Optimism, an organization offering Layer 2 scaling options for Ethereum, has secured backing from enterprise capital agency and Coinbase investor A
Optimism, an organization offering Layer 2 scaling options for Ethereum, has secured backing from enterprise capital agency and Coinbase investor Andreessen Horowitz, or A16z.
Andreessen Horowitz, which manages a portfolio price roughly $16.6 billion, introduced it’s main Optimism’s $25 million Collection A funding spherical on Feb. 24.
The demand for Layer 2 scaling options has escalated amid Ethereum’s surging charges, with common transaction prices pushing as excessive as $40 on Feb. 23.
To realize decrease charges, decrease latency, and better throughput in comparison with transacting on Ethereum’s Layer 1 fundamental web, Optimism makes use of “rollups” to bundle transactions collectively utilizing sensible contracts on an Ethereum side-chain earlier than broadcasting them to the mainnet.
Ethereum co-founder, Vitalik Buterin, summarized that “rollups transfer computation (and state storage) off-chain, however preserve some information per transaction on-chain.”
A16z acknowledged that the expansion of Ethereum over the previous 12 months or so has been a powerful indicator of demand, noting the common capability of Ethereum blocks has stabilized close to 98% — which means the community is functionally full.
“One lesson from web historical past is that if you give builders a robust new computing platform, they create purposes at such a fast charge that demand persistently outpaces provide. We consider the identical will likely be true for Ethereum,”
The announcement notes that A16z spent important time exploring completely different Layer 2 scaling options earlier than the agency selected to help Optimism.
The agency emphasised that Optimism’s philosophical and technological alignment with Ethereum was a major issue informing their choice to again the workforce, writing:
“One of the thrilling issues about what Optimism has constructed is that it may be seen in some ways as an extension of Ethereum — from its philosophy right down to its tech stack.”
Optimism is at present finishing a phased rollout and will likely be prepared for large-scale manufacturing later this 12 months. The platform has been working testnets in partnership with DeFi platform Synthetix, and has began hiring to expedite public mainnet launch — which is now scheduled for March.