Ethereum scaling solution Optimism raised $150M in Series B funding, co-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 fresh round of funding will be directed towards expanding its team.
Optimism Solves Ethereum Scalability Issues
Ethereum has established itself as an extremely popular computing platform rich in DeFi and NFT applications. The dramatic increase in demand from developers and users, however, has resulted in equally dramatic gas costs. Optimism, on the other hand, uses optimistic rollups to significantly reduce costs, latency, and much higher throughput compared to Ethereum Layer 1 alone, without compromising the security features of the underlying blockchain.
After the recent fundraise, Optimism CEO Jinglan Wang was quoted saying,
“We pledged to the public not to profit from operating centralized parts of the system, so we wanted to remove the financial incentive for ourselves to remain centralized.”
While confirming the investment in Optimism, Chris Dixon, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, stated that scaling Ethereum is a crucial near-term challenge and added that it will “dramatically expand the design space for Web3 applications.”
Milestones
The blog post revealed Optimism users saved $1 billion in gas over the past year on the mainnet, during which thousands of codes were deployed and three forks went live. . Optimism has also reduced fees by more than 30% over the past year and plans to work on improving the protocol to reduce costs even further.
Optimism is all set to decrease fees by 30-40% by deploying the first-ever system-wide calldata compression in the next few weeks, the statement said.
As part of Optimism: Bedrock, the startup will enable further fee reduction this summer by theoretically enabling optimal transaction submission costs via Cannon, its infallible next generation. The team will also contribute to the Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP-4844), aka Shard Blob Transactions, which offers the potential to reduce fees up to 100x.
The team stated,
“Our people are our greatest asset. The Optimism team is already filled to the brim with talent whose big brains are eclipsed only by their even bigger hearts. We’ve been growing immensely as a team, and are incredibly proud to have amassed such an incredible group of industry-leading technical talent. “
According to the latest stats from DeFi Llama, Optimism has over $360 million in total value locked (TVL) on the platform. The numbers noted a steep 96.6% increase in the last week of October, jumping from just $150 million to $295 million in three days. TVL reached nearly $400 million in TVL in January this year.
