op-geth to reth, creating the first Rust execution client
implementation for the OP Stack. This kicked off a series of development
to bring the OP Stack into a multi-client future.
At the same time, Optimism was undergoing its biggest upgrade yet - Bedrock.
This upgrade completely redefined Optimism. By sunsetting the OVM, Bedrock
laid the foundation for the OP Stack, bringing Optimism out of the dark ages.
The key architectural change was the concept of “minimal diff” which effectively
applies a minimal set of changes to the Ethereum execution layer (op-geth),
rather than a new virtual machine (the OVM).
Fast forward around 6 months, and op-reth was presented at Frontiers 2023.
It took a lot of debugging the night before to get it to work, but it was
syncing just in time. This piece of history was recorded by the wonderful
folks at Paradigm.
For the next year, a small 6 person team at OP Labs including @clabby and
@refcell went heads-down to build Fault Proofs for the OP Stack. op-reth
was left in the good hands of the Reth contributors and the community,
eventually being adopted by folks at Base in production.
Once Fault Proofs were released with guardrails in the spring of 2024,
[@clabby] and [@refcell] returned to the world of Rust to kick off a new fault
proof implementation, this time in Rust. Using our learnings from op-program, we
built the kona-proof, and released it at Frontiers 2024.
After a few hardforks and side quests into interop, @refcell kicked
off the kona-node project to build an OP Stack rollup node in Rust, built off
the abstractions we built in Kona. It became clear that Kona is more than just
one OP Stack component, but a monorepo for the entire OP Stack in Rust.
Now, in 2025, @clabby, @theochap, and @refcell are
cooking on Kona, iteratively building out the OP Stack in Rust. Come join us!