Optimism Proposes Bedrock Upgrade for Community Review, OP Price Hits New ATH

The Ethereum Layer-2 protocol, Optimism, is in the final stages of preparing to launch its significant upgrade, Bedrock.

On the morning of February 2, the layer-2 project Optimism (OP) announced that it has submitted the Bedrock upgrade proposal to the Token House governance board for review, as part of its official process.

Bedrock is described as the culmination of years of research and development by the Optimism team and represents a crucial step toward Optimism's vision of becoming a simple, modular blockchain protocol that can support a multichain ecosystem.

Specifically, Bedrock will divide the Optimism architecture, known as the OP Stack, into three components: Consensus Layer, Execution Layer, and Settlement Layer.

The separation of the blockchain into these distinct parts, along with other technical changes introduced by Bedrock, will bring several major benefits to Optimism, including:

• Reducing the time to transfer funds from Ethereum to Optimism by up to 4 times;
• Cutting data transfer costs to Ethereum by up to 20%;
• Narrowing the gap with Ethereum’s Geth client to just 500 lines of code, improving synchronization;
• Implementing EIP-1559 like Ethereum for gas fee updates;
• Paving the way for other proof-of-data solutions like ZK-Rollups.

Optimism has now completed all necessary technical preparations for Bedrock and has submitted the proposal for Token House approval. If there are no objections from the community or technical issues during the final review, the upgrade is scheduled to go live on March 15, 2023.

Token House is one of the two chambers of the Optimism Collective governance board, alongside the Citizens’ House. Token House consists of OP token holders who vote on changes to the Optimism protocol, while Citizens’ House includes nominated individuals overseeing retroactive issues and OP fund usage.

Additionally, on the afternoon of February 2, Binance announced the launch of BUSD on the Optimism network, with support for token deposits and withdrawals on the exchange.

Thanks to the overall growth momentum in the crypto market on February 2, combined with the Bedrock upgrade news and Binance's support, OP price has reacted positively, surging nearly 30% in 24 hours to reach a new all-time high of $2.911.

1H Chart of OP/USDT on Binance at 09:15 PM on February 2, 2023

At the end of January, OP had already reached a new ATH thanks to the Optimism Quests program.