The OP Superchain Roundup #10
Optimism's Bedrock Upgrade Killed MEV Sandwich Bots Activity, Optimism Launches Third Round of Retroactive Public Goods Funding Voting and Kraken Explores Building its Own Layer 2 Blockchain Network
🌟 Welcome to the 10th edition of The OP Superchain Roundup! 🌟Â
Join us as we uncover the exciting world of the Optimism Ecosystem. In this newsletter, we'll bring you all the latest updates and developments on the OP Ecosystem. Let's get started!
Major happenings in the Ecosystem
OP Mainnet
Optimism's Bedrock Upgrade Killed MEV Sandwich Bots Activity
Optimism's Bedrock upgrade introduced an EIP-1559 style gas price mechanism.
This eliminated MEV sandwich bot activity on Optimism.
Sandwich bots try to censor/delay transactions to make profitable trades in between.
EIP-1559 reduces predictability of transaction inclusion by removing first-price auction.
Bots no longer know exact gas price needed, making their strategy less effective.
Governance
Optimism Launches Third Round of Retroactive Public Goods Funding Voting
Optimism has initiated the third round of Retroactive Public Goods Funding (RetroPGF) voting.
The voting period will end on December 7th.
A total of 30 million OP tokens will be allocated to 643 contributors within the Optimism ecosystem.
The results of the voting and token distribution will be disclosed in early January 2024.
Infrastructure
The Canyon Hardfork
Canyon is the first post-Bedrock network upgrade by Optimism.
The upgrade will activate on testnets on November 14th at 17:00 UTC.
Canyon has already been successfully activated on a devnet in collaboration with Conduit and Base.
The upgrade must pass through the Optimism governance process to be activated on OP Mainnet and other mainnets in the Superchain.
The Canyon upgrade includes support for Shanghai and Capella hardforks, minor bug fixes, and OP Stack specific changes.
The EIP-1559 denominator will be increased from 50 to 250 to reduce the rate of change of the basefee.
Canyon modifies the protocol to handle unclosed channels and adds a new field to the deposit transaction receipt encoding.
Node operators need to upgrade their nodes following the Canyon upgrade.
Highlights of the Week
Kraken Explores Building its Own Layer 2 Blockchain Network
Kraken, a cryptocurrency exchange, is reportedly in discussions with blockchain infrastructure firms to develop its own Layer 2 blockchain network.
The potential partners being considered include Polygon, Matter Labs, and Nil Foundation.
The conversations regarding Kraken's plans are still ongoing and have not been made public yet.
Coinbase, a rival exchange, launched its own Layer 2 network called Base earlier this year.
Optimistic Rollups, which utilize off-chain computation and state storage, are currently dominant in the Layer 2 market, while ZK Rollups rely on zero-knowledge proofs for individual transactions.
It is speculated that if Kraken launches a Layer 2 network, it will likely be based on ZK technology.
Kraken's spokesperson stated that they are always looking for new industry challenges and opportunities but have nothing further to share at this time.
That’s it for today, folks. See ya next Friday. 🧢