As the layer-1 blockchain Ethereum continues to grow and evolve, layer-2 blockchains like Optimism are working to alleviate issues of scaling, speed and costs.
“We’ve been working on the same thing since 2017,” Jing Wang, Optimism’s CEO and co-founder, said on TechCrunch’s Chain Reaction podcast. “We’ve all been trying to solve the same problem for a long time.”
The mission to scale Ethereum is ongoing, said Ryan Wyatt, chief growth officer at Optimism. Before joining Optimism, Wyatt was the president of Polygon Labs, the entity building the layer-2 blockchain Polygon.
As it stands, using and transacting with Ethereum is still relatively clunky, slow and more expensive. That’s why layer-2 (L2) blockchains like Optimism exist: to focus on scaling and speed, while also lowering costs for users. It helps users interact with Ethereum’s chain for about 10x cheaper through its own network and also provides developers the ability to build decentralized applications (dApps) in a faster, scalable way.
“Just as Amazon is a serverless back end for web2 applications, Optimism is a decentralized serverless back end for web3 applications,” Wang said. “We wanted to scale Ethereum because I think Ethereum stays the most close to the original decentralization values and we wanted to give it a go staying close to those same values.”
But with scaling also comes the importance of growth. “There’s a lot of facets to it, and I think one missing piece is how we continue to work with developers across the ecosystem,” even if they’re not a part of the Optimism family, Wyatt said.
Usually when you think of scaling, you think of hiring big teams. But although Optimism wants to grow bigger, the ecosystem has to self-govern, and the best way to do that is to have developers across the space contribute.
Optimism wants developers to build dApps using its technology, therefore pushing users to the network. “There’s a ton of similarities to blockchain infrastructure in the developer ecosystem,” Wyatt said. “For me, it seems incredibly similar.”
For some, blockchains are like religious ecosystems, where there’s only one way or the highway. “It’s one chain versus the second chain,” Wang said. “Optimism’s Superchain vision is trying to get us closer to a world where the chains are closer to containers for compute … and all these chains interoperate together in what we call the Superchain.”
The goal is to help users forget which chain developers are building on, because it ultimately won’t matter. “Ideally in the future, there’s applications that are so massive that they’re probably running 100 concurrent chains. But for now, the amount of demand within the industry doesn’t necessitate that, so we have something that looks closer to one application per chain.”
But when it comes to success stories, it “should really be about the developers that are building on top of this infrastructure,” Wyatt said. “So the day that we get away from talking about L2s, I think is going to be a big day because now the story will be about the great apps and experiences that are being built on top of the infrastructure.”
This story was inspired by an episode of TechCrunch’s podcast Chain Reaction. Subscribe to Chain Reaction on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite pod platform to hear more stories and tips from the entrepreneurs building today’s most innovative companies.
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