Optimistic about the prospects? An article sorting out the projects using OP Stack

Written by LeftOfCenter
BNB Chain has launched its own second-layer chain and officially launched the Layer 2 testnet "opBNB" on June 19. With the support of the second-layer expansion chain, BNB Chain can greatly increase transaction speed and reduce the transfer gas cost to US$0.005, greatly enhancing BNB Chain's already powerful processing performance.
Interestingly, this application chain named "opBNB" is built on OP Stack (to be precise, it is built on the first official version of OP Stack, Bedrock). It should be noted that OP Stack is the second-layer expansion framework of the Ethereum ecosystem, and BNB Chain is a smart contract public chain launched by Binance. To some extent, the two are in a competitive relationship. So, what is the reason that prompted BNB Chain to actively adopt Ethereum's development framework OP Stack to build its own chain?
In fact, L2 is not a demand unique to Ethereum. With the surge in transaction volume of GameFi and other platforms, even high-performance public chains such as BNB Chain are facing the problems of network congestion and high gas fees. The original design and architecture can no longer meet the new scalability requirements, so opBNB came into being.
opBNB is a recent member of the OP Super Chain, but it is not the only one. In fact, we have seen many 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 ecological wallet World App under Worldcoin (OpenAI CEO's encryption project), the NFT trading market Zora invested by Paradigm, and the top venture capital a16z launched the client Magi written in Rust, together to create the grand narrative of the super chain.
These projects themselves have a huge number of users, high-quality resources and numerous partners. Their entry will inevitably attract more developers, applications and users to the OP ecosystem and ultimately generate cash flow. It can be said that this "one-to-many" model supported by giants will become the main focus of Optimism's early ecological expansion.
Take the NFT platform Zora as an example. While launching its own application chain Zora Network, it also brought 35 partners including Sound.XYZ, Rainbow Wallet and PleasrDAO into the Optimism superchain, along with 130,000 users. Worldcoin, initiated by OpenAI CEO, can bring 1.7 million users while adopting OP Stack. Worldcoin core developer Tiago Sada told Blockchain.com, "Currently, Worldcoin is in the first stage of migration to the superchain, and the World App account is migrating to the Optimism rollup mainnet."
It can be said that Optimism’s previous narrative has gradually been implemented and started to collapse into reality.
Although the ultimate vision has not yet been realized, the summer of application chain has really arrived.
OP Stack Progress
On a technical level, the progress of Optimism is reflected in the fact that it actually saves users a lot of on-chain fees.
Data shows that since the release of OP Mainnet, Ethereum’s usage fees have been greatly reduced, and can be compressed to less than 90%. Compared with Arbitrum One, OP Mainnet saves more transaction fees in the early stage, and subsequent technical upgrades of both parties will compress or further widen the gap in fees.
In addition, after the mainnet Bedrock upgrade was completed on June 7 this year, fees were reduced by about 50% and deposit time was shortened. The average gas fee per transaction dropped by about 75%, making the Optimism mainnet the cheapest Ethereum L2 network for token exchange. Bedrock brings Optimism closer to a "super chain".
Optimism Bedrock is an architecture for modular networks and the first implementation of the OP Stack, which uses the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) as the execution layer, equivalent to the EVM, and uses Cannon as its interactive fault proof on the settlement layer.
The Bedrock upgrade also makes Optimism more flexible and modular overall. If Ethereum passes EIP-4844 in the future, Optimism can also introduce new transaction types at the same time, which will further significantly reduce transaction fees.
Optimism is gradually gaining a foothold with the help of OP Stack. This is not only reflected in its technological progress, but also can be seen from the fact that more and more project parties are joining the OP Stack camp.
In addition to the initial member Coinbase (which launched its own L2 - Base based on OP Stack), more and more project parties have joined the super chain lineup and adopted OP Stack to launch their own application chains. This includes top venture capital a16z developing a Rollup client based on OP Stack components, and Worldcoin created by Sam Altman, the founder of ChatGPT, will also migrate from Polygon to Optimism. Zora launched the second-layer NFT casting platform Zora Network for NFT creators, brands and collectors, and brought in 35 partners. Even public chains like BNBCHAIN ​​have adopted OP Stack to build their own application chain opBNB.
Which projects use OP Stack?
