Background

This proposal seeks to standardize and reduce the OP Bridge withdrawal period for all the rollups currently live on Initia’s Mainnet to 24 hours.

Currently, rollups on Initia are Optimistic Rollups similar to chains like Optimism, Base, Arbitrum One, and more in that they have a permissionless and trustless native bridge. The native bridge allows L1 assets to be bridged to the rollup with strong security guarantees. The native bridge locks assets on the settlement layer, in this case the Initia L1, and mints a representation on the destination chain. Transfers from the L1 to a rollup complete in seconds but the withdrawals currently take 7 days. This delay is due to the withdrawal/challenge period.

Optimistic Rollups are “optimistic”

Optimistic Rollups assume transactions are valid unless proven otherwise. To maintain security, there’s a challenge period during which anyone can submit a fraud proof to dispute an invalid rollup output root, which in turn invalidates all the transactions in the batch. If fraud is successfully proven, the disputed batch is reverted and corrected. The challenge period mentioned earlier exists to give time for this challenge process, but that means the users must wait on withdrawal to ensure their bridge transaction isn’t a part of the fraudulent batch.

Traditionally, withdrawal periods are 7 days on major rollups. However, almost all rollups use at least one of the following to give users an alternative to the native bridge and allow faster withdrawals and more routes: 3rd party bridges (LayerZero, IBC, Hyperlane) with a set of verifiers, intent-based bridges where solvers bridge the assets to the chain of choosing for a small fee, or entirely short-circuit withdrawal periods (Aevo). Simply put, there are many ways to make withdrawals faster but each come with their tradeoffs — liquidity requirements, cost, or security.

Initia’s Bridges

Currently, in Initia’s landscape there are 2 bridge options used by rollups: the native OP Bridge (which functions as described above) or IBC. Rollups currently choose how each asset should be bridged to their chain. The OP Bridge provides the most robust security but sacrifices are made on UX given the 7 day withdrawal period. IBC on the other hand is quick and fast but lacks significant security in a single-validator setup unless users trust the appchain on which they are already on.

Interim solutions for faster withdrawals from the native OP Bridge exist on Initia like Minitswap: a platform that enables fast withdrawals of INIT from rollups to the L1. Minitswap is highly used on Initia given that almost every rollup’s INIT token is transferred through the native OP Bridge. Minitswap works by pooling liquidity of INIT on the L1 along with the INIT representations from each whitelisted rollup (simplified). It enables users to withdraw INIT to the L1 “quickly” by swapping the L2s INIT for the L1s INIT. While this works for most cases, users incur a price impact, and will be affected by Minitswap’s rate limits. Additionally, it can’t be extended to support additional assets apart from INIT unless sufficient liquidity is provided or incentivised.

The Initia Labs team has publicly mentioned that they are currently working on a solution that finds a middle ground between security and UX, providing near-instant withdrawals from rollups for all assets using a set of attesters and without the need for liquidity pools. However, until this is ready to be shipped, audited, and implemented, users must face slow withdrawals from rollups.

A Reduction is Due

While 7 days is the standard OP Bridge withdrawal period, its purpose is to provide a “long enough” window for an honest actor to notice fraud and challenge it. The period exists to ensure the strictest security where required and makes sense for a world where there’s thousands of rollups with a high-threshold of activity.

However, right now Initia is at a nascent stage. Which means:

• There are just a handful of rollups with moderate activity.
• Most of the rollups are running a sequencer with the help and oversight of the Initia Labs team.
• And each is being monitored through challenger nodes. These nodes monitor the output roots generated by the rollups for possible fraudulent activity and launch a challenge when necessary.

Given the security profile above, the fact that many rollups already use IBC, and Initia’s upcoming bridge improvements, this proposal pushes to update the standard OP Bridge withdrawal to 24 hours for all rollups. I believe the proposed change comes in with balanced trade-offs where it doesn’t deeply harm security but significantly improves the UX in the Interwoven Economy.

Parameter Changes

All proposed changes are in accordance with Initia’s governance process and will be automatically applied by the chain once the proposal passes and the voting period concludes.

Rationale

Please see section 1.

TLDR: Make OP Bridge withdrawals faster while still being secure enough.

Timeline

• July 30th - Forum Post
• August 1st - Onchain Vote
• August 8th - Implemented or Rejected

Governance Votes

• YES – You support implementing the proposed parameter changes.
• NO – You oppose making these changes to the on-chain parameters.
• NO WITH VETO – This is a strong rejection, used when the proposal is:
  1. Spam or unrelated to Initia,
  2. Harmful to minority participants, or
  3. Violates Initia’s governance framework or promotes violations.

If more than one-third of the total votes are “No with Veto,” the proposal will be rejected and any deposits will be burned.