Optimism is the team behind the development of Optimistic Rollup (OR).
OR is an Ethereum L2 scaling solution that promises an order of magnitude improvement in transaction throughput while preserving the L1 smart contract dev experience.
The Optimistic Virtual Machine (OVM) makes sure that the L2 contracts can be correctly interpreted and executed on L1 by the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM).
medium.com/ethereum-optim…
The demo was built in collaboration with @UniswapProtocol & included custom-built components.
Unipig got to ~250 TPS. The team calculated that an optimized production version would be capable of ~2000 TPS.
@synthetix_io organized a trading competition, where DeFi users got to experience the near-instant & cheap Ethereum transactions of the OVM.
Unlike Unipig, the demo ran on a generalized system meant to work for any Ethereum dApp.
medium.com/ethereum-optim…
OR has much in common with Plasma. Both use staked validators that commit blocks on-chain.
Tradeoffs:
- Plasma can achieve near-infinite scalability with a limited validator set.
- OR improves scale while enabling anyone to dispute a block's validity.
Miners on L1 make $ on tx fees, block rewards, and transaction ordering (this applies to block proposers on L2 as well).
Optimism's proposal: the right to reorder transactions within a block would go to the highest bidder:
ethresear.ch/t/mev-auction-…
We recommend checking out @jinglanW talk from the 2020 @EtherealSummit titled “Preparing Ethereum for Mass Adoption”: youtube.com/watch?v=0Iu7Az…