Bedrock’s Highly Anticipated Major Mainnet Upgrade, Optimism, Slated for June 6

The Highly Anticipated Bedrock Upgrade for Optimism Network

Optimism, a layer 2 scaling solution for Ethereum, is set to undergo its highly anticipated Bedrock upgrade on June 6. This upgrade is expected to result in significant improvements across the network, including reduced transaction fees, greater network security, and enhanced compatibility with Ethereum.

The Optimism team announced via a Twitter thread on May 15 that the network will be down for 2-4 hours on June 6 as the upgrade goes through. Transactions, deposits, and withdrawals will be unavailable during the downtime, and the OP Mainnet chain will not be progressing, as stated in an accompanying blog post.

Bedrock Upgrade: What to Expect

Bedrock is the first major network upgrade that was voted through by the Optimism governance council’s Token House. According to the Optimism community’s Bedrock explainer, the upgrade improves on its predecessor by reducing transaction fees using optimized batch compression and Ethereum as a data availability layer. It also shortens delays of including L1 transactions in rollups by handling L1 re-orgs more gracefully.

OP Labs, the network’s protocol development unit, estimates that transaction fees will drop by 47% with this upgrade. This is great news for the Optimism community as it will make using the network more affordable for everyone.

ZK Sync Era Overtakes Optimism?

However, the upcoming move to Bedrock comes at a time when zero-knowledge rollups (ZkEVMs) compatible with Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) have been taking the spotlight from optimistic rollup solutions such as Optimism.

According to data from L2beat, Matter Labs’ recently launched ZkEVM ZKSync Era has overtaken Optimism in terms of network activity. Over the past 30 days, ZKSync Era has seen 7.85 million transactions, compared to Optimism’s 7.66 million. In the past 24 hours, ZKSync Era has also outpaced Optimism in average transactions per second (TPS), at 6.80 TPS compared to 2.98 TPS.

Conclusion

The Bedrock upgrade for the Optimism network is highly anticipated by its community and is expected to provide significant improvements across the network. However, with ZKSync Era’s recent overtaking of Optimism in terms of network activity, it will be interesting to see how this competition in the layer 2 scaling space continues to unfold.

Key Takeaways

• Optimism is set to undergo its highly anticipated Bedrock upgrade on June 6, which is expected to provide significant improvements across the network.
• The upgrade will result in reduced transaction fees, greater network security, and enhanced compatibility with Ethereum.
• ZkEVMs such as Matter Labs’ ZKSync Era have been taking the spotlight from optimistic rollup solutions such as Optimism.
• ZKSync Era has overtaken Optimism in terms of network activity in the past 30 days and in the past 24 hours in average transactions per second.