Optimistic Outlook? An Overview of Projects Using OP Stack

Written by: LeftOfCenter, Rhythm BlockBeats

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 significantly enhance transaction speed and reduce transfer gas costs to $0.005, greatly strengthening the already powerful processing capabilities of BNB Chain.

Interestingly, the application chain named "opBNB" is built on the OP Stack (specifically, the first official version of OP Stack called Bedrock). It is important to note that OP Stack is a Layer 2 scaling framework for the Ethereum ecosystem, while BNB Chain is a smart contract public chain launched by Binance. To some extent, the two are in a competitive relationship. So, what motivates BNB Chain to actively adopt Ethereum's development framework OP Stack to build its own chain?

In fact, Layer 2 is not a demand unique to Ethereum. With the surge in transaction volumes from GameFi and other sectors, even high-performance public chains like BNB Chain face issues of network congestion and high gas fees. When the original design and architecture can no longer meet new scalability demands, opBNB was born.

opBNB is a recent addition to the OP Superchain, but it is 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 (OpenAI CEO's crypto project), the NFT trading market Zora backed by Paradigm, and the Rust-based client Magi launched by top venture capital firm a16z, all contributing to the grand narrative of the superchain.

These projects themselves boast a massive user base, high-quality resources, and numerous partners. Their entry will inevitably 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 ecosystem expansion.

Taking the 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, along with 130,000 users. Meanwhile, Worldcoin, initiated by the OpenAI CEO, can bring in 1.7 million users by adopting OP Stack. Worldcoin core developer Tiago Sada told BlockBeats, "Currently, Worldcoin is 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 materialized and is beginning to collapse into reality.

Although the final vision has not yet been realized, the summer of application chains has truly arrived.

OP Stack Progress

On the technical level, Optimism's progress is reflected in the significant savings it has provided to users in on-chain fees.

Data shows that since the launch of OP Mainnet, Ethereum's usage fees have been massively reduced, compressing to below 90%. Compared to Arbitrum One, the transaction fees saved in the early days of OP Mainnet were even greater, and subsequent technical upgrades from both sides will either compress or further widen the fee gap.

Additionally, after completing the Bedrock upgrade on June 7 of this year, fees were reduced by about 50%, and deposit times were shortened. The average gas fee per transaction decreased by approximately 75%, making the Optimism mainnet the cheapest Ethereum L2 network for token exchanges. Bedrock brings Optimism closer to the "superchain."

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

The Bedrock upgrade also makes Optimism overall more flexible and modular. If Ethereum introduces new transaction types through EIP-4844 in the future, Optimism can further significantly reduce transaction fees.

Optimism is gradually establishing its foothold with OP Stack, which is not only reflected in its technical progress but can also be seen from the increasing number of project parties joining the OP Stack camp.

In addition to the initially joined Coinbase (which launched its own L2—Base based on OP Stack), more and more project parties are joining the ranks of the superchain, launching their own application chains using OP Stack. This includes top venture capital firm a16z developing a Rollup client based on OP Stack components, Worldcoin, created by ChatGPT founder Sam Altman, migrating from Polygon to Optimism, and Zora launching a Layer 2 NFT minting platform Zora Network aimed at NFT creators, brands, and collectors, bringing in 35 partner collaborations. Even public chains like BNBCHAIN have adopted OP Stack to build their own application chain opBNB.

What Projects Are Using OP Stack?

OP Stack primarily offers one-click chain deployment, but it is not the only option available on the market. In fact, projects like Worldcoin, Coinbase, and BNB Chain have previously considered building their own public chains or using other frameworks to construct Layer 2 chains. However, they ultimately all chose OP Stack. What are the reasons behind this? Additionally, what strategic significance do application chains based on OP Stack hold for various projects?

Zora and Its 35 Ecosystem Partners

Zora Network has launched a Layer 2 NFT minting platform based on OP Stack, targeting NFT creators, brands, and collectors, providing a range of NFT creator tools and reducing minting costs to below $3.

Focusing on creating the best user experience for creators and collectors, Zora will offer faster speeds, lower costs, and better on-chain experiences.

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

Zora Network will seamlessly integrate with the existing infrastructure of the Zora marketplace. This means that the current platform's artists, brands, and collector users 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, along with the existing 130,000 users.

"By adopting OP Stack to develop the application chain, we hope to minimize costs for creators and make Zora a thriving place for on-chain media and culture."

To commemorate this release, Zora issued an open edition NFT called Energy, which fans can mint in the coming days.

