Babylon Chain brings Bitcoin Security to Cosmos and beyond

What is Babylon Chain?

Babylon is a blockchain platform that leverages the security of Bitcoin as a source of trust and a reliable timestamping service to enhance the security of Cosmos zones and other Proof-of-Stake chains.

Babylon is built using the Tendermint consensus engine and Cosmos SDK so it keeps the benefits of Tendermint and Cosmos SDK while greatly boosting security posture by using BTC as the security layer.

How would Cosmos Ecosystem benefit from Babylon chain?

Security

Bitcoin today is the most secure global blockchain. Its mighty Proof-of-Work mining power provides reliable and irreversible timestamps to Bitcoin transactions. This yields irreversible timestamps and an immutably ordered list of transactions and an immutable ledger. Babylon brings Bitcoin security by allowing blocks (and the transactions therein) to be time stamped onto the Bitcoin network.

Furthermore, the Babylon integration preserves sovereignty, fast block speed, as well as its high TPS.

Reduce Un-bonding Period

Un-bonding requests on many SDK based networks in the Interchain are set to in between 14 to 28 days to eliminate long-range attacks. Using Bitcoin security via Babylon, users only need to wait until the Bitcoin timestamp of the un-bonding request transaction is confirmed on Bitcoin with sufficient depth, which it can reduces the staked tokens un-bonding time of Proof-of-Stake chains from weeks to hours.

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 un-bonding process reliable by using the BTC block time.

Flexibility

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.

Conclusion

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!