UPDATED Proposal: Onboard bolt to the Lido Alliance
bolt – Enabling Preconfirmations with Proposer Commitments
Proposal TLDR
- With bolt, users can receive near-instant confirmation on non-contentious transactions through inclusion preconfirmations. Actions like transfers, approvals, and mints, which previously took an average of 7 seconds, can now be preconfirmed in approximately 250ms. Users can be confident in these ‘promises of inclusion’, as they are backed by economic collateral and enforced by slashing conditions.
- Starting with inclusion preconfirmations on Ethereum, bolt enables validators to further monetize their blockspace. Bolt leverages proposer commitments—a novel primitive that allows proposers (validators) to make credible commitments on the blocks they produce—to achieve this. Bolt is fully PBS-compatible, allowing validators to access ancillary revenue streams without giving up MEV rewards.
- Bolt starts with inclusion pre-confirmations but is designed to be flexible to unlock a variety of use cases. Promising applications include encrypted transaction inclusion, event-driven promises, settlement guarantees for dApps and rollups—and most notably, based sequencing. In future iterations, bolt plans to expand to other commitment types, such as blockspace claims, to potentially enable execution preconfirmations and blockspace futures.
- Bolt protocol is built by Chainbound, a research and development organization specializing in optimized infrastructure and networking solutions on Ethereum. Bolt is fully open-sourced and built with an Ethereum-first mentality. We understand the negative externalities and centralizing forces at play, and therefore, we have designed bolt with proposer-centricity at its core.
- In this updated proposal, Chainbound is proposing that bolt be considered for acceptance in the Lido Alliance. The team believes that the protocol aligns with Lido’s values and requirements. Additionally, the Alliance’s support for the adoption of bolt will bring preconfirmations to Ethereum while retaining alignment with the visions of Ethereum, Lido, and the broader community.
Protocol Overview
Bolt enables sub-second inclusion preconfirmations on Ethereum through the use of proposer commitments. Users can interact with Ethereum proposers in real time, allowing transactions to be confirmed instantly. By engaging with proposers within the proposal interval, bolt bypasses consensus in the hot path, resulting in significant speed benefits for users. Instead of relying on consensus, bolt leverages crypto-economic collateral to ensure the credibility of inclusion pre-confirmations.
For Ethereum validators, bolt allows proposers to take on additional duties (and risk) to access ancillary rewards in a MEV-Boost compatible and safe manner. By opting into the bolt protocol, proposers can make commitments with users and relay these commitments as constraints to MEV-Boost builders. This opens the door to a variety of potential use cases, including encrypted transaction inclusion, settlement guarantees for dApps and rollups, and based sequencing.
While developing bolt, we have built with these design principles in mind:
- Permissionless: Any proposer can opt in to the protocol, and any user can request commitments from them.
- Proposer-centric: Because bolt is proposer-centric, proposers can be fully held accountable for their commitments.
- Simple: A simple schema is implemented to facilitate integration for users and proposers.
- Trust Minimized: Bolt does not rely on delegation of duties to centralized third parties. The protocol aims to introduce no new trusted intermediaries.*
- Compatible: bolt is designed to be compatible with the existing PBS pipeline and eventually ePBS.
*For bolt v1, we aim to address the fair-exchange problem by implementing dedicated RPCs. Bolt intends to deploy the initial RPC during the protocol’s market launch. The main role of the RPC will be limited to protecting validators from spam, and time-stamping both commitment requests and responses.
Guided by these principles, we believe bolt is an effective preconf solution for Lido and Ethereum as a whole.
For Ethereum:
- Bolt ultimately accelerates Ethereum’s roadmap towards stronger censorship resistance properties (Inclusion Lists, PEPC), de-fragmentation (based sequencing), and fast UX (preconfs), without relying on trusted intermediaries.
- Bolt’s permissionless nature makes it unopinionated in the current relay and builder market competition. We believe that having an opinionated solution that could potentially favor specific relays or builders is fundamentally unhealthy for Ethereum.
- Bolt’s proposer-centric design ensures Ethereum doesn’t increase its reliance on trusted entities within the block-production pipeline. This is crucial to avoid adding to existing centralizing pressures and allows validators to directly issue commitments simply by running the bolt-sidecar (more on this below).
For Lido:
- Bolt is economical and easy to integrate for node operators. Bolt allows proposers to further increase their rewards in a MEV-boost compatible manner.
