For those who’ve never heard of Graviton (GTON), can you tell us what the core mission of your project is? What problem(s) is Graviton trying to solve?
The main aim of Graviton (https://graviton.one/) is to create a universal liquidity incentivization solution for wrapped assets and provide a seamless cross-chain experience.
But what does it actually imply? Let us first examine the current state of DeFi.
Have you ever wondered what the main factor is that stifles further growth of DeFi? It so happens that in the DeFi space of today, most opportunities lie with Ethereum. It provides a vast range of DeFi solutions and has ample liquidity, albeit hindered by exorbitant gas fees and frequent network congestion. However, for the last year many alternative blockchain networks and ecosystems have shown remarkable progress and growth, such as BSC, Fantom, Polygon, Optimism and others. They are providing comparable or even superior services but more affordable in terms of transaction costs and faster in execution.
At one point, it became obvious to us that DeFi is not limited to Ethereum. If you look closely, you can observe the gradual shift towards new ecosystems: communities spread out attention onto new blockchains and the major DeFi products, the market leaders, originated from Ethereum, expand their services onto alternative networks as well (look at the examples of Uniswap and SushiSwap).
However, it’s noteworthy when it comes to volumes and liquidity on Uniswap, SushiSwap, and other similar projects on the new blockchains, these are usually way less than on Ethereum.
What is the reason for this? We believe that moving to an alternative network is hampered by complicated, multi-step user experience and insufficient initial liquidity of tokens wrapped in blockchains other than Ethereum, both for DeFi projects and their token holders.
Thus, a range of products and technical solutions that would allow kickstarting tokenized projects in other networks could be beneficial for the entire industry.
Graviton tackles the issue of industry fragmentation and is set to make DeFi truly borderless and easy-to-use. To do so, Graviton incentivizes liquidity providers to supply liquidity to wrapped assets (i.e. those ported from one blockchain to another) via rewards with its governance token GTON. Simply put, Graviton launches farms for LP rewards, generated by pools containing wrapped assets. As you may know, setting up a pool for a wrapped asset will just create a physical opportunity to operate with it on a destination blockchain but will not ensure its liquidity growth. So the guaranteed farming for the LP reward will incentivize people to supply assets to the pool, and if the AMM doesn’t provide sufficient passive income for the liquidity provision, Graviton will.
GTON itself is not only a reward and governance token. Acting as a token-in-the-middle and being used in all LP pools on a wide range of most popular AMM DEXes and chains, it serves as an intermediary in all cross-chain swaps, creating positive feedback loops across the entire Graviton ecosystem. This concept called “a relay token”, which was first proposed by Bancor three years ago and failed to find traction then, is being revived in Graviton during this new DeFi era.
We envision Graviton as a universal hub, or a one-stop shop, for all cross-chain DeFi needs, that would allow users to easily manage their assets across multiple chains. To achieve that, we are also creating a bridge aggregator — Megabridge, as we call it, that integrates multiple cross-chain bridges, such as Multichain.xyz, RenVM, SuSy, and possibly more.
One of the biggest obstacles with multiple blockchains is liquidity. How does Graviton plan on incentivizing users to farm?
Liquidity provision is at the core of Graviton and reflects its primary goal of incentivizing users to provide liquidity to wrapped tokens. Through the so-called Catalyst programs, Graviton focuses on the emerging and growing projects and their tokens, currently having liquidity only on one chain, such as Ethereum, Solana, BSC, Waves, or Fantom. Liquidity incentivization programs are limited in time (1–2 weeks) and aimed primarily at the initial bootstrapping of a project in its non-native chains. Liquidity providers will receive LP tokens that will be automatically included in their portfolios and could be sent to Graviton farming. Liquidity providers’ income in GTON will depend on the allocated GTON, amount of earned LP tokens, as well as the asset, the pool, the exchange and the blockchain in which the exchange operates.
Can you tell us about the beta version of your cross-chain bridge? What does it currently do and when does Graviton plan on releasing the full version?
Interchain DeFi’s expansion spawned a plethora of gateways and bridges, i.e. Bridges from Binance Smart Chain, the Wormhole bridge from Solana, or cross-chain swap-focused projects like multichain.xyz, RenVM, and Susy protocol. Bridges are a necessary component in multiple subsystems of Graviton. As a liquidity incentivizer for wrapped assets, Graviton needs to leverage one or a number of gateway solutions that can issue wrapped tokens in a target chain by locking tokens in an origin chain.
Graviton intends to incorporate the best existing bridge solutions in order to maintain abundant infrastructure for cross-chain farming. It is worth mentioning that the Graviton team directly contributes to the development of SuSy, providing quality assurance and deciding which chains and tokens should be integrated.
Currently, the cross-chain experience is very fragmented and can be difficult for users to navigate, can you tell us how Megabridge and Relay Swaps will make it easier for the user?
Imagine: a user owns some assets on Ethereum and wants to try Solana, which is currently all the hype. Several issues arise at once. To start utilising the Solana blockchain, you have to first obtain some native tokens to pay the network fees. Thus, the question becomes: how do you obtain SOL for making the first transaction?
