Chihuahua Stories: Bitcoin Security is coming to Chihuahua via Babylon
“How about a memechain with Bitcoin security?” This is insane!” I understand what you’re thinking. It’s insane, but keep in mind that Chihuahua is not just a memechain… it’s THE memechain and one of the first Cosmonauts. Talented teams developing breakthrough technology is nothing new in Cosmos, and Chihuahua is not sleeping on great technologies and opportunities. Babylon’s plans for Cosmos Chains could not be ignored; their purpose is to create something fundamentally new that will take Cosmos (and Chihuahua) to the next level of decentralization and security.
What is Babylon?
Babylon is a PoS (proof-of-stake) blockchain that provides secure Bitcoin timestamps to its transactions. Babylon is built using the Tendermint consensus engine and Cosmos SDK.
It leverages cutting-edge cryptographic technologies and advanced Cosmos SDK features to send succinct, verifiable, and adversary-slashing checkpoints of the Babylon chain to BTC as BTC transactions. The BTC timestamps of Babylon checkpoints provide BTC-level security to all Babylon transactions.
Babylon can be viewed as a checkpoint verifier and aggregator. It verifies and aggregates the checkpoints submitted by its users into ones that BTC can securely timestamp. 🔒
It would be possible to keep the benefits of Tendermint and Cosmos SDK while greatly boosting security posture by using BTC as the security layer.
To summarize the checkpointing architecture, it is divided into three parts:
- Bitcoin 👉 timestamping service
- Babylon Chain 👉 middle layer
- Cosmos Zones 👉 consumers of security
The BabylonChain team provides an excellent in-depth explanation of the checkpointing architecture and how it will utilize Bitcoin as a security layer in their blog Checkpointing Babylon to BTC linked below if you’d like to learn more 👇
Benefits
How would Chihuahua benefit from becoming one of Babylon chain’s consumer?
Security 🔐
It was mentioned above and it will be mentioned again. If Bitcoin has something that all other chains do not have, is the level of its security. It is the father of Web3 and it is sensible that is established in way that all others have not had the time to do so yet. All other benefits below are the results of increased bitcoin security.
Reduce Unboding 🔥
Cosmos Chains have long un-bonding periods in order to eliminate long-range attacks (ChihuahuaChain currently has a 21-day un-bonding period). By replacing social consensus, BTC timestamping can reduce the staked tokens un-bonding time of PoS chains from weeks to just one day. The Babylon integration removes the need for a long trust period because once you have Bitcoin timestamps, users can easily discern the normal chain from the attack chain, which will have a later Bitcoin timestamp. Furthermore, Babylon makes timekeeping of the unbonding process reliable by using the BTC block time.
Censorship resistance 🕊️
Censorship resistance refers to anyone’s ability to use protocols such as ChihuahuaChain. To have access to blockchain networks such as Bitcoin, you do not need to be a certain age, live in a specific place, or have a specific political allegiance. You can run the software, analyze the code, and build your own copy of the code if you have access to the internet. Censorship resistance can also relate to the blockchain’s immutability — the irreversibility of transactions once they are completed. This is significant because public blockchains are intended to prohibit anyone from altering the shared ledger’s history to serve specific financial or other objectives.
Flexibility 🤯
Chihuahua users may prefer to wait for a BTC confirmation for high-value transactions, just as you may prefer to send a significant sum of cash via wire transfer, which takes three days despite the availability of a fast online transfer. Babylon allows developers and the community to determine the latency-security tradeoff.
Testnet Integration 🥳
The Chihuahua testnet has already incorporated BTC security since April 18. Thanks to Babylon, Chihuahua’s testnet chain has verifiable BTC timestamps, making them more secure and reliable than ever. Check it out on BabylonScan: https://babylonscan.io/chain/chihuahua 🚧
The intention is to include it on mainnet shortly after the testing phase. Chihuahua is the degen hub of cosmos, but even us would not include anything on mainnet without testing it beforehand. 👷
Babylon is one of the most anticipated projects. Bringing Bitcoin’s security in any other chain is not something easy but certainly requires a lot of work and talent. Cosmos Ecosystem’s attractiveness to top teams has allowed us to dream of Bitcoin’s security coming really soon!⏳
Woof woof! 🐾
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