I wanted to know what happens in the gap between when a finality provider's real backing changes and when the protocol admits it changed. So I traced how Babylon's x/epoching module actually processes a new delegation.
Staking and unstaking messages don't execute immediately. They queue for the length of an entire epoch, then get processed in one batch at the boundary. Until that boundary hits, the chain's finality voting power reflects the old snapshot, not the current one. A finality provider could be losing delegations in real time, could be economically hollowing out mid epoch, and still vote with the weight it had before anyone withdrew.
That's not a bug. It's the tradeoff for batching thousands of BTC-backed delegations into one settlement instead of processing each individually. But it means the crypto-economic security backing a given block isn't the security that exists right now. It's the security that existed as of the last checkpoint, carried forward on trust that nothing material changed in between.
I kept comparing this to how a credit line actually works. Your limit doesn't update the instant your income changes. It updates on a cycle, and in between, the bank is extending trust based on a number that's already slightly wrong. Babylon does the same thing with Bitcoin's weight, just with better cryptography wrapped around the wrongness.
I don't think this breaks the model. Fast unbonding, roughly two days, keeps that window short compared to typical PoS chains. But short isn't zero, and the part worth watching isn't the token price. It's how wide that epoch window gets as the validator set scales.
$BABY @BabylonLabs_io #baby $ON $BTC
Staking and unstaking messages don't execute immediately. They queue for the length of an entire epoch, then get processed in one batch at the boundary. Until that boundary hits, the chain's finality voting power reflects the old snapshot, not the current one. A finality provider could be losing delegations in real time, could be economically hollowing out mid epoch, and still vote with the weight it had before anyone withdrew.
That's not a bug. It's the tradeoff for batching thousands of BTC-backed delegations into one settlement instead of processing each individually. But it means the crypto-economic security backing a given block isn't the security that exists right now. It's the security that existed as of the last checkpoint, carried forward on trust that nothing material changed in between.
I kept comparing this to how a credit line actually works. Your limit doesn't update the instant your income changes. It updates on a cycle, and in between, the bank is extending trust based on a number that's already slightly wrong. Babylon does the same thing with Bitcoin's weight, just with better cryptography wrapped around the wrongness.
I don't think this breaks the model. Fast unbonding, roughly two days, keeps that window short compared to typical PoS chains. But short isn't zero, and the part worth watching isn't the token price. It's how wide that epoch window gets as the validator set scales.
$BABY @BabylonLabs_io #baby $ON $BTC