In the afternoon, at the office, I found the technical documentation for Babylon Genesis. When I read the line “Consensus | CometBFT (a Tendermint fork) | v0.50.9,” my finger hovered over the keyboard and stopped.
This project really has something. Binance Research wrote it clearly: “Babylon Genesis chain’s PoS consensus is built on the CometBFT stack.” Braid Cosmos’s CometBFT consensus together with Bitcoin staking—100 validators produce blocks, and 60 BTC stakers add finality signatures. The design idea is indeed beautiful.
But after breaking down the dependencies, the problems surfaced.
Babylon Genesis reuses the CometBFT stack, so all historical vulnerabilities are inherited directly—double-signing, forks, network stalls; none of them can be escaped.
In January 2026, the Tachyon vulnerability—due to inconsistent signature verification and time derivation—could lead to a chain halt; in February 2025, ASA-2025-002 allows a malicious node to stall the network by manipulating blocks partially; later that same year, ASA-2025-001 fixed an x86_64 synchronization parameter overflow; and in October 2025, a BitArray handling bug again posed a risk of network halt. A consensus key-rotation vulnerability could allow validators to equivocate infinitely and escape slashing, and the Horcrux vulnerability has also caused Osmosis validators to be fined and have 5% seized.
Babylon didn’t build an independent isolation and protection layer above the consensus layer. Once a CometBFT vulnerability is triggered, it can directly penetrate into the staking and finality core modules. Patches always run behind the vulnerabilities.
Entrusting consensus security to a bottom-layer stack that gets repeatedly penetrated, yet without any isolation layer—no matter how ingenious the design is, it can’t withstand cracks in the foundation. Cryptography can prove the correctness of BTC staking, but it can’t prove that CometBFT won’t explode with the next Tachyon tomorrow.
The above is only my personal opinion and does not constitute investment advice. If you hand full consensus security over to CometBFT, do you think Babylon needs to add an independent isolation and protection layer? Feel free to discuss in the comments.
#baby $BABY @BabylonLabs_io
This project really has something. Binance Research wrote it clearly: “Babylon Genesis chain’s PoS consensus is built on the CometBFT stack.” Braid Cosmos’s CometBFT consensus together with Bitcoin staking—100 validators produce blocks, and 60 BTC stakers add finality signatures. The design idea is indeed beautiful.
But after breaking down the dependencies, the problems surfaced.
Babylon Genesis reuses the CometBFT stack, so all historical vulnerabilities are inherited directly—double-signing, forks, network stalls; none of them can be escaped.
In January 2026, the Tachyon vulnerability—due to inconsistent signature verification and time derivation—could lead to a chain halt; in February 2025, ASA-2025-002 allows a malicious node to stall the network by manipulating blocks partially; later that same year, ASA-2025-001 fixed an x86_64 synchronization parameter overflow; and in October 2025, a BitArray handling bug again posed a risk of network halt. A consensus key-rotation vulnerability could allow validators to equivocate infinitely and escape slashing, and the Horcrux vulnerability has also caused Osmosis validators to be fined and have 5% seized.
Babylon didn’t build an independent isolation and protection layer above the consensus layer. Once a CometBFT vulnerability is triggered, it can directly penetrate into the staking and finality core modules. Patches always run behind the vulnerabilities.
Entrusting consensus security to a bottom-layer stack that gets repeatedly penetrated, yet without any isolation layer—no matter how ingenious the design is, it can’t withstand cracks in the foundation. Cryptography can prove the correctness of BTC staking, but it can’t prove that CometBFT won’t explode with the next Tachyon tomorrow.
The above is only my personal opinion and does not constitute investment advice. If you hand full consensus security over to CometBFT, do you think Babylon needs to add an independent isolation and protection layer? Feel free to discuss in the comments.
#baby $BABY @BabylonLabs_io