Superchain - Optimism's expanded vision

The Superchain concept brings groundbreaking scalability to the Optimism network and blockchains in the OP Chain ecosystem. This concept is quite similar to the Cosmos ecosystem, Avalanche's subnet.

The formation of Superchain

What is Superchain?

Superchain launched with the idea of merging the Optimism Mainnet network with OP Chains (blockchains using other OP Stack) to create a unified ecosystem. The aim of this merger is towards internet-level scaling.

Superchain projects will all be deployed on OP Stack (a set of solutions to help projects simplify the process of building Layer 2 blockchain), while sharing communication capabilities, bridges, security structures, and management. management, and network upgrades.

Vision of expansion

Optimism Foundation has a vision of expanding the blockchain ecosystem into a decentralized web - a re-architected internet that replaces centralized entities with permissionless protocols.

Optimism's Superchain is in fact horizontally scalable and requires the participation of multiple blockchains. The hardware requirement to synchronize a blockchain increases linearly with the amount of computation that blockchain performs, so to scale horizontally, blockchains must be run in parallel. However, traditional designs have limitations:

Each chain uses a new security model, leading to increased systemic risk when new chains are introduced into the ecosystem.
Developing new chains will be expensive because it requires building a completely new validator set or block producer.
By combining Layer 2s to form a multi-chain ecosystem, resources on those chains can be exchanged like commodities. This allows developers to freely build cross-chain applications without worrying about system risks.

Superchain can be considered a decentralized platform, consisting of many blockchains using the same security model and a unified technology set (OP Stack). With this vision, Superchain's competitors are the Cosmos, Avalanche and Polkadot ecosystems.

Structure of Superchain

As conceptualized above, Superchain is a network of many different L2 chains (called OP Chains) that share security, tech stack, and communication capabilities. This differentiates it from other multi-chain designs in its ability to standardize and exchange resources. Developers can then build an app that can be used for the entire Superchain.

For Optimism to upgrade to Superchain, the project must also meet a number of requirements:

·      Deployment: Helps projects deploy easily (done via OP Stack), low transaction costs.
·      Shared bridge: OP Chains use the same security standard, thereby allowing bridges to be performed between chains.
·      Shared L1 blockchain: Provides common transaction order across all OP Chains.
·      Configuration options: Allow OP Chains the ability to manually change the DA (Data availability) provider and the address of the transaction arranger (sequencer).
·      Cross-chain messages: Allows users to share state between OP Chains.
Bedrock-related updates also play an important role in Optimism's Superchain vision. Bedrock is basically an upgrade that helps modularize the system, reduce operating costs and improve the overall performance of Optimism.
The modular model gives Optimism the flexibility to customize each module according to its purpose, swap out individual components, and add new features in the OP Stack. In addition, Optimism has also added an update to help multiple chains interact with each other:

Upgrade Bedrock Bridge into a chain factory: Bedrock uses a type of smart contract to store all definition information about the L2 chain. Once the data is completely stored on-chain, Optimism can create a chain factory that deploys the configuration and all necessary contracts for each chain.

Get OP Chain data using chain factory: Bedrock introduces a solution to get L2 data from an L1 blockchain, where all chain data can be synchronized based on L1 blocks. This allows Optimism nodes to synchronize with any OP Chain.

Permissionless proof system: Bedrock instance has a position designated as proposer, responsible for posting the new L2 state root to L1. When a user withdraws money, the proposer will need to send a proposal to L1 within a certain period of time, this will encounter limitations as the number of chains increases. Optimism offers 2 solutions:

Permissionless withdrawal claims: allows anyone to submit a withdrawal request.

Remove proposal submission period: this eliminates costs incurred when deploying a new OP Chain.
Self-changing sequencer: OP Chain deployers can manually change the sequencer address (the role of arranging transactions on an L2), while allowing developers to deploy many different sequencer models.

Joint implementation of upgrades: Establish a decentralized security council to manage upgrades. This board has the ability to perform upgrades on OP Chains, pause emergency bridges, as well as cancel pending upgrades.

