Cosmos-Based Gravity DEX Rebrands and Moves Chains

With more money flowing into the inter-blockchain Cosmos network, multiple players are jostling to position themselves as the ecosystem’s premier destination for decentralized finance (DeFi).

Against this backdrop, Gravity DEX, a decentralized exchange (DEX) protocol on the Cosmos Hub blockchain, is re-launching as Crescent (CRE) and moving to a new Cosmos-based blockchain of the same name, according to B-Harvest, the project’s developer.

Along with rebranding to Crescent and moving to the eponymous Crescent network, B-Harvest plans to flesh out the platform with a suite of new features, including tools for lending and borrowing across blockchains, and a new order book DEX model.

What it means

B-Harvest made a name for itself as one of the earliest validators for the proof-of-stake Cosmos Hub blockchain. Cosmos Hub was the first blockchain to launch on the Cosmos ecosystem – a family of blockchains that serve different use-cases and are purpose-built to interoperate.

Gravity DEX was B-Harvest’s attempt to carve out a larger role for itself within Cosmos’s growing DeFi ecosystem. The Gravity DEX protocol currently powers Cosmos Hub’s Emeris DeFi platform, which launched in beta in the summer of 2021 and at press time has less than $5 million locked in liquidity pools, according to its dashboards.

Ignite (formerly Tendermint), the company behind Emeris, acquired B-Harvest last year and told CoinDesk it plans to build out support for Crescent after it launches on April 14.

Gravity, B-Harvest’s legacy protocol, will remain operational once Crescent launches, but Crescent will offer users farming rewards to entice them to migrate their liquidity over to the new protocol.

Cosmos DeFi

Crescent and Emeris seek to position themselves as the leading DeFi destination within the Cosmos ecosystem, but Gravity DEX (and Emeris) have thus far struggled to attract the same kind of interest as Osmosis (OSMO), another Cosmos-based DEX that has $1.5 billion in total value locked (TVL), according to DefiLlama.

B-Harvest CEO Hyung Yeon Lee told CoinDesk that building Crescent on a new blockchain – rather than the more “conservative” Cosmos Hub – will enable the team to build out more “innovative” features, like an order book exchange and cross-chain lending, which will, in theory, position the project to bite off a larger portion of the Cosmos DeFi pie.