Optimism, a layer 2 scaling solution, is getting a highly anticipated Bedrock upgrade on June 6th. The move is expected to significantly reduce transaction fees, provide greater network security and enhance compatibility with Ethereum.
The Optimism team said via a May 15 Twitter thread that the network will be down for two to four hours on June 6 as the upgrade progresses. “On upgrade day, transactions, deposits, and withdrawals will be unavailable during the downtime, and the OP mainnet chain will not work,” reads the accompanying blog post. Announced in May 2022, Bedrock marks the first major network upgrade to be voted on by the Optimism Governance Council’s Token House.
Optimism will benefit from lower transaction fees, with OP Labs the network's protocol development arm estimating a 47% drop in wilddrops. "Bedrock improves upon its predecessor by reducing transaction fees using optimized batch compression and Ethereum as a data availability layer; by reducing the latency of including L1 transactions in rollups by more gracefully handling L1 reorganizations," said Bedrock at Optimism Community The interpreter writes.
In addition to this, the network will also see shorter deposit times, with Optimism reducing the time it takes for a deposit to be confirmed from about 10 minutes to just three minutes, the explainer said. While node software performance will be "significantly improve" ed by executing multiple transactions in a single aggregate 'block', rather than the previous 'one transaction per block' model in previous releases."
Another key improvement is the network's compatibility with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), the core software that executes Ethereum smart contracts. With Bedrock, the network will eliminate the "multiple deviations" that currently exist in Optimism from Ethereum and the EVM, such as different code, design patterns, and transactions per block model. “Bedrock also added support for EIP-1559, chain reorgs, and other Ethereum features that exist on L1,” the explainer wrote.
With the imminent move to Bedrock, EVM-compatible zero-knowledge rollups (ZkEVM) have become the focus of Optimistic Rollup solutions such as Optimism. According to L2beat data, Matter Labs' recently launched ZkEVM, ZKSync Era, has surpassed Optimism in terms of network activity.
Over the past 30 days, ZKSync Era had 7.85 million transactions, while Optimism had 7.66 million transactions. ZKSync Era also outperformed Optimism with average transactions per second (TPS) of 6.80 TPS and 2.98 TPS over the past 24 hours.
