Babylon Labs raises $15 million from a16z crypto to build trustless BTC collateral

Babylon Labs said in a blog post Wednesday that it has raised $15 million from a16z crypto to develop and scale its Babylon Trustless BTCVaults, infrastructure intended to let native bitcoin serve as on-chain collateral.

The company said the funding will be used to advance the core technology behind BTCVaults and support integration with external applications that require verifiable, non-custodial bitcoin collateral. a16z crypto will also provide strategic input based on its experience investing in blockchain infrastructure. The platform's BABY token was higher by 13% after the a16z investment, the post said.

Babylon described BTCVaults as a system that allows bitcoin to be locked on the Bitcoin base layer while remaining verifiable to external systems, using cryptographic mechanisms to enforce conditions such as unlocking or liquidation rather than custodial control or wrapped representations.

The company framed the development as a response to growing institutional use of bitcoin as collateral and said BTCVaults are intended to support borrowing, lending and other collateralized products across decentralized and traditional financial systems. The blog post did not specify a timeline or list integration partners.

Key Topics

Crypto, Babylon Labs, Btcvaults, Bitcoin, Baby Token, Non-custodial Collateral