Mapping Out Optimism's Ecosystem

The rise in popularity of NFT and DeFi markets has frequently left the base Ethereum layer congested – with transaction costs sometimes reaching triple-digit dollar amounts. With Ethereum 2.0 still in development, this has opened an opportunity for other competitors, like Solana or Avalanche, in the sector to offer their versions of a scalable layer-1. Another angle in solving the scalability problem is layer-2 scaling. In this piece, we examine Optimism and its ecosystem. Optimism is a decentralized, permissionless, open-source Ethereum scaling layer that batches transactions and submits them as single transactions onto Ethereum's base chain, thereby saving transaction costs and increasing throughput on the base layer. You can find a deeper dive into Optimism and optimistic rollups here.

Optimism was first introduced in June 2019 by co-founders Karl Floersch, Jinglan Wang, and Ben Jones. The team’s recent $150 million series B raise in March 2022 valued the firm at $1.65 billion. Throughout the three funding rounds, Optimism has raised $178.5 million in total.