Securing Juno transactions and reducing unbonding periods with Babylon integration
With the rapid development of new dapps, interoperability and smart contract implementation are increasingly important for blockchains to allow for different applications to interact.
Babylon is proud to announce its testnet is integrated with Juno, an open-source permission-less PoS blockchain in the Cosmos ecosystem that enables developers to build and efficiently launch smart contracts by eliminating many of the obstacles that hinder other smart contract ecosystems, including high fees, centralized governance and poor scalability.
This collaboration will provide the Juno network with improved transaction security as well as the option of lower bonding periods. With Juno’s vision to be the Interchain Incubator for decentralized interoperable applications, Babylon offers Juno Bitcoin-level security that enables it to be one of the most secure yet interoperable smart contract network.
Securing Cross-Chain Smart Contracts
Babylon’s integration enhances Juno’s infrastructure and security, benefiting Juno’s community that uses and creates interoperable applications on the network.
As Juno strives to become a robust L1 for cross-chain smart contracts, it is focused on solving common smart contract L1 bottlenecks such as scalability, interoperability and runtime performance. As the Interchain Incubator, Juno is exploring faster block production that increases Transactions Per Second (TPS) that speeds up the development of new application types.
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 Juno by allowing Juno blocks (and the transactions therein) to be time stamped onto the Bitcoin network.
In addition, Babylon’s integration preserves Juno’s sovereignty, fast block speed, as well as its high TPS.
Lower Unbonding Period, Improved Flexibility
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 chain 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 Juno in terms of stake unbonding is a secure and reliable unbonding process regardless of how long or short Juno desires.
Beside secure and reliable unbonding, the Babylon integration also enables other features for Juno users. For example, Juno users may wait for BTC confirmation for their high value transactions, the same way you may prefer sending a large sum of capital through wire transfer that takes 3 days despite the option of an instant online transfer. Babylon gives the Juno developers and community the freedom and option to choose the latency-security tradeoff.
Ultimately, Babylon’s integration offers Juno composable and enhanced security, leveraging Bitcoin timestamping to secure transactions that take place on Juno.
