Optimism Foundation reverts to proof of fraud allowed, hard fork announced

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Optimism has returned its network to an allowed state after community-led audits identified several bugs in its recently released permissionless fraud protection system, including two high-severity issues.

The Optimism Foundation announced the pullback on X, saying the move was made “out of an abundance of caution” to avoid potential instability while vulnerabilities are patched.

In March, Optimism began testing its bug-checking system on Ethereum’s Sepolia testnet to enhance security and decentralization and address criticism of previous vulnerabilities.

The decision comes just over two months after the network implemented permissionless fraud proofs on June 10, followed by its token unlock event. This improved the network and enabled the withdrawal of ether and ERC-20 tokens, a milestone that allowed it to reach stage 1 of decentralization, as outlined by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.

Mofi Taiwo, a protocol engineer representing Optimism contributor OP Labs, submitted a proposal to the network governance forum detailing the reasons for enabling the fallback system. The post emphasized that no vulnerabilities were exploited and that users’ assets were never at risk.

“While the auditors found some high-severity issues, no good users were ever at risk. All of the audit issues listed below can be detected by our monitoring tools,” Taiwo said in the proposal.

The identified vulnerabilities primarily affect contracts related to the anti-fraud system that fell outside Optimism’s audit scope. These contracts were classified as having viability and reputational risks, which did not require formal audits in accordance with project guidelines.

To fix the issues, Taiwo proposed an upgrade called “Granit” scheduled for September 10 at 16:00:01 UTC. The upgrade will involve several network updates, including an L2 hard fork. While the hard fork was not formally audited, OP Labs conducted an internal security assessment and deemed the changes to be low risk.

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