Scaling Ethereum with the OP Stack

This report is part 1 of 2 in a research series on the OP Stack ecosystem. Part 1 focuses on Optimism's strategy and the technical implementation of the stack. Part 2 will dive deeper into the Superchain and the potential challenges ahead.

Key Insights

• Optimism is a unique project in the scaling wars. Its strategy is to sustainably fund the infrastructure that will proliferate composable, Ethereum-centric chains.
• The OP Stack extends to any infrastructure that supports Optimism, the Superchain, and Ethereum. Optimism plans to use Retroactive Public Goods Funding to seed a sustainable, public goods flywheel for the stack.
• The ease of development combined with an opt-in shared sequencer model for the Superchain means that protocol developers have reduced barriers to entry. The OP Stack represents a new paradigm for open-source collaboration and protocol design.

Most live rollup solutions today are minimal viable products with simple smart contract execution environments. These don’t afford developers with new degrees of freedom for app or business model design. Much of the analysis regarding L2s has focused on these general-purpose smart contract ecosystems – which are important – yet, they are not indicative of the future state of blockchain scaling nor encapsulate the potential of rollup designs or new business models.

Optimism, the popular L2, is soon to adopt an upgraded rollup framework on its mainnet, the OP Stack. It is a full SDK for constructing modular, Ethereum-centric rollups. With the OP Stack, developers can customize rollups specific to their use cases, without straying from Ethereum infrastructure and tooling. The OP Stack represents a new paradigm for open-source collaboration and protocol design.