OP Stack focuses on one-click chain launch, but it is not the only option on the market. In fact, Worldcoin, Coinbase and BNB Chain have considered building their own public chains or using other frameworks to build second-layer chains. However, in the end, none of them chose OP Stack. What is the reason behind this? In addition, what is the strategic significance of the application chain based on OP Stack for each project?
Zora and its 35 ecosystem partners
Zora Network has launched a second-layer NFT minting platform based on OP Stack, which provides a series of NFT creator tools for NFT creators, brands and collectors, and can reduce the minting cost to less than US$3.
By building the best user experience around creators and collectors, Zora will provide a faster, lower-cost, and better on-chain experience.
As Zora Engineering tweeted, “An interesting fact is that the combined cost of the two operations of ‘bridging’ to L2+ ‘minting’ is less than the cost of a single mint on mainnet.”
Zora Network will be seamlessly integrated with the existing infrastructure of the Zora Marketplace. This means that existing artists, brands, and collectors on the platform will be seamlessly added to the new second-layer network, including music NFT platform Sound.XYZ, wallet application Rainbow Wallet, Web 3.0 innovation incubator Seed Club and PleasrDAO, 35 Web3 project entities, and 130,000 existing users.
“By using OP Stack to develop application chains, we hope to minimize costs for creators and make Zora a place where on-chain media and culture can flourish.”
To mark the launch, Zora is issuing an open-edition NFT called Energy that fans can mint over the next few days.
Data shows that so far, since the launch of Zora Network on the 21st, its bridge address has exceeded 38,012, and the on-chain TVL has reached 375ETH, equivalent to approximately US$700,000.
BNB Chain Application Chain opBNB
L2 is not exclusive to Ethereum. With OP Stack, new public chains can also join the Ethereum L2 battle, such as the second-layer application chain opBNB built on OP Stack.
On June 19, BNB Chain launched a Layer 2 testnet based on Optimism OP Stack (the mainnet is expected to be launched in Q3 2023). By adopting OP Stack Rollup, opBNB can move computing and state storage off-chain, thereby alleviating congestion and reducing transaction costs.
opBNB can further improve the processing speed and its performance will be better than BNB Chain.
According to the official description, the opBNB block time is 1 second, the transfer gas fee is as low as US$0.005, and the number of transactions processed per second (TPS) exceeds 4,000. In comparison, the current layer 1 BNB Smart Chain processing speed is 2,000 transactions per second). The average cost of each transaction is about US$0.109, which is almost twice the speed of the BNB Chain mainnet, and the cost is also greatly reduced.
opBNB is a second-layer network (Layer2) on BSC built on OP Stack. Like Optimism Rollup, opBNB improves network performance by calculating and packaging transaction data off-chain and submitting it to Layer1, ultimately achieving high TPS, low gas fees and security consistent with Layer1.
So, why does opBNB use OP Stack to build its own application chain?
In fact, L2 is not a unique demand of Ethereum. With the surge in transaction volume of GameFi and other platforms, even public chains with higher performance such as BNB Chain are facing the problems of network congestion and high gas fees. The original design and architecture can no longer meet the new scalability requirements, so opBNB came into being.
As early as September last year, BNB Chain launched the zkBNB testnet (a Layer 2 network using zero-knowledge proof). However, since zkBNB is not compatible with EVM (incompatibility with EVM means it cannot interact with applications on Ethereum), BNB Chain turned to developing a new Layer 2 solution "opBNB".
opBNB introduces improved data availability, batch transactions, and a gas limit of up to 100M to the BNB public chain ecosystem. At the same time, the EVM-compatible OP Stack can also simplify the process of migrating Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) code from Ethereum to the BNB chain, allowing developers to create an open ecosystem faster and easier, thereby expanding the user base.
Unlike Optimism and Coinbase's second-layer expansion solution Base, opBNB is built on BSC (not Ethereum). BSC's performance is better than Ethereum itself, and opBNB will further improve its performance, not only surpassing BSC, but also better than expansion solutions such as Optimism.
Most importantly, BNB Chain’s adoption of OP Stack to build a second-layer application chain has strategic significance.
