Babylon has raised $18 million to develop a protocol that lets users put up bitcoin to secure proof-of-stake blockchains.

Polychain Capital and Hack VC led the round, which also drew participation from Framework Ventures, Polygon Ventures, and OKX Ventures.

Bitcoin’s continued price run has coincided with growing dry powder deployment in mining companies. But Babylon’s raise points to investor interest in something beyond funding GPUs: finding new use cases for bitcoin.

Babylon originated in a blockchain lab at Stanford. It spun up a novel way to stake bitcoin as an economic security token on blockchains that use proof-of-stake to reach consensus. Proof-of-stake chains typically use…

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