Optimism, a popular layer-2 blockchain, is set to release its long-awaited Bedrock upgrade on June 6th at 16:00 UTC. The Bedrock release – which is a complete rewrite of an entire rollup stack – is expected to be the largest upgrade ever released on OP Mainnet with a focus on reducing fees and improving Ethereum compatibility.
According to the official announcement, the upgrade will require 2-4 hours of downtime for OP Mainnet, during which there will be downtime at the chain and infrastructure level while the old sequencer is spun down and the Bedrock sequencer starts up. Transactions, deposits, and withdrawals will also remain unavailable for the duration, and the chain will not be progressing. While the read access across most OP Mainnet nodes will stay online, users may encounter a slight decrease in performance during the migration process.
Bedrock seeks to improve on its predecessor by reducing transaction fees with the help of optimized batch compression and Ethereum as a data availability layer. It also focuses on shortening delays of including layer-1 transactions in rollups by handling their re-orgs more “gracefully.” In addition to improving node performance by removing technical debt, it will also enable modular proof systems via code reuse.
The team behind the project stated, “We couldn’t be more thrilled to bring Bedrock to OP Mainnet. The protocol team at OP Labs has been working very hard for over a year to bring this complete re-architecture of the OP Stack to production.”
The development has had no impact on the price of its native OP token, which was down by nearly 4% in the last 24 hours.
Optimism’s Waning Market Share
The move comes as competition within Ethereum’s layer-2 ecosystem heats up. Optimism has enjoyed its fair share of success, taking on an early lead over the space with its optimistic rollup solutions that offer high compatibility with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). However, its market dominance has been threatened by EVM-compatible zero-knowledge rollups (ZkEVMs), which have gained significant prominence lately.
Optimism witnessed no notable growth in its TVL throughout this year and was currently hovering around $1.71 billion. Besides the emerging competition from zkEVMs, the buzz surrounding Arbitrum’s recent airdrop could be another factor for Optimism’s receding share.
At over $252 million in TVL, ZKSync Era has been rapidly increasing its presence across the layer-2 spectrum. In fact, the general-purpose zk-roll-up platform created by Matter Labs surpassed Optimism in terms of transactions in May.
Moreover, Polygon zkEVM has also witnessed an impressive growth to $9.15 billion in TVL since its beta mainnet launch in March this year.
