Babylon: Bitcoin Security for All

shall I start okay good afternoon everybody thanks for coming um yeah so today I'm going to give a talk on a use case for Bitcoin so we know Bitcoin is the most valuable asset in the crypto system but we can also view it as a public good to be used for other blockchains so that's what the talk is about so let's talk a little bit about the history of the blockchain space so we start with Bitcoin that's the first blockchain what's so good about blockchain about Bitcoin well one thing good about it is it's really secure it has never been attacked before very good track record now is there another blockchain which is equally secure as Bitcoin what do you think well we're at East Denver so I guess there is one this ethereum also a very secure blockchain now there's one difference between Bitcoin and ethereum though that that has a lot of work on scaling ethereum huge amount of work research engineering work in particular we know that there are these row UPS which allow us to scale with ethereum to a high throughput and a lot of research a lot of cryptography has been gone into developing technology to make this grow up not only scalable but inherit the full security of ethereum so a lot of these engineering and research about how to share the security of ethereum while being with these row UPS the recent development with coinbase issuing a new grow up base adds another dimension to this feature set of ethereum the gobian interoperability so now you have a lot of Roll-Ups scaling but now they have to talk to each other and that's what super chain is targeted for all right so now what we're seeing here is a lot of activities in the ethereum ecosystem building towards a system with security scalability and interoper business okay good so here's a thought is there a different way of building such a system in fact there is an ecosystem out there which has some of these features already in operation and this is the cosmos ecosystem so we know that ethereum went through the merge a few months ago but actually Cosmos ecosystem is one of the early ecosystems with proof of stick protocols it started about three or four years ago so in this ecosystem it is called the interchained ecosystem it's also called app chains application specific chains by the way can people actually hear me it would be a bit disaster to talk for 20 minutes and nobody can hear you okay this is one of the noisiest place I've ever driven a talk before in my life okay so if I could give a talk here and capture attention a little bit I think I made it okay all right so Cosmos have all these app chains and therefore there's built-in scalability because all these app chains are running in parallel to each other focusing on their own application they are also interoperable because there's a very important technology in Cosmos called IBC how many people have heard of IBC oh good interim blockchain communication it's like the internet tcpip for the internet okay it's analogy so you already have a system with these two features knowing that but each blockchain it has its own sovereignty so their own governance their own community what is missing in this ecosystem however is security because these chains are smaller the market cap is smaller the security is lower okay so a year ago we made this observation that there is this very exciting ecosystem with a lot of these features already but what is missing is security and so we're building a project we build a project which marries Bitcoin to this ecosystem using Bitcoin as a public good for security okay so you can think of there are quite a few projects that tries to build on bitcoin to make it more interesting more useful yes our approach is actually to take an existing flourishing ecosystem already and try to borrow the security from Bitcoin to enhance the security of this ecosystem so that's the difference between our approach okay to take an existing ecosystem and add Bitcoin Security on top of it okay it's a bit weird you know when you design protocols you usually start with security but now we have all the other features as well we don't have security and now I'm adding Security on top of it okay all right so you may ask so why do we take Bitcoin to do security sharing well there are two pretty good reasons one is that it is a proof of work chain so being a proof of work chain it is different security model the improval stick we suggest that combining proof of work improval state can give you a richer system because of diversity and complementary benefits of this particle so I'll give an example of that second it is 400 plus billion asset so if you think about Economic Security is incomparable okay there's no chain with such a high asset as I mentioned 14 years of track record of security so I think these two reasons are pretty good to think of Bitcoin as a source of security for securing app chains okay all right our project actually started with the first one proof of work combined proof of stake so I will show you a little video explaining why a proof of blockchain like Bitcoin can actually improve the security of proof of stake chains okay then I'll go back to how what we're building to extract the security good all right now you don't have to listen to me anymore [Music] in a blockchain blocks are validated through primarily one of two mechanisms proof of work or proof of stake each has strengths and weaknesses for example a proof of work chain like Bitcoin is extremely secure but it also consumes lots of energy and has a slow confirmation rate proof of stake is faster and more energy efficient due to the fact its validators stake tokens instead on the surface this appears to make proof of stake a more attractive option but it's not quite so simple because of the lack of work to support its security proof of stake chains have many more attack vectors than proof of work chains through intensive research the design of proof-of-stake protocols has been improved to repel many of these attack vectors but one attack Vector remains stake reuse attack all proof of stake chains suffer from this attack this is where an attacker can reuse its stake to build an attack chain after unstaking on the correct chain the solution to this is called social consensus where the community of users agree on the correct chain before unstaking is allowed however this is far from rigorous and very slow meaning validators who want to unstake tokens Can Wait a long time typically 21 days for a cosmos Zone suddenly proof of stake doesn't feel quite as fast or efficient an alternative to social consensus is the use of an external secure blockchain to timestamp proof-of-stake blocks this way the correct chain is established as rigorously as the chain with the earlier timestamps for example a secure blockchain like Bitcoin can confirm a timestamp in a matter of hours meaning unstaking can happen much faster unfortunately bitcoin's low throughput is a major barrier to this happening for many proof-of-stake chains and mass adoption of this technique would undoubtedly cause major scalability issues but what if we could remove this barrier and make the best of both worlds to create a better blockchain Babylon timestamp aggregation service which Bridges the security of Bitcoin to multiple proof-of-state consumer chains at the same time designed to transform the way proof of stake chains communicate with Bitcoin Babylon works by aggregating the timestamps of multiple proof-of-state consumer chains and then uniquely submitting them as one to bitcoin the