“Bitcoin Enters MasterChef… and Gets Told, ‘The Recipe Is Too Easy’”
The stage is set for MasterChef Crypto.
The judge picks up the microphone: “Contestant Bitcoin, today your challenge is to cook a dish called ‘Native Collateral.’ The ingredients must stay completely native—no wrapping, no bridges, and no trusted intermediaries!”
Bitcoin stands at the cooking station, looking nervous.
“In the past, this recipe required BitVM3 with 42 GiB of storage for every garbled circuit… it was way too complicated!”
Suddenly, Head Chef VladDegen (DeFi Product Lead at Babylon) walks onto the stage with a smile.
“Deposit native Bitcoin as collateral. It's not so difficult!”
The recipe may look simple on the surface, but behind it is some seriously advanced engineering.
Trustless Bitcoin Vaults (TBV) are powered by BABE – Verifying Proofs on Bitcoin Made 1000× Cheaper.
Storage requirements and setup costs are reduced by three orders of magnitude using witness encryption and garbled circuits optimized for elliptic curve scalar multiplication, making practical Groth16 proof verification possible directly on Bitcoin Script. @BabylonLabs_io
The system also uses a cut-and-choose protocol: 307 candidate instances are generated on the public testnet, with the six most secure ones selected.
Peg-in now takes only around 90 minutes.
More than 2,000 vaults have already been successfully deployed during the first two months of the public testnet.
A challenge period of approximately three days provides additional security, with a WOTS-based self-claim fallback available if needed. Bitcoin looks at the camera while dropping native $BTC into a Taproot-powered vault and says:
“So I can keep my Bitcoin fully native—no bridge, no wrap, no intermediary—and still use it as collateral to borrow on Aave v4?!” VladDegen nods.
“Exactly. The public testnet is live. Step into the kitchen and try it yourself—the recipe has been optimized to be easier than ever.”