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.

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

1. 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.

2. Finality your users can feel

   Proofs land in well under 7 days, replacing week long challenge window and enabling faster finality.

3. 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.

4. 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: