Optimistic Rollups are dead. We keep making transactions cheaper and you keep complaining that transactions aren’t cheap enough. We’re scrapping Optimism and introducing a brand new system which can finally be cheap enough for your broke asses. A bright vision We started Optimism with the hope of not only scaling Ethereum, but scaling…

Humanity’s defining characteristic is its ability to organize and cooperate. We have devised a number of tools to do this — from language, religion, and legal structures, to rules on the highway — all are systems created to align our actions. Despite these tools, many current attempts to coordinate large-scale…

Laying Strong Foundation It’s genuinely hard to overstate the excitement brewing at Optimism recently. After over a year on mainnet, the numbers say it all: Over $1B in gas saved by Optimism users Thousands of contracts deployed Three forks of Optimism’s code on mainnet A year in crypto is a lifetime, and we’ve…

Uh Oh: Every L2 Has Upgrade Keys 😱 — There’s a difficult truth which often doesn’t come up when discussing layer 2 (L2) protocols: Every major L2 project has a trusted party which can execute protocol upgrades. Currently, this is the primary point of centralization for just about everybody, including us. …

Funds Are Safu On February 2nd, the Optimism team was alerted by Jay Freeman (saurik of Cydia and Orchid fame) to the existence of a critical bug in Optimism’s Geth fork. …

Careful readers of our blog post announcing the removal of the whitelist may have noticed a small but important detail: we referred to the network as Optimism. When we started building out the network, we felt it was best to give the system a name that distinguished it from Optimism…

Today marks a very special occasion and another exciting milestone for Optimism and the Ethereum ecosystem at large. It’s official: the whitelist is gone and anyone can deploy to the Optimism mainnet! Why the whitelist? Optimism launched with a whitelist so that we could establish direct lines of communication with the projects building…

Or, Ethereum All the Way Down: How We Learned to Stop Re-implementing and Love the Ethereum Stack Last month, we announced the most significant upgrade in Optimistic Ethereum’s history. Recently, we migrated Optimistic Kovan to true one-click deploy and increased stability, with mainnet to follow in less than three…

Today, we’re thrilled to announce that we are donating $1m of network profits in our first experiment on retroactive public goods funding. The core idea behind retroPGF is to level the playing field between profit-maximizing startups and nonprofit/OSS projects. Profit-seeking entities have an advantage in their potential for an exit…