In the Babylon official documentation, I stared for a long time at the words “without bridging.” How do you give a PoS chain security with slashing penalties without using a cross-chain bridge? Even Bitcoin Script can’t read external state. @BabylonLabs_io
How is slashing carried out? The answer is in EOTS. The official EOTS Manager documentation makes it clear: if a Finality Provider signs two conflicting blocks at the same height using the same nonce (random number), the private key will be exposed, leading to slashing. After slashing, the Provider’s voting power is immediately set to zero and can never be recovered. I read through this logic three times before I finally understood it completely.
Trustless Bitcoin Vaults are even more worth a closer look. In the Abstract of the Bitcoin Staking Litepaper, the original wording is: “Bitcoin holders can trustlessly stake their bitcoins without bridging them to the PoS chain but yet provides the chain with full slashable security guarantees”. Each Vault is essentially a Taproot UTXO controlled by three parties: the holder’s private key, a timelock, and a Covenant Committee multisig. According to the official blog, as of October 2025 Babylon completed its first Trustless Bitcoin Vaults experiment, successfully lending USDC on the Ethereum mainnet using native BTC.
But there’s one problem I still can’t wrap my head around. The Covenant Committee is a specific set of nodes, not a fully decentralized validator set. Whether slashing happens and who gets to execute it is, in practice, decided by the Committee. Is this really trust-minimized, or is it trust simply wearing a new shell? The positioning of the BABY token also makes me uneasy. The official Tokenomics documentation shows that the initial total supply of BABY is 10 billion, with an annual inflation rate of 5.5%. Although BABY is the Gas token for Babylon Genesis—used for transactions and governance—if it’s only used for governance or secondary incentives, the inflation pressure is still significant.
I don’t view Babylon as just another restaking narrative. It welds “inactivity” and “programmability” together—the trade-off is that it hands some decision-making power to the Committee. When you look at the protocol, do you first stare at the TVL numbers, or do you first pick apart the underlying trust assumptions? #baby $BABY
How is slashing carried out? The answer is in EOTS. The official EOTS Manager documentation makes it clear: if a Finality Provider signs two conflicting blocks at the same height using the same nonce (random number), the private key will be exposed, leading to slashing. After slashing, the Provider’s voting power is immediately set to zero and can never be recovered. I read through this logic three times before I finally understood it completely.
Trustless Bitcoin Vaults are even more worth a closer look. In the Abstract of the Bitcoin Staking Litepaper, the original wording is: “Bitcoin holders can trustlessly stake their bitcoins without bridging them to the PoS chain but yet provides the chain with full slashable security guarantees”. Each Vault is essentially a Taproot UTXO controlled by three parties: the holder’s private key, a timelock, and a Covenant Committee multisig. According to the official blog, as of October 2025 Babylon completed its first Trustless Bitcoin Vaults experiment, successfully lending USDC on the Ethereum mainnet using native BTC.
But there’s one problem I still can’t wrap my head around. The Covenant Committee is a specific set of nodes, not a fully decentralized validator set. Whether slashing happens and who gets to execute it is, in practice, decided by the Committee. Is this really trust-minimized, or is it trust simply wearing a new shell? The positioning of the BABY token also makes me uneasy. The official Tokenomics documentation shows that the initial total supply of BABY is 10 billion, with an annual inflation rate of 5.5%. Although BABY is the Gas token for Babylon Genesis—used for transactions and governance—if it’s only used for governance or secondary incentives, the inflation pressure is still significant.
I don’t view Babylon as just another restaking narrative. It welds “inactivity” and “programmability” together—the trade-off is that it hands some decision-making power to the Committee. When you look at the protocol, do you first stare at the TVL numbers, or do you first pick apart the underlying trust assumptions? #baby $BABY