januszgrze

i write research about bitcoin l2s and related infra. most of the time calling out their marketing departments.

@januszgrze's bio

bitcoin staking is where users lock their funds in an l1 utxo. they put some metadata in the staking transaction that lets another system see that this bitcoin is allocated to some validator to improve their influence over a proof of stake network. in proof of stake, more money means you have either 1) have a higher chance to win the right to build/propose a block 2) control over which blocks get added to the chain by validating it

the promise of bitcoin staking is to secure networks with bitcoin, the asset. the argument is that bitcoin goes up, and inflationary shitcoins go down. thus, we should use bitcoin to secure other blockchains

however, in current implementations, bitcoin provides no security to the networks is "staked" to. for example, in Babylon Genesis (a proof-of-stake l1 secured by the BABY token) bitcoin stakers do not build, propose, or validate Babylon Genesis blocks

they instead provide something that is known as a "finality signature" over a block. this signature isn't to validate the blocks contents, or that the block was built correctly. it's simple a signature that says "yes, we recognize that this block has been built and committed to the chain per the chains' consensus rules because the chain's validators said so"

the problem with this finality signature, however, is that if it was not provided over a block, the proof-of-stake blockchain would continue to make progress. this means that if bitcoin stakers all went offline, the network itself would remain unaffected in practice. the bitcoin staker finality signature is simply a view of finality that other people have to recognize for it to be valuable

in addition to staking, Babylon Genesis checkpoints bitcoin with a timestamp. this timestamp divides the network into epochs (groups of time) where validators can be added, and removed, from the chain. this is helpful for proof of stake networks because it protects them from malicious validators unbonding quickly and starting a malicious fork that tries to rewrite the state. the chain is not reversable past the bitcoin checkpoint

now, many think that this checkpoint is produced by bitcoin stakers. it isn't. it's produced by the chains validators and committed to bitcoin by a relayer.  and, if bitcoin stakers go offline, the checkpointing mechanism still continues. there's no liveness failures.

therefore, we can see that the bitcoin staking is a social view of finality. it doesn't really provide any security and the chain is not really reliant on stakers for anything other than an arbitrary finality signature

lastly, networks that connect to babylon for bitcoin staking do not connect to bitcoin stakers directly. the contracts are set up to where messages between stakers must route through the babylon genesis chain (secured by baby tokens) from bitcoin to the network itself. therefore these "bitcoin supercharged network" are completely reliant on an honest 2/3s of babylon genesis validators, weighted based on BABY stake, to receive a message that bitcoin stakers signed off on their blocks

this post is not meant to say babylon is bad or whatever. you can decide that for yourself. it's to point out that, while bitcoin stakers themselves retain custody of their funds, the service they provide to other blockchains is not very valuable in its current form. checkpointing is a much better security property and doesn't require paying fees/token issuance to bitcoin stakers

in my opinion, after reviewing the code and documentation, i don't think it provides much benefit

to introduce myself, i'm janusz. i'm known for writing about new bitcoin l2s and projects who claim to be bitcoin l2s. people like that i debunk stuff i guess