With the advent of Cosmos SDK chains, Polygon supernets and Avalanche subnets, a multi-chain world with many sovereign and interconnected App chains is emerging. However, security has been a major bottleneck for these blockchains. To address this issue, Babylon, a blockchain protocol, has developed a solution that allows Proof-of-Stake (PoS) chains to benefit from the security of Bitcoin. Babylon's testnet is set to launch on March 2, 2023, at the Shared Security Summit in Denver. This milestone represents a major breakthrough for the blockchain industry, as Babylon combines the security of Bitcoin with the decentralized and scalable architecture of App chains to overcome the Blockchain Trilemma.

Babylon’s origins come from a research paper about Bitcoin security co-authored by co-founder of Babylon David Tse, a professor at Stanford and Ethereum 2.0 researcher, and the founder of EigenLayer Sreeram Kannan. Kannan has been a strong advocate for Babylon, and eloquently said:: "Programming became composable when you could import existing programs to build new programs. Babylon makes trust composable by allowing blockchains to #import bitcoin security. It is great to see the Babylon team build this tantalizing vision into reality with the launch of this testnet."

The company was able to gain support from prominent Cosmos leader Zaki Manian and has now secured integrations with eight top Cosmos SDK chains including Osmosis, Akash, Sei and others, showing traction and demand for the technology. Zaki Manian, co-founder of Sommelier Protocol, has been advising the Babylon team from the start. He also shared his excitement about Babylon's potential, stating, "Bringing Bitcoin security into the App chain world is a grand unification of the blockchain space. I am very excited to see them turning this vision into reality." Greg Osuri, Founder of Akash Network. said “Babylon Chain offers a unique way for App chains like Akash to borrow Bitcoin’s security that allows for extending the chain lifetime with the added benefit of optimizing emissions to incentive behavior instead of security.” 

With security being the foundation of any successful blockchain, Babylon aims to bring Bitcoin-level security to all PoS chains, with no additional energy consumption. The crypto market is currently valued at $1 trillion, with Bitcoin alone making up 40% of the total market cap. The rest of the market is primarily secured by PoS chains, making up a $600 billion asset. With Babylon's approach, the potential value of elevating the security of these assets is far greater than $1 billion.

Babylon leverages Bitcoin as a source of trust to provide secure and verifiable Bitcoin timestamps to other blockchains and DApps in the broader ecosystem. The Babylon architecture comprises three key components, including Bitcoin as the timestamping service, the Babylon chain as the middle layer checkpoint verifier and aggregator, and other PoS chains and Dapps such as Cosmos zones as the consumers of Bitcoin security. With Babylon's approach, PoS chains can now reduce the secure stake unbonding time from weeks to as short as a few hours. Additionally, Babylon's solution provides much-needed protection for high-value asset transfers across bridges between PoS chains.

The Company has raised $8M in a seed round led by IDG and Breyer Capital (early investors of Coinbase and Circle) and is looking to raise additional funds in the coming months to support developer outreach among other efforts. 

For more information about the Babylon project, please visit https://babylonchain.io/ 

Company Overview

Babylon, a blockchain protocol built on the Cosmos SDK, aims to leverage the security of Bitcoin to enhance the security of Cosmos zones and other Proof-of-Stake chains. The project is developed by a team of consensus protocol researchers from Stanford and experienced layer 1 developers from around the world.

At its core, Babylon is designed to use Bitcoin as a source of trust and a reliable timestamping service to benefit other blockchains in the broader ecosystem. By using Bitcoin's immense hash power and reliable timestamping capabilities, Babylon can significantly enhance the security of smaller blockchains, without compromising their autonomy.

Architecture:

The Babylon architecture consists of three components with two levels of checkpointing, including Bitcoin as the timestamping service, the Babylon chain as the middle layer, and other Cosmos zones as the consumers of security. The Babylon chain aggregates the checkpoint streams of many consumer zones and receives checkpoints from the consumer zones via Inter Blockchain Communication (IBC). It checks for the availability of the data behind the checkpoints of the consumer zones to prevent an attacker from timestamping unavailable data.

Technology & Use Cases:

Babylon's technology supports several use cases, including fast stake unbonding, bootstrapping new zones, protecting important transactions, and censorship resistance. Babylon can reduce unbonding periods from 21 days to 5 hours, bootstrap new zones with low token valuation, protect important transactions while providing fast finality to normal transactions, and allow transactions that are censored to be backed up in the ledger. Babylon offers core primitives and protocols that use timestamp information to realize these use cases, ensuring maximum security for the blockchain ecosystem.

Team:

Babylon was founded as a result of the combined efforts of distinguished researchers in consensus protocol from Stanford University and top-notch layer 1 developers from across the world. Professor David Tse, a Shannon Award and Hamming Medal recipient, founded the project at Stanford University. 

The team has an impressive track record of working with the Ethereum Foundation to reinforce the security of the Proof-of-Stake Ethereum chain, in addition to conducting basic research on consensus protocols. Their collective expertise has contributed significantly to the ongoing evolution of the blockchain industry, and Babylon is set to make a substantial impact in the field.