GFX Labs Petitions Optimism To Hasten Decentralization

Optimism is facing pressure to accelerate its decentralization roadmap.

On Sept. 18, GFX Labs, a web3 research and development company, launched a petition calling on Optimism to hasten its efforts to decentralize.

The proposal asserts that Optimism’s existing governance system relies on the Optimism Foundation to create proposals and execute code. By contrast, GFX Labs highlights that Optimism’s main competitor, Arbitum, has conferred “complete control” over both its Arbitrum One and Arbitrum Nova networks to ARB tokenholders.

As such, the petition calls for a complete transfer of all “system powers, resources, and access to governance” from OP Labs and the Optimism Foundation to OP tokenholders.

“Optimism governance launched more than two years ago,” the petition said. “To date, neither Token House nor Citizens’ House has the power to execute code… While there was some early value in the Foundation and OP Labs having all system access powers, that time has passed as both the promised decentralization of power and the business strategy of Optimism have underperformed expectations.”

Proposal

The petition calls for a three-phase transition, starting with OP tokenholders immediately gaining control over all “resources that are ostensibly owned by governance,” including the OP token contract, governance contracts, and governance funds.

The governance funds include the 231,928,234 OP (5.4% of the token’s supply worth $331.66 million) allocated to the Optimism Governance Fund, and the 15,397 ETH ($35.4 million) collected on behalf of the Optimism Collective — excluding a buffer of ETH earmarked for supporting Optimism Labs’ operations moving forward.

The second phase would involve transferring control over bridged funds from Ethereum to OP holders. The proposal says that governance should decide whether said funds should be mobilized for yield generation, noting that the strategy is currently being practiced by Blast, Mantle, and Gnosis, with Polygon expected to follow suit.

Phase two also calls for Optimism to present a roadmap for decentralizing OP Mainnet’s sequencer by Q3 2025.

The third phase would transfer “full control” over Optimism to governance, with the Token House, Citizen’s House, and any other bodies appointed by the two houses taking “complete technical control over the Optimism protocol. Phase three also calls for total disclosure of past and ongoing grants from the Optimism Foundation, and the decentralization of the OP Mainnet sequencer.

GFX Labs advocates for the completion of all three phases by Q3 2025. OP holders have mobilized 2.3 million tokens in favor of the petition so far.

Decentralization

In June, Optimism announced OP mainnet had achieved Stage 1 Decentralization after the project implemented permissionless fault proofs — allowing anyone to submit or contest fault proofs validating transactions to the Ethereum mainnet. Optimism maintains a security council that can overturn fault proofs to protect against malicious actors contingent on agreement with the Optimism Foundation.

The term Stage 1 Decentralization was coined by Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s chief scientist, to describe Layer 2 networks exhibiting “limited training wheels” in the form of a security council. By contrast, Stage 0 rollups are reliant on a centralized proposer to submit a network’s state root to the mainnet, while Stage 2 decentralization refers to when no centralized entity can post state roots.

According to L2beat, only DeGate v1 and Fuel v1 have achieved Stage 2 decentralization, while Arbitrum One, OP Mainnet, ZKsync Lite, and dYdX v3 are at Stage 1.

However, Optimism implemented a “permissioned fallback” in mid-August after community-led audits identified bugs in OP Mainnet’s fault proof system. Meanwhile, Arbitrum announced plans to pursue Stage 2 decentralization in June.

OP Mainnet is currently the third-largest Layer 2 network with a total value locked of $5.64 billion, sitting behind Base with $6.12 billion, and Arbitrum One with $13.4 billion.

The price of OP is down 0.6% in the past 24 hours according to The Defiant’s crypto price feeds.