For the public chain BNB Chain, using OP Stack to build application chains can not only enjoy the high security brought by a layer of Ethereum, but also use BNB as a token for gas fee payment. This means that as more use cases emerge in the future, the application scenarios of BNB can be greatly broadened, and these benefits can be captured by BNB. In the long run, BNB Chain will even become a strong competitor to Ethereum's growing L2 ecosystem.
Base, developed and incubated by Coinbase
Base (@BuildOnBase), which was launched in February this year, is one of the earliest application chains launched using OP Stack. It was incubated by Coinbase and is the earliest application chain to join the Optimism superchain ecosystem besides Optimism (the team's own project).
In addition, the Base development team is also a core contributor to the OP Stack codebase, and has been deeply involved in and promoted EIP-4844 long before. It can be said that the Base team is the biggest boost to OP Stack research and development.
Base, an application chain focusing on financial services, has the characteristics of security, low cost, developer-friendliness and easy deployment of dApp. So, as the largest and most compliant centralized cryptocurrency exchange in the United States, why did Coinbase choose to develop the Layer2 network Base?
Developing an application chain like Base at the current stage is in line with Coinbase's future roadmap.
In fact, after the previous phased goal of "developing and investing in a large number of decentralized applications to provide users with convenient application-layer access to cryptocurrencies" has gradually taken shape, it is time to practice Coinbase's ultimate goal of "ultimately building a global open financial system and reshaping the current financial system."
However, building an open financial system requires the support of a public chain and its ecosystem. Previously, Coinbase had the idea of ​​building its own public chain, but eventually gave up due to cost, difficulty, supervision, and strategic considerations.
Choosing OP Stack to build Base not only allows you to reuse existing Optimism development results, but also allows you to "launch a chain with one click". Its modular framework supports a high degree of openness and composability, including the chain's execution layer (which virtual machine to choose), proof method (fraud proof or ZK), data availability DA layer, settlement layer, etc. are all optional, a true modular Lego approach.
Most importantly, becoming an OP Chain means that Coinbase has joined the Ethereum lineup and will be able to take over Ethereum's traffic in the future. In addition, Base will also become a member of the "super chain", which can not only exchange resources with other OP Chains in the ecosystem, but also contribute to this "super chain" system that may reach the scale of the Internet in the future. Coupled with Coinbase's existing user base (Coinbase has nearly 110 million users and more than 8 million monthly transaction users in Q3 2022), Base will seamlessly connect current customers to the financial service protocols carried by Base, and use Base as the entrance to cross over to Ethereum L1, other L2 and other L1 ecosystems, greatly increasing the probability of Base's future success.
With the powerful resources behind Coinbase, as early as the launch stage, nearly 60 projects joined Base as its ecological partners, including infrastructure and tools such as 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 carry 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 joined forces with Upside DAO, Developer DAO, GenTwo, thirdweb, QuickNode, Google, Blockdaemon and other developer communities and organizations to hold multiple hackathons and developer competitions around the world to attract more developers.
Worldcoin and its on-chain identity system
In May of this year, the Worldcoin Foundation and early protocol contributors of Tools for Humanity (TFH) announced their support for the Optimism Collective to jointly build a scalable blockchain ecosystem based on the OP Stack.
As the first step to enter the Optimism Collective, Worldcoin's decentralized privacy identity protocol World ID will be launched on the OP mainnet, and its native wallet World App that carries Worldcoin will also be migrated to the OP mainnet in the future.
In fact, as early as 2020, Worldcoin had independently developed and launched an Optimistic Rollup application chain Hubble for simple payments, and launched the World App beta version. However, after the release, the team found that the test results were not ideal, and user needs were more than simple payment functions, which far exceeded the carrying capacity of Hubble, and later migrated to Polygon PoS.
Today, Worldcoin has turned to OP Stack to rebuild the application chain. However, the focus of this cooperation between the two parties will be on the construction of the on-chain identity system.
For Optimism, an on-chain decentralized identity system is the key to achieving its economic self-growth, unlocking democratic governance and innovation while enabling individuals to better control their finances and participate in the global economy on their own terms.
To this end, Optimism deployed the identity primitive AttestationStation. This experimental identity system allows anyone to make arbitrary attestations of other addresses, thereby assigning a trust score to a specific on-chain address and measuring the real social relationship (influence) of the address.
