Arbitrum Unveils BoLD Protocol to Tackle Delay Attacks

Ethereum Layer-2 scaling solution Arbitrum has proposed a new challenge resolution protocol called BoLD (Bounded Liquidity Delay) to boost its ecosystem.

The Arbitrum team first put forward the proposal on January 6.

The Arbitrum DAO has now opened an on-chain final vote on the BoLD proposal. At the time of writing, the proposal had received unanimous support from the Arbitrum community, with 99.79% voting in favor of it.

However, only less than a million people have voted out of the total 201.5 million so far. The voting will close on January 24.

The BoLD protocol aims to enable permissionless validation and protect against delay attacks.

“While Arbitrum chains today benefit from working fraud proofs, BoLD introduces a few subtle but innovative changes that let anyone challenge and win disputes – all within a fixed time period,” Arbitrum said.

Moreover, validation on Arbitrum One and Arbitrum Nova is now restricted to a limited group of validators. The Arbitrum DAO implemented this measure to prevent ‘delay attacks’.

These attacks occur when malicious parties exploit the challenge period, continuously raising disputes to delay confirming assertions.

According to the proposal, BoLD will address this issue by resolving disputes within a fixed time frame. Currently, this time period is equal to one challenge period, which is approximately 6.4 days.

The protocol guarantees that the maximum total time for dispute resolution will not exceed two challenge periods: one for raising disputes and another for resolving them. 

Additionally, BoLD includes a two-day grace period for the Security Council to intervene if necessary. This permissionless validation system is a significant step towards Arbitrum’s goal of achieving Stage 2 Rollup status.

With BoLD, any honest party can validate and bond their funds to post accurate Layer-2 state assertions and challenge malicious actors. This will lead to a more open and secure ecosystem for Arbitrum.

Currently, the the protocol is deployed on a public testnet in its alpha release. It allows developers and users to test and explore BoLD’s features. The team hopes that the BoLD proposal will help Arbitrum stay a leading Ethereum rollup.