Popular scaling solution Ethereum Optimism has announced a $150 million Series B funding round, led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Paradigm, with a total valuation of $1.65 billion.
According to an Optimism blog post, the Layer 2 (L2) solution has saved users of the Ethereum network over $1 billion in gas fees. The funding will be used to expand the Optimism team and further reduce network fees.
Fees on the Optimism network were reduced by a total of 30% last year, and the team is now contributing to work on the Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP-4844) for Shard Blob transactions, which could potentially reduce Ethereum network fees by up to 100x in the coming future.
Today on Ethereum #AllCoreDevs our very own @protolambda introduced EIP-4844: Shard Blob Transactions. support this EIP. But how, you ask? — Optimism ✨ (@optimismPBC) March 4, 2022
The popularity of L2 solutions such as Optimism has grown significantly due to the increased demand for NFTs, smart contracts and DeFi applications on the Ethereum network, which in turn increases transaction processing load and increases gas fees.
Optimism works through the use of “optimistic rollups” that aggregate transactions outside of the Ethereum blockchain, providing the benefits of reduced slippage, lower transaction costs, and vastly improved transaction speeds.
According to L2Beat data, total value locked (TVL) on L2 platforms has risen to $5.76 billion, with Optimism currently ranked fourth among its L2 peers with around $440 million TVL on its platform.
Kane Warwick, an Australian crypto veteran and founder of Synthetix, a decentralized derivatives exchange, told his 107,000 Twitter followers that not only did he participate in Optimism’s funding round, he “doubled down” expecting Optimism to “reach the size of ETH soon.” “.
Disclosure I participated in this round, which follows the previous round, but I doubled down a lot. My portfolio sizing right now looks like this: SNX ETH ILV GRT BTC OP (optimism) I expect Optimism to be there soon with ETH sizing wonder what could be the catalyst… https://t.co/yBw4mBtDz4—kain.eth L222 (@kaiynne) March 17, 2022
Late last year, Optimism expanded its whitelist-only status and made the network public, meaning any developer can start building a project on the Optimism network.
Related: Optimism Announces Updates to Enable “One-Click” Deployment
Allowing access to network development offers some important performance benefits, but as iOS jailbreak developer Saurik discovered, it also allows “critical bugs” to occur.
Fortunately, Saurik, real name Jay Freeman, discovered one such bug in early February that would allow attackers to create an infinite amount of ETH on the network, and notified the Optimism team about it. He was paid a $2 million award, one of the largest awards to date.
