Gravity
As we summarized it in our previous introduction, Gravity is a blockchain-agnostic protocol with the purpose of allowing communications between different blockchains and the outside world (oracles). In this article, we are going to take a deeper look at the technical aspect of this new protocol.
Architecture:
- Gravity system is a community of nodes where each node is an oracle for a target chain (TB)
- Each node has accounts in each target chain (TB) and in the internal ledger (IL)
- Internal distributed ledger enables communication between Gravity nodes, commit-reveals, data aggregation, accounting and calculation of p2p scores (oracle reputation)
- Smart contract in a TB serves as register of all Gravity nodes and their scores + data fees
- Nebula smart contract (used for verification and access to oracles) is the register of user subs and the account collecting payments and distributing them among oracles
- User smart contract contains subs for data delivery from Gravity
- Consuls are a selection of multiple oracles (nodes) with highest scores in the network.
Key advantages:
- Leverage stability and security across interconnected blockchains
- Increase scalability capacity (gateways to cross-chain applications and sidechains)
- Data transfer between real-world info sources and blockchains
- No additional layer added to the protocol (decreased complexity)
- No proprietary blockchain and/or native token needed
Applications:
Triggers: user smart contracts can be called through specified methods without transmitting any data to them. Which means that the true-false outcome of an event in the blockchain can be tied to a smart contract. Gravity system would be, thus, able to report when an event occurred.
Cross-chain transfer gateways: transferring digital assets (tokens) between 2 blockchain networks is now possible. With the locking of tokens in one blockchain (origin) and the releasing of the exact same number or tokens in the other one (destination).
Cross-chain delegation gateways: similarly to cross-chain transfers, the concept here is replicable to another type of data transfer. An account holder in one blockchain (origin) can create an event in another one (destination). Concretely it means that you can manage an application deployed in the origin blockchain from the destination blockchain without having an account in the origin blockchain.
Sidechains: scalability issues on an already deployed network can be solved directly through this technical solution. A decentralized oracle is required to provide signals through data fees from one blockchain to another. This is what Gravity is about and the end goal is to increase computation and transaction performance by spanning smart contracts across 2 different blockchains using only 1 token from the native blockchain.
Conclusion:
Gravity offers one holistic solution to tackle multiple scalability and inter-blockchain communication issues.
This is undoubtedly one of the remaining challenges to ensure worldwide adoption of blockchain technologies. Only the future will tell if this is a success but so far, the presented solution looks like the way to go.
