Ethereum
Optimism Finally Gets Its Critical “Flaw Proofs”
Optimism, a leader layer 2 blockchain, aims to help Ethereum users transact quickly and inexpensively. Its technology serves as the foundation for some of the biggest names in blockchain, including the popular blockchain exchange Coinbase and Worldcoin’s World Chain, from OpenAI founder Sam Altman.
But for years, Optimism had a problem. All blockchains that used Optimism’s technology were built on one fundamental principle: they “borrowed” Ethereum’s security apparatus. But in reality, that wasn’t the case.
Until now, Optimism was missing a critical feature at the heart of its security design: “failure proofs.” On Monday, this long-promised technology finally arrives on the Optimism mainnet.
Defaults are intended to keep optimism-based layer 2 chains honest. They help prevent operators on a Layer 2 chain from transmitting inaccurate transaction data to Ethereum’s Layer 1 transaction ledger, and they power the Layer 2 chain’s “decentralized” withdrawal mechanism.
Similar “proof” technology is used by all Layer 2 accumulation networks, including Optimism’s competitors like Arbitrum. It aims to ensure that users of a rollup – whether NFT traders, retail investors or renowned financial institutions – can trust Ethereum’s vast network of operators, rather than ‘to the rollup’s own internal systems, to record their transactions and withdrawals accurately.
While Layer 2 chains like Arbitrum test their systems, Optimism is lagging behind. For years, this made Optimism the target of criticism from peers who claimed their own technology was safer and more advanced.
Now that evidence of the outage is finally arriving on Optimism’s mainnet, the network’s developers – and the growing ecosystem of other teams using its technology – are hoping to put their past behind them.
Over the past couple of years, Layer 2 cumulative networks like Optimism have become the go-to method for operating on the notoriously expensive Ethereum blockchain.
When a user submits a transaction to a rollup network, it is grouped with other users’ transactions before being transmitted to Ethereum. These batches are recorded simultaneously in Ethereum’s transaction ledger, a setup that allows users to transact faster and for only a fraction of the fees.
In theory, cumulative transactions are secured by “proofs,” which are cryptographic methods that allow observers on Ethereum to verify whether transaction details were accurately recorded. This is particularly relevant in the context of withdrawals, as it allows users to trust Ethereum – rather than the rollup network – to withdraw their funds from the Layer 2 chain.
Without evidence of wrongdoing, users who deposited their funds into Optimism had to trust the rollup. “Security Council” to return their funds – a system that exposed the rollup human error or potential bias. With evidence of outages, these users should only have to trust Ethereum.
Optimism takes its name from its “optimistic” proof systemand it launched a version of the technology when it first released in 2021 before quickly removing it after finding issues.
“We literally took out the entire system, reorganized it and rewrote the whole thing,” said Karl Floersch, CEO of OP Labs, in an interview with CoinDesk. “It was brutal, but it was absolutely the right decision.”
The Optimism team previously announced in March that it was testing its fault proof system. on their Sepolia testnet. Since then, they have had a Audit conducted by blockchain security company Sherlock, and found a few bugs that they were able to fix.
“So we fixed everything we found, and we had a lot of confidence in the actual implementation being ready for prime time,” Floersch said.
From this week, the network will once again rely on a seamless energy collection system, but it will still retain “training wheels” intended to ensure proper functioning. The Security Council will remain intact and will be able to intervene in the event of a breakdown of the infallible system. This combination of the two entities is what Optimism calls “first stage decentralization”.
“Stage 2 is a multiple-failure-proof system, sufficient that it is possible to operate the system in a certain way, like on autopilot. The Security Council does not have the possibility to intervene at the last moment,” Floersch said.
Floersch added that the team was working hard to achieve its Stage 2 goals, but he did not give a timeline for when that ultimate vision would be achieved.
With the outage evidence finally shipped to Optimism’s mainnet, other chains that use Optimism’s OP stack will also have access to the technology. (According to DefiLlama, two blockchains that use Optimism’s OP stack, Blast and Base, currently outperform Optimism’s mainnet in terms of total value locked.)
“We’re going to start with the OP mainnet for this upgrade, it’s a pretty big upgrade,” Floersch told CoinDesk. “However, it should not be too long” for Coinbase’s base chain to also implement the proof-of-failure system, Floersch added.