For Worldcoin, the identity system is equally important. Since digital currency is to be distributed free of charge to 7.9 billion people around the world to achieve fair distribution of wealth, a method is needed to determine the identity of the user to prevent the same person from receiving tokens multiple times with different identities. To this end, the team developed World ID, which is the underlying identity protocol of Worldcoin. It can ensure that each person can only register one account with the pupil. In addition, the team has also developed a set of biometric devices to verify the uniqueness of a person by scanning the iris, while ensuring the privacy of the verified person through zero-knowledge proof.
Currently, Worldcoin has more than 1.6 million registered beta users and more than 500,000 monthly active World App users, which means that Worldcoin joining the Superchain ecosystem will bring a huge number of users to the OP ecosystem. In the long run, considering that Worldcoin's R&D and investment in identity systems are leading in the industry, this can enhance the governance capabilities of the "Citizens' House", a key component of the Optimism ecosystem, and promote the progress of the on-chain reputation system AttestationStation, ultimately expanding the Web3 identity system in the Optimism network and laying the foundation for decentralized governance.
The Worldcoin team has not yet announced the development progress of its application chain. However, Twitter user Spreek tweeted that someone has deployed a large number of gnosis safes accounts on the Optimism network. According to statistics, a total of about 300,000 gnosis safes accounts are deployed on the Optimism network, and each account has generated about 10,000-15,000 transactions in a week. Worldcoin core developer Tiago Sada claimed this "achievement" and told BlockRhythm that "these Safe contract operations are related to the World App account being migrated to the Optimism rollup mainnet. Worldcoin is currently in the first stage of migrating to the superchain."
Magi, the Rollup client launched by a16z
Magi is a second-layer Rollup client solution launched by a16z Crypto in April this year. It is written in Rust and built on OP Stack. It acts as a consensus client in Ethereum's traditional execution/consensus split, providing new blocks to execution clients to advance on-chain transactions. Magi execution has the same core functionality as the reference implementation (op-node) and works with execution nodes (such as op-geth) to synchronize to any OP Stack chain.
Magi aims to be an independently developed direct replacement for op-node to improve the client diversity of Rollup.
A16z hopes that building a new client based on Rust will encourage the entire OP stack to be more secure and active, and bring more contributors to the ecosystem.
As one of the most well-known investors in the crypto space, A16z has more than $7.6 billion (about 50 billion yuan) in funds to invest in the 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. It is not only an investor but also a developer. This is also the first step for a16z to enter the Optimism Collective.
Games on the blockchain: OPCraft, Keystone, and Loot
On-chain games usually have high-frequency interactive scenarios, so the requirements for speed and cost are extremely high. This means that on-chain games require customized blockchain infrastructure, and many expansion plans have launched expansion plans for on-chain games.
OP Stack is one of the most popular infrastructures for on-chain games. Among them, OPcraft, one of the most representative on-chain game experiments, is built on Op Stack.
OPCraft is an on-chain virtual world where every river, blade of grass, and snow on top of a mountain exists on-chain, and every action that takes place in it is a transaction on Ethereum. Like most pixel-art games, you can explore procedurally generated landscapes, mine ores, place materials, and craft new items on OPCraft. Players can build majestic buildings, erect monuments, and transform the land alone or in collaboration with other players.
OPCraft, built on OP Stack, can achieve higher throughput and shorter block time through simple debugging.
Keystone is another chain made with OP Stack that uses custom precompilation to build game ticks and ECS into the chain, which can increase the speed of on-chain games by 100 times and provide a more powerful gaming experience.
In addition, Loot ecological project Adventure Gold DAO recently announced that it will use OP Stack to build a new Ethereum L2 network Loot Chain dedicated to the Loot community to reduce gas fees and use its own native token AGLD as Gas Token. The chain also uses Polygon as a data availability layer, significantly reducing the cost of building, deploying, and operating Loot Chain.
Conclusion
"One-click chain launch + modularization" is nothing new. However, OP Stack, which relies on the Ethereum ecosystem, has attracted a large number of ecological partners with its highly open freedom and composability. After all, joining the OP Stack ecosystem means that you can share resources in parallel with Ethereum and enjoy the high security of Ethereum while still being able to choose to use your own native token as a Gas token. Who can refuse such a good thing?