- Bolt is expressive and future-proof. It is designed to unlock a variety of use-cases through the support of diverse commitment types, while also remaining compatible with the potential transition towards ePBS.
- Bolt is fault-tolerant. Bolt has an embedded fallback block building mechanism as a last resort to ensure that relays and builders aren’t critical to the proposers’ operation.
- Bolt is proposer-centric. Validators do not need to delegate responsibilities to sophisticated and centralized third-parties when issuing commitments.
bolt v1
Bolt V1 will support inclusion preconfirmations. Inclusion preconfirmations are commitments about the inclusion in a certain slot.
Architecture
Bolt’s architecture is designed to be simple, consisting of both off-chain and on-chain components. It is best to view bolt as a an extension to Mev-Boost. From a node operators perspective, validators run our modified MEV-boost client + sidecar, and opt-in to the bolt protocol through a registration process.
| Component | Placement | Description |
|---|---|---|
| bolt sidecar | Off-chain | The entrypoint for bolt. Implements the commitments-API and turns commitments into constraints. |
| MEV-Boost | Off-chain | Modified MEV-Boost client that implements the constraints-API and verifies contraint proofs |
| bolt RPC | Off-chain | RPC proxy server that propagates preconfirmation requests to opted-in proposers |
| Registry | On-chain | The registry smart contract that keeps track of the opted-in proposer set and their associated stake |
| Challenger | On-chain | The challenger smart contract that verifies inclusion proofs and slashes the appropriate stake |
| Observer | Off-chain | A server that receives and stores global preconfirmation state |
Preconfirmation Flow
- The User sends a preconfirmation request to the bolt RPC .
- The bolt RPC server (which implements the Commitments API) forwards the request to the bolt opted-in Proposer next in line (according to the beacon lookahead window).
- The Proposer simulates the transaction and validates that it satisfies the protocol validity rules, such as the base-fee and nonce requirements. If the transaction is valid, the Proposer sends a signed preconfirmation back to the bolt RPC to be relayed back to the User.
- The Proposer also shares the signed preconfirmation with the Relay, by calling its
/constraintsendpoint. - All Block builders subscribed to the Relay constraints SSE stream will receive the preconfirmation as an event.
- All Block builders build a payload which includes the preconfirmations and other transactions, as well as the constraint validity proofs. Then they submit the payloads to the Relay, along with these proofs.
- The Relay validates each bid along with its inclusion proofs (this step could also be skipped if running in optimistic mode).
- When it’s time to propose, the Proposer calls the Relay’s
/header_with_proofsendpoint to fetch the most profitable valid header. - Finally, the proposer also checks the validity of the header and its proofs, and if everything is correct, it signs it and sends it to the Relay via the
/blinded_blocksendpoint. - At this point the relay has all the necessary information to submit the signed payload to the beacon chain.
For full information on bolt’s design and code, please refer to the below. Everything is open-source.
Roadmap
| Mid-October ‘24 | Mid-November ‘24 | December ‘24 | January ‘25 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Deployments | Holesky v1 (testnet) | Holesky v2 (testnet) | Mainnet v1 | |
| Collaborations | Lido Alliance (TBD) | |||
| Working Groups | Cohort 1 - validator onboarding | Cohort 2 - validator onboarding | ||
| Security | Audit 1 & 2 | Audit 3 |
Security Culture
The bolt protocol is open-sourced and will be audited allowing for rigorous internal and external examination of all bolt components. Bolt is designed to be simple and minimal. Along with a modified mev-boost client, bolt only introduces 3 additional off-chain components: a sidecar, an RPC, and observer. Bolt will abide by any formal security analysis and procedure enacted by the Lido Alliance.
Chainbound has and will continue to collaborate with external parties for both on-chain and off-chain components. For example, bolt is fully integrated with audited battle-tested restaking solutions.
Additionally, bolt’s interface and standards have been and continue to be a collaborative output from many teams thinking about similar solutions. Chainbound will provide maintenance, monitoring and, analytics for continued transparency, integrity, and the security of bolt.
Lido Alliance <> Chainbound
Lido’s reGOOSE states:
Internalize validator services that align with Ethereum’s roadmap, starting with preconfirmations, without exposing stakers to additional risk
Bolt is not only: (1) a generalized proposer commitments protocol that can facilitate a variety of potential validator services, but also (2) designed with preconfirmations as the primary use case, and (3) aligned with Ethereum’s roadmap towards stronger censorship resistance guarantees, better UX, and defragmentation.
