OVC Protocol Lets Manufacturers Bid on Designs Without Seeing Them

Decentralized manufacturing faces a fundamental pre-contractual impasse: a provider cannot price a service accurately without inspecting the design file, yet the consumer cannot share that file without risking intellectual property theft. Researchers from the University of Ljubljana have proposed a solution called the Optimistic Verifiable Claim (OVC), a blockchain protocol that allows a consumer to publish a verifiable claim about a concealed design—such as the material it consumes—without revealing the actual file. The provider then bids based on that claim, and the design is only disclosed if a dispute arises. Four on-chain checks (authorized key access, delivery-channel integrity, syntactic conformance, and declared material consumption) are implemented in Solidity and tested on Ethereum, Arbitrum, and opBNB.

The protocol was benchmarked using a real 6.41 MB G-code file (the 3DBenchy) and a hypothetical 50 MB industrial design. On Ethereum, a no-dispute scenario for the 3DBenchy costs $7,207 and takes up to 9 hours; a fully contested dispute jumps to $49,660 and 57 hours. On opBNB, the same undisputed service costs just $2.87 and completes in 2 minutes, while a fully contested dispute costs $19.73 in 13 minutes. For a 50 MB design, Ethereum costs $56,173 undisputed (3 days) versus $22.36 on opBNB (16 minutes). The material-consumption check is the most expensive predicate. The authors conclude that OVC makes confidential, claim-based bidding economically feasible on Arbitrum and opBNB, but not on Ethereum at industrial scale.