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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. If upgrade keys were to be compromised, all…

Or: Win $50k by Helping Us Hack geohot — Today, we’re extremely excited to formally introduce Cannon to the world. Cannon is Optimism’s next-gen fault proof. Its initial implementation by geohot became the first public fault proof implementation that can run an EVM-equivalent L2. Oh, and it also enables the theoretical minimum calldata gas costs. From day 1, Cannon…

Optimistic rollups are rapidly gaining maturity. As we move beyond the “zero to one” phase, the name of the game is optimization–and the most tangible optimization is cost. Within the next month we will be decreasing fees 30–40% by deploying the first ever system-wide calldata compression on any production ORU…

It’s hard to overstate how much fun we had at ETHDenver last week. We’re still coming down from our post-conference high — the inevitable fallout from a week of unabated excitement and dopamine depletion. Call it the ETHDenver detox. While it’s true that all good things must come to an…

Sup nerds! Last month was Optimism’s 1-year mainnetiversary. We’re incredibly proud of this milestone — but the path is far from over. As rollups mature, the path to sub-dollar fees begins. About a month ago, we took the next step down this path, cutting transaction fees by about 30%. An…

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. The bug made it possible to create ETH on Optimism by repeatedly triggering the SELFDESTRUCT opcode on a contract that held an…