introduction
Last month, the WorldCoin Foundation announced the launch of World Chain, a blockchain based on OP Stack, which will join Optimism's Superchain and interact with other chains such as Base, Mode, OP Mainnet and Zora.
You may have heard of OP, OP Stack and Hyperchain. Curious people may ask: What? Why? Where? This article will answer them one by one, including the current status and vision of Hyperchain. At the end of the article, the operation process of one-click release of L2/L3 is also organized.
Let’s start with Optimism
Everyone must be familiar with Optimism, which is a Layer 2 solution based on Ethereum that aims to provide fast, stable, scalable and low-cost blockchain services. It helps alleviate network congestion by running on top of the Ethereum main chain (Layer 1), thereby reducing transaction costs and processing time.
Optimism uses a technology called Optimism Rollups, which packages a large amount of transaction data together and processes and pays fees only once on the Ethereum main chain. This method not only speeds up transactions and reduces costs, but also maintains the high security of relying on Ethereum as a foundation. Later, the Optimism Rollup technology was open source and became an open source blockchain framework announced by OP Stack - Optimism Collective.
OP Stack can be understood as a toolbox for launching L2 with one click, which greatly simplifies the construction of L2 chains. These decentralized L2 chains developed based on OP Stack share security, communication layers and open source technology Stack to form the vision of OP super chain.
Current situation - using OP Stacks in multiple areas.
OP Stacks has been adopted by many well-known projects, including Layer2 developed by Base: Coinbase, which currently ranks first in various L2 NFT transaction data, Debank Chain launched by asset management application Debank, and Farcaster Stack of social leading protocol Farcaster. The diversity of these applications reflects the OP super chain concept that OP Stack was designed to support from the beginning.
What is a "super chain"?
"Hyperchain" is a multi-chain network structure based on Layer 2 (L2) technology, which aims to solve the challenges of horizontal scalability of traditional blockchain. Traditional multi-chain architectures usually face difficulties in collaborative work and high overhead. "Hyperchain" commoditizes blockchain by treating each chain as "interchangeable computing resources", allowing developers to build cross-chain applications without increasing systemic risks.
In the "Hyperchain" model, individual chains (such as OP Chain) are standardized and integrated into a network formally managed by the Optimism Collective. These chains not only share security and communication layers, but also share an open source technology stack. This design allows developers to focus more on building applications on the entire hyperchain without having to worry about the specific technical details of a single chain.
In addition, this design concept also means that the concept of blockchain itself can become more abstract, and developers can view the entire interoperable blockchain network as a unified unit, thereby developing and deploying new solutions more efficiently. In this way, "super chain" not only optimizes resource utilization, but also provides new possibilities for the future development of blockchain.
How does OP Chain achieve security?
In the "superchain" bridge security model, security (i.e. validity) and liveness (i.e. censorship resistance) can be guaranteed. Security is guaranteed by the proof system, and liveness is guaranteed by the ability to submit transactions directly to L1. The combination of security and liveness means that if the OP Chain sorter fails, users can always submit transactions to L1, and L1 will migrate their use to a new OP Chain with a correctly functioning sorter.
The following is Optimism’s official definition of a “superchain”. A “superchain” is one that meets the following conditions:
Attribute Purpose Shared L1 blockchain Provides full ordering of transactions for all OP chains, i.e., sorter. Shared bridge for all OP chains Enables OP chains to have standardized security properties. Low-cost OP chain deployment Allows deployment and transactions without paying high L1 transaction fees. Configuration options for OP chains Allows OP chains to configure their data availability providers, sorter addresses, etc. Secure transactions and cross-chain messages Enable users to securely migrate data between OP chains.
OP Technology "Decentralized" Route
As a framework supporter, OP Labs has done a lot of work to make OP Stack support a wider range of technical decentralization. For example, the Bedrock version supports multiple proof schemes and multiple clients. Multi-client fault proof is a fundamental component of technical decentralization, and Bedrock's modular framework has greatly influenced the community's decentralized capabilities for actual development of OP Stack.
Strategy - Keep it Honest
In the pursuit of decentralization, it is important to remain intellectually honest about the challenges. Specifically, writing complex and bug-free code is extremely difficult, but critical, as any single bug could have catastrophic consequences for any L2.
Strategy - Developing protocol upgrades in parallel
OP advocates being purposeful, pragmatic, and cautious in the steps towards on-chain fault proofs. Achieving full proofs will take time, but Optimism believes that several protocol upgrades can be developed in parallel to enable the OP Stack to meaningfully further decentralization without waiting for fault proofs to be ready.
