To Optimism

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 PBC (the Public Benefit Corporation that currently pays most of the people working on the network). We picked the name that we felt captured our ideals, a name that enshrined an optimistic outlook for the future of the system that gave us the vibrant ecosystem we know and love: Optimistic Ethereum.

But names are tricky things. Sometimes they stick when you want them to, sometimes they stick when you don’t. We used “Optimistic Ethereum” in our documentation and when talking about the system as a team, but the wider community gravitated toward a different name: Optimism.

We were a bit hesitant at first, but we’ve come around to embrace the name. It’s short and sweet, and it rolls off the tongue. But more than anything else, Optimism represents who we are as people: we’re Optimists. We work with the conviction that the platforms we build will be used to change the world for the better. We experiment with new funding models so that we can do our part to sustain the beautiful, weird, and extraordinary Ethereum ecosystem that made us who we are.

Going forward, we’ll be referring to the network that we’re building as Optimism. We’re way too optimistic for the future of Ethereum to be called anything else.

To Optimism!