Excitement around Blackrock’s Bitcoin ETF filing has fueled the current rally, but Ethereum has a few catalysts of its own. Optimism recently released its Bedrock upgrade on June 6th. Among its key features is an optimized batch compression method, which reduces gas costs by roughly 50%.

Gas costs have been significantly reduced since Bedrock’s deployment, with the cost of an average transaction dropping to $0.08, compared to around $0.40 before the upgrade.

Previously, L2s have been been convenient gas savers, but are still vulnerable to increased gas fees from surges in mainnet usage. Periodic spikes in meme coin trading have frustrated Optimism and Arbitrum users, who had hoped to remain insulated from high gas costs. Bedrock does not make Optimism immune to these instances, but provides a nice buffer.

These benefits aren’t limited to simple token transfers, either. Users can now interact with more complicated contracts for negligible gas costs. For example, buying a call option on Lyra now only costs about 30 cents in gas. The Synthetix ecosystem as a whole should be in a strong position to benefit from Bedrock, as recent efficiency-oriented improvements are compounded by gas savings. A user leverage- longing ETH via GMX on Arbitrum likely pays significantly more in both trading fees and gas costs than making the same trade via Synthetix perps v2 on Optimism. Being able to just do things on-chain without having to consider these costs is a huge UX boost. Synthetix’ early commitment to Optimism may finally be paying off.

More broadly, Optimism’s daily new and returning users continue to increase. After a slow start, Optimism is demonstrating consistent growth. Coinbase’s BASE is expected to launch on the OP stack later this summer, potentially onboarding millions of additional users to the Optimism ecosystem. Bedrock could put Optimism in place to provide a strong UX for new users and to capitalize on these tailwinds.