Ethereum
Arbitrum Prepares to Completely Remove Its Training Wheels to Become a Phase 2 Ethereum Rollup
Community members are considering an instant temperature check on whether to bring BOLD, a new dispute resolution protocol, to Arbitrum One and Nova, which should improve the security of Arbitrum channels and remove restrictions on who can become a validator.
Posted June 12, 2024 at 10:40 AM EST.
While OP Mainnet reached an intermediate step on its path to decentralization on Monday, implementing its error-proofing mechanism, its main competitor Arbitrum took a preliminary step towards potentially reaching parity, preparing to take its wheels off completely training as an Ethereum scaling solution.
ArbitrumDAO members are currently considering checking the temperature on whether to propose an enhancement proposal to move Arbitrum’s tech stack closer to a Phase 2 Ethereum deployment. If approved, the network Layer 2 blockchain would be further along the path to becoming one of the first rollups among the 104 active and upcoming rollups to reach Stage 2, the final stage of the decentralization process, according to Ethereum co-founder, Vitalik Buterin. .
THE governance proposal would upgrade Arbitrum smart contracts to use BOLD, a new dispute resolution protocol that aims to improve the security of Arbitrum chains and allow anyone to be an Arbitrum validator, since current validators, which verify withdrawals from Arbitrum to the Ethereum base layer, are limited to an authorized list.
With BOLD, “validation is open to everyone, which means someone is sitting in their basement saying, ‘Hey, I don’t agree with what this validator said.’ I don’t need to trust you. I can just validate and do it myself,” said Steven Goldfeder, co-founder of Offchain Labs, the developer of Arbitrum.
THE continuous temperature control, which began Thursday and ends in a day, comes as rival L2 Optimism joined Arbitrum as a phase 1 rollout on Monday when the developers launched outage proofs, which allow users to opt out of L2 d ‘Optimism without any involvement of trusted third parties. However, even though Arbitrum had an anti-error system implemented on its mainnet chains before OP Mainnet, Arbitrum’s outage proofs are not permissionless unlike OP Mainnet’s.
The different stages of rollups
Most rollups have what Buterin calls “complete training wheels” because they are usually controlled by a multisig consisting of a security board. For these rollups, “it doesn’t matter if the on-chain mechanism for publishing new state roots is simply a multisig with no active evidence of fraud. [also known as fault proofs] or proof of validity whatsoever,” Buterin added.
Learn more: Should Ethereum Layer 2 urgently decentralize their sequencers?
Stage 1 rollups, on the other hand, can verify whether batches of transactions are valid before they are finalized on Ethereum’s base layer through various mechanisms such as outage proofs like those posted online on Optimism Monday. “There must be a system of proof of fraud or validity, which has the practical power to accept or reject which state roots are accepted by the cumulation contract,” Buterin wrote in November 2022.
State roots are cryptographic hashes that represent the current state of a blockchain network at a given time.
However, Stage 1 rollups still have a security council that can override the network’s proof system using a multi-signature wallet if necessary, thus maintaining a level of centralization. Arbitrum has been a phase 1 rollup for over a year, and according to a March 2023 blog post from the Arbitrum Foundation, evidence of fraud has been available on Arbitrum since its first testnet launch.
For stage 2 networks, “there should be no group of actors that can, even unanimously, publish a state root other than the output of the code,” Buterin wrote. In other words, smart contracts manage the result of the rollup, with human intervention only in the case where the code has bugs that could lead to conflicts between the different proof systems. Or, in more technical terms, this means that the rollup has more than one single proof system and its smart contracts cryptographically enforce a user’s ability to leave the system regardless of what anyone says, does or wants on the network, including security. advice.
“Implementing BOLD [if governance permits] securing Arbitrum One and Nova effectively enables permissionless validation, marking a key milestone for Arbitrum chains to be recognized as Phase 2 rollups, as part of Arbitrum’s journey toward full decentralization,” the proposal states.
What is fat?
An acronym for “Bounded Liquidity Delay,” BOLD is expected to decentralize Arbitrum’s technology stack and make the network more secure by “ensuring that any honest party can always successfully defend against malicious claims about the state of a blockchain.” Arbitrum,” according to the proposal.
BOLD aims to improve Arbitrum in two ways, namely by making validation permissionless and reducing the risk of delay attacks, which can prevent a user from removing their assets from the L2 and Ethereum base layer.
At the time of going to press, only a handful of validators are able to contribute to the security of Arbitrum, but “should it [Arbitrum Improvement Proposal] If adopted, permissionless validation using BOLD will allow any entity, individual, or team in the community to constructively participate in securing Arbitrum,” according to the governance proposal.
So far, 99.9% of all votes cast are in favor of introducing the BOLD upgrade to Arbitrum chains. If passed, the ArbitrumDAO will launch a public audit program before taking a formal vote on on-chain governance.
ARB, Arbitrum’s governance token, has a market capitalization of $2.7 billion, according to CoinGecko data. The cryptocurrency has slipped 7.2% over the past year and 15.1% over the past seven days to change hands at around 93 cents.
Correction (June 12, 2024 at 2:14 p.m. EST): While Arbitrum had evidence of failures before OP Mainnet, OP Mainnet made its system flawless before Arbitrum. Unchained incorrectly stated that Arbitrum was a step ahead of OP Mainnet with its recent upgrade in its decentralization journeys. Unchained regrets the mistake.