Ankr and Babylon Launching First Bitcoin Staking Solution

Kevin Dwyer

Kevin Dwyer

February 29, 2024

3 min read

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Unlocking 21 Million BTC To Secure PoS Networks

Ankr is extremely excited to announce our collaboration with Babylon in the launch of their new trustless BTC staking protocol that extends bitcoin’s security to all participating Proof-of-Stake protocols!

What Is the Babylon Staking Protocol?

Babylon’s Bitcoin Staking Protocol will enable PoS systems to introduce bitcoin as a staking asset and enjoy higher crypto-economic security than what native tokens can provide. As a result, PoS systems will be able to utilize Babylon’s trustless scalable staking features to unlock value from the idle, unencumbered $1 trillion Bitcoin ecosystem.

Babylon’s BTC staking protocol also enables BTC stakers to trustlessly “restake” their tokens in a principle similar to EigenLayer, allowing them to earn multiple layers of yield while proliferating cryptoeconomic security across networks.

How Is Ankr Collaborating With Babylon?

Ankr will create liquid staking tokens (LSTs) for the bitcoin staked via Babylon. The LSTs will then be issued on PoS chains secured by the BTC staking protocol. For stakers, this means their BTC will be locked on the bitcoin blockchain while new LSTs are minted on the PoS chain they chose to provide security for. In this way, both security and liquidity is provided to the PoS chains.

The collaboration will also include Ankr’s involvement in running validators on the Babylon testnet and building advanced security infrastructure to support Babylon nodes and finality providers. As one of the industry’s most experienced staking infrastructure providers, Ankr’s validation and LSTs will provide a solid foundation for bitcoin staking to power yields for millions of global BTC holders while securing an array of PoS ecosystems.

Quotes from the Co-Founders On Creating BTC Staking

“As the industry finds innovative new ways to secure blockchain networks while utilizing all available capital to its full potential, Ankr is proud to take its place in the technical implementation of Babylon’s bitcoin staking and restaking mechanics. This will be an incredibly powerful protocol for both the bitcoin community to earn yield while they hold BTC as well as the Web3 developer community to tap into a trillion dollars worth of capital to secure the next generation of apps and use cases,” said Chandler Song, Ankr’s Co-Founder and CEO.

“We believe our collaboration with Ankr will ignite a new era of Bitcoin-secured decentralized economies. By enabling PoS systems to utilize Bitcoin as a staking asset, we are pioneering a pathway for the trillion-dollar Bitcoin economy to contribute to the security of PoS systems,"  said Fisher Yu, Co-founder of Babylon.

More BTC Staking News On the Way!

LSTs are an increasingly important way to spread cryptoeconomic security across protocols without the traditional capital inefficiency of Proof-of-Stake. As a key add-on feature of Babylon, LSTs will be essential for onboarding BTC TVL into other chains and ecosystems for easy use in DeFi and other applications.

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