Light at the end of the tunnel.

Optimism
Optimism PBC Blog
Published in
3 min readSep 25, 2020

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Tldr: Testnet rollout plans, early adopters, and path towards mainnet.

Mystical island landscape emerging at the end of a long tunnel, flanked by an Ethereum logo and “Optimistic Ethereum”.
Clearly none of us are designers... but we do try our best.

Over the past few months, Ethereum has faced an unprecedented barrage of long waits, prohibitive fees, and stifling congestion. Our mission has felt more urgent than ever, and our path forward clear. It’s been 4 sleepless, exhausting months since our last update, but your supportive memes and messages have given us the energy to keep pushing forward.

Now, it’s time for a quick breath of air and to share a milestone we could not be more nervous and excited to reveal: today marks the first phase of our testnet launch, and the start of yet another chapter.

This is our Systems Engineer, Mark. He’s living in a tent on the roof of the office, and has refused to go home until mainnet is launched.

Testnet Rollout Plan

Due to overwhelming demand, we have opted for a gradual release process where we will be integrating a small cohort of early adopters one at a time, in order to provide the best possible support to each pioneering project.

Synthetix has bravely volunteered to be the first! They will be incentivizing testnet usage (and breakage) with 200,000 SNX in rewards to their users for participating.

There are no words for how grateful we are to Synthetix for the opportunity to truly test our code in an environment that is as close to mainnet as possible, where serious value is in play.

Rainbow gradient timeline graphic that shows staggered start dates for integrating new projects onto testnet.
This image is not to scale.

The testnet is currently open for public use, but not yet for public contract deployment. In order to best isolate bugs as they arise, the first phase of testnet will be limited to a subset of the full featureset. As we gain confidence in the stability of the testnet, we will progress through each phase until the full Optimistic Ethereum system is up and running.

Phase A — No deposits or withdrawals. Airdrop tokens into L2 Goerli and allow participants to mint & burn sUSD, and claim staking rewards.

Phase B — Deposits enabled. Airdrop of L1 Goerli SNX to participants. Users can now increase their staked SNX if they perform a deposit.

Security Drill — Upgrade OVM Contracts to add verification abilities. We’ll actively commit fraud and reward the users who successfully submit a fraud proof!

Phase C — Withdrawals are enabled. Participants must perform a successful withdrawal to receive their testnet rewards on mainnet.

In parallel, we will be preparing some of our other early adopters for testnet integrations so that they are ready to deploy once the full testnet is running.

Join Us

Logos of Synthetix, Uniswap, and Chainlink aligned horizontally.
Much excite!

Projects that wish to join Synthetix, Uniswap, Chainlink and others as part of our early adopter cohort can sign up here: https://forms.gle/AGmLANiRma9oFNxt7

And stay tuned! We have many more extremely exciting announcements & integrations coming over the next few months. (The above logos are not listed in any particular order as it pertains to integrations).

Special Acknowledgements

We truly could not have done this without the help and support of our friends and contributors:

For saving our asses: George Hotz.

For lighting a fire under our butts: Kain Warwick, Justin Moses, Clem Balestrat, Clinton Ennis, Alejandro Santander, Evgeny Boxer, Yannis Stamelakos, and our Discord friends eagerly poking and supporting us: Synthaman, ΔLΞXΔNDΞR, allo, Crab, Tan, Amxx, et al ❤.

For being a frequent sounding board: Dan Robinson, Barry Whitehat, Hayden Adams, Georgios Konstantopoulos, Albert Ni.

For refining our vision: Althea Allen, Phil Daian, TQ Roquerre, Abbey Titcomb

And for all of the above, Vitalik Buterin.

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