Original - Odaily
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As one of the Four Kings of L2, Arbitrum has recently made a proposal that has attracted widespread attention - the ArbOS upgrade of core components, which is also known as the first hard fork proposal in L2.
Odaily interprets the content of this proposal and understands what impact Arbitrum’s ArbOS upgrade will have on Arbitrum’s ecosystem?
What is ArbOS upgrade?
ArbOS is the operating system for Arbitrum’s AVM (Virtual Machine). ArbOS is responsible for tracking and managing network resources, generating blocks from incoming messages, and executing smart contracts through its own Geth instance.
From the picture above, you can know the importance of ArbOS in Arbitrum.
Arbitrum’s network structure is simplified into 5 parts:
As the bottom layer of Arbitrum, Ethereum ensures the security of the second layer;
Bridge smart contracts are used on Ethereum to ensure the verification of operational accuracy between Ethereum and L2;
The AVM structure ensures that the content output through the bridge smart contract on Ethereum can be recognized by Arbitrums virtual machine program;
ArbOS is similar to an operating system, the glue component that helps the Arbitrum network run properly;
Finally, ArbOS provides EVM compatibility for Arbitrum.
For example, suppose there is a DApp running on Arbitrum that needs to communicate with other chains and perform smart contract operations. ArbOS, as part of Arbitrum, will be responsible for tracking and processing messages from other chains, converting them into L2 blocks, and executing smart contract operations. It can also provide specific functions through pre-compilation, such as cross-chain communication with other chains or resource billing. With the support of ArbOS, DApps can run on Arbitrum at lower cost and higher efficiency, and can interoperate with other chains.
It can be seen from this that ArbOS plays a role as a link between the previous and the following and can be compared to the client software of the L1 public chain. The impact of this ArbOS upgrade is no less than a fork of the public chain. However, compared with the upgrade of the L1 public chain, the upgrade of L2s core components will not cause a real possibility of a hard fork.
Although ArbOS is upgraded, each node operator needs to coordinate the upgrade of its software, which may result in different versions of ArbOS running on the node, resulting in two inconsistent historical versions of the chain. But the advantage of L2 is that L2 needs to verify the correctness of the state of the main network Ethereum through the Ethereum bridge smart contract Arbitrum Bridge. This avoids forks caused by consensus.
Because during the ArbOS upgrade process, validators can make claims about the state of the chain, and other validators can challenge them. The bridge contract will adjudicate these challenges and ensure that the bridge’s view of the Arbitrum chain is accurate through a series of assertions and fraud proofs. This ensures that only chains that are consistent with the rules specified by the Arbitrum bridge contract are canonical chains.
What impact will the ArbOS upgrade have?
According to the description of the official proposal, this upgrade will not have much impact on the entire Arbitrum as a whole. It is more about support for the EVM Shanghai upgrade and PUSH 0 opcode, as well as various bug fixes. These improvements have now been reviewed and are ready for adoption, and the proposal is also for Arbitrum One and Arbitrum Nova.
This upgrade is more relevant to the underlying verifiers and less relevant to ordinary users. According to the current voting share, the approval rate is as high as 99.79%, and it is highly likely to pass. At that time, everyone will determine whether a series of on-chain operations such as transfers can be performed during this upgrade based on official news.
