OffChain Labs Unveils BoLD for Secure Layer-2 Transactions

OffChain Labs, the company behind Arbitrum, has unveiled its permissionless validation protocol called Bounded Liquidity Delay (BoLD) to enhance layer-2 Ethereum scaling.

Arbitrum, a layer-2 scaling solution, relies on Ethereum's security to ensure the accuracy of its state. Currently, Arbitrum utilizes Ethereum to verify the correctness of its network. It is still possible to withdraw funds from Ethereum even if Arbitrum experiences a temporary transaction halt when data is transferred from Arbitrum to Ethereum through a validating bridge.

In order to prevent fraudulent activities, the process is built-in with a delay of around seven days. During this period, whitelisted actors can challenge any claims they deem suspicious, which helps maintain the system's integrity.

However, permissioned approaches such as those described above pose challenges since users must rely on whitelisted validators, which are not always reliable. Placing trust in humans can lead to issues, such as delay attacks, where malicious actors use funds to prevent accurate confirmations, potentially locking users' funds indefinitely.

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BoLD Resolves the Present Challenges

OffChain Labs has developed BoLD as an evolution of Arbitrum's dispute system to address the current challenges. This protocol reportedly provides fixed upper bounds on Optimistic Rollups' confirmation times and ensures that a single honest party can win against multiple malicious claims.

Anyone who agrees with a state can defend it until a single disagreement is found. Since malicious actors cannot fabricate proofs of execution in the honest L2 state, honest parties will always prevail when participating.

The recent development has the potential to catalyze a price recovery for ARB, similar to the positive market response observed with previous releases by OffChain Labs.  Arbitrum is trading at $1.14, up 1.24% in 24 hours.

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What is Arbitrum:

Arbitrum is an Ethereum layer-2 network that allows developers to build and deploy highly scalable smart contracts for a low cost. Arbitrum chain will enable developers to use Web3 apps, deploy smart contracts, etc., but transactions will be cheaper and faster. The flagship product for the team, Arbitrum Rollup, is an Optimistic roll-up protocol that inherits Ethereum-level security.

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