The Optimism Collective is an effort to establish a novel type of organization, founded on the principle that human beings are more important than capital and having an effect equals financial gain, and devoted to resolving the coordination issues that cryptography as a whole has yet to address.
In the end, Optimism is creating a digital society, not just constructing a blockchain. But lofty goals need infrastructure that is just as ambitious.
Today, we are delighted to present the most recent advancement of Optimism’s scalability architecture: the OP Stack.
The OP Stack is a modular, open-source plan for extremely flexible and interoperable blockchains of all types. Not only rollup. Not just Optimistic.
The OP Stack is an investment in the creativity of the entire Ethereum community. It makes constructing your own blockchain simpler than ever, allowing you to concentrate on what matters -the leading edge.
The OP Stack is also a bet that the future will neither be multi-chain nor mono-chain; rather, we think that an assemblage of highly integrated chains will form an emergent structure known as ‘the Superchain’, which powers collective activity.
History
As we approach the two-year anniversary of Optimism Mainnet going live, it’s awe-inspiring to reflect on our journey from being enthusiastic scalability researchers to where we are now. Throughout the entire process, two values have always been at the forefront: keeping things as simple as possible and breaking them down into smaller components.
A formative experience early on in our journey was when an experienced sailor called geohot replaced a transpiler, which we had been working on for months, with a modification to the Solidity compiler that only required 300 lines of code and took a few days. Geohot set an example for us of the level of simplicity and sophistication needed to achieve widespread acceptance in the Ethereum community.
In 2021, we chose to discard the OVM design and instead opted for a more modular strategy that separated execution from verification. The result, our EVM Equivalence update, has proven to be successful in comparison to recent releases by other rollups even though it is almost a year old. We certainly learned from this experience.
Nowadays
For the past twelve months, we’ve been hard at work on our upcoming Bedrock product, which reinforces the ideas of modularity and minimalism. This new design builds upon The Merge’s concept of separating the consensus and execution layers to make Optimism’s code incredibly straightforward. With a hundred times less code than our original OVM, and only 1,000 lines necessary for an alternate client, it became clear that we had something truly remarkable in our possession.
As the new, highly modular codebase became more reliable, an unexpected result occurred. People started copying the codebase and using it for unexpected applications.
Optimism was already the most widely forked ORU available, but these new forks were strange. We had grown accustomed to forks adding minor functions or replacing the data access layer to cut down costs. We were surprised when the next fork turned out to be totally unlike what we anticipated: OPCraft.
The amazing individuals who created this project, Lattice, used the Bedrock codebase to bring an entire voxel game to the blockchain. OPCraft’s universe exists on the chain, and mining virtual blocks gives rise to blockchain transactions… it’s unbelievable!
The team at 0xPARC followed OPCraft with an even crazier concept — the Optimistic Game Boy. Nalin Bhardwaj and Adhyyan Sekhsaria changed Bedrock’s operation system to a Game Boy emulator, thus creating a Game Boy Rollup. Even better, since the emulator could be converted into MIPS, every step of its running could be securely verified using cannon.
At this point, it became clear that the wisdom of geohot and our faith in open source software with straightforward designs had paid off. We knew we had created something extraordinary. Initially, we used Ethereum to divide our codebase, and now the Ethereum community was taking our parts to construct something never witnessed before.
The OP Stack
The OP Stack is the foundation of Optimism’s cutting-edge infrastructure. It is a collection of modules that collaborate to construct dependable blockchains. Every one of these parts performs a particular layer of the stack. Here is what these fundamental elements look like:
The OP Stack is composed of layers, each with its own specific API. If you want to tailor the stack to your application, you can simply swap out existing modules or create new ones. For example, Ethereum could be replaced by Celestia as the data availability layer and Bitcoin could be used as the execution layer.
The OP Stack is a tangible implementation of the modular blockchain concept. We’ve progressed past analyzing how this might work to having a working codebase that allows users to assemble components. Developers can get more details about each element’s API and how the components cooperate to form a modular chain system in Kelvin’s presentation at Devcon.
The OP Stack is being constructed for the Optimism Collective to ensure its longevity. Its key feature that makes this possible is the abstraction of the proof layer when accessing funds from another chain. This process can be accomplished without affecting user experience, and ultimately allows Optimism to take advantage of newer proof systems in the future.
The Future
Unleashing the OP Stack is the initial move towards a surge of interoperable L2s and L3s, which we affectionately refer to as op-chains. Through sharing and contributing to a secure, organized and modular codebase, all these systems are able to work together in order to create Ethereum’s future. Thanks to a standardised message-passing format, these chains can interact with each other without requiring custom connectors for each one.
The OP Stack presents a remarkable chance to accomplish something great. We can spread Optimism’s principles across a unified system of blockchains – with Sequencing being the focal point. Despite the fact that numerous chains may want to operate their own Sequencers, it is difficult to set up and should be decentralized in the long run to ensure users get the dependability they anticipate. It is probable that many more chains won’t want to maintain their own Sequencers, just like Optimism chose to ride on Ethereum’s consensus layer instead of having its own validator set.
When multiple op-chains use the same Sequencer Set, they gain access to an amazing capability: atomic cross-chain composability. Validators that generate blocks on several chains simultaneously can guarantee atomic transactions between them. This is possible because a single entity has the capability to create blocks on each chain — they don’t need outside validators for these atomic operations. Op-chains that join Optimism Collective’s shared Sequencer Set become part of a system where boundaries between chains become blurred.
Despite its composition of several chains, the incorporation of atomic cross-chain interactions makes it seem to users like one continuous chain. We refer to this ultimate outcome as the Superchain.
The Superchain has been created to promote the idea of a lasting and autonomous digital community. By enabling not only Optimism but also other connected op-chains to access the Collective’s assets, it brings about the potential for entirely fresh blockchain ecosystems to work together towards this goal.
The Forthcoming Future
Our main focus for the upcoming months is to deliver the Bedrock upgrade, which is a major component of the OP Stack, to Optimism Mainnet. As we progress with this initiative, we will be refining the Bedrock codebase and providing instructions on how users can run and customize their own op-chains based on OP Stack.
For now, if you’re interested in playing with the OP Stack, get in touch — or, if you’re feeling as adventurous as our early adopters, Optimism’s code is always developed in the open!
