We are proud to announce the successful completion of the Babylon Phase-2 mainnet launch!
Quick recap:
- On 10th April, the Babylon Genesis chain was successfully launched. BABY token staking was enabled on a number of tools and platforms to secure Babylon Genesis.
- On 11th April, Bitcoin’s third native use case - ‘Trustless and self-custodial staking’ was successfully activated in pilot mode. 1,000 BTC from Phase-1 were allowed to be registered to secure Babylon Genesis.
- On 24th April, the Bitcoin staking protocol became fully permissionless and started to accept both Phase-1 stakes and new stakes via the Babylon BTC Staking Dashboard and a number of third-party platforms.
As of today (8th May 2025), the system has been running successfully and smoothly for two weeks. The total amount of BTC staked has surpassed 50,000, with over 60% already activated to secure Babylon Genesis and receive staking rewards. Babylon Genesis is now among the most secure L1 blockchains in the world in terms of staking market cap.
This marks the successful bootstrap of Bitcoin staking. This is very important to the crypto industry because it can be used as a fundamental infrastructure to build useful decentralized applications wherever Bitcoin can be held or collateralized.
Bitcoin is a planet with tremendous potential, but is quite inaccessible. Babylon Genesis solves that by acting as a port that unlocks Bitcoin’s utilities and shares them with the rest of the world trustlessly, and in a technologically secure and highly-efficient way. Staking security is just the first utility it unlocks. Being technologically secure and trustless, the Babylon Genesis port will be able to unlock and serve the arguably biggest potential utility of Bitcoin: access to its trillion-dollar liquidity.
With the Phase-2 launch, a solid foundation for this port is laid out. Besides being secure, Babylon Genesis can be:
- highly modular, which will allow other networks to integrate and become Bitcoin Supercharged Networks (BSNs) in Phase-3
- interoperable with other networks (such as ETH, ETH rollups, and any Cosmos-SDK based chains), allowing a broad range of tokens and assets (including USDC) to be safely bridged to and from Babylon Genesis.
- gaining traction with on-chain DeFi, with both DEX (Tower) and liquid BABY staking protocols (such as Satlayer, Escher, and Milkyway) successfully launched.
This launch has been a combined, shared success amongst all of the projects that have contributed to Babylon Genesis!
For the next two quarters, the Babylon Labs team will:
- work on technical upgrades of the Bitcoin staking protocol to enable Bitcoin multi-staking and the integration of BSNs, i.e., the Phase-3 launch. The integrated BSNs might reward stakers for security with staking rewards.
- double-down on the R&D of trustless Bitcoin liquidity.
- technologically support on-chain ecosystem growth
- continue to improve Babylon Genesis’ performance and usability. This includes:
- advancing the execution environment (i.e., the virtual machine, currently Wasm)
- developing token factory module for streamlined native token and asset issuance on Babylon Genesis
- solutions reducing block time for faster transaction execution
- developing more bridging features for even more secure, broader, faster, and affordable inter-chain connectivity
Closing Remarks
The successful completion of Phase-2 demonstrates that Bitcoin staking can operate securely, permissionlessly, and at scale. With the foundation now in place, Babylon Genesis is positioned to expand its functionality, support further network integrations, and continue developing infrastructure for the next phase of Bitcoin’s utility.
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