Protocol Upgrade: Superchain Registry 2.0

Proposal Title: Superchain Registry 2.0

Proposal Type: Protocol Upgrade

Executive Summary

This Protocol Upgrade makes several improvements to the Standard Rollup Charter’s Onchain Criteria. Primarily, it adds additional requirements for standardization which were previously enforced by the Optimism Foundation via Offchain Criteria.

This is a non-fork upgrade, meaning no upgrades to smart contracts or off-chain node software are required. This upgrade is accompanied by the “Superchain Registry 2.0,” a refactor of the Superchain Registry which reflects these improvements and makes other quality-of-life updates for its maintainers.

Motivation

The original Superchain Registry, and accompanying Onchain Criteria, were primarily focused on validating that the L1 smart contracts for a given chain used the correct bytecode. However, the continued rollout of Fault Proofs to more chains introduces security-critical, non-bytecode requirements. These checks have historically been managed by the Optimism Foundation in its capacity to enforce Offchain Criteria, but would better serve the Collective as strict, mandatory, onchain requirements.

Additionally, this upgrade’s new Onchain Criteria require that, going forward, chains use the OP Contracts Manager (OPCM) to deploy their L1 smart contracts. The OPCM is itself a smart contract which helps automate the deployment of L1 contracts. Mandating usage of OPCM makes it substantively easier for the Collective to validate that chains have been deployed in compliance with the Standard Rollup Charter’s criteria, and makes it more difficult for chains to accidentally be deployed in a nonstandard way.

Lastly, some Chain Governors have expressed a desire to deploy their chains in advance of publicizing their information to the Superchain Registry. While not strictly prohibited by earlier versions, these updates to the Standard Rollup Charter include authorizing the Security Council to take action on those chains, pre-publication, if necessary.

Specifications

  • Blockspace Charter

    • This protocol upgrade would update the Standard Rollup Charter in accordance with PR 42.
  • Technical details

    Most of the details are directly explained in the PR linked above. To summarize, the following changes are made:

    • Chains not already deployed are required to have been deployed with the OPCM, with a small grace period.
    • Additional role requirements, previously enforced by the Optimism Foundation, are added to the onchain criteria for chains using permissioned proofs.
    • A “standard prestate” criteria is introduced for chains using fully permissionless proofs (i.e. Stage 1 Chains), with explicit rules for updating the prestate when new chains are added.
    • Permissioned fault proof parameters have been added to the standard parameter TOMLs to enshrine what was previously enforced offchain by the Optimism Foundation.
  • Impact summary (a comprehensive description of the consequences of adopting the proposed changes).

    Because these changes do not impact existing chains, this upgrade is low impact. It is possible that, during this transition period, chains could fail to meet the Onchain Criteria because they were deployed without OPCM. To minimize this impact, we extend a grace period before this criteria is mandatory. Additionally, to minimize this risk, RaaS providers and other stakeholders have already been informed of this change, and have begun to use OPCM for new chain deployments.

  • Precommitment impact review:

    No precommitments are affected or changed by this upgrade since it is just a minimal change to the Onchain Criteria and does not directly impact chain operations or governing policies.

Action Plan

Because this Protocol Upgrade does not require any updates to node software or contracts, the required rollout is minimal. On approval, these additional Onchain Criteria would become “governance-approved” as opposed to a part of the Offchain Criteria enforced by the Optimism Foundation. Additionally, new additions to the Superchain Registry would follow an improved process, outlined here.

Conclusion

This small Protocol Upgrade strengthens the Onchain Criteria for Standard Chains as we prepare for more chains in the Superchain to move to Stage 1, and introduces quality-of-life improvements for the Superchain Registry process. We believe this is a clear-cut, net-positive change for the Optimism Collective.


Note: By submitting a proposal, you represent and warrant to the Optimism Collective that all the information it contains is true and complete to the best of your knowledge.

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The Developer Advisory Board has reviewed this proposal as well as the linked PR.

We’re in agreement that this seems like a great change, and a great step towards standardizing contract releases, which is really beneficial to new chains.

We had two questions we’d love more clarity on:

  1. Has the OPCM implementation been audited? If so, can you link the audit report?
  2. Is there any plan for existing chains to migrate? If so, can you share some more details on how and when we expect this to happen, and what will happen to legacy chains that don’t meet the criteria at that point?

Thank you!

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Has the OPCM implementation been audited? If so, can you link the audit report?

The OPCM has not been audited. The OPCM is effectively a replacement for the offchain scripts historically used to deploy chains. Those historical scripts were run locally by chain deployers, significantly reducing the enforceable guarantees (e.g. that the script was unmodified, no errors occurred, …). As such, usage of the OPCM represented an immediate improvement to the security model, by ensuring deployments are consistent, even before this Upgrade Proposal. In fact, the OP Labs support team started assisting chains in deploying via the OPCM over 4 months ago, though it was not mandatory at the time.

We do plan an audit for a future OPCM release—specifically, with the addition of upgrade capabilities to the OPCM, so that both deployment and upgrading chains is a fully deterministic, uniform process, with the Security Council able to upgrade many chains in a single onchain action. Moreover, we intend to incorporate the OPCM into the process around each upgrade, so that the deployment of a new OPCM can be used to define the scope of audit for each upgrade.

In the meantime, the Optimism Foundation will continue to perform some additional validation checks on new chains, primarily this script.

Is there any plan for existing chains to migrate? If so, can you share some more details on how and when we expect this to happen, and what will happen to legacy chains that don’t meet the criteria at that point?

The current scope of the OPCM is just for new chain deployments. This means that legacy chains cannot “migrate” to it, as they are already deployed. However, as I mentioned above — the plan is for a future iteration of the OPCM to be able to upgrade existing chains as well. At that point, we should include all existing standard chains in the scope of upgradability so that they can leverage these features.

As a tactical note, the “legacy chains” note in the Standard Rollup Charter PR addresses this, by specifying that chains deployed prior to OPCM still meet the onchain criteria. So the language does explicitly reinforce that legacy chains meet the criteria / that this criteria is only applied on a go-forward basis (on March 1).

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Thanks for the quick reply.

Given that the OPCM is currently only being used for initial deployments, and is equivalent to the off chain scripts previously being run, we’re comfortable with this proposal’s change.

As you expressed, we’d love to have more precise security guarantees from an audit before the OPCM is used for upgrades, but are comfortable giving our thumbs up on the current upgrade proposal :saluting_face:

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