Data shows that since its launch on the 21st, Zora Network has surpassed 38,012 bridge addresses, with an on-chain TVL of 375 ETH, approximately $700,000.

BNB Chain Application Chain opBNB

Layer 2 is not exclusive to Ethereum. With OP Stack, new public chains can also join the Ethereum Layer 2 battle, such as the Layer 2 application chain opBNB built on OP Stack.

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

opBNB can further enhance processing speed, outperforming BNB Chain.

According to official descriptions, opBNB has a block time of 1 second, with transfer gas fees as low as $0.005, and a transaction volume (TPS) exceeding 4,000 per second. In comparison, the current Layer 1 BNB Smart Chain processes about 2,000 transactions per second, with an average cost of approximately $0.109 per transaction, nearly double the speed of the BNB Chain mainnet, while significantly lowering costs.

opBNB is a Layer 2 network on BSC built on OP Stack. Like Optimism Rollup, opBNB enhances network performance by computing transaction data off-chain and packaging it for unified submission to Layer 1, ultimately achieving high TPS, low gas fees, and security consistent with Layer 1.

So, why did opBNB choose to build its application chain using OP Stack?

In fact, Layer 2 is not a unique demand of Ethereum. With the surge in transaction volumes from GameFi and other sectors, even high-performance public chains like BNB Chain face issues of network congestion and high gas fees. When the original design and architecture can no longer meet new scalability demands, opBNB was born.

Last September, BNB Chain had launched the zkBNB testnet (a Layer 2 network using zero-knowledge proofs), but due to zkBNB's incompatibility with EVM (incompatibility with EVM means it cannot interact with applications on Ethereum), BNB Chain turned to develop a new Layer 2 solution, "opBNB."

opBNB introduces improved data availability, batch transactions, and a gas limit of up to 100M for the BNB public chain ecosystem. At the same time, the EVM-compatible OP Stack simplifies the process of migrating Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) code from Ethereum to the BNB chain, allowing developers to create open ecosystems more quickly and easily, thus expanding the user base.

Unlike Optimism and Coinbase's Layer 2 scaling solution Base, opBNB is built on BSC (rather than Ethereum), which already has better performance than Ethereum. opBNB will further enhance performance, not only surpassing BSC but also outperforming scaling solutions like Optimism.

Most importantly, BNB Chain's adoption of OP Stack to build a Layer 2 application chain has strategic significance.

For the public chain BNB Chain, building an application chain using OP Stack not only allows it to enjoy the high security provided by Ethereum Layer 1 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 could even become a strong competitor to Ethereum's continuously evolving Layer 2 ecosystem.

Base Developed and Incubated by Coinbase

Launched in February of this year, Base (@BuildOnBase) is one of the earliest application chains to adopt OP Stack. It was incubated by Coinbase and is the first application chain to join the Optimism Superchain ecosystem, aside from Optimism's own projects.

Additionally, the Base development team is a core contributor to the OP Stack codebase and has previously participated deeply in promoting EIP-4844. It can be said that the Base team is a significant force behind the research and development of OP Stack.

The application chain Base, which focuses on financial services, features security, low cost, developer-friendliness, and ease of deploying dApps. So, why did Coinbase, the largest and compliant centralized crypto exchange in the U.S., choose to develop the Layer 2 network Base?

At this stage, developing an application chain like Base aligns with Coinbase's future roadmap.

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

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

Choosing to build Base with OP Stack not only allows the reuse of existing Optimism development achievements but also enables "one-click chain deployment." Its modular framework supports high openness and composability, including optional elements such as the execution layer of the chain (which virtual machine to choose), proof methods (fraud proof or ZK), data availability (DA) layer, and settlement layer, truly embodying a modular LEGO approach.

Most importantly, becoming part of the OP Chain means Coinbase joins the Ethereum lineup, allowing it to capture Ethereum's traffic in the future. Additionally, Base will become a member of the "superchain," enabling resource exchange with other OP Chains in the ecosystem while contributing to this "superchain" system, which may reach internet-scale in the future. Coupled with Coinbase's existing user base (in Q3 2022, Coinbase had nearly 110 million users and over 8 million monthly trading users), seamlessly integrating current customers into the financial service protocols supported by Base and using Base as an entry point to cross over to Ethereum L1, other L2s, and other L1 ecosystems significantly increases Base's chances of success.

With the strong resources behind Coinbase, nearly 60 projects joined Base as ecosystem partners during its launch phase, including infrastructure and tools like Chainlink, Nansen, Dune Analytics, 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. To this end, since its launch, Base has already collaborated with multiple developer communities and organizations, including Upside DAO, Developer DAO, GenTwo, thirdweb, QuickNode, Google, and Blockdaemon, to host numerous hackathons and developer competitions worldwide to attract more developers.

