[FINAL] Upgrade #1: Bedrock Protocol Upgrade - v2

I’m unclear about the timelines. Ideally, I’d like to see voting on this proposal after Go-live criteria is established, and 2 weeks’ stability is demonstrated, but it’s unclear at what point this proposal goes to vote. Cycle 11 seems a bit sketchy while Goerli testing is still pending on a new version with multiple changes post-Sherlock. Without that, governance voting is more like “giving Optimism Foundation rights to manage the upgrade as defined” rather than actually voting on the upgrade. Which may be the defacto situation anyway, and I don’t have an issue with that in this early stage, but it should be clarified. In the medium-to-long term, though, upgrade proposals should only be submitted after readiness for mainnet has been abundantly demonstrated.

Appreciate the detailed recap of Sherlock. Can the “internal upgrade rehearsals” be expanded akin to shadowforks L1 devs do? I.e. after the fork, mainnet transactions are replicated on the shadowfork. That’s a great way to test upgrades.

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I dont have the technical expertise to check the fixes in detail myself. I understand that an external audit is being planned, before this is going to vote (and implementation).

I wonder though - with such an important update for the whole ecosystem - if not (at least) TWO external audits from two Tier-1 auditors would be the smart thing to do?

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omg what a big text^_^

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Hey everyone,

Ross and Mason here from a16z. We are excited to see the Bedrock upgrade come to fruition in the near future. Thanks to @ben-chain for the highly detailed overview and the entire OP team for the work they’ve done on Bedrock. The community’s identification of 14 findings in the Sherlock audit contest is a testament to the practical value of decentralized governance processes.

The introduction of the OP stack untethers users from the bootstrapping and technical requirements typically necessary to stand up a chain and allows for experimentation via its highly modular design. We foresee this framework of open experimentation and rapid iteration resulting in the proliferation of novel L2 deployments. As more developers introduce modified deployments of the OP stack via their own chains, further cohorts of developers will be inspired and incentivized to deploy their chain using the OP stack. This cyclical feedback will feed a flywheel effect wherein developers launch their chain based on the OP stack and contribute to the codebase and surrounding tooling → the OP stack’s codebase and developer experience matures and improves over time → more developers launch their chains using the OP stack and contribute to the ecosystem.

The Bedrock upgrade also lays the groundwork for the Superchain vision. OP chains with shared infrastructure will inherit stronger security assumptions, better tooling, and new sequencing models that open up a massive design space for innovation.

Finally, this proposal is a symbolic opportunity to mark Optimism’s transition to on-chain voting. We look forward to hearing the community’s assessment of on-chain voting’s impact on transparency, decentralization, and efficiency. We also look forward to hearing community feedback on Agora’s implementation of Optimism’s on-chain voting module.

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Thanks for the thoughtful followup as always! :slightly_smiling_face: Yes, this proposal does defer additional discretion to the Foundation regarding timing and deployment for the upgrade. While it also attempts to provide a rigorous standard for the community to uphold, and various conditions which would require a re-vote, that is definitely a bottom line. As I mentioned in my previous comment, we believe this is the best path forward in this early stage, given the involved nature of this upgrade.

In the medium term (i.e. post-Bedrock), I believe we should work as a community to make upgrades which are smaller, more explicit, and more incremental. There are meaningful advantages to upgrades which are implementable more similarly to L1 Ethereum, in which all code can be deployed in advance and then subsequently triggered by a pre-set block number. We’re just not there pre-Bedrock.

WRT the shadowforks, this is an interesting callout — let me loop back with the team to get some thoughts.

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Thanks for the detailed overview. The go-live criteria seem reasonable. Very excited for this one to happen!

I am an Optimism delegate [ Delegate Commitments - #141 by Tjark ] with sufficient voting power, and I believe this proposal is ready to move to a vote.

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Scalability- The potential that this Bedrock update has for the continued scaling capabilities on layer two is incredible and provides the true potential for mass adoption to occur. This is a critical time for such an event to take place.
I believe the OP stack creates a standard for blockchain technology that is unheard of for modern day development teams who are looking for new opportunities provided from the retroactive public goods fund. It’s amazing that the funds continue to grow larger for the builders of the network who make the most impact as they are attracting new users with state of the art development products.

IMPACT OVER PROFIT

Centralization- There are still many aspects of the network that are currently still centralized including the way the discord server is setup at the moment. The actual sequencers for the network are also centralized from my understanding. As far as security for the network is concerned there is much more that can be done to ensure the safety of the users on the network and who are active in the community discussion. A major amount of work needs to be done in this category to continue on a steady path towards decentralizing these aspects so that way we do not rely on the convenience of the old legacy system which provides a point of failure for the way optimism operates at the current moment. When we rely on convenience we not only sign away our rights by using this type of technology, we also risk our security by storing information in a centralized database or servers that are vulnerable to attack.

