Exclusive interview with Babylon: Raised $96 million in financing and focused on Bitcoin security pledge

Author: Climber, Golden Finance

When the crypto market is caught in a general decline of copycats and Meme coins vs. VC coins, there are still a number of projects that are working hard and waiting for the bull market to come. Babylon is a typical representative, intending to lead a new cycle of Bitcoin ecological narrative.

Bitcoin fundamentalists believe that Bitcoin is gold and you should hold it. In the world of PoS (proof of stake), holding coins means making money. The general principle is that pledgers lock up personal tokens and become validators of the PoS system. The protocol maintains the integrity of the pledge process through a reward and confiscation mechanism.

The Bitcoin pledge protocol launched by Babylon can transform native Bitcoin into a pledgeable asset of any PoS system, releasing the $1.5 trillion value of 21 million BTC. This vision also allowed Babylon to win $96 million in financing for three consecutive years. The former founder of Polygon even said that Babylon was seriously underestimated compared with projects like Eigenlayer.

In view of this, Golden Finance interviewed Trudy Liuu, the partnership lead of Babylon. Through Q&A, we learned about the value of Babylon built by the internal staff of the project and the technical principles that enable them to balance the stability and security of Bitcoin asset pledge.

1. Golden Finance: First of all, congratulations to Babylon for completing a large financing of US$70 million recently. Please briefly introduce Babylon and the team members of the project.

Trudy: Babylon is a set of security sharing protocols that brings the unparalleled security of Bitcoin to the decentralized world. The latest protocol Bitcoin Staking allows Bitcoin holders to pledge their Bitcoin to provide cryptoeconomic security for the PoS (Proof of Stake) system in a trustless and self-custodial manner.

Babylon was founded by David Tse, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Stanford University professor, a pioneering electrical engineering expert and a renowned Stanford University professor, as well as a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a renowned blockchain security expert. He is the recipient of many prestigious honors, including the IEEE Claude E. Shannon Award and the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal.

Dr. Fisher Yu is a co-founder: an expert in blockchain security and cryptography, participated in the creation of a startup, led the R&D and products of Dolby Laboratories, a postdoctoral fellow in blockchain security at the University of Southern California, has more than 15 co-authored patents and more than 20 high-impact academic papers, and is an advisor to top blockchain projects, including Cardano.

In addition, we have a team of dozens of developers, researchers, and industry experts from different countries.

2. Golden Finance:What factors prompted your team to decide to create and develop this project? What are the challenges faced in the development of the project?

Trudy:Babylon is bringing Bitcoin's security and decentralized properties to Proof of Stake (PoS) blockchains and Rollups by creating the first native Bitcoin staking protocol. This solves two huge challenges - it allows Bitcoin holders to earn returns without trust for the first time, and enables PoS networks to bootstrap and diversify chain security in an affordable way.

3. Golden Finance:Babylon is positioned as a Bitcoin staking protocol, so how does the project work specifically? What are its operating mechanisms and principles?

Trudy:We have successfully used existing Bitcoin scripts and advanced cryptographic primitives to simulate Bitcoin's staking and forfeiture. In other words, we have managed to build a minimalist Bitcoin staking contract that resides on the Bitcoin chain, similar to how smart contracts reside on other blockchains.

You only need to lock your Bitcoin in a self-custodial manner according to our protocol. The locked Bitcoin becomes available for staking and forfeiture, while also enjoying all the popular staking benefits in the PoS world.

4. Golden Finance:For BTC pledgers, the most important thing is the security of the pledged assets. How do you ensure the security of user assets? And how do you design the pledge yield?

Trudy:The Babylon Bitcoin Equity Protocol allows Bitcoin holders to lock Bitcoin in self-custody. This process has no third-party bridge and is permissionless.

In addition, we also have:

1. Coinspect team. They are the top security company in the field of Bitcoin-related security, especially Bitcoin scripts, which is also the core key technology to protect Babylon Bitcoin pledge. Their clients include ZCash, Ledger, RSK, etc.

2. Zellic team. They are also involved in building the next version of the Babylon code. The Zellic team has a unique white hat hacker background and is a security expert for top infrastructure projects such as Aptos, LayerZero, MystenLabs and Osmosis.

5. Golden Finance:The project white paper mentions that Babylon follows a remote equity pledge method, and you overcome the lack of smart contracts in the Bitcoin chain by combining encryption technology, consensus protocols, and Bitcoin scripting language. So how do you achieve this process?

Trudy:Unlike most other blockchains, the Bitcoin chain gives up programmability in exchange for stability. You can't simply write code (such as smart contracts) to instruct the Bitcoin chain how to verify evidence of malicious behavior and confiscate relevant Bitcoin stakeholders. In layman's terms, the Bitcoin chain doesn't know how to be an enforcer of diplomatic affairs.

What Babylon wants to build is a trustless and non-custodial Bitcoin pledge protocol. To do this, people must find a way (through code) to teach the Bitcoin chain how to properly handle pledges and confiscations (i.e., using the Bitcoin scripting language).

6. Golden Finance:Please introduce the current progress of the project. What are the outstanding data performances so far? For example, TVL, ecological projects, interactive data, etc.

Trudy:Currently, the Babylon ecosystem involves multiple track projects such as BTC L2s, DeFi, Liquid (Re)staking, Wallet & Custodians, Cosmos Ecosystem, Finality Provider, Rollup Infrastructure, etc., with a total of 87 partners.

7. Golden Finance:In the current Bitcoin ecosystem, there are many projects in each track, especially the Bitcoin L2 track. Where do you think Babylon's advantages lie? What is the connection between Babylon and Bitcoin L2?

Trudy:Babylon is a set of security sharing protocols that brings Bitcoin's unparalleled security to the decentralized world. The latest protocol, Bitcoin staking, enables Bitcoin holders to stake their Bitcoin in a trustless and self-custodial way, providing cryptoeconomic security for the PoS (Proof of Stake) system. Babylon can provide Bitcoin security for Bitcoin L2.