Keeping the technical solution updated all the time is actually the reason why Arbitrum found two bugs in OP a while ago [1]. As a technology provider, such an open source framework widely used by the community is also waiting for the scrutiny of the market and the community at any time, and needs to bear more responsibilities.
Technology Decentralization Timeline and Milestones
OP Stacks Superchain layout is successful in the commercial industry
According to L2Beat data, as of May 4, 2024, Layer2 TVL (total locked value) totaled $39.98 billion, of which OP Stack had $18.61 billion, nearly half of the total TVL and ranked first. Optimism's Stack service has been widely adopted, and more and more projects have adopted the OP Stack framework to quickly build a new L2, such as Optimism, Base, Mode, Zora, Frax, Lyra, Ancient, Redstone, Worldcoin, Mint, and Lisk. This highlights the value of Stack services in market narratives.
OP Stacks — How to evolve into a super chain?
From a technical perspective, we have removed some code and official information to answer the question.
Introducing the SystemConfig contract
Bedrock, the technology platform behind OP Stack, introduced the SystemConfig contract and began to define L2 chains directly through L1 smart contracts. This can be extended to put all the information that defines the L2 chain on the chain, including generating unique chain IDs, block gas limits and other key configuration values. The following is a snippet of the SystemConfig contract [2]:
/** * @title SystemConfig * @notice The SystemConfig contract is used to manage configuration of an Optimism network. All * configuration is stored on L1 and picked up by L2 as part of the derviation of the L2 * chain. */ contract SystemConfig is OwnableUpgradeable, Semver { /** * @notice Enum representing different types of updates. * * @custom:value BATCHER Represents an update to the batcher hash. * @custom:value GAS_CONFIG Represents an update to txn fee config on L2. * @custom:value GAS_LIMIT Represents an update to gas limit on L2. * @custom:value UNSAFE_BLOCK_SIGNER Represents an update to the signer key for unsafe * block distrubution. */ /* * @notice Minimum gas limit. This should not be lower than the maximum deposit gas resource * limit in the ResourceMetering contract used by OptimismPortal, to ensure the L2 * block always has sufficient gas to process deposits. */ uint64 public constant MINIMUM_GAS_LIMIT = 8_000_000; /** * @notice Identifier for the batcher. For version 1 of this configuration, this is represented * as an address left-padded with zeros to 32 bytes. */ bytes32 public batcherHash; /** * @notice L2 gas limit. */ uint64 public gasLimit;
CREATE2 Generate a certain chain address
Based on the SystemConfig design, once the data is fully on-chain, a factory can be created to deploy the configuration and all other required contracts for each chain. We further extend this step by using CREATE2 to generate a one-to-one contract address: this means that given a chain configuration, we can determine all bridge addresses associated with that chain. This also allows us to interact with the chain without deploying a bridge contract, making chain deployment almost free and allowing the chain to inherit standard security properties.
Communication between OP chains - "Chain Factory" uses OP chain data
Bedrock introduces a way to build L2 chains from L1 chains, where all chain data can be synchronized with L1 blocks. With the L1 chain factory extension putting all configurations on-chain, Optimism nodes are able to deterministically synchronize any OP chain with just an L1 address plus a connection to L1.
It is important to note that when the OP chain synchronization is completed, the chain state is calculated locally. This means that determining the state of the OP chain is completely permissionless and secure. Since all invalid transactions are ignored by the local node calculation process performed by the node, no proof system is required for the derivative chain. However, in order to guarantee withdrawals on the Superchain chain, a proof system is still required.
Modular design of sequencer using SystemConfig
The ability to set the sorter address in the SystemConfig contract was introduced in Bedrock. With the introduction of multiple chains with their own SystemConfig contracts, the deployer of the OP chain can be allowed to configure the sorter address. This configurable sorter design is called modular sorting. This allows different entities to sort OP chains while retaining the standard [Superchain bridge] security model - a key step towards the decentralization of sorters.
Modular sorting allows permissionless experimentation with different sorting models. Developers can adopt various sorting protocols such as polling sorting, sorter consensus protocol, price competition sorting (PGA sorting), or first-in-first-out sorting (FIFO sorting). We can expect that more user-friendly sorting standards will gradually emerge over time.
