#baby $BABY @BabylonLabs_io

Couldn't sleep last night, so I pulled up three separate write-ups on Babylon's Aave Temp Check side by side, more out of habit than anything.
One word wouldn't stop bugging me.
Bitcoin.com, Cointribune, and LiveBitcoinNews all describe the TBV liquidation flow the same way. A permissionless liquidator swaps a seized vault for WBTC instantly, at a small premium. A separate set of "permissioned arbitrageurs" then buy that position and redeem the real BTC later, on Bitcoin's own timeline.
Give Babylon credit for the first half permissionless liquidation checks out exactly as advertised.
It's the second half where I went looking further back than the Aave proposal. Babylon's own August whitepaper on Trustless Bitcoin Vaults never says "permissioned" either it says liquidations run through "whitelisted liquidators" who monitor price and vault state. Different word, same shape. An independent analyst who exchanged messages with Babylon's team on X raised the same point directly to them: enough of those whitelisted parties behaving correctly is a trust assumption the marketing doesn't mention.
So the word turned out accurate. The real question is why that role has to be restricted at all, when the WBTC-swap side isn't. Bitcoin's scripting language can't evaluate arbitrary off-chain state. BitVM3 works around that by wrapping a zero-knowledge proof verifier inside a garbled circuit, but someone still has to generate and submit that proof to trigger redemption. The WBTC-swap side is easy to leave permissionless any liquidator with capital takes the trade. Proof-submission is the harder problem BitVM3 hasn't solved yet.
This isn't about whether the vault is trustless. Babylon didn't hide the whitelisting in its own whitepaper. Trustlessness doesn't disappear here. It just ends one step earlier than most of the coverage lets on.

$EUL


What defines a truly trustless BTC vault?