Prospects optimistic? An article summarizing projects using OP Stack.

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Author: LeftOfCenter

BNB Chain has launched its own Layer 2 chain and officially launched the Layer 2 testnet "opBNB" on June 19. With the support of the Layer 2 scaling chain, BNB Chain can greatly improve transaction speed and reduce transfer gas costs to $0.005, greatly enhancing BNB Chain's already powerful processing performance.

Interestingly, the application chain called "opBNB" is built on the OP Stack (specifically, the first official version of Bedrock based on OP Stack). It should be noted that OP Stack is a second-layer expansion framework for the Ethereum ecosystem, while BNB Chain is a smart contract public chain launched by Binance. To some extent, the two are in competition. So, what is the reason for BNB Chain to actively adopt the Ethereum development framework OP Stack to build its own chain?

In fact, L2 is not a unique requirement of Ethereum. With the surge in trading volume of GameFi and other applications, even high-performance public chains like BNB Chain are facing the challenges of network congestion and high gas fees. In this situation where the original design and architecture can no longer meet the new scalability requirements, opBNB has emerged.

opBNB is one of the recent members to join the OP Super Chain, but not the only one. In fact, we have seen several well-known projects join the OP Chain camp, including the self-developed Optimism blockchain (now renamed OP Mainnet), the Base Chain developed by Coinbase, the World App ecosystem wallet under Worldcoin (the encryption project of OpenAI CEO), the NFT trading market Zora invested by Paradigm, and the client Magi written in Rust launched by top venture capital firm a16z, all working together to create a grand narrative for the Super Chain.

And these projects themselves have a massive user base, high-quality resources, and numerous partners. Their entry into the game will undoubtedly attract more developers, applications, and users to the OP ecosystem, ultimately generating cash flow. It can be said that this "one-to-many" model supported by giants will become the main focus of Optimism's early ecological expansion.

Using NFT platform Zora as an example, while launching its own application chain Zora Network, it also brought in 35 partners including Sound.XYZ, Rainbow Wallet, and PleasrDAO into the Optimism superchain. This also brought in 130,000 users. Meanwhile, Worldcoin, initiated by OpenAI CEO, can bring in 1.7 million users while adopting OP Stack. Tiago Sada, the core developer of Worldcoin, told BlockBeats that "Worldcoin is currently in the first phase of migrating to the superchain, and World App accounts are being migrated to the Optimism rollup mainnet."

It can be said that the narrative of Optimism has gradually landed and begun to collapse into reality.

Although the ultimate vision has not yet been realized, the summer of this application chain has really arrived.

OP Stack Progress

From a technical perspective, the progress of Optimism is reflected in its tangible savings of a significant amount of on-chain fees for users.

Data shows that since the release of OP Mainnet, the usage fees of Ethereum have been significantly reduced, and can be compressed to less than 90%. Compared to Arbitrum One, OP Mainnet saves more transaction fees in the early stage, and the subsequent technological upgrades of both parties will compress or further widen the gap in fees.

In addition, after the Bedrock mainnet upgrade was completed on June 7th this year, fees were reduced by about 50% and deposit times were shortened. The average transaction gas fee has decreased by approximately 75% per transaction, making Optimism the cheapest Ethereum L2 network for token exchange. Bedrock brings Optimism closer to being a "super chain".

Optimism Bedrock is the architecture of a modular network and the first implementation of the OP Stack. It uses the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) as the execution layer, which is equivalent to the EVM, and uses Cannon as its interactive fault proof on the settlement layer.

The upgrade of Bedrock also makes Optimism more flexible and modular as a whole. If Ethereum introduces EIP-4844 in the future, Optimism will be able to introduce new transaction types at the same time, further reducing transaction fees.

Optimism is gradually gaining a foothold with OP Stack, which is reflected not only in its technological progress, but also in the increasing number of project parties joining the OP Stack camp.

More and more project parties have joined the lineup of the super chain by launching their own application chains based on OP Stack, except for Coinbase, which was the first to join. This includes top-tier venture capital firm a16z developing a Rollup client based on OP Stack components, Worldcoin, founded by ChatGPT's Sam Altman, which will also migrate from Polygon to Optimism, Zora launching a second-layer NFT casting platform Zora Network for NFT creators, brands, and collectors, and bringing in 35 partners. Even public chains like BNBCHAIN have built their own application chains opBNB using OP Stack.

What are the projects that use OP Stack?

