone.
It's like security. If you don't hear about your infrastructure, it's doing a really, really good job behind the scenes. That's one of the main reasons that we reached out and started looking at different options within this space. We're tracking about 240 chains by the end of the year are going to be launched in the blockchain crypto ecosystem.
So with those different 240 different chains, there's a huge opportunity not to make the same mistakes. Like the number one hack, the number amount of funds lost in hacks were bridge attacks over the last two years. And it quates into hundreds of millions of not billions of dollars. And most recently, you know, we've been in touch with Phantom to help them get some
projects, but now we're in touch with them to talk about the gravity bridge because they've been tremendously affected by the multi chain fiasco. So unfortunately, it does take big catastrophes and collapses, but imagine if gravity was implemented with harmony, right?
would have happened then the Harmony Bridge wouldn't have collapsed. Maybe that would be the gaming chain that everybody was on. So having good infrastructure and making sure that things don't collapse and the trains leave on time and your funds end up when the wallets that were you sent them to and you can count on that and trust that is something that we were really excited to partner with you guys on
Yeah, absolutely. And Justin, I see if you're hoping maybe you'd be able to join us and speak a little bit about the centralized relayer design. A lot of times what we're seeing with Bridges now for one of the security problems sort of something you don't think about, right? Just sort of having that one
single point of failure being a relay or that's basically company run. Many projects don't think about that. You think about the bridging, you think about how decentralized it is, but oftentimes, and we saw this of course with multi-chain 2, you really basically have a company or corporate run
bridge and it may not be immediately apparent. So I was hoping maybe Justin might be able to speak a little bit more about that. Well, Justin, if you get the speaker requests, please jump in there and maybe elaborate a little bit more technically on what we were saying there. And while we're waiting a bit for
that Brian Joe, I believe you have a Commonwealth proposal up as well for it. So if folks want to engage with you or they have questions or comments, where could they find y'all? Are you in discord or you in Commonwealth? Where should people engage in the conversation around sort of growth and of gravity
business development.
Yeah, and I think that's what's so super awesome about the community aspect of gravity, right? It's not just one team saying this is how everything's gonna go, but it's really the diversity of stakeholders and gravity, you know, sharing ideas and growing together. So super excited to have you all on board and Justin,
Yeah, it looks like you're speaking now. You want to show a little bit more about the relares. Yeah, so I mean this is more of a discussion about bridge design in general and the reality of the matter is that at least as far as I can tell right now, gravity brings
is the second most horked bridge protocol after IBC. And that's really because there are very, very small number of bridges that are completely open source with no closed source components or closed source levers. And that's a big transparency problem for the
in the blockchain community. There are a lot of bridges that claim to be decentralized but are less decentralized than they claim. Or, you know, don't make any representations for people who use them any way. And particularly one of the bigger issues around there is that even if the bigger issues around having centralized bridges is
that even if a bridge appears to be operating correctly, there's a lot of opportunity for what I'm calling BEV, bridge extractable value. And that is where a bridge with a centralized or controlled relayer can either rate limit or rearrange or decide when transactions are relayed.
way that it extracts value from the eBridges user base. And the scary part of this is that it can be very difficult to prove whether or not anything like this is going on because of how we'll pay the internal workings of many bridge
protocols are. And this is part of why we really need highly transparent bridge protocols for people to use because generally in DeFi, anywhere that lacks transparency is abused. And that's going to continue to be the role. I doubt that's different for bridge
for some reason. And this is something that we are very happy about with Gravity Bridge and really sort of the Gravity Bridge ethos is that there are no centralized levers, no team control, no components of the system that would fail,
are not incentivized. For example, mini bridges run at a loss on east gas. So that means that they are spending more money running their centralized relays than they are necessarily collecting in fees. Which brings up a really interesting question of why they are continuing to run the bridge anyways.
But gravity bridges decentralized related design doesn't have that problem. The bridge net collects revenue in all cases no matter what. And that's a good thing for decentralization and transparency because the way everything operates is actually transparent and open to it.
one to participate. So I think that's enough. I think that goes over sort of the basics of the reasoning like why gravity bridge and why it's a compelling proposal for a lot of chains to integrate gravity bridge. Because essentially if they're not
If they are not using an open bridge, they are very vulnerable and they are vulnerable in a way that they might not know they are being exploited for a long time or potentially ever. This is completely independent to the risk of rage hack. So for obviously, no bridge is completely
No software is completely secure, but transparency and simplicity are a fairly reliable way to make things more secure. And so far, what we have seen in the recent history of bridge hacks, which are then devastating and lost a lot of money, is that the
compromises were related to centralization or upgrades or you can say upgrades are centralization too. So you can say it's all related to centralization if you really want to be pedantic. But let's see, no mad pre-jump grade.
