★ Sudden admin-rescue/ACL change without discussion
Babylon Protocol's assessment for RD-F-123 — scored yellow on the v1.7.0 rubric. The evidence below is the curator's reasoning for this score.
Evidence summary #
Babylon Genesis chain uses Cosmos SDK x/gov for all software upgrades and parameter changes — V2 upgrade (2025-06-12 proposal, 2025-06-16 execution), V4 upgrade, and all chain parameter changes go through public governance votes with discussion. No unilateral admin key for chain upgrades. This is a strong positive. However, the covenant committee composition (Babylon Labs holds 3/9 keys = 33.3%) is NOT governed by on-chain BABY governance and was not ratified by community vote. Phase-2 covenant-committee.json in bbn-1 repo confirms same 7-org composition as Phase-1, but no governance forum thread proposing or ratifying this composition was found. The covenant committee is a privileged access surface (co-signs unbonding and slashing transactions for $4.16B of staked BTC) whose composition was selected and announced unilaterally by Babylon Labs. No threshold reduction, emergency override, or malicious ACL change event identified. Yellow (not red) because: committee technically CANNOT ste
Sources #
- URL
- Governance Docs — Babylon Foundation ForumBabylon Foundation governance docs forum postretrieved 2026-05-04
- bbn-1 covenant-committee.json — Phase-2 compositionPhase-2 covenant committee JSON (bbn-1)retrieved 2026-05-04
Methodology #
Determine whether any admin-rescue function or ACL change was committed to the repo or executed on-chain without corresponding public discussion in issues, PRs, or governance forum.
See the full factor methodology and distribution across all protocols →