TL;DR

Today we are extremely excited to release a new Gateway interface which enables arbitrary token deposits and withdrawals to Optimistic Ethereum! In the previous major release of the Gateway we allowed tokens listed in the Optimism token list to be transferred to L2 (and back). With this new release we want to open the gates to innovation and allow any ERC20 token to transition the boundary between the layers.

How it works

In developing L2 chains, figuring out how to handle token bridging makes for a complex and tradeoff-rich landscape. Our bridge implementation seeks to provide a balance between the facts that:

• ERC20…

Today marks a major milestone for OE: with our latest protocol changes running stably on mainnet, it’s time to begin opening up deployment! Anybody who meets our launch criteria can apply to be whitelisted on mainnet and will be approved within 2 weeks.

With over 750,000 transactions since our last protocol release, it’s. finally. time. The days of scalable, composable ecosystem growth are upon us. Additionally, this will kick off the process of increasing our TPS limit, starting with a doubling next week.

Why no full deployment?

While we are incredibly excited to be opening up to more projects, the OVM is still in…

Author: Kelvin Fichter

Solidity devs: meet Smock v2. The Solidity mocking library. A collaboration between Optimism and the fantastic team over at DeFi Wonderland.

Smart contract testing has historically been… hard? If not hard, then just confusing. Way back in the early days of Solidity the best way to test a contract was to write another contract responsible for doing all the testing. This was a terrible idea for about 20 different reasons. I’ll name a few of the most important ones:

1. You had to write your test code in Solidity.
2. You had to re-compile your test contracts just to…

Author: Matt Masurka

Dearest Etherscan,

How to describe what you mean to us? Let us count the ways. You are…

• The stable provider of knowledge.
• The humble watcher of the realm.
• The telescope with which we marvel upon the decentralized heavens.
• The bedrock on which the house of DeFi stands.
• The quiet knight of web3.
• The loyal shepherd of Ethereum.

Anyone who has used Ethereum knows about Etherscan. But often unappreciated is the awesome team behind the name, how great a product they’ve built, and how vital that product is to this community.

It’s also worth mentioning what Etherscan is…

A note from the editorial team:

There’s so much interesting work happening in the universe of Optimistic Ethereum that we often forget to take a moment to tell the world what we’ve been up to. We’ve heard from a lot of you that you’d like to get a more detailed view into the inner workings of Optimistic Ethereum and the people who help make it a reality. As a result, we’re launching a dev blog where the people working on Optimistic Ethereum write about the ideas and challenges they tackle on a daily basis. We aren’t enforcing any particular style…

Note: The Optimism team has long been in search of a solution on how to sustainably fund public goods, and we now have the structure of our first experiment thanks to a brilliant design by Vitalik Buterin. This post is a collaboration with Vitalik as a guest author in section 2.

It’s insanely hard to build an ambitious project with no business model. It’s hard to get funding, to hire the best, and to persist through the hardships and obstacles of creating something great.

Startups are notoriously difficult challenges even with ample investment funding: the majority fail. But they have…

Almost two years ago at DEVCON V in 2019, we collaborated with Uniswap to build Unipig Exchange, the first-ever demo of Optimistic Rollup.

As an Ethereum L2 at the tail end of a major L1 gas crisis, our most frequently asked questions are:

1. How cheap ($) will transactions be on Optimistic Ethereum?
2. What will determine transaction costs on Optimistic Ethereum?

Unsurprisingly, these answers are fundamentally related. In this post, we’re going to tackle question #1, sharing concrete figures for what fees users can expect in the near term. Question #2 is a bit more involved — we’ll be sharing more in an upcoming Part 2.

Our system currently reduces baseline user transaction costs by ~10x-50x. …