5 Things About Optimism You’ll Kick Yourself for Not Knowing

Mawuli- Akorlie
Coinmonks
4 min readOct 1, 2022

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Beautiful Free Images & Pictures | Unsplash

As cryptocurrency has become more popular in the past several years, some blockchains have struggled to keep up with the heightened load. Optimism is a low-cost and lightning-fast Ethereum L2 blockchain built by Ethereum developers. Optimism takes everything you love about Ethereum and turbocharges it. Optimism is a nonprofit organization that is dedicated to making transactions on the Ethereum ecosystem more fast, stable, scalable, and less expensive.

Optimism is home to 35 protocols, the biggest being Synthetix (SNX), a derivatives exchange, Uniswap (UNI), a DEX, and Velodrome (VELO), an AMM. Users can begin their journey on Optimism by adding the chain on their Metamask and bridging tokens like ETH to the L2. The top cryptocurrency exchanges for trading in Optimism stock are currently Binance, BTCEX, BingX, MEXC, and OKX

Why Ethereum Needs Optimism

Optimism is one of the biggest scaling solutions for Ethereum with over $300 million in Total Valued. It’s understood that Ethereum is a slow network with high transaction fees and one of the most secure and decentralized blockchains. To keep everything operating smoothly, the network is built around three properties: Decentralization, security, and scalability. However, because of the limitations due to the blockchain trilemma, Ethereum can only deploy two out of these three properties effectively. This is where Optimism comes into play. Optimism offers a scalable solution to the Ethereum network, which helps increase the speed of transactions on Ethereum without sacrificing decentralization and security.

Who Are The Founders Of Optimism?

Optimism is led by the Optimism Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to growing the Optimism ecosystem which is led by Jinglan Wang the Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer at Optimism. The company helps to enhance and enshrine fair access to public goods on the internet, Similar to Ethereum, Optimism aims to become a fully decentralized public good that is not profit-oriented. Also, Optimism is entirely funded by donations and grants around the world.

What Makes Optimism Unique ??

Optimism saves both time and money as each transaction does not have to be checked frequently. If a verifier thinks that a transaction is fraudulent, then they can request to have it verified. If it is fraudulent, then the verifier is rewarded, and the user who completed the fraudulent transaction is fined. This system reduces the amount of energy needed to complete transactions, which in turn reduces transaction costs and increases speed.

Another feature that sets Optimism apart is its focus on “Public Goods,” completed through the Ecosystem Fund and the Retroactive Public Goods Funding program. Portions of the total token supply are reserved for the funding and rewarding of projects that are helpful to society as a whole. Optimism has already donated over $1 million to such projects.

Also, the Optimism chain is the way that (dApps) are deployed. Most Layer 2 solutions use Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible mechanisms to deploy dApps. This approach makes it easy for Ethereum developers to port over their dApps to Layer 2s and sidechains. Optimism uses the Optimism Virtual Machine (OVM), which is an EVM equivalent. Ethereum dApps can be loaded onto Optimism with no changes in the overall code.

Furthermore, Optimism’s setup process is constructed around the idea of long-term sustainability and not taking shortcuts to scalability. That is why it uses optimistic rollups and takes advantage of the consensus mechanism of Ethereum to scale the network. Blocks are created and run on the L2 (Optimism), while user transactions are batched up and submitted to the L1 (Ethereum). The L2 has no mempool, and transactions are immediately accepted or rejected. This guarantees a smooth user experience while ensuring security through the Ethereum consensus mechanism.

Lastly, the ecosystem further stresses pragmatism [Pragmatic optimism is a combination of two terms: pragmatism and optimism. Put together; this means that you’re optimistic about your future and pragmatic about what you need to do to get there]. Optimism is driven by the real-world needs and constraints of its team and the users engaging with the ecosystem. Hence, Optimism aims to build iteratively and implement features like EVM equivalence gradually.

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