![]() This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. In addition, this content may include third-party advertisements a16z has not reviewed such advertisements and does not endorse any advertising content contained therein. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, a16z has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by a16z. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L.L.C. We are thrilled to partner with Optimism, and to help support the Ethereum ecosystem as it continues its rapid growth. Optimism is currently in the midst of a phased rollout, and will be ready for large-scale production later this year. The Optimism mainnet, now live, is the result of years of dedicated effort, dating back to the team’s research at Plasma. Importantly, they are truly committed to the mission of scaling Ethereum. In addition to their undeniable technical acumen, Jing, Karl, Ben and the rest of the team have shown themselves to be hard working, earnest, and pragmatic, and the addition of Josh brings critical operational and legal expertise. We’ve gotten to know the Optimism team over the last several years, and have been extremely impressed. This close adherence to Ethereum development paradigms results in a very easy transition for developers, wallets and users: no new programming languages, minimal code changes to existing contracts required, and out-of-the-box support for the majority of existing Ethereum tooling. One of the most exciting things about what Optimism has built is that it can be seen in many ways as an extension of Ethereum - from its philosophy down to its tech stack. Optimism’s exceptional team, carefully designed developer experience, major scaling benefits, years of research and testing, and full composability made it the obvious choice. Optimism is an Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution that uses optimistic rollups to achieve far lower fees, far lower latency, and far greater throughput versus Ethereum Layer 1 alone while also providing a world-class developer and user experience. We’ve spent a great deal of time looking at various approaches and teams building Layer 2s, and today we’re thrilled to announce we are leading a $25 million Series A investment in Optimism. We believe the same will be true for Ethereum, and therefore that the answer to scaling is “all of the above,” including Ethereum 2.0, bridged Layer 1s, and Layer 2 solutions. One lesson from internet history is that when you give developers a powerful new computing platform, they create applications at such a rapid rate that demand consistently outpaces supply. While there is little debate that scaling Ethereum is necessary to continue supporting the rapid growth of the network, this issue is sometimes framed as a competition between Ethereum 2.0, Layer 2 services, and “Ethereum killer” Layer 1s. Ethereum has also been a victim of its own success: its limited ability to support high throughput has, at various points, driven gas fees to unsustainable levels. The ecosystem of Ethereum applications is richer than ever before, driven by DeFi, NFTs, and a number of other use cases. The dollar value settled per day has grown to a 30-day moving average of $9.15 billion USD, a 24x increase from one year ago. Since May of 2020, the capacity used per block (a strong proxy for demand) has stabilized near 98%, meaning the network is functionally full. Ethereum has proven itself to be an extremely popular computing platform, with both developer and user demand growing dramatically.
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