Securing IRISnet’s PoS chain and reducing unbonding periods with Babylon integration
While many blockchains have been built to provide services to individuals, few to none in the Cosmos network are solving the problems of narrow performance or unstructured governance mechanisms. making it challenging for dapps to assist real-world distributed business collaboration.
Babylon is proud to announce its testnet integration with IRISnet, a service infrastructure and protocol built to enable cross-chain interoperability and provide modules to support distributed business systems. The integration with Babylon will secure IRISnet with Bitcoin's timestamping technology, providing an additional layer of Bitcoin security to the network. Additionally, Babylon’s innovative approach also allows for PoS chains to significantly reduce their secure stake unbonding time from weeks to as little as a few hours.
Securing the infrastructure for distributed business systems
IRISnet’s main goal is to provide a decentralized, service-oriented infrastructure and network for small to medium companies offering a variety of services in the Cosmos ecosystem, aka a distributed business system. Doing so requires the integration of business services and interoperability of these services across different chains. An example of this would be supporting client-side tools such as a smart wallet that enables cross-chain multi-asset storage.
A key aspect of Babylon is its ability to leverage Bitcoin Timestamping Protocol and timestamp events of other blockchains onto Bitcoin. Bitcoin is considered the most secure blockchain. Its mighty PoW mining power provides reliable and irreversible timestamps to Bitcoin transactions. The result yields irreversible timestamps — immutably ordered list of transactions and, thus, an immutable ledger. Babylon brings Bitcoin security to IRISnet by allowing IRISnet blocks (and the transactions therein) to be time stamped onto the Bitcoin network. Babylon effectively allows IRISnet to borrow Bitcoin's security as a timestamping server.
More Flexibility with a Lower Unbonding Time
Babylon’s Bitcoin timestamping protocol also enables fast stake unbonding, which generally takes 2-3 weeks in the Cosmos ecosystem. Unbonding periods generally last weeks because they serve as a trust period where users can return to the chain and safely re-synchronize to the chain knowing any attacks that may have occurred while they were away will have already been slashed. Within a shorter period, attackers could fool users with an attack chain that has reversed some of the transactions.
Unbonding requests on the Cosmos chains typically takes 21 days. Using Bitcoin security, users only need to wait until the Bitcoin timestamp of the unbonding request transaction to be confirmed on Bitcoin with sufficient depth (e.g., 100 Bitcoin blocks), which only takes about one day. However, Babylon’s integration removes the need for a long trust period because once you have Bitcoin timestamps, users can easily discern the normal chain from the attack chain, which will have a later Bitcoin timestamp.
In addition, Babylon makes timekeeping of the unbonding process reliable by using the BTC block time (10mins a block), which is not always achievable by Tendermint alone even if everyone is honest. Therefore, what the Babylon integration brings to IRISnet in terms of stake unbonding is a secure and reliable unbonding process regardless of how long or short IRISnet desires.
About IRISnet
IRISnet (a.k.a IRISHUB) is an Interchain NFT Hub tailored for next-generation dApps. Built using the Cosmos SDK, it facilitates cross-chain interoperability of NFTs, services, and on/off-chain systems. Named after the Greek goddess Iris, the project aspires to bridge the gap between blockchains and real-world business systems, much like Iris connects the earth and the heavens.
A trailblazer in innovative technologies, IRISHUB was the first to create the IBC connection with Cosmos Hub, implement NFT technology in Cosmos, and manage NFT assets via Interchain Accounts.
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About Babylon
Babylon is a project that designs security protocols for the decentralized world. Babylon’s origins come from a research paper about Bitcoin security co-authored by co-founder of Babylon David Tse, a professor at Stanford and Ethereum 2.0 researcher, and the founder of EigenLayer Sreeram Kannan, and their colleagues. The project is led by a team of consensus protocol researchers from Stanford and experienced layer 1 engineers from around the world.
Babylon's mission is to scale Bitcoin to secure the decentralized world. To achieve this, Babylon utilizes the three primary facets of Bitcoin: Bitcoin as an asset, its reliable timestamping service, its most censorship-resistant blockspace in the world,. To leverage these facets, Babylon is developing three innovative security-sharing protocols: Bitcoin Staking Protocol, Bitcoin Timestamping Protocol, and Bitcoin Data Availability Protocol. Through these pioneering protocols, Babylon envisions a more secure and decentralized future.
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