# Optimism’s OP Stack by Karl Floersch | Devcon Bogotá

- Speakers: [Karl Floersch](https://streameth.org/speakers/karl-floersch)
- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2023-10-09
- Duration: 26:11
- Topics: Science & Technology
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-HiU-g8XHi5s
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiU-g8XHi5s

## Description

Visit the https://archive.devcon.org/ to gain access to the entire library of Devcon talks with the ease of filtering, playlists, personalized suggestions, decentralized access on Swarm, IPFS and more.
https://archive.devcon.org/archive/watch/6/optimisms-op-stack/

Introducing the OP Stack — a standardized tech stack for L2 chains.

Introducing the Superchain vision — the inevitable unification of the distinct L2 chains into a single, horizontally scalable, super-sequenced, Superchain!

The OP Stack is how we realize the Superchain vision.

Speaker(s): Karl Floersch
Skill level: Intermediate
Track: Layer 2s
Keywords: scalability,multi-chain,superchain

Follow us: https://twitter.com/efdevcon, https://twitter.com/ethereum
Learn more about devcon: https://www.devcon.org/
Learn more about ethereum: https://ethereum.org/ 

Devcon is the Ethereum conference for developers, researchers, thinkers, and makers. 
Devcon 6 was held in Bogotá, Colombia on Oct 11 - 14, 2022.
Devcon is organized and presented by the Ethereum Foundation, with the support of our sponsors. To find out more, please visit https://ethereum.foundation/

