Optimism Bedrock Upgrade

In May 2023, OP Labs that are in charge of the Optimism protocol announced that the Bedrock Upgrade which is much-anticipated by the project’s community, is scheduled for June 6. The innovation is supposed to decrease the fees on the platform and make transactions faster.

In this article, we will find out what the upgrade will entice and in what ways it’ll make Optimism’s work better.

What is the Bedrock Upgrade?

Optimism, a Layer-2 solution for Ethereum, which was launched by the second-largest blockchain developers in 2019, employs the concept of optimistic rollups. They enhance the network’s scalability and make the fees lower, however, there are a few problems associated with the technology. Namely, the transaction time, and some security issues. The team is planning to overcome those by implementing a few key changes to the system.

The Bedrock upgrade is not a "regenesis" event which is why the data of the blockchain (the chain ID, transaction history, as well as state) is not going to be lost. The developers say that it can be regarded rather as a hard fork: the chain will be continued. Thanks to this, the team counts on the process to be seamless.

During the upgrade, there will be a temporary network downtime of approximately four hours. However, most OP Mainnet nodes will still allow read access.

What sets this upgrade apart is that it was approved through a voting process conducted by the Optimism community via the governance council's Token House. More than 28 million OP tokens were utilized in this voting procedure.

What will the Bedrock Update change?

Here are the estimated results of the upgrade that the team is expecting:

1. Fee reduction of up to 47% through the utilization of optimizations like batching and compression techniques.
2. Significant reduction in deposit times, shortened from around 10 minutes to just 3 minutes.
3. Enhanced EVM compatibility by eliminating multiple deviations.
4. Addition of support for Ethereum features such as EIP-1559 and chain re-orgs.
5. Implementation of modular proof systems, utilizing reusable code to minimize errors.
6. Strengthened security for the OP Mainnet bridge with the introduction of a two-step withdrawal process.

Conclusion

The much-needed update of the Optimism network might have a positive impact on the platform’s overall performance. Some users speculate on Twitter that the company might be struggling to compete with both the Layer-2 blockchains which use zero-knowledge rollups, and Arbitum, another platform that utilizes optimistic rollups, which made the news in 2023 because of their huge airdrop. 

Either way, the Bedrock update is an exciting development for the project, and if it goes as smoothly as the developers hope, it might bring positive changes to the Layer-2 landscape overall.

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