Othentic BLS (OBLS)

BLS (Boneh-Lynn-Shacham) signatures are a cryptographic tool that can be used to achieve consensus in a distributed system.

Othentic introduces OBLS, a modular consensus engine to reach on-chain agreements on specialized AVS tasks, enabling AVS’s Operators to submit unique task specifications.

The OBLS contains three main components:

Dynamic voting power consensus

To fit the consensus engine into the shared security environment, the Operator's voting power is proportional to the amount of re-stake assets locked on the L1, which is referred to as “dynamic voting power”.

In the OBLS smart contracts, the voting power of the Operators is based on their re-staked balance, which means that the influence of each Operator in the consensus process is determined directly by the re-staked effective balance.

Hub for submitting specialized tasks

In the new modular environment, where node clients have diverse roles and tasks, not all tasks are executed through the consensus layer. To address this, Othentic proposes an off-chain signatures aggregation framework with the OBLS smart contracts that enable Operators to submit various tasks. Operators are required to provide signatures and proof of the validity of their work.

BLS aggregation

One of the key advantages of OBLS is the ability to efficiently aggregate signatures from multiple Operators into a single, compact signature. This aggregation reduces computational overhead and minimizes transaction size, which results in a cost-effective process, leading to lower gas costs.