The Superchain
What is the Superchain?
- The Optimism Superchain is a network that enables shared bridging, decentralized governance, upgrades, a communication layer and more between standardized chains.
- The Superchain is based on a vision of an internet that no longer requires trusted entities who have and will continue abusing that trust. However, this vision of a decentralized web requires a level of scalability that is not yet widely available.
- The Superchain's mission is to achieve revolutionary scalability for blockchains.
The Superchain puts forward a new architecture for multi-chain ecosystems.
- New chains, when introduced, frequently have divergent security models and significant expenses associated with their rollout.
- The solution is to use an L2 architecture that commoditizes new chains - enabling efficient crosschain applications without introducing systemic risk and significant setup costs. In the future, we should be able to treat many L2 chain instances as a single unit, realizing the vision of the Superchain.
The end goal of the Superchain is for developers to be able to abstract away underlying chains when developing dapps.
What defines the Superchain?
The Superchain is a network of interoperable blockchains, including Ink and Optimism. The Superchain satisfies the following properties:
| Property | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Shared L1 blockchain | Provides a total ordering of transactions across all OP Chains. |
| Shared bridge for all OP Chains | Enables OP Chains to have standardized security properties. |
| Cheap OP Chain deployment | Enables deploying and transacting on OP Chains without the high fees of transacting on L1. |
| Configuration options for OP Chains | Enables OP Chains to configure their data availability provider, sequencer address, etc. |
| Secure transactions and cross-chain messages | Enables users to safely migrate state between OP Chains. |
Check out the Optimism docs on architecture: the OP Stack.
Ink and the Superchain
Ink is an OP Chain (Ethereum Layer 2) which is part of the Superchain. Being part of the Superchain network means Ink can easily interface with other connected chains, promoting both interoperability and specialization while benefiting from shared security, crosschain upgrades and decentralized governance. Ink and Optimism strongly align on the ultimate mission of realizing greater freedom for all through blockchain technology.
Developing on the Superchain
You can use Supersim to simulate the Superchain and develop apps that can be used across any chain!
Supersim enables builders to:
- Experiment with apps that can be accessed from any chain
- Create tokens with SuperchainERC20, a fungible token standard for tokens that can be used across the Superchain
- Simulate crosschain messaging