With the additional duties placed on proposers, bolt naturally introduces new risks. Bolt relies on economic security, adding slashing conditions on proposers. However, we believe the added rewards through bolt compensate for this risk. There are additional methods, such as insurance funds, that protocols can use to minimize risk for stakers.
Lido Alliance Support for Chainbound
Acceptance into the Lido alliance would be a direct endorsement for Chainbound and bolt. With this endorsement, Chainbound would appreciate the convergence from Lido stakeholders around bolt as one of the preconfirmation solutions to test and iterate over. From the Lido Alliance, Chainbound would appreciate direct collaboration and feedback on bolt’s design choices, suggestions around auditors, continuous testing of the software, and ongoing assistance around validator adoption.
In the near-term, as bolt approaches Holesky, we would appreciate the Lido Alliance to actively help bootstrap Cohort 1 of our Proposer Working Group with key Lido Node Operators. This can come in the form of introductions, education, and integration-assistance.
Next Steps
With the acceptance into the Lido Alliance, bolt would immediately recognize Lido as a key steward of the bolt protocol, and the Lido alliance would recognize itself as a key contributor to the bolt protocol. As a result, we feel it is appropriate to allocate governance power to the Lido Alliance to align incentives going forward; this will come in the form of bolt token grants.
Lido Alliance Alignment Collateral
We have structured a ‘Lido Alliance - bolt Token Allocation’ document that describes bolt’s alignment collateral. As a summary:
Total Allocation (6.5%)
Bolt plans to allocate 6.5% of its total token supply to the Lido Alliance. The total allocation consists of two components:
- Strategic Allocation: 3.5%
- KPI-Based Allocation: 3%
Strategic Allocation (3.5%)
- Direct Grant: The Strategic Allocation in an unconditional direct grant to the Lido Alliance. This 3.5% represents the minimum number of tokens that the Lido Alliance will receive.
- Unlock Schedule: Tokens will follow the same unlock schedule as early contributors to bolt.
KPI-Based Allocation (3%)*
- KPI Definition: The KPI is defined as the percentage of Ethereum delegated to validators part of the Lido on Ethereum Curated Module who have opted in and are running the bolt protocol, out of the total amount of Ethereum delegated to all validators part of the Lido on Ethereum Curated Module. More information on the Curated Module, which is formerly known as the NodeOperatorsRegistry, can be found here.
- KPI Threshold: bolt is targeting a 90% adoption rate among the validators part of the Lido on Ethereum Curated Module as the threshold for 100% KPI achievement.
- Vesting Schedule: The tokens will vest over the pre-approved vesting schedule attributable to the “Ecosystem Incentive” stakeholders category, which is tentatively, a 4-year vest with a 1- year cliff.
*More details can be found on the IPFS document
The token allocation process is as follows:
- Vote: Lido DAO votes on the acceptance of bolt into the Lido Alliance
- Sign: Necessary legal documents are signed by the Lido Alliance
- bolt launch: Following the initial mainnet launch of Bolt, expected in early Q1 2025, Chainbound, or a bolt foundation/DAO, will calculate the Lido KPI allocation amounts on a monthly basis, inform the Lido DAO, and adjust the respective allocations accordingly.
- TGE: The unlock and vesting schedules for both the Strategic Allocation and KPI-based Allocation commence on the TGE date.
- Distribution: The Strategic Allocation and the KPI-based Allocation are distributed on unlock and vesting dates. The total amount is conditional on the KPI value, which is also measured on vesting dates.
Why Us?
Chainbound is the research and development organization spearheading bolt, and we believe we are the correct team to help bring preconfirmations to Ethereum.
We have:
- The track record in building safe, performant, low-level Ethereum infrastructure. Our products, Fiber and Echo, are utilized by the top block-builders and applications (telegram bots).
- We build with an open development and open innovation ethos. Bolt is fully open-source, and from the start, we have collaborated closely with node operators and external researchers to ensure bolt’s design is both optimal and secure.
- We build with an Ethereum-first mentality. We understand the negative externalities and centralizing forces at play, and therefore, we have designed bolt with proposer-centricity at its core.
- We pride ourselves on the reputation we have built, represented through our products and research. Most notably, our latest research for the Ethereum Foundation on geographic validator decentralization.
From the entire Chainbound and bolt team - thank you for the consideration!
