Ethereum's Layer 2 scaling solution Optimism plans to release its preliminary mainnet on January 15

Ethereum • January 4, 2021, 4:35AM EST

Ethereum's Layer 2 scaling solution developer Optimism has said that it expects to release its preliminary mainnet on January 15.

The first trial run will be with decentralized exchange protocol Synthetix, which will experience Optimism's full mainnet. This includes converting Ethereum smart contracts to Optimistic Virtual Machine (OVM) and deploying them onto mainnet. OVM is almost fully compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine, meaning Synthetix won't have to change its code to deploy its smart contracts onto OVM.

Since the mainnet release is preliminary, Optimism cautioned that it could result in outages and bugs. Therefore, the project team will hold upgrade keys for at least the first six months to ensure user funds' safety. "Until we relinquish those keys, please do not consider this the full and final system," said Optimism.

A public testnet is expected to get released on March 15. Overall, with its solution, Optimism aims to resolve Ethereum's scaling problem, i.e., improving its transaction processing capacity at a reasonable cost. The current capacity of Ethereum is about 1.2 million transactions per day, and the current average fee per transaction is around $15.

Other projects that have announced to trial Optimism's solution are Uniswap and Chainlink.

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