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

• Bitcoin protocol Babylon completed its second staking round on Tuesday, increasing deposits to about 24,000 BTC ($1.5 billion) from about 1,000 BTC previously.
• The staking round was "duration-based," meaning it lasted for 10 Bitcoin blocks.

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.

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UPDATE (22:48 UTC): Adds comment from Babylon co-founder David Tse.

UPDATE (15:33 UTC): Adds comparison to DeFi data from DeFi Llama.