David Tse and his co-authors have achieved a significant milestone as their latest research paper has been accepted by the 2023 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, recognized as the world's leading security conference.
This paper serves as the foundation of Babylon, a revolutionary protocol designed to enhance the security of Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchains.
This article discusses the security issues inherent in Proof-of-Stake (PoS) chains and proposes a new protocol called Babylon, which uses an off-the-shelf PoS protocol to checkpoint onto the Bitcoin blockchain to address these issues. The article explains that PoS chains are energy-efficient and have fast finality, but are susceptible to non-slashable long-range safety attacks, low liveness resilience, and difficulty in bootstrapping from low token valuation. The Babylon protocol reduces the stake withdrawal delay from weeks to less than 5 hours, at a transaction cost of less than 10K USD per annum for posting the checkpoints onto Bitcoin.
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