Why join Gravity Development?
Since the Gravity protocol was announced in late 2019, several teams have been actively working on it. In this article, I’ll explain why you should join this process and how to do it.
Gravity attracts
Gravity is a cross-chain communication protocol or interoperability protocol without a native token. Overall, a native token captures both functionality and economical importance of a blockchain ecosystem. In a way, it even centralizes the financial underwriting/staking/ecosystem collateral for oracles, etc. But financial incentives of an entire ecosystem obviously want to see it grow, so #token-go-up.
However, with all our usual tribalism and monopoly games, in the future, there’s no guarantee for interoperability, as an independent and agnostic function to succeed. Therefore, Gravity’s solution is to have no native token. Gravity enables connection to any chain, functionality, or userbase. And this protocol has a number of advantages and attractive concepts about which you can read in the white paper.
People from the blockchain space would specifically appreciate:
- The absence of a separate token for the Gravity network
- A reputation mechanism for reaching consensus
- A blockchain-agnostic approach.
If you are a developer of any blockchain protocol or decentralized apps or just want to dig deeper into blockchain technologies, Gravity has even more to offer to you. Let’s look at it in more detail.
For all developers
Building an architecture for a complex product
The Gravity protocol offers developers several interesting challenges, such as the implementation of a BFT-like consensus and execution of a system for reputation and network node evaluation. The future success of an entire concept largely depends on a correct node architecture, which prompts developer teams to make the right choices. For instance, they go for a network interaction protocol between libp2p and Waves binary protocol and decide on how to implement a BFT-like consensus: whether to use the best available products, such as Tendermint etc.
You can join the conversation and share your experience, learn more about strengths and weaknesses of various solutions or offer alternatives.
Learning about protocols
There are two best ways to learn about how various blockchain protocols work:
- Writing code for explorers and blockchain wallets
- Writing code for Gravity integration
Gravity is a truly blockchain-agnostic solution open for integration of various blockchain platforms. Therefore, if you have long wanted to figure out how a specific blockchain works, the implementation of Gravity integration would be a perfect first issue.
Start a protocol’s integration with Gravity by creating an issue on Gravity GitHub and explaining what protocol and why you’d like to integrate. Developers will help you better understand what is necessary for Gravity operation and what the best way to organize the process is.
A reason to Go
As developers, we often want to master a new programming language, and Gravity could become the first major project on Go, in which you’ve taken part or made sense of a codebase.
Joining a major project at an early stage and observing its entire development process, while getting immersed into the language and infrastructure, is much easier than later trying to make sense of hundreds of thousands of code.
Subscribe to Gravity repositories to receive notifications of commits and gradually learn the Go language and the Gravity product.
For protocol developers
If you develop a blockchain protocol, it’s absolutely necessary for you to participate in Gravity development. As noted above, Gravity is a blockchain-agnostic solution and any blockchain can be connected to Gravity to enjoy its advantages, such as:
- Resolving the oracle issue and obtaining real-world data
- Enabling users to transfer funds to your network with decentralized gateways
- Obtaining data from other blockchains.
Several teams are already working on the implementation of the Gravity core, but if you are a developer of a blockchain protocol and intend to use it in the future, you’re the best authority on what pitfalls and potential issues are likely to be involved in its integration.
Already now, at an active Gravity core development stage, you can follow the project on Discord and Telegram and join discussions on the chat to make the integration of your protocol easier at a later stage.
For decentralized app developers
If you develop decentralized apps, Gravity will provide you with excellent opportunities for building apps not just for a single blockchain, but for several networks. Imagine that you’ll be able to call an Ethereum smart contract from your dApp and get a response directly to your contract without a central authority. Gravity makes it possible!
You can already start thinking about possible interaction cases for your products and the best ways to achieve them. To see how the protocol works, check out the Gravity white paper and watch the first Gravity demos. If you have questions, join discussions on Github, Discord, and Telegram.
