When building a custom blockchain rollup, the last thing you want is to design everything from scratch by hand. It’s always a great option to get help from existing codebases that have been tested and proven to work instead of writing everything on your own. This is exactly what frameworks like OP Stack enable you. This complete article is dedicated to the modular nature of OP Stack. Let’s see what it allows us to do and how it’s revolutionizing the modular blockchain design. 

OP Stack: The first open-source frameworks to build an Optimistic Rollup 

The detailed instructions, the popularity of the Optimism network, and fast adoption made it one of the most popular frameworks for building custom rollups. One of the main reasons behind this popularity was its modular nature. 

Built by the Optimism Collective to power Optimism, the OP Stack is a bunch of components that, when combined together, form a fully functioning Optimistic rollups provider  The prominent components of OP Stack are Data Availability, Sequencing, Derivation, Execution, Settlement Layer, and Governance. These components almost completely handle different mechanisms or functions of a rollup. 

For example, the Data Availability component will look after the storage of the processed data on either layer 1, like Ethereum, or a custom Data Availability layer. The sequencing module or component will see how the transactions get ordered. Again, you can choose the default, centralized sequencer, or in the future you will be able to go for a custom sequencing solution. The same is the case for the Derivation, Execution, Settlement, and Governance layers. This composable approach means any user can take any part of this system separately and work on that. 

This means if a rollup wants to focus on security by having a custom data availability layer, custom sequencing, and governance layer, they can choose those components and customize them according to the needs of their roll-up solution. Similarly, if any project wants to focus on speed, it can adjust components accordingly. This enables a level of flexibility while assuring fast development that was unthought of before. 

These can be summarized in the four main components that the OP Stack uses – OP Geth, OP Node, OP Batcher, and OP Proposer. These encapsulate different features of the rollup depending on the lifecycle of a transaction. 

And not just this, the Optimism Collective constantly rolls out new features to this framework so as to keep it up to-date and relevant in the fast-changing ecosystem of Web3. So, updates like Bedrock changed quite a few things and introduced interesting concepts like system configuration contracts, the derivation of L2 chains from L1, modular proof designs, and a few more changes to take the post-bedrock superchain to the next level. 

OP stack constantly adds new features with such upgrades 

To fix problems related to decentralization, security, and scalability there are always newest additions. For example, the inclusion of the component for permissionless fraud proofs. This system uses a modular multi-proof design for safe token withdrawals from Layer 2 and layer 1. 

The composable approach of choosing between the different components for an application-specific use case especially helps new projects. Because it reduces the additional cost by using MIT-licensed, tried, and tested modules for the repetitive things all rollups need. And focus on only those aspects of the rollup that contribute more to the most important sections. 

Another benefit of modular design is that it simplifies the development and deployment process. Which directly translates to faster deployment times. Easy deployment further reduces the time your Web3 app or rollup gets into production and goes live. 

With all these features and advantages found in one place, the OP Stack becomes the complete solution for everything you need about an Optimistic Rollup. Being the pioneer in many of these technologies, the stack is revolutionizing blockchain design in the form of custom modules. 

Conclusion:

The modular nature of creating custom rollups offered by OP Stack introduces many fascinating technologies in the form of composable modules. Because these modules and the complete OP Stack are an open-source framework, anyone can adapt to their needs. This led to a massive number of chains getting deployed using this brilliant framework. This further leads to more innovation, and the cycle of innovation and adoption continues. At the heart of it lies a framework that prioritizes the three pillars of blockchain: security, scalability, and decentralization, along with one necessity of the time, modularity.