Key takeaways
- Optimism has returned to evidence of fraud being allowed due to vulnerabilities discovered during audits.
- A hard fork named “Granite” is planned for September 10 to update the Optimism network.
Share this article
Optimism has restored its network to an authorized state after community-led audits identified several bugs in its recently launched authorization-free fraud prevention system, including two high-severity issues.
The Optimism Foundation announced the rollback of X, saying the decision was made “out of an abundance of caution” to avoid potential instability while the vulnerabilities were patched.
In March, Optimism began testing its failover system on Ethereum’s Sepolia testnet to strengthen security and decentralization and address criticism over previous vulnerabilities.
The move comes just over two months after the network implemented permissionless fraud proofs on June 10, followed by its token unlocking event. This upgraded the network and enabled withdrawals of ether and ERC-20 tokens, a step that allowed it to reach layer-1 decentralization as Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin pointed out.
Mofi Taiwo, a protocol engineer representing Optimism contributor OP Labs, submitted a proposal to the network governance forum detailing the reasons for activating the fallback system. The post emphasized that no vulnerabilities had been exploited and that user assets had never been at risk.
“Although auditors discovered high severity issues, no user assets were ever at risk. All audit issues listed below can be detected by our monitoring tools,” Taiwo said in the proposal.
The vulnerabilities identified mainly concern contracts related to the anti-fraud system that are not covered by the Optimism audit. These contracts were classified as presenting viability and reputational risks, which did not require formal audits according to the project guidelines.
To address these issues, Taiwo has proposed an upgrade dubbed “Granite,” scheduled for September 10 at 16:00:01 UTC. The upgrade will involve several network updates, including a L2 hard fork. While the hard fork has not been formally audited, OP Labs conducted an internal security review and deemed the changes to pose little risk.
Share this article
