How to Stake Bitcoin Natively | with David Tse

“99% of Bitcoin is held idle, not because of lack of interest, but because of lack of trust.”

Not long after Ordinals (and BRC20) revitalized the “Bitcoin DeFi” narrative, Babylon Labs seemingly leapt onto the scene with what felt like overnight success – locking several billion dollars of TVL in its “trustless Bitcoin staking” protocol.

With some of the most interesting advisors and contributors in the space (…seriously, what other projects can claim both Domo and Robin Linus as collaborators?), Babylon quickly became a “BTC-Fi” Goliath – converting both Bitcoin Season 2 types and formerly staunch ETH maxis alike.

In this episode, I sit down with creator David Tse to get the protocol's birth story - and learn how POS staking became the first truly trustless Bitcoin DeFi application in the world.

In this episode, we cover:

- Why smaller POS chains need better security… and how Bitcoin liquidity may be the answer to securing experimental chains in smaller ecosystems

- How David’s former experiences in the Cosmos ecosystem informed the core thesis of using Bitcoin to secure smaller chains

- A quick breakdown of Babylon’s staking architecture - and what exactly makes it “trustless”

- Babylon’s relationship with BitVM, and the team’s lesser known contributions to both BitVM2 and BitVM3 (Fun Fact: David Tse is Robin Linus's PhD advisor at Stanford 🧑‍🎓)

- Why Bitcoiners didn’t want to stake their Bitcoin for yield until now… and how the "trustlessness" thesis is already panning out (with 1 whale dropping a whopping 10K Bitcoin in the protocol just a few months back!)

Bitcoin Rails is powered by:

- Best In Slot — the leading API for Ordinals and BRC-20 data aggregation and indexing.

- Spark — a Statechains implementation advancing Bitcoin-powered payments.

- Citrea — the leading Bitcoin rollup technology and BitVM alliance contributor.

Timestamps

00:00 Intro

00:38 Bitcoin++ Insights

01:52 David’s Background and Information Theory

05:34 Journey into Bitcoin and Blockchain

07:34 Scaling Bitcoin with Prism Protocol

10:38 Babylon and Cosmos Ecosystem

13:51 Bitcoin Staking and Security Mechanisms

24:49 The Importance of Reputation in Crypto

25:51 Partners and Announcements Break

27:25 Profile of Babylon Stakers

29:17 The Grand Vision for Babylon

32:40 Garbled Circuits and Secret Revelation

44:05 Trustless Bitcoin Vaults and Future Prospects