The main mainnet upgrade from Optimism to Bedrock is scheduled for June 6

Layer 2 scaling solution Optimism will receive its highly anticipated Bedrock upgrade on June 6. The move is expected to result in significantly lower transaction costs, better network security, and improved compatibility with Ethereum.

The Optimism team stated via a May 15 Twitter thread that the network will be unavailable for 2-4 hours on June 6 during the upgrade.

“On upgrade day, transactions, deposits, and withdrawals will not be available for the duration of the downtime, and the OP Mainnet chain will not progress,” reads an accompanying blog post.

The official date of the upgrade from OP Mainnet to Bedrock has been set: June 6, 2023 at 16:00 UTC!

The upgrade requires 2-4 hours of downtime for OP Mainnet.

Visit Mission Control for all the details on what to expect:

— Optimism (✨_✨) (@optimismFND) May 15, 2023

Bedrock was announced way back in May 2022 and is the first major network upgrade to be approved by the Token House of Optimism’s board of directors.

Optimism will benefit from lower transaction costs, which OP Labs, the network’s protocol development unit, estimates will fall by 47%.

“Bedrock improves upon its predecessor by lowering transaction costs using optimized batch compression and Ethereum as a data availability layer; shortening delays in including L1 transactions in rollups by handling L1 reorganizations in a more graceful way,” reads the Bedrock interpreter of the Optimism community.

The Bedrock upgrade provides a 47% reduction in protocol costs and security costs for Optimism Mainnet

Engineer extraordinary @trianglesphere explains how in the latest dev blog post

— OP Labs (@OPLabsPBC) March 2, 2023

On top of that, the network will also see shorter deposit times, with Optimism going from around 10 minutes to confirm a deposit to just 3 minutes with Bedrock, the explanation says.

While the performance of the node software “will be significantly improved by allowing the execution of several transactions in a single collapsed ‘block’, as opposed to the previous ‘one transaction per block’ model in the previous version.”

Another major improvement is the network’s compatibility with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), the main piece of software that executes Ethereum smart contracts.

With Bedrock, the network is removing “multiple anomalies” from Ethereum and the EVM currently present at Optimism, such as different code, design patterns, and transaction-per-block models. “Bedrock is also adding support for EIP-1559, chain re-orgs and other Ethereum features present on L1,” the explanation reads.

The Bedrock upgrade provides a 47% reduction in protocol costs and security costs for Optimism Mainnet

Engineer extraordinary @trianglesphere explains how in the latest dev blog post

— OP Labs (@OPLabsPBC) March 2, 2023

ZK Sync era trumps optimism?

The impending move to Bedrock comes at a time when EVM-enabled zero-knowledge rollups (ZkEVMs) have caught the attention of upbeat rollup solutions like Optimism.

Related: Ethereum’s Beacon Chain Updated After Finality Issues

According to data from L2beat, Matter Labs’ recently launched ZkEVM ZKSync Era has overtaken the optimism in network activity.

In the past 30 days, ZKSync Era has seen 7.85 million transactions, compared to Optimism’s 7.66 million. While ZKSync Era has also surpassed Optimism in average transactions per second (TPS) in the last 24 hours, with 6.80 TPS compared to 2.98 TPS.

The only interesting trend in this dull mid-May on ethereum is the growth of @zksync Era, which is now steadily making more trades than @optimismFND and will soon threaten @arbitrum.

map of: @l2beat pic.twitter.com/9dSNHtZMEC

— funnyking.eth zkHODLER (@PaoloRebuffo) May 15, 2023

magazine: ZK rollups are “the end game” for blockchain scaling, founder of Polygon Miden