Decentralization - The DAO for optimism has provided a sense of participation from the token holders who use the native $OP token to cast votes for proposals or important milestones for the network. Although it seems there is still a majority of the growth to be made on the network for the way grants are structured as well as the way international applicants are communicated with during the application process to ensure fairness for all regions of the planet. This aspect of an autonomous organization helps provide checks and balances to keep the community true to the original vision that it is focused on with the growth and expansion of the network while providing security for the users.

These three pillars are essential in the way they are balanced and it’s important to remember as we shift closer towards one of them we lean further away from the other two. This should help explain to people who do not understand the difference between a central bank and decentralized finance.

I am very excited for the bedrock update and have become fascinated with this technology over the past few years.
We are aiming towards building our own iteration of a layer two blockchain similar to Optimism with planned interoperability and retroactive contributions heading back to the mother of the OP Stack.
It would be amazing to see exactly what we can all we come up with when we put our brains together. Bedrock is the type of technical update that gives me a deeper appreciation for blockchain or development teams who are dedicated to pushing this scaling technology forward !

We are ready to commit our efforts into building a sustainable ecosystem for creators whether they make art or code in solidity. Alongside Optimism, Base, and any others who join the OP stack over the course of the future.

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I am one of the Synthetix Ambassadors, and a Optimism Badgeholder.

I am an Optimism delegate [Delegate Commitments - #65 by mastermojo ] with sufficient voting power, and I believe this proposal is ready to move to a vote.

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We are an Optimism delegate with sufficient voting power and believe this proposal is ready to move to a vote.

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Thank you very much for the information

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Thanks for the proposal.

Looks like there’s a lot of work going on to ensure a smooth upgrade. kudos​:100::100:

One area I would like to get a little bit of clarity is the education part. Are there any elaborate efforts to keep the community and the world informed about everything going on with the upgrade? Or is mainly tweets, forums and discord for now?

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We are an Optimism delegate with sufficient voting power and believe this proposal is ready for a vote.

After months of playing on the testnet to ensure Rubicon is prepared for the upgrade, our team is excited to see Bedrock’s lower fees, consistent block time, and multi-client L2 ecosystem in production! :rock:

Network upgrades are no easy feat; we were very pleased to see the strong commitment to security and transparency throughout this process. In particular, we love the “reset” functionality in this vote and think it will be great practice for future network upgrades!

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This is Ethan from Pika Protocol, an Optimism delegate with sufficient voting power and believe this proposal is ready for a vote.

Since Pika Protocol’s users are very sensitive to gas fees and block stability, we are excited to see Bedrock’s low gas fees and consistent block time and believe the upgrade will bring large benefits to our users.

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Can the “internal upgrade rehearsals” be expanded akin to shadowforks L1 devs do? I.e. after the fork, mainnet transactions are replicated on the shadowfork. That’s a great way to test upgrades.

Good suggestion, thank you. We are in fact using a shadow fork to run our upgrade rehearsals. Of course there are also security concerns related to running a shadow fork, namely the risk of a signed transaction being leaked and replayed to mainnet, potentially leading to an unintended upgrade of the production system!

To prevent this, we use our op-wheel tool to replaces the address of the multisig which controls the upgrade process with a throw away account which we use during rehearsal.

I should also note that only L1 transactions are being replayed to our shadow fork. Due to the fact that the Optimism Mainnet L2 is still running the legacy system and does not support EIP-1559 transactions, the L2 state roots will immediately diverge, meaning we’d receive little insight from replaying L2 transactions.

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I am one of the Kwenta Elite Council.

I am an Optimism delegate [Delegate Commitments - #173 by Kevin-IzzRite] with sufficient voting power and I believe this proposal is ready to move to a vote.

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Voted for the Bedrock proposal. It’s a no-brainer as it’s a step towards achieving the Optimism vision for scaling.

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Hello this is Stanley from Boiler Blockchain. We have voted for the Bedrock proposal and believe that this is an important upgrade to achieve modularity, simplicity, and similarity with ETH.

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At SEED Latam, we hosted our 11th OP Governance Call, and we decide to vote YES for the Bedrock upgrade proposal.

Rationale: After proposal v1 was canceled due to security issues found, we agree that once patched and booted into testnet, we agree to move forward. We acknowledge Bedrock’s role prior to other future features and implementations such as Superchain and Fault proof systems (Cannon). We just require that the update be early enough in terms of communication so that the community can be aware of it.

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