The Optimism ecosystem is overflowing with opportunities for builders. With OP Stack, Optimism Mainnet, and AttestationStation at your disposal, here is an always-growing list of Big Ideas for you to build.
These ideas range from “the community really wishes this tool existed” all the way to “might change the course of human history.” We draw inspiration from sources like Vitalik’s blog, community suggestions, and late-night brainstorms at conferences. Whether you’re hacking, shipping, or scaling, there’s something on the list where you can make your mark.
- Pick an idea – any idea – and start building.
- Use the Optimism Starter Kit, our Getting Started tutorial, or the AttestationStation guide.
- If you’re the run-your-own-rollup type, get started with OP Stack.
- Join us on Discord or Telegram to chat with other Optimism devs, find other builders working on ideas, and tell us what you’re working on.
The OP Stack is the standardized, shared, and open-source development stack powering Optimism Mainnet and the Superchain. It maximizes interoperability and composability between different chains using the OP Stack.
- The Superchain Explainer including vision, roadmap, and opportunities.
- Deep Dive Tweet Thread on how it can work, how it can be built, and what it can enable.
- Getting Starting Guide for launching your own Superchain-ready L2.
The following ideas relate to products, companies, and infrastructure that will power the Superchain.
The Superchain is the end state of OP Stack and chains that run on it: a network of chains that share bridging, decentralized governance, upgrades, a communication layer and more. You can hasten the Superchain’s existence by tackling the following infra projects.
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Universal Message Passing: Write a messaging system that can communicate between different OP Stack chains. Enable cross-chain transactions, without a waiting period, with L2-to-L2 messages.
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Unified Block Explorers: Create a block explorer or indexer that seamlessly explores (or indexes) multiple OP Stack chains. Consider a block-explorer-as-search-engine, where searching for “top dex traders” returns addresses that do the most dex volume.
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Indexing. Indexing. Indexing. Indexing. Indexing. Create trustless indexing chains or tools that can seamlessly index every Superchain L2. Bonus idea: enable subscriptions to L1 events.
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Impact evaluation indexers. A subset of indexing a chain, combine the index with measurements of the impact of that chain’s participants.
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Cross-Chain Oracles and other Utility Chains: There is a huge opportunity for cross-chain oracles, as well as oracles that pull data from L1 and make it available in L2. Create entire chains with APIs that provide utility to users, products, and other chains.
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Alt-Data Availability Layer (aka Plasma Returns): Create a generic plasma protocol, where transaction data is committed to on L1 but not supplied to L1 directly, with a data availability challenge fallback. A generic Plasma protocol is able to scale beyond what is possible on rollups because only the users who are interested in the transaction data will download the Plasma data, whereas with rollups every Ethereum node downloads all of the transaction data.
Launching an L2 means being able to run actual products on it. Create these use cases as a feature, product, or proof of concept.
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Crowdfunding: Implement a kickstarter or gitcoin-like crowdfunding protocol as an L2.
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Generalized “Airline Miles” Rollup: A common use case pitched by brands is bringing “points” on-chain. Create a framework for spinning up an L2 that manages these points and can be managed by the company launching it.
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Decentralized Vercel/AWS: As data availability, bridging, and L2s improve, spinning up a new chain becomes a form of application hosting. Get the jump on this use case by creating Vercel-in-a-Rollup.
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Prediction Market Framework for Everything: Create an L2 for prediction, voting, etc. that can tap into live events:
- Prediction markets on stats for other chains.
- Predict who gets kicked off The Bachelor/Bachelorette.
- Place predictions for fantasy sports outcomes.
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Put an entire movie on-chain: We’re not sure how this would work, but that’s what the ideas list is for.
What apps, products, or ideas are fundamentally better as their own interoperable L2?
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Alt-L1 L2s: Create EVM-compatible rollups for Solana, Cardano, Bitcoin - you get the idea.
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Doom as a Chain: It’s cool to run Doom on a blockchain. But what if Doom is the blockchain? Create an OP Stack hack that puts Doom into the execution layer.
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Decentralized Roblox-Like: Create a set of tools, including a version of Lua, that make it easy for Roblox developers to port their games to an OP Stack L2.
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DeSoc (Decentralized Social) Rollup: Use OP Stack and your favorite social protocol (Lens? Farcaster? Your own?) and create a social rollup. Or, create a decentralized backend for a web2 social media service.
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Rollback Rollup Netcode for Games: Create a version of GGPO or other implementation of deterministic lockstep rollback, encoded as a rollup that games can deploy on to enable netcode.
Help the Superchain come into existence by making it easier to deploy and run chains.
- Observability Tools: Like Grafana, but rollups.
- Auto-Deply via Smart Contract: send ether to a smart contract and a chain auto-deploys.
- Run Ethereum validators on Ethereum.
- Flashbots Chain: What if the entire chain was focused on MEV?
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Generalized oracles. Right now pricing is a huge gap in defi tooling. Liquidity for many tokens exists in places where oracles are lacking, making it risky for lending protocols to deploy.
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Onchain pricing / oracles for NFTs. Pretty much all pricing on NFTs uses some sort of centralized service. We're about to see an explosion of interesting stuff in this area, and we want to be ready for it.
