On October 11, Paradigm announced that it had invested $20,000,000 in Ithaca to build a Layer 2 blockchain called Odyssey. Different from previous simple financial investments, Paradigm has also sent a number of senior executives to Ithaca to serve. Among them, Georgios Konstantopoulos, Paradigm's chief technology officer and general partner, will serve as Ithaca's CEO, and Paradigm co-founder Matt Huang will serve as Ithaca's director. long.​

Layer2 Odyssey built by myself

In fact, Paradigm has internal teams that have been building open source projects. According to Ithaca, in the past four years, Paradigm has organized a team of less than 20 engineers to build some open source tools commonly used in the industry, such as Reth and Foundry. From this perspective, Ithaca is actually Paradigm's formal spin-off of the technical project team as a new company. The first project of this new company is the Ethereum Layer2 network Odyssey.​

Konstantopoulos called Odyssey "Layer 2 from the future" in an interview with the media. "What makes Odyssey unique is that it provides multiple features of Ethereum's future roadmap that have not yet been built by any other team." , Konstantopoulos explained, “More powerful smart contract wallets mean frictionless onboarding of cryptocurrencies, which is one of the most important problems being solved.”

Source: PANews

Currently, Odyssey’s testnet Chapter 1 has been launched on Sepolia, built by Reth (OP Stack), and deployed on Conduit. PANews found that the wallet features currently launched by Odyssey are indeed different from previous blockchain projects. During use, Odyssey does not require a traditional wallet extension application to create an account, but can directly use Google or Apple's key management tools.​

An innovative network with no wallet, no Gas coins, and no cross-chain

According to official information, Odyssey allows users to log in without installing a wallet, owning Gas tokens, interacting with the bridge, and without setting up a new RPC. This works across devices and across applications, leveraging the operating system's keychain or password manager. In addition, Odyssey Chapter 1 also contains multiple EIPs (Ethereum Improvement Proposals), such as EIP-7702 (account abstraction), EOF (EVM object format), RIP-7212 (secp256r1 elliptic curve precompilation) and other new technology solutions. In particular, it is reported that RIP-7212 can reduce gas costs by up to 50 times compared to traditional methods. Ithaca said it has worked closely with Layer 2 networks such as Optimism, Uniswap, Conduit, Flashbots, Succinct and Base to maximize EVM performance and improve developer and user experience.​

Source: PANews

As of now, there is not much experience with the available features of Odyssey. According to its testnet browser, the current total number of addresses is about 2,700 and the total number of transactions is 130,000. Odyssey's next two network upgrades are said to be called Pectra and Fusaka. However, there is currently no news about whether there is an airdrop plan that users may be more concerned about.​

If the investment project performs poorly, it is better to do it yourself

Recently, the Layer 2 track seems to have welcomed some different players. Previously, Uniswap announced the launch of Unichain, and now Paradigm investors are personally involved in building Layer2.​

Previously, Paradigm has invested in multiple Ethereum Layer2s, such as Optimism, StarkNet, Aztec Network, Blast, etc. However, judging from the current development situation, the status of these projects is not ideal. In several Layer2 comparisons, PANews found that the data of Layer2 such as Optimism, StarkNet, and Blast are far lower than Arbitrum or Base. Taking the data on October 10 as an example, the number of active addresses for the best-performing Optimism was only 98,000, and Blast was 38,000, while Base was 1,600,000 and Arbitrum was 480,000 during the same period.​

Maybe it’s because the investment in Layer2 failed to meet Paradigm’s expectations, so it chose to end it personally now? In addition to Layer2’s underwhelming performance, some of Paradigm’s other recent investments have also underperformed. Friend.tech, which was once popular, has been in trouble since the airdrop. On July 9, the number of daily active users dropped to 15. As of September 24, data shows that Friend.tech has only 8 daily active users. Paradigm's reputation suffered as a result.​

Source: PANews

Whether Paradigm has had enough of unreliable partners and chose this move, we don’t know. On the short official website, Ithaca specifically lists values ​​as a column (the official website has 4 columns in total), and one of the sentences says, "It is more important to work on pushing things forward than to try to stay right." Perhaps, this sentence Words are the commentary of Paradigm's actions.

[Disclaimer] There are risks in the market, so investment needs to be cautious. This article does not constitute investment advice, and users should consider whether any opinions, views or conclusions contained in this article are appropriate for their particular circumstances. Invest accordingly and do so at your own risk.

• This article is reprinted with permission from: (PANews)

• Original author: Frank, PANews