Today we are excited to announce that Union will become interoperable with Babylonchain, the project that brings Bitcoin’s security and timestamping capabilities to PoS chains. This means that Union will be the transporter of all assets and LSTs in and out of Babylonchain through its hyper-efficient interoperability layer secured by ZK proofs.
Introducing Union
Union is a hyper-efficient zero-knowledge infrastructure layer that provides:
General Message Passing
Asset Transfers
NFT Bridges
DeFi Interoperability
By leveraging advanced zero-knowledge cryptography and BLS signatures, Union solves the limitations faced by existing interoperability solutions. Rather than relying on external validators, oracles, multi-signatures, or other trusted third parties, Union validates the entire chain consensus in zero-knowledge. This results in faster and more secure bridging for projects across thousands of chains.
ZK Consensus Verification: Verifies chain consensus without external trust, maintaining the highest level of security.
Unprecedented Efficiency: Generates zk proofs on consumer-grade hardware, a breakthrough in scalability and cost efficiency.
Sub-second Transfer Times: Through the use of intents and state lenses, Union targets near-instant transactions in and out of Babylonchain.
Any Execution Environment: Union can transfer assets across ecosystems, including EVM, MoveVM, BitVM, and Cosmos.
Union’s ultimate vision is a frictionless web of chains—where security, performance, and user experience scale together without compromise.
Introducing Babylonchain
Babylonchain is a Layer 1 that turns Bitcoin’s proof-of-work timestamping and censorship-resistant block space into a security layer to empower PoS chains to benefit from Bitcoin’s unmatched robustness.
Bitcoin Timestamping: Provides succinct, verifiable timestamps for PoS blockchains, reinforcing data integrity and mitigating reorg risks.
Bitcoin Staking: Allows participants to trustlessly stake BTC for additional security, fusing economic weight with PoS mechanisms.
Babylon wishes to extend Bitcoin from a store of value into a foundational element of decentralized security. Their Shared Security Protocol seamlessly integrates Bitcoin’s PoW into PoS ecosystems, helping them counter potential attacks and ensuring a trust-minimized foundation.
What This Integration Means
Through this collaboration, Union will seamlessly transfer all Babylon assets and CW20-based liquid staking tokens (LSTs) to every chain Union is connected to. Here’s what this means:
Heightened Security: Through consensus verification, Union provides Babylon users with top-tier security—no additional trust assumptions required.
Privacy & Reliability: The integration features Union’s latest MPC-powered proving system, enhancing both privacy and reliability.
Full Suite of Union’s Latest Features: Union’s latest R&D efforts will be unlocked, such as:
State Lenses for seamless message passing, even to L2s like Arbitrum.
Intents, enabling asset transfers in and out of Babylonchain in an average of 2 seconds
Interop for LSTs: Union will also be able to move any CW20-based LSTs originating on Babylon to other chains, including launch partners such as Berachain and Movement, extending liquidity and utility across the broader DeFi ecosystem.
This integration is already fully functional on Union Testnet 9 and will be open to public testing shortly. Union commends Babylon’s modern infrastructure, which greatly simplified the technical collaboration.
Cor Pruijs, CTO of Union Labs had this to say:
“We couldn’t be more excited to add Babylonchain to our network. Thanks to Babylon’s CosmWasm support, we can unlock our full feature set—from State Lenses for seamless cross-chain messaging to Intents for faster-than-finality transfers. The integration is already live on Testnet 9, and we’ll open it to the public soon for users to test out. Babylon’s modern stack made the entire process seamless.”
Clayton Menzel, Head of BD at Babylon Labs said:
“We’re excited to see Union integrate with Babylonchain to bring Bitcoin’s security and timestamping capabilities into their ZK-powered interoperability layer. This collaboration aligns with Babylonchain's aim to unlock Bitcoin’s potential as a foundation for decentralized security, and Union’s technology will help increase the liquidity and utility for Babylon assets across the broader decentralized ecosystem.”
Testnet Quests & BSN Support
To commemorate this launch and test the integration, Babylon achievements will be added to the Union Dashboard. These will include onchain missions, such as transferring assets between Babylonchain and Union Testnet. Make sure to sign up on dashboard.union.build to stay up to date for when these missions go live.
The core teams are also exploring how Union’s Layer 1 can benefit from the Babylon Bitcoin Staking protocol by becoming a Bitcoin-Secured Network (or BSN) in anticipation of its mainnet launch. More details to be announced soon.
Union looks forward to empowering Babylon’s ecosystem with secure, speedy cross-chain connectivity. Together, we’re laying the foundations for a more interconnected blockchain ecosystem—one that combines Bitcoin’s unparalleled security with trustless modularity.
Subscribe to the Union Newsletter for regular updates, follow @union_build, and join the Union Discord to be part of this new chapter in decentralized innovation.
Follow Babylon Labs for information and updates on Babylonchain on 𝕏/Twitter, Discord, and LinkedIn.