Optimism Mainnet Upgrade to Erase Transaction History

According to an announcement published by Synthetix, the solution won’t put any Synthetix funds at risk but will mean that transactions history before the regenesis will not be preserved.

The regenesis involves preserving the network state but redeploying the entire network in a new genesis block, the company explained. The solution has reportedly been weeks in the making — the team behind Optimism had worked through options that maintain transaction history but found “a number of inherent risks” with each one.

“The route where we preserve transaction history would add another two months of engineering work in the near term,” the Optimism Team said in a statement.

Earlier this year, Optimism “soft launched” its Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution — the Optimistic Virtual Machine (OVM) — with Synthetix. Last month, Optimism postponed the launch of its mainnet to “at least” July. The company said the mainnet launch was a “collaborative effort” of the Ethereum community and required the participation of other protocols, oracles, wallets, nodes, and explorers.

On 9 April, the Optimism team took the mainnet down for 12 hours in what was the first of a handful of regenesis upgrades to take place before the public mainnet launch. When launched, the mainnet will improve the system’s stability and performance.

“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 team said.

All activity on Optimism has been halted, with pending withdrawals accelerated and processed on Layer 1. Following the upgrade, users will not be able to view their historical withdrawals on the block explorer, so the Optimism team will be tracking all withdrawals from the past week.