The Bitcoin stack in Cosmos: How Nomic BTC bridge and Babylon Bitcoin timestamping work

Intro

The Cosmos ecosystem is full of innovative app-chains, built with sovereignty at their core. These projects seek to build their chains to serve a specific purpose, they wish to do on task, and be exceptional at it.

One example I can name are Osmosis, an AMM that provides an extremely good UX, and uses various different capital efficient features to create light amounts of slippage and distributes the value captured, back to Osmosis token stakers.

A few app-chain, that will be entering the Cosmos, are Nomic and Babylon. Both are providing Bitcoin related services, to bring both Bitcoin liquidity and security to the Cosmos ecosystem.

Nomic- Bitcoin bridge, bringing BTC to the Cosmos ecosystem. This bridge doesn’t use a standard multi-sig, it has validators that operate a large scale multisig, that requires consensus from all of the validators, to disperse funds on the Bitcoin blockchain side. Making this potentially one of the most secure Bitcoin bridges in existence with such a strict security framework on the Bitcoin side.

Other bitcoin forks such as Litecoin or Dogecoin, will likely be bridged from Nomic as well in the future.

The upgrade to bring in BTC via the Nomic bridge, was actually instituted on the 27th and finished up today. So if all is well, then we may have BTC in the Cosmos via a noncustodial network of validators. This will enable the ability to freely send BTC (nBTC is the official name of the wrapped token) to and from the Bitcoin mainnet with no KYC, or need to trust a third party.

Babylon- Bringing Bitcoin security to the Cosmos. Babylon is working to timestamp transactions, from Cosmos networks, to the Bitcoin Blockchain, to add an extra layer of security and data availability to Cosmos PoS blockchains. One of the big use cases that can come from BTC time stamping, will drastically reduced unbonding times. Many Cosmos chains have unbonding times between 14-28 days. However, Babylons service could bring down unbonding times to potentially be around 1 day or less, depending on the chain and it’s security preferences.

Conclusion

These two chains have work left to do, before they officially launch, however both plan to have mainnets in 2023. They lay the foundation to bring Bitcoin liquidity and security to the Cosmos ecosystem, without centralized sequencers or 5/8 multisig attack vectors. Creating secure, reliable and decentralized products to make the Cosmos more liquid, and secure than it is today.