While the compliant skin of dolphin has long been believed to play a crucial role in reducing skin friction drag owing to its flexibility and sensitivity, most conventional studies have been focused on the static skin microstructure and the hydrodynamic pressured-excited passive deformation, which could not provide a convinced solution to the mystery of Gray’s paradox. In this study, inspired by microvibrations measured on dolphin skin, we hypothesize that a dynamically undulating skin surface actuated by the microvibrations enables effectively altering the turbulent boundary layer adjacent to the skin, resulting in decreasing the velocity fluctuations, thus in reducing skin-friction drag. We constructed an idealized model of open channel with a portion of the bottom wall undergoing the microvibrations and carried out a series of numerical simulations to investigate the characteristics of the boundary layer flow in terms of traveling and standing waves. We found that the microvibrations-excited skin/wall surface can create a reversed flow against or enhance the streamwise flow in the viscous sublayer of the boundary layer, substantially leading to a negative friction drag or a negative total drag, hence greatly reducing or even eliminating the drag to generate a thrust. The results reveal that a novel drag reduction mechanism can be achieved by means of the dolphin-inspired microvibrations, which thus may provide a highly plausible explanation for the long-standing mystery of the excellent hydrodynamic performance in dolphin swimming.