The Birth Story of Optimism: 3 People, 5 Years, $9 Billion Valuation

Original author: 0x137, Rhythm BlockBeats

In early May, Messari made an in-depth analysis of Optimism in his report and gave a valuation of $9 billion. After several rounds of huge financing, Optimism has become the consensus among top VCs such as a16z and Paradigm. With the release of the airdrop news, Optimism has once again become a hot topic in the market.

Undoubtedly, the arrival of OP is another landmark event in the history of encryption development, which symbolizes the opening of a new chapter in the expansion of Ethereum. Behind this historic moment, there are legendary stories written by several "Ethereum geeks".

The Plasma Dream

In mid-2017, Vitalik and Joseph Poon co-authored a paper called "Plasma: Scalable Autonomous Smart Contracts" and here The Plasma architecture was proposed for the first time in this paper. This was the earliest solution to the scalability problem of Ethereum. At that time, the encrypted game Crypto Kitty was hot, and the transaction volume on the Ethereum chain surged. People had to wait for more than ten minutes to buy an encrypted kitty and pay Expensive Gas fees, the scalability of Ethereum has become a problem that must be solved.

Shortly after the Plasma proposal was proposed, it aroused strong sympathy among the three Ethereum core developers and researchers. They gathered together and established a non-profit research Team Plasma Group to build and realize Vitalik's "Ethereum Final Vision".

Among the three, Karl Floersch is the most "Optimistic" one, always smiling, speaking with passion, and an out-and-out optimist. Karl is an OG developer of the Ethereum Foundation and has a close relationship with Vitalik. After seeing the paper, he was very excited and took action immediately.

Jinglan Wang is an experienced blockchain evangelist. She started her crypto journey by joining the school’s Bitcoin club at MIT, and later went to Nasdaq as a blockchain product manager and founded trade finance company Eximchain. Later, she and Jeremy Gardner co-founded The Blockchain Education Network, a blockchain education network, helping schools around the world form blockchain clubs.

Ben Jones is also an early researcher and developer of Ethereum, but in his spare time he often makes some parody songs based on Ethereum under his stage name Weird ETH Yankovic, and is the artist among the three.

At that time, Rollup had not yet appeared, and plasma was all the rage, so this small group of "Ethereum fanatics" began to graffiti on the whiteboard every day, imagining new solutions, and held monthly meetings Conference calls, sharing new designs for implementers to adopt, had a very pure rush.

Plasma Group Member Communication Design

But as the research progressed, some key design limitations of Plasma became more apparent. The team found that Plasma was missing a very important thing, and the development of Plasma also stalled in 2019.

「But can it run Uniswap?」

Let's go back in time to 2017, a mechanical engineering graduate named Hayden Adams had just lost his first job. He contacted his good friend Karl Floersch who was developing Casper at the time, and the reply he got was: "Congratulations, this is the best thing you have ever encountered!" Karl told Hayden: "Ethereum is the future, your The mission is to write a smart contract".

Hayden didn't even know how to program at this point, but he decided to give it a go. So Hayden spent two months learning the basics of Ethereum, Solidity and Javascript, and at the suggestion of Karl, he made an AMM on Ethereum. Hayden named it Uniswap.

Uniswap's The original version

As a believer in encryption economy, Karl was excited after seeing Uniswap, so he introduced Hayden and Uniswap to Vitalik. After browsing the contract code on the phone, Vitalik said directly to Hayden: "You should apply for funding from the Ethereum Foundation." Not long after, Jinglan also got to know Hayden through Karl and became an important consultant of Uniswap.

At the Ethereum Industry Development Summit Karl, Vitalik, and Hayden

We all know what happened next. Uniswap has grown into a unicorn in the encryption field, leading DeFi Summer to a climax. Why is this story mentioned? Let's move on.

Back to Plasma Group, the team launched the test network in 2019. In the initial testing phase, Plasma did show excellent results. Because the Plasma architecture does not need to face the problem of Validity, it can theoretically achieve unlimited scalability.

But it didn't take long for Plasma's fatal problem to arise. When the testnet was first launched, applications such as MakerDAO and Uniswap had not set off a frenzy, so people's concept of smart contract applications was not very strong. But after entering DeFi Summer, Uniswap had a huge impact on the encryption industry. Various applications began to appear on Ethereum, and Uniswap has also become an indispensable daily tool for many encryption players.

So when the Plasma Group "reported" to Vitalik, the first question asked was, "Can it run Uniswap?"

Plasma Chain (Child Chain) Architecture One of the biggest disadvantages of , is that it takes a long time to transfer funds between the L2 and L1 layers, and sometimes users even have to wait for as long as 1 week. This also makes it impossible for general-purpose smart contracts like Uniswap to be used on Plasma. Although Ben led the technical team to make many attempts, the problem of "running Uniswap" has never been resolved.

