OP Stack and Superchain

Editors Note: This is Part 3 in our 3 part series on Optimism by Tayyab Hussain. Read Part 1 Rollups 101 and Part 2 Being Optimistic for more information.

We’ve talked about Rollups and Optimism (the technology, the chain, and the collective), but OP Labs has even bigger ambitions. If you’ve been paying attention to the crypto world, you may have noticed that a few well known crypto companies are launching their own rollups. Much of that is thanks to the OP Stack.

The OP Stack

Optimism originally set out to build their own execution engine (how the code tells the blockchain what to do) called OVM, but for many reasons that ended up becoming a bit challenging for them. Through a series of events, they realized that a modular (think Lego blocks) architecture would be beneficial, and they ended up creating an Ethereum Virtual Machine, or EVM, equivalent execution engine, meaning that an Ethereum developer would have zero differences in building on Ethereum vs Optimism. Because what they had built was made open source, other teams started to learn more about it, and saw how it stably worked for OP Mainnet… and realized that maybe they could adopt it too.

Because of this, the stack became regularly forked, meaning the code was copy-pasted by other projects to solve some of their own problems. Optimism mentions how a team called Lattice took that code and built a Minecraft like game, but with major components onchain, plus more and more.

The team at Optimism realized… “Wait, let’s lean into this! Let’s make our code as re-usable as possible to as many teams in the Ethereum ecosystem as possible. And wow, this flys against any business advice you would get from MBA school.” Rather than keeping their software a secret and file lawsuits against anyone trying to “copy” their intellectual property (IP), they decided to just let everyone have it for free and find a way to turn it into a positive sum situation. They named this architecture the OP Stack.

This is truly revolutionary thinking. I just finished a book called How Innovation Works by Matt Ridley, who points out that historically IP actually has held back innovation by disallowing competition on certain axes Crypto, however, is rewriting all the rules towards a positive sum future.

Major players have entered the room

Not only has Optimism created great software that is wanted by small teams who don’t have the resources to build a rollup from scratch, but also they’ve been able to attract some of the biggest names in the space. Coinbase, Zora, Gitcoin, and more have already announced and even launched their OP Stack based rollups to the world.

Coinbase, probably the elephant in the room in most crypto rooms, has already gone live with its OP Stack based rollup called Base. There is something to be said that a major institution is making a significant bet by building a rollup and bringing its 100M users along with it. There is a lot of possibility here for Coinbase to create an ecosystem around Base that provides all kinds of new onchain opportunities for its customer base and maybe even the institutions.

As for Zora, they are using the OP Stack to become THE place where creators come and distribute media. They’ve been constantly ahead of the game here and have even dedicated money from the fees that they earn back to the creators themselves,which can be done swiftly at super low gas costs.Then there is Gitcoin which launched Public Goods Network, or PGN, to solve the issue of gas costs becoming an issue for donors in funding public goods. It also creates a single place to pool all Gitcoin liquidity rather than spread it out across multiple chains, which is easier to manage and easier to distribute to grant winners.

In our town analogy from my previous piece, this is like Optimism open sourcing how it runs its own town and shares knowledge with everyone and anyone so that they too can have their own sovereign towns. I wish all physical cities and towns worked this way as well. Think about all of the knowledge that could be learned from one another in this open source fashion and the improvements it could make on people’s lives. At the same time, being open source makes Optimism stronger in two ways: 1) More eyes looking at the OP Stack codebase, making improvements, finding bugs, extending it, and pushing its limits, and 2) Superchain.

Superchain and the Law of Chains

This is the most cutting edge work by Optimism, so by the time this goes live… some of this may be outdated.

Having all of these towns that make life easier and less congested on Ethereum is a wonderful thing. Everyone gets shared security and a central hub to go to where all the main action is happening, but without many of the headaches. Except now there is a new headache! Let’s say you want to go from Base to PGN; today you have to check back in with Ethereum, drive down the still slightly congested Ethereum highway, and drive to PGN. What if there was a way to drive directly from Base to PGN, like a local freeway? Well in comes the Superchain! (I know, what a cheesy name, but Optimism deserves to be creatively free after what they’ve done for the ecosystem).

Superchain is, in a very simplified way, a re-unification of all of the rollups into a single easier to use blockchain. If we have Base, ZoraChain, PGN, and others, how does a user decide where to put all of their money? What if I don’t want to spread myself across so many different chains? Do people really want twelve bank accounts, or just one super safe and easy to use bank account for all their needs? Most people want the convenience of one account. That’s Superchain’s vision, achieved by tying up all of the OP Stack rollups into a single cohesive chain. You can find out more about it all works, here.

Now, this is almost like the different towns forming a union of sorts, a European Union style relationship, which means we need a set of governing rules for all of these chains. This is called the Law of Chains, “a neutrality framework promoting core principles of user protection, decentralization, and economic autonomy as foundations for the developing Superchain.” Essentially, the Law of Chains is a code of conduct for how any chain using the OP Stack can participate in the Superchain, to avoid any bad actors from taking actions that could harm users or developers. You can read more here.

Ether’s Phoenix

Whilst writing this Optimism deep dive, I had been familiar with most of the concepts that I’ve mentioned to you before, but the one that was newer to me was the idea of Ether’s Phoenix. It’s a play on the thought exercise of (I warn you to not read this if you are afraid of existential thought provoking ideas) Roko’s Basilisk. Roko’s Basilisk is a doom and gloom story of how we are all headed towards control by an all-powerful machine or else it will destroy us.

Ether’s Phoenix is the (as always) optimistic viewpoint on our future. Phoenix’s are known for their ability to always find a way to rise from the ashes, and that’s what it symbolizes for the Ethereum community. Reward early contributors who get us through the early hurdles;collective and cooperative actions will lead to better systems, and those better systems will lead to even further collective cooperative action.

I’m now absolutely obsessed with Ether’s Phoenix and the wild optimistic possibilities for the future 🙂

What else before I go?

Let’s summarize: Ethereum is a rapidly gaining ecosystem that is constantly overwhelmed with demand and needs a way to scale. Rollups, specifically at the moment optimistic rollups, seem to be the leading solution on how to do this by giving users a secure off-ramp to perform onchain actions. OP Labs, aka the team behind Optimism, became pioneers in this space by:

• (1) launching Optimism, one of the first optimistic rollups;
• (2) establishing a governance model designed to improve the collective while rewarding the individual through public goods funding;
• (3) releasing OP Stack, which allows anyone to launch an optimistic rollup, leading to an explosion of new rollups trying to scale Ethereum.
• (4) leading the way towards a re-unified future through Superchain.

It’s an amazing feat to witness watching a decentralized community of builders come together to provide the world with a permissionless platform on which to build the future of applications that give power back to users.

Let’s help Ether’s Phoenix rise together!