Worldcoin and Its On-Chain Identity System

In May of this year, the Worldcoin Foundation and early protocol contributor Tools for Humanity announced support for Optimism Collective to jointly build a scalable blockchain ecosystem based on OP Stack.

As the first step into the Optimism Collective, Worldcoin's decentralized privacy identity protocol World ID will launch on the OP mainnet, and its native wallet World App will also migrate to the OP mainnet subsequently.

In fact, as early as 2020, Worldcoin developed and launched an Optimistic Rollup application chain called Hubble, specifically for simple payments, and released a beta version of World App. However, after the release, the team found that the test results were not ideal, and user needs extended beyond simple payment functions, far exceeding Hubble's capacity, leading to a migration to Polygon PoS.

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

For Optimism, an on-chain decentralized identity system is key to achieving its economic self-growth, as it can unlock democratic governance and innovation while allowing individuals to better control their finances and participate in the global economy in their own way.

To this end, Optimism has deployed the identity primitive AttestationStation, an experimental identity system that allows anyone to attest to any other address, 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 globally and achieve fair wealth distribution, a method to determine user identity is needed to prevent the same person from claiming tokens multiple times under different identities. To this end, the team developed World ID as the underlying identity protocol for Worldcoin, ensuring that each person can only register one account using their iris. Additionally, the team developed a set of biometric devices to verify a person's uniqueness by scanning their iris while ensuring the privacy of the verified individual through zero-knowledge proofs.

Currently, Worldcoin has over 1.6 million registered beta users and over 500,000 monthly active World App users, which means that Worldcoin's entry into the superchain ecosystem will bring a massive user base to the OP ecosystem. In the long run, considering Worldcoin's leading position in the industry regarding research and investment in identity systems, this can enhance the governance capabilities of a key component of the Optimism ecosystem, "OP Citizens' House," and advance the progress of the on-chain reputation system AttestationStation, ultimately expanding the Web3 identity system within the Optimism network and laying the foundation for decentralized governance.

The Worldcoin team has not yet disclosed the development progress of its application chain. However, Twitter user Spreek tweeted that a large number of Gnosis Safe accounts have been deployed on the Optimism network. According to statistics, approximately 300,000 Gnosis Safe accounts have been deployed on the Optimism network, with each account generating about 10,000 to 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 superchain."

Rollup Client Magi Launched by a16z

Magi is a Layer 2 Rollup client solution launched by a16z Crypto in April of this year. It is written in Rust and created based on OP Stack, acting 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 alongside execution nodes (such as op-geth) to synchronize with any OP Stack chain.

Magi aims to become a directly replaceable independent op-node to enhance the diversity of Rollup clients.

A16z hopes that building a new client based on Rust will encourage the entire OP Stack to be more secure and active, bringing more contributors to the ecosystem.

As one of the most well-known investors in the crypto space, A16z has over $7.6 billion (approximately 50 billion RMB) allocated for investments in this field (as of May last year). As one of the investors in the Ethereum scaling project Optimism, a16z Crypto is leading the development of the Magi client on OP Stack, acting as both an investor and a developer. This also marks a16z's first step into the Optimism Collective.

On-Chain Games: OPCraft, Keystone, and Loot

On-chain games typically involve high-frequency interactions, which means they have high demands for speed and cost. This implies that on-chain games require customized blockchain infrastructure, and many scaling solutions have launched scaling solutions specifically for on-chain games.

OP Stack is one of the most popular infrastructures for on-chain games, with one of the most representative on-chain game experiments, OPCraft, built on OP Stack.

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

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

Keystone is another chain made with OP Stack, using custom precompiles to embed game ticks and ECS within the chain, increasing the speed of on-chain games by 100 times and providing a more powerful gaming experience.

Additionally, the Loot ecosystem project Adventure Gold DAO recently announced that it will build a new Ethereum L2 network Loot Chain specifically for the Loot community using OP Stack to reduce gas fees and use its native token AGLD as the gas token. The chain also uses Polygon as the data availability layer, significantly reducing the construction, deployment, and operational costs of Loot Chain.

Conclusion

"One-click chain deployment + modularity" is not a new concept. However, relying on the Ethereum ecosystem, OP Stack attracts a large number of ecosystem 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 Ethereum's high security while still being able to choose one's own native token as the gas token. Who could refuse such a good deal?