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Decentralized RPC service, censor-proof experience at the RPC level. Often sought, never solved, and potentially massive knock-on impact.
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Definitive account abstraction SDK. There may be something internal to OP in the works, but in any case this would be pretty useful for, e.g., appchains leveraging OP Stack.
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Cron jobs for view functions / historical data. There's a ton of engineering around, e.g., subgraphs pulling data. It's time-consuming and redundant, and often corners are cut and key data solutions omitted. Instead, maybe indexed chain data or APIs that cache chain data.
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Gearbox or fork. Would help with, for example, yields on LSDs. In fact, anything that would attract LSDs to Optimism through yield would be fantastic; there still aren't that many great options.
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Autocompounders / LP managers for bridge liquidity. Bridge infra in this regard is rapidly evolving in a few dimensions — if it's possible, would be great to think through how to get a ton of liquidity on bridges.
| ATTN ETHDenver Hackers: consider ideas from here to get started hacking. Many of these qualify for Optimism’s official BUIDLathon bounties. Note that whether something is on this list does not impact judging. However, these ideas have been identified as exciting by our community and may be rewarded with traction, which is a strong qualifier for RetroPGF and other rewards. |
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Optimism’s AttestationStation (ATST) is a data primitive that allows people to start building their identity onchain. This smart contract provides a permissionless, accessible data source that enables anyone to make reputation-based applications. The following ideas make use of AttestationStation to create new identity primitives, reputation products, and even some competitors to real-world IDs.
- What is AttestationStation?
- AttestationStation Tutorial (GitHub).
- AttestationStation web-based user interface
- Optimism Getting Started Guides
- Optimist Score Queries & Data (Flipside)
- Dune Dashboard - AttestationStation
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Auth Everywhere: Create an authentication system that uses AttestationStation to improve signin on wallet-connected dapps. Bonus points for forward-compatibility with Account Abstraction, such as EIP-4337. Sign into everything, everywhere, all at once. (Fun fact: in OP Labs’ internal brainstorms, this came up literally over a dozen different ways.)
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Decentralized PGP Keyserver: Use attestations to create a decentralized key server for PGP keys. For instance, make it easy for users to attest that a public key is genuine, and display a trust score for that key’s genuine-ness.
- Cryptographic Key Servers; consider the Problems with keyservers section
- Public key infrastructure
- Web of trust
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Anti-Sybil Protocol / API: Imagine an open, permissionless anti-Sybil API that any project can use to block fake accounts who do nothing but engagement farm.
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Global Passport NFT: Create an NFT that acts as a global passport, which can receive “stamps” to signal where you’ve visited.
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Decentralized Project Reputation: Free, open source, on-chain star ratings of crypto projects.
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Deep Fake Protection: Create a tool for creators to attest that a livestream, video, image, or clip is from their real account(s). (h/t Livepeer)
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Onchain Gaming Achievement System: Create a decentralized achievement system as a public good that other games can build with. Features could include:
- Traditional achievement system that activates an achievement-attestation when you accomplish something in-game.
- “Props” system that you can say a teammate was good at healing, DPS, etc, to help with finding pickup groups in other games.
- Onchain multi-game achievement rewards for being good at multiple titles.
- User-created achievements and voting system.
- API for parsing achievement data to display in-game.
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“Lazy Attestations”: Off-Chain program that aggregates not-yet-committed attestations, then handles committing them all in one go or using them as call data.
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ATST Indexer/Subgraph: The indexer tracks attestations via the AttestationStation by user account. The ATST Explorer then uses this data to populate attestation history. Indexer should include an API server, which serves data to web browsers. Try using ponder.sh or The Graph to start.
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ATST Explorer: Build Etherscan-for-Attestations. No-code interface used to view, create, update, explore, and contextualize attestations.
- Search for attestations by attester address, receiver address, and transaction hash
- See the latest attestations and all attestations
- See the transaction hash, status, block, timestamp, raw data, referenced attestations, referencing attestations, author, receiver, key, and value for each attestation
- An interface that allows user to read / view attestations
- An interface that allows users to make / update batch or single attestations
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TokenList.org-style AttestationList: Create a community-led initiative to improve discoverability, reputation and trust in attestations in a manner that is inclusive, transparent, and decentralized. Attestation Lists is a specification for lists of attestation metadata (e.g. address, decimals, ...) that can be used by any dapp interfaces that need one or more lists of attestations.
- An instance of an attestation list following a standard JSON schema and can be hosted publicly on ENS, IPFS, or HTTPS.
- Context on what attestation lists are
- Directions on how to validate that a schemas follow the proposed standard
- Directions on how to author a attestation list
- List data
- List URL
- List Name
- List version
- Link to the official homepage of the list manager
- Attestation data
- Attestation name
- Attestation author
- Attestation key
- Attestation value
- Attestation image
- Attestation description
- List data
- Directions on how to deploy an attestation list
- Examples of what a attestation list looks like
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ATST Schemas: Upgrade the ATST contract to enable schemas. A schema is a way for a client of the AttestationStation to understand the content of a given attestation.