## Transcript

foreign [Music] why hello wow that's so much easier to be loud oh my goodness okay so before we have any slides I'm just going to tell you a little about me I'm Carl I'm a contributor to the optimism Collective I work at op labs and today we're going to talk about the op stack it is op and the super chain which you will hear once and you will never forget because it is a sticky meme sticky meme now well my slides have arrived just in time like Uber Eats okay okay this is gonna be a fun talk let me tell you let me tell you so as usual I have a bajillion bajillion slides so in 2018 we set out I use we very liberally we set out to build plasma group plasma group was a non-profit focused on scaling ethereum with layer 2 technology we wanted to unlock tons of applications but jillions of transactions per second and so you know we sailed out on ethereum cyberspace following vitalik's Doctrine following his advice we knew what to build and so we went and in fact we did some cool stuff last Devcon we talked we introduced optimistic roll-up and we introduced the unipig which was like the first implementation and it was pretty sweet if you don't ask if you do ask me so ethereum we did good things good things for ethereum public goods this was open source software it already got forked immediately but guess what happened we could not get funding for it because we're a non-profit and ethereum did not have the public goods funding infrastructure that we needed to support the building that we were doing to for the public good no bueno no bueno at all anyway until we formed optimism and we set out to not only scale ethereum but also fund public goods fund ethereum public goods optimism public goods build the community push the community forward and so that we did not realize it we thought it was going to be like 12 people at the you know doing optimism that was an absolute rabbit hole and so this is a story all about how the op stack was formed and now I'm going to tell you about how the op stack became the super chain and that powered the optimism Collective the social technology which I hope we can use to fund public goods to align people to really make a serious difference and dent in the way that we live our lives in the future millions of people you know and really billions in my humble opinion maybe maybe you know trillions if we go multi-planetary billions of AI really more than that trillions of transactions actually weigh more than trillions that's for sure all of these things promoting humans over capital and impact making impact profitable right we need to be expressing what we want as impact and make that profitable that's public goods funding really at the end of the day so optimism Collective that's why we're here but that is not the story let's go Leroy Jenkins the rough start so this is the whole journey a whole journey rough start right we formed some you know terraformed some land and ethereum cyberspace and you know created our little your little community and built an ethereum Layer Two that was evm compatible and you know it was pretty cool but to be honest it was not easy not at all we had built a roll-up we had built a fault proof but it was complicated it was hard to maintain it was difficult to onboard new people this was not the you know easy sailing that we thought we were gonna do we're like yes we know how to build it now let's put it into production wow this is really hard really hard and so by the grace of ether's Phoenix the god of rationalist retroactivity we happen to be eating dinner and we saw in the back corner of our eye George hotz literally the you know founder of comma AI builder of really really good open source production software and we're like George come through and it turns out he knows ethereum and like new ethereum Layer Two is pretty insane so you know George on his little you know Journey kind of stopped by our little island said you know what's up and he looked at our code and I'm not gonna lie he gave us some you know it's a hard pill to swallow he said one he said you have a hundred times the lines of code that you actually need for this two every line of code should be worth at least a hundred dollars that means the cost of maintaining it the cost of people learning it it is expensive to write lines of code even a comment and finally the goal your goal should be to Upstream to ethereum and build software that is so simple that it can be standardized and built on top of that's your goal and so to kind of prove this point it was like okay let me take this compiler that you have that was thousands of lines of code and let me rewrite it and do it right and turn it into 300 lines of code that was the beginning of the formation of our North Star towards Simplicity and standardization and so of course as jiohad does he he left and then chapter two we finally had our North Star and so we could start measuring progress towards it we were going to boil our code down to its Essence we were going to reduce our death diff to less than 1 000 lines of code that was our basically our whole road map at the time and so we went to coding our little gerbil selves you know all these are durables well they're really hamsters because hamsters actually are cuter than gerbils anyway um I'm sorry gerbils okay we started making improvements to our L2 Island right we terraformed the land further it really we like started making real progress simplifying our code it was easier and we became fat gerbils off of our great successes and so we had made some serious progress and in 2021 Q4 we released our evm equivalence upgrade and that thing has served us well we have been evm equivalent for basically a year now and fast as ethereum and it has been nice it was a beefy release it was fantastic but our job was not over we still hadn't finished because Joe hot came back he just popped in and he said all right let me tell you something else well done you got rid of a lot of your code that must have hurt that is hard but your proof system is way too complicated still you're going you're going off the deep end here I can help and so what he did well he contributed Canon just this really simple proof system and why did it why was it so simple well it was because it separated the client software from the proof software from the proof layer you compile the client down to the proof and in fact vitalik at the same time was suggesting the same kind of architecture but George actually took that and created a you know pretty pretty solid version that people have been playing with ever since and that showed us something else that we hadn't thought about before that showed us the power of modularity the fact that he was able to achieve this evm equivalence was because he split it out into two different components and so right evm equivalent fall proof less than 4 000 lines of code the client compiles to the proof and it showed us that power now we had a North star but for our goal of reducing our get diff down to less than a thousand lines now we had a path to achieving it and so we also at the same time happen to be listening to some nice like streaming episodes and this is one of my favorite moments in in like every podcast that I've listened to basically it's just this line is when things are beautifully done usually there's a well thought out set of abstraction layers it has the thinking