{"document_id":"BLC-STUDY-0171","slug":"optimism-fault-proofs","title":"The Fault Proof System","authors":"Optimism","year":2023,"date_label":"2023","publisher":"Optimism","paper_type":"Design paper","category":"Scaling","topics":["Scaling"],"source_url":"https://specs.optimism.io/fault-proof/index.html","source_label":"OP fault-proof spec","legacy_pdf_path":null,"sha256":null,"sha256_note":"No hash is published. This build does not store those PDF bytes, so a checksum would be invented. Where a legacy path exists, it points at the Internet Archive copy of the old library.","version":"Source cited by the 2023 study. The study is the reading. This page does not add a second essay.","doi":null,"rights_status":"Official external source only","source_status":"Official source","use_status":"Metadata and commentary only. The reading is the study page.","licence":null,"licence_label":"No licence recorded. Rights status under review.","full_text":null,"full_text_reason":"Full text is not published on this page. Public availability is not a licence to republish a document. Blockchain Lab has not recorded a licence that permits an HTML transcription, a training set, or a retrieval corpus of the paper. Text on this page is Blockchain Lab's own wording, or a pointer to a study that is also Blockchain Lab's wording.","editorial_line":"A dispute walks a single instruction of a state transition on a parent chain, so anyone who can post a bond can force the on-chain step that decides a bad proposal.","canonical_url":"https://blockchainlab.com/whitepaper/optimism-fault-proofs","record_url":"https://blockchainlab.com/research/corpus/papers/optimism-fault-proofs","study_url":"https://blockchainlab.com/whitepaper/optimism-fault-proofs","last_reviewed":"2026-10-01","last_checked":"2026-10-01","relationships":[{"rel":"Canonical reading","label":"Optimism Cannon study","href":"/whitepaper/optimism-fault-proofs"},{"rel":"Related paper","label":"Arbitrum","href":"/whitepaper/arbitrum"},{"rel":"Related paper","label":"Fraud and data availability proofs","href":"/whitepaper/fraud-and-da"}]}