Optimism issues tokens, Ethereum upgrades goes to a new stage?

As we all know, ETH, as the ace public chain in the blockchain world, has always been favored by applications (DEFI, NFT, Gamefi). However, behind the prosperity of the application ecology also brings the troubles of high transaction fees and inefficient TPS.

If you buy an NFT work at Opasea, the gas fee may cost 100USDT, but the price of NFT itself is less than 100USDT. Many times, new users are discouraged from the NFT market because of high handling fees. In addition to the handling fee, the transaction speed is also a big trouble for users. Before ETH2.0 was launched, ETH could process about 15/Tps per second, and Visa’s processing capacity was about 45,000/Tps. ETH 2.0 changed the consensus mechanism from POW to POS. The main reason is to increase the transaction speed. The first stage goal is to reach 100,000 TPS, which has far exceeded the Visa system.

Before ETH2.0 was launched, many layer 1 public chains were appeared. New public chains such as Terra, Solana, Avalanche and Fantom have successfully achieved faster transaction speed and lower transaction fees. They have obtained huge attractiveness and market share.

In addition to creating a full-fledged general-purpose smart contract platform from scratch, another recently popular approach is to develop a 2-layer scaling solution, the main purpose of which is to increase speed and reduce fees.

At present, Layer2 solutions mainly include: State Channel, Rollup, Sidechain, Plasma and Validum. Up to now, these 2-layer networks have locked billions of dollars of TVL, And it is attracting more on-chain activities every day.

There is no doubt that the most market-recognized Layer2 solution is still Rollup. There are two main Rollup technologies on the market, one is Optimistic Rollup, which uses a security solution, and the other is ZK Rollup, which uses zero-knowledge proof, In particular, Optimistic Rollup recently announced that it is about to issue tokens, which is particularly eye-catching.

First, we look at the fundamentals of Optimism, a non-profit public benefit corporation that pledges all of their profits to advance public goods (over $1 million in total) and retrospectively uses quadratic voting. On March 18, 2022, Optimism announced the completion of a $150 million Series B financing at a valuation of $1.65 billion. This round of financing was led by a16z and Paradigm.

a16z will not be introduced here, Paradigm will share with you. As we know that Paradigm is a cryptocurrency hedge fund founded by Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam, former Sequoia Capital partner Matt Huang and Pantera Capital veteran Charles Noyes, led by world-class investment manager David Swenson (David Swenson) management, he started Yale’s endowment (the second largest in higher education) with a “mere” $1 billion. Paradigm investment cases: Osmosis, Lido, FTX, Uniswap, StarkWare, Mina, dYdX, OpenSea, Compound, Phantom, etc. With reference to Paradigm’s past successful investment cases, we can have unlimited imagination for the future of Optimistic Rollup.

Looking at the product features, Optimism uses a non-interactive fraud proof mechanism to ensure the legitimacy of transactions. A validator (anyone running an Optimism “full node”) can challenge the validity of the transaction proposal submitted by the orderer, and then rollup Will be checked by performing transaction calculations on Ethereum. The challenge period set by Optimism is 1 week. After the transaction proposal is challenged during the challenge period, the final result will be obtained and then submitted to the Ethereum main network. If the proposal turns out to be fraudulent, the validator is rewarded and the orderer is penalized.

The advantage of Optimistic Rollup is that applications on one layer can be easily migrated, and Defi or other applications on Layer 1 can basically use the code on Optimistic Rollup. After auditing on Layer 1, the more mature codes and applications that you use can be directly moved to Layer 2, and the ecological establishment will be much more convenient. With the establishment of the ecology, Optimism with high speed and low gas has brought a high-quality experience to many Ethereum dapps.

As of this writing, Optimistic has processed more than 7000,000 transactions, and the Opt browser is very smooth.

Optimistic’s browser displays batches of transactions, not blocks, very intuitively. The transactions on the first and second layers on the right must be recorded in the main chain in full accordance with the rules of the main chain, so there is a Bk on the right, the block logo, which is indeed more thoughtful than Arbitrum.

The reason why Optimistic can stand out in the Layer 2 circle is that Optimistic announced that it will issue the governance token OP in the near future, and will conduct an airdrop in the near future, which will become the first Layer 2 head project to issue tokens.

Driven by this positive effect, as of the time of writing, two centralized exchanges, Huobi and Kucoin, have supported the withdrawal and deposit of ETH on the Optimism network, and the ZT exchange also supports the withdrawal and deposit of ETH and USDT on the Optimism network.

19% of the OP token distribution is used for airdrop rewards. The first round of airdrops will account for 5% of the total number of tokens. It is expected that more than 260,000 addresses will receive airdrop rewards, and 14% of the tokens will be airdropped in the future to reward community contributions. By. The initial total supply of OP tokens is 4,294,967,296, and the total supply will be issued at a rate of 2% per year.

The scope of OP’s airdrops is very wide. In addition to users who use optimism, users who have participated in the governance of the protocol on Ethereum, multi-signature wallet signers, users who donate on Gitcoin, and users who use the official cross-chain bridge to transfer assets from Ethereum. Users who cross-chain to Polygon, Arbitrum, and Solana have the opportunity to receive airdrop rewards.

Optimism is not only the first Layer 2 head project to issue coins, but also has a very wide range of airdrops. Optimism has attracted a lot of market attention. With token rewards, more developers and users will participate in the Optimism ecosystem, which is a great benefit for the development of ecological projects. On the bright side, the participants who get airdrops will be more actively interacting with other Layer 2 projects.

Affected by Optimism’s coin issuance, on May 8, according to the latest project-related documents on the official website of zkSync, the second-layer expansion solution for Ethereum, zkSync has determined that the project will launch its native Token in the future.

In the final analysis, the second-layer protocol comes to the end, and even the expansion plan is to solve the problem of data availability. In terms of data availability, the second-layer protocol reduces the amount of data. Zk is a zero-knowledge proof. Send the data to the main chain; Op is optimistic and accept it, first process the data and transfer it to the main chain, and then wait for someone to challenge it. If no one proves it wrong within a week, then it is right.

The Ethereum mainnet puts all data on the chain, and anyone can query it, so there is no doubt about its security. But it brings high transaction fees and inefficient transaction speed. The solution idea of the side chain is more extreme, and a new chain is directly created. The data of the side chain is on the side chain, which has nothing to do with the main chain, so the security of the main chain is independent of the side chain. This is why many people generally think that the Layer 2 protocol is the best expansion solution, precisely because the Layer 2 protocol can cleverly utilize the security of the main chain.

Optimism is about to issue token, and the hype of Layer 2 will strike again. In addition, ETH2.0 has not yet landed, and the bonus belonging to the Layer 2 track is coming?

Time will tell us the answer…