Optics v2 Announcement
After sharing yesterday’s Optics v2 proposal in the #community-owned-optics channel on Discord and receiving feedback from the broader community in the AMA zoom call and Discord, we are seeing support for a new instance of Optics alongside a migration plan that will allow users to safely move their funds from the current Optics instance.
First and foremost, we’re focused on launching Optics v2 in a thoughtful and secure manner that maximizes trust and confidence in the new bridge. Given this goal, it will take a few days to stand up the new instance and properly audit it with the community.
Migration Plan
Since launching the new bridge will take some time, we are making recommendations for what people should do today to keep their funds safe until they are ready to migrate to the new bridge. We recommend that users perform the following actions as soon as possible:
- For large holders not impacted by the cost of gas on Ethereum, we suggest using the current instance of Optics (v1) to move your funds back to Ethereum and then back to Celo using the newly deployed Optics v2 at a later time once it is launched.
- For smaller holders not looking to be impacted by the price of gas on Ethereum, there are numerous non-optics assets that are not affected (e.g. cUSD, cEUR, cETH, cBTC) that we recommend trading into, and back to the Optics v2 assets once they are live.
Launch Plan
Based on the community feedback we’ve received so far, we are planning to move forward with the following:
Deploy Optics V2: Upon final testing and internal verification, we will publish the deploy config and work together with the community to explain it and have it checked and verified against the deployed onchain state. This config will include a 2 week timelock for entering recovery mode and an initial community-owned multisig controlling both the Governor and Recovery Manager.
Governance and Recovery Manager via Community Multisig: Before going live, we will assemble and agree as a community on a set of entities/projects to act as signers for the multisig. To get the deployment started, we have put together the following initial list but plan to amend this based on community feedback:
- Moola Market (DeFi Dapp)
- Mobius (DeFi Dapp)
- Ubeswap (DeFi Dapp)
- CeloWallet.app (Wallet)
- cLabs (Core Development)
- Censusworks (Validator)
- Celo Foundation
Code Audit Released: An audit of the Optics code was completed previously and can now be viewed here.
Additional Planned Improvements
In addition to the above improvements around deployment and governance, Optics v2 will include a number of new features and enhancements which will be rolled out in the following weeks after launch:
Migration Page
We plan to release a migration page that will make it easier for people to move their assets between the two instances, but users do not need to wait for the migration GUI’s completion per the Migration Plan above.
Additionally, we are investigating creating additional pools, e.g. WETH (Optics v1) <> WETH (Optics v2) that would allow users to directly trade legacy optics assets for Optics v2 assets. We invite any parties interested in arbitraging these pools (and taking on any associated Optics v1 risk) to do so by sending assets over both bridges to maintain price parity.
Bridge Gas Refund
There is a CGP Proposal being discussed to automatically refund users for gas when sending funds towards Celo using a bridge. If passed, this proposal will make it easier and cheaper for users to bridge funds to Celo using future bridges.
Recovery Manager Timelock UI Notification
If the recovery manager activates recovery mode, it will take 2 weeks before it is enabled, and UIs will be modified to show a warning to users.
Faster and More Security
We’re reducing the window before which funds are made available from 3 hrs to 30 mins. This means faster bridging. At the same time, we are working hard to enable the community to run Watcher Agents to further increase the security of the bridge (see the Optics design). We don’t have an exact timeline for this but stay tuned! Over time, there are other changes we plan to make with the community to strengthen the security of the system too.
Avalanche Support
Based on popular demand, Optics v2 will be deployed on the Avalanche C-Chain as well as Ethereum, Celo and Polygon, so that after testing, we can support bridging of AVAX and other assets.
Final Thoughts
We appreciate the community’s feedback and participation in what have been some difficult conversations over the past few days. There are definitely lessons we have learned from this situation, and we will continue to look closely at what went wrong, and why. To that end, we plan on issuing a full incident report as soon as possible.
Now we are focused on this next chapter for Optics, and want to thank you for helping us get there. The team came up with a swift solution under difficult circumstances and I want to personally thank everyone involved for their efforts.