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Optimism has reverted its network to permissioned status after community-driven audits revealed several bugs in its recently launched permissionless tamper-resistant system, including two high-severity issues.

The Optimism Foundation announced the rollback of X, saying the move was taken “out of an abundance of caution” to avoid potential instability while the vulnerabilities were patched.

In March, Optimism began testing its fault-proofing system on Ethereum’s Sepolia test network to improve security and decentralization, and address criticism of past vulnerabilities.

The decision comes just over two months after the network implemented permissionless fraud proofs on June 10, followed by the token unlock event. This improved the network and enabled ether and ERC-20 token withdrawals, a milestone that made it possible to achieve Stage 1 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’s governance forum outlining the rationale for activating the fallback system. The post emphasized that no vulnerabilities had been exploited and that user assets were never compromised.

“While the auditors discovered some very serious issues, no user assets were ever at risk. All of the audit issues listed below can be detected by our monitoring tooling,” Taiwo said in the proposal.

The vulnerabilities identified primarily relate to contracts related to the tamper-proof system that were outside of Optimism’s audit scope. These contracts were categorized as risks to liveness and reputation, which did not require formal audits as per the project guidelines.

To address the issues, Taiwo proposed an upgrade dubbed “Granite,” scheduled for September 10 at 16:00:01 UTC. The upgrade includes several updates to the network, including an L2 hard fork. While the hard fork has not undergone a formal audit, OP Labs has conducted an internal security review and deemed the changes as low risk.

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