Introducing Gravity Protocol
Introducing Gravity, the new TRULY decentralized cross-chain, oracle network.
This week sees the Waves ecosystem launch the much-anticipated Gravity Whitepaper, the concept for a new open-source, altruistic, blockchain-agnostic protocol for communication between blockchains, and also with the outside world, which has the capacity to revolutionize the industry.
What differentiates Gravity from existing solutions?
Current projects in the space have been created to meet the demand for cross-chain communication, however these existing solutions have some drawbacks. The main one of these being that they are all built around a native utility token with a volatile price, therefore driven by an internal economy that has its own special properties, and, (in the true sense of the word) not entirely decentralized. The fact that they have also developed their own separate master blockchain with a new native token, rather than a true blockchain agnostic solution, also diverts their development focus to this.
In reality, these factors described above, mean these solutions do not deliver their promise of being a truly decentralized system. Gravity is unique in comparison to these, and offers an all encompassing decentralized network, mainly due to its lack of native token. Instead of creating a new tokenomics with a new token, like existing solutions, the Gravity network works with the economies of the native tokens of the public blockchains integrated into Gravity. It also combines all functionality — cross chain, data oracles and sidechains into a single integrated structure.
Additionally, unlike other existing oracle networks, the Gravity network can be viewed as a single self-governing decentralized oracle with free entry for new members, instead of a framework to create centralized oracles or a marketplace with a partnership of oracles without free entry.
For this reason, Gravity ensures true parity between all public blockchains integrated in the network and does not discriminate between different blockchains in terms of functionality or implementation, therefore rendering it the most truly decentralised cross-chain oracle network that exists to date.
What does Gravity mean for the future of blockchain technology?
Gravity is driven by the concept of oracle consensus and its implementation in the protocol called Pulse Consensus algorithm. The proposed design of consensus allows Gravity to be considered a singular decentralized blockchain-agnostic oracle. Creating this unified decentralized oracle is a common global challenge for all of the public blockchain ecosystems to ensure their symbiosis and prosperity.
The Gravity Protocol is the first attempt at solving this industry-wide challenge. By establishing a solid foundation for the creation of gateways and cross-chain applications, it provides a solution to scalability challenges through the mechanism of sidechains. As the blockchain network grows on a daily basis, as does the number of users, the issue of scalability has been a long standing reason for limitations in expansion and adoption. Enter Gravity.
Gravity addresses the interoperability issue the industry is facing, which is another factor in why mass adoption is further delayed. Currently, developers and organizations are restricted by having to select one specific technology or protocol to use as the foundation for building their new products. As a consequence of this choice, the limitations are lack of access of their applications to the user base of all other protocols and taking advantage of some of their benefits in order to produce a well rounded and efficient product. All these factors make the ecosystem as a whole very fragmented and economically inefficient.
Another key mechanism to note, and enables expansion of the blockchain ecosystem is that Gravity is open for new members to join, and its internal governance mechanics ensures protection from attacks and other malicious actions, as well as allowing it to remain flexible and regularly updated to adapt to the variability of technology and the market.
How will individual users benefit from Gravity?
At the core of the protocol, delivering data to decentralized dapps can hugely benefit dapp developers that need to receive permissioned data from a private blockchain and use it on a public one. As a result we will see much-needed progress in the world of decentralized applications.
From an economic viewpoint, incentives for the public Gravity network participants depend on the respective economies of the interconnected blockchains. There is no volatile native token driving it, unlike existing solutions which are driven by their currency, therefore providing more financial risk when using those options. Eliminating this allows for a much smoother system that can help forward the goal of open finance.
The team behind the project explain their motives behind creating Gravity, “Our vision has always been to create a protocol that solves existing pain points in the blockchain space, allowing developers to expand their horizons by leveraging the power of multiple ecosystems at once. Gravity does just this, allowing people to interoperate as well as addressing scalability issues developers are facing.”
For more information you can read the Gravity Whitepaper, visit the Gravity website, join the community on Twitter or Telegram or contact press@gravity.tech.