OP Stack is known for its one-click chain deployment, but it is not the only option available on the market. In fact, projects such as Worldcoin, Coinbase, and BNB Chain have all considered building their own public chains or using other frameworks to construct layer 2 chains. However, none of them ultimately chose OP Stack. What is the reason behind this decision? Additionally, what strategic significance does the application chain based on OP Stack have for these projects?

Zora and its 35 ecological partners

Zora Network has launched a second-layer NFT minting platform based on OP Stack, which is aimed at NFT creators, brands, and collectors. The platform provides a range of tools for NFT creators and can reduce minting costs to below $3. Additionally, Zora Network offers a link to their NFT creator tools at https://zora.co/create/edition.

Aiming to create the best user experience for creators and collectors, Zora will provide a faster, more cost-effective, and better on-chain experience.

As Zora Engineering tweeted, "An interesting fact is that the cost of 'bridging' to L2+ and 'minting' in two steps is less than the cost of a single mint on the mainnet."

Zora Network will seamlessly integrate with the existing infrastructure of Zora Marketplace. This means that the current platform's artists, brands, and collectors will seamlessly join the new Layer 2 network, including 35 Web3 project entities such as the music NFT platform Sound.XYZ, wallet application Rainbow Wallet, Web 3.0 innovation incubator Seed Club, and PleasrDAO, as well as the current 130,000 users.

"Using OP Stack to develop application chains, we hope to minimize the cost for creators and make Zora a thriving place for on-chain media and cultural development."

To commemorate this release, Zora has issued an open version NFT called Energy. Fans can mint it in the next 10 days. The NFT can be found at https://zora.co/collect/zora:0x6c00cf938446c553a581f913fb0ad17a613157f9/1.

Data shows that as of now, Zora Network has surpassed 38,012 bridging addresses and has a TVL of 375ETH on-chain, equivalent to approximately $700,000.

BNB Chain Application Chain opBNB

L2 is not exclusive to Ethereum. With OP Stack, new public chains can also join the Ethereum L2 game, such as the second-layer application chain opBNB built on OP Stack.

On June 19th, BNB Chain launched a Layer 2 testnet based on Optimism OP Stack (expected to launch the mainnet in Q3 2023). By adopting OP Stack Rollup, opBNB can move computation and state storage off-chain, thereby alleviating congestion and reducing transaction costs.

opBNB can further improve processing speed, and its performance will surpass BNB Chain.

According to the official description, the opBNB block time is 1 second, and the transfer gas fee is as low as $0.005. The transaction processing speed (TPS) exceeds 4000 per second. In comparison, the current processing speed of layer 1 BNB Smart Chain is 2000 transactions per second. The average cost per transaction is about $0.109, which is almost twice as fast as the BNB Chain mainnet speed and significantly reduces costs.

opBNB is a Layer2 network built on the OP Stack on BSC. Similar to Optimism Rollup, opBNB calculates transaction data off-chain and packages it for submission to Layer1 to improve network performance, ultimately achieving high TPS, low gas fees, and the same level of security as Layer1.

So, why does opBNB use the OP Stack to build its own application chain?

In fact, L2 is not a unique requirement of Ethereum. With the surge in trading volume of GameFi and other applications, even high-performance public chains like BNB Chain are facing the challenges of network congestion and high gas fees. In this situation where the original design and architecture can no longer meet the new scalability requirements, opBNB has emerged.

As early as September last year, BNB Chain launched the zkBNB testnet (the second layer network that uses zero-knowledge proof). However, due to the incompatibility of zkBNB with EVM (which means it cannot interact with applications on Ethereum), BNB Chain had to develop a new Layer 2 solution called "opBNB".

opBNB has introduced improved data availability, batch transactions, and a gas limit of up to 100M for the BNB public chain ecosystem. Additionally, the EVM-compatible OP Stack simplifies the process of migrating Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) code from Ethereum to the BNB chain, enabling developers to create open ecosystems faster and more easily, thereby expanding the user base.

Unlike Base, the Layer 2 scaling solution of Optimism and Coinbase, opBNB is built on BSC (not Ethereum), which has better performance than Ethereum. OpBNB will further improve performance, surpassing not only BSC but also other scaling solutions such as Optimism.

The most important thing is that BNB Chain's adoption of OP Stack to build a second-layer application chain has strategic significance.

