Optimism Mainnet Upgrade: Scheduled Downtime and Regenesis

This week the Optimism team informed the Synthetix Core Contributors that they believe the best path forward for upgrading pseudo-mainnet is to perform a full regenesis of the network. This will not put any funds at risk, but will mean that transaction history before this point will not be preserved.

The regenesis involves preserving the network state but redeploying the entire network at (insert block number) in a new genesis block. The Optimism team have spent several weeks now working through options that maintain transaction history but there are a number of inherent risks in pursuing those paths. Given these risks and the uncertainty around the timeline to mitigate them, the consensus is that proceeding with regenesis is the best path forward.

Based on this discussion the CCs took this proposal to the Spartan Council to review. After discussing with the Council and the Core Contributors assigned to the various OΞ SIPs the view was that this was the optimal path forward. This is especially true given that the upgrade is a hard requirement for enabling exchanges on OΞ. The only other downside to regenesis is that there will be up to a day of network downtime while this upgrade is performed.

The CCs have let Optimism know that the Synthetix community as represented by the Council is happy for them to proceed with the upgrade as described above.

A word from the Optimism team:

Dear Synthetix community,

We will be taking mainnet down for 12 hours on April 09 starting at 11am PT to perform a “regenesis” system upgrade that will wipe transaction history. This will be the first of a handful of regenesis upgrades between now and public mainnet launch that will dramatically improve system stability, performance, and greatly reduce technical debt.

Fear not, funds are safu and balances, contracts and storage will not be impacted. All activity will be halted and pending withdrawals will be accelerated and processed on L1 so that we can safely take this snapshot. After this upgrade, users will not be able to view their historical withdrawals on the block explorer, so we will be tracking all withdrawals from the past week.

Since mainnet is still in alpha mode and not yet open to the public, we made this tradeoff in order to move quickly, reduce technical debt and improve security. The route where we preserve transaction history would add another two months of engineering work in the near term - thankfully, as part of these upgrades, we will be adding features that eliminate the need for a regenesis in the future.

With love,
Team Optimism

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