Fisher Yu, co-founder and CTO of Babylonchain, revealed, to the audience at Cosmoverse, the vision Babylon has in integrating Bitcoin staking in the Cosmos ecosystem and its effects.
BabylonChain is a blockchain project that aims to scale Bitcoin to secure the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) economy. It allows Bitcoin holders to earn yields from their idle bitcoins in a secure way by locking their bitcoins in a self-custodial manner to gain the rights to validate PoS chains and earn yields as a return.
This is achieved without the need for third-party trust or bridging Bitcoin to any other chain. The company’s vision is to evolve Bitcoin into a trusted security backbone for PoS chains, delivering a decentralized world driven by Bitcoin.
It also offers a shared security protocol, Bitcoin staking protocol, providing features such as fast unbonding, scalable restaking, maximal liquidity, and yields.
Babylon on Cosmos
Speaking about the integration, Fisher extolled the virtues of the Cosmos ecosystem. He described it as a friendly, collaborative, and decentralized environment that allows every action to have its own solvent, high-performance blockchain.
Additionally, it supports interoperability through IBC, making it highly scalable. However, Fisher acknowledged a potential security concern due to the smaller market cap app chains, making them more vulnerable to attacks.
To address this problem, he said that Babylonchain brings Bitcoin’s robust security to Cosmos with its initial offering, the Bitcoin time-stamping protocol. This protocol generates secure and provable time stamps of Cosmos chains onto the Bitcoin network, essentially creating a backup of the Cosmos blockchain on Bitcoin.
He noted that the key problem this protocol solves is the long-range attack issue, where validators could potentially backtrack to an older block. This innovation eliminates the need for social consensus on the Cosmos chain, boosting its security and speed.
Moreover, the Bitcoin time-stamping protocol significantly reduces stake unbounding time for Cosmos chains, making it more attractive for users. Fisher said that Babylonchain launched a testnet earlier this year, which has already seen integration with over 30 Cosmos chains.
Securing fast confirmation with Bitcoin staking
The CTO noted that while time stamping is an aspect of its service, Babylonchain’s ambitions extend beyond just time stamping. It aims to leverage Bitcoin as a staking asset. Fisher made a compelling case for this, highlighting the strengths of Bitcoin as an asset with its stability, decentralization, and vast security budget.
By using Bitcoin staking, Cosmos chains can maintain a high security level and attract more users to lock their value on the chain. This, in turn, helps reduce inflation pressure on Cosmos chains, potentially leading to healthier tokenomics and greater utility for native tokens.
Overcoming hurdles and future plans
Furthermore, Fisher addressed the challenges they faced, particularly skepticism from Bitcoin holders who value self-custody and mistrust third parties. To make Bitcoin staking more palatable, Babylonchain ensured that it is completely trustless, so users don’t need to send their tokens to another address. This is a crucial feature that aligns with the principles of Bitcoin holders.
The firm’s solution for Bitcoin staking boasts key properties like slashability, fractional slashing, trustless staking, delegation, on-demand unbounding, and re-stakability.
Looking ahead, Fisher said that in just four months since the inception of the BTC staking idea, Babylonchain has developed a minimum viable product, including an explorer and a web application that allows users to experience BTC staking.
It plans to launch a testnet with BTC staking and time stamping by the end of the year, while its mainnet should be out by next summer. There are also plans to develop Bitcoin-based data availability and tackle liquidity, creating new opportunities for the Cosmos ecosystem.
