Spent the afternoon in the $BABY corner of the timeline because something felt slightly off.
While @BabylonLabs_io was running the Upbit trading campaign, I went looking for the feature that originally pulled me into researching Babylon in the first place: native Bitcoin-backed borrowing without giving up custody.
I expected to find people using it.
Instead, I found the borrowing flow through Aave v4 is still on the public testnet. That matches what was discussed in last week's founders call.
At first I thought, "So the marketing is ahead of the product."
But the more I sat with it, the more I realized that's probably the wrong question.
The more interesting one is: what should we count as adoption for infrastructure?
If Babylon's job is to become the security layer beneath other applications, then everyday users may never interact with Babylon directly. They'll use apps built on top of it. In that world, token trading, protocol usage, and infrastructure adoption become three very different things.
Mechanically, that makes sense. Infrastructure is usually tested long before it's widely consumed. There's nothing unusual about that.
What changed my perspective is realizing that market attention can scale much faster than infrastructure usage—and those two curves don't necessarily tell the same story.
So when we say Babylon is "being adopted," are we measuring people using the protocol, developers integrating the security layer, or traders positioning around the future they expect it to enable?
I don't think those are interchangeable.
And I suspect that's a distinction we'll need to make more often as Bitcoin-backed infrastructure matures.
#baby $BABY
While @BabylonLabs_io was running the Upbit trading campaign, I went looking for the feature that originally pulled me into researching Babylon in the first place: native Bitcoin-backed borrowing without giving up custody.
I expected to find people using it.
Instead, I found the borrowing flow through Aave v4 is still on the public testnet. That matches what was discussed in last week's founders call.
At first I thought, "So the marketing is ahead of the product."
But the more I sat with it, the more I realized that's probably the wrong question.
The more interesting one is: what should we count as adoption for infrastructure?
If Babylon's job is to become the security layer beneath other applications, then everyday users may never interact with Babylon directly. They'll use apps built on top of it. In that world, token trading, protocol usage, and infrastructure adoption become three very different things.
Mechanically, that makes sense. Infrastructure is usually tested long before it's widely consumed. There's nothing unusual about that.
What changed my perspective is realizing that market attention can scale much faster than infrastructure usage—and those two curves don't necessarily tell the same story.
So when we say Babylon is "being adopted," are we measuring people using the protocol, developers integrating the security layer, or traders positioning around the future they expect it to enable?
I don't think those are interchangeable.
And I suspect that's a distinction we'll need to make more often as Bitcoin-backed infrastructure matures.
#baby $BABY