This is a long overdue post to announce the incredible additions we have made to the team. We closed a round of funding in November led by a16z with a meaty re-up of their optimistic supply from Paradigm. This cash has allowed us to quickly scale up with the brightest minds and sharpest operators in the space.

As a result of being able to hire this kind of talent, we will be launching arbitrary contract deployment on mainnet in March instead of public testnet!! Details to come soon.

We’re hiring now — if you’re anything like these folks below, we…

A defense-in-depth approach to mainnet.

Ethereum is at an unprecedented moment in its history — there has never been more usage, more excitement, or more value created. Last year, cumulative transaction fees surpassed Bitcoin, and today, Ethereum remains the top dawg in terms of daily transaction fee revenue. Usage of decentralized apps like Uniswap has eclipsed their centralized counterparts despite these soaring fees.

The demand for Ethereum has been undeniably insane, and the adoption is so exciting to see, but it drives home the importance of scalability in making Ethereum usable by the masses. For the last year, we have…

Holy shit, what a year.

When the pandemic swept across the world, most of the team was already living in the same apartment. Wake up. Work. Sleep.

Every morning started with the solo mechanical patter of Mark’s Thinkpad and the whir of Ben grinding coffee. Evenings were usually dominated by the wall-shaking thud of Kevin and Karl doing jump squats on the roof. On Saturdays, there was a choice of joining Kelvin in playing expert level Rocket League, or trash talking enemy Halo teams with Jing.

Things haven’t been perfect — building an effective & cohesive team…

OPEN TO ALL: Welcome to the final phase of the Optimistic Ethereum testnet! Follow our step by step guide to proving fraud and win a reward for contributing to the security of L2! If you’re new here, you can check out our testnet announcement to learn about the previous phases.

In the coming days, we will intentionally commit fraud on our testnet and you — yes, you! — have the chance to be the 1-of-N keeping our chain secure. Your level of technical ability doesn’t matter — setting up a verifier is super easy. Read on to follow our step…

Introducing native support for Optimistic Ethereum on Coinbase wallet.

Scaling Ethereum is a monumental endeavor, only possible as a full community effort. At Optimism, we’re creating a protocol which can support massive scale, but it will take much more than that to make scalability a reality. User experience is just as key to the viability of the protocol as the underlying architecture is:

“In the migration to rollups, the biggest challenge is User Experience. Making sure users only do secure things by default and don’t accidentally do insecure things…the biggest part of the answer is a comprehensive ecosystem level push…

Tldr: Testnet rollout plans, early adopters, and path towards mainnet.

Over the past few months, Ethereum has faced an unprecedented barrage of long waits, prohibitive fees, and stifling congestion. Our mission has felt more urgent than ever, and our path forward clear. It’s been 4 sleepless, exhausting months since our last update, but your supportive memes and messages have given us the energy to keep pushing forward.

Now, it’s time for a quick breath of air and to share a milestone we could not be more nervous and excited to reveal: today marks the first phase of our testnet launch…

Today we are pumped to announce a demo of Synthetix Exchange on the Optimistic Virtual Machine (OVM)! Synthetix is a synthetic asset issuance and trading protocol, and one of the largest projects on Ethereum. We collaborated to integrate Synthetix with the OVM to battle test the OVM’s key benefits in alleviating issues with high gas costs, slow transactions, and expensive oracle updates.

As part of battle-testing the OVM, there will be a trading competition with a prize pool of 15,000 SNX awarded to the top 20 traders. The competition will run from May 5 to May 19.

Why another demo?

In October 2019…

Why build the OVM?

Many of our team previously worked to design the first generalized plasma construction with support for contracts–plapps! However, plapps required entirely new developer tooling involving limited “predicate” contracts. We quickly realized that for many this wouldn’t cut it: Ethereum L2 doesn’t just mean using Ethereum to scale: it means scaling Ethereum itself.

This eventually led us to develop Optimistic Rollup, the first L2 construction which promised to bring the full feature-set of Ethereum smart contracts to the scalability landscape. Unipig.exchange first demonstrated this unprecedented functionality: for the first time, Uniswap was on L2. However–Unipig still required that we write a…