With the above vision and design, Superchain can become an ecosystem with the advantages of uniform governance, the ability to expand on a large scale, interact between chains while still maintaining the same level of security.

Current Superchain ecosystem

Currently, there are 37 ecosystems using OP Stack with more than 6 billion USD in TVL value, more than 16.5 million transactions performed. These blockchains will be divided into 3 different groups:

·      OP Chain: Built on OP Stack, governance-approved version, therefore governed by Optimism and participates in contributing revenue to the Optimism Collective.
·      Bedrock: Uses the fork of OP Stack Bedrock version, modifications can be added or not. These chains are not included in the Superchain.
·      OVM: Use the fork of OP Stack Optimism Virtual Machine version. This version is considered outdated and will not be allowed to join the Superchain.
Blockchains such as Base, Mode, Zora are considered OP Chain and have joined Superchain. These blockchains will then make upgrade changes according to Optimism's governance, participating in sharing and contributing profits to the Collective. This is the project group with the highest number of users and TVL.

Base is currently the blockchain with the highest revenue as well as the highest retained profit because Optimism contributes 100% of profits to OP Collective. The 2 projects that generate the most transaction fees on these 2 networks are Worldcoin (OP Mainnet) and Uniswap (Base).

In addition to some of the above large chains, OP Chains also has other prominent projects using the fork of OP Stack Bedrock version such as opBNB, Aevo, Debank Chain... However, these projects have a relatively slow development speed. Compared to the OP Chains group, the TVL level is relatively small (less than 50 million USD) and most are in the testnet stage.

Projects using the fork of OP Stack Optimism Virtual Machine version such as Mantle, Metis, Boba Network are projects from the previous stage, have a certain amount of key value, however these projects will never considered part of the Superchain.

Some dApps on Superchain

The largest AMM on Optimism mainnet, Velodrome, has been selected to become Superchain's first liquidity hub. Velodrome immediately expanded to other chains, firstly Mode and Built on Bitcoin (BOB).

Velodrome's AMM and gauge system will be used directly on the Mode ecosystem. veVELO voters can vote emission for gauges on Mode and receive rewards generated from those pools.

In addition to Velodrome, there are 2 other projects that have multi-chain operations on OP Chains:

·      Owlto Finance - decentralized bridge for Rollups, has not issued tokens yet and has a scoring program. Users can bridge both tokens and NFTs.
·      Symbiosis Finance: DEX supports swaps on both EVM and non-EVM chains such as Bitcoin, Tron, Merlin... The project has successfully raised 5 million USD from 14 different funds including Delta Blockchain Fund and Binance Labs.

Some weaknesses need improvement

To improve the scalability and decentralization of Optimism, the project also points out a few points that need to be improved, each weakness is also proposed to be resolved but has not been implemented:
·      Withdrawal requests are relying on a centralized group of proposers.
·      Cross-chain transactions are slow because they require a challenge period.
·      Cross-chain transactions are not synchronized, cross-chain transactions such as flash loans are not performed.
·      Sending transactions to Superchain cannot scale because transaction data must still be sent to L1 which has limited capacity.
·      There is no framework yet to build scalable applications across multiple OP Chains.
·      There is no unified wallet to manage tokens/assets across different OP Chains.

Optimism is researching and offering solutions to each of the above problems, and the next updated versions will most likely aim to solve these problems. Some important keywords mentioned by Optimism include:
·      Mixing multiple proof systems: Combining fraud proofs - Fault proofs and zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs).
·      Shared sequencing protocol: Helps solve the problem of decentralization of sequencers on the current Rollup.
·      Plasma protocol: Replaces the DA layer on L1, providing a cheaper data processing solution, better expansion, but a poorer security model.

summary

Optimism believes the implementation of Superchain and the support of OP Stack will bring a great step forward in expanding the blockchain ecosystem. The Superchain ecosystem already has notable names, but to achieve its goals, Optimism still needs to introduce many improvements in the future.