Optimism
Optimistic rollups are a great way to leverage all the tooling you’ve learned so far because they are generally compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine.
In the next few lessons, we’re going to walk through some examples of how to actually use this new technology.
Again, we want to stress how new this technology is. You should be extremely cautious when working with it and be aware that documentation may not be up to date.
Basic Mechanics
To create a sandboxed environment which guarantees deterministic smart contract execution between L1 and L2, Optimism uses an Optimism Virtual Machine, which replaces context-dependent EVM opcodes with their OVM counterparts. See a complete comparison of the OVM vs EVM here.
To accommodate this change, Optimism had to have their own compiler. They ended up forking solc and changed ~500 lines. Beward a potential gotcha: a contract compiled with the Optimism Solidity Compiler ends up bigger than it was, meaning that contracts near the 24KB limit must be refactored since they need to be executable on the mainnet as well as Optimism.
Accounts on the Optimism Chain “are redeployable contracts layer-2 contracts which can represent a user and provide a form of ‘account abstraction’.” (source)
To put it all together, the Optimism Rollup chain: - Uses the OVM as its runtime/state transition function - Uses Optimistic Geth as the L2 client with single sequencer - Has solidity smart contracts deployed on Ethereum mainnet for data availability and dispute resolution/fraud proofs (you can read more about these “bridge” contracts here)
Top-level summary of how fraud proofs work: 1. Somebody will dispute a transaction if they disagree 2. They’ll publish all related state on Ethereum including a Merkle proofs for each piece of state 3. They will re-execute the state transition on-chain 4. They will be rewarded for correctly disputing, the malicious sequencer will get slashed, and the invalid state roots will be pruned guaranteeing safety
This is all implemented in Optimism’s Fraud Prover service which is packaged with an optimistic-geth instance in a docker compose image. You can read more about the Transaction Challenge contracts here.
Optimism Example
We’ll be walking through the Optimism Truffle Box to show you how to deploy our SimpleStorage smart contract from previous lessons to Optimism!
After this example, you will be able to compile, migrate, and test Optimistic Solidity code against a variety of Optimism test networks.
Requirements
- Node.js 10.x or later
- NPM version 5.2 or later
- docker, version 19.03.12 or later docker-compose, version 1.27.3 or later
- Recommended Docker memory allocation of >=8 GB.
You’ll also need to setup an Optimism project from your Infura account. You don’t have to update your account, right now access is being offered at the “core” level for free up to 100,000 daily requests. You must enable the Optimistic Ethereum ADD-ON under the billing section under Manage Add-Ons in your Infura account Settings for the API requests to work properly. When setting up your project, be sure to select the “Ethereum” network. Then, under settings, select the “Optimism Kovan” testnet, as shown below:
You’ll also need to have Kovan test ETH for the project if you’d like to run it on a public testnet. You can get some from the Kovan testnet faucet, the MyCrypto faucet, or Chainlink’s faucet.
Once you have Kovan ETH, you’ll need to bridge it to Optimism. After getting Kovan ETH, follow these steps:
- Add Optimism Ethereum as a Custom RPC to your Metamask wallet, using the steps here, except set the RPC URL to
https://optimism-kovan.infura.io/v3/" + infuraKey - Go to this site and bridge your Kovan ETH to Optimism Kovan ETH
- Ensure that your
optimistic_kovannetwork intruffle-config.ovm.jsis connected to your Optimism Kovan wallet. Note: You may get an error about your fee being too low when attempting to deploy to Optimistic Kovan. To bypass this error, you may need to increase the gas value in the optimistic_kovan network configuration in truffle-config.ovm.js to the value the error indicates. Gas price should be set at the transaction level, like so:{ gasPrice: 15000000 }.
Note, we’ll also be building it locally so if you’re having trouble finding Kovan ETH, you can start by running it locally.
Let’s get started! (For more detail, you can find the tutorial this lesson is based on here.)
Setup
From a new directory, unbox the Optimism box:
truffle unbox optimism
You will need at least one mnemonic to use with the network. The .dotenv npm package has been installed for you, and you will need to create a .env file for storing your mnemonic and any other needed private information.
The .env file is ignored by git in this project, to help protect your private data. In general, it is good security practice to avoid committing information about your private keys to github. The truffle-config.ovm.js file expects a GANACHE_MNEMONIC and a KOVAN_MNEMONIC value to exist in .env for running commands on each of these networks, as well as a default MNEMONIC for the optimism network we will run locally.
If you are unfamiliar with using .env for managing your mnemonics and other keys, the basic steps for doing so are below:
Use touch .env in the command line to create a .env file at the root of your project. Open the .env file in your preferred IDE Add the following, filling in your own Infura project key and mnemonics:
MNEMONIC=“candy maple cake sugar pudding cream honey rich smooth crumble sweet treat” INFURA_KEY="" GANACHE_MNEMONIC="" KOVAN_MNEMONIC=""
Note: the value for the MNEMONIC above is the one you should use, as it is expected within the local Optimism Ethereum network we will run in this Truffle Box.
As you develop your project, you can put any other sensitive information in this file. You can access it from other files with require(‘dotenv’).config() and refer to the variable you need with process.env[''].
Some Differences
You may notice some differences in the workflow from our typical Truffle environment. For example, a new configuration file exists in this project: truffle-config.ovm.js. This file contains a reference to the new file location of the contracts_build_directory and contracts_directory for Optimism contracts and lists several networks for running the Optimism Layer 2 network instance.
Another difference: When you compile or migrate, the resulting json files will be at build/optimism-contracts/. This is to distinguish them from any Ethereum contracts you build, which will live in build/ethereum-contracts. As we have included the appropriate contracts_build_directory in each configuration file, Truffle will know which set of built files to reference.
Compiling
The SimpleStorage.sol contract code is already in both the ethereum and optimism directories. To compile using the Optimism Virtual Machine compiler, run:
npm run compile:ovm
As we mentioned earlier, the OVM and EVM compiler are slightly different, so keep an eye out for any issues or errors.
Migration
Now that we’ve compiled the contract for Optimism, we can migrate it to an Optimism Layer 2 network. First, let’s just try to our local Ganache, which will be almost similar to a normal Ethereum ganache instance:
npm run migrate:ovm --network=ganache
This may be a bit underwhelming! However, if we have loaded in our Infura Optimism Kovan network endpoint and have enough Optimism Kovan eth in the wallet tied to the .env mnemonic, we can also run:
npm run migrate:ovm --network=optimistic_kovan
Please note: as of early September, the Optimism box is having issues with gas prices on Kovan network. Local or Mainnet Optimism deployment may be better.
Like standard Truffle, if you would like to migrate previously migrated contracts on the same network, you can run truffle migrate --config truffle-config.ovm.js --network=(ganache | optimistic_ethereum | optimistic_kovan) and add the --reset flag.
Following the above steps should allow you to deploy to the Optimism Layer 2 chain. This is only the first step! Once you are ready to deploy your own contracts to function on Layer 1 Ethereum using Layer 2 Optimism, you will need to be aware of the ways in which Layer 1 and Layer 2 interact in the Optimism ecosystem.
Furthermore, keep an eye out for new developments in Truffle tooling to assist with bridging L1-L2 data and execution.
Please note that, at this moment, Optimism has a whitelist of applications that are allowed to go from Optimism to Ethereum mainnet. You can learn more about that here.
Additional Material
- Optimism website
- Docs: Optimism Great documentation for different audiences, whether you want to learn about the infrastructure or deploy dapps.
- Tutorial: Optimism Beginner Tutorial
- Docs: Whitelisting on Optimism