about the problem space slicing it up and then going at it that mentality it changes the game for software development and architecture so you know he's off again and next up the last Mile right we had just made this 10x line of code reduction we but we still had 5x too many lines of code and get it was crazy and we still had 10x too many overall so what did we do well turns out that we started coding and we noticed that eth2 was coming to the same realizations that we were having as well they realized that they needed to modularize the E2 clients and make them talk to each other via the engine API they realized that the currently it was too tightly coupled too monolithic and so what did they do they took the client software and they split it further into consensus and execution that's why we have these consensus clients and execution clients so well we saw this eth2 consensus we were like huh we could just write a roll-up consensus client and boom slot it in in the same way and now we can reuse all of these other execution clients like Geth like Aragon like Etc there's so many and this gives us that multi-client ecosystem that is absolutely critical for securing a chain which has billions of dollars we need we cannot stop with one client unless you're going to formally prove your client and good luck and anyway formal proofs are like two clients anyway okay point being we finally had our golden ticket to a less than one thousand line of code diff in Geth and so we got to building in 2022 to do terraforming building cool things and boom in our Bedrock release our upcoming Bedrock release we finally have that commit that single commit that turns up you know normal death into opgath with less than a thousand lines of code so let's you know 8 21 less than a thousand we achieved our goal we got to have a little hamster celebration gerbil celebration we include all rodents in this talk the Bedrock release finally we had created this code in a simple modular way we split up consensus execution and the proofs and we renamed the proofs to settlement because it's more Mimi and boom we had achieved that goal of Simplicity and standards but then something unexpected started happening [Music] I really didn't I did this from memory I have not refreshed the actual sound I just know the dirt sound anyway Rattata okay no we started getting forked literally all over the place it is absolutely mind-boggling right we multiple people set out took our code base forked it set up their own settlements and further it got crazier some were modifying evm we're modifying to evm and the execution layer in Geth and some were modifying the actual roll-up part of it to make it a plasma so that you don't post the data from like all of these forks and I'm not talking about like you know Pet Project Forks I'm talking about like Mega you know you look at l2b you got the little Ops shout out we got some Forks in the room so we had set out we had created the consensus layer execution layer split and then things got crazy guess what next guess what next well if you were at a talk like five hours ago you would know what next someone literally took the code base for like forked it and made a three-day Survival game that is fully on chain literally playing something that is unrecognizable brand new software and and literally every single block like like I just gotta momentarily like we're not talking about like oh yeah you know you get an asset and now you have a nft or something no I'm talking about like you minor block and that's a transaction or you put something in your inventory that's a transaction that is crazy sauce right stuff we never thought was possible and they're modifying right like we modify the the roll-up to become a plasma for extra uh scalability and modifying the execution layer and wrapping it with mud shout out to Mud making it super fast right and we get to reuse the whole settlement layer code base for that process and next Hannon literally made it a Game Boy like made it prove a Game Boy emulator so that they can then literally play Pokemon and fall prove it literally having a freaking you know Pokemon roll up it doesn't make sense it's like ridiculous what you can really do with this code this guy really is the limit right you have the rust program they turned Canon into rust all of these things because we were Building open source we were building foundational modules that stand alone and are elegantly built so very we got all these new Forks all these new little Islands out in ethereum L2 and then our North Star of Simplicity started bearing fruit great exciting so and thus this begins a new era it creates it was time for Branding because our code base had no name it was just the code base you know it's like that's kind of boring so we're like hey let's turn this let's flip it let's make it cool let's make it fun let's call it the op stack now everyone is using the op stack they're contributing to the op stack to give it back to the stack we're all building on the stack and so just build the stack build open source public goods push the ecosystem forward um so the op stack what is it it's our open source software stack designed to power blockchain ecosystems built for the optimism Collective so that includes that includes of course what we've been talking about this whole time the whole chain software right the decentralized stack required for spinning up chains the consensus layer execution layer more layers to come literally this is just the beginning additionally it also requires a governance layer things that we're building such as the identity layer the retroactive public goods funding all of these things need to be built in a modular way so that they can be reused and all on top of ethereum of course where are we right now come on what's on my shirt now we are in Devcon actually that was a great transition I did not mean to make we are in Devcon in in case you didn't know talking about the op stack and so this is kind of the time that we're just really talking about it and that means that this story is bridging into the future okay now we're in the future gal okay so everyone in this future in our future everyone's future contributing back to the stack right with shared modules this is the lesson I literally came from a talk on you know practical pluralism everyone is able to share bass players share modules that's how Innovation happens in this space and we can all benefit we can literally push the ecosystem forward and so there's lots coming down the pipeline literally so much we have this really nice code base that we're releasing very soon with bedrock it's super hype it's clean it's like the cleanest but there are things that we can make improvements to such as introducing multi-client fault proofs such as introducing multi-client ZK proofs and critically this means that deploying a you know deploying one of these op chains we're calling them it doesn't tie you to a single proof system it doesn't tie you to a single technology you can have a ZK roll up with a seamless upgrade so that no one even has to notice you're just lowering the withdrawal times in the background right these kinds of things happen because you have clean apis where you can separate and plug things in and additionally we got you know plasma consensus for some ZK plasma for super scalable op chains and you know we got a Pokemon execution