Layer 2: Optimistic Ethereum ($OP)
Optimism is an EVM equivalent Optimistic Rollup chain. It's designed to be fast, simple, and secure.
The Optimism network allows you to send transactions in a similar way as Ethereum, but with two key differences and one function that remains unchanged.
Near-instant transaction finality. You know almost immediately if your transaction took place or not.
Much lower transaction fees. Typically between a 1% and 10% of the cost on the Ethereum mainnet (also known as layer 1 or L1). For the current gas price and a few sample transactions' costs see here.
Decentralization: All transactions are posted to L1 Ethereum, inheriting the strong security guarantees of Ethereum.
Optimism is an optimistic rollup. The data of a transaction is sent to the Ethereum mainnet when you submit it, but the transaction is performed by a single computer, the sequencer (instead of thousands of computers as Ethereum does it). This lowers transaction costs dramatically, while a challenge mechanism assures that the sequencer is trustworthy.
A rollup is a mechanism that allows transactions to be executed on a separate blockchain while inheriting the availability and integrity guaranteed of Ethereum itself (also called L1 Ethereum). Rollups achieve this goal by writing all transactions into L1 Ethereum as calldata, and then writing a hash of the transaction result (the state of their blockchain after the transaction).
Rollups use one of two mechanisms to convince the rest of the network that the result is correct:
Optimistic rollups rely on verifiers that challenge incorrect results.
Zero Knowledge rollups rely on mathematical proofs, which are difficult (computationally intensive) to create, but relatively easy to verify.
Is Optimism Ethereum a Sidechain?
No. Sidechains are their own blockchain systems with entirely separate consensus mechanisms. Optimism is verified by a series of smart contracts on the Ethereum mainnet. Because all the necessary data is written to the blockchain, we inherit Ethereum's availability, and as long as there is at least one honest verifier, Ethereum's integrity.
Unfortunately. There is a tradeoff between security and cost, with Ethereum being very expensive and very secure, sidechains being a lot cheaper and usually a lot more centralized and therefore less secure, and rollups sitting in the middle with security that is about as good as Ethereum's and costs that are somewhat higher than those of sidechains. using Ethereum also means we have to pay some Ethereum gas, which causes our transactions to be more expensive than those on a sidechain.
What is the Optimism Token?
The Optimism Token (ticker symbol OP) is an ERC-20 token that lets you participate in the
governance of the Optimism protocol and public goods funding.
Note that you do not need OP to use Optimism or pay for gas. Transactions are paid for in ETH, which you transfer onto Optimism using a bridge.
Note: These tokens are on Optimism, address `0x4200...0042`. At present there is no equivalent L1 asset, the tokens are not bridgeable to L1.
What power does this token give me?
OP allows users to participate in the Optimism Collective, the governance system of the Optimism protocol and public goods funding. The specific mechanisms for governance and resource allocation are experimental and likely to evolve over time.
To start, OP token holder governance will be stewarded by the Optimism Foundation, consistent with the Working Constitution of the Optimism Collective. More information about the OP token and the governance of the Optimism Collective is available in the Discourse forum.
What are public goods?
Public goods are valuable things (goods, information, services, etc) that cannot charge money. For example, clean air is a public good because if you pay for a factory to install pollution reducing mechanisms I get cleaner air for free. The factory cannot reduce the pollution you breathe without also reducing the pollution I breathe.
In the Ethereum ecosystem we have a lot of projects that provide public goods. For example, geth, the most popular execution layer node, underlies most projects in the ecosystem. But it has to be trusted, to be trusted it has to be open source, and because it is open source it cannot charge a usage fee.
Why do we need another public goods funding mechanism?
A lot of projects in our ecosystem are funded by the Ethereum Foundation (EF). EF does excellent work, but it doesn't have infinite resources. EF started with about 6.12 million ETH, and as of March 2022 is down to about 350,000.
The Optimism Collective hopes to add a decentralized and sustainable parallel mechanism. See here for more details.
Source:
https://community.optimism.io/
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