Axi and Finity, there were actually only four people running the bridge and three of them were on the same machine I think was that one. Multichain actually company running the bridge. I think wormhole was the only one that was actually technically impressive attack.
But even then, you could make the argument that the wormhole attack was due to excess complexity in the bridge design, you could make that same argument, know that. Which is something we've tried to avoid with gravity bridge, although once again, there are no guaranteees, but transparency is always helpful.
Yeah, I think those are really important insights that this idea of kind of BEV and understanding where the value capture is and the sustainability and all of that really goes into understanding the risks around it and a lot of it is just that educational depth and so that's what we appreciate.
and Joe of course joining us, helping more people understand exactly how bridges work. I appreciate your explanation to Justin. I think that the idea of BEV is really important to understanding the risk profiles.
this last five minutes just given a quick update on what's going on with some of the in process updates and things like that. Please feel free to jump in raise a hand. We'd love to have you come speak ask questions. That's a really great folks on this call here. Looks like we even have someone from hats.
finance. So please feel free to jump in or ask questions in Discord. We'll hopefully be able to have you come up and engage with the speakers here. So a couple exciting things that are on the horizon. The notional team is still working on the auction module. They posted
a medium article giving an up to you know where they're at looks like they're making good progress on that auction module. If you're curious about what that is, what that does is a community led initiative to handle some of the funds and the basically kind of auction off or sell the funds.
in the community pool. You can learn more about that in the commonwealth or discord. Please feel free to jump in there. So that's in progress. That's pretty exciting. The NFT bridging things are also very exciting. Hopefully we can have some folks from Empower and Stargaze on that have been working
working together to on some of the technical pieces. I just got a quick update from the block skate team this morning that they had. They're making good progress with the front end for NFT bridging as well. So that's an amazing value that's coming to the Cosmos ecosystem is
ICS 721 bridging from Ethereum. So essentially using the gravity bridge, you can send your ERC 721 NFTs across into Cosmos so you could then sell them on Stargaze or on Omnifix or whatever your favorite, you know, Cosmos.
NFT platform is. So that's pretty darn exciting and that's really been led by the Stargaze team along with Iris who also just completed the game of NFT. So super exciting stuff on that. And again, please feel free to jump into the discord. Hey, Deborah, you missed one feature which is bringing NFTs
originating on cosmos to appear. Yes, that is true. You can also go the other way with it as well. Interoperable NFTs for the win. So that's pretty darn exciting stuff. And I think there's still a little bit of work to be done integrating in with gravity bridge. So when we say soon, we're
probably not talking soon next week, but within the next probably quarter or so we should be able to start seeing these things appear. So that's pretty exciting. - Yeah, I just wanted to take a moment to talk about how we're dealing with the impacts to security on the flungable token bridge of integrating an NFT bridge.
because one thing we've always been really interested with gravity is maintaining simplicity in order to maintain security. And in order to do that, the NFT bridge is actually a completely isolated parallel module which copies several of the same concepts. But the point is that it's not going to interfere with the fungible token
It's not grafted onto the fungible token bridge. It's technically a second bridge that's running on the same chain. And it will have an independent separatitarian contract as well. And this will help us provide two bridges that maintain simplicity of design individually that are sort of operating out of the same space. They're really running on the same
I'm not sure if it's a good idea to say that the gravity bridge community chooses to support some sort of crowdfunded security audit, which is yet to be decided, but I would also like to see that before the module is launched.
Oh, good segue into hats. So hats finance past. It's a bug burning program that is that that you can sort of source different avenues for funding that right? You can you can actually donate your graph to this module. It's on the Ethereum side. So
Now, Grav is actually, maybe you can talk a little bit about this too, Justin, but you have an ERC-20 representation of Grav that's available right now as well. And that will integrate with the HATS protocol so people can, if they've got, you know, Grav they want to donate to.
the bug bounty program and that right now I believe we're just setting up the committees and getting some of the logistical parts of that but that should be up pretty soon as well. I don't know if you have any thoughts about the ERC 20 Grav token Justin? Yeah I mean so if you go and take a look at the
which just merged a gravity bridge integration thanks to Chandrassation. You can see that about a little bit less than half of gravity's total TBL is these representation of tokens on cosmos that are being moved to ethereum.
So, Gravity Bridge has its own representation of the of the Gravity Bridge Native State in Coconut on ETH. And this has been done to this has been deployed to really assist working with Hats Finance which already has an ETH compatible platform.
And it's also useful for many different sort of cosmos chains that want access to Ethereum. In fact, I think the vast majority of the chains that are using this feature right now are using it to access and integrate with centralized exchanges that would prefer to only support ERS in 20s.
