What opportunities will the cooperation with Babylon bring to B² Network? On March 26, B² Network announced a strategic partnership with babylon_chain. B² Hub, the core component of B² Network, will enhance its security by integrating Babylon's BTC pledge.
B² Network is an EVM-compatible Bitcoin second-layer network based on Bitcoin's zero-knowledge proof verification commitment, and adopts a modular blockchain design architecture. In January this year, B² Network successfully completed a seed round of financing from well-known investors such as HashKey Capital, OKX Ventures, IDG, KuCoin Ventures, ABCDE, Waterdrip Capital, OGs Fund and Antalpha.
Babylon is a scalable Bitcoin security protocol that brings Bitcoin security to all PoS blockchains. Babylon has also completed financing from many leading institutions, including Binance Labs, Polychain Capital, Hack VC, Framework Ventures, Polygon Ventures, Castle Island Ventures, OKX Ventures, Finality Capital, Breyer Capital and Symbolic Capital.
How will Babylon bring security to the B² Network?
First, let’s understand how B² Network works:
B² Network is divided into the Rollup layer and the DA layer. B² Hub acts as a core hub, receiving data and proofs from ZK-Rollup.
On the one hand, it stores the transactions and detailed data of the Rollup layer in the DAS protocol and distributed storage protocol of B² Hub, and writes the data proof into Tapscript and submits it to Bitcoin to ensure data availability;
On the other hand, it verifies the ZK proof of ZK-Rollup, generates a commitment of the verification process, submits it to Bitcoin, allows challengers to challenge, and finally completes the verification of state transition.
It can be seen that B² Hub is the core security component of B² Network.
B² Hub is a PoS blockchain network that ensures the security of B² Hub through validators of staked assets (BTC and B² tokens), and guarantees the data availability of Rollup and the validity of state transitions through B² Hub validators.
Babylon will bring higher security. Let’s take a look at its security mechanism:
Extractable One-Time Signatures EOTS: If the same private key is used to sign two different blocks at the same block height, the private key is exposed. That is, if there is a security violation (such as double spending) during the pledge verification process, the pledged Bitcoins will be destroyed;
Final signing round: A block is considered final only when it receives EOTS signatures from more than 2/3 of the Bitcoin stakes.
Bitcoin Timestamp Protocol: Babylon can use the blocks of the PoS chain as checkpoints for BTC and implement the fork selection rule using an earlier Bitcoin timestamp. In this way, either the attacking fork will have a later timestamp in the Bitcoin canonical chain and will never be chosen by anyone, or in order to be chosen, the attacker will have to create a very long Bitcoin fork in which the attacked PoS fork has an earlier timestamp, which is economically impractical. Therefore, with BTC timestamps, long-range attacks are resolved.
So how does Babylon help enhance the security of the B² network?
Babylon’s Bitcoin Staking Protocol: Each block is voted by the final provider of staked Bitcoins via an Extractable One-Time Signature (EOTS) vote through the Babylon Staking Protocol.
At the same time, in the B² Hub, the next Epoch will check the previous block and become a checkpoint through Babylon's Bitcoin timestamp protocol to prevent long-range attacks.
The final confirmation of blocks in the B² Hub requires two checkpoints:
After passing the verification of B² Hub, Rollup completes the first confirmation;
B² Hub submits the DA proof and state transition verification commitment to Bitcoin, and after the challenge period, Rollup completes the final confirmation.
From the perspective of project ecology, this cooperation between the two parties will show that once the underlying security is guaranteed, B², as a modular BTC L2, will have strong scalability, and many BTC projects will be built based on B².
From the perspective of liquidity, after the cooperation between the two, B² Rollup will be able to support a wider range of BTC DeFi activities, such as supporting LSD-related projects to use BTC staking and re-staking activities, while also providing more liquidity for users who participate in Babylon Bitcoin staking. More abundant liquidity will bring a more prosperous B² ecosystem.
From the perspective of user asset income, participating in B² network staking can obtain B² network token rewards on the one hand. When the Babylon BTC staking mainnet is launched, BTC users will not only have the multiple benefits of re-staking BTC, just like holding ETH, but will also receive protocol token rewards from the two protocols.
Therefore, taken together, this cooperation between the two parties is a rare exploration of the BTC DeFi ecosystem with unlimited potential from the perspective of underlying security, ecological development, liquidity, and user income.
