Bitcoin-Enhanced Proof-of-Stake Security: Possibilities and Impossibilities
Security researchers examine technical aspects of Bitcoin-Enhanced Proof-of-Stake Security: Possibilities and Impossibilities.
Summary
Context
Anusratas presents joint work on Bitcoin-enhanced proof-of-stake security, motivated by Ethereum's merge and PoS goals: lower energy, faster confirmation, and validator accountability.
Accountability limits
Accountable safety identifies at least one-third double-signing validators after conflicting finalizations, but evolving stake and posterior-corruption attacks—publish attack chains only after unbonding—block slashable economic penalties for late-joining clients.
Babylon architecture
Pair a PoS chain with Bitcoin as a data-limited timestamping server; periodic succinct commitments (block hash + aggregated BLS signatures) anchor unbonding order so late clients can reject post-unbond attack chains.
Properties and costs
Babylon claims slashable safety, optimal resilience bounds, and improved liveness (one-third to one-half); experiments used hourly OP_RETURN timestamps (~$10K/year at $0.90 fees), but fee spikes could push costs toward ~$360K, driving aggregation across chains.
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