apparently for ZK Pokemon plasma Bitcoin you know whatever you know the sky's the limit really so everyone can benefit from these shared modules really nice so one person creates a little Greek statue which is of course a great contribution to the op stack and boom now it's an OPI second boom everyone can adopt it no problemo it's great and by the way and retroactive public goods funding right we're not doing this and the whole the whole reason why we got into this thing was because we wanted to contribute back to the open source software the stack that and then make sure that we would get paid even though we were building public goods and so of course you know people got to get paid for their their great Greek statues so with everyone contributing everyone gets paid everyone's happy let's go plasma groups dream is starting to be realized all right well that's not all y'all that's not all because right right now it's like oh there's these little Islands these op chains and they're they're doing their own thing but the reality is we are in this together experimentation cannot should not must not equal fragmentation at the same time as we're experimenting we need to unify we need to bring the user experience the developer experience everything together because it's better right so that means that we're standardizing op-chain security right when you reuse these modules you don't have all these crazy Bridge hacks literally every week because everyone is running the same software bending fitting from the same Lindy effect of that software it's all you know proven formally proven multi-client whatever it is we need to standardize because it makes everyone stronger additionally standardizing off chain tooling we noticed this with the evm equivalence upgrade everyone got to use their tooling from before and standardizing option governance everything from building governance modules to even introducing people into the collective through an identity layer so that we can have democratically run governance all of those things are absolutely critical for people for us to share as a community and and it's important to note that just because you have two different options does not mean that they cannot communicate atomically with one another right you can send a transaction to One op chain and have a flash loan Atomic Swap this is something that is very possible and it is enabled when everyone is running the same software and even shares a sequencing layer so no bridging who bridging bridging is Lane I don't like bridging I like doing things that's not a doing thing that's a doing thing to do a thing anyway very very that's how we design things I mean really it is actually in some sense okay the op sack is not about pushing people apart it's about bringing people together so we can all have a gerbil party together and so talking too loud now the final evolution right we're doing all these standards we've got all this composability we're getting to the point where like the software stack is maturing it is this one thing we're all contributing to what does that mean that means that we are starting to form a superstructure not just defined by this or that you know opt chain doing this thing this saw you know we're actually bringing people together with the network effects of cooperation to form something that is entirely new and what is that thing well if you remember the beginning of the talk you might start to find out as the islands configure the super chin we're back baby the super chain I I told you I was gonna do it that would be weird if I didn't anyway the super chain birthed through the op stack through these standards through the shared compatibility the atomic composition shared sequencer set we start seeing this thing the replacement of the web 2 infrastack with decentralized Alternatives that can power horizontally scalable applications like we're talking about the internet's computation and this is not multi-chain right options are not app chains everyone is a part of the collective we're all part of this network additionally this is not the mono chain right because at the same time as we're all interconnected we're also not you know the same right there is still multiplicity there's still biodiversity and it's horizontally scalable so instead it's all connected by the same Technical and social fabric it is not the multi-chain it's not the model chain tell your friends y'all it's a super chain let's go but wait but wait I just went Ham on some tech let me just real quick bring it back to why we are here because I forget that literally I get so into the tech it's so much fun anyway but we are here because we are forming new technological social institutions we are forming the optimism Collective why we want humans to be valued over Capital we want identity citizens Etc we want impact to be profitable we want to build the optimism Collective and just contextualizing this why now right why is this so critical now it's because we are entering a new era in the internet and as a species period because I'm gonna tell you right now I'm a species in the internet right now my life is crazy so today we are living in a world where profit maximizing corporations they are the ones that are operating our our social public infrastructure right I can't post on the internet without going through a privately owned Corporation also we're so literally we are confronted daily with global coordination failures from conflict to biological stuff like it is getting terrifying and we're doing this in this crazy Melting Pot World very misaligned all while we're about to birth a super intelligence that's going to look at our economy and be like oh yeah so you the way that the things that we reward in this system is extraction and you know bad behavior right that this is terrifying to me our future is not guaranteed we need to build this thing this is not not an isolated problem so right unprecedented times require unprecedented social technology the end of the day blockchain is a social technology it what it's what brings us together it's the social problems that we're fixing on the internet today reframing those incentives so that's why we're building the op stack as an open source public good right we're funding public goods retroactively we need to be doing this on a massive scale our social institutions for funding public goods are not adequate and we need to be providing people identities so we measure human utility not just you know shareholder profits so we can maximize impact and give profit to people and that's why we're building the optimism Collective and that's because together we can make impact equal profit and summon ethers Phoenix it's like it's like the it's like the rationalist god that will like give you money for making it come to be and you know you're You're Building public goods and you're you know being a good person anyway it's just like our the pull towards Utopia our better selves ethers Phoenix so that's how right we started out as building out we built out this op stack because we realize that's how we push open source forward we that is going to become the super chain and that will all power the optimism Collective which will align incentives and y'all please come contribute align your incentives with us and stay optimistic and thank you very much all the loves all the hearts I'm out of time [Applause]