Babylon and Gomining Plan to Activate Up to 1,000 BTC via Trustless Vaults

Key Takeaways:

• Babylon and Gomining announced a Trustless Bitcoin Vault (TBV) integration for up to 1,000 BTC.
• BTC holders earn Gomining mining rewards via Babylon’s vaults without bridging, wrapping, or custody loss.
• Babylon holds 56,853 BTC in staking vaults and raised $15M from a16z crypto in January 2026.

How the Integration Works

Bitcoin owners will be able to lock their BTC into Babylon’s Trustless Bitcoin Vaults (TBV), a mechanism that holds bitcoin on its native blockchain under programmatic rules, without moving it off the Bitcoin network. From there, users can programmatically borrow and self-commit those locked funds to Gomining’s mining products, earning rewards from Gomining’s industrial-scale operations in the form of native bitcoin yield.

The key distinction, per the official announcement, is that users never wrap their BTC into a synthetic token, never bridge it to another chain, and never hand custody to a third party. The bitcoin remains onchain on the network throughout, with vault rules enforced at the protocol level rather than by a centralized operator.

David Tse, co-founder of Babylon, said the integration “extends the reach and adoption of TBV within a Bitcoin-aligned ecosystem,” while Mark Zalan, CEO of Gomining, added that the partnership “extends infrastructure to Bitcoin holders who refuse to compromise on self-custody.”

The initial rollout targets up to 1,000 BTC, approximately $82 million at current prices, committed through the aforementioned vault system.

Why It Matters for Bitcoin DeFi

The persistent challenge in Bitcoin decentralized finance ( DeFi) has been generating yield on BTC without compromising the properties that make it valuable, i.e. self-custody, onchain transparency, and censorship resistance. Wrapped bitcoin solutions, such as WBTC, require trusting a centralized custodian, and cross-chain bridges have repeatedly proven to be attack vectors, accounting for billions in losses across the broader crypto industry.

Babylon has been building around this constraint since its founding. Its staking protocol already holds 56,853 BTC in staking vaults, approximately $5.64 billion at current prices, making it the largest Bitcoin staking protocol by total value locked. The firm raised $15 million from a16z crypto in January 2026 to develop Bitcoin collateral infrastructure.