Bitcoin Protocol Babylon Pulls in $1.5B of Staking Deposits as Cap Lifted

Election 2024 coverage presented by
Babylon, a Bitcoin staking platform billed as a new way of providing the original blockchain’s security to new protocols and decentralized applications, pulled in about $1.5 billion worth of bitcoin on Tuesday after briefly opening to additional deposits.
The uptake could show robust demand for a growing decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem atop the 15-year-old Bitcoin blockchain, previously confined to alternative networks like Ethereum and Solana.
The incoming deposits should be enough to instantly vault Babylon to the top of the industry leaderboard for Bitcoin DeFi projects, with the Lightning Network a distant second at $321 million of collateral, based on DeFi Llama data. That’s still well below the overall DeFi projects, such as the Ethereum-based liquid staking platform Lido, with $23.7 billion of collateral, or EigenLayer, a retaking project on Ethereum, at $10.9 billion.
David Tse, Babylon’s co-founder, who also has an appointment as an engineering professor at Stanford University, told CoinDesk in an emailed statement that the inflows were “way beyond our expectations.”
According to Babylon staking dashboard, some 18,601 BTC had already been staked as of 20:03 UTC (4:03 p.m. ET), with an additional 5,419 BTC pending in the staking queue.
The cap was lifted for about 10 Bitcoin blocks over the course of one hour and 23 minutes, with the only restriction being that users could only stake up to 500 BTC per transaction. (Many transactions are typically included in each block.)
Because of that structure, the round of new staking deposits was described as “duration-based,” in a departure from the initial opening in August, where the cap was set at a fixed 1,000 BTC and filled up in an hour and 14 minutes.
Babylon’s aim is to allow proof-of-stake chains to acquire capital from the deep reserves stored in BTC.
It is one of a large number of initiatives aimed at introducing utility to Bitcoin – commonplace on networks such as Ethereum but historically largely absent from the world’s first blockchain.
The project turned heads in May this year when it completed a $70 million funding round, following an $18 million round the previous December.
Read More: Bitcoin’s Programmability Draws Closer to Reality as Robin Linus Delivers ‘BitVM2’
UPDATE (22:48 UTC): Adds comment from Babylon co-founder David Tse.
UPDATE (15:33 UTC): Adds comparison to DeFi data from DeFi Llama.
Edited by Bradley Keoun.

Disclosure
Please note that our privacy policy, terms of use, cookies, and do not sell my personal information have been updated.CoinDesk is an award-winning media outlet that covers the cryptocurrency industry. Its journalists abide by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk has adopted a set of principles aimed at ensuring the integrity, editorial independence and freedom from bias of its publications. CoinDesk is part of the Bullish group, which owns and invests in digital asset businesses and digital assets. CoinDesk employees, including journalists, may receive Bullish group equity-based compensation. Bullish was incubated by technology investor Block.one.
Bradley Keoun is the managing editor of CoinDesk’s Tech & Protocols team. He owns less than $1,000 each of several cryptocurrencies.
Jamie Crawley is a CoinDesk news reporter based in London.