As the layer-1 blockchain Ethereum continues to grow and evolve, layer-2 blockchains like Optimism are working to alleviate issues of scaling, speed and costs.
“We’ve been working on the same thing since 2017,” Jing Wang, Optimism’s CEO and co-founder, said on TechCrunch’s Chain Reaction podcast. “We’ve all been trying to solve the same problem for a long time.”
The mission to scale Ethereum is ongoing, said Ryan Wyatt, chief growth officer at Optimism. Before joining Optimism, Wyatt was the president of Polygon Labs, the entity building the layer-2 blockchain Polygon.
As it stands, using and transacting with Ethereum is still relatively clunky, slow and more expensive. That’s why layer-2 (L2) blockchains like Optimism exist: to focus on scaling and speed, while also lowering costs for users. It helps users interact with Ethereum’s chain for about 10x cheaper through its own network and also provides developers the ability to build decentralized applications (dApps) in a faster, scalable way.
“Just as Amazon is a serverless back end for web2 applications, Optimism is a decentralized serverless back end for web3 applications,” Wang said. “We wanted to scale Ethereum because I think Ethereum stays the most close to the original decentralization values and we wanted to give it a go staying close to those same values.”