IMPORTANT NOTE: This is the first piece of a two-part paper publication about BATTLE. In this initial consignment, we focus on the theoretical, broader aspects of the protocol and a general overview of its applications.

For the second piece, expected in the following weeks, we will be diving deeper into BATTLE’s application for Bitcoin.

The rapid growth of optimistic blockchain systems—rollups, bridges, and off-chain computation—has created a critical vulnerability: resource exhaustion attacks. When multiple challengers simultaneously dispute honest asserters, they can overwhelm even well-funded participants, threatening the security and decentralization these systems promise.

Current multiparty dispute protocols face the "fraud proof trilemma"—a fundamental trade-off between safety, promptness, and decentralization. Existing solutions like Arbitrum BoLD require massive security bonds (3,600 ETH), while others sacrifice decentralization or suffer prolonged settlement delays.

Introducing BATTLE

BATTLE (Bonded Adversarial TournamenT with Logarithmic Escalation) introduces a tournament-style dispute resolution mechanism that achieves constant minimum initial capital requirements for honest asserters while resolving disputes in logarithmic time, regardless of challenger count.

The breakthrough lies in progressive rewards: BATTLE systematically reinvests dispute rewards to fund subsequent rounds. Like progressive poker tournaments, honest participants use victory rewards to engage in an increasing number of simultaneous disputes each round.

BATTLE operates in two phases: a bracket tournament among competing asserters, then a challenger phase where the winner faces all challengers in structured rounds that progressively double concurrent disputes as capital allows.

Key Advantages

• Constant capital requirements for honest participants
• Logarithmic time complexity regardless of challenger count
• Bitcoin compatibility using garbled circuits and FLEX protocols
• No trusted validator sets required
• Capital-efficient dispute resolution

BATTLE represents a significant breakthrough in solving the fraud proof trilemma, enabling truly decentralized and efficient optimistic blockchain systems.

Read the full research paper 🔗here.