Layer 2 scaling

The much-needed upgrade will provide a number of improvements across the network, and come at a time when competition in the layer 2 space has been heating up.

Layer 2 scaling solution Optimism is set to undergo its highly anticipated Bedrock upgrade on June 6. The move is expected to result in significantly reduced transaction fees, provide greater network security and enhanced compatibility with Ethereum.

The Optimism team stated via a May 15 Twitter thread that the network would be down for two to four hours on June 6 as the upgrade goes through.

“On upgrade day, transactions, deposits, and withdrawals will be unavailable for the duration of the downtime, and the OP Mainnet chain will not be progressing,” an accompanying blog post reads.

The official date of OP Mainnet’s upgrade to Bedrock has been set: June 6, 2023 at 16:00 UTC!

The upgrade will require 2-4 hours of downtime for OP Mainnet.

Visit Mission Control for full details on what to expect:https://t.co/o6UjKZaVKy

— Optimism (✨_✨) (@optimismFND) May 15, 2023

Bedrock was announced back in May 2022, and it marks the first major network upgrade that was voted through by the Optimism governance council’s Token House.

Optimism is slated to benefit from lower transaction fees, which OP Labs — the network’s protocol development unit — estimates wildrop by 47%.

“Bedrock improves on its predecessor by reducing transaction fees using optimized batch compression and Ethereum as a data availability layer; shortening delays of including L1 transactions in rollups by handling L1 re-orgs more gracefully,” the Optimism community’s Bedrock explainer reads.

The Bedrock upgrade will bring a 47% reduction in protocol costs and security fees to Optimism Mainnet

Engineer extraordinaire @trianglesphere explains how in the latest dev blog post https://t.co/MvcG04shEB

— OP Labs (@OPLabsPBC) March 2, 2023

Adding to that, the network will also see shorter deposit times, with Optimism going from roughly 10 minutes to confirm a deposit to just three minutes, the explainer states.

While node software performance will be “significantly improved by enabling execution of several transactions in a single rollup ‘block’ as opposed to the prior ‘one transaction per block’ model in the previous version.”

Another key improvement concerns the network’s compatibility with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), the core piece of software that executes Ethereum smart contracts.

With Bedrock, the network will remove “multiple deviations” from Ethereum and the EVM that are currently present with Optimism, such as differing code, design patterns and transaction per block models. “Bedrock also adds support for EIP-1559, chain re-orgs, and other Ethereum features present on L1,” the explainer reads.

The Bedrock upgrade will bring a 47% reduction in protocol costs and security fees to Optimism Mainnet

Engineer extraordinaire @trianglesphere explains how in the latest dev blog post https://t.co/MvcG04shEB

— OP Labs (@OPLabsPBC) March 2, 2023

ZK Sync era overakes Optimism?

The upcoming move to Bedrock comes at a time in which EVM compatible zero-knowledge rollups (ZkEVMs) have been taking the spotlight from optimistic rollup solutions such as Optimism.

Related: Ethereum’s Beacon Chain updated after finality issues

According to data from L2beat, Matter Labs’ recently launched ZkEVM ZKSync Era has overtaken Optimism in terms of network activity.

Over the past 30 days, ZKSync Era had seen 7.85 million transactions, compared to Optimism’s 7.66 million. Over the past 24 hours, ZKSync Era had also outpaced Optimism in average transactions per second (TPS), at 6.80 TPS compared to 2.98 TPS.

The only interesting trend in this boring middle May on ethereum is the growth of @zksync Era, which is now steadily doing more transactions than @optimismFND and will soon threaten @arbitrum.

chart from: @l2beat pic.twitter.com/9dSNHtZMEC

— funnyking.eth zkHODLER (@PaoloRebuffo) May 15, 2023

Magazine: ZK-rollups are ‘the endgame’ for scaling blockchains, Polygon Miden founder