Announcing the Cosmos Gravity Bridge

• We're announcing Gravity, an Ethereum-Cosmos bridge designed for the Cosmos Hub
• Gravity is an evolution of Althea Peggy,  leaving the 'pegzone' concept behind
• Backed by billions of dollars of Atoms staked on the Cosmos Hub, the Gravity Bridge will be the most secure, efficient, and decentralized cross chain bridge to Ethereum

We're proud to announce the Ethereum-Cosmos bridge, Gravity, which we will to bring to the Cosmos Hub with a governance proposal later this year. Gravity is an evolution of the Peggy bridge, which we have been working on together with the Interchain Foundation for much of the past year. Gravity is designed specifically for the Cosmos Hub. Gravity is intended to pull as many transactions and as much value as possible into the orbit of the Hub by bridging it directly to Ethereum.

Gravity is engineered to be exactly as secure as the Cosmos Hub. That is, if you trust the Hub to secure your bridged assets, you can trust Gravity to bridge them. We are working with Informal Systems to prove that this is the case. Since the Hub is backed by billions of dollars of staked Atoms, Gravity will be very secure. Once our governance proposal passes, and Gravity is installed on the Hub, Cosmos Hub validators will directly participate in the operation of the Gravity bridge. Since the Hub is backed by billions of dollars of stake, Gravity will be the most secure bridge to Ethereum in production.

Gravity is also engineered to be very efficient. The Ethereum contract is highly optimized to use as little gas as possible, and transactions are batched. This results in very cheap and frictionless transactions from Ethereum to Cosmos and back. We believe that this is important to pull as much value onto Cosmos as possible.

Gravity will be able to bring ERC20 assets from Ethereum into Cosmos, but it will also be able to bring Cosmos assets to Ethereum. $ATOM and every other asset in Cosmos ecosystem will trade on Uniswap and other Ethereum AMMs, bringing a huge amount of liquidity and value to these assets.

At Althea, efficient and secure Ethereum to Cosmos transactions are very important because it is how our users around the world pay for their internet bandwidth. We've worked very closely with the Interchain Foundation to get to this point. We've already run two testnets, and are looking forward to hosting an incentivized testnet in late Q1 2021. There will be prizes available for validators, relayers, and hackers.

Althea will be shepherding Gravity through the testing, audit, and implementation process on the Hub. We are committed to playing a long-term roll upgrading, documenting and supporting Gravity over the coming years.

If you're interested in participating in the testnet as a validator, relayer, or hacker, get in touch at gravity@althea.net, or view the source code at github.com/cosmos/gravity-bridge.