In the layer 2 Ethereum family, we ask for Optimism! For a few days, it has been whispered that there could be an airdrop of Optimism… What does this scaling solution for Ethereum have in store for us? This is what we will see together.

What is Optimism, this layer 2 Etherem?

First things first: what is Optimism? It is an Ethereum overlay, also called layer 2. Its goal is to make the Ethereum blockchain scalable, but not only. While Optimism makes Ethereum transactions faster, it also makes them cheaper. Since launching its mainnet a year ago, this L2 Ethereum has achieved the equivalent of $17 billion in transaction volume, while saving its users $1.1 billion in gas fees, compared to Ethereum. Gas costs in the last 24 hours have cost on average less than 50 cents!

Initially, the draft project took shape among a small group of Ethereum enthusiasts, who later founded the nonprofit research organization Plasma Group. Subsequently, under the name Optimism, they gave birth to the Optimistic Rollups technology in June 2019, allowing the protocol to benefit from the security of the parent blockchain, Ethereum. In January 2020, the team announced the creation of the startup Optimism and its first round of funding, in the amount of $3.5 million. In total, the project will raise $175 million to ensure its development. Today, the project has 40 employees and a strong community.

The Optimism ecosystem

A key step in the development of the protocol was the equivalence with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), to which we will return. One thing is for sure, the Optimism ecosystem is growing! There are no less than 39 DeFi DApps listed on its site! And it doesn’t stop there: dozens of applications related to NFTs, DAOs, bridges or even wallets are also present. According to DeFi Llama, the protocol’s TVL is worth $524 million, including $225 million just for Synthetix, a decentralized asset deployment protocol. The top DApps on Optimism continue with Uniswap, Stargate, Perpetual Procotol, Synapse and Lyra to name a few.

Optimism is also a bridge that gives its users the possibility to transfer assets between the protocol and Ethereum. The token transfers concern both ETH and ERC-20 tokens.

Optimism’s values

Optimism lives up to its name! The project is defined not as a blockchain in its own right, but as an extension of Ethereum, a blockchain in which the team members are particularly optimistic about its future. They themselves say so! Please note that Optimism is a public utility company and that its team has decided to donate the profits made to projects. More than a million dollars has already been donated to public interest projects. In addition to optimism, the other pillars of the philosophy at the heart of this layer 2 are simplicity, pragmatism and sustainability. One of the consequences of these principles is the desire to clean up the code to make it as simple as possible, so as to make it accessible to the community, while ensuring better security for the protocol.

Optimism is not only for users, but also for developers. This layer 2 Ethereum claims to be not only UX friendly, but also DevX friendly, the equivalent of User Experience for devs. To make it easier for Ethereum developers to port their DApps to Optimism, the same tools are available and so are the Solidity and Vyper programming languages. The protocol, in addition to being compatible with theEthereum Virtual Machine (EVM), is EVM Equivalent, with a few details.

Optimism: a crypto airdrop in the offing?

This is the moment you’ve been waiting for: the cryptocurrency airdrop. Be careful, we want to tell you: this Optimism airdrop is currently only a rumor, without any official statement from the main interested party. An information to be taken with pinches therefore! It all started on Twitter, a social network known for the reliability of its information (no!). Word of an Optimism airdrop began to spread when the exchange platform Coinbase added a price page (with none) for Optimism to its site.

What is the cryptocurrency of Optimism? We suspected that you were going to ask us! Well… We don’t know. The famous Coinbase page, which was made inaccessible, did not include information on possible Optimism token. What does tip the scales in favor of the release of a possible dedicated cryptocurrency for the project, however, is a blog post titled “A New Chapter“. Here, the team celebrates the one-year anniversary of the launch of the mainnet, released on April 19, 2021. At the end of the article, a section, also called “A New Chapter”, announces the arrival of a new community-driven chapter. Is a governance token in the works? We are tempted to believe it! The team concludes by reminding us that it is essential to pay attention to fraud in the coming weeks, which tends to reinforce this idea. We will keep you informed…

In summary:

• Optimism is an Ethereum layer 2 that meets the scalability needs of Ethereum.
• An Optimism crypto could be coming soon and could be accompanied by an airdrop of tokens.