BabylonChain Inc.

Babylon, a blockchain protocol built on the Cosmos SDK, aims to leverage the security of Bitcoin to enhance the security of Cosmos zones and other Proof-of-Stake chains. The project is developed by a team of consensus protocol researchers from Stanford and experienced layer 1 developers from around the world. At its core, Babylon is designed to use Bitcoin as a source of trust and a reliable timestamping service to benefit other blockchains in the broader ecosystem. By using Bitcoin's immense hash power and reliable timestamping capabilities, Babylon can significantly enhance the security of smaller blockchains, without compromising their autonomy. Technology & Use Cases: Babylon's technology supports several use cases, including fast stake unbonding, bootstrapping new zones, protecting important transactions, and censorship resistance. Babylon can reduce unbonding periods from 21 days to 5 hours, bootstrap new zones with low token valuation, protect important transactions while providing fast finality to normal transactions, and allow transactions that are censored to be backed up in the ledger. Babylon offers core primitives and protocols that use timestamp information to realize these use cases, ensuring maximum security for the blockchain ecosystem. Architecture: The Babylon architecture consists of three components with two levels of checkpointing, including Bitcoin as the timestamping service, the Babylon chain as the middle layer, and other Cosmos zones as the consumers of security. The Babylon chain aggregates the checkpoint streams of many consumer zones and receives checkpoints from the consumer zones via Inter Blockchain Communication (IBC). It checks for the availability of the data behind the checkpoints of the consumer zones to prevent an attacker from timestamping unavailable data.