OP chains share a technology upgrade path
In order to launch the initial Superchain with high confidence in terms of security and decentralization, a decentralized security committee should be introduced to manage upgrades. The security committee should be able to update the set of chain attesters, initiate contract upgrades with delays, and press the bridge pause button in an emergency while canceling ongoing upgrades.
The ability to pause the bridge in an emergency means that in the worst case scenario, where the private keys of a security committee member are compromised, the result will be that withdrawals will be suspended indefinitely and the bridge upgrade will be permanently canceled. In other words, the L1 bridge will be frozen. This follows from the design principle of safety over liveness - that the loss of ETH or tokens should always be prevented (i.e., enforcing safety), even if it means that ETH or tokens are locked up (i.e., sacrificing liveness).
OP Stack becomes a pain point on the road to becoming a "super chain"
Of course, there are still some important pain points that need to be solved before the vision of scalable blockchain can be fully realized. The expected pain points include:
Withdrawal requests rely on a set of trusted chain attestors.
Cross-chain transactions are slow and require a challenge period.
The scalability of submitting transactions to Superchain is insufficient, and transaction data must be submitted to L1 with limited capacity.
Cross-chain transactions are asynchronous, which undermines the ability to perform atomic cross-chain transactions such as flash loans.
This was improved after EIP4844.
Lack of a good framework for building scalable applications that leverage multiple OP chains.
Lack of a simple wallet to manage tokens and applications across multiple OP chains.
We envision that once these pain points can be addressed, it will be possible to build decentralized alternatives to the most complex web2 applications.
4844 What will be the large-scale application of super chains after that?
The launch of EIP-4844 is almost synchronized with the Delta upgrade of the Optimism ecosystem, which is a perfect match.
Data availability (DA) solutions such as Celestia are mainly aimed at reducing the cost of rollup submitting data to L1, while 4844 provides a native solution that reduces the operating expenses (OPEX) of the OP chain by more than 90%.
We can see that before 4844, the main cost of OP Stack was concentrated on the gas cost of L1, as follows:
OP Stack on-chain L1 activity data (chain/L2 revenue/L1 fees/gross profit margin/L1 fee share):
OP Mainnet: 2k ETH / 1.97k ETH / 30 ETH / 98.5%
Base: 1.7k ETH / 1.37k ETH / 330 ETH / 80%
After 4844, it will be a boon to OP Stack and the Superchain ecosystem, and more and more project owners will be willing to use L2 as a technical solution. We also hope to see the reduction of blockchain solution fees, which will provide more business opportunities for project owners and provide the possibility for large-scale applications (Mass Adoption).
How to easily deploy L2 using Superchain
How to do it in practice? Superchain provides a platform called Superchain Dev Console [3][4], which supports Ethereum, Base, Fraxtel, Mode, OP Mainnet, Redstone, Lisk, Zora and other chains as L1 or L2.
At the same time, there are also many tools in the Hyperchain community that can be used to launch L3 with one click, such as Mode Flare developed by the Mode team. The architecture uses Pyth, Blockscout, Goldsky, etc. [5].
Some thoughts at the end: We have seen the layout of Optimism and the success of Hyperchain in the business landscape. OP Stacks has greatly reduced the threshold for launching a chain, and more and more teams benefit from the convenient and fast deployment of their own L2 and L3 by OP Stack. Will OP Stack become like AWS or Alibaba Cloud in the future, providing us with various infrastructures that are convenient for developers to build their own projects? Indeed, this decentralized technology solution can guarantee the open source and security of the technology to a certain extent. From a design perspective, does Hyperchain also have potential industry monopoly risks?
Time will tell.
Notes
[1]: Causes of the two bugs:
https://medium.com/offchainlabs/security-disclosure-289a4ad50709
[2] SystemConfig contract snippet:
https://github.com/ethereum-optimism/optimism/blob/74a63c94d881442b4edd4df6492513e0113eb064/packages/contracts-bedrock/contracts/L1/SystemConfig.sol
[3] Superchain Dev Console：
https://console.optimism.io/?ref=blog.oplabs.co
[4] Superchain App Quick Start：
https://docs.optimism.io/builders/app-developers/quick-start
[5] MODE FLARE L3：
https://www.mode.network/mode-flare-l3
References
https://docs.optimism.io/
ttps://optimism.mirror.xyz/2jk3D1Y8-hid8YOCUUa6yXmsyzNCYYyFJP0Nhaey9x0
https://blog.oplabs.co/decentralization-roadmap/
https://www.chaincatcher.com/article/2088168
