SatLayer on Babylon

SatLayer leverages Babylon Genesis to power shared security with Bitcoin

What is Babylon

Babylon Genesis is a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain built using the Cosmos SDK, making it a part of the broader Cosmos ecosystem. Babylon Genesis will also be the first Bitcoin-secured network (BSN) in the Babylon ecosystem.

What sets Babylon apart is its security model: instead of solely relying on its own token and validators for security, Babylon has an extra guarantee secured by Finality Providers who stake native Bitcoin. This native Bitcoin remains on the Bitcoin network, but can still be slashed if a Finality Provider acts maliciously.

Babylon employs extractable one-time signatures (EOTS) to achieve such slashing. EOTS is a cryptographic technique that allows any third party to extract the private key of a Bitcoin wallet, if that wallet attested to a double-spend or fork attack. Thus, when a validator acts maliciously, the staked Bitcoin can be slashed as a penalty.

How Babylon secures native Bitcoin on its chain

Building SatLayer on Babylon

How SatLayer fits into the Babylon ecosystem

SatLayer is a set of core smart contracts, written in CosmWasm, and will be deployed onto Babylon Genesis. CosmWasm is a Turing-complete smart contract platform that allows for highly customizable smart contracts. This flexibility allows SatLayer to implement advanced security features, including tailored slashing mechanisms to penalize specific types of malicious behaviors on the network.

These custom slashing mechanisms are crucial for applications such as oracles, data availability platforms, bridges, and decentralized exchanges, as their security requirements extend beyond basic equivocation attacks like fork attacks or double spends. As a result, we cannot use extractable one-time signatures alone to secure these types of applications, instead we must use Turing-complete smart contracts.