Somewhere between locking BTC in phase one and waiting for BABY rewards in phase two, I noticed the gap that mattered wasn't security, it was selection. Babylon, $BABY , #baby , @BabylonLabs_io frames itself as removing intermediaries, no bridges, no wrapped tokens, just your keys and a script. But when I actually staked, the default flow didn't ask me to run a finality provider, it asked me to pick one from a list, and only the top 60 by delegation size get to earn anything meaningful once phase two opens. Over 57,000 BTC sits locked this way, and most of it isn't self-delegated, it's routed toward whichever provider already had the most volume, which of course attracts more volume. The self-custody is real at the wallet level. The influence over consensus is not distributed the same way. I kept thinking about how a system can be trustless in its cryptography and still concentrated in its defaults, how "no intermediary" can quietly become "an intermediary you didn't choose to notice." Nobody hid this, it's just not what gets said first. Does the protocol correct for that later, or does it just get load-bearing enough that nobody asks.
@BabylonLabs_io
#baby
$BABY