On Wednesday evening, the technology director Mr. Wang forwarded a popular science piece about BitVM3. When he read the line “Assets stay put; proofs come first,” his finger paused above the keyboard.
Babylon actually has something interesting: the native $BTC can participate in DeFi without bridging, and more than 56,000 BTC have already earned yield through this mechanism. Throughout the entire process, BTC never leaves the Bitcoin mainnet; it’s locked inside Taproot scripts jointly signed by depositors. The design philosophy really earns the label “Bitcoin’s secure network.”
But once you break down what the “no-bridge” architecture truly means, the problem emerges.
Babylon’s core idea is “Assets stay put; proofs come first.” All staking credentials rely on cryptographic proofs for transmission; there’s no third-party middle ledger for proof-of-record storage. After BTC is locked, it generates verifiable cryptographic proofs. Those proofs are used to tell the Babylon network that a specific amount of BTC has participated in shared security. The PoP signature is the necessary credential for BTC to be delegated for creation and for the finality provider to register. The only path out of the vault is for a ZK proof to be verified successfully on the Bitcoin chain. Cryptography shifts security from “I believe this multisig address is hard to attack” to “I believe mathematical proofs can’t be forged.”
However, cryptography’s airtightness doesn’t automatically mean absolute safety for the execution chain. Babylon’s codebase has previously exposed a vulnerability in cryptographic signature verification. Another vulnerability allows a malicious verifier to deliberately omit the block hash field during BLS voting expansion, triggering a consensus processor panic. If cryptographic proofs are corrupted or generated abnormally, users have no third-party ledger to roll back, no intermediate records to audit. Once a proof fails, the staking state can’t be externally verified, the assets can’t be redeemed, and there’s no technical basis for pursuing rights.
Cryptographic proofs can’t be forged, but they can be damaged, bypassed, or generate anomalous states via exploited vulnerabilities. When the proof itself becomes the only credential, and the proof goes wrong, what can users use to prove they own that BTC?
The above is only my personal opinion and does not constitute investment advice. Do you think “Assets stay put; proofs come first” is an upgrade in trust—or does it push users into a bottomless abyss where there’s no evidence? Feel free to discuss it in the comments.
#baby $BABY @BabylonLabs_io
Babylon actually has something interesting: the native $BTC can participate in DeFi without bridging, and more than 56,000 BTC have already earned yield through this mechanism. Throughout the entire process, BTC never leaves the Bitcoin mainnet; it’s locked inside Taproot scripts jointly signed by depositors. The design philosophy really earns the label “Bitcoin’s secure network.”
But once you break down what the “no-bridge” architecture truly means, the problem emerges.
Babylon’s core idea is “Assets stay put; proofs come first.” All staking credentials rely on cryptographic proofs for transmission; there’s no third-party middle ledger for proof-of-record storage. After BTC is locked, it generates verifiable cryptographic proofs. Those proofs are used to tell the Babylon network that a specific amount of BTC has participated in shared security. The PoP signature is the necessary credential for BTC to be delegated for creation and for the finality provider to register. The only path out of the vault is for a ZK proof to be verified successfully on the Bitcoin chain. Cryptography shifts security from “I believe this multisig address is hard to attack” to “I believe mathematical proofs can’t be forged.”
However, cryptography’s airtightness doesn’t automatically mean absolute safety for the execution chain. Babylon’s codebase has previously exposed a vulnerability in cryptographic signature verification. Another vulnerability allows a malicious verifier to deliberately omit the block hash field during BLS voting expansion, triggering a consensus processor panic. If cryptographic proofs are corrupted or generated abnormally, users have no third-party ledger to roll back, no intermediate records to audit. Once a proof fails, the staking state can’t be externally verified, the assets can’t be redeemed, and there’s no technical basis for pursuing rights.
Cryptographic proofs can’t be forged, but they can be damaged, bypassed, or generate anomalous states via exploited vulnerabilities. When the proof itself becomes the only credential, and the proof goes wrong, what can users use to prove they own that BTC?
The above is only my personal opinion and does not constitute investment advice. Do you think “Assets stay put; proofs come first” is an upgrade in trust—or does it push users into a bottomless abyss where there’s no evidence? Feel free to discuss it in the comments.
#baby $BABY @BabylonLabs_io