So that's a little bit about the feature, a little bit about why it's being used. There's also opportunities to bootstrap liquidity for these Colesmo's tokens, including Grav on ETH. But so far, there hasn't been a huge amount of community movement on that. But I'd definitely be excited to see something like that.
exciting stuff. I'll go ahead Brian please. Yeah so we got you know once once we get going on this and and start to add the bridge to different chains. You know there's two parts here. One part is how do you how do you get the chain integrated and you know make the original narrative like what the cause was all about to basically bridging from
change a chain and connect an empty centralized it's secured. And that's right. And the second thing we'll probably get into later on as we bridge to more chains and get more chains integrated through business development is that we're going to work on some programs to help pull some liquidity of potentially if the community likes it and wants us
to do it. But we'll put out a proposal to help start to incentivize the pooling of liquidity. Right now, especially we're kind of in a bear market, maybe there's an inkling of getting out of the bear market right now, but liquidity has a premium. The dex is the solidly forks. They're willing to pay for liquidity. And so as we bridge to say, defend
We already have an existing partnership with equalizer over there that will pay for liquidity and incentivize liquidity to come. So I think that's a lot of good utility for the gravity token. Not only does it give exposure to, hey, here's a place to bridge, but all of the people that would be using the bridge, they're the people that are trying to
trading on things like equalizer and velodrome and these different solidly forks. These are the people that are the users. Bringing liquidity over, bringing those ERC 20 representations over will definitely raise awareness for gravity bridge in total. I think it just really drives back to
This protocol, this chain is really driving the original ethos of what Cosmos is about to do, which is securely bridged from chain to chain to chain and do it in a secure manner. I would say that our biggest challenge, and we've been talking to a couple of chains, like over the last week or two, is the education aspect.
So you have this kind of issue and this is the challenge that we're going to be solving over time is just unbelievable content on how it technically works, it securely works. Sometimes the purchasers at the different chains aren't the same individuals.
that are going to be able to understand those technical differences. We were talking to a chain and they weren't even aware that some of the chain bridges that they were going to go with were a multi-sake and they thought they were like what this can happen again. So it's getting that educational content out there. It's building a narrative. It's getting
getting the users involved that are saying they use the gravity bridge once, they use the gravity bridge twice. Hey, why is this the gravity bridge of run optimism? Why is this the gravity bridge of run arbitrum starting that discourse, starting that education? And I think it's just going to ramp up and really take off.
Well, exciting times and we look forward to working more with you all the community of course can get in touch with you and discord or in the commonwealth to engage with. And I think that basically brings us up to speed and
terms of recent events happening. Justin, Brian, Joe, in your last thoughts about what we should expect and we'll hope to have another community call here soon too. So I think, you know, Brian and Joe are planning to bring
have some exciting things coming up for the next community call. And so look for the scheduling on that here hopefully in the next few days. Yeah, I think it's going to be a crawl walk run. I mean, there's an entire go to market strategy that is needed to put the materials together.
video in the comments below we put together as an example to start to educate the purchasers on the other side of the people that we're going to integrate Gravity Bridge. And I think it's going to be an uphill battle at first to be quite honest. But as these
things go, they just start to compound. You get one new chain, you get the next new chain, and then all of a sudden it's just going to be a lot of inbound of processing. We're very excited. So, you know, low expectations at the beginning, we get two or three kind of connections going and I think it's just going to really start to snowball.
And it's really important that if you do have thoughts that you're welcome to share those, we invite you to be a part of our Discord child. It's a very open and friendly place. And so please do get involved either there on Discord.
or reach us to us on Twitter or however you want to plug in, there's no bar, you don't have to be necessarily technical or MMR of Cosmos or Theorem or anything like that. Everyone is welcome to participate and be a part of the gravity community.
And that's really what helps lead the way. And yeah, I'm excited for the next call coming up and some of these exciting things on the horizon. And I really appreciate everybody being here today. If there's any last words from Brian Justin and Joe.
No, all good. Appreciate everything. All right. Thanks so much, everyone, for being here today. Shorten sweet today. And we'll see you all next time. Thank you.

FAQ on Gravity Community Call with Alpha Growth! | Twitter Space Recording

Who is the CEO of Hawk Networks and co-founder of Altia?
Deborah Sampir
Which project does the Alpha Growth team support?
Gravity Bridge
What is the main struggle for Gravity Bridge?
Awareness
What is the main focus of the Alpha Growth team?
Pushing the adoption of Gravity Bridge
Which team did Alpha Growth have conversations with?
Archway, Phantom, Lido
What type of attacks have caused the most funds lost over the past two years?
Bridge attacks
How many chains are expected to be launched by the end of the year?
240
What is one of the main reasons behind the partnership with Gravity Bridge?
Avoiding bridge collapses and hacks
What is bev (bridge extractable value)?
When a bridge with a centralized or controlled relayer extracts value from its user base
What makes Gravity Bridge different from many other bridge protocols?
Transparency and lack of centralized levers