What is Optimism (OP)?
Optimism is the full name of Optimism coin, abbreviated as OP in English. The total initial issuance is 4,294,967,296, and the total circulation is 225,485,783 (2022.05.31). Optimism is the EVM equivalent of Optimism Rollup chain. It is designed to be fast, simple and secure. The full name of OP coin is optimism, which is used for community governance, voting rights, and allocation of project incentives.
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The Optimism Foundation is a nonprofit dedicated to growing the Optimism Collective. We are committed to upholding the values of Ethereum by producing infrastructure that fosters the growth and sustainability of public goods. Not only are we writing software that extends Ethereum technology, we are also extending Ethereum value by creating tracks for high-impact projects that don't have successful business models. Read more about how we do this here. Until the project is fully decentralized, we will donate all profits from running a centralized sorter to expanding and sustaining public goods.
Optimism is a low-cost, lightning-fast second-tier Ethereum blockchain. The Optimism Ecosystem is an overview of the applications and integrations in the Optimism ecosystem. Optimism addresses real needs of developers and users. The Optimism Foundation is a non-profit organization dedicated to the development of the Optimism Collective. Optimism is a layer 2 scaling solution used on Ethereum, and its main feature is to make transactions on Ethereum applications very cheap. By moving transactions from one blockchain to another, miner fees are significantly reduced and throughput is increased. Optimism provides Ethereum developers with the opportunity to use all the tools available on Ethereum without making changes.
Optimistic Rollups use a different type of proof: fraud proofs. As the name implies, Optimistic Rollups are "positive and optimistic" because when they publish the updated state to the Ethereum blockchain, they do not publish any "proofs" at all. Anyone can publish a Rollup block containing a statement about the correct result of executing a transaction, and other nodes can challenge the first node's claim when executing the same transaction as long as they disagree with the first node's claim. An effective dispute protocol can resolve any disagreements and ensure that the correct party will win the challenge. All parties have a strong incentive to publish only correct claims, rather than question incorrect claims, so in the common case, all nodes will "simply" execute all transactions and never need to call the proof code-the whole process is managed by the Layer 1 contract.
Optimism incentive mechanism
Optimism Collective creates value for three groups:
Through efficient redeployment of Sequencer revenue, token holders gain value.
Contributors and builders derive value directly from retroactive public goods funding and the markets it supports.
The value for users and community members comes from the continued airdrops of OP, the incentives for projects supported by OP ecosystem funds, and the benefits provided by public goods.
OP Coin Distribution Amount (OP) Ratio Description
The ecological fund allocates 1.073 billion, 25% of which is used to stimulate the development of the Optimism ecosystem. It will be further divided into the governance fund (5.4%), partner fund (5.4%), seed fund (5.4%), and the remaining 8.8% has not yet been allocated.
RetroPGF allocates 20% of 859 million to fund public affairs products that can help the ecosystem develop further but do not have a clear profit model like ordinary projects. This funding is expected to be executed once a quarter.
Core contributors allocate 19% of 816 million to reward developers who helped Optimism from concept to implementation.
Airdrop 816 million 19%, of which 5% will be allocated to the currently confirmed first round of airdrops (Airdrop #1), and the remaining 14% will be reserved for future user airdrops (Airdrop #2, #3...).
Investors allocated 17% of 730 million. In early 2020, Optimism received $3.5 million in seed round financing from Paradigm and IDEO. In February 2021, a16z led Optimism's $25 million Series A investment. In March of this year, Optimism completed a $150 million Series B financing at a valuation of $1.65 billion, with a16z and Paradigm jointly leading the investment.
Why use Optimism?
The Optimistic Network allows you to send transactions similar to Ethereum, but with two important advantages:
Near-instant feedback on trade results. You’ll know almost instantly whether your trade is completed.
Significantly lower gas fees. Roughly between 1% and 10% of Ethereum mainnet (also known as layer 1 or L1) costs. For current gas fees and costs of some example transactions, see here.
Decentralization: All transactions are published to L1 Ethereum, inheriting Ethereum's strong security guarantees.
How does Optimism work?
Optimism uses optimistic rollup. When you submit a transaction, the transaction data is written to the Ethereum mainnet, but the transaction itself is executed by a single computer, the sorter (rather than thousands of computers like Ethereum). This significantly reduces transaction costs, and the challenge mechanism ensures that the sorter is honest.
What is a rollup?
A rollup is a mechanism that allows transactions to be executed on a separate blockchain while inheriting the availability and integrity guarantees of Ethereum itself (also known as L1 Ethereum). Rollups achieve this by writing all transactions to L1 Ethereum as calldata, and then writing a hash of the transaction results (the state of the blockchain after the transaction).
Rollups use one of two mechanisms to convince the rest of the network that the result is correct:
Optimistic rollups rely on validators to challenge incorrect outcomes.
Zero-knowledge rollup (Zk Rollup) relies on mathematical proofs, which are difficult to create (computationally intensive) but relatively easy to verify.
Is Optimism a sidechain?
No. Sidechains have their own blockchain system with a completely independent consensus mechanism. Optimism is verified by a series of smart contracts on the Ethereum mainnet. Because all necessary data is written to the blockchain, we inherit the availability of Ethereum. As long as at least one honest validator verifies its integrity.
Unfortunately, there is a trade-off between security and cost, Ethereum is very expensive and secure. Sidechains are much cheaper, usually more centralized, and therefore much less secure. Rollups, which have security just as good as Ethereum, cost slightly more than sidechains. Using Ethereum also means we have to pay some Ethereum gas fees, which makes our transactions more expensive than transactions on sidechains.
Optimism development history and planning
In June 2019, Optimistic Rollup was introduced
Unipig Optimistic Rollup testnet, October 2019
September 2020, EVM compatible testnet
January 2021, Alpha Mainnet
October 2021, EVM equivalent mainnet
December 2021, mainnet launch
2022, the next generation of fail-proof
2023, Sharding Summary
2023, Incentivized Verification
2023, decentralized sequencer
2024, Failure Proofs for L1 Governance
