Bitcoin Staking & Timestamping
Last updated
Last updated
The Side Chain will enable Bitcoin stakers to validate transactions on the Side Chain and sign votes for valid blocks. Leveraging Bitcoin Timestamping, the Side Chain will record hashes and signatures on the Bitcoin chain. These functionalities will be facilitated through our integration with our partner, Babylon, which adopts a remote staking approach to ensure fully slashable PoS security. Their blockchain serves as the checkpoint aggregation and data availability service, timestamping the Side Chain to Bitcoin to resist long-range attacks and enable fast unbonding, reducing unbonding periods to a few hours.
The IBC Relayer (go implementation) maintains the IBC protocol connection between Babylon and Side Chain. Its responsibilities include updating the Side Chain's light client within the Babylon blockchain to enable checkpointing and propagating checkpoint information to the Babylon smart contract deployed within the Side Chain.
A smart contract will be deployed on Side Chain to enable Bitcoin Checkpointing functionality without introducing invasive changes in the codebase of the Side Chain. Based on the Bitcoin Checkpointing functionality, the Side Chain can make decisions based on the inclusion of its checkpoints in the Bitcoin ledger (e.g. execute BTC-assisted unbonding requests).
