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Optimism’s Tier 2 scaling solution is due for the long-awaited Bedrock update on June 6th. The move is expected to lead to significant reductions in transaction fees, greater network security, and improved interoperability with Ethereum.
The Optimism team stated in a May 15 tweet that the network will be down for 2-4 hours on June 6 while the update is in progress.
“On the day of the update, transactions, deposits and withdrawals will be unavailable for downtime, and the OP Mainnet chain will not evolve,” the 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 is the first major upgrade of the network to be voted on by Token House by the Optimism Governance Board.
Optimism is expected to benefit from lower transaction fees, which OP Labs, the network protocol design arm, estimates will be down 47%.
“Bedrock improves on its predecessor by lowering transaction fees, using optimized batch compression and Ethereum as the data availability layer; reducing delays in including L1 transactions in summaries by handling L1 reorganization more gracefully,” Bedrock explained in an Optimism community explanation.
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
On top of that, the network will also see shorter deposit times, with Optimism dropping from around 10 minutes for deposit confirmation to just 3 minutes with Bedrock, the explainer states.
While the performance of the node software will be “significantly improved by the ability to execute multiple transactions in a single consolidated ‘block’, as opposed to the previous ‘one transaction per block’ model in the previous version.”
Another key improvement concerns network compatibility with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), the main software that runs Ethereum smart contracts.
With Bedrock, the network will eliminate the “multiple deviations” from Ethereum and EVM that are currently present in Optimism, such as different code, design patterns, and transaction models for each block. “Bedrock also adds support for EIP-1559, chain reorganization, and other Ethereum features present in L1,” the explanation 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
Is the era of ZK Sync overshadowing optimism?
The upcoming transition to Bedrock comes at a time when EVM-compatible zero-knowledge rollups (ZkEVM) are drawing attention to optimistic storage solutions like Optimism.
Related: Ethereum beacon network updated after finality issues
Matter Labs’ recently launched ZkEVM ZKSync Era has overtaken Optimism in terms of network activity, according to L2beat data.
Over the past 30 days, ZKSync Era has seen 7.85M transactions compared to 7.66M for Optimism. Though over the last 24 hours, ZKSync Era also outperformed Optimism in average transactions per second (TPS) of 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