size of these Bitcoin stamps is also minimized through cryptographic techniques meaning the footprint of Babylon on the Bitcoin network is extremely small and does not scale with the number of consumer chains the outcome a brand new solution that combines the Energy Efficiency and speed of proof of stake with the enhanced security of proof of work [Music] Babylon the future of proof of stake how is that voice better right than my voice so I had a choice of British or American accent I think I chose the right one all right so yeah so that's the starting point of our project the last year we've been building this technology and we've just launched I'll test it okay so I was gonna do a live demo here but given the environment I decided not to do that so if you're interested please go to our website and you can check out our internet our Explorer of the test net so I'll show a screenshot to walk you through a little bit what's going on here all right so as the video said Babylon is using this technology called time stamping okay so in nakamoto's white paper he mentioned the following fact he or she or they mention the following fact that the Bitcoin chain is a Time stamping server it time stamps Bitcoin transactions to make sure that everything is in the right order what we're doing is we're using the same idea but to timestamp proof of stake blocks like Cosmos chain blocks and what this technology is doing is we're building a cosmos chain called Babylon we have bit one which time stamps on to bitcoin and it allows many Cosmos chains to timestamp on to Babylon and using the timestamp from Babylon you get a single timestamp so that not every chain has the timestamp to pick on directly Bitcoin is very firstly about sort of putting a lot of stuff on the Bitcoin chain okay all right so right now on the Tesla we have eight Cosmos chains these are all application specific chains or time stamping onto Babylon now you may think well this time standing is a very complicated if I want to timestamp if I want to go to Babylon to get Bitcoin timestamp do I need to like do a lot of stuff no if you are a cosmos change then you can simply open an IBC connection into blockchain communication connection to Babylon and once you do that actually IBC automatically for some magical reason that we discovered due to time stamping for you and so therefore what we're doing now is we are getting a timestamp of every block of every one of these chains so every chain has a Bitcoin timestamp saying hey this block was created at this time according to the Bitcoin chain and so for example if you want to do unbonding then you can say okay I I've sent it and burning request in a blog times them onto Bitcoin chain where there's a hundred block deep for example very very deep then it's very secure the unburning request cannot be reverted and then you can safely unborn and that takes about 16 hours 100 by 16 hours so this is the current numbers here 16 0.39 and Bunny hours compared to 21 days on a typical Cosmos chains and compared to Infinity on ethereum Infinity right now there's no unbonding yet when there's unbonding it will be slow all right so this is how the timestamping works so now in addition to unbonding facet bonding which is averaging likes that nobody wants to wait 21 days when they can Import in 16 hours uh uh more generally you can think of this Bitcoin time stamping as giving you additional security in addition to your native proof of Stack chain how does this work all right so on the left is a uh one of our partnership osmosis it is time stamping to Babylon in the middle and time stamping to bitcoin so that every blog gets a Bitcoin timestamp okay so this is a Bitcoin timestamp one two three here so in a osmosis chain you first get osmosis confirmation okay so this is the confirmation is economic security of Osmosis validators about 400 million osmosis validators the stake is about 400 million okay compared to ethereum it's not much 40 million okay so you say hey this is okay for normal transaction but suppose I have a very important high value transaction maybe I should wait until the Bitcoin miners weigh in to make sure that this is confirmed so I wait until I get BTC one confirmation that means one block has built by the timestamp I said okay that's not quite enough let's wait a little bit longer until I get btc2 confirmation now coinbase would confirm a Bitcoin translation when it's too confirmed too bloody so this is coinbase level trust confirmation so this is very secure so this is a way to get Economic Security from Bitcoin and now even wattage when we were talking to wallet you integrate with wallet our service then in addition to telling you that a transaction is successfully confirmed on the osmosis chain it will also tell you that it has which is a confirmation zero one two so that you look at it you want to say hey good my one million the osmo token Transformer transaction is now confirmed I'm sure it's gotten to the chain no problem okay all right so you can do the same thing for IBC relay so if you want to transfer funds from one change to another chain you can also put this confirmation Bitcoin confirmation into the wallet okay so so going back to the question of reducing the native economic cost so basically you can think of there are many attack vectors out there long range attack I mentioned which is the unbonding attack double spend attack which is the four king invalid execution you create money from nothing or Library should store the chain or you do censorship okay so all these attacks let's see how Bitcoin security can protect you which kinds of attack can protect you it can protect long range attack I already earlier it can also protect double spec type because whenever there's a 4K event the timestamp will save you however in value execution Bitcoin can I help you because when you create money Bitcoin miners don't know what you're doing they don't execute transaction here however with new technologies like zero knowledge or fraud proofs this can solve this problem so this is a short-term problem not a long-term problem so therefore actually with Bitcoin security all is left is your concern that your change should remain live and so basically just roughly the cost of running the validators to keep the chain moving okay so last year osmosis security cost in terms of taking reward is 50 million the cost which goes to the validators of run network is about 2.5 million so you can see that with Bitcoin security there's a pretty big range you can reduce the security cost and that would allow the inflation of the coin to lower so this is very healthy for the tokenomics of the chain okay that's it so that's our project and this we have a team of uh this is our team of engineers and researchers all around the world and if you want to find out more about the project you can go to our website or follow us on Twitter okay uh thank you any do you have time for one or two questions baby so the concern is that so the question is what happens if your timestamp get re-arged out because in Nakamoto consensus blocks can get re-out yeah so the way to prevent it or minimize the chance of that is to make sure that your timestamp is deep enough in the Bitcoin chain so for example for the unsticking we wait until it's a hundred block deep there has never been a hundred block re-org on the Bitcoin chain so that's the yo so the question is what happens if you wait six blocks right coinbase only weigh two blocks so if it's good for coinbase it's good for me all right thank you very much