Bitcoin Staking
For PoS chains seeking Bitcoin-grade security, this provides a practical, deployed solution with massive adoption, though it is an incremental extension of existing staking and merge mining concepts.
Bitcoin staking enables trustless use of idle Bitcoin to secure Proof-of-Stake chains, achieving automatic slashing via novel cryptographic techniques. The protocol was deployed on Babylon mainnet with over 58,000 BTC staked (~$4B) at 0.05% APR, reducing security costs by two orders of magnitude compared to native token staking.
The idea of security sharing goes back to Nakamoto's introduction of merge mining, a technique that enables Bitcoin miners to reuse their hash power to bootstrap and secure other Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchains. However, with the rise of Proof-of-Stake (PoS) chains, there is a need for new methods of Bitcoin security sharing. We introduce Bitcoin staking, a protocol that allows Bitcoin holders to trustlessly use their idle asset to secure a PoS chain. The key challenge is to enable automatic slashing of bitcoins on the Bitcoin chain upon safety violations on the PoS chain. We achieve this using double-authentication-preventing signatures, finality gadgets and bi-directional timestamping between Bitcoin and the PoS chain. Our design is entirely modular and can be integrated with any PoS chain. A version of this protocol was deployed to secure the Babylon mainnet in April 2025 and currently has over 58,000 bitcoins staked (about 4 billion USD at current prices) while paying only 0.05% APR reward to the stakers. This is 2 orders of magnitude cheaper security cost than in PoS chains secured by their native token.