Babylon

Unlocking 21 Million ₿ to Secure the Decentralized Economy

Babylon provides a suite of security-sharing protocols between Bitcoin and the PoS world. It provides two inter-connected protocols:

• Bitcoin timestamping: Submits succinct and verifiable timestamps of any data (such as PoS blockchains) to Bitcoin.
• Bitcoin staking: Enables Bitcoin holders to provide economic security to any decentralized system through trustless (and self-custodian) staking.

System requirements

This system spec has been tested by validators and found to be comfortable:

• Quad Core or larger AMD or Intel (amd64) CPU
• 32GB RAM
• 1TB NVMe Storage
• 100MBps bidirectional internet connection

You can run Babylon on lower-spec hardware for each component, but you may find that it is not highly performant or prone to crashing.

Build and install

To build and install, you need to have Go 1.21 available. Follow the instructions on the Golang page to do that.

To build the binary:

make build

The binary will then be available at ./build/babylond .

To install the binary to system directories:

make install

Documentation

For user-facing documents, please visit docs.babylonchain.io. For technical documents about high-level designs of Babylon, please visit docs/README.md. Each module under x/ also contains a document about its design and implementation.

Joining the testnet

Please follow the instructions on the User Guides.

Contributing

The docs directory contains the necessary information on how to get started using the babylond executable for development purposes.