Ronin validators select Optimism for Ethereum L2 stack

Following the announcement that the Ronin blockchain planned to migrate from being its own L1 blockchain into an Ethereum-backed L2, the next decision was which technology stack to adopt to fulfil this vision.

Various foundations were asked to table proposals, with Optimism’s OP Stack being selected by Ronin’s current set of validator operators.

Not only is this technology already used by the likes of Coinbase’s Base blockchain, Sony’s Soneium and Uniswap’s Unichain, but its proposal also offered at least $5 million-worth of milestone-based grants and opportunities for further developer support.

OP Stack also hosts many more user operations per second than other competing chains such as Arbitrum, Polygon and zkSync, as shown in the following graph.

The OP Stack is a collection of open-source development tools that Ronin’s developers will use to create a new version of Ronin with block times between 100 to 200 milliseconds, which is 15 times faster than the current performance.

As well as an allocation of the OP token, Ronin will be able to take advantage of grants in EIGEN tokens from Eigen Labs, for data availability and other services, as well as ZKC tokens from Boundless Foundation, which provides verifiable off-chain computation.

Developers building on Ronin will also be able to apply to the Optimism’s OP Retro Fund. Discounts will also be available for infrastructure tooling like block explorers, indexers and oracles.

“We’re thrilled to support Ronin’s return to Ethereum and their next wave of growth on Optimism’s OP Stack. The OP Stack delivers fast, cheap and scaled blockspace, empowering projects like Ronin to focus on delivering the best products and experiences to their users, not the underlying technology,” commented OP Labs protocol product lead Eli Haims.

“We approached Ronin with a proposal alongside several key technical collaborators, and together we’ll accelerate Ronin’s vision to become Ethereum’s gamification engine. Over the coming weeks and months, we look forward to working closely with the Ronin team, getting to know the Ronin community better, and spearheading their L2 migration with all of the features needed to make this a pivotal moment for web3 gaming.”