Optimism, a layer 2 network atop the Ethereum blockchain, recently announced its Bedrock upgrade, which treats the cryptocurrency ether (ETH) as a native token. According to an OP Labs security engineer who goes by Maurelian, ETH is now being treated as the native token of both the Ethereum and Optimism networks, rather than as an ERC-20 token. This change was evidenced by a transfer of more than $550 million of ETH out of the Optimism Gateway, the bridge crypto users use to move assets between the main Ethereum network and Optimism’s layer 2.
The ETH, which belongs to users who had deposited the Ethereum cryptocurrency into Optimism, was transferred out of the bridge into a new smart contract on Optimism, the Optimism Portal. This smart contract is responsible for passing messages between the main Ethereum blockchain and Optimism, and serves as both the entry and exit point to the Optimism L2, according to Optimism’s GitHub page. Optimism’s head of communications, Lynnette Nolan, stated that the ETH in the portal represents all of the ETH on OP mainnet.
The Bedrock upgrade is designed to help morph the layer 2 network into a Superchain of interoperable and composable blockchains, all built with Optimism’s OP Stack. The U.S. crypto exchange Coinbase is building its own layer 2 network called Base on Optimism. Maurelian explained that with Bedrock, we’ve added a new method of making deposits via the new Optimism Portal contract. This approach treats ETH as a native token, so that an L1 to L2 transaction can have both ETH and data associated with it.
The Optimism Gateway, which doesn’t hold any ETH now, currently has more than $576 million worth of tokens, including USDC, USDT, WBTC and rETH, according to block explorer Etherscan.