The upgrade is expected to take two to four hours, starting at 16:00 coordinated universal time (UTC), according to the Optimism team. Deposits and withdrawals will be unavailable during the period.

The Optimism Foundation proposed the protocol upgrade in February, and it’s been described as “the largest upgrade ever released on OP mainnet,” and a “complete re-write.”

According to that original proposal, the new upgrade would offer “a new level of modularity, simplicity and Ethereum equivalence for layer 2 solutions, providing unprecedented performance and functionality.”

There’s an intense competition underway to win market share as a top Ethereum scaling solution, with Arbitrum as the industry leader, followed by Optimism and several rollups using zero-knowledge cryptography, according to the website L2Beat. In the past few months, Optimism has scored big wins with both the crypto exchange Coinbase and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (known as a16z) revealing efforts to build on the network.

Optimism’s OP token has rallied, gaining 77% so far in 2023 versus a 52% rise for ether (ETH), the native cryptocurrency of the Ethereum blockchain.

According to the crypto analysis firm Messari, the Optimism community approved the upgrade in April with 99.87% of votes in favor.

The upgrade “implements a modular architecture that separates the OP stack into consensus, execution and settlement components, which will allow Ethereum execution clients to be converted into Optimism execution clients,” Messari wrote.

Another new feature with Bedrock is a two-phase withdrawal process for enhanced bridge security, according to Messari.

Scaling Optimism Ethereum Arbitrum

Bradley Keoun

Bradley Keoun is CoinDesk's managing editor of tech & protocols, where he oversees a team of reporters covering blockchain technology, and previously ran the global crypto markets team. A two-time Loeb Awards finalist, he previously was chief global finance and economic correspondent for TheStreet and before that worked as an editor and reporter for Bloomberg News in New York and Mexico City, reporting on Wall Street, emerging markets and the energy industry. He started out as a police-beat reporter for the Gainesville Sun in Florida and later worked as a general-assignment reporter for the Chicago Tribune. Originally from Fort Wayne, Indiana, he double-majored in electrical engineering and classical studies as an undergraduate at Duke University and later obtained a master's in journalism from the University of Florida. He is currently based in Austin, Texas, and in his spare time plays guitar, sings in a choir and hikes in the Texas Hill Country. He owns less than $1,000 each of several cryptocurrencies.