Ethereum scaling solution, Optimism, has raised $150 million in Series B funding, led by Andreessen Horowitz and Paradigm.
In the latest blog post, the blockchain startup revealed that it is currently valued at $1.65 billion. The new round of funding will be directed towards expanding its team.
Optimism Solving Ethereum’s Scalability Crisis
Ethereum has established itself as an extremely popular computing platform rich in DeFi and NFT applications. The dramatic increase in developer and user demand, however, resulted in dramatic gas charges alike. Optimism, on the other hand, uses optimistic rollups to achieve significantly lower costs, latency, and far higher throughput than Ethereum Layer 1 alone, without compromising the security features of the underlying blockchain.
After the recent fundraising, Optimism CEO Jinglan Wang was quoted as saying,
“We have made a commitment to the public that we will not profit from operating centralized parts of the system, so we wanted to remove the financial incentive for ourselves to remain centralized.”
Confirming the investment in optimism, Chris Dixon, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, said, Having said Ethereum expansion is a significant near-term challenge, adding that it will “dramatically expand the design space for Web 3 applications.”
milestones
The blog post revealed that Optimism users saved $1 billion in gas on the mainnet over the past year, during which thousands of codes were deployed, and three forks went live. Optimism has cut fees by more than 30% over the past year, and there are plans to work towards scaling up the protocol to cut costs even further.
Optimism is poised to reduce fees by 30-40% by deploying system-wide calldata compression for the first time in the next few weeks, the statement said.
As part of optimism:base, the startup will theoretically enable greater fee reduction this summer by allowing for optimal transaction submission costs through Canon, its next-gen fault-proof. The team will also contribute to the Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP-4844), aka Shard Blob Transactions, which has the potential to reduce fees by up to 100x.
The team said
“Our people are our greatest asset. The Optimism team is already full of talent whose big minds have only been eclipsed by their even bigger hearts. We are growing as a team, growing very much, and becoming industry-leading. Incredibly proud to have brought together such an incredible group of tech talent.”
According to the latest figures from DeFi Lama, Optimism has more than $360 million in net worth locked (TVL) on the platform. The figures registered a 96.6% increase in the last week of October, from $150 million to $295 million in just three days. TVL earned around $400 million in TVL in January this year.
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