Babylon Protocol vs Ethena

Babylon exports Bitcoin’s economic security to Proof‑of‑Stake networks by letting holders restake native BTC without wrapping. Validators lock BTC in time‑locked UTXOs; mis‑behaviour is punished via cryptographic slashing that burns the locked coins. A Cosmos‑SDK based testnet secured by Babylon went live in March 2024, paving the way for mainnet in late 2025 and integrations with EigenLayer and Berachain.

USDe is Ethena’s synthetic dollar backed by delta‑neutral ETH perpetual hedge positions rather than off‑chain treasuries. The collateral basket auto‑rebalances between spot ETH, LSTs and short perps so the net delta remains near zero, turning staking rewards and funding rates into protocol revenue. USDe launched on Ethereum in January 2024 and surpassed $2 billion supply within five months, with deep secondary liquidity on Curve and Bybit.