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ATST Relayer: Make attestations on Optimism accessible on L1 Ethereum. This should have decent liveness (i.e not fall more than a few hours behind OP mainnet). It should be accessible from a smart contract. And, data should be well indexed and relatively easy to retrieve against the attested address.
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WORM ATST: Upgrade the ATST contract to write once, read many. Do not allow attestors to modify a previously written attestation.
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Right to be forgotten ATST: Upgrade the ATST contract to allow an address to delete a transaction where it is the
aboutaddress, regardless of the attestor.
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Events Ticketing: Create an application that lets creators create an event ticketing flow using attestations.
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ATST Friending: Create an application that lets people meet and connect through consensual attestations, such as exchanging info at a conference.
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ATST Ratings: Allow users to “rate” dapps that they have interacted with. Bonus points for making this cross-chain, enabling ratings for apps on OP Stack chains, Ethereum, or more.
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Next Level Token Gating: Instead of using tokens to lock access to something, instead have access unlock after getting specific attestations, or a certain threshold of multiple attestations.
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Walletless Onboarding: Create a “low security zone”, similar to “free” users in a free-to-play game, where users can access features that don’t require signatures.
Meta Faucet
An alternative to a traditional faucet: the user uploads their contract + params/bytecode and the relayer deploys it for free and sends the user ~2 OP Goerli ETH for testing. Could require users to scan a QR code to use during events.
SDK Contributions
Anything from improving documentation, adding a feature to creating a tutorial! Our SDK is still in its early stages, so all contributions are welcome and encouraged!
SDK Docs, Repo
ethgasstation for Optimism
Create a version of https://ethgasstation.info/ that tracks and reports on gas fees and more for Optimism.
Blockchain & infrastructure projects
For more ideas on how to develop the rollup itself or its supporting infrastructure, checkout the Infrastructure Project Ideas page. These projects tend to be beefier, and cater to aspiring blockchain devs.
RetroPGF dashboard
Help make RetroPGF approachable. Show data from the previous rounds, include links to articles (our article, Vitaliks).
Tokenized GitHub repo
High level objective: Influence developers to reflect their work in tokens so we can fund them with RetroPGF. Rough idea: Make it easy to tokenize a GH repo. The owner can choose an initial allocation, automatic rewards for merged PRs, etc. They are then responsible for distributing the tokens to contributors, etc.
Token-gated GitHub repos
Write a GitHub app that invites users to a repo if they connect their wallet and own a particular token.
Full Wallet Migration
Bridge multiple / all tokens (ERC20 & ERC721) from your L1 wallet to Optimism in one transaction.
Embedded gateway
Open source component that devs can embed in their own project provide in-app bridging.
Bridge Lottery
Slot machine extension for bridge that rewards random users with an NFT or other token.
Bridge Snap for MetaMask
An extension for MetaMask that allows bridging from within the wallet.
See: MetaMask Snaps documentation
Referral incentives
Sybil resistant referral system where each new address a user gets to use OP is rewarded.
Composable Allowlists Create a way for projects to allowlist certain addresses and make those allowlists shareable using the AttestationStation
L2 Gift Cards
An L1 NFT that sends ETH or OP to your L2 address when bridged over.
See also: Bridge Pass
Nested NFTs
Create a new standard or implementation for NFTs that can own NFTs. Think: item inventory, accessories, composable art.
Onchain Activity Feed
A simple app that allows a user to connect a wallet and see what the addresses they've previously interacted with are up to now. Bonus points for categorizing contracts or rendering transactions with rich metadata.
Notification service
A protocol and UI for address-to-address messaging.
See also: Pearl, EPNS
Optimistic CFD 👀 LOOKING FOR CONTRIBUTORS
A synth protocol that somewhat resembles CFDs. The innovation lies in the fact that the protocol comes in to compensate imbalances between the longs and the shorts, while incentivizing the imbalance to correct itself. See the design notes for more information.
Automated Trading Bot
A web app that lets users create automated trading bots, in the fashion of Option Alpha. This requires frontend, backend, contract and bot development!
See: Podcast
| Project | Description | Hackathon |
|---|---|---|
| Retr0x | Fully on-chain retro-generative public goods funding app deployed with Optimism. Our implementation includes funding initiation with a curated whitelist, a smart contract that executes quadratic voting and fund disbursement logic and a dashboard to access on-chain data. | ETHAmsterdam |
| Stargaze | Today, open source projects are based on voluntary contributions. While these contributors do not seek financial gain for their contributions, the donations made to these projects rarely reach many of the downstream developers and contributors that have created and maintain them. We aim to solve that problem by distributing funds to contributors when donations to projects are made by supporters. In this current implementation, Stargaze uses a basic metric to value contributions and calculate an impact score representing a contributor’s share of the total value created. He or she receives donations proportionately to his or her share. |
ETHNewYork |
| ETHdos | ETHdos numbers measure degrees of separation of people (akin to Bacon/Erdos numbers) while hiding individual friendships entirely. This is the first of its kind social experiment using the composability of recursive zk snarks. | ETHNewYork |