Grayscale has announced the rollout of an innovative Grayscale Optimism Trust. The new digital currency investment trust provides solutions that broaden and enhance the application of the Ethereum ecosystem.

The Grayscale Optimism Trust allows investors to gain exposure to $OP, the governance token for the OP collective. Optimism aims to solve liquidity fragmentation through its OP tech stack.Learn more & see important disclosures: https://t.co/4YJjx6EFCp pic.twitter.com/GhopX7Wp8P

— Grayscale (@Grayscale) December 27, 2024

Why launch this trust?

The trust provides digital asset users with exposure to the Optimism protocol. It allows investors to invest in Optimism cryptocurrency, a native token for the Optimism blockchain, without necessarily acquiring the assets directly.   

The trust is now open for offerings to qualified retail investors and accredited institutions and businesses. The investment vehicle operates like Grayscale’s existing array of crypto investment trusts and only invests in the native token supporting the Optimism protocol.

So far, there are several crypto investment trusts in the market to give users wider options for trading and investing in digital assets. Some of the trusts that Grayscale offers include the following but not limited to:

·        Grayscale Livepeer Trust

·        Grayscale Lido DAO Trust

·        Grayscale Filecoin Trust

·        Grayscale Decentraland Trust

·        Grayscale Chainlink Trust

·        Grayscale Basic Attention Token Trust and many others.

Through these investment products, eligible retail and institutional investors can gain exposure to crypto without worrying about the complex process of purchasing and storing digital assets in wallet addresses.

Digital assets have become a game changer as investor demand continues to surge. That is the reason multiple digital currency investment trusts continue emerging to fill customer needs. The interesting thing is that new entrants become a real-world asset class, creating a way for investors to access opportunities.

The role of Optimism on Ethereum scalability   

Over the years, Ethereum emerged as a host for tremendous quantities of decentralized applications in the Web3 world. In the last four years, more than 90% of on-chain activities operated on the layer 1 network. However, the network experienced increasing demand for blockspace build-up and eventually started witnessing network congestion and expensive gas fee issues. And it became clear that Ethereum could not manage to handle the increasing decentralized activities alone.

This set the stage for the development of Ethereum scalability solutions such as the Optimism Layer 2, which provides affordable EVM blockspace for application developers and decentralized users.

Optimism helps scale Ethereum by decreasing congestion on Ethereum’s network and offering more proficient and cheaper transactions to users. The protocol has been crucial in enabling Ethereum to scale to become more competitive amid the rise of newer and faster layer 1 blockchains like Solana, Polkadot, BNB, and others.

A major upgrade that is set to enable Optimism and all other shared properties to unite into an integrated ecosystem of compatible rollups is called the Superchain. Developers are still developing the interoperability for the Superchain.