As the Cosmos Interchain ecosystem continues to grow, the importance of bridges to chains outside of the IBC is clear, and after several years in development multiple bridges are coming online. With the Gravity Bridge and Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) protocols now being utilized by teams at Atom’s own Gravity DEX; Emeris, Gravity Bridge (GRAV) and Evmos (EVMOS), plus a Bitcoin bridge built by the team at Nomic (NOM), very soon we will see the greater crypto space becoming less fragmented as it becomes possible to transfer tokens, NFT’s and utilize dApps via cross-chain interoperable bridges.

Gravity Bridge

Gravity Bridge will operate as a neutral Ethereum to Cosmos bridge. It will allow any Cosmos SDK based chains to utilize the Gravity Bridge via IBC without the need to develop a connection to the gravity bridge protocol on their own chain. This will give access to ERC20 assets (Ethereum layer 2 project tokens), across the Cosmos and begin to unify two of the largest ecosystems in the crypto space.

Gravity Bridge will be able to bring ERC20 assets from Ethereum into Cosmos, as well as Cosmos assets to Ethereum ERC20 representations. ATOM, and any other asset in the Cosmos ecosystem, will be able to trade on Uniswap and other Ethereum Automated Market Makers (AMM), and interact with Ethereum DeFi like any ERC20 token.

Airdrops to Atom holders and stakers of the Graviton token were distributed a couple of weeks ago. Osmosis is already in the process of setting up connections to Ethereum via Gravity Bridge and now we eagerly await the first chains to connect and allow ERC20 assets to be accessible via IBC.

Evmos

Evmos utilizes the Cosmos SDK and serves as the first IBC-compatible EVM-based chain, bringing composability, interoperability, and fast finality to Ethereum. The aim of Evmos is to create a more balanced L1 system in which developers, users and block proposers are on more equal footing to gain sustainable value accrual across all these important actors.

The initial distribution will be via what the team are calling a Rektdrop. The EVMOS token will distributed far and wide across Cosmos SDK chain stakers and liquidity providers, and Ethereum L2 liquidity providers (AAVE, Uniswap etc). The thing that sets this airdrop apart is that they will also be distributing tokens to Ethereum users who were affected by a slew of rugpulls, hence the name Rektdrop. This is a very amicable way of helping those who got rekt by these ETH based rugpulls to recover some of their financial losses.

The liquidity that has the potential to now flow between the Cosmos Interchain ecosystem and the Ethereum ecosystem will be enormously beneficial to the blockchain space as a whole, making the entire space easier to navigate and less reliant on centralized exchanges.

Gravity DEX: Emeris

Emeris is the platform built by the Cosmos team to be the central hub and wallet for Cosmos DeFi and a place for the gravity bridge protocol to be utilized. Whilst the initial launch was lackluster, as Emeris was viewed by the community at large to be too soon, being barely more than a month after the launch of Osmosis, creating community tensions of undue competition and concerns of the platform still being in early Beta. Gravity DEX has failed so far to capture significant value for users, so has done very little in the way of growth however, Emeris still has great potential to be a central point in the Cosmos ecosystem as it matures.

Nomic Bitcoin Bridge

January 31st 2022 saw the launch of the Nomic Stakenet with NOM being airdropped to Atom holders and stakers. At this stage the token is only able to be staked and the Bitcoin bridge is yet to be launched. However, the Bitcoin Bridge is bringing Bitcoin to Cosmos. The bridge creates a new asset, nBTC, which is IBC-enabled and fully backed by BTC.

This will open the floodgates for BTC pairs in DeFi with the most exciting being Osmosis. If you haven’t checked out Osmosis I highly recommend it as Osmosis has the second highest TVL to MC across the entire blockchain space and with Ethereum and Bitcoin bridges going live (not to mention superfluid staking), Osmosis has the potential to be the biggest DeFi platform in all of cryptocurrency.

There are other bridges such as Sommelier that are not far from being ready too. (Not to discount Sommelier with just a mention, as it is also a high level, brilliant project). The blockchain space is slowly but surely becoming defragmented, as these important projects come online.

I’ll be deep diving into more chains and aspects of the Cosmos ecosystem over the coming weeks and months so subscribe if you haven’t already to keep up to date with everything Cosmos

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