Ethereum startup Optimism raises $150M in Series B funding

Optimism, a layer-02 scaling Ethereum network, has raised $150 million in Series B funding. The funding round was co-led by prominent crypto investors Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Paradigm. According to media reports, the blockchain startup was valued at $1.65 billion.

• According to a blogpost by Optimism, over $1 billion in gas was saved by Optimism users and fees on the Optimism network was minimised by over 30 percent in the last year.

• The team is currently working on an Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP-4844) for Shard Blob Transactions, which has the potential to reduce Ethereum network fees by up to 100x in the future.

• Optimistic rollups, a crucial feature of Optimism, allow transactions outside of the Ethereum network, resulting in reduced slippage, lower transaction costs, and substantially faster transactions.

• Optimism is currently ranked fourth among its L2 contemporaries, with around $440 million in TVL on its platform. Optimism is a recent Unicorn in the crypto industry, and its perpetual growth corresponds with renewed interest in the NFTs and DeFi sectors. Scaling solutions like Optimism are critical in the crypto industry as they help investors save money on transaction costs, which on the Ethereum network can be extremely expensive.

• Numerous Ethereum layer 2 solutions, such as Polygon, Arbitrum, Parastate, and the XDAI chain, have addressed the scalability issues. Cartesi, one of the Ethereum scaling solutions, uses its native coin CTSI to provide incentives to platform node operators, promoting them to engage in honest and transparent participation with the network. While Parastate, a popular Ethereum scaling solution employs native Ethereum protocol token 'STATE,' and also issues pDot to users as incentives.

These are just some of the popular L2 solutions, and adoption of these L2 solutions would significantly increase the future scalability of Ethereum 2.0.