On Wednesday afternoon, I was in the office debugging code when Old Zhou, who’d been working on contract development, suddenly sent me a message: “Have you looked at Babylon’s slashing mechanism? EOTS can only catch double-signing. In a lending scenario, if the borrower defaults, it’s not really a signature conflict. How does this logic even get applied?”
I opened Babylon’s technical documentation and read through the two materials on EOTS and BitVM3 side by side. I found that they’re actually two solutions to the same problem, and the second one is a complete pivot.
EOTS’s logic is concise: the Finality Provider signs two different blocks at the same height, the private key is exposed, and the staked BTC is destroyed. In the PoS double-signing scenario, it forms a perfect closed loop. But it can only handle one kind of malicious behavior: “double signatures.” The Babylon whitepaper also admits: “slashing for penalizing consensus-protocol fault conditions is far more complex than slashing for double-signing fault conditions.” The Tendermint forgetfulness attack can’t be expressed as a double-signing attack.
BitVM3 changed the way of thinking. “A Bitcoin-side construction family that lets a zero-knowledge proof generated off-chain be verified by Bitcoin’s existing script capabilities.” Instead of trying to “catch contradictory signatures,” it has both parties lock their secrets into a garbled circuit. If someone lies in the proof, the other side can use that circuit to expose the lie.
The essence of this shift: expanding from “targeting a specific behavior pattern” to “targeting any verifiable false statement.” The first scheme is a specialist—it only treats double-signing. The second scheme is a generalist—so long as it can be encoded into a statement whose truth can be verified, it can be applied. That’s why what used to be limited to staking scenarios can now extend to lending, stablecoin minting, and perpetual contracts. It’s not that more application scenarios are coming—rather, the underlying penalty logic itself has evolved from a specialist to a generalist.
Babylon co-founder David Tse has publicly stated that the system has used BitVM3 to make native Bitcoin “the first time it can serve as collateral for Ethereum lending in a trustless way.”
From EOTS to BitVM3, from catching and verifying double-signatures to verifying any false statement. Do you think this evolution path can explain where Babylon’s technical roadmap has actually gone?
The above is only my personal view and does not constitute investment advice. Do you have a different perspective? Feel free to discuss in the comments.
#baby $BABY @BabylonLabs_io
I opened Babylon’s technical documentation and read through the two materials on EOTS and BitVM3 side by side. I found that they’re actually two solutions to the same problem, and the second one is a complete pivot.
EOTS’s logic is concise: the Finality Provider signs two different blocks at the same height, the private key is exposed, and the staked BTC is destroyed. In the PoS double-signing scenario, it forms a perfect closed loop. But it can only handle one kind of malicious behavior: “double signatures.” The Babylon whitepaper also admits: “slashing for penalizing consensus-protocol fault conditions is far more complex than slashing for double-signing fault conditions.” The Tendermint forgetfulness attack can’t be expressed as a double-signing attack.
BitVM3 changed the way of thinking. “A Bitcoin-side construction family that lets a zero-knowledge proof generated off-chain be verified by Bitcoin’s existing script capabilities.” Instead of trying to “catch contradictory signatures,” it has both parties lock their secrets into a garbled circuit. If someone lies in the proof, the other side can use that circuit to expose the lie.
The essence of this shift: expanding from “targeting a specific behavior pattern” to “targeting any verifiable false statement.” The first scheme is a specialist—it only treats double-signing. The second scheme is a generalist—so long as it can be encoded into a statement whose truth can be verified, it can be applied. That’s why what used to be limited to staking scenarios can now extend to lending, stablecoin minting, and perpetual contracts. It’s not that more application scenarios are coming—rather, the underlying penalty logic itself has evolved from a specialist to a generalist.
Babylon co-founder David Tse has publicly stated that the system has used BitVM3 to make native Bitcoin “the first time it can serve as collateral for Ethereum lending in a trustless way.”
From EOTS to BitVM3, from catching and verifying double-signatures to verifying any false statement. Do you think this evolution path can explain where Babylon’s technical roadmap has actually gone?
The above is only my personal view and does not constitute investment advice. Do you have a different perspective? Feel free to discuss in the comments.
#baby $BABY @BabylonLabs_io