It may look even more complicated and wasteful from the perspective of somebody who creates their own tokens. It is impossible to start instantly with established pools in non-native ecosystems, somebody has to do the work and supply some liquidity first. When those wrapped tokens lack liquidity, entering new ecosystems for a regular user may seem like a waste of time. It’s a loss of lucrative trading opportunities.
Graviton provides several options at once that will help you to enter a new blockchain.
First of all, you can purchase native tokens for transaction execution on your chosen destination chain: simply use the Relay swap to get some within several clicks.
Second, you need to transfer some capital to operate with the DeFi products on the new chain. This is already doable with multichain.xyz, RenVm or many other bridge solutions, but with Graviton’s Megabridge, you are offered a wider choice of both EVM and non-EVM chains in one place.
After that, it’s finally time to make money. You have native tokens for fees, you have wrapped assets, meaning so you probably can start trading or receiving passive income right away. Move between the Graviton tabs, find different farming options and supply liquidity to AMMs and pools at your choice and earn rewards in GTON, Graviton’s governance token.
If you’re a creator or contributor to one of the projects and are willing to expand to other ecosystems, Graviton is definitely the platform to start with. You can approach the team and negotiate the development of a bridge within SuSy protocol and setting up pools on the chosen destination chains. Once the pool is up and running, it automatically appears in Graviton Catalyst with a designated farm and GTON rewards for incentivization of liquidity provision.
Where does the token GTON fit into all of this?
GTON is not just a governance and reward token for LPs. It is also placed in the very core of the Graviton system as a proxy (relay) token for pairing wrapped tokens with liquid assets on destination chains, enabling an interconnected system of pools with fast and low-slippage token swaps. We felt inspired by Bancor’s original idea of the “relay token” $BNT, although it did not find much traction when it was launched.
However, nowadays we can observe a growing demand for cross-chain technologies and tokens in DeFI, and it might be time to revive this approach with GTON. With new competing blockchains appearing, a wide adoption of cross-chain technologies is essential for the synergetic growth of the industry. In the meantime, the demand for wrapped assets is growing, and hence the demand for their liquidity. Therefore, we strongly believe that the current state of the market and technology demonstrates a renewed interest in the “token-in-the-middle” concept, as we now possess all the necessary pieces to finally make this approach useful for a wide audience while also stimulating the growth of the token itself through network effects.
Can you tell us a little about the program Graviton Catalyst?
Graviton Catalyst is an essential product within Graviton that boosts and sustains wrapped tokens’ liquidity. Catalyst is based around regularly boosted reward incentives for wrapped tokens’ liquidity provision. It is aimed at helping tokenized blockchain projects, such as protocols, AMMs and farms, to expand onto non-native networks incorporated into Graviton by incentivizing liquidity and extending communities’ attention across ecosystems. Through Catalyst, the communities of participating projects will be involved in short-term and middle-term programs that incentivize bootstrapping of liquidity for recently emerged wrapped tokens through providing extra LP rewards. Those who enter the newly formed pools as LPs, Graviton rewards with GTON.
What are the short, medium, and long-term goals for Graviton?
Short-term:
Graviton is a system that solves many issues at once through product and technology solutions. A major focus of the development team right now is establishing farms with LP rewards for wrapped assets through the Catalyst program. However, farming rewards are not the only way users can participate in the Graviton system. Automatic staking of GTON has already been launched in testing mode, and it will soon be available to everyone who keeps GTON on their governance balance. Users will be able to both earn GTON for farming activities and immediately start receiving staking on top of that, or otherwise to buy GTON on various DEXes, deposit it into the Graviton system, and also receive staking rewards automatically. These two options are already in production and are being tested by our community, so the successful completion of testing and a public launch are our most important short-term goals.
Mid-term:
As we said earlier, Graviton was conceived as a liquidity boosting platform for wrapped assets. Therefore, farms for LP rewards coming from pools with wrapped assets were branched out into a separate product.
In Graviton, a product that presents a showcase of different farms for LP rewards from a large number of blockchains is called Catalyst. It will be capable of fostering enough momentum for the initial growth of wrapped assets with guaranteed GTON rewards.
The launch of Catalyst is our mid-term priority.
Long-term:
In addition to generating income through LP rewards and staking, users will be able to use Graviton to work with tokens from different ecosystems. Firstly, they will be able to wrap their own tokens, that is, transfer them to other blockchains using bridges, and also swap native tokens from one ecosystem to another, while doing so in one operation in just a couple of clicks. In order to achieve this, we are developing 2 products:
Megabridge and Relay swaps.
Megabridge is a bridge aggregator that includes our own bridges, which are being developed in full swing, as well as the best solutions already on the market, such as multichain.xyz.
Relay-based swaps of native tokens through GTON are fast and inexpensive with minimal slippage and are possible thanks to the token-in-the-middle utility that we originally came up with for GTON.
Is there anything else you’d like to share with our community?
We’d love to hear what the YB community thinks on the current possible trajectories of cross-chain DeFi evolution, the key issues faced by users and the possible ways of solving them. We are always focused on listening to the common issues in the cross-chain experience and providing appropriate solutions.
