The Ethereum scaling startup Optimism has closed a $150 million Series B funding round co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Paradigm at a $1.65 billion valuation.
“We made a commitment to the public that we would not take profit from operating centralized parts of the system, so we wanted to remove the financial incentive for ourselves to remain centralized,” Optimism CEO Jinglan Wang tells TechCrunch in an interview. “While we are making revenue, we’re giving all of that revenue back toward funding public goods on Ethereum … We don’t just want to say that we want to be decentralized, we also want to show the community that we’re setting up our own incentives to be compatible with that.”
The most talked-about L2 solutions are Zero-Knowledge (ZK) rollups and Optimistic rollups. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Optimism is based on Optimistic roll-up technology, which has generally been seen as a more near-term viable solution due to some of the cryptographic complexities of ZK rollups that are used by other networks made by startups like StarkWare and Matter Labs.
“We want to be future proof so we’re not closing the doors to the possibility of integrating a ZK [Ethereum Virtual Machine] down the line,” Wang says. “We’re also pragmatists and we don’t want our work to toil forever in academic hell — we want people to use it.”
“We’re very into building out in the open, every line of code we write is open source as we write it, and similarly we’re transparent about the vulnerabilities and bugs that are found and disclosed in our network,” Wang says. “We want to build a good security culture around the Optimism community, where [ethical security hackers] know that if they find vulnerabilities, they will be compensated fairly.”
Lately, the company has focused on reducing the complexity of its codebase and promoting close compatibility with code written for Ethereum so that developers don’t have to alter their existing applications to be compatible with Optimism. An upcoming release called “Bedrock” is doubling down on so-called “EVM-equivalence” and should reduce costs on the network substantially, the company said in a blog post.
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