PANews reported on February 12 that according to The Block, Offchain Labs, the developer of the Arbitrum project, has implemented the Bounded Liquidity Delay (BoLD) protocol, a dispute resolution protocol that allows "permissionless verification" on its Layer 2 ecological chain and improves the decentralization and security of the network. After approval by a governance vote, BoLD is now activated on Arbitrum's One and Nova chains. The system replaces the validators in the previous permission list with a permissionless mechanism, open to anyone interested in network security.
Offchain Labs said that for many years, verification on optimistic rollups has been complicated. Even with the existence of a fraud proof mechanism, the chain could still theoretically be vulnerable to denial of service attacks, and malicious validators could repeatedly delay withdrawals and status confirmations. This means that verification must remain permissioned and security requires strict control over who can participate, which is a necessary compromise but may limit decentralization. The launch of the BoLD protocol changes this, and now anyone can make state assertions on the chain, creating an open system.
BoLD modernizes the fraud proof system used in optimistic rollups by introducing an interactive, time-limited dispute resolution mechanism. This ensures that disputes on the Arbitrum ecosystem chain will be resolved within approximately 12 days. The most important feature is that by allowing anyone to verify transactions and challenge assertions, BoLD abandons the permission-based validator system, thereby promoting a more decentralized and open verification process.
