OP in Paris: Rollup Recap
A recap of all things Optimism at EthCC Paris, with links to presentations on Bedrock, EIP-4844, Cannon, and Optimism's technical roadmap.
ICYMI: last week our team headed to Paris to participate at the EthCC conference and connect with the global Ethereum community.
In total, three Optimists gave talks at EthCC:
• Norswap on leveling up optimistic rollups through Cannon.
• Joshua Gutow on OP Mainnet: Bedrock, the protocol’s next major upgrade.
• Karl Floersch with a one year retrospective of retroactive public goods.
Outside of these conference talks we also hosted two unique side events: a coworking space at a Parisian cafe and technical and governance workshops held in partnership with the Optimism Foundation. We’ve provided a short description of all presentations and workshops in this post (as well as links to slides and video recordings) so you can get up to speed on everything that went down in Paris, even if you weren’t able to make it.
OP Café
In order to provide something a little different from your regularly scheduled conference programming we decided to host a coworking space close to the conference. The idea was to give people the option to work independently or be social if they so chose—all while enjoying some of Paris’s famous coffee and baked goods!
Optimists in Paris Workshops
But Paris wasn’t just about world-class croissants and coffee. Together with the Optimism Foundation we also facilitated a series of engaging workshops on EIP-4844, Bedrock, Cannon, ZK proofs, and the future of on-chain governance. Much was gleaned from these invaluable presentations and workshops.
You’ll find a short description for each, as well as links to video recordings and presentation slides below.
EIP-4844 by Proto
EIP-4844 also known as “Proto-Danksharding”, increases the data-availability capacity of ethereum with a transaction-type dedicated to making blobs available for a fixed period of time. This creates a more sustainable, efficient, and scalable platform for rollups like OP Mainnet to secure the availability of their data with. The talk covers how the EIP implements this, how it prepares ethereum for full “Danksharding”, how OP Mainnet will adopt the EIP, and in what stage of development the EIP is currently at.
Bedrock by Josh Gutow
Bedrock is the next major upgrade to OP Mainnet. The talk goes over the motivation behind the upgrade and some technical details. It goes over the sequencer, verifiers, the batcher, the proposer, challenge agents, users, and how they interact together in the upcoming system. It also touches on the new guarantees on deposit inclusion and how they are enforced, plus some of the nitty gritty details of how the new bedrock contracts and system work together.
Cannon by Norswap
Until now, optimistic rollups have been relatively clunky as they need to patch the EVM bytecode in order to make it executable on layer 1 and in order to enable challenges via fault proofs. But not anymore! Cannon is a new fault proof system that minimizes the amount of code needed to run an optimistic rollup and ensures that no changes have to be made to the bytecode. As a result, the rollup is fully EVM-equivalent and compatible with all existing tooling.
Wen ZK by Kelvin Fichter
OP Mainnet has some major milestones coming up on the road to becoming a fully decentralized, fully trustless Rollup. Wen Bedrock? Wen proofs? Wen sequencer decentralization? Wen ZK 👀? This talk covers it all. Each section tries to cover some context about why each project is being prioritized, where it fits into the greater roadmap, and how far away we are from production. Lots of incredible protocol alpha contained herein!
Governance by Bobby Dresser
Optimism hosted a group of community members to discuss common themes and challenges in DAO governance. Simona Pop ran a session on DAO standards and habits. Abbey Titcomb facilitated a discussion on designing reputation systems in governance. And OP Labs’ very own Vee led a conversation around communication platforms and process. The knowledge shared by Simona from her experience with Gitcoin governance combined with Abbey’s questions from Radicle’s explorations along with Optimism’s early learnings in governance helped to move the conversation forward.
Some key themes that emerged from the workshop:
- Patterns are key. Taking cues from biology or other complex systems that include both balance and entropy, patterns and rhythm are key tools to keeping systems in sync.
- Iteration is the only path forward. No community has solved all these questions, and needs change as projects evolve. Listening, adjusting, and improving over time is the best way to design an appropriate governance process.
- New space, old problems. We aren’t the first humans to think through these problems. Historical social and political thinkers have a lot to lend to our current explorations.
- We’re not in it alone. There’s remarkable overlap in the problem space across DAOs and projects. It’s not just productive to share questions and discover together — it’s reassuring, too.
La fin
All in all, Paris and EthCC was a huge success! We met with partners, co-worked with friends, and vibed with many a fellow Optimist amongst the amazing Ethereum community.
While this is a digital decentralized movement, it’s always nice to get a little face time. And for those who weren’t able to make it in person we hope this post gives you a nice preview of what you missed.
Big thanks to everyone who made it to Paris and participated in the workshops. We’ll see you at the next one.
Until then, thanks for reading and, as always, restez Optimiste! 🔴✨