In this way, the Plasma Group was stumped by the unicorns he cultivated by himself. Plasma was once regarded as the "EndGame" solution for Ethereum expansion , It also seems to have entered a technical dead end. Now, the three "scalability pioneers" of the Plasma Group had to find a new solution.

Eureka!

Just when the team was at a loss, Karl stumbled across an article published by Vitalik in 2014, which mentioned a concept called Shadow Chain, which, as the name suggests, is for Ethereum creates a shadow. The team immediately realized that Vitalik's design could be applied to the Optmistic mode they were designing for Plasma.

Comparison of data availability and availability of each expansion plan

So with the help of the community, Optimistic Rollup was born. This new architecture is able to run any Ethereum smart contract while still significantly reducing Ethereum’s Gas cost. There is no doubt that it opens a new chapter in the scaling of Ethereum.

Optimistic Rollup draws on the design of Plasma, but sacrifices its almost unlimited scalability to run an EVM-compatible virtual machine called OVM (Optimistic Virtual Machine) , which also enables Optimistic Rollup to run all applications that can be run on Ethereum.

This time, the team finally solved the ultimate problem faced by Plasma-OR can run Uniswap!

In order to show everyone the new solution of the team, Karl found his old friend Hayden and made an OR-based decentralized transaction with Uniswap Apply Unipig, and released a demo at the Ethereum Devcon conference.

Unipig Application Demo

After nearly 3 years, Plasma Group finally has its own "Eureka Moment".

Optimistic Ethereum

The Demo at the Devcon conference not only excited the developers of Ethereum, but also allowed capital to see potential huge opportunities. So not long after Unipig came out, top VCs such as Paradigm came to the door one after another.

In January 2020, with $3.5 million in backing from Paradigm and IDEO, the Plasma Group transitioned from a non-profit research organization to a for-profit startup, Optimism was officially born.

One month later, Optimism launched the alpha test network of OVM, and then completed the soft launch of the main network in early 2021, and got the In-depth support of leading projects such as Uniswap, Compound and Synthetix. After the mainnet was officially launched in the summer of the same year, Optimism once again received the support of the "iron buddy" Uniswap, becoming the first ecology to launch the V3 version besides Ethereum.

The biggest feature of Optimism is that its development has a strong will of the upper layer of Ethereum. The ultimate goal of Optimism is not to be a new force, but to become Ethereum itself, which is why we often hear teams use the term Optimistic Ethereum.

It is also this concept that has contributed to the biggest upgrade of Optimism - EVM Equivalence (EVM Equivalence), which greatly reduces the space occupied by Optimism and allows developers to obtain "one-click deployment" and an "out of the box" experience. In subsequent Bedrock upgrades, the team will also introduce Cannon failure proofs, further reducing the difference between Optimism and upstream geth to 300 lines of code.

Of course, in order to achieve these upgrades better and faster, the Optimism team has also made great efforts. At one point, a team member named Mark pitched a tent directly on the roof of Optimism’s offices in order to keep the testnet running smoothly.

Team member Mark set up a tent on the roof

The team's enthusiasm for the future of Ethereum expansion and hard work also make Optimism continue win the favor of capital. In February last year, a16z led Optimism’s Series A round with $25 million. In March this year, Optimism completed a $150 million Series B round at a valuation of $1.65 billion.

Today, Optimism has nearly 40 members including EIP signees, product engineers and protocol wizards. At the end of 2021, the team removed the whitelist deployment and opened the Optimism ecosystem to everyone. From here, more than 50 applications have been deployed on Optimism, over 60,000 ETH have been bridged from the Ethereum mainnet, the total value on the chain is over $900 million, and transaction fees are 40% cheaper than before.

In the Optimism official blog post:

“It’s hard to believe that in just over a year since Optimism mainnet launched, we’ve:

Saved more than 1.1 billion US dollars in Gas fees for users;

Deployed over 6,800 smart contracts;

Ushered in over 300,000 unique addresses;< /p>

Obtained more than $900 million in chain value;

Facilitated over $17.4 billion in transaction volume;

Generated over $24.5 million in revenue;

Donated more than $1 million to public welfare funds”

Today, with the arrival of the new governance mechanism Optimism Collective, Optimism once again caused the entire encryption A lively discussion in the community. The airdrop of Optimism’s native governance Token OP is not only a hot spot in the current market, but also another landmark event in the entire history of encryption development.

With the arrival of OP, Ethereum has opened a new chapter. To use a sentence in "Margin Call" - "Remember this day boys, remember this day".

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