Optimism Says Ether $ETH Now Treated as Native Cryptocurrency Alongside $OP Token

“With Bedrock, we’ve added a new method of making deposits via the new Optimism Portal contract. This approach treats ETH as a native token, so that an L1 to L2 transaction can have both ETH and data associated with it,” said Maurelian. “To achieve this, we needed to decouple the storage of ETH from the rest of the ERC-20 tokens in our bridge, and move it into the Optimism Portal.”