Optimism describes its growth journey and may launch a governance token?
Optimism has learned to walk, and it's time to try running fast.Original Title: "A New Chapter"
*Original Author: * Optimism
Original Translator: Kyle, The Way of DeFi
It's hard to believe that it has been over a year since the official launch of the Optimism mainnet. Since then, Optimism has achieved:
Saved users over $1.1 billion in gas fees
Deployed over 6,800 contracts
Logged over 300,000 unique addresses
Secured over $900 million in value
Facilitated over $17.4 billion in transaction volume
Generated over $24.5 million in revenue
Donated over $1 million to public goods funds
As the network grew, the Optimism team has also grown, now comprising:
Over 40 employees
Over $175 million in funding led by a16z and Paradigm
These numbers may speak for themselves, but statistics alone cannot tell the story of Optimism's growth.
Soon, this story will open a new chapter.
First, let's take a moment to look back at the growth journey of Optimism.
Starting Small
Optimism began a few years ago with a small group of ETH enthusiasts scribbling on a whiteboard.
We lived in a time before Rollups existed. At that time, Plasma was all the rage in terms of scalability. We operated a research non-profit organization called Plasma Group.
PG was both an organization and a community. We held monthly calls and shared new designs for implementers to adopt.
However, Plasma was lacking something, and we began searching for something new, something better.
Gradually Growing
In June 2019, we realized that Vitalik's rollup design could be applied to Plasma's optimistic design pattern. With the help of the community, many designs rapidly evolved, and Optimistic Rollup was born.
Optimistic Rollups promised to run any Ethereum contract at a cost 5-500 times cheaper. This was the answer to Ethereum's scalability needs.
We intended to build it out. We needed a team.
So, shortly after Devcon V released Unipig (the first Rollup proof of concept in collaboration with Uniswap), we raised our first $3.5 million in funding from Paradigm.
Ultimately, the endgame for scalability would take years to become clear. However, to this day, these designs remain at the core of Ethereum's pragmatic, rollup-centric roadmap.
As we built the network and the team, the second year brought rich and valuable experiences. We ran two incentivized testnets using Synthetix, making the leap from research to actual production networks.
Perhaps the most valuable lesson was the growth of the team. At one point, to keep the testnet running smoothly, our teammate Mark camped out on the roof of our New York apartment that night.
Yes, he really did camp out.
Legendary Experiences
To scale Ethereum, we needed to scale ourselves. We did it at scale.
Today, we have nearly 40 strong EIP authors, product wizards, and protocol guides, boasting a world-class collection. We are forever grateful to talents like Mark and the SNX community, who have accompanied us from a small and ambitious team to a mature powerhouse. ❤️
Additionally, we owe thanks to the legendary George Hotz for his guidance. The knowledge he provided will reflect in our practices and the standards of excellence for the coming years.
Continuous Product Iteration
We have learned a lot about how scalability relates to developer experience—namely, by letting Ethereum do its thing.
These experiences ultimately led to Optimism's biggest upgrade: EVM equivalence. This upgrade significantly reduced Optimism's footprint while supporting one-click deployment and out-of-the-box tools.
The next iteration of our protocol, Optimism: Bedrock, will introduce Cannon, our next-generation EVM-equivalent fault proof. Once Bedrock is implemented, the differences between Optimism and the upstream geth client will be reduced to about 300 lines of code. Bedrock and Cannon will leave competitors behind and set the standard for Optimistic rollup architecture.
Ecosystem Growth
The Optimism network is now ready to support a real ecosystem.
In December 2021, we removed the whitelist mechanism and opened the system to everyone.
Since then, we have seen over 50 applications deployed on Optimism, bridging over 60,000 ETH, with a total on-chain value exceeding $900 million. Upgrades like calldata compression continue to improve the user experience, with today's transaction fees being 40% cheaper than before.
We have received ongoing support from some of the most respected investors in the field, facilitating a $150 million Series B funding round led by a16z.
Most of this funding will be used to further expand our team. The collective energy of these optimists will be used to continue to expand Ethereum's status quo, with 100% of the resulting profits donated to its future.
We have provided $1 million in funding for retroactive public goods and are excited to share our future plans on how to sustain and grow this initiative.
A New Chapter
It has been a few years since we began our journey to build the best scalability solution for Ethereum.
The network has developed rapidly and is getting better every day. Optimism has learned to walk, and it's time to try running fast.
We are approaching the end of one chapter and the beginning of the next—driven by community ownership and governance.
This moment is coming quickly.
