Introduction to Babylon

The Babylon project designs security protocols that scale Bitcoin to secure the decentralised world. To this end, Babylon leverages the three primary facets of Bitcoin: bitcoin the asset, Bitcoin the PoW-secured timestamping server, and Bitcoin the most censorship-resistant blockspace in the world. Through inventing pioneering protocols, Babylon envisions a more secure and decentralised world backed by Bitcoin.

The Babylon chain consists of the following two Bitcoin security sharing protocols, which serve as modular plugins compatible with various consumer systems:

• BTC timestamping: Babylon's BTC timestamping protocol allows any arbitrary data submitted to the Babylon chain to obtain Bitcoin timestamps. A primary use case of this protocol is to timestamp consumer systems to enhance their economic security, in particular resisting against long range attacks. This also serves as a primitive that enables BTC staking.
• BTC staking: Babylon's Bitcoin staking protocol allows BTC holders to stake their BTC into consumer systems. It provides economic security guarantees to the consumer systems while ensuring efficient stake unbonding to enhance liquidity for Bitcoin holders. The protocol is trustless, in the sense that BTC does not go through any third-party custody/bridge/wrapping.

BTC staking integration

System architecture

The below figure depicts the BTC staking integration with a consumer system. The system includes the following components:

• Bitcoin and the Babylon chain
• Consumer system with some modules for BTC staking integration
• Finality provider which submits finality votes to the consumer system
• EOTS manager which securely signs EOTS signatures and sends it to the finality provider
• BTC staking relayer which relays messages between the Babylon chain and the consumer system
• BTC staking monitor which monitors adversarial behaviours of the Babylon chain (when it’s compromised)

Within these components,

• The Babylon team will maintain the source code of Babylon node and EOTS manager. Both of them are generic and can work with any consumer system.
• Consumer side needs to implement the modules in the consumer system, finality provider, BTC staking relayer and BTC staking monitor, since they need to be made compatible with the interfaces of the consumer system. Babylon team will provide reference implementations for them.

Security guarantee