Pro
Babylon: Middleware Between Bitcoin and Proof-of-Stake
Key Insights
- Babylon Chain is a Cosmos Zone that obtains Bitcoin timestamps for important transactions on other Cosmos Zones.
- This infrastructure can be generalized to any PoS network. Babylon enables fast stake unbonding, which reduces unbonding periods to hours from days for PoS validators, allowing for greater liquidity in the respective network.
- A Proof-of-Stake (PoS) network’s guarantee of the canonical chain depends on weak social consensus, which creates delay and potential for attacks in the system to which Proof-of-Work (PoW) networks are immune.
- Due to Babylon checkpointing a single compressed transaction for N Cosmos Zones on Bitcoin, it only uses a trivial amount of energy compared to Bitcoin’s current consumption.
Bitcoin established an electronic payment system that has relied the least on social trust compared to all PoS blockchains. Because it depends on code for correctness, Bitcoin security is irrevocably trusted. Though PoS networks have proliferated and supported DeFi and other applications, trust in their underlying chains is still less secure compared to Bitcoin’s. As a result, several PoS projects have opted to use Bitcoin to supplement their security.
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Eshita is a Research Analyst at Messari focused on Web3 topics. Previously, she was a Venture Fellow at Bloomberg Beta and prior to that was working on data at Shareworks by Morgan Stanley.
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