Conduit and Boundless: Making ZK Fraud Proofs Easy for your Chain

We’re excited to share that the OP Kailua upgrade is live and ready to bring ZK fraud proofs to any OP Stack chain. In fact, you may have seen that BOB – the Conduit-powered chain unlocking Bitcoin’s DeFi potential – recently became the first ever rollup with live ZK fraud proofs thanks to our partnership with Boundless.

We co-developed OP Kailua with Boundless and RISC Zero to help OP Stack chains unlock faster finality, strengthen security, and advance toward Stage 1 decentralization, without taking on the costs of full ZK validity proofs. We’re also working with RISC Zero and the EigenDA team to make OP Kailua compatible with EigenDA, allowing chains to benefit from the higher throughput of alt-DA in addition to ZK security. Any OP Stack rollup on Conduit can now integrate OP Kailua quickly, with virtually no engineering overhead – we handle the heavy lifting and coordination with Boundless and RISC Zero.

Contact us here to launch an OP Stack chain with OP Kailua ZK fraud proofs, or migrate an existing chain.

How OP Kailua ZK fraud proofs work

ZK fraud proofs are a hybrid model between optimistic fault proofs and full ZK validity proofs. By default, your rollup still functions on the optimistic model – challengers have seven days to dispute invalid transactions for any given block. 

But with Kailua’s ZK fraud proofs, disputes aren’t settled via the standard optimistic process, which requires a long series of transactions and large bonds from challengers. Instead, the proposer simply submits a ZK fraud proof generated by the Boundless network attesting to the block’s validity. An L1 smart contract automatically checks the proof and distributes the bond to whoever is right, thereby settling the dispute. 

Benefits of OP Kailua: Faster finality, lower proving costs, integration with EigenDA

With OP Kailua, your chain is optimistic by default, and only turns to ZK proofs when they’re most necessary: during a dispute. This hybrid model offers several benefits:

• Faster finality: The ZK fraud proof dispute process is much faster than the optimistic model, so you can give users faster finality. Withdrawal times are as low as one hour, but you can adjust that time based on your chain’s business model and security needs.
• Lower bonds and proving costs. Optimistic fault proofs require prospers and challengers to put up large bonds – up to thousands of ETH depending on the rollup’s TVL. The simplicity of ZK fraud proofs lowers the bond requirement drastically, making the chain more capital-efficient and widening the pool of potential challengers. On the flip side, while ZK rollups don’t require bonds, it’s expensive to constantly generate ZK proofs. ZK fraud proofs are more cost-efficient because ZK proofs are only generated during disputes.
• Closer to Stage 1. A functional proof system with permissionless challenging is an essential component of reaching Stage 1. OP Kailua provides this, and its compatibility with EigenDA allows your chain to advance through the decentralization stages while still benefiting from alt-DA. 

OP Kailua provides chains an efficient, sufficiently decentralized proving system today, while still allowing them to move to full ZK proving with Boundless if they choose to later.

Get OP Kailua now

There’s no easier and safer way to implement ZK fraud proofs than by integrating OP Kailua on your Conduit rollup. We helped build OP Kailua and power the first rollup to put it into production with BOB’s recent announcement – not to mention the 60+ other chains on our platform.

Get in touch with us and start your ZK fraud proof journey with Conduit and OP Kailua today.