ZK for Every Rollup
Santiago Campos-Araoz
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The Seven Day Bottleneck
Optimistic rollups unlocked cheaper blockspace, but the mandatory 7-day challenge period still locks up capital and limits what DeFi, gaming, and other latency-sensitive apps can do. Teams have long promised “a ZK upgrade” to close the gap, but the rewrite cost of shifting from Optimistic to ZK has felt daunting and costly to most teams. Boundless removes this barrier.
Meet OP Kailua
OP Kailua is a drop-in framework on Boundless that converts any OP Stack rollup into a ZK Rollup in hours, not months. It offers two modes:
- Hybrid Mode: swaps the interactive game for a single ZK fraud proof, allowing optimistic finality in as little as three hours if required.
- Validity Mode: removes the dispute phase entirely and proves every block, pushing finality below one hour.
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Boundless provides 24/7 reliability
A ZK rollup is only as healthy as its proofs. If proofs stop, deposits freeze and withdrawals stall. Reliable, decentralized proving is therefore mandatory, and that’s exactly what Boundless provides.
Boundless powers an open marketplace that pairs provers (nodes that generate proofs) with requesters (rollups and apps that need them). Thousands of independent nodes bid in a reverse-Dutch auction, and the Proof of Verifiable Work (PoVW) mechanism slashes any winner that fails to deliver. Competition guarantees liveness and drives prices down to near hardware cost.
What rollups gain immediately with Boundless
- Cryptographic safety & guaranteed liveness
Kailua Validity minimizes the trust placed in sequencers. Boundless supplies a global pool of provers, ensuring a proof always arrives, even if a data-center goes dark.
- Finality your users can feel
Proofs land in well under 7 days, replacing week long challenge window and enabling faster finality.
- Costs that trend toward zero
On chains like Base, proofs already cost about $0.002 per transaction at production scale, and continued hardware gains push that lower each quarter.
- Reliability without reliance
Proving on Boundless is fully permissionless - no single prover or region controls the system. Each prover stakes collateral under a hard deadline; miss it and the stake flips into an on-chain bounty any node can claim by submitting the proof. This bounty-backed retry loop keeps proofs flowing and blocks any attempt to stall or censor transactions.
From optimistic to full ZK
For an OP Stack team the upgrade feels less like a fork and more like a software update:
- Spin up Kailua Hybrid: alongside existing fault proofs and watch three-hour finality land in production.
- Dial down the timer: one day, twelve hours, three, until you trust the system enough to switch off the old challenge contracts.
- Toggle Validity: when your team is ready; the state root now lands with cryptographic certainty, not a social contract.
- Forget The Infra: Boundless nodes line up to win the job and race each other to zero-margin efficiency.
All of that happens without changing a single deployed smart contract or asking users to bridge to a “v2” chain.
Teams building with OP Kailua Today
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BOB is moving from a classic OP design to OP Kailua Validity. ZK proofs will shorten its dispute window to hours. One proof secures BOB’s Ethereum settlement and its BitVM bridge, saving capital on both sides of the divide.
SOON is building an SVM (Solana Virtual Machine) Rollup Stack so any chain can tap Solana-class performance. Kailua Hybrid handles the fraud-proof layer: a single ZK proof replaces week-long disputes, bringing SOON chains down to ~three-hour finality. As usage grows, SOON can toggle to Kailua Validity and settle in under an hour: no migrations, no downtime, just a faster Solana-style world on every L1.
Eclipse is an L2 that uses the SVM to help scale Ethereum. Using OP Kailua’s dispute mechanism, Eclipse will reduce L1 finality times down from 7 days to ~3 hours and possibly transition to a full validity rollup.
Switch on ZK Today
The market now demands cryptographic certainty, not optimistic promises, and Boundless supplies the hardware, network, and economics to make it standard. ZK-ify your rollup today and let Boundless do the heavy lifting.
It’s time to flip the switch for ZK.
