Babylon has been out for almost a week now. I’ve been scrolling through posts about Babylon on the 广场, and when I got to the seventh or eighth one, I felt a bit thrown off—almost every article keeps saying something like “through zero-knowledge proofs and technologies such as BitVM3.”
The exact same wording shows up again and again.
The problem is that this sentence lumps two different things together.
In fact, Babylon has two layers of components.
The first layer is native staking. This layer doesn’t really need any zero-knowledge proofs at all. It relies on things Bitcoin already has: Bitcoin Script, the UTXO model, and time locks. Users lock BTC in the Bitcoin network to provide economic security for the PoS chain; the chain side pays to buy that security. Everything stays within Bitcoin’s own rules.
The second layer is TBV. This part is much harder—it has to get Ethereum contracts to believe what happened on the Bitcoin chain, so they can use native BTC as collateral to borrow stablecoins. BitVM3 is a predecessor design along this route, but it has a fatal flaw: the on-chain verification cost can reach one or two hundred thousand dollars, making it impossible for real-world use.
Babylon’s BABE protocol is precisely about cutting down this cost. It brings on-chain verification down to the tens-of-dollars range, and off-chain storage from dozens of GB to around twenty-odd MB.
So the accurate way to say it isn’t “it used BitVM3,” but rather “it optimized costs along the BitVM3 roadmap.” Miss one word, and the meaning changes quite a lot.
Understanding the purpose of these two layers matters because it helps you not look in the wrong place when reading the data:
BTC staking scale ↓ tells you whether the base of the first layer is thick enough
Number of PoS chains connected ↓ tells you whether the security demand is genuine
Number of TBV borrowing transactions ↓ tells you whether the second layer actually works
As for the token BABY, it takes on functions like network gas, governance, and collateral security—i.e., it sits between these two layers. That also means its value can only be sustained if both layers see scale; having only one layer isn’t enough.
Of course, risks can’t be ignored either.
But then again, in any given track or trend, people who are willing to flip through a couple more pages of documentation when everyone else is just repeating the same official wording are simply not that many.
@BabylonLabs_io $BABY
#baby
The exact same wording shows up again and again.
The problem is that this sentence lumps two different things together.
In fact, Babylon has two layers of components.
The first layer is native staking. This layer doesn’t really need any zero-knowledge proofs at all. It relies on things Bitcoin already has: Bitcoin Script, the UTXO model, and time locks. Users lock BTC in the Bitcoin network to provide economic security for the PoS chain; the chain side pays to buy that security. Everything stays within Bitcoin’s own rules.
The second layer is TBV. This part is much harder—it has to get Ethereum contracts to believe what happened on the Bitcoin chain, so they can use native BTC as collateral to borrow stablecoins. BitVM3 is a predecessor design along this route, but it has a fatal flaw: the on-chain verification cost can reach one or two hundred thousand dollars, making it impossible for real-world use.
Babylon’s BABE protocol is precisely about cutting down this cost. It brings on-chain verification down to the tens-of-dollars range, and off-chain storage from dozens of GB to around twenty-odd MB.
So the accurate way to say it isn’t “it used BitVM3,” but rather “it optimized costs along the BitVM3 roadmap.” Miss one word, and the meaning changes quite a lot.
Understanding the purpose of these two layers matters because it helps you not look in the wrong place when reading the data:
BTC staking scale ↓ tells you whether the base of the first layer is thick enough
Number of PoS chains connected ↓ tells you whether the security demand is genuine
Number of TBV borrowing transactions ↓ tells you whether the second layer actually works
As for the token BABY, it takes on functions like network gas, governance, and collateral security—i.e., it sits between these two layers. That also means its value can only be sustained if both layers see scale; having only one layer isn’t enough.
Of course, risks can’t be ignored either.
But then again, in any given track or trend, people who are willing to flip through a couple more pages of documentation when everyone else is just repeating the same official wording are simply not that many.
@BabylonLabs_io $BABY
#baby