Optimism began with a single chain – an L2 called OP Mainnet – a single team, and a single dream: to scale Ethereum. Watching Optimism grow is perhaps the greatest privilege: today, we are lucky to count dozens of values-aligned organizations as members of the Optimism Collective. Over 20 OP Stack Chains have committed to joining the Superchain vision, each contributing revenue towards the Collective’s shared initiatives. With over 39% of all L2 transactions in July, the Superchain is making significant progress toward a future where an abundance of blockchain infrastructure can support internet-level usage.

From its inception, the Superchain was envisioned as a unified, cohesive network of chains. But what does this really mean? As Ethereum goes “multi-chain,” new challenges emerge, and it’s the Superchain’s mission to solve them.

Let’s talk about some of those challenges, and the upcoming steps to ensure that we scale together, not apart.

Growing the Superchain with clarity and confidence

The modular, open source nature of the OP Stack allows developers to customize their chain to suit their specific needs. Permissionless innovation is a superpower of the OP Stack, but it also introduces heterogeneity risk: different OP Stack configurations result in different security models, operation costs, and more. It's crucial for users and developers to understand these differences, so that they can make secure and informed decisions across the Superchain.

This year, we are doubling down on ensuring that tradeoffs made across the Superchain are as accessible, transparent, and reliable as possible. In particular, we are introducing the Superchain Registry – an information hub providing thorough actionable information for every chain in the Superchain. The Superchain Registry will provide a source of truth for the configuration, security, and policy choices made across the Superchain, making it easier to discover, assess, and utilize different chains.

In tandem, we’ll introduce Blockspace Charters–a powerful new framework which gives Optimism Governance the tools to make informed decisions about protocol upgrades, taking into account the potential differences between different kinds of chains, and grouping similar chains together.

The Superchain Registry will make it dead-simple for users and developers to know which chains are suitable for them. Blockspace Charters will allow Optimism Governance to implement protocol upgrades which apply specifically to chains that share a certain configuration, leveraging their specific security/cost tradeoffs for maximum benefit.

The story doesn’t end there. Being able to group different types of chains together, and guaranteeing their uniformity with shared upgrades, sets the stage for realizing another key piece of our vision for the Superchain.

Making the Superchain interoperable

As the number of chains increases, composability between applications is reduced. Moving assets between chains quickly and safely can be challenging; users need to find a bridge application, hope it works, and then potentially wait for lengthy time periods before assets are received on the other side. Beyond asset bridging, it’s incredibly difficult to build apps which coordinate across multiple networks, especially when they need to communicate quickly and securely.

In the Optimistic future, we envision a unified Superchain with both the scalability of parallel chains and the composability of a single blockchain. To accomplish this, we're building a native Interoperability standard which allows fault proofs over multiple chains at once. This facilitates secure, rapid cross-chain communication – significantly enhancing economic efficiency and unlocking new multi-chain application use cases – without introducing fundamentally new security assumptions.

To support this, we are enhancing the overall multi-chain development experience by designing a set of tools to empower app developers to deploy efficiently using native Interop. We will introduce a comprehensive multi-chain dev environment with the abstractions and reference implementations that developers need to get started building interoperable apps.

We are also developing frameworks for asynchronous communication to simplify the use of Interop capabilities and integrate relayers, intents, and more.

Advancing tech decentralization

Earlier this summer, we launched permissionless fault proofs on OP Mainnet, bringing the OP Stack to Stage 1 decentralization. Currently, other OP Stack chains are upgrading to include the fault proof functionality. By adhering to the OP Stack standard configuration, these chains can seamlessly benefit from upgrades, which brings them closer to native Interoperability, unlock the network effect, and move them towards true decentralization.

Furthering decentralization, we aim to build redundancy in our Fault Proof System by adding a second proof system. It will consist of a new open-source, Rust-based Fault Proof Program Kona and a new Fault Proof Virtual Machine Asterisc, built by OP Stack core contributors – the OP Labs team, the Reth team at Paradigm, and Sunnyside Labs.

Forging a superior infrastructure

By ensuring a certain level of homogeneity among all chains and enhancing composability with a native Interoperability standard, we are paving the way for a scalable decentralized compute platform. These efforts aim to ensure that the users, developers, and assets move seamlessly and securely across the Superchain, bringing us closer to our vision of a decentralized internet built on superior infrastructure.

We have many other features, improvements, and tools in the pipeline, but these are some of the big rocks you'll see moving.

Stay tuned, and, as always--

Stay Optimistic!