For the public chain BNB Chain, using OP Stack to build an application chain not only allows for high security brought by the Ethereum layer, but also enables the use of BNB as a gas fee payment token. This means that as more use cases emerge in the future, the application scenarios for BNB can be greatly expanded, and these benefits can be captured by BNB. In the long run, BNB Chain may even become a strong competitor to Ethereum's continuously developing L2 ecosystem.

Developed and incubated by Coinbase, Base

Base (@BuildOnBase), launched in February this year, is one of the earliest application chains to adopt OP Stack. Incubated by Coinbase, it is an application chain that joined the Optimism superchain ecosystem earliest, except for Optimism's own project.

In addition, the Base development team is also a core contributor to the OP Stack codebase and has been deeply involved in and promoting EIP-4844 together since earlier. It can be said that the Base team is the biggest driving force behind OP Stack research and development.

The application chain Base, which focuses on financial services, has the characteristics of security, low cost, developer friendliness, and easy deployment of dApps. So, as the largest and compliant centralized cryptocurrency exchange in the United States, why did Coinbase choose to develop the Layer2 network Base?

Developing an application chain like Base at this stage aligns with Coinbase's future roadmap.

In fact, after the previous phased goal of "developing and investing in a large number of decentralized applications to provide users with convenient access to cryptocurrency" gradually took shape, it is time to practice Coinbase's ultimate goal of "ultimately building a global open financial system and reshaping the current financial system".

However, building an open financial system requires the support of public chains and their ecosystems. Previously, Coinbase had the idea of building its own public chain, but ultimately abandoned it due to cost, difficulty, regulation, and strategic considerations.

Choose OP Stack to build your base, not only can you reuse existing Optimism development achievements, but you can also "one-click send chain". Its modular framework supports high openness and composability, including the execution layer of the chain (which virtual machine to choose), proof method (fraud proof or ZK), data availability (DA) layer, settlement layer, and so on, all of which are optional, truly modular Lego-style.

The most important thing is that becoming an OP Chain means that Coinbase joins the Ethereum lineup and can handle Ethereum traffic in the future. In addition, Base will also be a member of the "Super Chain", which can not only exchange resources with other OP Chains in the ecosystem, but also contribute to this "Super Chain" system that may reach Internet-level scale in the future. With Coinbase's existing user base (nearly 110 million users and over 8 million monthly trading users in Q3 2022), customers can seamlessly access financial service protocols hosted by Base and use Base as an entry point to cross over to Ethereum L1, other L2s, and other L1 ecosystems, greatly increasing the likelihood of Base's future success.

With the powerful resources behind Coinbase, Base had nearly 60 projects join as its ecosystem partners during its launch phase, including infrastructure and tools such as Chainlink, Nansen, Dune Analytics, and The Graph, as well as well-known projects originally deployed on Ethereum, such as Sushiswap, Balancer, and PoolTogether.

According to the development plan, Base will not directly serve C-end users in the future, but will introduce more decentralized applications to provide services for C-end users. Since its inception, Base has partnered with multiple developer communities and organizations around the world, including Upside DAO, Developer DAO, GenTwo, thirdweb, QuickNode, Google, and Blockdaemon, to hold hackathons and developer competitions to attract more developers.

Worldcoin and its on-chain identity system

In May of this year, the Worldcoin Foundation and Tools for Humanity (TFH) early protocol contributors announced their support for Optimism Collective to jointly build a scalable blockchain ecosystem based on the OP Stack ahead of the mainnet launch.

As the first step in entering the Optimism Collective, World ID, the decentralized privacy identity protocol under Worldcoin, will go live on the OP mainnet. The native wallet of Worldcoin, World App, will also be migrated to the OP mainnet in the future.

In fact, as early as 2020, Worldcoin had independently developed and launched an Optimistic Rollup application chain called Hubble, which was only aimed at simple payments, and also released a World App test version. However, after the release, the team found that the test results were not ideal, and user demand was more than just simple payment functions, which far exceeded the carrying capacity of Hubble, and later migrated to Polygon PoS.

Currently, Worldcoin has switched to using OP Stack to rebuild its application chain. However, the focus of this collaboration will be on building an on-chain identity system.

For Optimism, a decentralized identity system on the chain is the key to achieving its economic self-growth. It not only unlocks democratic governance and innovation, but also enables individuals to better control their finances and participate in the global economy in their own way.

For this purpose, Optimism has deployed an identity primitive AttestationStation. This experimental identity system allows anyone to provide arbitrary attestations for other addresses, thereby assigning a trust score to a specific on-chain address, measuring the real social relationships (influence) of that address.

