Bitcoin protocol Babylon completed its second staking round on Tuesday, increasing the amount of deposits to around 24,000 BTC ($1.5 billion) from around 1,000 BTC previously. Staking rounds are “period-based”, meaning they last for 10 Bitcoin blocks.
Babylon, the Bitcoin staking platform touted as a new way to provide the security of the original blockchain to new protocols and decentralized applications, is worth about $1.5 billion on Tuesday after temporarily accepting additional deposits. withdrew Bitcoin.
This uptake could signal robust demand for the growing decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem on the 15-year-old Bitcoin blockchain, which was previously limited to alternative networks such as Ethereum and Solana. be.
The incoming deposits should be enough to instantly catapult Babylon to the top of the industry leaderboard of Bitcoin DeFi projects, and based on data from DeFi Llama, the Lightning Network will be able to secure 2 with $321 million in collateral. It follows the rank. This is still significantly lower than DeFi projects overall, including Ethereum-based liquid staking platform Lido, which has $23.7 billion in collateral, and EigenLayer, a retake project on Ethereum, with $10.9 billion.
Babylon co-founder David Tse, who is also a professor of engineering at Stanford University, told CoinDesk in an emailed statement that the inflows were “far beyond our expectations.”
According to the Babylon Staking Dashboard, as of 20:03 UTC (4:03 PM ET), approximately 18,601 BTC has already been staked, with an additional 5,419 BTC waiting in the staking queue .
It took about 1 hour and 23 minutes to lift the cap on approximately 10 Bitcoin blocks, with the only restriction being that users could only stake up to 500 BTC per transaction. (Each block typically contains many transactions.)
Due to its structure, the new staking deposit round is described as “period-based”, unlike its original launch in August, where the cap was set at a fixed 1,000 BTC and filled in 1 hour and 14 minutes. I did.
Babylon’s purpose is to allow proof-of-stake chains to obtain capital from the rich reserves stored in BTC.
This is one of many efforts aimed at introducing utility to Bitcoin, common on networks such as Ethereum but historically largely absent from the world’s first blockchain. did.
The project attracted attention when it completed a $70 million funding round in May of this year, following an $18 million funding round in December of the previous year.
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UPDATE (22:48 UTC): Added comment from Babylon co-founder David Tse.
UPDATE (15:33 UTC): Added comparison with DeFi data from DeFi Llama.
This article was originally published on Coindesk
