Spent the afternoon digging into the actual cost of making Babylon’s Trustless Bitcoin Vaults work. @BabylonLabs_io
Everyone talks about the “no bridge, no wrap” part. Almost nobody talks about what sits underneath to make that claim real.
Every vault needs pre-generated garbled circuits from the BABE / BitVM3 setup. One circuit alone is around 43 GB and takes roughly twenty minutes to build on a single core. Most of the time nobody pays the heavy price because the happy path stays quiet. But if a challenge ever lands, the claimer has to post a roughly 100 KB signature of the ZK proof straight onto Bitcoin. In their mainnet tests that single transaction cost about $93.
The challenge window itself runs for about three days — 432 Bitcoin blocks. During that stretch any challenger, or even the original depositor, can step in and dispute.
So the real bill for keeping Bitcoin on Bitcoin while still checking Ethereum state is measured in gigabytes of storage and days of waiting, plus the occasional expensive on-chain proof. Grabbed my chai and sat with that number a bit longer.
The design is genuinely non-custodial. The price of that guarantee just lives in a quieter place than the marketing usually points to. Still chewing on how many people actually factor that storage and time tax into the story when they say “trustless.”
#baby $BABY
Everyone talks about the “no bridge, no wrap” part. Almost nobody talks about what sits underneath to make that claim real.
Every vault needs pre-generated garbled circuits from the BABE / BitVM3 setup. One circuit alone is around 43 GB and takes roughly twenty minutes to build on a single core. Most of the time nobody pays the heavy price because the happy path stays quiet. But if a challenge ever lands, the claimer has to post a roughly 100 KB signature of the ZK proof straight onto Bitcoin. In their mainnet tests that single transaction cost about $93.
The challenge window itself runs for about three days — 432 Bitcoin blocks. During that stretch any challenger, or even the original depositor, can step in and dispute.
So the real bill for keeping Bitcoin on Bitcoin while still checking Ethereum state is measured in gigabytes of storage and days of waiting, plus the occasional expensive on-chain proof. Grabbed my chai and sat with that number a bit longer.
The design is genuinely non-custodial. The price of that guarantee just lives in a quieter place than the marketing usually points to. Still chewing on how many people actually factor that storage and time tax into the story when they say “trustless.”
#baby $BABY