Optimism Ethereum L2 blockchain

3 min read

What is Optimism? 

Decentralized, permissionless, open source, secured low-cost, and lightning-fast Ethereum L2 blockchain – in one word – Optimism. As a nonprofit organization, The Optimism Foundation dedicates itself to the actual growth of the Optimism Collective. While writing software that is meant to scale Ethereum technology, the optimism team is also scaling Ethereum values by fundamentally creating pathways for highly impactful projects that don’t have a spectacular business model that leans towards success. One more awesome thing about it is that until the project is fully decentralized, they will be donating all profits from running a centralized sequencer towards scaling and sustaining public goods. Optimism’s roadmap is effective, achievable and so far successfully up to date and all practically started with an introduction of Optimism. 

Rollup back in Jun of 2019 

Simplified it basically looks like this: - Introduced Optimistic Rollup – Jun 2019 - Unipig Optimistic Rollup Testnet – Oct 2019 - EVM Compatible Testnet – Sept 2020 - Alpha Mainnet – Oct 2021 - EVM Equivalent Mainnet – Oct 2021 - Open Mainnet – Dec 2021 - Next Gen Fault Proof – 2022 - Sharded rollup – 2023 - Incentivized Verification – 2023 - Decentralized Sequencer – 2023 - L1 Governed Fault Proofs. 

For now 

The general philosophy of Optimism is that they are pledged to uphold the values of Ethereum itself by actually producing infrastructure that promotes the growth and sustainability of public goods, which makes it not too hard to understand and love it. 

The Optimistic Vision 

As Web3 basically made a path to a new potential reality – Cyberspace that is not only occupied but also governed by its citizens, optimism is presented with an opportunity to reinvent the way we organize in this digital age. Generally, we can say that Cyberspace today suffers from a monumental market failure because its economic rulesets have been brought and built for the physical world. But unlike the old world made of elements, flash, and steel, cyberspace is built on actual information, a substrate that can be freely replicated. All of this just means that public goods are very important for the growth of cyberspace but our markets are not too well equipped to nurture that growth. Our inability to reward the creators of these public goods for the clear impact they have is what’s holding us back. As a new model of digital democratic governance, The Optimism Collective has a goal to optimize and drive rapid and sustained growth of a decentralized ecosystem. Motivating the creation of a more productive and empathetic economy is the key so it’s basically all towards one principle – impact = profit. What Optimism collective will do is dispel the myth that public goods cannot be profitable by consistently providing massive retroactive incentives for public goods which benefit Optimism, Ethereum, and the Collective as a whole. 

What do I actually need to know? 

Simplified and without going into any depths, what you need to know is that optimism will reduce transaction fees in the first place. As a Layer2 scaling solution for Ethereum’s Dapps, instead of running all computation and data on the Ethereum network, Optimism works in a way that it puts all transaction data on-chain and runs computation off-chain which results in an increase in Ethereum’s transactions per second and decreasing transaction fees. Overall, Optimism Rollup is a great thing that reduces fees for its users and helps the Ethereum network process transactions faster which makes it something that everyone should be happy to use.