For Worldcoin, the identity system is equally important. Since it aims to distribute digital currency for free to 7.9 billion people worldwide and achieve fair distribution of wealth, a method is needed to determine the user's identity and prevent the same person from receiving tokens multiple times under different identities. To this end, the team has developed World ID as the underlying identity protocol for Worldcoin, which ensures that each person can only register one account with their iris. In addition, the team has also developed a set of biometric devices that verify a person's uniqueness by scanning their iris, while ensuring the privacy of the verified person through zero-knowledge proof.

Currently, Worldcoin has over 1.6 million registered users for its beta version and over 500,000 monthly active users for its World App. This means that Worldcoin, which is part of the SuperChain ecosystem, will bring a huge number of users to the OP ecosystem. In the long run, considering Worldcoin's leading position in the development and investment of identity systems in the industry, this can enhance the governance capabilities of the key component "OP Citizens' House" in the Optimism ecosystem and promote the progress of the on-chain reputation system AttestationStation, ultimately expanding the Web3 identity system in the Optimism network and laying the foundation for decentralized governance.

The Worldcoin team has not yet announced the development progress of its application chain. However, Twitter user Spreek discovered that someone has deployed a large number of gnosis safes accounts on the Optimism network. According to statistics, a total of about 300,000 gnosis safes accounts have been deployed on the Optimism network, and each account has generated approximately 10,000-15,000 transactions within a week. Worldcoin core developer Tiago Sada claimed this "achievement" and told BlockBeats, "These Safe contract operations are related to the migration of World App accounts to the Optimism rollup mainnet. Currently, Worldcoin is in the first phase of migrating to the super chain."

a16z launches Rollup client Magi

Magi is a second-layer Rollup client solution launched by a16z Crypto in April this year. It is written in Rust language and based on OP Stack. It serves as a consensus client in the traditional execution/consensus split of Ethereum, providing new blocks to the execution client to advance on-chain transactions. Magi has the same core functionality as the reference implementation (op-node) and works with execution nodes (such as op-geth) to synchronize to any OP Stack chain.

Magi aims to become an independently developed op-node alternative, enhancing the client diversity of Rollup.

A16z hopes to build a new client based on Rust that will encourage greater security and activity throughout the OP stack, and bring more contributors to the ecosystem.

As one of the most well-known investors in the encryption field, A16z has over $7.6 billion (approximately RMB 50 billion) in funds for investment in this field (as of May last year). As an investor in the Ethereum scaling project Optimism, A16z Crypto is leading the development of the Magi client on the OP Stack, not only as an investor but also as a developer. This is also the first step for a16z to enter the Optimism Collective.

On-chain games: OPCraft, Keystone, and Loot

On-chain games usually have high-frequency interactive scenes, so the requirements for speed and cost are extremely high. This means that on-chain games need customized blockchain infrastructure, and many scaling solutions have launched scaling solutions for on-chain games.

OP Stack is one of the most popular infrastructures for on-chain games. Among them, one of the most representative on-chain game experiments, OPcraft, is built on Op stack.

OPCraft is a virtual world on the blockchain, where every river, every blade of grass, and every snow-covered mountain top exists on the chain, and every action that takes place is a transaction on the Ethereum network. Like most pixel-style games, you can explore procedurally generated landscapes, mine for resources, place materials, and craft new items in OPCraft. Players can work alone or collaborate with others to build magnificent structures, erect monuments, and transform the land.

OPCraft, built on the OP Stack, can achieve higher throughput and shorter block times with simple debugging.

Keystone is another chain made with OP Stack in the encryption industry. It uses custom pre-compilation to embed game tick and ECS into the chain, which can increase the game speed on the chain by 100 times and provide a more powerful gaming experience.

In addition, the Loot ecosystem project Adventure Gold DAO recently announced that it will adopt OP Stack to build a new Ethereum L2 network, Loot Chain, exclusively for the Loot community, in order to reduce gas fees and use its native token AGLD as a gas token. The chain also uses Polygon as a data availability layer, significantly reducing the cost of building, deploying, and operating the Loot Chain.

Conclusion

"One-click link sharing and modularization" is not something new, however, relying on the Ethereum ecosystem, OP Stack has attracted a large number of ecological partners with its high degree of openness and composability. After all, joining the OP Stack ecosystem means being able to share resources in parallel with Ethereum, enjoying the high security of Ethereum, and still being able to choose their own native token as gas token. Who can refuse such a good thing?

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