According to news on March 26, Ethereum’s most-watched expansion project, Optimism, stated that the "rough estimate" of the mainnet will not be public until July. Optimism originally planned to announce the mainnet at the end of March, which is one of the solutions of Ethereum Layer2.

The development team gave the reason for postponing the mainnet launch, "We only considered our own needs, and did not consider the schedule and requirements of our partners." From the perspective of the community, entering Layer 2 in a hurry is dangerous, which may lead to popular Decentralized applications will be forked and released by opponents to deceive users.

The delay of Optimism also means that Ethereum's "speed up" plan has to be delayed.

In order to solve the problems of network congestion and high transaction rates, Ethereum has been upgrading to 2.0, and this upgrade process is very long. The growing number of DApps and users on the Internet has been plagued by low transaction efficiency and high costs for a long time, and calls for capacity expansion have greatly increased.

It is difficult and high-risk to expand the existing Ethereum Layer 1 network, and the Layer 2 transition plan is proposed. Subsequently, state channels, side chains, Plasma, and Rollup became the four major Layer 2 solutions. Among them, the Rollup technology was the most respected and became the hope of solving the current situation of Ethereum congestion. Optimistic is an expansion project using Rollup technology.

How does Optimistic work? How to solve the congestion problem of Ethereum? Which applications are being built in it?

Although the time for Optimistic to publicize the mainnet has been delayed, it has also left us more time to understand it.

Potential problems

Although the transaction rate and handling fee issues can be solved by Layer 2, the Optimistic-Rollup network consensus mechanism contains the premise of "believe that the vast majority of block verifiers are credible", and it is not ruled out in actual operation. trickster. If there is a dispute, the referee on L1 will rerun the calculation on the Ethereum network and check the result.

The impact of this is that the trustworthiness of ORU is not as high as zero-knowledge proof.

In addition, when the asset returns from ORU to Ethereum, it takes 1-2 weeks, which makes its interaction with Ethereum inefficient. Of course, there are already smart contract developers who plan to use tokens to solve interaction problems.

For example, the MakerDAO smart contract team plans to launch the Optimism-Dai Bridge solution to resolve the issue of Optimistic-Rollup that requires a one-week withdrawal time. Specifically, the solution allows locking L1 DAI to mint L2 oDAI, and allows oDAI to be destroyed instantly to access L1DAI.

Deployed application

Synthetix, a DeFi synthetic asset platform, is already testing Optimism. Developers claim that with Optimism, GAS fees can be reduced by up to 143 times, and transaction confirmation time can be as low as 200 milliseconds. The application plans to completely transfer its pledge and mining functions to L2, and the transaction function of this application intends to remain on both L1 and L2.

Uniswap, the DEX ace application on Ethereum, plans to deploy the V3 version on the Optimistic layer. On October 19 last year, Uniswap used Optimistic Rollups to run a gamified proof of concept (Unipig). Tests show that the GAS fee can be reduced by up to 100 times, and the transaction confirmation time is as low as 169 milliseconds.

SushiSwap's CTO Joseph Delong previously tweeted that he plans to complete the deployment after the Optimism mainnet goes live.

MakerDAO will launch the "official" version of DAI on Optimism. The smart contract team plans to launch a solution Optimism DaiBridge to solve the problem of long withdrawal cycles on the L2 network.

It should be noted that Optimism does not currently launch related tokens, and users need to be wary of unofficial news.