Paper 2022/076 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2022/076 ↗
Babylon: Reusing Bitcoin Mining to Enhance Proof-of-Stake Security
Abstract
Bitcoin is the most secure blockchain in the world, supported by the immense hash power of its Proof-of-Work miners, but consumes huge amount of energy. Proof-of-Stake chains are energy-efficient, have fast finality and accountability, but face several fundamental security issues: susceptibility to non-slashable long-range safety attacks, non-slashable transaction censorship and stalling attacks and difficulty to bootstrap new PoS chains from low token valuation. We propose Babylon, a blockchain platform which combines the best of both worlds by reusing the immense Bitcoin hash power to enhance the security of PoS chains. Babylon provides a data-available timestamping service, securing PoS chains by allowing them to timestamp data-available block checkpoints, fraud proofs and censored transactions on Babylon. Babylon miners merge mine with Bitcoin and thus the platform has zero additional energy cost. The security of a Babylon-enhanced PoS protocol is formalized by a cryptoeconomic security theorem which shows slashable safety and liveness guarantees.
Metadata
- Available format(s)
PDF- Category
- Applications
- Publication info
- Preprint.
- History
- 2022-01-20: last updated
- 2022-01-20: published
- Short URL
- https://ia.cr/2022/076
- License
- https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
BibTeX
@misc{cryptoeprint:2022/076,
author = {Ertem Nusret Tas and David Tse and Fisher Yu and Sreeram Kannan},
title = {Babylon: Reusing Bitcoin Mining to Enhance Proof-of-Stake Security},
howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2022/076},
year = {2022},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/076}
}